Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Of Trees, Forests, and Bible Study

    I was impressed recently while reading several different blog entries about the importance of the way(s) in which we look at Bible passages. Now I certainly emphasize looking at the forest–at the broad sweep of Biblical themes. One way of looking at themes is in terms of trajectories–which way is the Bible story going.

    For example, we know that as the Israelites leave Egypt, God doesn’t intend them to remain a nomadic band wandering in the desert. Slowly he gives them additional laws. Included in those laws are some that look forward to possession of the land. As Christians, we ultimately look at a trajectory that leads to Jesus Christ, and even through him to the church, which is to embody Jesus in the world.

    Another way to look at themes is in terms of doctrinal statements or confessions. In this case we look at the doctrinal statement of our church, for example, and look at how scripture fits into this larger doctrinal whole, which is a light form of systematic theology. I think this is so important that when teaching interdenominational classes, I ask the students to be aware of their own church’s doctrinal statement as they study. This gives focus from the community of faith to which someone belongs.

    But all of these elements can cause problems. When looking at trajectories, it’s quite easy to go off on a trajectory, and perhaps head for interstellar space without a guidance system. It’s quite possible for me to imagine that the intention of a Biblical writer is to go to some point that I prefer, while ignoring what the writer actually says, and where God’s people actually went. It’s quite possible for me to reinterpret scripture to support my preferred doctrinal statement, rather than going back to the source.

    Recently, Molly Aley posted this article on the Complegalitarian blog dealing with the Hebrew word “ezer” in Genesis 2, and how it should apply to male-female relationships. Now I should make it clear that I’m egalitarian, so I have a bias here, but I think both sides have tended to be more concerned with hearing what they want to hear in Genesis 1 & 2 than they are in listening to what the text actually says.

    Molly has broken out of that and pointed out what this text does and does not say specifically. Now can that answer tell us the answer to all debates about complementarianism vs egalitarianism? Hardly! What it does is get us one anchor point. How that unfolds in a broader theme requires further study.

    The study of a forest has to move from the individual cells in the trees to the trees themselves, to the ecology of the forest as a whole, and also to the many beasties, including human beasties, who use the forest. There is a place for word by word dissection of a passage, and there is a place for broad, sweeping overviews. But they have to be tested against one another on a regular basis.

    In terms of Bible study, this means that there is a place for reading the whole Bible, whole books, individual passages, individual verses, and even individual words. There is a place for spending hours, days, and weeks on a single word. But if we get unbalanced about it, we’re going to produce nonsense, and nonsense in the study of God’s word is a pretty dangerous thing. One important way to avoid nonsense is by sharing. A blog is one way of sharing. Commenters come by and point out your mistakes, or add pieces you never thought of to the puzzle.

    The forest ecology, for Bible study, extends to the church fathers, to other commentators, to your pastor and fellow church members, to members of the academic community, and even to members of other faith communities. I have received great blessing from reading Jewish commentary along with the Hebrew scriptures.

    Listen, read, change focus, change perspective, and then listen some more. It’s a great joy to find something new, or more importantly to find yourself in a new, growing relationship with the Word Giver as you do so.

  • Random Design and New Information in the Genome

    Last night I wrote a response to chapters 9-11 of Dr. Richard Colling’s book Random Designer, and I really thought my post was inadequate. Those chapters discuss the very core of evolutionary theory–variation (specifically mutation) and natural selection, including the balance between preserving information through accurate copying, but also allow new information through copying errors.

    Of course, this jumps right into one of the key objections of anti-evolutionists–the production of new information. They repeatedly make the claim that variation + natural selection cannot produce new information, and they produce substantial formulas to “prove” it. Sometimes people tell me that I can’t be a Christian and accept the theory of evolution. My normal response is, “And yet here I am.” In this case I’m tempted to respond, “And yet there the new information is!” Of course, that wouldn’t answer the question.

    But Dr. Steve Matheson has provided an answer on his blog, which I read shortly after writing the other piece. I was particularly glad that I read his piece right after reading Dr. Colling’s very simple explanation, because the basics of the process were fresh in my mind. It’s often hard for me to follow this information–they didn’t teach me about gene duplication in Greek class!

    In any case, Dr. Matheson goes to work on a gene duplication in yeast, in a case where we can observe the operation of yeasts that have the unduplicated and unmutated form of the gene, and others that do. I’m not even going to take a stab at summarizing the science, but it’s there. The weakness of Dr. Colling’s presentation is that there are few examples. Now his book is such that it would be inappropriate to fill it with lengthy examples. One would never get to the end. But of course there will be those who say, “We can’t just take his word for this!” Well, don’t. Steve Matheson has provided some of the science that backs this up.

    I should mention, of course, that for those with the stamina, you can find a great deal more in Ernst Mayr’s book What Evolution Is. The problem there, however, is that for someone like me who is not a scientist, it’s hard going. I had a dictionary in one hand and my browser open to an online encyclopedia (not Wikipedia!) throughout just so I could look up the examples. But folks like Drs. Colling and Matheson cut it down to size.

    What becomes clear is that it’s really quite easy for new information to appear in the genome, and that it has happened many times. The real question is what pathways are used. The mark of a scientists is looking for new answers. The mark of a non-scientists is declaring questions closed. Scientists expect peer review. It may not always be fun, but it’s generally beneficial. Non-scientists want to get their junk out to the public who are not qualified to check it. I particularly liked this quote:

    I’m a developmental biologist, and therefore partial to many of the arguments of evo-devo thinkers. I’m excited about the union of evolutionary and developmental biology, and I do think that many of the new evo-devo ideas are thought-provoking and potentially fruitful. But the debate is riveting and informative, and I find Lynch and Coyne and their talented colleagues to be alarmingly convincing. I’m worried about some of those cool ideas, but I do take some comfort in this thought: any idea that can survive the onslaught of Lynch and Coyne is a hell of a good idea.

    The public needs to realize that scientists are generally operating with this type of an attitude. If they actually realized this, I believe they would be much less susceptible to the blandishments of pseudoscience.

  • Random Designer IV

    This is a continuation of my series blogging through the book Random Designer by Dr. Richard Colling. The previous entry is Random Designer III.

    In chapters 9-11, Dr. Colling continues to present the basics of evolution and the history of life on earth in language that is comprehensible to the layman. I’m very glad to have found this book, if nothing else than for the clear explanation of what’s involved in the theory of evolution and the basic outlines. There is a certain amount about faith in this first section, but primarily these chapters are about the process of evolution and the history of life on earth, and the level of evidence involved.

    Chapter 9, titled “The Platform of Life” discusses the basic genetic material that all creatures have in common and how changes occur. The basics of evolution, mutation and natural selection are introduced. In chapter 10 we go on to discuss good, bad, and neutral mutations, and how cells manage to copy accurately. There is a balance between changes and stability that allows life to continue to diversity.

    Chapter 11 moves from a discussion of the mechanics and the details of cells and looks at the age of the earth and how life has developed. One thing that I noticed was that for 2 billion years bacteria were the sole inhabitants of the earth. I had known this, but it just hadn’t struck me before. The process of developing an oxygen atmosphere took a long time. In addition, I hadn’t realized that the cells had to develop a way to deal with one byproduct of oxygen.

    Dr. Colling strongly emphasizes the strength of the evidence for all of this, including the lines of evidence from multiple fields. This may contradict a literal reading of Genesis, but it is clearly true, and thus we need to examine how we understand the scripture passages.

    This takes us to Part II which deals with the issues of faith and evolution. I am likely to end up blogging more on that part than I did on this.

  • Intelligent Design and Faith

    An interesting discussion broke out in the comments to this post on The Panda’s Thumb, regarding the nature of faith and how intelligent design relates to faith. On the one hand we have some who hold that anything that provides evidence for God works contrary to faith, i.e. the purest faith is based on no evidence whatsoever. On the other we have the claim that faith is largely trust rather than belief, and thus that the issue is irrelevant.

    I’ve written a number of posts on theological problems with intelligent design (ID), and I have tried to stay general for the most part. What are the theological problems with ID that would be recognized by most theologians? What are the hidden problems, if any, that would be of concern to a variety of Christians? I recognize that there are very few things one can criticize in theology without reference to a particular theology, but I have tried to address the broadest base possible.

    In this post, however, I’m speaking directly from my own theology, which is moderate to liberal Christian. To anchor the discussion, what does that mean? Well, I’m a Christian believer who accepts such central doctrines of Christianity as the incarnation and the Trinity. I can say the apostles creed without crossing my fingers, but I’m not rigid on the details of interpretation. When I say “I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth” I see myself in fellowship with a range of beliefs about how God accomplished this creation. When I say that Jesus was crucified, dead, buried, and rose the third day, I’m not extremely tense about just how one believes that accomplishes salvation.

    Hidden in that short statement is the idea that I accept the possibility of divine intervention in the physical universe. While “Trinity” may be seen as language for us limited mortals to use in talking about God, a reality that would probably be shocking if we could actually come to comprehend it, “incarnation” involves intervention. God, in some way, becomes more part of his creation in this one person than at any other time or place. My observation is that in most miracle claims the issue is communication, rather than an alteration of reality. In other words, I don’t believe that God intervenes generally to do things all the way from emptying parking places for people to eliminating or preventing the results of a madman like Adolph Hitler. (I’ve addressed the issue of why this would be so briefly in my book Not Ashamed of the Gospel: Confessions of a Liberal Charismatic. I’ve also discussed the notion of miracles more extensively in my series of essays on the Hand of God, part 1, part 2, and part 3.)

    The key element here is that God created a universe that is functional, and that God lets that universe function according to consistent, observable rules as much as possible. I think at a minimum we can observe that God doesn’t intervene on a constant and regular basis in our daily lives. If God behaved in that way, one could get much clearer results from all these “prayer studies.” If God consistently altered the general chain of cause and effect for believers, all you would have to do would be to separate a group of believers from a group of non-believers (including those who believe differently than your target group), and watch what God does. While there may be statistical arguments about God’s intervention based on studies of prayer at a distance, unknown to those who are prayed for, those are marginal numbers. No study suggests that every Christian in the group, for example, is healed, or that everyone prayed for by a Christian is healed.

    I’m not saying here that nobody is healed as a result of prayer–I’m remaining agnostic on that point for purposes of this essay. What I think the evidence demonstrates quite clearly is that there is no regular, predictable form of intervention going on. This can be a critical point. I know of quite a number of people who believe that if a believer prays for something and has faith, that thing will happen. This is especially asserted in terms of healing. The excuses, of course, are always with us. If someone is not healed, someone didn’t pray with enough faith. Some would say that if a group prays for someone’s healing and one person in the group lacks faith, then the healing won’t take place. As a result, it’s hard to present airtight counterexamples. But if you look at the general picture, there are many people praying and believing, and relatively few people getting better. The data certainly counterindicates a consistently favorable result.

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  • PSA: Thoughts on Centering

    David Heddle commented on my earlier post, PSA: An Unbalanced and Ineffective View of the Atonement, in his post Penal Substitutionary Atonement: it’s not about Justice. I haven’t had time to respond until now, and I will only respond to a few points. One of the things I have noticed about debates on the atonement is that they tend to cover wide swathes of material, and bring on board large numbers of assumptions. It’s pretty much impossible to avoid.

    First let me note a couple of quotes to which I want to respond briefly and then get to the actually topic.

    Heddle says: “The scriptural support for PSA is impressive.” He then proceeds to cite Isaiah 53:5 and Romans 3:23-25. Of course both sides claim support from scripture–that’s required–but it seems to me that proponents of PSA find every verse that has both the words “redemption” (or salvation, or something similar) and the word “for” in them, and claim that they support substitutionary atonement as understood in a courtroom setting.

    That importation is certainly wrong in Isaiah 53, which quite clearly has the concept of substitution, but lacks the courtroom metaphor and doesn’t deal with someone being adjudged in one way or another. It is not good practice to interpret the substitution of Isaiah 53, in which the servant suffers for a group of people, without looking at the servant passages in general. In this case, we have a small group of people suffering as a result of the actions of the whole nation. There is substitution and representation, but there is no imputation or impartation going on. The more I study “clear” texts supporting penal substitution, the less clearly they support penal substitution. In particular, few can properly be read in a courtroom setting.

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  • Moderate Christian Blogroll Change

    The RSS feed for the Moderate Christian blogroll, useful for putting links in your sidebar, will be changing. Since many of the blogroll members don’t read the blogroll admin blog, I’m putting the announcement here as well. The old feed will be going away, and the new feed is already active. If you are using this feed to display links to the blogroll members, please change the link.

    The new feed is: http://ncs.hneufeld.com/?bdprssfeed=1.

    I had to make this change because the level of traffic on this blog got beyond a couple of administrative items, and it isn’t because of blog readership. It appears to be the overhead of the aggregator software that caused the problem.

    Note: If you’ve had problems getting this blog over the last couple of days, it’s because of this problem. I know the blog has been down at least three times.

  • Random Designer III

    Continuing to work through this book, chapter 6, “Magnificent Molecular Micro-Machines” presents a great deal of the complexity of the cell, and its form and structure. I’m going to start this time with a quote:

    At first glance, it would seem impossible to generate such increidble diversity from such a small pool of amino acid building blocks. However, in living organisms where random design has been effectively operating for billions of years, the task is actually quite simple. ( p. 54)

    One of the serious problems, I think, for Christian readers of books like Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, is that they may have learned just how complex cells are in the book for the first time. That leaves those who are uninformed with the impression that scientists are kind of ignoring all this complexity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scientists are constantly working on learning just how all of this works. This chapter in Colling’s book will put the incredible complexity into some perspective, and show how it is quite workable within evolutionary theory. In fact, Dr. Colling calls this “incredibly productive.”

    Chapter 7 continues with a basic description of RNA and DNA, and their functions. This is fairly routine stuff, though critical, of course, and again Dr. Colling lays it out in a way that the lay reader can easily understand.

    I’m going to conclude this entry by looking at chapter 8, “Trial and Error-or is it Trial and Success.” The production of many options and a selection of only a few was introduced earlier concerning the production of various complex molecules. Generation of random options with selection of working results looks very interesting when we’re talking about molecules, but when it comes to living creatures. We’re OK with molecules falling apart. Few of us are even concerned about the death of bacteria, but what about puppies? Or people?

    Dr. Colling makes the strong case that the principle of Random Design applies everywhere, even to human beings. Human beings may be more than physical beings–he believes we are–but we are also biological entities and the laws of biology act upon us fully. Whatever spiritual nature we possess, it doesn’t exempt us from the same rules that apply to all other life.

    This is probably the hardest thing for a Christian to present regarding evolution. Dr. Colling presents it very positively, as his optimistic chapter title indicates. But if Christian readers are going to stumble, they’re probably going to do it right her in this one chapter. But the bottom line is that the evidence is too overwhelmingly strong that random design does apply to all living creatures, including human beings, and if one believes in God the creator, it must be God’s product.

  • Christian Carnival #201 Posted

    . . . at Thinking Christian.

  • Links for 12/7/07

    Here a just a few things I think my readers might find interesting, but that I won’t get much time to comment on:

    • Human events has an article on intelligent design by a conservative who doesn’t think much of it. In fact, he thinks the main stream media cover it because it’s embarrassing to conservatives. “The Left believes, correctly, that Intelligent Design is a political loser, and so they gleefully attempt to hang it around the neck of every right-of-center movement from libertarian neo-conservatism to isolationist populism — shouting all the while ‘See, the American Taliban has come for your children! Elect a Democrat before it’s too late!’” — It’s an interesting perspective! (HT: Panda’s Thumb)
    • It’s not really about evolution, but Carl Zimmer has his 100th picture of a science tattoo
    • Steve Martin has the fourth in his series of articles on Polkinghorne quotes, in which we find this quote (from Martin, not Polkinghorne): “Many Christians, I think, put too much stock in the implications of scientific discoveries.” Hmmm! It leads one to think!
    • I’m just getting all my RSS subscriptions updated on my new computer or I would have gotten this one earlier, but this post by Dr. Steve Matheson is too good to miss. He looks at a Discovery Institute showcase piece by Jonathan Wells, and shows it’s serious problems. The answer seems to be that there was a testable hypothesis in the article, but it proved wrong, and didn’t have anything to do with ID in the first place. In addition, any article that calls Jonathan wells “a former developmental biologist” can’t be all bad!
    • And in the obligatory link to something I wrote, my fictional God-Talk Club gets into ID while discussing homeschooling in my latest post. Remember that those posts are for fun and practice, though I do welcome responses either to presentation or to content.

    There are very few things that haven’t been moved to the new computer, imported, or otherwise sorted out. For those who my have missed the post I switched not only to a new CPU but to a new operating system. I’m now using Ubuntu Linux, after trying it on a separate machine for a few months. I’m thus far very happy with the results. Having the old machine on the same network has made moving stuff pretty easy.

  • Christian Carnival #201 Posted

    . . . at Thinking Christian.