Ten on Darwin

Ben Myers on Darwin

If his theory of evolution by natural selection is the best theory in town that explains the evidence (palaeontological, morphological/taxonomical, molecular/genetic) – and it is – deal with it. Of course refute it on empirical grounds if you can, but don’t rubbish it because you don’t like its theological or moral implications, or because you have a political agenda. Fight science with science

Genesis is not science. Again I’ll stand on the side of ancient Near Eastern context and take Genesis for what it is – a creation account of God placing the functions and ordering of the universe. Not God manufacturing and telling us how – as if we could ever understand that in its entirety, theologically or scientifically.

But it is a good start to know exactly what Darwin did and didn’t say: he never claimed to account for the origins of life from inorganic matter, let alone ex nihilo; rather he argued that his theory explained how present-day species evolved from earlier ones. Even the later Darwin could speak of life being “breathed by the Creator”.

This is what we should be talking about when we say “Creator”. The originator of life, the “intender” of life. This is no way implies a deistic stance that God “made it and left it” either.

observes Diogenes Allen, “Darwin supplied what Hume lacked”: in contrast to the prevailing Aristotelian view of the fixity of species, “an account of present-day life forms arising by natural processes from earlier ones. The argument for a designer, which moves directly from present-day life forms to a designer, can no longer be employed because the only alternative to chance is not design.” Allen correctly continues: “the fundamental issue nature’s order poses is whether it is intended, not whether it is designed.”

The Genesis accounts do much less explanation of “how man came to be” than its contemporary literature. But it does indicate intention, and the good kind. Not the kind where man is the servant of the gods, to do their work. But rather as God’s very image.

Scientific theory and philosophical considerations, however, were relatively light loads in the cumulative burden that eventually flattened Darwin’s faith.

Despite what some use evolution for – an out to excuse their lack of faith – Darwin did not. He flatly denied that The Origin of Species was an atheistic book whatsoever.

Because the fact that “the causal heart of Darwinian theorizing is against the idea of progress” (Michael Ruse) clears an intellectual space for biblical eschatology: more precisely, for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the world’s apocalyptic counter-evolutionary moment in which the weakest kata sarka turn out to be the “fittest” kata pneuma. John Howard Yoder famously said that “those who bear crosses are walking with the grain of the universe.” Strictly speaking, that should be: against the grain of “nature, red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson; cf. Romans 8:22), and with the grain of the new creation

Now that is a spectacular image of Christianity defined over and against the contemporary culture holding to a social Darwinism (however large or small). We shouldn’t be arguing whether or not nature works in such a way – but arguing that humanity should not!

John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, reflecting on how Darwin’s theory has influenced our understanding of the deity, suggest that “two images of God took a beating”: “the artisan or mechanic”, and “the magician” of special creation. Which perhaps invites us to re-imagine the Creator more as an improvising artist or musician. John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”, anyone?

I’ll leave that last one for you.

Fail Fast

While this example is from Quincy Jones and the music industry the very idea of failing fast has so much to offer in the programming world. We spend our days building castles in our minds, then castles in the air out of code. It can all come crashing down at any time. And the higher you build, the further the fall.

Good programming is an exercise in abstraction. Peeling away all the common parts into generic bite-sized tasks. And when you abstract things you gain power – but you lose clarity. You aren’t sure which time around something goes slightly askew. You don’t know where in the chain of events something messed up. Failing fast is important. Fail as soon as you reach a problem, so there is no confusion about where it is. If you reach a case when you don’t know what to do, fail. If that case ever happens in reality, you will at least have somewhere to start.

I cannot understand the person who builds castles in the air all day long without a concrete referent. Even in fields of theology and history that I study, arguably very “castles in the air”, there is always a concrete referent that is at the heart of the discussion, whether it be a text, the past, the present, or some combination of them all.

Solving problems you don’t have is not failing fast. That is wasting time not solving the problems you do have. If you are unsure what problems you have, you are not failing fast. If you fail fast, you are forced to fix your mistakes before you move forward. This principle applies to nearly every art and science of design, be it graphic design, engineering, aerospace, as well as computer science.

On one hand I am sad that software, especially on the web, is so inexpensive to create. The aerospace industry knows this principle of failing fast so well. Why? Because it is insanely expensive to build an entire plane. They can’t waste all that money building planes that don’t fly. They have to start at the smallest possible point. Create. Test. Fail. Improve. Over and over. Until they get a single plane that approaches production ready. They get some more tweaks out of it, iterating on the complete plane until they are done. It passes everything with flying colors and it goes into production. I wish people in the software world understood this.

On Music

Often times I’ve heard Christians lament when one of their favorite bands “tone down” their overtly “Christian” message. From that point of view the explicit mention of “biblical” words in a song determines whether or not it is “Christian”. And for whatever reason that was the only observable metric that really made sense, even to me. Everything else is wishy-washy. Yesterday I was talking with a singer-songwriter friend of mine, after he finished playing a show, about one of his songs which I thought was “Christian”. And he gave me an interesting way to think about it. He didn’t think it was any more particularly “Christian” that any of the songs he wrote. Since he wrote them, and that is always an influence in his life, it is in the song as well. He makes a different distinction: Sacred and non-sacred. I found that very helpful in thinking about this. There are plenty of “Christian” songs, that I give that designation despite their artist or the public’s thinking on it, because of the effect they have on me. I wouldn’t call any of those Sacred however.

Some Milk

Responding to Sean Penn’s Oscar speech:

In this worldview, gender is viewed as a social construct that has nothing to do with what it means to be human. Notwithstanding the accidents of biology, male and female are totally interchangeable in marriage and in society. The normalization of homosexual relations flows naturally from this view, as does advocacy of gay “marriage.” When male and female are interchangeable, almost any sexual arrangement can be normalized. Both Black and Penn put this worldview on display in their acceptance speeches.Denny Burk

Denny goes on to point out that gender, in the Christian worldview, is no accident at all. It is intentional. One of the beliefs of the ancient world (both Pagan and Jewish actually) is that man was initially a composite being, being both man and woman. Understand this, this belief has nothing to do with anatomy – this is a statement about the makeup of a human being, the traits and character. I must admit I’ve not studied what conclusions this belief led to in the pagan world. However, in the Jewish world it led to the idea that man and woman were split up (taking Adam’s rib), and brought back together as one in marriage. So, when Jesus says in the resurrection there will be no more marriage because man will be like the angels, this is the idea he is talking about. Understand this, we are neither talking about anatomy, nor the metaphysics of angels or spirit-beings, or that man will become ‘a god’/spirit-being. Jesus is saying that man will once again be made whole in the age to come, in the resurrection. Therefore marriage, the means of making one what was split, will be unnecessary.

In our time now, marriage is the way to make one whole again. And that marriage of wholeness can only be accomplished between a man and a woman in the Christian worldview. That is what settles it for the Christian. We do not deny that any two people can love each other. We do not deny lots of things. What we deny is that it is God’s intention for marriage. That is why Christians are guarding the word – because the referent is their theology.

As far as I’m concerned, I would like to keep the institution of marriage a Christian concept. Though I agree everyone gets to fight over the term today. As it stands, we are in the majority. When I’m in the minority, I won’t whine that you get to control the word. But I won’t give up my worldview. As far as I’m concerned, give whichever couples whichever rights you want to. On civil legislation I have no view.

Christianity has to learn to operate without the power structures that have been so ingrained. Just like throwing money at the problem is never a solution – Power is never God’s solution. If you need to be reminded of that, remember the cross.

Shane Claiborne at Park St Church

Last night we saw Shane Claiborne (of the Simple Way, and Irresistible Revolution as well as Jesus for President) at Park St Church in Boston. The man is certainly a storyteller. He has chosen to do things most people think is crazy. He is a fantastic encouragement that anyone can do this. Around ten years ago he started a community on Potter St in Philadelphia. They opened a community garden, and housed Christians. They got increasingly involved with the neighbors and children around them. They set aside (tithe) money to help the community with whatever needs were current. They’ve made a huge impact and given Christians a good name there.

A lot of what I’ve been reading recently and thinking about personally was affirmed in his talk. For a while I’ve been distressed at the Church’s largely personal and individualized gospel. Not only was it ignoring the larger Kingdom context of Jesus’ preaching and the Jewish hope – whatever it did retain about that was for the most part off in the future. I’m being forced to reconsider the amount of inaugurated eschatology that I do believe in – that God’s power, through the spirit, is causing the age to come to break into this age prematurely. Shane calls what they do there “practicing resurrection”.

One of the most profound insights I had was a single word that Shane used in his talk: “patterns”. I use the word found in Paul’s epistles ‘institutions’, but that word is unable to effectively communicate it to people today. The patterns of the world is the way to communicate that very same idea, and Shane turned me on to it. To talk about the Church, and being the Church, we cannot conform to the patterns of the world. In nearly all cases the patterns of the world are built to negate so much of God wants done. Therefore to be complicit with those patterns, to encourage them, enforce them, support them – through action, or theology – is to be anti-Gospel. Why? Because Jesus did not conform to the patterns of this world, he broke them at every turn to glorify God and redeem His creation. His very death being salvific instead of the destruction of hope is a perfect example. This is the very beginning of the theology that lies behind Christian justice movements. Unfortunately this theology is hardly ever taught in churches.

Quote

It might be much “safer” to retreat from the world; but it would imply that the one true god was not after all the creator of the present world, or equally that he was not intending to claim it as his own in a great act of new creation. NT Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, pg 293

That is a pretty good one to wake up to.

On Sin and Death in Genesis

Over at Jesus Creed they’ve been exploring Genesis as it interacts with science and faith. I’ve not done a specific study, but I’ve read a book or two on Genesis from the Ancient Near Eastern perspective. Of course if you have been living anywhere other than a cave you’ve heard from the not-so-new atheists about how science and faith are incompatible, and you can’t live without science, so you must drop your faith. As if it were so simplistic – they should be scolded. The recent Pew data should show them that Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus – by percentage – believe in evolution more frequently than the “Unaffiliated” group (which I would imagine includes atheists). Religious belief is certainly compatible with science – even evolution. Perhaps if they were to change their rhetoric to “Fundamentalist Protestant Faith is incompatible with science” then they might have a case. But since not everyone is a Protestant, let alone a Fundamentalist, there is plenty of room. Or at least there should be.

As I am not a fundamentalist (any longer), they very idea of death and sin (or original sin) requires a major effort to understand. This one post, which really needs to be re-categorized, talks specifically about the understanding of death and its relation to sin.

My understanding as it is now is that death is the cessation of life. Man is a one-part being, the soul or spirit of a man (God’s ruach or pneuma in Genesis) combines with the “dust/clay of the ground” to form a being. The clay was not a “living being” (nephesh) alone, nor was the “breath” alive on its own. Only when combined do they form a living being. This seems to be a very simple, and to me, uncontroversial, point. Death then is the reversal of this process, the separation of these parts, the undoing of life.

I fundamentally disagree with Calvin’s guiding hermaneutic that mankind was not destined for an earthly existence. That flies directly in the face of all Jewish theology in the 10th and 8th centuries BC as well as Second Temple Judaism (I needn’t back this point up, Daube, Sanders, McKnight, Evans, NT Wright, as well as so many others do it quite well). NT Wright at least has a foothold to stand on when he writes:

One potentially helpful way of understanding the entry of death into the world through the first human sin is to see “death” here as more than simply the natural decay and corruption of all the created order. The good creation was nevertheless transient: evening and morning, the decay and new life of autumn and spring, pointed on to future, a purpose, which Genesis implies it was the job of the human race to bring about. All that lived in God’s original world would decay and perish, but “death” in that sense carried no sting. The primal pair were, however, threatened with a different sort of thing altogether: a “death” that would result from sin, and involve expulsion from the garden (Gen 2:17). This death is a darker force, opposed to creation itself, unmaking that which was good, always threatening to drag the world back toward chaos. Thus, when humans turned away in sin from the creator as the one whose image they were called to bear, what might have been a natural sleep acquired a sense of shame and threat.

His assertion would be that mankind was not meant to live forever, just an incredibly long and full life. He uses some natural revelation to back this up, the transient seasons, etc. I have to agree that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are mytho-historic and in direct relation (sometimes implicit agreement, other times explicit contradiction) with other Ancient Near Eastern beliefs surrounding them. Being in the middle of his 700pg Resurrection of the Son of God gives me plenty of other thoughts surrounding the very idea of resurrection and ‘life after death’/'sleep’/'soul sleep’/etc in pagan and Jewish contexts. Perhaps this is just another turning point.

Slowness

I apologize for the lessening frequency of posts around these parts. I’ve been hitting the gym four days a week, ultimate Sunday night, and have plenty on my social calendar lately. I was also re-introduced to a game from my childhood – Starcraft – and as a result that is a time suck as well. Everything is good. Expect posts to resume soon.

Architecture Astronauts

I don’t think I’m ever going to understand the position of the astronauts, or how they think. Of course, I don’t expect anyone to understand how I think without explaining myself. This might get very ranty. But their perceived solution to a problem (that they, sometimes, do not understand) is often the baseline to start arguing about the real solution.

Right now we’ve got a doozy of a problem trying to integrate Javascript into our framework. The fundamental issue is a bad perception of what Javascript really is, and what it is to do it correctly. Yes there are many approaches, and “good enough” ways to do things. Sometimes “good enough” is exactly what you want. But an arbitrary decision to have everything split up and organized into a certain way “because that is what makes sense”, or “is the right way” just betrays all sorts of bias.

Javascript is a very loose and fluid language – very unlike many other standard programming languages. And when you add javascript with HTML you have a very strange concoction. There is HTML that is written for the design of the page. And there is HTML that is written to show data. If you believe that these two types of HTML are written the same – you clearly haven’t done either for very long. If you don’t understand why writing semantic HTML (when displaying data, primarily) is important the likely-hood you don’t understand Javascript is very high.

Amen

Many Christians brought up in a fundamentalism with all of the answers have discovered things are much different than they would have anticipated. – iMonk