The stories amongst most of my friends as far as the Christian religion is concerned is that originally they were non-believers and later got converted. But I took a different path. I was baptized as a Catholic when I entered secondary school. I remained a Catholic for more than 3 decades. Then I tried to deepen my faith.
I started reading about religion especially the Christian religion: what do we know about heaven and hell, what the arguments for the existence of God are including what certain mystics said about their encounters with God, the efficacy of prayers, what the great ancient and contemporary theologians have to say about God, how the Christian religion developed in history and what we actually know about the old testaments and new testaments.
2015年8月13日 星期四
2013年9月10日 星期二
Has Science Buried God? (科學已埋葬上帝？)
Just came back from a long holiday and got lots on my hands but I did take out time to watch an excellent video between Richard Dawkins and Dr. John Lennox on whether science has buried God .
Richard Dawkins is an atheist and a vice president of the British Humanist Association and was an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and the University's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Amongst his numerous publications, he wrote The Selfish Gene. Oxford: OUP (1976), The Extended Phenotype, OUP (1982), The Blind Watchmaker. NY: W. W. Norton & Company. (1986) River Out of Eden. NY: Basic Books. (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable. NY: W. W. Norton & Company (1996) Unweaving the Rainbow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, (1998), A Devil's Chaplain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin (2003), The Ancestor's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.(2004), The God Delusion. NY: Bantam Books (2006) The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Free Press (USA), Transworld (UK) (2009), The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True. Free Press (2011).
Dr. Lennox is a British mathematician and philosopher of science who is Professor of Mathematics at the same university and a Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College there, the Pastoral Advisor of Green Templeton College, a Fellow of Wycliffe Hall and the author of a number of books on the relations of science, religion and ethics including Informetika (2001), Has Science Buried God? (2002), Worldview (2004) with D. W. Gooding (3 volumes in Russian and Ukrainian). His most recent book is God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway? (2011).His other publications include Subnormal subgroups of groups, which he wrote with Stewart E. Stonehewer. Oxford : Clarendon, 1987; with David Gooding, Key Bible Concepts, Port Colborne : Gospel Folio Press, 1997; with David Gooding, Christianity Opium or Truth,same publsiher 1997, and The Definition of Christianity, Port Colborne : same publisher 2001,The Bible & Ethics, Ontario : Myrtlefield Trust, 2011; with Derek J S Robinson, The Theory of Infinite Soluble Groups, University of Oxford & University of Illinois, 2004 , Seven Days That Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis and Science, Zondervan (2011), God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway?, Lion UK, 1st edition (1 September 2011), Gunning for God: A Critique of the New Atheism, Lion UK (2011).
Dr. Lennox has engaged himself in a number of public debates with atheists, including some with Richard Dawkins (2007) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama on Dawkins' views in his book The God Delusion and a follow up debate in April 2008 at Trinity College, Oxford to expand upon topics left undeveloped during that debate and later the same year at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on whether science has buried God ; with Christopher Hitchens at the Edinburgh International Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2008 on whether or not Europe should jettison its religious past and welcome the "New Atheism" and for a second time at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama on the question "Is God Great?" on the validity of some of Hitchens' claims in his book in the the same subject and also with Michael Shermer at the Wesley Conference Centre in Sydney, Australia on the existence of God and again in March 2009. Lennox speaks English, Russian, French, German and Spanish.
I'll let Dr. Dawkins and Dr. Lennox speak for themselves.
Having seen the video, I think Dr. Lennox has definitely lost because many of his arguments are based on the fact that what the Bible said is somehow "magically" true including the creation myth, the miraculous birth of Jesus from a virgin and a Jesus who turned water into wine and could walk on water, who died on the cross and then rose from the dead etc. when the existence of God itself in question. How can he assume the "truth" of something purportedly attributed to an entity which is itself the very subject of the argument "as if" it is already proven fact in order to support his conclusion? If the existence of the Christian God is the very subject of the relevant arguments, how on earth can he quote the Christian Bible as evidence in support of his argument "as if" it contained the personally revealed words of God in the form of Jesus (whose words are by definition "true" because we cannot conceive of a lying God) which for many and certainly for me, is a collection of books riddled with inconsistencies concerning manner of the earth's creation (two versions of the genesis taken from different sources with significant differences on what was created on which day and which look suspiciously like pilferings from Persian mythology), the date, the place where Jesus was alleged to have been born and where and how exactly his resurrection (upon which the whole project of Christian salvation pivotally depends), took place.
To me, many of the "arguments" of Dr. Lennox are based on the assumption that God would give us an "ultimate" basis of justice and of morality. It is quite obvious that he belongs to the type who for personal psychological reasons, wants the kind of "absolute" certainty which the objective evidence from our observation of the phenomena of the physical, biological and psychological and social world around us simply do not support. The fact that he has such a psychological need for certainty does not of itself make the hypothesis for kind of God the Christian theologians "created" i.e. a personal God who created the world, provided its laws and is the ultimate source of human morality, true. His arguments are not convincing at all and appear to be based on little more than Christian dogma.
2013年1月16日 星期三
Should Discrimination against Gays and Lesbians be Legally Prohibited? (應否立法禁止歧視男/女同性戀者?)
In our society, gays and lesbians seldom openly acknowledge their sexual orientations. Most gays and lesbians are forced to live a shadowy existence in the dark corners of cinemas, restaurants, bars or the privacy of their "homes". Why? Experience has taught them that openly flaunting or even just accidentally disclosing their sexual orientation may have some serious consequences affecting their social encounters with "normal" people, the prospects of getting or retaining their job or careers or getting promotions or advancement, especially in the so-called disciplinary forces, the prospects of being admitted to certain social clubs, sports club or professional associations and very often conservative churches or religious-affiliated organizations and doing so are fraught with risk to their public image. Yet in other respects, gays and lesbians are just "ordinary" people, like you and me, who need to eat, to sleep, to wear clothes, to have sex, to love and be loved, to receive education, to have jobs or careers, a craft or a trade, to need housing or if they fall upon bad times, to need assistance from various services offered by the government and/or NGOs. Perhaps that's why most of them stay within their "closets". Common sense will tell us that if one has to constantly live in mortal fear of one's true "sexual identity" being exposed, that must be a very painful or at least not a very pleasant experience. What is the reason for such pain and suffering, such unpleasantness or such artificially raised obstacles to leading a rather more "normal" life which every one else seem able to enjoy? Prejudice and arising from such prejudice discriminatory remarks and acts of refusing exposed gays and lesbians some of the essential services, opportunities and assistance they need to live a "normal" life.
Curiously, some of the conservative Christians have gathered in huge numbers (they claim 50,000, the police say about 5,000) in public to voice their opposition to the Government's intention of legislating against discriminatory words and practices against persons with reference to their "sexual orientation". It's interesting to note that the Catholic Church, which boasts some 300,000 faithfuls in Hong Kong, does not appear to have spoken out against the proposed legislation. Perhaps they think that such legislation is consistent with the notion of Christian love and justice. Whatever the reason for such conspicuous absence may be, let's look a little more closely at the grounds the Protestant Christians,which at one time was a progressive force in the Christian movement, claim to have in support of the validity of their claims? I do not claim to know all their grounds. According to the report of the Ming Pao (14.01.13):
(1) 大會宣言強調「人人平等」，「反同性戀行為，不等於歧視同性戀者」
(2)發言牧師亦指出，教會從不是強迫別人接受他們觀念，但立法將
(a) 帶來另一種歧視，並
(b) 影響言論自由及下一代教育，「（立法後）同性戀者可以批評傳統一夫一妻，但我們不能批評同性戀」。
(3) 多個基督
教團體為反對性傾向歧視條例立法...活動召集人、播道會恩福堂牧師譚子舜雖強
調，只反對立法但並非反對就是否立法諮詢，但大會講道牧者之一、陳恩明牧師在台上表示，如果展開諮詢就沒辦法不立法，擔心一旦立法，會造成「逆向歧視」。
It seems to me that those who argue thus would, on a superficial first look, appear to have some grounds but upon examination, such "grounds" do not appear to be logically and factually sustainable. I'll explain why.
The Assembly emphasized the concept of "人人平等". If that means every one should enjoy equal "rights", then I suppose that must include the "right not to be discriminated against" by reason of their sexual orientation, a concept much wider than just homosexuality or lesbianism but also includes heterosexual orientations. If so, one must ask, "what must be the necessary consequences of having homosexual or lesbian orientations?" Certainly one necessary consequence of having such sexual orientations or tendencies must be the "expression" of such "orientations" or "tendencies" in real life i.e. conduct which such sexual orientations naturally lead to. The opposing Christians appear to want to distinguish "homosexual conduct" from the "practitioner" of such "homosexual conduct". Conceptually of course, a person is not necessarily just his conduct: it may include his thoughts, his feelings, his attitudes or his tendencies to behave in certain ways rather than in other ways. By way of answer, I would ask them an extremely simple question: "can there ever be human conduct without a human being?" The answer seems obvious. If we can't, then will "discrimination against homosexual conduct" not to the extent that the Christians discriminate against such "homosexual conduct" not at the same time be discriminating against the homosexuals as human beings too? In classical Chinese philosophy, we learn that the nominalists (名家) have once argued that "a white horse is not a horse" (白馬非馬) i.e. an "attribute" of a horse is not "identical" with the horse. This is certainly analytically correct. But I ask, in reality, as a matter of telling how we judge a homosexual as a person in our every day encounter with the latter, can we separate his "identity" as a "homosexual' from his "homosexual conduct"? Even if they argue that "theoretically" or "linguistically" we can do so, such an argument can have no "practical" or "empirical" meaning in the actual context in which such so-called "Christians" encounter the relevant homosexuals. In short, they are talking "non-sense" or "nonsense." Verbal tricks of sophistry will get them nowhere .
Those who are against legislating against discrimination against other persons by reason of their "sexual orientations" also appear to be claiming that legislation will bring about "another kind of discrimination" which 陳恩明牧師 elaborates as 「逆向歧視」or "reverse discrimination". Here I suppose what he means is that once the relevant legislation is passed, then Christian mouths will be muzzled and their voice silenced IF they continue to preach against homosexuality in accordance with their own interpretations of certain passages in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. They claim that homosexuals may criticize the one-man-one woman traditional marriage but Christians will not be permitted to criticize homosexuality「（立法後) 同性戀者可以批評傳統一夫一妻，但我們不能批評同性戀 」. To me, there are a number of problems with this "argument".
(1) Hong Kong is a party to the International Covenant of Human Rights. The HKSAR Government is committed to freedom of speech and publication, and also to freedom to practice one's own religion or faith, both of which are our fundamental rights. Such right will extend "equally" to homosexuals and Christians alike. The homosexuals will NOT have any rights which the Christians do not now enjoy. IF we may judge by reference to our existing legislation against discrimination against "gender", then, as far as freedom of speech is concerned, only what the ordinary person regard as "abusive" or "insulting" words and words which may reasonably be viewed (the test being objective) as "disturbing" will be prohibited. If so, then if a Christian minister preaches his faith and beliefs in accordance with what is said in the Bible, including those passages in the Bible that he/she believes is against homosexual practices ( actually the words "homosexuality" or "lesbianism" or for that matter, the expression "sexual orientation" do not appear in the Bible for the simple reason that such concepts did not yet exist at the time they were written or edited), to people who attend at their churches or places of worship and not talk openly to the lay public on the radio or some other secular environment against the express provision of the intended legislation, then he/she will be well within their rights.
(2) We have not yet seen the true text of the intended legislation. Therefore we do NOT YET know what EXACTLY will be included or not included in the intended law. IF "Christians" are worried that their "freedom of speech" or their "religious freedom" in regard to "discrimination" against homosexuality may be infringed, I am quite sure they will through more than one "anti-homosexuality" sympathizers in the Legislative Assembly propose the relevant "amendments" to the draft legislation to ensure that their rights to preach their own faith within their church will be preserved. In any event, if as they claim, they are not "against discrimination against homosexuals", then there should be little to worry about. It seems that they are jumping the gun and "crying wolf" by claiming that the proposed legislation will lead to "reverse discrimination" and "loss of freedom of speech" for Christians even before the text of the relevant legislation is out. I don't think they will be foolish enough to argue that they have a "right" to "discriminate" against 'homosexuals" once the proposed legislation is passed. If not, what "rights" will they have lost by the intended legislation?
(3) "reverse discrimination" (「逆向歧視」) is a legal concept related to what has been called "affirmative action". In ethnic legislation in America, certain states have in purported implementation of "equal rights" for ethnic minorities, given "priority" to certain ethnic minorities in their admission policies for state colleges by fixing a definite "ratio" for the annual intake of students based on their ethnicity instead of on their objectively tested academic abilities. Such "active steps" taken to redress the perceived disproportion of the number of "ethnic majority" to "ethnic minority" (whites vs colored) in college population is called "affirmative action" but the courts have already ruled against this kind of "mechanical" application of the principles of ethnic equality. To me, it is a complete abuse of the term "reverse discrimination" if religious ministers apply this term in the context of "discrimination" against homosexuality in Hong Kong. There simply cannot be any conceivable possibility of any "affirmative action" being applied in Hong Kong to get organizations or institutions, whether government or private, to fix a "quota" or "ratio" for the admission of homosexual or lesbian students or employees in the relevant institutions vis-a-vis the number or proportion of non-homosexual or non-lesbian students or employees for the simple reason that unlike the case of ethnic minorities whose race can be easily checked and verified by looking at their birth certificates because it is something which all Hong Kong citizens are lawfully required to obtain within a certain period of their actual biological birth, it is most difficult in practice to tell if someone is definitely and objectively a 'homosexual" or a "lesbian", apart from their own "declaration" that they are so. I do not know if the relevant religious ministers have actually studied the relevant literature before they use the term. If they have not, then I suggest that they do. To me, it seems quite irresponsible to use the expression "reverse discrimination" for political or religious purposes without knowing their proper meaning or worse, if they do know it, to deliberately abuse it by using it in improper and an otherwise inapplicable context. This type of verbal "sleight of hand" or trickery is called "concept switching".
For the avoidance of doubt, I have no axe to grind. I am not a homosexual or bisexual and have absolutely no intention of becoming either. But I am deeply troubled by the stance of certain conservative and purportedly "Christian" groups ( I say "purported" deliberately because to me Christians should be all loving and fair, like the God they say they worship) to further what I regard as fear mongering amongst not only their faithfuls but also amongst the general public against the idea of the homosexuals and lesbians getting their right not to be discriminated against in their daily lives in the sphere of their employment and education and the obtaining of the needed services by virtue of their sexual orientation. In passing the relevant legislation, we are not giving them any EXTRA rights. All that our government intends to do is to level the grounds for them ie. giving BACK to them certain rights that they have been UNJUSTLY ( UNFAIRLY) DEPRIVED of, rights which every one else in Hong Kong already enjoys, but not them because of the perceived "prejudice" by certain members of our community against them as a minority group.
Curiously, some of the conservative Christians have gathered in huge numbers (they claim 50,000, the police say about 5,000) in public to voice their opposition to the Government's intention of legislating against discriminatory words and practices against persons with reference to their "sexual orientation". It's interesting to note that the Catholic Church, which boasts some 300,000 faithfuls in Hong Kong, does not appear to have spoken out against the proposed legislation. Perhaps they think that such legislation is consistent with the notion of Christian love and justice. Whatever the reason for such conspicuous absence may be, let's look a little more closely at the grounds the Protestant Christians,which at one time was a progressive force in the Christian movement, claim to have in support of the validity of their claims? I do not claim to know all their grounds. According to the report of the Ming Pao (14.01.13):
(1) 大會宣言強調「人人平等」，「反同性戀行為，不等於歧視同性戀者」
(2)發言牧師亦指出，教會從不是強迫別人接受他們觀念，但立法將
(a) 帶來另一種歧視，並
(b) 影響言論自由及下一代教育，「（立法後）同性戀者可以批評傳統一夫一妻，但我們不能批評同性戀」。
(3) 多個基督
教團體為反對性傾向歧視條例立法...活動召集人、播道會恩福堂牧師譚子舜雖強
調，只反對立法但並非反對就是否立法諮詢，但大會講道牧者之一、陳恩明牧師在台上表示，如果展開諮詢就沒辦法不立法，擔心一旦立法，會造成「逆向歧視」。
It seems to me that those who argue thus would, on a superficial first look, appear to have some grounds but upon examination, such "grounds" do not appear to be logically and factually sustainable. I'll explain why.
The Assembly emphasized the concept of "人人平等". If that means every one should enjoy equal "rights", then I suppose that must include the "right not to be discriminated against" by reason of their sexual orientation, a concept much wider than just homosexuality or lesbianism but also includes heterosexual orientations. If so, one must ask, "what must be the necessary consequences of having homosexual or lesbian orientations?" Certainly one necessary consequence of having such sexual orientations or tendencies must be the "expression" of such "orientations" or "tendencies" in real life i.e. conduct which such sexual orientations naturally lead to. The opposing Christians appear to want to distinguish "homosexual conduct" from the "practitioner" of such "homosexual conduct". Conceptually of course, a person is not necessarily just his conduct: it may include his thoughts, his feelings, his attitudes or his tendencies to behave in certain ways rather than in other ways. By way of answer, I would ask them an extremely simple question: "can there ever be human conduct without a human being?" The answer seems obvious. If we can't, then will "discrimination against homosexual conduct" not to the extent that the Christians discriminate against such "homosexual conduct" not at the same time be discriminating against the homosexuals as human beings too? In classical Chinese philosophy, we learn that the nominalists (名家) have once argued that "a white horse is not a horse" (白馬非馬) i.e. an "attribute" of a horse is not "identical" with the horse. This is certainly analytically correct. But I ask, in reality, as a matter of telling how we judge a homosexual as a person in our every day encounter with the latter, can we separate his "identity" as a "homosexual' from his "homosexual conduct"? Even if they argue that "theoretically" or "linguistically" we can do so, such an argument can have no "practical" or "empirical" meaning in the actual context in which such so-called "Christians" encounter the relevant homosexuals. In short, they are talking "non-sense" or "nonsense." Verbal tricks of sophistry will get them nowhere .
Those who are against legislating against discrimination against other persons by reason of their "sexual orientations" also appear to be claiming that legislation will bring about "another kind of discrimination" which 陳恩明牧師 elaborates as 「逆向歧視」or "reverse discrimination". Here I suppose what he means is that once the relevant legislation is passed, then Christian mouths will be muzzled and their voice silenced IF they continue to preach against homosexuality in accordance with their own interpretations of certain passages in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. They claim that homosexuals may criticize the one-man-one woman traditional marriage but Christians will not be permitted to criticize homosexuality「（立法後) 同性戀者可以批評傳統一夫一妻，但我們不能批評同性戀 」. To me, there are a number of problems with this "argument".
(1) Hong Kong is a party to the International Covenant of Human Rights. The HKSAR Government is committed to freedom of speech and publication, and also to freedom to practice one's own religion or faith, both of which are our fundamental rights. Such right will extend "equally" to homosexuals and Christians alike. The homosexuals will NOT have any rights which the Christians do not now enjoy. IF we may judge by reference to our existing legislation against discrimination against "gender", then, as far as freedom of speech is concerned, only what the ordinary person regard as "abusive" or "insulting" words and words which may reasonably be viewed (the test being objective) as "disturbing" will be prohibited. If so, then if a Christian minister preaches his faith and beliefs in accordance with what is said in the Bible, including those passages in the Bible that he/she believes is against homosexual practices ( actually the words "homosexuality" or "lesbianism" or for that matter, the expression "sexual orientation" do not appear in the Bible for the simple reason that such concepts did not yet exist at the time they were written or edited), to people who attend at their churches or places of worship and not talk openly to the lay public on the radio or some other secular environment against the express provision of the intended legislation, then he/she will be well within their rights.
(2) We have not yet seen the true text of the intended legislation. Therefore we do NOT YET know what EXACTLY will be included or not included in the intended law. IF "Christians" are worried that their "freedom of speech" or their "religious freedom" in regard to "discrimination" against homosexuality may be infringed, I am quite sure they will through more than one "anti-homosexuality" sympathizers in the Legislative Assembly propose the relevant "amendments" to the draft legislation to ensure that their rights to preach their own faith within their church will be preserved. In any event, if as they claim, they are not "against discrimination against homosexuals", then there should be little to worry about. It seems that they are jumping the gun and "crying wolf" by claiming that the proposed legislation will lead to "reverse discrimination" and "loss of freedom of speech" for Christians even before the text of the relevant legislation is out. I don't think they will be foolish enough to argue that they have a "right" to "discriminate" against 'homosexuals" once the proposed legislation is passed. If not, what "rights" will they have lost by the intended legislation?
(3) "reverse discrimination" (「逆向歧視」) is a legal concept related to what has been called "affirmative action". In ethnic legislation in America, certain states have in purported implementation of "equal rights" for ethnic minorities, given "priority" to certain ethnic minorities in their admission policies for state colleges by fixing a definite "ratio" for the annual intake of students based on their ethnicity instead of on their objectively tested academic abilities. Such "active steps" taken to redress the perceived disproportion of the number of "ethnic majority" to "ethnic minority" (whites vs colored) in college population is called "affirmative action" but the courts have already ruled against this kind of "mechanical" application of the principles of ethnic equality. To me, it is a complete abuse of the term "reverse discrimination" if religious ministers apply this term in the context of "discrimination" against homosexuality in Hong Kong. There simply cannot be any conceivable possibility of any "affirmative action" being applied in Hong Kong to get organizations or institutions, whether government or private, to fix a "quota" or "ratio" for the admission of homosexual or lesbian students or employees in the relevant institutions vis-a-vis the number or proportion of non-homosexual or non-lesbian students or employees for the simple reason that unlike the case of ethnic minorities whose race can be easily checked and verified by looking at their birth certificates because it is something which all Hong Kong citizens are lawfully required to obtain within a certain period of their actual biological birth, it is most difficult in practice to tell if someone is definitely and objectively a 'homosexual" or a "lesbian", apart from their own "declaration" that they are so. I do not know if the relevant religious ministers have actually studied the relevant literature before they use the term. If they have not, then I suggest that they do. To me, it seems quite irresponsible to use the expression "reverse discrimination" for political or religious purposes without knowing their proper meaning or worse, if they do know it, to deliberately abuse it by using it in improper and an otherwise inapplicable context. This type of verbal "sleight of hand" or trickery is called "concept switching".
For the avoidance of doubt, I have no axe to grind. I am not a homosexual or bisexual and have absolutely no intention of becoming either. But I am deeply troubled by the stance of certain conservative and purportedly "Christian" groups ( I say "purported" deliberately because to me Christians should be all loving and fair, like the God they say they worship) to further what I regard as fear mongering amongst not only their faithfuls but also amongst the general public against the idea of the homosexuals and lesbians getting their right not to be discriminated against in their daily lives in the sphere of their employment and education and the obtaining of the needed services by virtue of their sexual orientation. In passing the relevant legislation, we are not giving them any EXTRA rights. All that our government intends to do is to level the grounds for them ie. giving BACK to them certain rights that they have been UNJUSTLY ( UNFAIRLY) DEPRIVED of, rights which every one else in Hong Kong already enjoys, but not them because of the perceived "prejudice" by certain members of our community against them as a minority group.
2012年8月5日 星期日
Perhaps time for a new kind of spirituality
A mad man walks through the market, in the full light of day, in the morning, a lit lantern in hand, crying out aloud, unceasingly "I seek God, I seek God". One passer-by thinks he is "lost". Another thinks that he is straying, "like a child". A third thinks he has hidden himself away from the world too long and has grown afraid of seeing real people. The mad man jumps into their midst and transfixes them with his glances. He calls out "Where is God gone?". Nobody answers. He continues:" I mean to tell you! We have killed him--you and I.We are all his murderers" He asks" What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun?...Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards,in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually darker and darker? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?...God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" he raves on. He asks:" How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,--who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this task too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of the it?.." The madman falls silent and looks again at his hearers; they also are silent and look at him in surprise. At last, he throws his lantern on the ground. It breaks into pieces and is extinguished. "I come too early, " he then says, "I am not yet at the right time....Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard..." The same day, he makes his way into different churches and there repeats his message" requiem aeternam deo" and when led out, he always replies "What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?" This is what Nietzsche wrote in "The Gay Science" in late 19th century.
If Nietzsche's madman was too "early" then, he is no longer now. The day of reckoning has come. We see, we hear, we feel that "God is dead" all around us, everywhere we go. Where has God gone? We need look no further than all that's around us: at the quickening and maddening pace of urbanization, industrialization, standardization, technologicalization of our life and at the ubiquity of our information media, our I-pads, I-phones, desktops, our I-banking, I-government services, I-purchases etc. It is said that our old Christian God is almighty, all-knowing and all good. Our information technology seems to have taken the place formerly occupied by that Christian God. Our internet technology and its products and processes have become omnipotent, omnipresent and if someone were to type a question on the keyboard of our super-computer about whether it considers itself moral, the computer screen will most likely display the answer that it thinks itself all good too.
It is reported that Jesus said a long time ago, "man does not live by bread alone." If he is right, the great Roman Empire had long thought of a solution: "bread and circus!." The Roman Empire fell. It was replaced by the Holy Roman Empire, with the Holy Roman Emperor sitting upon his throne at the head of the secular government and the Pope at the head of the realm of man's spirit in Vatican. It lasted a few hundred years more. Then came the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the industrial revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the age of Western imperialistic expansion and then the world wars, the Communist Revolutions, first in Russia, then in China, then national liberations, decolonization etc and now the emergence of Third World countries. Is the greater part of humanity thereby rendered happier? Do they find their life more satisfactory? Do they find more joy, less stress? Are they more anxious, restless, fearful about their uncertain future or the reverse? Is materialism our only option? Does man still have need of a certain spirituality?
In the West, the number of people who find consolation and peace in the traditional religions are rapidly declining. Its magnificent churches have now become more "tourist attractions" than places of worship. The once universal, Catholic and apostolic church has now splintered into thousands of denominational churches. The Church has plenty of competition. Man' s needs for some kind of spirituality, for meaning and for hope are now satisfied by the thousand and millions of fortune tellers, astrologers, tarot card readers, wija board operators, masters of chi mei calculations, four-pillar fortune telling, feng shui, worship of all sort of idols, including secular rock stars, movie stars, TV celebrity, sports heroes etc if not in person, then in newspapers, magazines, periodicals, on TV or even on the internet. What does that tell us? We don't just have eyes, ears, mouths, noses, stomaches and sex organs. We got brains too. We got what used to be called "hearts" which are supposed to be the seat of our emotions and our "soul". Their needs have to be attended to too. Are they? These are problems on which many thoughtful people have spent a whole life time reflecting and writing. Some of them are making certain tentative suggestions. One of them is Thomas Moore, who wrote inter alia, the following
1. Care of the soul: a Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (1994)
2. Soul Mates: Honoring the Mystery of Love and Relationship (1994)
3. The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life (1997)
4. The Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism (1998)
5. The soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an act of Love (1999)
6. Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality (2001)
7. Dark Nights of the Soul (2005)
8. A Life a Work: The Joy of Discovery what you were born to do (2009)
To me, Moore always writes with sympathy and a great deal of insight. In the chapter entitled "Theology of the World" in "The Re-Enchantment of Everyday life", he urges us to listen to the "voice of the earth and being in a family relationship to the world". because to him the modern sciences, both physical and social, do not actually foster any "real dialogue between nature and human life". In the sciences, we are the subject and the world is an object. To him, only "theology grants subjectivity and power to nature" and for this reason, he thinks that "only theology can speak adequately" but that nowadays, our conventional theology is "colluding" with the disenchanted logic of our culture at large. The kind of theology he has in mind is much broader in scope and bolder in vision, "a fundamental, life-informing mode of understanding that takes the infinite, the mysterious, and the spiritual into full account as it seeks to formulate our imagination of human events.", one which is nonsectarian, nondenominational, something not defensive, narcissistic, obsessive or jealous and which yet considers the many issues of ordinary life that involve mystery. "We need the specialist who has no need to defend his or her own beliefs but who can speak intelligently and reflectively on how to live ritually, how to deal with death, and how to find deeply rooted attitudes towards marriage, illness, work and community." This is not at all easy. Although we are now in the 21st century, he regrets that there are still "few signs that theology as a field is adjusting to this new world." He thinks that it's not sufficient to shape a theology out of the major religious traditions of the world because to him, even the "smallest religion" has something of value to contribute. Neither does he think it sufficient or appropriate to look for "some intellectual amalgamation of all religious views" i.e. the idea that all religions say the same thing or point in the same direction. We need something which is able to deal with such things as deaths, accidents, meaning, nature, intuitions, rites of passages, sacredness, holy places, ethics, values and educations. He says that the kind of theology he is looking for is "not a blend of all traditions but rather a style of thought that takes spiritual matters into account as we try to deal with daily challenges". He believes that unless we have such a theology, we would continue to think of our problems as merely psychological or sociological when in fact, it requires "a special way of thinking and responding that reaches into the mysteries that underlie human life."
What would the kind of theology Moore thinks of involve? It requires a deep sense of our connections with the mysteries of every day life, what he calls " a profound appreciation for dialogue with the holy, for the limits of human knowledge in the face of mystery, and for emptying our language and idea about the divine so that we can live with an attitude of utter openness to fate, nature and destiny." because to him, secularistic disciplines and methods force us to live in a closed system but only theology may hope to open up our possibilities towards the infinite. He thinks that we should stress love over law, intimacy over understanding, rather like the traditional shaman, the mystics, like Julian of Norwich, going through an initiatory illness in a way that is remarkably shamanic. For him, we have had enough of intellectualization and moralization which has "kept us culturally disenchanted and divided into competitive groups". We need to break these old patterns of response in our spiritual practice: we need a new kind of imagination. As he says, it is less a question of borrowing the idea and practices of one religion from another than of "rediscovering" spiritual perspectives and opportunities within one tradition through association with another. He cites the example of Thomas Merton. I think he might usefully include Thich Nhat Hahn too.
Moore complains that for far too long, "we have imagined that the "theos" of theology to be the limited image of divinity that we jealously protect and hold as the only valid and true version." To him, "theos" or "God" is a word that fails every time it is defined, described or translated. It is an "evocative" word which "calls forth the spirit that is often described as "infinite", "unnameable", "beyond" any statement about it, and yet is "the source of all life". For some, "it is an invitation to silence, the emptying of all understanding, beyond language and story, and yet fully present as the active spring from which time and events flow." In short, we should focus on its connotative and suggestive rather than its denotative possibilities. To me, what he is advocating seems remarkably similar to what the Zen Buddhist are talking about. Moore, however, relies on the what the European theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the Nazi prison: " God is beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.", the word "church" to be understood here not in any institutional sense but as the "spirit which gather us together to acknowledge the ultimate mysteries that frame a human life." To him, "theos" is not something set apart from life, but is "the very heart and substance of the most ordinary dimension of everyday life." and as he says, "it is the ultimate source of enchantment, so that to seek the spell of the dreamlike immersion in the boundless sea of life is to live religiously, worshiping the God who is beyond any definition or idea of God, the God who appears, as God appeared to Bonhoeffer, in the face of utterly inscrutable insanity and inhumanity.". He talks a bit like a Christian existentialist philosopher: "taken to the brink of rationality, we look into the absurd abyss and behold pure divinity, beyond any institutional description, far beyond any moral prescription, and infinitely beyond any convenient, defensive, anxious, provincial, narcissistic or belligerently argued notion". To him this kind of theology is "the ultimate basis for an enchanted life": "it restores magic as a principle of mature living rather than an aberration in the course of human experimentation, and it gives utter seriousness to the re-enchantment of everyday life". We need to restore a little of the "magic" of a spirituality conformable to the conditions of modern life and build anew a certain "ritual", a ritual which restores to everyday activities a kind of "sacredness", a kind of "holiness", a sense of its hidden or long suppressed or repressed "connections" with other living things, with the air, the sea, the sky, the mountains, the trees, etc, and feel once again that pounding of our heart beat, that sense of intimacy which has been denied to us for so long by our prolonged exposure to our artificial, dessicated and dessicating urban, intellectual and cultural environment which has drained us from that vital source and fountain of all life: the feeling of connection to everything else in our world..
However, as it is, many people encounter enormous resistance to their tentative efforts to discover or invent this new kind of unattached spirituality emanating not only from the traditional religions, but also perhaps, from their own prejudices built up over the years and manifesting itself by the way they limit themselves by their own particular needs and narrowness of vision. There is no doubt that the practitioner of this new type of spirituality also needs community, something which they will have to build for themselves and they must also be careful not to fall into the trap of the kind of narcissism and narrow-mindedness of the tradition from which they are now trying to escape. To Moore, enchantment needs its own specialist and mystery its own lobbyist. To him "a theology of daily life, practised by us all would open our eyes to a dimension solidly sealed off by the modern secularistic imagination and it would restore soul, because soul is fed by the eternal and spiritual as much as it finds nourishment in the temporal and the physical". Is that not what we, in the UUHK are trying to do? I am so happy to find corroboration of the worth of what we are trying to do from this master of the art of the human soul.
If Nietzsche's madman was too "early" then, he is no longer now. The day of reckoning has come. We see, we hear, we feel that "God is dead" all around us, everywhere we go. Where has God gone? We need look no further than all that's around us: at the quickening and maddening pace of urbanization, industrialization, standardization, technologicalization of our life and at the ubiquity of our information media, our I-pads, I-phones, desktops, our I-banking, I-government services, I-purchases etc. It is said that our old Christian God is almighty, all-knowing and all good. Our information technology seems to have taken the place formerly occupied by that Christian God. Our internet technology and its products and processes have become omnipotent, omnipresent and if someone were to type a question on the keyboard of our super-computer about whether it considers itself moral, the computer screen will most likely display the answer that it thinks itself all good too.
It is reported that Jesus said a long time ago, "man does not live by bread alone." If he is right, the great Roman Empire had long thought of a solution: "bread and circus!." The Roman Empire fell. It was replaced by the Holy Roman Empire, with the Holy Roman Emperor sitting upon his throne at the head of the secular government and the Pope at the head of the realm of man's spirit in Vatican. It lasted a few hundred years more. Then came the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the industrial revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the age of Western imperialistic expansion and then the world wars, the Communist Revolutions, first in Russia, then in China, then national liberations, decolonization etc and now the emergence of Third World countries. Is the greater part of humanity thereby rendered happier? Do they find their life more satisfactory? Do they find more joy, less stress? Are they more anxious, restless, fearful about their uncertain future or the reverse? Is materialism our only option? Does man still have need of a certain spirituality?
In the West, the number of people who find consolation and peace in the traditional religions are rapidly declining. Its magnificent churches have now become more "tourist attractions" than places of worship. The once universal, Catholic and apostolic church has now splintered into thousands of denominational churches. The Church has plenty of competition. Man' s needs for some kind of spirituality, for meaning and for hope are now satisfied by the thousand and millions of fortune tellers, astrologers, tarot card readers, wija board operators, masters of chi mei calculations, four-pillar fortune telling, feng shui, worship of all sort of idols, including secular rock stars, movie stars, TV celebrity, sports heroes etc if not in person, then in newspapers, magazines, periodicals, on TV or even on the internet. What does that tell us? We don't just have eyes, ears, mouths, noses, stomaches and sex organs. We got brains too. We got what used to be called "hearts" which are supposed to be the seat of our emotions and our "soul". Their needs have to be attended to too. Are they? These are problems on which many thoughtful people have spent a whole life time reflecting and writing. Some of them are making certain tentative suggestions. One of them is Thomas Moore, who wrote inter alia, the following
1. Care of the soul: a Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (1994)
2. Soul Mates: Honoring the Mystery of Love and Relationship (1994)
3. The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life (1997)
4. The Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism (1998)
5. The soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an act of Love (1999)
6. Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality (2001)
7. Dark Nights of the Soul (2005)
8. A Life a Work: The Joy of Discovery what you were born to do (2009)
To me, Moore always writes with sympathy and a great deal of insight. In the chapter entitled "Theology of the World" in "The Re-Enchantment of Everyday life", he urges us to listen to the "voice of the earth and being in a family relationship to the world". because to him the modern sciences, both physical and social, do not actually foster any "real dialogue between nature and human life". In the sciences, we are the subject and the world is an object. To him, only "theology grants subjectivity and power to nature" and for this reason, he thinks that "only theology can speak adequately" but that nowadays, our conventional theology is "colluding" with the disenchanted logic of our culture at large. The kind of theology he has in mind is much broader in scope and bolder in vision, "a fundamental, life-informing mode of understanding that takes the infinite, the mysterious, and the spiritual into full account as it seeks to formulate our imagination of human events.", one which is nonsectarian, nondenominational, something not defensive, narcissistic, obsessive or jealous and which yet considers the many issues of ordinary life that involve mystery. "We need the specialist who has no need to defend his or her own beliefs but who can speak intelligently and reflectively on how to live ritually, how to deal with death, and how to find deeply rooted attitudes towards marriage, illness, work and community." This is not at all easy. Although we are now in the 21st century, he regrets that there are still "few signs that theology as a field is adjusting to this new world." He thinks that it's not sufficient to shape a theology out of the major religious traditions of the world because to him, even the "smallest religion" has something of value to contribute. Neither does he think it sufficient or appropriate to look for "some intellectual amalgamation of all religious views" i.e. the idea that all religions say the same thing or point in the same direction. We need something which is able to deal with such things as deaths, accidents, meaning, nature, intuitions, rites of passages, sacredness, holy places, ethics, values and educations. He says that the kind of theology he is looking for is "not a blend of all traditions but rather a style of thought that takes spiritual matters into account as we try to deal with daily challenges". He believes that unless we have such a theology, we would continue to think of our problems as merely psychological or sociological when in fact, it requires "a special way of thinking and responding that reaches into the mysteries that underlie human life."
What would the kind of theology Moore thinks of involve? It requires a deep sense of our connections with the mysteries of every day life, what he calls " a profound appreciation for dialogue with the holy, for the limits of human knowledge in the face of mystery, and for emptying our language and idea about the divine so that we can live with an attitude of utter openness to fate, nature and destiny." because to him, secularistic disciplines and methods force us to live in a closed system but only theology may hope to open up our possibilities towards the infinite. He thinks that we should stress love over law, intimacy over understanding, rather like the traditional shaman, the mystics, like Julian of Norwich, going through an initiatory illness in a way that is remarkably shamanic. For him, we have had enough of intellectualization and moralization which has "kept us culturally disenchanted and divided into competitive groups". We need to break these old patterns of response in our spiritual practice: we need a new kind of imagination. As he says, it is less a question of borrowing the idea and practices of one religion from another than of "rediscovering" spiritual perspectives and opportunities within one tradition through association with another. He cites the example of Thomas Merton. I think he might usefully include Thich Nhat Hahn too.
Moore complains that for far too long, "we have imagined that the "theos" of theology to be the limited image of divinity that we jealously protect and hold as the only valid and true version." To him, "theos" or "God" is a word that fails every time it is defined, described or translated. It is an "evocative" word which "calls forth the spirit that is often described as "infinite", "unnameable", "beyond" any statement about it, and yet is "the source of all life". For some, "it is an invitation to silence, the emptying of all understanding, beyond language and story, and yet fully present as the active spring from which time and events flow." In short, we should focus on its connotative and suggestive rather than its denotative possibilities. To me, what he is advocating seems remarkably similar to what the Zen Buddhist are talking about. Moore, however, relies on the what the European theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the Nazi prison: " God is beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.", the word "church" to be understood here not in any institutional sense but as the "spirit which gather us together to acknowledge the ultimate mysteries that frame a human life." To him, "theos" is not something set apart from life, but is "the very heart and substance of the most ordinary dimension of everyday life." and as he says, "it is the ultimate source of enchantment, so that to seek the spell of the dreamlike immersion in the boundless sea of life is to live religiously, worshiping the God who is beyond any definition or idea of God, the God who appears, as God appeared to Bonhoeffer, in the face of utterly inscrutable insanity and inhumanity.". He talks a bit like a Christian existentialist philosopher: "taken to the brink of rationality, we look into the absurd abyss and behold pure divinity, beyond any institutional description, far beyond any moral prescription, and infinitely beyond any convenient, defensive, anxious, provincial, narcissistic or belligerently argued notion". To him this kind of theology is "the ultimate basis for an enchanted life": "it restores magic as a principle of mature living rather than an aberration in the course of human experimentation, and it gives utter seriousness to the re-enchantment of everyday life". We need to restore a little of the "magic" of a spirituality conformable to the conditions of modern life and build anew a certain "ritual", a ritual which restores to everyday activities a kind of "sacredness", a kind of "holiness", a sense of its hidden or long suppressed or repressed "connections" with other living things, with the air, the sea, the sky, the mountains, the trees, etc, and feel once again that pounding of our heart beat, that sense of intimacy which has been denied to us for so long by our prolonged exposure to our artificial, dessicated and dessicating urban, intellectual and cultural environment which has drained us from that vital source and fountain of all life: the feeling of connection to everything else in our world..
However, as it is, many people encounter enormous resistance to their tentative efforts to discover or invent this new kind of unattached spirituality emanating not only from the traditional religions, but also perhaps, from their own prejudices built up over the years and manifesting itself by the way they limit themselves by their own particular needs and narrowness of vision. There is no doubt that the practitioner of this new type of spirituality also needs community, something which they will have to build for themselves and they must also be careful not to fall into the trap of the kind of narcissism and narrow-mindedness of the tradition from which they are now trying to escape. To Moore, enchantment needs its own specialist and mystery its own lobbyist. To him "a theology of daily life, practised by us all would open our eyes to a dimension solidly sealed off by the modern secularistic imagination and it would restore soul, because soul is fed by the eternal and spiritual as much as it finds nourishment in the temporal and the physical". Is that not what we, in the UUHK are trying to do? I am so happy to find corroboration of the worth of what we are trying to do from this master of the art of the human soul.
2012年8月2日 星期四
How far can we use reason to access God?
It is sometimes claimed that faith starts where reason ends because in the final analysis God is incomprehensible and that words can never adequately capture the essence of God. Is that so? Obviously Michael Scriven doesn't agree, if we may rely upon his article " God and Reason" in Critiques of God ed. Peter A Angeles 1997 .
Scriven does not accept the idea that because God is infinite, we cannot talk about God. He argues that "there is nothing in the least self-contradictory about a human being reasoning to the conclusion that there are beings with more than human power, just as the big game hunter frequently reasons to the presence of elephants....we can go even further; the whole of modern particle physics involves reasoning about the existence of beings with properties that are so fundamentally different from the ones with which we are familiar with that comprehension in the sense of simple analogy with the familiar is almost completely lacking but the success of applied physics shows that such inferences are not only possible but very effective. And mathematics readily demonstrates the possibility of reasoning to the existence of infinite entities and properties." Here he is right about our ability to draw inference from things known to our senses to things not "directly known" or "perceived" by such senses ie. to so-called "invisible" things, assuming that "sight" is a very powerful way we can affirm if something exists or not, but I think he is misconstruing the problem. The God of the Christian is not something within the universe. If the particles are "infinitesimally" small, it is a so-called "infinity" within and still part of the universe and hence not "truly infinite". It is only an approximation of what is truly infinite. Besides, to be able to talk about infinities in some way is just not the same as being able to talk "adequately" about "infinities" , which is what the mystics claim.
From that premise, Scriven argues that "there is a clear possibility of direct proof of the existence of a Being with wholly unfamiliar powers and that there is nothing inappropriate about approaching that possibility via the simpler strategem of discussing the finite and more comprehensible Basic God, however different this may be in itself from the mighty God of our fathers. it is different but not irrelevant....So an approach via the existence of Basic God makes it possible to show there is a God that many would consider worthy of awe, reverence and prayer even if the difficulties about the more complex entities of certain religions are insuperable". The real question is not whether it is possible to talk about God "in some way" at all. The true question is whether there are any ways in which we can "fully comprehend" God the way we can fully comprehend something simple like say, the metal iron. We can't even say we "fully understand" human beings. How much more difficult it is for us to fully understand an "entity" (although here, there is some doubt if, strictly speaking, the word "entity" can be used about God at all) infinitely more complex than man and obtain the kind of "proof" that Scriven is talking about. Scriven appears to understand his difficulties. He says, "The mightiest arguments of the theologians are aimed higher, it might be said, and for better or worse, they bear on a different question. God is not just more of everything or even the most. He is different in kind from other things: He is the Creator and not just a jumbo sized friendly handyman, and so on with the other properties.". He says that "these points are good' but "'irrelevant". Why? Because he says that he is just concerned with the question of whether what he calls a "Basic God" exists, not whether a God "as or more powerful than Basic God" exists. But the whole point is that there is no so-called "Basic God", just a "God" who is infinite. Mathematicians have shown us that at infinity, the "normal" rules of mathematics and logic break down and they would have to make various further assumptions to make their mathematical formulas work! We must confess our inability to deal "adequately" and "fully" with infinities, certainly as far as our "understanding" and "knowledge" of infinities are concerned. "Some" knowledge is simply not "total" knowledge! A part of us is never congruent with the whole, holographs not withstanding, because holographs are merely visual images of what the original image is and sight is but one of our senses.!
Scriven complains that some theologians have argued that the words we use to describe God do not have their "ordinary" use at all. "All religious knowledge is symbolic and not to be taken literally, they say", he commented. He says, "This move throws out the baby of belief with the bath water of mythology: it is too sophisticated for its own good". Why? "In the first place, almost all believers and potential believers, past and present, take the usual claims about God's nature to be something like the truth, even if not quite literally true and it is to them we are addressing these discussions." Secondly, he says that, if we ask seriously "what it is about religious belief, interpreted in this way, that distinguishes it from the beliefs of a pagan or avowed atheist: we find that either there is no agreement on the answer or the answer is that no such distinctions exist." He argues, if there is real difference between almost everyone who believes in the existence of God and everyone who does not" ie. that the two groups disagree about what a thorough census of all existing entities would show and only one of them thinks it would include an intelligent Being with supernatural powers, concerned with our welfare.". He says that "recent liberal Protestant theology" fails to see what is indistinguishable cannot be indispensable. Now if by "no agreement on the answer", he means that the theists and atheists cannot agree, that is obvious. There is no common ground. I am not sure what he means when he refers to "this residual content in theism" by the liberal Protestant theology" being equivalent to saying that there, the differences between atheists and theists have become "indistinguishable". In any event, he says that such differences can now be dispensed with. Why? According to him, if we say that theists claim that God is Unknowable or certainly unknowable, then "there cannot be any reason for worshiping or respecting or loving or praying to or believing in such a God". This to me, is simply false. We do it every day. We love and respect our parents, our mates and even our grown children without completely understanding their every thought, feeling and acts! He is making a completely unfounded assertion! There is no good reason for him to suggest that we cannot or should not do so in such circumstances! His reason? "The Unknowable may be evil, stupid, inanimate or non-existent." he says. But as far as I am concerned, that is not the Christian concept of God! If he is suggesting that the Christians are "wrong" in their belief, I can equally argue too that he is wrong in "his" assumptions that God is evil, stupid etc. The unknown is unknown. If it is possible to assume that the Christian God is evil, stupid, as Scriven does, then it is "equally" legitimate for the Christians to assume the contrary. At least the Christians have some evidence in the form of their Holy Scriptures that their God is good, loving etc. Scriven has none or if he has, he has not demonstrated them. So his argument goes! Against this, he falls back on the position that the God of the great religions has "quite enough properties to make him...non-existent" What are they? He did not specify.
He says that "one can all too easily get carried away by catchy little slogans like "The finite cannot comprehend the infinite" "Man cannot presume to judge God", "God takes up where Reason gives out" . He says some "special reason" must be given why an infinite God cannot be reasoned about in the same way about "ordinary" things. He asks: why should the human mind be incapable of dealing with the infinite in theology but not in mathematics and cosmology, where it is a commonplace and well-defined part of the subject? The theological answer is simply that God is not a "being amongst other beings" but he is the "Being" which embraces and contains all the "beings" there are in the universe and in whom they have their individual "beings": God is their "Creator" and their "sustainer". Here, Scriven is making a categorical mistake. God is simply not the "kind" of being that he is talking about as if God were just like any other "being"! According to theology, God is the first cause of all the other causes of there being something rather than nothing. He is the infinite of the infinites, so to speak and non-ordinary. He is one of a kind, unique, incomparable! Here my argument about strange things happening in mathematics whenever infinities are involved applies: e.g the infinity of even numbers is the same as the infinity of odd numbers ! Where infinities are involved, the "normal" rules simply do not apply.
Scriven argues that "reason can in principle both prove and disprove the existence of God" He says, "the world must to some extent be a reflection of his character. If we can show that the world is best explained in terms of a divine plan, we have the best reasons for theism. If the world is simply a natural phenomenon, whose natural properties are grossly imperfect for our needs and not improved by any unseen forces, it seems at first sight as if we would have some kind of reason for thinking Him less than good, powerful and wise." I have no quarrel with him on this score. But to me, the evidence is ambiguous: the world is both good and bad from the human point of view and there is as much order as there is disorder, as much appearance of "design" as "chaos". We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God simply from studying evidence of whether or not there is "order" in the universe. Scientists tell us that more than 95% of the known universe contains "dark matter" or "dark energy". We know much less than we think! That'll teach us some humility in what we think we know or can know, despite our "reason".
Then Scriven argues. "even if it were His nature to be anonymous, the nature of our basic question still makes an answer possible. For we are not discussing the question of whether the existence of God is possible but the question of whether it is likely...the absence of all evidence for God's existence would it most unlikely that He exists." I am sure that Christians will come up with plenty of evidence to refute him on this score.
To conclude, Scriven has simply failed to persuade me that if God is truly infinite, why it is not reasonable for us to find we should be unable to fully understand him or that we now have all the necessary intelligence and all the necessary evidence to fully penetrate such a God's "existence" in a humanly comprehensible way, including the question of whether or not he truly exists and if so, in what form.
.
Scriven does not accept the idea that because God is infinite, we cannot talk about God. He argues that "there is nothing in the least self-contradictory about a human being reasoning to the conclusion that there are beings with more than human power, just as the big game hunter frequently reasons to the presence of elephants....we can go even further; the whole of modern particle physics involves reasoning about the existence of beings with properties that are so fundamentally different from the ones with which we are familiar with that comprehension in the sense of simple analogy with the familiar is almost completely lacking but the success of applied physics shows that such inferences are not only possible but very effective. And mathematics readily demonstrates the possibility of reasoning to the existence of infinite entities and properties." Here he is right about our ability to draw inference from things known to our senses to things not "directly known" or "perceived" by such senses ie. to so-called "invisible" things, assuming that "sight" is a very powerful way we can affirm if something exists or not, but I think he is misconstruing the problem. The God of the Christian is not something within the universe. If the particles are "infinitesimally" small, it is a so-called "infinity" within and still part of the universe and hence not "truly infinite". It is only an approximation of what is truly infinite. Besides, to be able to talk about infinities in some way is just not the same as being able to talk "adequately" about "infinities" , which is what the mystics claim.
From that premise, Scriven argues that "there is a clear possibility of direct proof of the existence of a Being with wholly unfamiliar powers and that there is nothing inappropriate about approaching that possibility via the simpler strategem of discussing the finite and more comprehensible Basic God, however different this may be in itself from the mighty God of our fathers. it is different but not irrelevant....So an approach via the existence of Basic God makes it possible to show there is a God that many would consider worthy of awe, reverence and prayer even if the difficulties about the more complex entities of certain religions are insuperable". The real question is not whether it is possible to talk about God "in some way" at all. The true question is whether there are any ways in which we can "fully comprehend" God the way we can fully comprehend something simple like say, the metal iron. We can't even say we "fully understand" human beings. How much more difficult it is for us to fully understand an "entity" (although here, there is some doubt if, strictly speaking, the word "entity" can be used about God at all) infinitely more complex than man and obtain the kind of "proof" that Scriven is talking about. Scriven appears to understand his difficulties. He says, "The mightiest arguments of the theologians are aimed higher, it might be said, and for better or worse, they bear on a different question. God is not just more of everything or even the most. He is different in kind from other things: He is the Creator and not just a jumbo sized friendly handyman, and so on with the other properties.". He says that "these points are good' but "'irrelevant". Why? Because he says that he is just concerned with the question of whether what he calls a "Basic God" exists, not whether a God "as or more powerful than Basic God" exists. But the whole point is that there is no so-called "Basic God", just a "God" who is infinite. Mathematicians have shown us that at infinity, the "normal" rules of mathematics and logic break down and they would have to make various further assumptions to make their mathematical formulas work! We must confess our inability to deal "adequately" and "fully" with infinities, certainly as far as our "understanding" and "knowledge" of infinities are concerned. "Some" knowledge is simply not "total" knowledge! A part of us is never congruent with the whole, holographs not withstanding, because holographs are merely visual images of what the original image is and sight is but one of our senses.!
Scriven complains that some theologians have argued that the words we use to describe God do not have their "ordinary" use at all. "All religious knowledge is symbolic and not to be taken literally, they say", he commented. He says, "This move throws out the baby of belief with the bath water of mythology: it is too sophisticated for its own good". Why? "In the first place, almost all believers and potential believers, past and present, take the usual claims about God's nature to be something like the truth, even if not quite literally true and it is to them we are addressing these discussions." Secondly, he says that, if we ask seriously "what it is about religious belief, interpreted in this way, that distinguishes it from the beliefs of a pagan or avowed atheist: we find that either there is no agreement on the answer or the answer is that no such distinctions exist." He argues, if there is real difference between almost everyone who believes in the existence of God and everyone who does not" ie. that the two groups disagree about what a thorough census of all existing entities would show and only one of them thinks it would include an intelligent Being with supernatural powers, concerned with our welfare.". He says that "recent liberal Protestant theology" fails to see what is indistinguishable cannot be indispensable. Now if by "no agreement on the answer", he means that the theists and atheists cannot agree, that is obvious. There is no common ground. I am not sure what he means when he refers to "this residual content in theism" by the liberal Protestant theology" being equivalent to saying that there, the differences between atheists and theists have become "indistinguishable". In any event, he says that such differences can now be dispensed with. Why? According to him, if we say that theists claim that God is Unknowable or certainly unknowable, then "there cannot be any reason for worshiping or respecting or loving or praying to or believing in such a God". This to me, is simply false. We do it every day. We love and respect our parents, our mates and even our grown children without completely understanding their every thought, feeling and acts! He is making a completely unfounded assertion! There is no good reason for him to suggest that we cannot or should not do so in such circumstances! His reason? "The Unknowable may be evil, stupid, inanimate or non-existent." he says. But as far as I am concerned, that is not the Christian concept of God! If he is suggesting that the Christians are "wrong" in their belief, I can equally argue too that he is wrong in "his" assumptions that God is evil, stupid etc. The unknown is unknown. If it is possible to assume that the Christian God is evil, stupid, as Scriven does, then it is "equally" legitimate for the Christians to assume the contrary. At least the Christians have some evidence in the form of their Holy Scriptures that their God is good, loving etc. Scriven has none or if he has, he has not demonstrated them. So his argument goes! Against this, he falls back on the position that the God of the great religions has "quite enough properties to make him...non-existent" What are they? He did not specify.
He says that "one can all too easily get carried away by catchy little slogans like "The finite cannot comprehend the infinite" "Man cannot presume to judge God", "God takes up where Reason gives out" . He says some "special reason" must be given why an infinite God cannot be reasoned about in the same way about "ordinary" things. He asks: why should the human mind be incapable of dealing with the infinite in theology but not in mathematics and cosmology, where it is a commonplace and well-defined part of the subject? The theological answer is simply that God is not a "being amongst other beings" but he is the "Being" which embraces and contains all the "beings" there are in the universe and in whom they have their individual "beings": God is their "Creator" and their "sustainer". Here, Scriven is making a categorical mistake. God is simply not the "kind" of being that he is talking about as if God were just like any other "being"! According to theology, God is the first cause of all the other causes of there being something rather than nothing. He is the infinite of the infinites, so to speak and non-ordinary. He is one of a kind, unique, incomparable! Here my argument about strange things happening in mathematics whenever infinities are involved applies: e.g the infinity of even numbers is the same as the infinity of odd numbers ! Where infinities are involved, the "normal" rules simply do not apply.
Scriven argues that "reason can in principle both prove and disprove the existence of God" He says, "the world must to some extent be a reflection of his character. If we can show that the world is best explained in terms of a divine plan, we have the best reasons for theism. If the world is simply a natural phenomenon, whose natural properties are grossly imperfect for our needs and not improved by any unseen forces, it seems at first sight as if we would have some kind of reason for thinking Him less than good, powerful and wise." I have no quarrel with him on this score. But to me, the evidence is ambiguous: the world is both good and bad from the human point of view and there is as much order as there is disorder, as much appearance of "design" as "chaos". We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God simply from studying evidence of whether or not there is "order" in the universe. Scientists tell us that more than 95% of the known universe contains "dark matter" or "dark energy". We know much less than we think! That'll teach us some humility in what we think we know or can know, despite our "reason".
Then Scriven argues. "even if it were His nature to be anonymous, the nature of our basic question still makes an answer possible. For we are not discussing the question of whether the existence of God is possible but the question of whether it is likely...the absence of all evidence for God's existence would it most unlikely that He exists." I am sure that Christians will come up with plenty of evidence to refute him on this score.
To conclude, Scriven has simply failed to persuade me that if God is truly infinite, why it is not reasonable for us to find we should be unable to fully understand him or that we now have all the necessary intelligence and all the necessary evidence to fully penetrate such a God's "existence" in a humanly comprehensible way, including the question of whether or not he truly exists and if so, in what form.
.
2012年7月30日 星期一
The Limits of Ignorance 8
Cont'd
In the earlier parts of this blog on the subject of ID, I said that creation of the universe by God is probably a myth and that it's doubtful if the Bible is the literal word of God as so many Christian fundamentalists believe. What is the basis of this claim?
1. There are two different accounts of the genesis story (Gen. 1-2:24)
Genesis 1:
1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
6 And God said, ‘Let there be a dome/vault in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ 7So God made the dome/vault and separated the waters that were under the dome/vault from the waters that were above the dome/vault. And it was so. 8God called the dome/vault Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
9 And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
14 And God said, ‘
20 And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.’ 21So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. 22God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’ 23And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
24 And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ And it was so. 25God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind* in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth,* and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
27 So God created humankind* in his image,
in the image of God he created them;*
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ 29God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. 31God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Genesis 2
1. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. 2And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; 6but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— 7then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground,* and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. 8And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. 11The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 12and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. 13The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. 14The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’
18 Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ 19So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man* there was not found a helper as his partner. 21So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23Then the man said,
‘This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,*
for out of Man* this one was taken.’
24Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.
Here we see that in Gen. 1: 1-23, God created the world in six days by merely saying "Let there be..." blessed them after they appeared and then on the 7th day, he rested. If God were almighty and all powerful, as we have been taught, why did he need to take a "rest", just like a man after some hard work.?
Order of Creation: in the first account (Gen 1:1–1:2–3), man is created "after" the animals on the sixth day and in the second account (2:4–3:23) which follows the account of the 7th day, mankind was created first. In the first account, it appears he made both man and woman together. In the second account, he created man first, then woman. Also in the second account, God appears to have made heaven and earth on the same "day", not so in the first account. If they were truly the words of God, as the Christian fundamentalists believe, would God contradict himself. If the words were 'inspired by God", are they suggesting that God, who is supposed to be all knowing, all powerful and all good, would deliberately mislead his faithful servants whom he "inspired "to write the "history" of his relations with mankind? If not, are they suggesting that God is above reason, above logic, as they are understood by his prize creation, mankind using terrestrial reason or logic? If so, then Christians can no longer claim that their religion is based on "reason" understood in the conventional sense. They cannot have their cake and eat it!
Biblical scholars tell us that the Pentateuch, of which the Genesis forms part, was probably written in 6th or 7th century BC from two sources, the Jahwist source (Gen. 2:4-24) and the Priestly source (Gen1: 1-23). From the way the Genesis is written, which seem to suggest two different accounts of the creation from two different Judaic traditions, what the scholars suggest seems credible. If so, then they are the work of man, not of God.
2. There is evidence that the Jewish race, which first emerged as a distinct people in history around 1,200 BC is much younger than the Persians or Babylonians and the Egyptians and their Bible and creation myths followed more or less the kind of order in the prior creation myths common at the time of its creation. According to Mark S Smith, "We may identify three major models of creation [creating by divine power, with divine wisdom or with some form of the divine presence] all related to kingship...Power, wisdom and presence (especially in the place) are all attributes associated with kings. In addition, the king is responsible for building temples. In accordance with these ideas, various creations accounts present God as a warrrior-king, as a wise ruler, or as the great monarch presence in his palace or builder of his sanctuary space. All of these were old ideas in the ancient world well before the historical emergence of Israel around 1200 BCE" (Priestly Vision of Genesis I Fortress Press 2009 11-12) And according to Edward T Babinski,"as kingdom succeeded kingdom, sacred myths were recycled, re-edited, or combined with others."and the names of the winners in these myths were changed to match the name of the gods worshiped by the new regimes" (Babinski in his "Cosmology of the Bible" ("CB") in "The Christian Delusion" ed. John W Loftus Prometheus Books 2010 110)
3. Note the similarity of the some of the accounts of the creation of the world by Marduk and the attributes and doings of the respective God of the Babylonians, Marduk and that of the Jews as reflected in the Genesis and their Bible:
1. "Marduk shall be Lord of All the Gods...No one among the gods shall [make him equal] to him" Enuma Elish Tablet VI: 141 VII: 14
"Our God is above all gods...God of gods...Lord of Lords" Psalm 135:5 and 136:2, 3
2. "Marduk established the holy heavens...Creator of the earth above the waters, establisher of things on high...who made the world's regions...He created "places" and fashioned the netherworld" Enuma Elish Tablet VII: 16, 83, 89, 135
"[God] established the heavens...insribed a cricle on the face of the deep...made firm the skies above...marked out the foundations of the earth" Proverbs 8:
27-28
3. "Marduk patterned the days of the year..established the positions of Enlil and Ea [referring to the rotation of stars in the sky]...made the moon appear, entrusted [to him] the night...assigned to the crown jewel of nighttime to makr the day [of the month]...Marduk defined the celestial signs [for religious festivals]...the doorbolt of sunrise...the watches of night and day " Enuma Elish Tablet V: 3, 5, 8, 12, 13, 23, 44, 46
"God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons [the literal Hebrew means religious festivals] and for days and years...And God mad two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth." Gen. 1: 14, 16-17
4. "Marduk made mankind...creatures with the breath of life...creator of all people" Enuma Elish Tablet VI: 33, 129 & VII:89
" God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" Gen 2: 7
5. "Marduk shall be shepherd of ...his creatures" Enuma Elish Tablet VI: 107
"The Lord is my shepherd. Psalm 23:1
6. "Creation, destruction, absolution, punishment. Each shall be at Marduk's command" Enuma Elish Tablet VI: 1: 31-32
"The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity" Isaiah 45: 7
7. "Marduk's word is truth, what he says is not changed, Not one god has annulled his utterance." Enuma Elish Tablet VII: 151-52
"Has God said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good?" Numbers 23: 19
8. "Word of Marduk shall endure, not to be forgotten" Enuma Elish Tablet VII: 31-32
"the Word of our God shall stand forever" "Isaiah 40:8
9. "Marduk's beneficent roar shall thunder over the earth." "Enuma Elish Tablet VII: 120
"God's mighty thunder...rumble from his mouth...under the whole heaven, and his lightning to the ends of the earth" Job 26:14 and 37:2-3
10. "Marduk crossed vast Tiamat [sea goddess] back and forth in his wrath, Spanning her like a bridge at the place of single combat" "Enuma Elish Tablet VII:
74
"God tramples down the waves of the sea" JOb 9: 10 and "God's way was in the sea, and his paths in the mighty waters" Psalm 77:19
11. "Marduk, profound of wisdom, ingenious in perception, Whose heart is so deep that none of the gods can comprehend it" "Enuma Elish Tablet VII: 117-118
"God does great things, unfathomable, and wondrous works" Job (:10 & "Among the gods there is none like unto thee O Lord " Psalm 86: 8
This is how Smith explains the evolving nature of the creation story in the Bible:
" Genesis I built on and supplanted other Israelite versions of creation that understood the primordial universe as a field of battle between two divine wills. It envisions instead a royal-priestly power beyond all powers, enthroned over the world understood as a holy place similar to a sanctuary...The royal politics of creations expressed in texts such as Enuma Elish and Psalm 74 were replaced partially in Genesis I with a priestly order imbued with the proper religious life of the Sabbath ['rest on the seventh day'] and festivals of the priestly calendar [the appointed times] of Gen 1.14" (Smith 11-12)
Genesis 1:2, states, like Enuma Elish, that in the beginning nothing had yet been formed: "And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.". Creation stories told by Israel's neighbors start in a similar manner--with a big splash rather than a big bang, out of which heaven and earth are eventually made (cf. 2 Peter 3:5 in NT). The deep is mentioned not only in Gen. 1:2 but also in Gen 49:25 which lists blessings of various divine figures, including the blessing of Heaven above, blessings of Deep crouching below (see also Deut. 33:13) and "Deep" in the passive was feminine as was the Babylonian sea goddess Tiamat. Moreover, heaven and Deep are both divinities related to cosmic origins in earlier West Semitic tradition" (Smith 59) . To Smith, it is not necessary to see a particular Mesopotamia background at work behind Genesis 1 to compare the Hebrew word tehom (Deep) with Tiamat. The word for Deep or the ocean occurs in the Ugaritic texts not only in the god lists, but also in mythological contexts ...and tehom in a battle context is an old West Semitic idea and not just a Mesopotamian one." (ibid 69, 239)
4. That the Bible is not meant to be read as a scientific text is quite obvious. In Genesis 1: 3-5. "Let there be lights in the dome/vault of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. 16God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17God set them in the dome/vault of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day." We know now that the day and night depends on the revolution of the earth around the sun. Yet at that point, the sun and the moon had not yet been created nor set in the firmament. Where did the light come from if not from the sun, the moon, the stars? The Jews appear to be repeating the same kind of mistake made by their neighbor: in texts from the ancient Ugarit, Israel's west Semitic neighbor, they also mentioned gods of light as well as gods of darkness, gods of Dawn and Dusk that are separate from gods of Dawn and gods of Dusk.(CB 120) All teachers know that when a "mistake" is repeated in two different papers by students, one of them must be a work of plagiarism! Since the Jewish version of their Bible appeared much later, it is obvious who copied from whom! Is the Jewish Bible and now Christian Bible the original word of God or "inspired" by God? Or the creation of ignorant ancient men who copied with scant regard to consistency?
If faith should not be based on the "Word" (what the Greeks called "Logos" and adopted by St. John), what is the proper basis of Christian faith? What does "belief" in the Christian God mean? Does it consist in merely "believing" in the sense of assenting to certain propositions about the nature of God, the purpose of human life, the human soul, sin, heaven and hell, the role of our "mother church", following a mass and doing Sunday worship, helping with church work and doing "charitable" works in our spare time? Is it that easy? If you think so, perhaps you should read Sören Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death and his Fear and Trembling.
In the earlier parts of this blog on the subject of ID, I said that creation of the universe by God is probably a myth and that it's doubtful if the Bible is the literal word of God as so many Christian fundamentalists believe. What is the basis of this claim?
1. There are two different accounts of the genesis story (Gen. 1-2:24)
Genesis 1:
1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
6 And God said, ‘Let there be a dome/vault in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ 7So God made the dome/vault and separated the waters that were under the dome/vault from the waters that were above the dome/vault. And it was so. 8God called the dome/vault Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
9 And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
14 And God said, ‘
20 And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.’ 21So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. 22God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’ 23And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
24 And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ And it was so. 25God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind* in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth,* and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
27 So God created humankind* in his image,
in the image of God he created them;*
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ 29God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. 31God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Genesis 2
1. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. 2And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; 6but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— 7then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground,* and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. 8And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. 11The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 12and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. 13The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. 14The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’
18 Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ 19So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man* there was not found a helper as his partner. 21So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23Then the man said,
‘This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,*
for out of Man* this one was taken.’
24Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.
Here we see that in Gen. 1: 1-23, God created the world in six days by merely saying "Let there be..." blessed them after they appeared and then on the 7th day, he rested. If God were almighty and all powerful, as we have been taught, why did he need to take a "rest", just like a man after some hard work.?
Order of Creation: in the first account (Gen 1:1–1:2–3), man is created "after" the animals on the sixth day and in the second account (2:4–3:23) which follows the account of the 7th day, mankind was created first. In the first account, it appears he made both man and woman together. In the second account, he created man first, then woman. Also in the second account, God appears to have made heaven and earth on the same "day", not so in the first account. If they were truly the words of God, as the Christian fundamentalists believe, would God contradict himself. If the words were 'inspired by God", are they suggesting that God, who is supposed to be all knowing, all powerful and all good, would deliberately mislead his faithful servants whom he "inspired "to write the "history" of his relations with mankind? If not, are they suggesting that God is above reason, above logic, as they are understood by his prize creation, mankind using terrestrial reason or logic? If so, then Christians can no longer claim that their religion is based on "reason" understood in the conventional sense. They cannot have their cake and eat it!
Biblical scholars tell us that the Pentateuch, of which the Genesis forms part, was probably written in 6th or 7th century BC from two sources, the Jahwist source (Gen. 2:4-24) and the Priestly source (Gen1: 1-23). From the way the Genesis is written, which seem to suggest two different accounts of the creation from two different Judaic traditions, what the scholars suggest seems credible. If so, then they are the work of man, not of God.
2. There is evidence that the Jewish race, which first emerged as a distinct people in history around 1,200 BC is much younger than the Persians or Babylonians and the Egyptians and their Bible and creation myths followed more or less the kind of order in the prior creation myths common at the time of its creation. According to Mark S Smith, "We may identify three major models of creation [creating by divine power, with divine wisdom or with some form of the divine presence] all related to kingship...Power, wisdom and presence (especially in the place) are all attributes associated with kings. In addition, the king is responsible for building temples. In accordance with these ideas, various creations accounts present God as a warrrior-king, as a wise ruler, or as the great monarch presence in his palace or builder of his sanctuary space. All of these were old ideas in the ancient world well before the historical emergence of Israel around 1200 BCE" (Priestly Vision of Genesis I Fortress Press 2009 11-12) And according to Edward T Babinski,"as kingdom succeeded kingdom, sacred myths were recycled, re-edited, or combined with others."and the names of the winners in these myths were changed to match the name of the gods worshiped by the new regimes" (Babinski in his "Cosmology of the Bible" ("CB") in "The Christian Delusion" ed. John W Loftus Prometheus Books 2010 110)
3. Note the similarity of the some of the accounts of the creation of the world by Marduk and the attributes and doings of the respective God of the Babylonians, Marduk and that of the Jews as reflected in the Genesis and their Bible:
1. "Marduk shall be Lord of All the Gods...No one among the gods shall [make him equal] to him" Enuma Elish Tablet VI: 141 VII: 14
"Our God is above all gods...God of gods...Lord of Lords" Psalm 135:5 and 136:2, 3
2. "Marduk established the holy heavens...Creator of the earth above the waters, establisher of things on high...who made the world's regions...He created "places" and fashioned the netherworld" Enuma Elish Tablet VII: 16, 83, 89, 135
"[God] established the heavens...insribed a cricle on the face of the deep...made firm the skies above...marked out the foundations of the earth" Proverbs 8:
27-28
3. "Marduk patterned the days of the year..established the positions of Enlil and Ea [referring to the rotation of stars in the sky]...made the moon appear, entrusted [to him] the night...assigned to the crown jewel of nighttime to makr the day [of the month]...Marduk defined the celestial signs [for religious festivals]...the doorbolt of sunrise...the watches of night and day " Enuma Elish Tablet V: 3, 5, 8, 12, 13, 23, 44, 46
"God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons [the literal Hebrew means religious festivals] and for days and years...And God mad two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth." Gen. 1: 14, 16-17
4. "Marduk made mankind...creatures with the breath of life...creator of all people" Enuma Elish Tablet VI: 33, 129 & VII:89
" God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" Gen 2: 7
5. "Marduk shall be shepherd of ...his creatures" Enuma Elish Tablet VI: 107
"The Lord is my shepherd. Psalm 23:1
6. "Creation, destruction, absolution, punishment. Each shall be at Marduk's command" Enuma Elish Tablet VI: 1: 31-32
"The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity" Isaiah 45: 7
7. "Marduk's word is truth, what he says is not changed, Not one god has annulled his utterance." Enuma Elish Tablet VII: 151-52
"Has God said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good?" Numbers 23: 19
8. "Word of Marduk shall endure, not to be forgotten" Enuma Elish Tablet VII: 31-32
"the Word of our God shall stand forever" "Isaiah 40:8
9. "Marduk's beneficent roar shall thunder over the earth." "Enuma Elish Tablet VII: 120
"God's mighty thunder...rumble from his mouth...under the whole heaven, and his lightning to the ends of the earth" Job 26:14 and 37:2-3
10. "Marduk crossed vast Tiamat [sea goddess] back and forth in his wrath, Spanning her like a bridge at the place of single combat" "Enuma Elish Tablet VII:
74
"God tramples down the waves of the sea" JOb 9: 10 and "God's way was in the sea, and his paths in the mighty waters" Psalm 77:19
11. "Marduk, profound of wisdom, ingenious in perception, Whose heart is so deep that none of the gods can comprehend it" "Enuma Elish Tablet VII: 117-118
"God does great things, unfathomable, and wondrous works" Job (:10 & "Among the gods there is none like unto thee O Lord " Psalm 86: 8
This is how Smith explains the evolving nature of the creation story in the Bible:
" Genesis I built on and supplanted other Israelite versions of creation that understood the primordial universe as a field of battle between two divine wills. It envisions instead a royal-priestly power beyond all powers, enthroned over the world understood as a holy place similar to a sanctuary...The royal politics of creations expressed in texts such as Enuma Elish and Psalm 74 were replaced partially in Genesis I with a priestly order imbued with the proper religious life of the Sabbath ['rest on the seventh day'] and festivals of the priestly calendar [the appointed times] of Gen 1.14" (Smith 11-12)
Genesis 1:2, states, like Enuma Elish, that in the beginning nothing had yet been formed: "And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.". Creation stories told by Israel's neighbors start in a similar manner--with a big splash rather than a big bang, out of which heaven and earth are eventually made (cf. 2 Peter 3:5 in NT). The deep is mentioned not only in Gen. 1:2 but also in Gen 49:25 which lists blessings of various divine figures, including the blessing of Heaven above, blessings of Deep crouching below (see also Deut. 33:13) and "Deep" in the passive was feminine as was the Babylonian sea goddess Tiamat. Moreover, heaven and Deep are both divinities related to cosmic origins in earlier West Semitic tradition" (Smith 59) . To Smith, it is not necessary to see a particular Mesopotamia background at work behind Genesis 1 to compare the Hebrew word tehom (Deep) with Tiamat. The word for Deep or the ocean occurs in the Ugaritic texts not only in the god lists, but also in mythological contexts ...and tehom in a battle context is an old West Semitic idea and not just a Mesopotamian one." (ibid 69, 239)
4. That the Bible is not meant to be read as a scientific text is quite obvious. In Genesis 1: 3-5. "Let there be lights in the dome/vault of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. 16God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17God set them in the dome/vault of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day." We know now that the day and night depends on the revolution of the earth around the sun. Yet at that point, the sun and the moon had not yet been created nor set in the firmament. Where did the light come from if not from the sun, the moon, the stars? The Jews appear to be repeating the same kind of mistake made by their neighbor: in texts from the ancient Ugarit, Israel's west Semitic neighbor, they also mentioned gods of light as well as gods of darkness, gods of Dawn and Dusk that are separate from gods of Dawn and gods of Dusk.(CB 120) All teachers know that when a "mistake" is repeated in two different papers by students, one of them must be a work of plagiarism! Since the Jewish version of their Bible appeared much later, it is obvious who copied from whom! Is the Jewish Bible and now Christian Bible the original word of God or "inspired" by God? Or the creation of ignorant ancient men who copied with scant regard to consistency?
If faith should not be based on the "Word" (what the Greeks called "Logos" and adopted by St. John), what is the proper basis of Christian faith? What does "belief" in the Christian God mean? Does it consist in merely "believing" in the sense of assenting to certain propositions about the nature of God, the purpose of human life, the human soul, sin, heaven and hell, the role of our "mother church", following a mass and doing Sunday worship, helping with church work and doing "charitable" works in our spare time? Is it that easy? If you think so, perhaps you should read Sören Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death and his Fear and Trembling.
2012年7月27日 星期五
The Limits of Ignorance 7
Cont'd
Why do I say that there is a secret agenda in the ID advocates in pushing for the teaching of ID in American high schools? Let's look at what they want every high school kid to read in their biology class in the Dover district schools, the subject of the litigation:
"Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's views. The reference book "Of Pandas and People " is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves discussion of the origin of life to individual students and their families".
Imagine what would happen if a high school student were to read such a statement. The following inferences and implications would mostly likely be drawn by them:
1. since this is a statement passed out by the school which they implicitly trust would have their interest in mind, they would think the statement is put out for their benefit ie. for their academic benefit.
2. It emphasizes that Darwin's theory is "just" a theory and not a "fact", The implication is that it should be accorded much less credibility than a "fact"
3. It points out that it may be a "defective" theory because there are gaps in the theory for which there is no evidence. Since what exactly the "gaps" are is not specified, the "general" impression must be that the gaps must be quite "serious", certainly "serious" enough to merit such special "warning" . This further undermines the "credibility" and "validity" of Darwin's theory.
4. It mentions "Intelligent Design" twice as an "alternative" theory AS IF it enjoys "equal" theoretical status as "Darwin's theory", (they are careful to use the expression "Darwin's theory" and not "Darwinian theory" or "the theory of evolution" or "the evolutionary theory" because "Darwin's theory" can be read both ways. The ambiguity is probably deliberate. By using "Darwin's theory", IF they are challenged about what they say about the gaps, some of which has since been filled, they can argue that "Darwin's theory" refer to the "original" theory as first proposed by Darwin in the 19th century. Probably because they know that if they were to use an expression like "Darwinian theory", they would have much less justification for making that "bald statement", without any qualifications, that "Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence" in the way they actually did because of the huge amount of subsequent confirmatory evidence discovered by evolutionary scientists since Darwin first proposed his theory, and thus "justifying" the ID advocates' criticism of his theory)
5. Not only do they put Darwin's theory in doubt, they actively "suggest" or "recommend" the students read a book written by ID advocates on the same topic IF they are interested to explore the matter further.
6. Students are reminded to keep an "open" mind on the subject. There is nothing wrong with it as such. But in the context, to keep an "open" mind can mean only that they give both ID and Darwin's theory "equal" time and "equal" attention.
They speak with a forked tongue. This is what George Orwell would describe as "double speak" and what lawyers would call "innuendos". ie. subtle suggestions in the text which are not "explicitly" stated but which in the specific context of the text, people reading them would likely "understand". It was a meticulously planned statement done with a motive which is not "immediately" apparent. It must be intended as a "trap" and a "bait" for the unwary average high school student. This is why I said earlier that their methods are "dishonest" and "devious".
In thinking what I am thinking, I have the support of Kenneth R Miller, the expert called on behalf of the Plaintiff in the Dover case, who says in respect of this statement and other points made by the ID advocates at the trial:
(1) it calls special attention to just one scientific theory, the theory of evolution. The effect of citing evolution, and only evolution, in this way has the obvious effect of suggesting to students that the scientific support for evolution is weak, and that students should hold this particular theory up for special scrutiny. In reality, evolutionary theory enjoys the same status as other well-tested explanations in science and there is no rational basis for suggesting that it and it alone, should be mentioned in the context of doubt and skepticism that pervades this statement from the Dover Board.
(2) The Board's statement telling students that "The theory is not a fact" is clearly designed to mislead students about evolution. The Board's emphasis that evolution is not a fact might be appropriate if they had pointed out instead that no scientific theory is a fact, and that all scientific theories continue to be tested in light of new scientific discoveries....The important point to be made is that scientific theories don't ever become facts; rather, scientific theories explain facts....The Board's language clearly has the effect of promoting student misunderstanding as to the nature and validity of scientific theories.
(3) ID theory argues that an unnamed "designer" must have been responsible for much of the process, although it presents no evidence for the actions of such a "designer". This means that "ID" is an entirely negative concept, since the case of "design" is made entirely by assembling a selection of arguments that call the validity of evolutionary mechanisms into question.
(4) ID advocates often cite the complexity of living cells as a reason to invoke the hypothesis of design. While this may seem to account for any unexplained problem in biology, it does so only by abandoning the scientific method and making "design" the solution to every such problem. An explanation of this sort, which can explain any conceivable evidence, in fact explains nothing. Since the "design" explanation is not testable, it falls outside the realm of science and places it in the realm of theology, where non-natural explanations are an accepted part of the explanatory landscape. Theological explanations may be correct, of course, (as when I believe that a loving God hears my prayers and acts in my life to answer them) but they cannot be tested by the methods of science and therefore they are not science."
(5) "Irreducible complexity" is defined by its author, Michael Behe, as follows: "...a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning" (DBB 39)...An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional...Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually, it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on". Speech Discovery Institute's God and Culture Conference, Seattle, WA Aug. 10 1996) The scientific literature contains counter examples to any assertion that evolution cannot explain biochemical complexity (Kenneth R Miller Finding Darwin's God 1999 147)
(5) ID advocates relies heavily on the work of another of its advocates William Dembski in his recent book No Free Lunch 2002, using information theory and mathematics to show that life is the result of intelligent design and asserts that living organisms contains what he calls "complex specified information" (CSI") and further that the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection cannot produce CSI and that therefore any instance of CSI in a living organism must be the result of intelligent design and living organisms are chockful of CSI. He says that Behe's "irreducible complexity" is a "special case of "specified complexity". But in fact, Demski's calculations show that "he assumes what he is trying to prove"! At one place in his book, even Behe admits as much: "we may not know enough to determine all the relevant chance hypotheses" upon which his probability calculations are based and even if we think we know the relevant chance hypothesis, we may later discover that we missed a crucial one. "In the one case, a design inference could not even get going; in the other, it would be mistaken". ( No Free Lunch 123 n 80). What Demski is telling us is that in order to "detect" design in a biological object, one must first come to the conclusion that the object could not have been produced by any "relevant chance hypotheses" (meaning evolution). Then and only then, are Demski's calculations brought into play. "Stated more bluntly, what this really means is that the "method" first involves assuming the absence of an evolutionary pathway leading to the object, followed by a calculation "proving" the impossibility of spontaneous assembly. This faulty a priori reasoning is exactly the sort of logic upon which the new "science" of ID has been constructed" and Demski's arguments have been repeatedly criticized on this issue and on many others. (H A Orr "The Return of Intelligent Design" Nature Bosteon Review 27 Summer 2002; B Charlesworth "Evolution by Design" Nature 418 2002 129 and K Padian "Waiting for the Watchmaker" Science 295 2002 2373-4)
(6) Of People and Pandas the recommended text which pretends to be an open, objective examination of the pros and cons of evolutionary biology, is nothing of the sort. It is instead, " a collection of half truths, distortions, and outright falsehoods that attempt to misrepresent biology and mislead students as to the scientific status of evolutionary biology". Miller then cites a few examples of such misrepresentations and falsehood in respect of the fossil records and the age of the earth about which not a single word is said and there is nothing about the scientific techniques used by geologists to determine the age of the rocks and fossils.It says, "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abrupt through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact--fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks and wings etc. Some scientists have arrived at this view since fossil forms first appear in the rock record with their distinct features intact, rather than gradually developing" (Of People and Pandas 1993 99-100)("Pandas") but in fact the fossil records show the gradual appearance of a wide variety of physical adaptations eg. the vertebrate limb, the earliest known fish were quite different from those we find today including jaws, paired limbs and bony internal skeletons and there is strong evidence that land vertebrates evolved from lobe-finned fish eg. acanthostega gunnari which though clearly a land-dwelling animal, retained an unmistakable sign of aquatic ancestry: internal gills so that it could breathe under water, just like a fish and could also breathe on land, using lungs, a true "transitional form". Pandas implies that fossils like these have never been discovered. In 1997, another fossilised fin was discovered by Edward B Daescheler and Neil Shubin containing 8 well-formed digits, just like the digits of Acathostega ie. the limbs of land vertebrates did not appear suddenly as if designed but began to appear gradually, in the ancestors of land vertebrates, as if they evolved. (Fish with Fingers Nature 391 1997). In addition, Pandas fail to address the issue of why some species are extinct at all. But evolution theory provides a simple explanation for it: extinction is a major evolutionary mechanism. Miller concludes that Pandas was " a document that contrived not to teach, but to mislead: it misstates evolutionary theory, skims over the enormous wealth of fossil records and ignores the sophistication of radiometric dating"
As Miller, an evolutionary expert, frankly admits, 'there is a great deal that we do not know about the origin of life on this planet," but he adds, "that does not mean that science is obliged to pretend that it knows nothing or to engage in a kind of scientific relativism, pretending that all speculations about the origin of our species are equally correct."
I really have a great deal of sympathy for the ID advocates in their desperate attempt to hold on to their faith in the light of the advances of modern science but unfortunately, they have been barking up the wrong tree! I understand that many of my Christian friends still subscribe to some form of belief in ID. That is why I am writing this blog. To me, ID is simply a "no go" area, a scientific and religious "dead end", not worth bothering about, a bit like "flat earth" beliefs in the age of the Renaissance, after it was discovered that the earth is not the centre of the universe as it was then taught by the Holy Catholic Church. Christianity may involve certain "beliefs" about how this world came about, some kind of "dogma" which by definition need not be completely supported by logic because it is something "metaphysical", something which "transcends" purely human reasoning, something which in the final analysis is based upon our subjective personal "experience" of what we believe to be an entity called "God" as he has been portrayed by the pastors and priests and other "true believers" rather than scientifically testable "objective" material "facts". Such metaphysical speculation and "creation myths" have precious little to do with what true Christianity is all about: how we should live as true "human" beings in this "vale of tears", and for Christians, "as Christians", modeling their lives on the life of the Christ of their faith, and not the Jesus of human history. It may help if Christians were to look upon Jesus Christ as a "model human being" and if they were to concentrate their efforts on "practising" their faith and make it a" living faith" in concrete acts of tolerance, understanding, openness, humility and charity preached by that exemplar of all that is most noble in man, viz. Jesus, whom they worship, instead of treating the "dogmas" of their faith as if they were some kind of "scientific" propositions to be argued and debated and intellectually defended. with the tools of secular logic or the tools of scientific logic The Bible is not a book of "natural science", nor a book of human history, although it has certain statements which "may" be read as such. There is no "compulsion" to so read the Bible. The Bible was written as a "teaching tool" about the "Christian" message of love and the hope of "human" salvation from what they regard as human "sins", which in ordinary non-religious human language simply means the "wrongs" we do to other human beings, to ourselves and to the universe. Why are they so adamant that their God should have his finger in every pie?
I understand that there is another campaign by right wing Christians in Hong Kong to solicit support to oppose the efforts by some of our legislators to make new laws to give more rights to people with different sexual orientations, something which I think would be within their human rights. They incite fear into the hearts of the ordinary people by spreading alarmist claims that once we allow equal rights to the "gays" and "lesbians", our one-man-one woman family will break down. My immediate response is: if such families could so easily break down, does that not say something about the worth of "preserving" and "keeping" them? If not, why don't we live and let live? Will the gays and lesbians cause any harm to them? If so, in what ways? Why can't they allow those who hold different sexual preferences to live the way they want, just like everybody else and enjoy citizen rights just like everybody else? I suggest that their energies for "doing good" to their "neighbor" (in Jesus' admonition to "love thy neighbor" but not narrowly defined) could be better spent by helping those whose sexual orientation are unlike themselves to integrate into our society socially and economically, by making it easier for them to live a bit more like an "ordinary" human being in a complex modern metropolis in the same way that we should allow people of different ages, races, religious beliefs etc to live amongst us. After all, Jesus always welcomed and treated kindly the "outsiders", the minority, the social sub-groups, the "underdogs", so to speak, the people living at the margins of Jewish society of his day: the widows, the lepers, the Samaritans (second class Jews from abroad), tax collectors, the fishermen etc. even whores!
(To be Cont'd)
Why do I say that there is a secret agenda in the ID advocates in pushing for the teaching of ID in American high schools? Let's look at what they want every high school kid to read in their biology class in the Dover district schools, the subject of the litigation:
"Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's views. The reference book "Of Pandas and People " is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves discussion of the origin of life to individual students and their families".
Imagine what would happen if a high school student were to read such a statement. The following inferences and implications would mostly likely be drawn by them:
1. since this is a statement passed out by the school which they implicitly trust would have their interest in mind, they would think the statement is put out for their benefit ie. for their academic benefit.
2. It emphasizes that Darwin's theory is "just" a theory and not a "fact", The implication is that it should be accorded much less credibility than a "fact"
3. It points out that it may be a "defective" theory because there are gaps in the theory for which there is no evidence. Since what exactly the "gaps" are is not specified, the "general" impression must be that the gaps must be quite "serious", certainly "serious" enough to merit such special "warning" . This further undermines the "credibility" and "validity" of Darwin's theory.
4. It mentions "Intelligent Design" twice as an "alternative" theory AS IF it enjoys "equal" theoretical status as "Darwin's theory", (they are careful to use the expression "Darwin's theory" and not "Darwinian theory" or "the theory of evolution" or "the evolutionary theory" because "Darwin's theory" can be read both ways. The ambiguity is probably deliberate. By using "Darwin's theory", IF they are challenged about what they say about the gaps, some of which has since been filled, they can argue that "Darwin's theory" refer to the "original" theory as first proposed by Darwin in the 19th century. Probably because they know that if they were to use an expression like "Darwinian theory", they would have much less justification for making that "bald statement", without any qualifications, that "Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence" in the way they actually did because of the huge amount of subsequent confirmatory evidence discovered by evolutionary scientists since Darwin first proposed his theory, and thus "justifying" the ID advocates' criticism of his theory)
5. Not only do they put Darwin's theory in doubt, they actively "suggest" or "recommend" the students read a book written by ID advocates on the same topic IF they are interested to explore the matter further.
6. Students are reminded to keep an "open" mind on the subject. There is nothing wrong with it as such. But in the context, to keep an "open" mind can mean only that they give both ID and Darwin's theory "equal" time and "equal" attention.
They speak with a forked tongue. This is what George Orwell would describe as "double speak" and what lawyers would call "innuendos". ie. subtle suggestions in the text which are not "explicitly" stated but which in the specific context of the text, people reading them would likely "understand". It was a meticulously planned statement done with a motive which is not "immediately" apparent. It must be intended as a "trap" and a "bait" for the unwary average high school student. This is why I said earlier that their methods are "dishonest" and "devious".
In thinking what I am thinking, I have the support of Kenneth R Miller, the expert called on behalf of the Plaintiff in the Dover case, who says in respect of this statement and other points made by the ID advocates at the trial:
(1) it calls special attention to just one scientific theory, the theory of evolution. The effect of citing evolution, and only evolution, in this way has the obvious effect of suggesting to students that the scientific support for evolution is weak, and that students should hold this particular theory up for special scrutiny. In reality, evolutionary theory enjoys the same status as other well-tested explanations in science and there is no rational basis for suggesting that it and it alone, should be mentioned in the context of doubt and skepticism that pervades this statement from the Dover Board.
(2) The Board's statement telling students that "The theory is not a fact" is clearly designed to mislead students about evolution. The Board's emphasis that evolution is not a fact might be appropriate if they had pointed out instead that no scientific theory is a fact, and that all scientific theories continue to be tested in light of new scientific discoveries....The important point to be made is that scientific theories don't ever become facts; rather, scientific theories explain facts....The Board's language clearly has the effect of promoting student misunderstanding as to the nature and validity of scientific theories.
(3) ID theory argues that an unnamed "designer" must have been responsible for much of the process, although it presents no evidence for the actions of such a "designer". This means that "ID" is an entirely negative concept, since the case of "design" is made entirely by assembling a selection of arguments that call the validity of evolutionary mechanisms into question.
(4) ID advocates often cite the complexity of living cells as a reason to invoke the hypothesis of design. While this may seem to account for any unexplained problem in biology, it does so only by abandoning the scientific method and making "design" the solution to every such problem. An explanation of this sort, which can explain any conceivable evidence, in fact explains nothing. Since the "design" explanation is not testable, it falls outside the realm of science and places it in the realm of theology, where non-natural explanations are an accepted part of the explanatory landscape. Theological explanations may be correct, of course, (as when I believe that a loving God hears my prayers and acts in my life to answer them) but they cannot be tested by the methods of science and therefore they are not science."
(5) "Irreducible complexity" is defined by its author, Michael Behe, as follows: "...a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning" (DBB 39)...An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional...Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually, it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on". Speech Discovery Institute's God and Culture Conference, Seattle, WA Aug. 10 1996) The scientific literature contains counter examples to any assertion that evolution cannot explain biochemical complexity (Kenneth R Miller Finding Darwin's God 1999 147)
(5) ID advocates relies heavily on the work of another of its advocates William Dembski in his recent book No Free Lunch 2002, using information theory and mathematics to show that life is the result of intelligent design and asserts that living organisms contains what he calls "complex specified information" (CSI") and further that the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection cannot produce CSI and that therefore any instance of CSI in a living organism must be the result of intelligent design and living organisms are chockful of CSI. He says that Behe's "irreducible complexity" is a "special case of "specified complexity". But in fact, Demski's calculations show that "he assumes what he is trying to prove"! At one place in his book, even Behe admits as much: "we may not know enough to determine all the relevant chance hypotheses" upon which his probability calculations are based and even if we think we know the relevant chance hypothesis, we may later discover that we missed a crucial one. "In the one case, a design inference could not even get going; in the other, it would be mistaken". ( No Free Lunch 123 n 80). What Demski is telling us is that in order to "detect" design in a biological object, one must first come to the conclusion that the object could not have been produced by any "relevant chance hypotheses" (meaning evolution). Then and only then, are Demski's calculations brought into play. "Stated more bluntly, what this really means is that the "method" first involves assuming the absence of an evolutionary pathway leading to the object, followed by a calculation "proving" the impossibility of spontaneous assembly. This faulty a priori reasoning is exactly the sort of logic upon which the new "science" of ID has been constructed" and Demski's arguments have been repeatedly criticized on this issue and on many others. (H A Orr "The Return of Intelligent Design" Nature Bosteon Review 27 Summer 2002; B Charlesworth "Evolution by Design" Nature 418 2002 129 and K Padian "Waiting for the Watchmaker" Science 295 2002 2373-4)
(6) Of People and Pandas the recommended text which pretends to be an open, objective examination of the pros and cons of evolutionary biology, is nothing of the sort. It is instead, " a collection of half truths, distortions, and outright falsehoods that attempt to misrepresent biology and mislead students as to the scientific status of evolutionary biology". Miller then cites a few examples of such misrepresentations and falsehood in respect of the fossil records and the age of the earth about which not a single word is said and there is nothing about the scientific techniques used by geologists to determine the age of the rocks and fossils.It says, "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abrupt through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact--fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks and wings etc. Some scientists have arrived at this view since fossil forms first appear in the rock record with their distinct features intact, rather than gradually developing" (Of People and Pandas 1993 99-100)("Pandas") but in fact the fossil records show the gradual appearance of a wide variety of physical adaptations eg. the vertebrate limb, the earliest known fish were quite different from those we find today including jaws, paired limbs and bony internal skeletons and there is strong evidence that land vertebrates evolved from lobe-finned fish eg. acanthostega gunnari which though clearly a land-dwelling animal, retained an unmistakable sign of aquatic ancestry: internal gills so that it could breathe under water, just like a fish and could also breathe on land, using lungs, a true "transitional form". Pandas implies that fossils like these have never been discovered. In 1997, another fossilised fin was discovered by Edward B Daescheler and Neil Shubin containing 8 well-formed digits, just like the digits of Acathostega ie. the limbs of land vertebrates did not appear suddenly as if designed but began to appear gradually, in the ancestors of land vertebrates, as if they evolved. (Fish with Fingers Nature 391 1997). In addition, Pandas fail to address the issue of why some species are extinct at all. But evolution theory provides a simple explanation for it: extinction is a major evolutionary mechanism. Miller concludes that Pandas was " a document that contrived not to teach, but to mislead: it misstates evolutionary theory, skims over the enormous wealth of fossil records and ignores the sophistication of radiometric dating"
As Miller, an evolutionary expert, frankly admits, 'there is a great deal that we do not know about the origin of life on this planet," but he adds, "that does not mean that science is obliged to pretend that it knows nothing or to engage in a kind of scientific relativism, pretending that all speculations about the origin of our species are equally correct."
I really have a great deal of sympathy for the ID advocates in their desperate attempt to hold on to their faith in the light of the advances of modern science but unfortunately, they have been barking up the wrong tree! I understand that many of my Christian friends still subscribe to some form of belief in ID. That is why I am writing this blog. To me, ID is simply a "no go" area, a scientific and religious "dead end", not worth bothering about, a bit like "flat earth" beliefs in the age of the Renaissance, after it was discovered that the earth is not the centre of the universe as it was then taught by the Holy Catholic Church. Christianity may involve certain "beliefs" about how this world came about, some kind of "dogma" which by definition need not be completely supported by logic because it is something "metaphysical", something which "transcends" purely human reasoning, something which in the final analysis is based upon our subjective personal "experience" of what we believe to be an entity called "God" as he has been portrayed by the pastors and priests and other "true believers" rather than scientifically testable "objective" material "facts". Such metaphysical speculation and "creation myths" have precious little to do with what true Christianity is all about: how we should live as true "human" beings in this "vale of tears", and for Christians, "as Christians", modeling their lives on the life of the Christ of their faith, and not the Jesus of human history. It may help if Christians were to look upon Jesus Christ as a "model human being" and if they were to concentrate their efforts on "practising" their faith and make it a" living faith" in concrete acts of tolerance, understanding, openness, humility and charity preached by that exemplar of all that is most noble in man, viz. Jesus, whom they worship, instead of treating the "dogmas" of their faith as if they were some kind of "scientific" propositions to be argued and debated and intellectually defended. with the tools of secular logic or the tools of scientific logic The Bible is not a book of "natural science", nor a book of human history, although it has certain statements which "may" be read as such. There is no "compulsion" to so read the Bible. The Bible was written as a "teaching tool" about the "Christian" message of love and the hope of "human" salvation from what they regard as human "sins", which in ordinary non-religious human language simply means the "wrongs" we do to other human beings, to ourselves and to the universe. Why are they so adamant that their God should have his finger in every pie?
I understand that there is another campaign by right wing Christians in Hong Kong to solicit support to oppose the efforts by some of our legislators to make new laws to give more rights to people with different sexual orientations, something which I think would be within their human rights. They incite fear into the hearts of the ordinary people by spreading alarmist claims that once we allow equal rights to the "gays" and "lesbians", our one-man-one woman family will break down. My immediate response is: if such families could so easily break down, does that not say something about the worth of "preserving" and "keeping" them? If not, why don't we live and let live? Will the gays and lesbians cause any harm to them? If so, in what ways? Why can't they allow those who hold different sexual preferences to live the way they want, just like everybody else and enjoy citizen rights just like everybody else? I suggest that their energies for "doing good" to their "neighbor" (in Jesus' admonition to "love thy neighbor" but not narrowly defined) could be better spent by helping those whose sexual orientation are unlike themselves to integrate into our society socially and economically, by making it easier for them to live a bit more like an "ordinary" human being in a complex modern metropolis in the same way that we should allow people of different ages, races, religious beliefs etc to live amongst us. After all, Jesus always welcomed and treated kindly the "outsiders", the minority, the social sub-groups, the "underdogs", so to speak, the people living at the margins of Jewish society of his day: the widows, the lepers, the Samaritans (second class Jews from abroad), tax collectors, the fishermen etc. even whores!
(To be Cont'd)
The Limits of Ignorance 6
Cont'd
There is a history of the teaching of ID/Creationism. According Eugene C Scott, ID arose in the last decades of the 20th century and although "claimed to be a qualitatively different set of ideas from creation science--the earlier and arguably, most important form of twentieth century anti-evolutionism--ID is a subset of creation science" and though It ignores many creation science contentions such as the age of the earth or the reality of Noah's Flood, ..it does not present any unique ideas not previously found in its ancestor. " (Creation Science Lite: "Intelligent Design" as the New Anti-Evolutionism" in SCC 59-109)
The movement was started by one Henry M Morris, a Baptist who wrote That You Might Believe (1946) and then The Bible and Modern Science (1951) and the movement crystallized in 1961 when he published The Genesis Flood which he co-wrote with theologian John C Whitcomb in which they proposed that there is scientific evidence that earth is less than 10,000 old and that therefore evolution is impossible and to promote such view, they founded the Creation Research Society (CRS) and started in 1964 to publish The Creation Research Society Quarterly. They propagated the view that God created everything in the universe, including the solar system, earth, plants and animals and humans in their present form, over 6 24-hour days and that God created the "kinds" of living things with limited genetic variability. (SCC 60) such that there can be variation or evolution "within kinds" but not "new kinds" . But ID creationism started with the publication of The Mystery of Life's Origins: Reassessing current theories (ed.C B Thaxton, W. L Bradley & R L Olsen with a preface written by D. H. Kenyon 1984) which claims that we cannot explain life without without reference to an outside, intelligent cause (SCC 60) but without relying directly on the Bible, with no reference to a universal flood, to special creation of Adam and Eve or any other creature or to a young earth. They started an organization called the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) in Dallas to promote the idea. The term "Intelligent Design" first appeared in the book Of Pandas and People: the Central Question of Biological Origins ( P W Davis and D H Kenyon 1989, published by the FTE as a supplement to high school biology texts written from the Darwinian point of view setting out 6 case studies comparing Darwinian and ID explanations to see which better fitted the data, with the ID explanations always prevailing. This the book was proposed for adoption as an approved textbook (thus eligible for purchase using state funds) in at least two states viz. Idaho and Alabama and in several school districts.There "intelligent design" is defined as a frame of reference that "locates the origin of new organisms in an immaterial cause: in a blueprint, a plan, a pattern, devised by an intelligent agent".
Then in 1991, the ID movement received a boost with the publication of Darwin on Trial by Phillip E Johnson, a Presbyterian law professor at the University of California (Berkeley) in which he criticized Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker (1986). In the Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins says: "Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeless form of all life. It has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker." ( pp5-6). In his book, Johnson complains against Dawkins for using the assumption of naturalism as the only legitimate way of doing science, an assumption which he claims unfairly limited the range of possible explanations and ruled out a priori any consideration of theistic factors. The book was dismissed by noted biologist Stephen J. Gould as "scarcely more than an acrid little puff." I do not think that Johnson's criticism against Dawkins is justified for the simple philosophic reason embodied by what has been called "the
Occam's razor", which states that for reasons of economy, where one hypotheses is good enough for a particular purpose, there is no need to add a further and new hypothesis i.e. we should not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily. If the hypothesis of naturalism is reasonably sufficient,why add a further "supernatural" hypothesis of God to explain "natural" phenomena? Whatever the truth may be, the ID movement received another boost when in March 1992, a conference at the Southern Baptist University was held under the title "Darwinism: Scientific Inference or Philosophical Preference" including presentations by Johnson and ID proponents like Michael Behe (author of Darwin's Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge to evolution 1996 published by the Discovery Institute), William Dembski ( author of The Design Inference: Eliminating chance through small probabilities (1998) No Free lunch: why specified complexity cannot be purchased without intelligence (2001) and Stephen C Meyer.
Public opinion polls show that in America, more than 85% of the population profess themselves as Christians and the majority of them believe the Book of Genesis to be inerrant ( G. H Gallup Jr. 1990 Religion in America , G Wills 1990 Under God: Religion and American Politics; and E J Larson and L Witham 1997 Scientists are still keeping the Faith in Nature 386 435-36) and and only one in ten believe in naturalistic evolution. Therefore conservative politicians know that they can get a lot of milage out of supporting the anti-evolution electorate especially in the mid-American states, the so-called Bible belt states. This is what Ronald Reagan and Bush did in their election campaigns. Both of them wanted equal time for ID in the American high school biology class. But what is the reaction of the naturalist evolutionists to ID? According to Petto and Godfrey, their reactions to ID were, as expected, overwhelmingly negative ( See R. C Pennock ed. 2001 Intelligent Design creationism and its critics: Philosophical, theological, and scientific perspectives; B Forrest & P R Gross 2004 Creationism's Trojan Horse: The wedge of intelligent Design).(SCC 54) They think however, that "as long as the Bible remains the most trusted and widely read text in America and scientists maintain their considerable cultural authority, consensus seem unlikely even if desirable." (SCC 54).
(To be cont'd)
There is a history of the teaching of ID/Creationism. According Eugene C Scott, ID arose in the last decades of the 20th century and although "claimed to be a qualitatively different set of ideas from creation science--the earlier and arguably, most important form of twentieth century anti-evolutionism--ID is a subset of creation science" and though It ignores many creation science contentions such as the age of the earth or the reality of Noah's Flood, ..it does not present any unique ideas not previously found in its ancestor. " (Creation Science Lite: "Intelligent Design" as the New Anti-Evolutionism" in SCC 59-109)
The movement was started by one Henry M Morris, a Baptist who wrote That You Might Believe (1946) and then The Bible and Modern Science (1951) and the movement crystallized in 1961 when he published The Genesis Flood which he co-wrote with theologian John C Whitcomb in which they proposed that there is scientific evidence that earth is less than 10,000 old and that therefore evolution is impossible and to promote such view, they founded the Creation Research Society (CRS) and started in 1964 to publish The Creation Research Society Quarterly. They propagated the view that God created everything in the universe, including the solar system, earth, plants and animals and humans in their present form, over 6 24-hour days and that God created the "kinds" of living things with limited genetic variability. (SCC 60) such that there can be variation or evolution "within kinds" but not "new kinds" . But ID creationism started with the publication of The Mystery of Life's Origins: Reassessing current theories (ed.C B Thaxton, W. L Bradley & R L Olsen with a preface written by D. H. Kenyon 1984) which claims that we cannot explain life without without reference to an outside, intelligent cause (SCC 60) but without relying directly on the Bible, with no reference to a universal flood, to special creation of Adam and Eve or any other creature or to a young earth. They started an organization called the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) in Dallas to promote the idea. The term "Intelligent Design" first appeared in the book Of Pandas and People: the Central Question of Biological Origins ( P W Davis and D H Kenyon 1989, published by the FTE as a supplement to high school biology texts written from the Darwinian point of view setting out 6 case studies comparing Darwinian and ID explanations to see which better fitted the data, with the ID explanations always prevailing. This the book was proposed for adoption as an approved textbook (thus eligible for purchase using state funds) in at least two states viz. Idaho and Alabama and in several school districts.There "intelligent design" is defined as a frame of reference that "locates the origin of new organisms in an immaterial cause: in a blueprint, a plan, a pattern, devised by an intelligent agent".
Then in 1991, the ID movement received a boost with the publication of Darwin on Trial by Phillip E Johnson, a Presbyterian law professor at the University of California (Berkeley) in which he criticized Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker (1986). In the Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins says: "Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeless form of all life. It has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker." ( pp5-6). In his book, Johnson complains against Dawkins for using the assumption of naturalism as the only legitimate way of doing science, an assumption which he claims unfairly limited the range of possible explanations and ruled out a priori any consideration of theistic factors. The book was dismissed by noted biologist Stephen J. Gould as "scarcely more than an acrid little puff." I do not think that Johnson's criticism against Dawkins is justified for the simple philosophic reason embodied by what has been called "the
Occam's razor", which states that for reasons of economy, where one hypotheses is good enough for a particular purpose, there is no need to add a further and new hypothesis i.e. we should not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily. If the hypothesis of naturalism is reasonably sufficient,why add a further "supernatural" hypothesis of God to explain "natural" phenomena? Whatever the truth may be, the ID movement received another boost when in March 1992, a conference at the Southern Baptist University was held under the title "Darwinism: Scientific Inference or Philosophical Preference" including presentations by Johnson and ID proponents like Michael Behe (author of Darwin's Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge to evolution 1996 published by the Discovery Institute), William Dembski ( author of The Design Inference: Eliminating chance through small probabilities (1998) No Free lunch: why specified complexity cannot be purchased without intelligence (2001) and Stephen C Meyer.
Public opinion polls show that in America, more than 85% of the population profess themselves as Christians and the majority of them believe the Book of Genesis to be inerrant ( G. H Gallup Jr. 1990 Religion in America , G Wills 1990 Under God: Religion and American Politics; and E J Larson and L Witham 1997 Scientists are still keeping the Faith in Nature 386 435-36) and and only one in ten believe in naturalistic evolution. Therefore conservative politicians know that they can get a lot of milage out of supporting the anti-evolution electorate especially in the mid-American states, the so-called Bible belt states. This is what Ronald Reagan and Bush did in their election campaigns. Both of them wanted equal time for ID in the American high school biology class. But what is the reaction of the naturalist evolutionists to ID? According to Petto and Godfrey, their reactions to ID were, as expected, overwhelmingly negative ( See R. C Pennock ed. 2001 Intelligent Design creationism and its critics: Philosophical, theological, and scientific perspectives; B Forrest & P R Gross 2004 Creationism's Trojan Horse: The wedge of intelligent Design).(SCC 54) They think however, that "as long as the Bible remains the most trusted and widely read text in America and scientists maintain their considerable cultural authority, consensus seem unlikely even if desirable." (SCC 54).
(To be cont'd)
2012年7月26日 星期四
The Limits of Ignorance 5
Cont'd
I've been talking about the controversy surrounding the teaching of ID in American high schools and how it failed to get the American federal court's approval for doing so. What do ID advocates have against Darwin's evolutionary theory? Behe's main complaint is that modern evolutionary science could not give a "detailed account of how the cilium or vision or blood clotting or any complex biochemical process might have developed in a Darwinian fashion" (DBB 187). He argues that if something is not put together gradually, then it must have been put together quickly or even suddenly and that if adding individual pieces does not continuously improve the function of a system, then multiple pieces would have to be added together. He then discusses two ways of rapidly assembling a complex system proposed by modern biology and how they are unsatisfactory.
The first alternative to gradualism was championed by Lynn Margulis who proposes advancement by co-operation and symbiosis whereby organisms help one another and accomplish together what they could not accomplish separately. A eukaryotic cells is full of complex "molecular machines" tidily separated into many discrete compartments the biggest of which is the nucleus, with one fifth of the volume of the typical cell containing about 2000 smaller compartments called "mitochondria" each of which contains machinery needed to capture the energy of food consumed and to store such energy in a chemically stable but readily available way. Such mitochondria uses a flow of acid to power its machines which shuttles electrons among half a dozen of carriers and such operations require an exquisitely delicate interactions between many components. Margulis suggests that at one time on the ancient earth, a larger cell would "swallow" a bacterial cell, roughly the size of the "mitochondria" but did not digest it so that we have one smaller cell living within a larger cell. The smaller cell would receive nutrients from the larger host cell and in return would pass on to its host some of the chemical energy it made and when the larger host cell reproduced, the smaller one did too and the smaller cell and its descendants would continue to reside in body of the larger host cell and over time, the symbiotic cell would lose many of the systems that free-living cells need e.g a mouth and specialized more and more in providing energy for its host and eventually it became a mitochondria. Behe asks: "can symbiosis explain the origin of complex biochemical systems?" He says that it cannot because the essence of the symbiosis is the joining of two previously separate cells or two separate systems, both of which are already functioning. He complains that neither Margulis nor her followers gave any "detailed explanation" of "how the pre-existing cells orginated" (DBB 189). To him, symbiosis may help to explain the "development" of life on earth but not the "ultimate origins" of complex systems. (DBB 189)
The second alternative to gradualism is "complexity theory" (chaos theory), one championed by Stuart Kauffman. According to this theory, a large number of interacting components would "spontaneously organize themselves into ordered systems and sometimes there are several patterns available to the complex system and "perturbations" of the system can cause it to switch from one pattern to the other. Kauffman proposed that chemicals in the pre-biotic soup in the beginning of the earth's history organized themselves into complex metabolic pathways and further proposed that the switch between cell "types"( like how a fertilized egg goes on to make liver cells, skin cells etc) is a "perturbation" of a complex system and results from the spontaneous self-organization he supposed. Kauffman compares the situation to what happens when very complex computer images can be produced by introducing "random changes" to some originally very very simple computer programs but repeated over a long period of time. Kauffman describes it thus: "most mutations have small consequences because of the system's [change-resisting] nature. A few mutations, however, cause large cascades of change. Poised systems will therefore typically adapt to a changing environment gradually, but if necessary, they can occasionally change rapidly. These properties are observed in organisms." (Antichaos and Adaptation Scientific American August 1991 82) (DBB190) ie. small changes in a computer program may cause large changes in the computer output, something now popularly called "butterfly effect". By analogy, Kauffman proposed that small changes in the relevant DNA can produce large co-ordinated biological changes. Behe complains that Kauffman did not go into a lab and test if his hypothesis is right by doing experiments to see if "self-sustaining metabolic pathways spontaneously organize themselves." (DBB 190). Behe asks, even if we were to "assume" that Kauffman is right, "can this explain the origin of complex biochemical systems?". No. he says, because "no eukaryotic cell can turn on pre-existing genes and suddenly make a bacterial flagellum because no pre-existing proteins in the cell interact that way. The only way a cell could make a flagellum is if the structure were already coded for in its DNA.". In short, he is complaining that even if Kauffman were right, Kauffman could not explain the ultimate "origin" of life. All Kauffman could do was to explain how "life" could have "developed" after it started! This is, I think, a fair criticism.
To me, Behe's arguments against both Margulis and Kauffman merely rehearse the familiar philosophic argument about "infinite regression": even if we succeed in explaining an effect E, by giving cause C1, we can always ask what is " cause" of "cause C1" and suppose that further cause is "cause C2", we can go on to ask what is the cause of "cause C2" and so on ad infinitum. If he thinks this is unacceptable and unsatisfactory, then I can apply the same logic that he is using to what I think he is driving at and supposing he were to say that the ultimate cause of life is the "intelligent designer" ie. God, I can following his logic, pose the question "what is the cause of God" or "who made God? ". The theological answer, based on nothing but "doctrine", is that God is the ultimate cause, the first cause, the cause of itself/himself/herself but is the cause of every thing else in the universe. This is a metaphysical answer, based on nothing but belief, not on logic or reason nor on what non-Christians, non-Muslim, non Jewish faith followers, would regard as "evidence". It is certainly not a "scientific" answer. Science does not concern itself with metaphysical questions and science operates on the "assumption" that all "natural" phenomena have "natural" causes, not "supernatural" causes, a cause of complaint by another ID advocate Phillips E Johnson, whom I shall deal with later..
What we are dealing with in evolution theory is a "scientific" theory, not a "metaphysical" or "religious" theory of existence. We are dealing with the "evolution" of life, not the ultimate "origin" of life, including, in particular, something of interest to the followers of Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity, who worship the same God), the origin of "human beings", part of what Christians call "special creation": whether human beings started "human" life as a result of "evolution" from apes or whether he was created in more or less the form that he is from the very beginning. But the advocates of ID have a secret agenda: that all life began with creation by their Christian God as the "creator" and "lord" of the universe.
The attack on the theory of evolution by Christians did not start only in the 20th century. It started soon after Darwin proposed it in the 19th century. There was a famous debate between Aldous Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce in which the latter asked rhetorically whether Huxley was descended from apes on his paternal or his maternal side! The promotion of the ID thesis was the work of the Discovery institute, founded in 1991 by conservative politician and its president Bruce Chapman, whose public relations arm is the Creation Research Society's Centre for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC) founded in 1996 ( renamed Centre for Science and Culture ("CSC") in August, 2002, dropping the word "Renewal") , and Chapman stated very clearly what the goals of the CRSC were in a letter to his subordinates: " To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies. To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God...Accordingly our Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks to show that science supports the concept of design and meaning in the universe--and that design points to a knowable moral order" (Chapman B 1998 Letter from the President, Seattle, Discovery Institute quoted in SCC 65). It quickly replaced the FTE as the hub of ID activities. Its real religious and political motives cannot have been stated more clearly!
(To be cont'd)
I've been talking about the controversy surrounding the teaching of ID in American high schools and how it failed to get the American federal court's approval for doing so. What do ID advocates have against Darwin's evolutionary theory? Behe's main complaint is that modern evolutionary science could not give a "detailed account of how the cilium or vision or blood clotting or any complex biochemical process might have developed in a Darwinian fashion" (DBB 187). He argues that if something is not put together gradually, then it must have been put together quickly or even suddenly and that if adding individual pieces does not continuously improve the function of a system, then multiple pieces would have to be added together. He then discusses two ways of rapidly assembling a complex system proposed by modern biology and how they are unsatisfactory.
The first alternative to gradualism was championed by Lynn Margulis who proposes advancement by co-operation and symbiosis whereby organisms help one another and accomplish together what they could not accomplish separately. A eukaryotic cells is full of complex "molecular machines" tidily separated into many discrete compartments the biggest of which is the nucleus, with one fifth of the volume of the typical cell containing about 2000 smaller compartments called "mitochondria" each of which contains machinery needed to capture the energy of food consumed and to store such energy in a chemically stable but readily available way. Such mitochondria uses a flow of acid to power its machines which shuttles electrons among half a dozen of carriers and such operations require an exquisitely delicate interactions between many components. Margulis suggests that at one time on the ancient earth, a larger cell would "swallow" a bacterial cell, roughly the size of the "mitochondria" but did not digest it so that we have one smaller cell living within a larger cell. The smaller cell would receive nutrients from the larger host cell and in return would pass on to its host some of the chemical energy it made and when the larger host cell reproduced, the smaller one did too and the smaller cell and its descendants would continue to reside in body of the larger host cell and over time, the symbiotic cell would lose many of the systems that free-living cells need e.g a mouth and specialized more and more in providing energy for its host and eventually it became a mitochondria. Behe asks: "can symbiosis explain the origin of complex biochemical systems?" He says that it cannot because the essence of the symbiosis is the joining of two previously separate cells or two separate systems, both of which are already functioning. He complains that neither Margulis nor her followers gave any "detailed explanation" of "how the pre-existing cells orginated" (DBB 189). To him, symbiosis may help to explain the "development" of life on earth but not the "ultimate origins" of complex systems. (DBB 189)
The second alternative to gradualism is "complexity theory" (chaos theory), one championed by Stuart Kauffman. According to this theory, a large number of interacting components would "spontaneously organize themselves into ordered systems and sometimes there are several patterns available to the complex system and "perturbations" of the system can cause it to switch from one pattern to the other. Kauffman proposed that chemicals in the pre-biotic soup in the beginning of the earth's history organized themselves into complex metabolic pathways and further proposed that the switch between cell "types"( like how a fertilized egg goes on to make liver cells, skin cells etc) is a "perturbation" of a complex system and results from the spontaneous self-organization he supposed. Kauffman compares the situation to what happens when very complex computer images can be produced by introducing "random changes" to some originally very very simple computer programs but repeated over a long period of time. Kauffman describes it thus: "most mutations have small consequences because of the system's [change-resisting] nature. A few mutations, however, cause large cascades of change. Poised systems will therefore typically adapt to a changing environment gradually, but if necessary, they can occasionally change rapidly. These properties are observed in organisms." (Antichaos and Adaptation Scientific American August 1991 82) (DBB190) ie. small changes in a computer program may cause large changes in the computer output, something now popularly called "butterfly effect". By analogy, Kauffman proposed that small changes in the relevant DNA can produce large co-ordinated biological changes. Behe complains that Kauffman did not go into a lab and test if his hypothesis is right by doing experiments to see if "self-sustaining metabolic pathways spontaneously organize themselves." (DBB 190). Behe asks, even if we were to "assume" that Kauffman is right, "can this explain the origin of complex biochemical systems?". No. he says, because "no eukaryotic cell can turn on pre-existing genes and suddenly make a bacterial flagellum because no pre-existing proteins in the cell interact that way. The only way a cell could make a flagellum is if the structure were already coded for in its DNA.". In short, he is complaining that even if Kauffman were right, Kauffman could not explain the ultimate "origin" of life. All Kauffman could do was to explain how "life" could have "developed" after it started! This is, I think, a fair criticism.
To me, Behe's arguments against both Margulis and Kauffman merely rehearse the familiar philosophic argument about "infinite regression": even if we succeed in explaining an effect E, by giving cause C1, we can always ask what is " cause" of "cause C1" and suppose that further cause is "cause C2", we can go on to ask what is the cause of "cause C2" and so on ad infinitum. If he thinks this is unacceptable and unsatisfactory, then I can apply the same logic that he is using to what I think he is driving at and supposing he were to say that the ultimate cause of life is the "intelligent designer" ie. God, I can following his logic, pose the question "what is the cause of God" or "who made God? ". The theological answer, based on nothing but "doctrine", is that God is the ultimate cause, the first cause, the cause of itself/himself/herself but is the cause of every thing else in the universe. This is a metaphysical answer, based on nothing but belief, not on logic or reason nor on what non-Christians, non-Muslim, non Jewish faith followers, would regard as "evidence". It is certainly not a "scientific" answer. Science does not concern itself with metaphysical questions and science operates on the "assumption" that all "natural" phenomena have "natural" causes, not "supernatural" causes, a cause of complaint by another ID advocate Phillips E Johnson, whom I shall deal with later..
What we are dealing with in evolution theory is a "scientific" theory, not a "metaphysical" or "religious" theory of existence. We are dealing with the "evolution" of life, not the ultimate "origin" of life, including, in particular, something of interest to the followers of Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, Christianity, who worship the same God), the origin of "human beings", part of what Christians call "special creation": whether human beings started "human" life as a result of "evolution" from apes or whether he was created in more or less the form that he is from the very beginning. But the advocates of ID have a secret agenda: that all life began with creation by their Christian God as the "creator" and "lord" of the universe.
The attack on the theory of evolution by Christians did not start only in the 20th century. It started soon after Darwin proposed it in the 19th century. There was a famous debate between Aldous Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce in which the latter asked rhetorically whether Huxley was descended from apes on his paternal or his maternal side! The promotion of the ID thesis was the work of the Discovery institute, founded in 1991 by conservative politician and its president Bruce Chapman, whose public relations arm is the Creation Research Society's Centre for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC) founded in 1996 ( renamed Centre for Science and Culture ("CSC") in August, 2002, dropping the word "Renewal") , and Chapman stated very clearly what the goals of the CRSC were in a letter to his subordinates: " To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies. To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God...Accordingly our Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks to show that science supports the concept of design and meaning in the universe--and that design points to a knowable moral order" (Chapman B 1998 Letter from the President, Seattle, Discovery Institute quoted in SCC 65). It quickly replaced the FTE as the hub of ID activities. Its real religious and political motives cannot have been stated more clearly!
(To be cont'd)
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