Ancient Greek Science

(This post is reprinted from one of my earliest, when I first began blogging.)

Arguably the first important underwater archaeological find was a shipwreck discovered in 1900 off the Aegean Sea island of Antikythera. The ship was Greek, dated from the time of Christ, and carried a wealth of statues and pottery.

Also aboard this ancient ship was a heavily-encrusted instrument, which little-by-little came to be recognized as a navigational device. It wasn't until the 1950's, though, that with x-ray and gamma-ray examination of its internal structure investigators recognized it as a sophisticated instrument that accurately mimicked past, present, and future movements of the sun, moon, and planets. Some early Greek had developed an analog computer 2000 years ago!

Historians of science recognize that several ancient civilizations besides Greece--Mesopotamia, China, India, Egypt, and Islam--made impotant contributions to modern science (especially in mathematics and astronomy, but also in other areas). In the case of each of these cultures, however, such contributions (and the individuals that effected them) were rather anomalous. They weren't followed by further progress, or by a succession of like-minded individuals and similar innovation and advance. Science historian Stanley Jaki has argued that science was "stillborn" in these other cultures. Why?

Worldview. These cultures each had worldview inadequacies, aspects of their overall view of reality that stifled scientific advance. Modern science was conceived, was born, and flourished only within the Judeo-Christian worldview of 16th and 17th century Europe. All of the founders of modern science were either devout Christians (Boyle, Newton, Pascal, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Leibnitz, Linnaeus, Mendel, Cuvier, Agassiz, Pasteur, and others) or at least operated within a Christian understanding of reality (Copernicus, Galileo, van Leeuwenhoek, and others).

And this was not just a coincidence. The very philosophical presuppositions that allowed the scientific revolution come from a biblical understanding of the world. What's more, science only makes sense within a theistic--and specifically Christian--worldview. While science can be (and increasingly is) conducted by atheistic naturalists, naturalism fails to provide a rational foundation for science. Naturalists engaging in science do so on capital borrowed from Christian theism.


(The Antikythera Device was in my local paper today, which is what prompted this repost. New research indicates that the device was also used for organizing the calendar with regard to the four-year cycle of the ancient Olympic Games.)

Spontaneous Generation

Looking for something to do to prepare yourself for celebrating next year's 150th anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species? I suggest sitting down with a copy of Giuseppe Sermonti's Why is a Fly Not a Horse? It was originally written in Italian, and its title, Dimenticare Darwin, means "Forget Darwin." A geneticist, Sermonti writes interestingly and persuasively about the need to dump Darwinism as completely out of touch with reality and with the latest findings of science. The rest of my post today comes from reading Chapter 1, "Achilles Inspires Redi."*

For many, modern biology had its start when Francesco Redi--in 1688--disproved the notion that the origin of maggots in meat was due to spontaneous generation. He showed experimentally that maggots came to be in meat only when flies were allowed to lay their eggs in it, and generalized his conclusions to all living things--"all life comes from the egg."

But the idea of spontaneous generation did not go away, and has had to be refuted over and over again. Louis Pasteur extended Redi's principle to include the very smallest microbes (which others of his day excluded from Redi's principle), demonstrating that adequate sterilization could prevent the origin of any life. According to Sermonti,

Biology has advanced in status with every new confutation of the spontaneous generation thesis.

Despite, however, the conclusive experimental evidence (of Redi with worms, of Lazzaro Spallanzani with protozoans, of Pasteur with bacteria), belief in spontaneous generation remains a necessary part of Darwinian (and neo-Darwinian) evolutionary theory. Sermonti again...

Darwin, though a great admirer of Pasteur, regretted that the Frenchman had denied spontaneous generation. "If it could be demonstrated," he was to write to Haeckel in 1873, "this would be very important to us."

This led, of course, to the field of origin-of-life studies, of efforts to produce living things in laboratory test tubes, of the zealous teaching of perceived successes (the Miller-Urey experiments) and relative silence about the overarching failures. To this day, however, the spontaneous generation of living things from non-living chemicals remains a necessary corollary of neo-Darwinian evolution, though all of the evidene would lead to an opposite conclusion. Sermonti:

There will be only one way to refute spontaneous generation. That is to take note of the astronomic complexity of the simplest organisms, and to show that the minimum conceivable life form calls for structures so elaborate that no fortuitous accident can bring them all together. But we had to wait until the second half of the twentieth century for the proof.

* The title of this chapter of Sermonti is interesting. What apparently inspired Redi to conduct his experiments was a passage from Homer's Iliad in which Achilles recognizes that maggots arise in a corpse only if flies are allowed access to that corpse. In other words, Homer understood what Greek philosophy, medieval science, and neo-Darwinism did not, that spontaneous generation is not an accurate understanding of the origin of living things.

Church and the Homeless

So, in that last series of posts, I tried to demonstrate that true followers of Christ would be channels of grace to the poor and suffering, whether the homeless and the prisoners in our own communities or the orphans and slaves across the world. What I struggled to articulate in blogland was powerfully shared by a guest speaker at Antioch last Sunday. Mike Yankoski is the author of Under the Overpass, which chronicles his five months living as a homeless person. I highly recommend the book (as life-changing), but for now would first suggest that you hear and see what he shared with us last week. Go here to download either the video or an audio-only version of that sermon.

Busy in a Good Way

It's been more difficult to find time to blog lately, but that's been a good thing. It means I've been in the field a good deal, and I love that. What's more, I've been in a number of different habitats most weeks, seeing different trees, different flowers, different mammals, and different birds.

Within the past couple of weeks, what's occupied my time has included a young Swainson's Hawk in Gilliam County, a fledgling Spotted Owl in Jefferson County, a brooding Common Nighthawk and a rare paintbrush in Crook County, Yellow-breasted Chats (for you non-birding types, I'm not making that name up), Black-throated Gray Warblers, a cougar(!), and golden currants in Wheeler County, and White-faced Ibis and a western rattlesnake in Harney County. And that's just confining myself to Oregon. To top it all off, I'm (mostly) getting paid to travel around this great state communing with nature (and its Creator)!

So if a few days go by without a new blog post, don't worry about me.

Motivation for Justice

There's one more strange line of reasoning to which I need to respond regarding the issue of Christians and justice...

There are those who jump to the conclusion--when they hear of a church like Antioch being involved in human rights issues--that the motivation for such activity is an effort to earn our own salvation. This, of course, is a non-sequitur: the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. As an argument, it would look like this...

Premise: Christians are showing compassion to the poor and outcast.

Conclusion: These particular Christians must be trying to earn their way to Heaven; they must not understand the grace of God in Christ.

I know, it seems pretty silly when I write it out in its logical form. Nonetheless, this is the sort of thinking engaged in by those Christians skeptical of their brothers and sisters who are active in the area of human rights and social justice.

Obviously, there's an alternative, a quite different motivation for loving others and extending to them grace, mercy, and justice. And that is that we understand Christ's grace and mercy and desire for justice. As His close friend and follower the apostle John had it,

We love because He first loved us. (1 John 4:19)

The apostle Paul spelled it out pretty clearly...

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God... For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:8-10)

In short, God has in Christ adopted us as sons and daughters. Further, He has called us (throughout Scripture) to love and show compassion to others. We therefore do those things in order to obey and to please Him. It's as simple as that.

Justice and Eschatology

So, I've been taking issue with the view--popular among the last couple of generations of American evangelicals--that says that doing justice (meeting the needs of the world) has little place in what Christians are called to do. I've been interacting with an author who defends this view (without naming him). Another misconception he has involves eschatology--one's understanding of end-time events, of the ultimate disposition of this planet (among other things).

He discusses two eshatologies (again, as if these were the only options): what he calls Covenant Theology and Dispensational Theology. According to that author,

In general, the Covenant churches emphasize social and cultural involvement. The Dispensational churches emphasize evangelizing and discipling people out of the world. The contrast was probably best stated by D.L. Moody, who said, "Don't spend too much time polishing the brass rails on a sinking ship."

For the author in question, Moody was right, Dispensational Theology is right, and that eschatology dictates that we spend little of our time concerning ourselves with issues of justice.

Now, I think there is a great deal that could be argued for the other--Covenant-- view and against the Dispensational one. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the author is correct--that things in this world are only going to get worse , that the world is a 'sinking ship' and that the "new heavens and new earth" (of Revelation 21) are to be taken concretely. The problem remains that we are not given the time of the end, nor are we given license to ignore all of the biblical mandates to do justice, love our neighbors (and our enemies), and do unto others as we would have them do to us.

Many are the times in the history of the church when things were bleaker than today, times during which Christians had more reason than we to expect the imminent return of Christ because 'things couldn't get much worse.' When barbarian hordes had overrun all of Christian Europe, followers of Christ kept His teachings alive and ministered to their conquerors, eventually winning the right to share with them the good news of Christ's desire for their reconciliation to Him.

When William Wilberforce recognized the inhumanity and cruelty of the British slave trade, he did not consider that the promise of new heavens and a new earth somehow justified his doing nothing to abolish such injustice.

When (again) Europe was overrun by the Nazis, Christians could well have refused to harbor Jews, or to enlist to go to war against the Nazis. Those would have been the sorts of decisions that this eschatological view would have logically produced. Thank God that throughout church history, Christians have not succumbed to the poor reasoning of Moody but have remained at their posts, doing those acts of justice to which God called them.

Indeed, on the view put forth by this author, Martin Luther King, Jr, should have stuck to simply preaching the gospel of eternal salvation and ignored the fact that black people were still being treated as second class citizens.

My point is this... even if Dispensational Theology is the more accurate understanding of Scripture (and I have serious doubts about this), it does not provide justification to disobey the Scripture-wide call upon God's people to do justice, and to have compassion on people (all of whom are made in God's image).

Justice and a False Dichotomy

So here's a question posed by a Christian author who has some of the misunderstandings about justice issues that I mentioned in the last post...

Should the Gospel be defined as receiving Christ or should the Gospel be defined as meeting the needs of the world?

Of course, this represents a false dichotomy. There are certainly more than just these two options and, in fact, neither option is satisfactory. The Jewish men who penned the New Testament would never have defined the great redemptive work accomplished by the Messiah as narrowly as modern evangelicals have. Throughout the history of God's dealings with humanity, His focus was not just on individuals but also on families, tribes, nations, and the world. The same is true of that ultimate act of reconciliation that is the focal point of both human and cosmic history--the atoning death and subsequent resurrection of His sinless, eternal Son.

In defending his own answer (that the Gospel should be defined as receiving Christ), the author grants that we should care for our world and the needy. As part of this admission, he cites Jeremiah 29:7, which says,

But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

But if one were more open to the idea that justice is at the heart of God's desire, one could cite a vast number of Scripture passages. One of the most succinct summaries of God's requirement of His people was originally written on stone tablets. This summary included ten commandments (see Exodus 20), five of which deal with man's relationship with God, and five of which deal with man's relationship with one another. Through the prophet Micah (6:8), God spelled out His requirements even more concisely:

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

Then Jesus Himself was asked what the greatest commandment was and what one must do to inherit eternal life. His response?

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

This prompted the question "And who is my neighbor?", to which Jesus explained (through the parable of the "good Samaritan") that anyone in need is our neighbor. If we want it condensed to just one sentence, how about (from Matthew 7:12)...

So, whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.

In our day, this means that when we find a young girl who has been sold into sex slavery, we do what we can to free her and get her back to her home and a better life.

I cannot imagine how an honest reading of the Bible or of the Gospels could ever lead to reducing the Gospel to merely the future salvation of individual souls. It's as if the 'great commission' ("Go and make disciples") were the only thing Jesus meant for us to remember, and that it somehow annulled all of His other teachings and commands.

Doing Justice

I want to do a couple of intramural posts, on a subject that frankly shouldn't be controversial among Christians. It's the subject of engaging in human rights issues, of doing justice at home and around the world.

At my church, Antioch (of Bend, Oregon, a church plant in October of 2006), we care about such issues of justice. We help feed and clothe the homeless in our own city. We have a partnership with a ministry in Uganda, where we will be adopting a very poor region, helping with providing water and education, and sponsoring children orphaned by AIDS and by rebel attacks. We're helping with efforts to free Nepalese women and girls from sex slavery and to provide them with a new life. One of our number is establishing schools in an earthquake-ravaged region of Pakistan. We're helping women in Kenya, Burundi, and Rwanda to make a living for themselves. And the list goes on.

But here's the problem. Believe it or not, there are many Christians who are skeptical of--or even opposed to--such efforts. Both the skepticism and the opposition are ill-founded, and each requires a response. But for now, let me lay out (as best I can) how these Christians tend to articulate their position.

Those skeptical of Christian efforts at justice generally offer one of two justifications. One, they may be confused into thinking that when we say "human rights" we are somehow thinking of abortion rights or homosexual rights. It is, of course, to be regretted that proponents of the homosexual agenda and of abortion-on-demand have successfully hoodwinked the general public--including Christians--into seeing these as issues of human rights. They are not, which is why many blacks take great offense at attempts to equate same-sex marriage activism with the civil rights movement of the 1950's. (But that's another post.)

Second, some Christians equate 'social justice' with liberal churches (those who don't really believe the truth of Christianity) or with secular organizations. Indeed, theologically speaking, some jump to the conclusion that we 'do' human rights thinking to earn our own salvation.

Those Christians opposed to such humanitarian efforts often come from a particular eschatological interpretation, one that says that things will only get worse (and that they can't get much worse than they already are), that Jesus will come back very soon and do away with this Earth and create a new heaven and a new Earth. On this view, the only worthwhile endeavor for the Christian is to evangelize--to teach people that the end is near but that there is salvation for their eternal souls. Thus, any attempts to make living conditions better (for the poor, the orphan, the man dying of AIDS) is like (in the words of D.L. Moody) "polishing the brass railings on a sinking ship."

These, then, are the illogical views that I'll take a stab at addressing in the next few posts.

Regaining Consciousness

Steven asks,

So how does an unconcious human being regain consciousness? Does God work a miracle every time somebody comes out of the operating room? Does God have to remember not to restore consciousness until the anaesthetic wears off, or else people will be able to see a miracle?

I suspect that Steven thinks he's either being clever here, or else coming up with penetrating and difficult questions that somehow jeopardize Moreland's conclusion (see preceding posts) that the origin of consciousness is better explained by Christian theism than by naturalism.

As an aside, it continues to amaze me how often it is the defender of theism who wants to deal with reason and evidence and the person taking the side of materialistic science who tries to bring in theological considerations. The answers to Steven's questions here depend upon one's definition of miracle as well as one's understanding of the degree of God's sovereignty. And these are issues upon which even Christians come to different conclusions.

But none of these questions address the real issue (yes, these too are red herrings), which was the origin of consciousness. In fact, the subject of regaining consciousness further highlights the problems with a materialist view of personhood (and the superiority of the Christian view). Let me offer (in support of this claim) three lines of argument, two evidential and one logical.

There is a vast and growing body of data that clearly demonstrates that the person/mind exists independent of the human body. That is, in cases of lost consciousness or (especially) near-death experiences, the human mind can relate verifiable events from elsewhere that occurred while the unconscious or lifeless body remained in one place. (The best source I know for this sort of evidence is Beyond Death by Gary Habermas and J.P. Moreland.)

Another field of research that leads to the same conclusion (that mind/consciousness is independent of or separate from brain) is neurosurgery, specifically brain probing done with a conscious patient. In such cases, the surgeon can cause the patient's toe (say) to move by innervating a particular portion of the brain. The patient will frequently say (in effect), "You did that--it wasn't me." These sorts of results have led many of the leading neurophysiologists to abandon the naturalistic views with which they began and to accept that we are more than just physical beings, that we have a mind/soul/spirit.

Of course, philosophers have been skeptical of the materialist view since long before that skepticism was verified by empirical proofs. Simply put, consciousness and related things (thoughts, memories, desires, emotions) are categorically different than physical things like gray matter, neurons, brain cells. That is, we can--in discussing the latter--refer to their mass, or color, or electrical charge. But such physical characteristics are absurd for describing memories or consciousness.

This is not to say, of course, that our brains (and eyes and ears) have no role to play (at least at present) in our ability to access memories or to articulate sights and sounds. But the fact is (as science is increasingly demonstrating), persons (that is, conscious minds) can see real events while those persons are no longer associated with their bodies. The strangest examples include blind people, some of whose 'minds' acurately desribe events that their sightless eyes would have prevented them from accessing had they still been in their bodies.

The point is, human consciousness exists apart from the human body, a scientific finding that is fatal to a materialist understanding of the world. Steven's facetious attempt at raising the issue of 'lost consciousness' strengthens the theistic view espoused by Moreland in his new book (and weakens the materialist view Steven seems to want to defend).

Consciousness

In the last post, I highlighted a new book by J.P. Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God. I shared a quote that identifies the main thesis of the book, to wit that the existence of consciousness (in human beings and other living things) is better explained by Christian theism than by naturalism. A reader, Steven, skeptical of Moreland's thesis, offered some comments that I'd like to address. If nothing else, it might help us all--if we sincerely seek truth--to think more clearly about such issues.

I'll take Steven's last comment first, since it is so obviously an attempt to sidestep the argument.* In response to Moreland's claim, "If you start with particles and just rearrange them according to physical law, you won't get mind," Steven writes,

Gosh! This guy Moreland can tell us everything that can ever happen in a universe of amazing size and complexity. What a genius!

I suspect that Moreland legitimately qualifies as a genius (though I am not privy to his scores on an I.Q. test), but that is irrelevant to the issue. So, too, is the notion that accurately assessing that physical law is inadequate for explaining the origin of consciousness is equivalent to knowing all things about the universe. Steven's comment here is both a straw-man and an ad hominem (abusive), and does not in any way provide us with reason to think that Moreland's conclusion is a false one.

Regarding the question 'How does consciousness exist?', Steven also mischaracterizes both the naturalist position ("That is a difficult question.") and Moreland's ("It just does.") Moreland's view is not that consciousness 'just exists,' but rather that consciousness (that of a self-existent, eternal, transcendent, personal Being) precedes all of the material of this universe (including the physical aspects of living things). While Steven may not like this view, it is a perfectly reasonable one. Indeed, it has been the default view for the vast majority of the history of Western civilization, and is being continually supported by the latest scientific discoveries.

There was only a brief window of time (from Kant until Einstein), in fact, when the alternate view--that the universe itself was eternal--seemed at all likely. But with general relativity now the most rigorously tested--and validated--concept in all of physics, we know that the universe had a beginning, and the only real objection that has ever been made to the cosmological argument for the existence of God has been soundly refuted.

In short, Moreland's claim that consciousness precedes the material aspects of this universe is on firmer evidential footing than ever, and on far firmer footing than the materialist alternative.

Moreover, the idea that the origin of consciousness is merely a difficult question (for the naturalist) is greatly understated. The origin of consciousness (and other immaterial things, like mind, soul, or spirit, thoughts, memories, emotions) is so problematic for the materialist view that naturalists have spent much of the last several decades trying to deny the existence of such things. Unfortunately, the evidence (and reason) are all against such a denial. And that is why materialists have had to offer up hand-waving 'emergent law' ideas.

(More in the next post.)


* It should be clear to anyone following these posts that the brief quote I shared does not contain Moreland's argument. Rather, it identifies the conclusion of that argument. The argument itself, and refutations of each of the extant rebuttals to it, are found in the full-length version (the book, not the sound bite from the Amazon interview). If Steven or any other skeptic truly believes that Moreland's position is flawed, they would do well to read the book and interact with the argument as there presented. Alternatively, those in Central Oregon in early November may have opportunity at the Conference to dialogue with J.P. about the supposed inadequacies of his view.

Argument from Consciousness

I just learned that J.P.Moreland has a new book out. (J.P. will be the featured speaker at an apologetics event to be held in Bend this fall, sponsored by The Apologetics Guild.) The book is titled Consciousness and the Existence of God, and its central thesis is the "argument from consciousness."

I can't yet give you my review of the book (I'll plan to read it soon), so here's an excerpt from Amazon.com...

As mentioned in the introduction, many believe that finite minds provide evidence of a Divine Mind as their creator. If we limit our options to theism and naturalism, it is hard to see how finite consciousness could result from the rearrangement of brute matter; it is easier to see how a Conscious Being could produce finite consciousness since, according to theism, the Basic Being is Himself conscious. Thus, the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning. To put the point differently, in the beginning there were either particles or the Logos. If you start with particles and just rearrange them according to physical law, you won’t get mind. If you start with Logos, you already have mind.

True Beliefs

(I just posted this at the blog of Kilns College, an exciting new venture with which I'm involved. I thought my readership here would appreciate it as well.)

The leadership of Kilns College is beginning to kick around what to include in a "Statement of Faith," which is a necessary sort of thing for a Christian college to have. Normally, such a statement would include our beliefs about God, Scripture, the human condition, salvation, and perhaps one or two other items.
But today, it seems, one cannot simply lay out what it is one believes to be the truth about such things. No, in our postmodern culture, one may first have to at least claim--if not actually go through the process of substantiating the claim--that there is such a thing as objective truth in the first place.

So, lest we put a good deal of effort into a corporate statement of faith only to have it viewed as a subjective exercise not meant to intersect with any absolute reality, I thought it best to establish up front that we at Kilns College hold to an objectivist view of truth. That is, with the vast majority of thinkers throughout the history of Western civilization, we hold that some statements (ideas or beliefs) are true and that others are false, that some correspond to reality and others do not.

As an example, we are likely to make a statement such as, "Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, died by Roman crucifixion and was bodily raised on the third day." By making this claim, we are not merely saying that this particular belief works for us or has more meaning for us than it does for other people. Rather, we would be claiming that this is a fundamental truth about Jesus Christ that matches reality at all times and for all people, regardless of whether or not they believe (agree with) it.

In this case, the truth value of the statement resides in Jesus--the object of the statement--and not in the claimant or anyone else considering the truth value (these latter would both be subjects). We reject a subjectivist understanding of truth and affirm an objectivist understanding.

The subjectivist, relativist understanding of truth espoused by postmodernists is ultimately self-referentially absurd. But rather than demonstrate that the way I normally would, let me come at it a different way, one appropriate to a school of higher education.

Just as relative morality makes nonsense of the concept of moral reform or moral improvement, a subjectivist view of truth makes unintelligible the concept of learning. If there is no truth--no accurate understanding of the way things are--then gathering more knowledge is pointless. You may continually change your understanding or the way you view things, but if there is no right understanding to which you have gotten closer, you might just as well be doing almost anything else.

Until a very short time ago, virtually everyone believed in objective truth, goodness, and beauty, and the goal of a liberal arts education was to raise up gentlemen and ladies by helping them align their thoughts, will, and emotions with that tuth, goodness, and beauty.

We at Kilns College still believe these things, and I hope that our statement of beliefs (when finished) will reflect this.

A Guatemalan Gardener

For some reason, I've been thinking about a particular gardener that I spent several enjoyable days watching years ago. My oldest son, Nathan, and I were staying in downtown Guatemala. The "hotel" was a group of bungaloes separated by lawn and gardens and walled off from the surrounding city sprawl. We were cooling our heels while waiting for research permits (we eventually headed back to Tikal to collect blood samples--for genetic analysis--from Swallow-tailed Kites). So we spent a bit of time swimming, sitting poolside, or reading in the gardens.

We had plenty of leisure to watch the gardeners (of which there were actually three). A typical morning's work for one of these men was to trim a vine growing up one of the stairways. It would require a bit of snipping here, a spot of pruning there. He raked up the trimmings and swept any flagstones or walks as he went, never making much noise or breaking a sweat.

The afternoon might have brought a small patch of lawn to mow. This was accomplished with an old mower like Grandpa had, with the spinning blades. Edging was done by hand. There were no motors, no gas fumes, no noise. I've heard tell of the attention to small detail of the Japanese gardener, but he has nothing on our little Guatemalteco. His was a simple employment, and one which he seemed to enjoy and at which he excelled.

To tell the truth, I haven't been just thinking about this gardener from time to time--I've been thinking wistfully about him, perhaps even envying him.

Creation Enjoyment

One of the things I plan to share in my "Creation" talk this Sunday evening is this... that since we personally know the Author and Artist of creation, and have an idea about some of His purposes and intents, we Christians should enjoy the creation more than anyone. Unfortunately, I find that this is not often the case, that many Christians today are ambivalent at best toward the wonders of creation all around us.

I won't be sharing this Sunday night, but here's something I copied out of The Wilderness World of John Muir when I read it many years ago. It relates a conversation Muir had with a farmer as he headed up into the Sierras on a months-long botanical excursion...

"You look like a strong-minded man," he replied, "and surely you are able to do something better than wander over the country and look at weeds and blossoms. These are hard times, and real work is required of every man that is able. Picking up blossoms doesn't seem to be a man's work at all in any kind of times."

To this I replied, "You are a believer in the Bible, are you not?" "Oh, yes." "Well, you know Solomon was a strong-minded man, and he is generally believed to have been the very wisest man the world ever saw, and yet he considered it worth his while to study plants; not only to go and pick them up as I was doing, but to study them; and you know that we are told that he wrote a book about plants, not only of the great cedars of Lebanon, but of little bits of things growing in the cracks of the walls."

"Therefore, you see that Solomon differed very much more from you than from me in this matter. I'll warrant you he had many a long ramble in the mountains of Judea... And again, do you not remember that Christ told His disciples to 'Consider the lilies how they grow' and compared their beauty with Solomon in all his glory? Now, whose advice am I to take, yours or Christ's? Christ says, 'consider the lilies;' you say, 'Don't consider them. It isn't worthwhile to 'any strong-minded man.'"

I don't completely agree with Muir's exegesis here, but find his position food for thought.

Creation

Next week, I have a chance to talk to a select group of folks about my favorite topic, Creation. I'm really looking forward to it (and to the week of thinking about it between now and then). I hope to make the following points...

The doctrine of Creation is foundational to the Christian worldview, and it grounds our understanding of metaphysics, theology, anthropology, epistemology, hamartiology, morality, aesthetics, soteriology, and eschatology.

For the Israelites--including those of the second-temple period (Jesus' time)--what set Yahweh apart from all other beings (idols, false gods, angels, demons, people) was His role as Creator and Sustainer of the universe. Likewise, it was Jesus' demonstrated power as Creator/Sustainer that caused the fierce montheists of His day to consider Him (and the Spirit) as one with Yahweh.

The understanding that the universe was created has in our day greater empirical support than ever, as God is blessing our skeptical generation with overwhelming evidence for His existence and love, and that from virtually every scientific discipline. The latest evidence provides powerful apologetic support for biblical Christianity.

Christians should be leading the way in "creation care."

Christians should enjoy the creation more than anyone.

Some pretty fun talking points, eh?

Ehrman

I was told that a friend was reading Bart Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus and so thought I would repost what I wrote about it last fall. It is just another in a list of very popular books attempting to refute Christianity. Like Richard Dawkins (in The God Delusion), Ehrman's main problem is that he doesn't think well, that his "arguments" are not persuasive because they involve logical fallacies and lack adequate support.

With regard to the reliability of the New Testament, Ehrman adopts a hermeneutic of suspicion (or skepticism) for a very silly--and self-centered--reason. In effect, his whole approach is based on the reasoning he describes here...

I came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place... And if he didn't perform that miracle [of preserving the words], there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words.

It doesn't take a gifted logician to see that this is not a valid, cogent argument, but merely an arrogant opinion. He is saying, in effect, "If I were God, I would have done it this way. Since it was not done the way I think it should have been, it cannot have involved God."

This, of course, is just another case of the root of all sin, the pride by which we would put ourselves in the place of Almighty God. Unfortunately, many of Ehrman's readers will be either unequipped to see through this sort of sloppy thinking or willing to come to the same conclusion (and thus deny the claim of God upon their lives).

The Greatest Drama Ever Staged

Last night, I reread an essay by Dorothy Sayers titled "The greatest drama ever staged." It's good stuff, so I thought I'd share a sample here...

The church's answer is categorical and uncompromising, and it is this: that Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the "God by whom all things were made"... Now, this is not just a pious commonplace; it is not a commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is--limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death--he (God) had the honesty and the courage to take his ownmedicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

Genetic Similarity

Today I want to point out another problem with the appeal to genetics as support for evolution. This part of the claim...

DNA profiles show evolutionary relationships among species.

involves circular reasoning. Genetic similarity is offered as proof for evolution, but only because the claimant assumes that any similarity must be due to evolution. This is, of course, fallacious.

The evidence, stated without bias, is that all living things share varying degrees of similarity, both in their biochemical composition and in their genetic make-up. The degree of similarity tends to increase within recognizable hierarchies, such that mammals are more similar to one another than any mammal is to birds, and primates are more similar to one another than any primate is to bats or whales. That this is true at the morphological level has been known for a long time. The ancients Greeks understood it (and, I dare say, so did most ancient peoples). It certainly was well-known prior to Darwin, as by his time comparative anatomy was a well-developed discipline.

As I shared in the last post, Darwinists expected this similarity NOT to be true at the molecular (biochemical level), and they were wrong. We now know that this hierarchy of similarity extends (generally) to the genetic level.

But again, this recognition utterly fails to distinguish among competing theories for the diversity of life. Specifically, the alternate view that has been held for the vast majority of the history of Western civilization--that there is a single Creator/Designer responsible for life--finds at least equal support from these findings from the latest genetic research. Indeed, the great similarity (on the levels of morphology and physiology, biochemistry, and genetics) between living things actually presents problems for Darwin's theory. This includes the highly-publicized finding that chimps and humans share 95% or more of the same genetic material.

You see, Darwin's theory was not an attempt to explain the similarities between living things. Rather, it was an attempt to explain the differences. Gradualistic evolution--with its vast number of hypothetical (and yet-undiscovered) transitional forms--was meant to explain how the differences (as between chimps and humans) came to be. And that explanation involved strictly material causes and effects. That is, if evolution is an accurate explanation for the diversity of life, we will discover differences (at some level, whether biochemical, genetic, embryological, or whatever) that represent sufficient causes for the morphological, physiological, and other obvious differences.

Instead, at each material level (first biochemistry, then genetics, now evo-devo) evolutionary scientists are surprised at how similar different organisms (like chimps and humans) are. In other words, we still cannot say--on strictly materialist terms--what accounts for the vast differences (especially on characteristics like intelligence, reasoning, imagination, and such) between us and chimps. The genetic evidence doesn't account for these differences--and so, far from supporting evolution (as is frequently claimed), that evidence further undermines naturalistic evolution as an adequate explanation.

To believe otherwise is simply to argue in a circle.

Genetics and Evolution

We have seen (in recent posts) that microevolution (as in the development by bacteria of resistance to antibiotics) is irrelevent to the issue of whether evolution accounts for the diversity of life and that the fossil evidence does not support neo-Darwinism. There is one other claim made by those unfamiliar with the evidence, here represented by a comment I received a few weeks ago...

DNA profiles show evolutionary relationships among species. There was no field of genetics when Darwin published the Origin of Species. The development of the field of genetics stood to topple natural selection. It turned out to be one of the strongest demonstrations of the fact of evolution there is.

There are several problems with this appeal to genetics. First, the claimant wrongly implies that evolutionists made predictions about what genetics would reveal, and that those predictions were validated. Conversely, the implication could be that theism made predictions that were falsified by genetics. Neither is true.

Darwinian evolution quite simply persists because its proponents explain away contrary evidence in the relatively few cases where predictions were made in the first place. Modern evolutionary theory is not predictive, but reactive. And 'just-so stories' after the fact are much more numerous than are cases of evidence actually fitting a priori expectations. According to Behe,

...reasoning straightforwardly in terms of Darwin's theory led badly astray even the most eminent evolutionary biologists, who reached conclusions completely opposite to biological reality.

Behe lists several examples, of which I'll quote just two. The first is from Francois Jacob...

When I started in biology in the 1950s, the idea was that the molecules from one organism were very different from the molecules from another organism. For instance, cows had cow molecules and goats had goat molecules and snakes had snake molecules, and it was because they were made of cow molecules that a cow was a cow.

Today, of course, we know this idea to be false. And, to be sure, this finding is not fatal to neo-Darwinism, but that's not the point. The point is that biochemistry and genetics did not validate the Darwinian expectation--it refuted it.

Incidentally, the Bible (indeed, portions of it written 3500 years ago) claimed just what modern science has verified--that humans are made of the same 'stuff' as other animals. Genesis 2:7 has the physical part of humans being formed from the 'dust of the ground,' whereas verse 19 of that chapter tells us that the same is true of "every beast of the field and every bird of the air." In more modern terms, all life is formed of the very same elements of which the earth's crust is composed. As late as the 1950's, Darwinian theory apparently led its believers to expect otherwise.

Here's Behe's second example...

In the 1960s, Ernst Mayr, an architect of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, confidently predicted on Darwinian grounds that "the search for homologous genes is quite futile," of which Sean Carroll notes, "The view was entirely incorrect."

And here's the take-home message (from Behe, in answer to my anonymous Darwinbot),

In retrospect, it is astounding to realize that the strong molecular similarity of life, which Darwinists now routinely (and incorrectly) appropriate as support for their entire theory, was not anticipated by them. They expected the opposite.

Limits of Darwinism

In my last post, I discussed the logical fallacy involved in using evidence for antibiotic resistance in bacteria to argue for macroevolution. But there are other problems with the claim involving such resistance.

First--and most obvious--is the fact that the bacteria remain bacteria, that no essential change in the species has occurred. That is, that while the new resistance has a significant effect on the species likelihood to persist (survive), the change is nonetheless extremely slight with regard to the organism as a whole. Indeed, we now know that bacteria alive today are essentially indistinguishable from the first bacteria living on the planet. This is (to say the least) evidence contrary to the expectations of macroevolutionary theory.

Second, the latest technology from genetics, genomics, and pathology allows us to examine both the types of mutational changes involved in the acquisition of resistance and the facility and frequency of such mutational changes.

In his latest book, The Edge of Evolution, biochemist Michael J. Behe does just such an examination, and his conclusions are anything but supportive of neo-Darwinism. Behe looks at systems involving extremely large population sizes for which we can determine the frequency and type of beneficial random mutations: malaria cells, human blood cells (in their response to invading malarial cells), HIV, and E. coli.

As to the type of mutation occurring in these systems, the changes that represent a specific benefit (to the malarial cell in its efforts to parasitize humans or in the human blood cells in their efforts to defeat malaria) actually involve a breaking of an existing gene product. That is, a genetic change that confers an adaption in this very specific regard is an abandoning of a previous function. It is not the mutational advance spoken of so easily by Darwinists, but a degradation of existing function.

Moreover, the likelihood of such random mutations--as determined by its frequency in these systems--is extremely small (as Behe takes several chapters to carefully demonstrate). If you're interested in this stuff, by all means get Behe's book, but here's an example of the conclusions to which this research leads...

The likelihood that Homo sapiens achieved any single mutation of the kind required for malaria to become resistant to chloroquine--not the easiest mutation, to be sure, but still only a shift of two amino acids--the likelihood that such a mutation could arise just once in the entire course of the human lineage [given] ten million years, is miniscule... On average, for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would need to wait a hundred million times ten million years. Since that is many times the age of the universe, it's reasonable to conclude the following: No mutation that is of the same complexity as chloroquine resistance in malaria arose by Darwinian evolution in the line leading to humans in the past ten million years.

Instead of concentrating on us humans, we can look at the odds another way. There are about five thousand species of modern mammals. If each spoecies had an average of a million members, and if a new generation appeared each year, and if this went on for two hundred million years, the likelihood of a single [such mutation] appearing in the whole bunch over that entire time would be only about one in a hundred.

Again, we see that the evidence appealed to most readily by modern Darwinists turns out, on closer inspection, to tend toward falsifying the theory for which they argue.