Religion – Page 55 – Threads from Henry's Web

Another Note on Design

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Since I hadn’t commented on the Intelligent Design controversy for some time, I want to add a couple of notes to what I said yesterday.

I absolutely believe in design. I believe everything is designed by God. I believe God is involved in everything. In teaching on this subject I have occasionally simply started dropping my pencil on the podium. Someone will surely ask me why I’m doing it. I then ask why the pencil always falls. The 20th or 21st century answer is, of course, gravity. Duh! “No,” I like to say, “The pencil falls because God wants it to.”

What do I mean by that? Do I not believe in gravity? Oh absolutely! Like everything else, I do so because I believe in God. God’s desire is expressed so consistently that we can write it as a law.

I followed the suggestion in one of the comments to the Science and the Sacred post I linked yesterday, and went and read the entire essay in PDF, thus avoiding the wait for the second half. I want to quote a couple of paragraphs.

The first is this:

The point is, different chance hypotheses give different results. Dembski writes, “…opposing chance to design requires that we be clear what chance processes could be operating to produce the event in question.”2 Dembski is very explicit about the necessity of the design inference eliminating all chance hypotheses. But this is a fatal flaw: except in very unusual cases, it is impossible to identify all possible chance hypotheses simply because finite human beings are unable to identify every chance scenario that might be operative. [link added]

This is what I meant in my fumbling, non-mathematician’s statement that I reject the design inference on the grounds of garbage-in garbage-out. We don’t know how the creation of life or certain biological structures occurs, and thus it is not possible to determine the probability of such events.

Again:

Also, suppose an intelligent agent designed a natural process that incorporated chance. Human beings do this frequently …

Even if we accept, as I do, that God is the creator, we don’t know the process, so how precisely to we identify God’s fingerprint? I would also suggest that the claim that God cannot design a process that includes chance is just as limiting to God as any of the many other limitations we try to put on him.

Dr. Bradley further argues that design is one of those points where theology can legitimately contribute to our knowledge of the world. It’s a great essay. I suggest reading it.

I would note another issue I have with intelligent design, which is simply that it is detecting instances of design in a universe that is, I believe, designed. Thus, in some sense it is detecting “more” design in some portions of the universe than in others. This is the problem I have with the design argument going back to Paley. The watch is designed, yes. But the sand is also designed in some sense. (Note that I’m aware the analogy is between the watch and living organisms, not sand. That is, in fact, my problem with it.) One could almost infer that the design argument tests for the absence of God’s designing work in other places in the universe. Almost, but not quite. This is, of course, a theological argument on my part, but then I have always thought this argument should be theological and philosophical, rather than scientific.

Incidentally, it is my belief that God is involved at all points in the universe that makes theistic evolution a difficult thing for me. For many people it is simply a matter of saying that the Bible tells us God created but science tells us how God created–evolutionary processes. This said, we move on without examining our theological views based on the result. But the idea that the earth is old and that death occurred before before the fall seems to display a God who is quite willing to let sparrows, amongst many other things, fall. That is a challenging gulf to bridge. I cannot agree with many of my friends who say that evolution doesn’t really make much theological difference.

December 28, 2010

On the Design Inference

I’m definitely going to follow this new series on Science & the Sacred. The first post is Why Dembski’s Design Inference Doesn’t Work. Part 1.

I’ve rejected the design inference on the grounds of garbage-in garbage-out. You can’t determine how likely a chain of events is when you don’t know what events constitute the chain. The probability of unknown events is, well, unknown, or so it seems to me.

James Bradley is Professor of Mathematics emeritus at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, and is addressing the heart of the matter.

December 27, 2010

Wesley’s Rules for Preachers

Joel gives us John Wesley’s Twelve Rules for Preachers. Which of us can live up to these?

December 27, 2010

Putting up Barriers to Ministry

I empathize with Alan Knox’s post today, Help or Get Out of the Way. He relates two experiences of church leadership standing in the way because they required people to go through existing church programs. This is not the way to go about Christian ministry. Come to think of it, it’s not even the way to go about secular business.

How about this as a rule of thumb: If you find yourself telling people that they cannot serve people because of program X, then program X needs to get out of the way. If you can say, “Yes, we can help you with program X, then maybe, just maybe, program X is something useful.

Let me illustrate. When I first came to a United Methodist congregation, I had been out of the church–any church–for nearly 12 years. I had a strong work background and my education and experience–an MA degree in Biblical and Cognate Languages. It didn’t take long after I joined the church for them to put me to work. I was soon teaching Sunday School classes and various events for the youth. Now I don’t have a problem with a church being careful about who they have teaching. They should, and they did. I talked with various people in leadership about my experience, my beliefs, and what I would be teaching.

Then the pastor invited me to preach one Sunday. An individual in the church, heavily involved in our United Methodist lay speaking program, was quite irate. I had not gone through the lay speaker training program, and thus shouldn’t be speaking in the church. The pastor ignored him.

After this event I did go attend the lay speaker training, and while I have any number of problems with the content, I was glad to have the experience. I didn’t really learn new theology, and some of what I did hear was incorrect (John Wesley influenced by the writings of Karl Marx?), but I did get to know other United Methodists and how they worked, and that was helpful.

My point here is that the program–lay speaking–can be a tremendous help, but when it becomes a means whereby “leaders” control the church members it can be a hindrance. To carry forward that thought, after I had become a Certified Lay Speaker, I was again approached because I was speaking at various places without coordinating with the lay speaker program. This individual thought that now that I was a lay speaker, any time I spoke anywhere I needed permission from the church’s coordinator and needed to report to him after I did, even when those events had nothing to do with the United Methodist Church at all. Again, something potentially helpful was being used as a barrier.

What I’ve noticed in Methodist churches is a strong tendency to multiply programs. This results in overlapping and redundant people managing the programs, and often in a great deal of discouragement because people with good ideas find that there are nearly dead programs in the way. In one church people were tracked by three different programs with pastoral care looking at church attendance, Sunday School classes tracking one’s presence, and then a lay pastoral care ministry. About this time someone wanted to start a Stephen’s ministry. Each of these things would demand weekend training events (or longer), social events so that everyone could get together, statistics reported to the appropriate leadership or committee, and so forth. And you know what? People would still fall through the cracks while others were exhausted trying to get to all the events that allowed boxes to be checked off.

Well, this is a longer rant than I intended. Head on over to Alan’s blog and check out the discussion.

(HT: Dave Black Online)

December 27, 2010

Merry Christmas!

I’m not going to write a Christmas post here, but I wrote three of them on my Jevlir blog, where I write a bit of fiction. They are:

Enjoy!

December 24, 2010

Linking the Birth of Our Nation with the Birth of Our Savior

Chuck Baldwin maintains that the birth of our Savior and the birth of our nation are closely linked. I’m afraid I don’t get it, even allowing all his facts, some of which I would dispute. I just don’t see the parallel between the guns of the revolution and the Babe of Bethlehem emptying himself of divinity to come save us.

What do you think?

December 23, 2010

Greetings from the Religious Arm of Socialism

In a blog post My Dream: No More Methodist Church, Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation fame says that his dream is that there be no more Methodist church. What set him off was a church sign (on a Methodist church, of course) urging passage of the DREAM act. He says that the church is nothing more than the “‘religious’ arm of socialism.”

My response? Check the title!

Midday open thread (dailykos.com)

December 20, 2010

A Christian Officer and DADT

Jesus is considered by scholars such as Weber ... — Image via Wikipedia

Lt. Col. Stacy L Maxey has written a letter to Stars and Stripes indicating that he has plans to violate military regulations following the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Or something like that. Actually it’s hard to tell precisely what he plans to do. One paragraph of the letter reads:

Here’s the truth: I will continue to witness to who I want, when I want and where I want. My commitment to my God supersedes my commitment to the DOD and, if officials are upset about that, then I guess they can “learn to deal with it.”

Now it’s hard to tell precisely what he means by “witnessing” but it appears his plans include things that would violate regulations–regulations that exist for very good reasons. I was not a Christian while I was in the Air Force, and I encountered situations in which I was very glad there was protection from officers who felt their religious views could be forced on others appropriately.

While I support the repeal of DADT, and am glad to see it happen after so many years (note to objectors: straight servicemen and women have been serving with gay servicemen and women for years, and often we knew it quite well; our unit cohesion did not evaporate), my post is not about that issue.

There is one way in which I support Lt. Col. Maxey, and this is it. He is absolutely right that his “commitment to [his]God supersedes [his] commitment to the DOD” and he must obey God first. I say that without any form of sarcasm. I believe it.

But he also took an oath (or made an affirmation) as an officer in the U. S. Air Force, and that promise is also sacred. For those who may quote Jesus saying not to swear at all (Matthew 5:33-37), let me point out that Jesus was calling for a higher, not a lower standard of honesty, one in which a simple “yes” or “no” was your commitment.

There is an option for someone who cannot carry out the duties of an officer in good conscience: Resign your commission. It comes down to this. If you can’t obey Caesar’s laws, don’t take Caesar’s money.