harmonicminer

Just read this.

The previous post in this series is here.

A long lost high school friend (recently rediscovered on the internet) and I have been having an amiable conversation about the Creation, particularly the age of the universe.  This is especially fun since in high school I was mostly an atheist or agnostic, I suppose, and I was unaware of any religious leanings in my friend.  But these days, I am probably best described as an “old earth Creationist” who finds some form of “progressive Creation” to be a coherent explanation of the facts of scripture and science.  He appears to be a “young earth Creationist” who thinks the universe is maybe 6,000-10,000 years old.

Both of us would say we “believe the Bible”, yet we disagree.  The nub of the conversation is what is meant by “Biblical inerrancy.”  Historical Christians, including the early church fathers in the Patristic period, have had various points of view on that.   I think almost anyone will have to agree that no definition of “Biblical inerrancy” can remove from us the responsibility to understand what the Bible is really saying, and what it was intended to say by those who wrote it, though I think sometimes God found ways to say things in the scripture that the writers themselves may not have fully understood, and whose meaning would not become clear until later generations.  We see that happen in the Old Testament, especially in prophecy, though not necessarily only that, and we certainly see it happen in the New Testament, as well.

But to get a flavor:

The medieval church clearly believed that its commitment to scripture required it to embrace a geocentric universe, instead of a heliocentric solar system.  In the end, it didn’t matter what the church thought the scripture meant; the facts were the facts.

It is clear that what was errant was not scripture itself, but the interpretation of it.  That sorry episode has been used by a good many would-be scripture-debunkers down through the centuries.

We see some verses in the NT that very clearly suggest that the writers believed the end-times were quite near.   Even Jesus seems to be suggesting this.   I find those to be interesting passages, because I think God wanted to tell us something in them, but it clearly was not what the writers thought.   There is evidence that some in the first and second generation of readers of those scriptures (the first generation after they were written) believed they were saying the end was quite near, within their lifetimes.   But it didn’t happen that way.  So what are we to do?  Throw up our hands (as the skeptics do) and say that proves the Bible is sometimes wrong or error-prone?   Or do we seek ways to harmonize the plain facts (we’re still here, aren’t we?) with the scripture in a way that does justice to both scripture and the facts, denies the truth of neither, and seeks a way of understanding each in the light of the other?

But historical truth isn’t the only kind of truth.  There really IS such a thing as scientific truth.  In fact, historical truth and scientific truth are two sides of the same thing, in many ways.  If there isn’t such a thing as historical and scientific truth, then there is no such thing as Biblical truth, because we have no means other than essentially historical and scientific ones to determine if a particular manuscript is reliable or fake, to determine if we have translated it correctly, to determine the cultural (archaeological, too) facts surrounding the scripture, etc.  We know that the Gospel of Judas is not a reliable guide to much of anything for basically scientific and historical reasons that locate it outside of the early, reliable revelation.  There is no scripture that says, “ignore the Gospel of Judas,” for very good reasons; it didn’t exist yet, a fact we know from history and science, not scripture.

There are other kinds of science, of course, and the question is always how reliable are the conclusions of a particular scientist, or the implications of a particular theory.

There is a point (and believers will locate that point differently, depending on what they know of science, and on the degree of their commitment to a particular interpretation of scripture) where a scientific “theory” is so validated, so supported by every conceivable piece of evidence, that it cannot be gainsaid by anyone who has enough faith in science to use it for any other purpose, say, for example, to trust an airplane to fly and land safely.   No modern Christian believes it is an article of scripturally required faith that the Earth is the center of the solar system.  And similarly, there are many of us who are utterly convinced that the universe is indeed very, very old, that the Earth has been around a very long time, and that there have indeed been billions of years of life on Earth.

We are no smarter, nor more faithful, than the scientifically and hermeneutically confused medieval clergy who persecuted Galileo.   We simply have access to information they did not.   Indeed, I think it safe to say that if any of those worthies could be brought forward in a time machine to review modern evidence on the matter at hand, they would be likely to agree that the Sun is the center of the solar system.

Some of us are pretty sure that the tipping point has been well-passed, similarly, in the matter of the age of the universe.   I find the astronomical evidence utterly convincing.   That’s probably partly because I find it easier to understand than the geological evidence for the age of the Earth, not that I doubt either.   On the other hand, I have very large doubts about macro-evolution, finding it highly unsatisfactory both in its own terms and in scriptural terms, requiring as it does a God who “cheats at solitaire” by using a “random” process to “create” us, if that randomness is understood as a process that didn’t HAVE to lead to us (the standard understanding among evolutionists).  That’s why I continue to find “theistic evolution” such a stretch.   But I am always entertained by the efforts of materialist scientists to explain the origin of life, concerning which many have adopted the X-Files explanation.

But my central point is that I am not impervious to evidence that my interpretation of scripture may be awry.   So, I try to “keep an open mind” about what scriptural passages might mean when they appear susceptible of multiple interpretations (especially when those interpretations are all equally capable of supporting historical understandings of “salvation history.”   I don’t think it is evidence of lack of faith or distrust of the Bible to look for extra-Biblical sources to aid my understanding of scripture, including science.   Indeed, Paul tells us to test everything, and hold to what is true.

It is said by some that, “God’s word is inerrant and sufficient.”   The question is, inerrant with what interpretation, and sufficient for what?  The answers, I think:  it is inerrant when we understand how to interpret it (i.e., there seems to be no “fixed target” for peripheral matters, but plenty of clarity for central teachings), and it is sufficient for us to know enough about God for His purpose of salvation.

But there can be no such thing as inerrancy without correct interpretation (and there will be things we simply do not and cannot know), and there is little sense in claiming the Bible has all we need to know to live our lives, if that is what is meant by “sufficiency.”  Most of us have jobs that require us to know something beyond the Bible, just to take the simplest example.

And it is completely clear that in the history of the church, the most influential strands have always been among the best educated in disciplines outside the study of the scripture.  In fact, the church was the preserver of such studies when others had forgotten or ignored them.

The final irony, for me: there is an awfully high proportion of Ph.D.s among the scientists most often quoted by “young earth creationists,” who are the ones likely to assert that scripture is “inerrant and sufficient” without the qualifications I listed above.   And those Ph.D.s usually aren’t in Biblical studies, implying that some kinds of knowledge and study other than the Bible are important, even to those making the “inerrant and sufficient” claim.

One of the things I pray for is a rapproachment between believers, so that those who believe in a “young earth” (which I believe places an unnecessarily large road block to believing the Bible for many modern, educated people) and those who embrace the findings of science regarding the age of Creation can just “get along.”  Some of the ad hominem attacks and imputations of ill motives made in the discussions do not serve the King.  To quote one writer, responding to the assertion that old-earth creationism is heretical:

Of course, there are Christians on both sides of age-of-the-earth debate who are guilty of poor behavior. To this end, we must always be mindful that it is love that builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1) and our conversations should always [be] full of grace (Colossians 4:6).

I love to discuss, and, I admit, to argue. But I hope always to do so in a spirit of love and fellow believer-ship, and to “keep it in the family”, i.e., keep it from becoming a stumbling block to those we want to attract to the Faith.

The next post in this series is here.

Obama’s Attack on Medical Civil Liberties

While the media remain fixated on a slumping economy that gets sicker with each punishing presidential prescription, a different set of defining and similarly freedom-diminishing policy directives emerging from the White House goes dissimilarly unnoticed.

Earlier this month, the President took the first step in rescinding a Bush administration moral conscience regulation which enforces existing legal protections against discrimination and intimidation for doctors and other healthcare professionals who invoke conscience by refusing to participate in medical procedures they believe immoral.

The rule, which was finalized last year placed no restriction upon any legal medical procedure; it simply brought the executive branch into compliance with several existing laws including:

# the 1973 “Church Amendments” which protect doctors and other healthcare professionals from discrimination due to religious belief or moral conviction;

# the 1996 “Public Health Service Act Amendment” which prohibits government from discriminating against individual and institutional healthcare providers who choose not to provide abortion services or receive abortion training; and

# the 2004 “Hyde-Weldon Amendment” which prohibits certain federal funds going to federal and state agencies and programs that discriminate against healthcare providers who decline to offer or refer abortion services.

Simply put, these three venerable laws passed by Congress and signed by former Presidents protect doctors and nurses from being professionally threatened because they allow their conscience to dictate their professional actions.

By eliminating the enforcement of these legal protections, the Obama Administration is signaling that it intends to ignore the law and refuse to protect the civil liberties of healthcare professionals based upon religious or moral conscience. Without enforcement, healthcare personnel will have scant legal recourse for intimidation and bigotry rendering the laws intended to protect them meaningless.

This is a repost of an article done earlier in another context, but which seems to fit nicely into the series on The Left At Christian Universities.  The previous post in the series is here.

A few months ago, at a local Christian university, as I was entering a building to attend a conference on science and theology, I happened to notice a sign advertising the campus ROTC program, free tuition for going into the Army as an officer for a period of time following graduation.  (ROTC is Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.)  The ROTC sign was obviously at the entrance of the building, a major classroom building, so it would catch the eye of students who might be interested.

I saw a young man whom I assumed to be a student, who picked up the sign and laid it down behind a trash can, out of view.  I heard him say to a friend, as they entered, “That was non-violent, wasn’t it?”  At the time, I was disinclined to say anything, thinking it was just a couple of students engaged in a prank, and because I was a bit late and in a hurry, I decided to restore the sign to its original location when I left the conference.

When I got to the conference room, I saw that things hadn’t gotten started yet, and people were just chatting and waiting.  Then I saw the young man who had hidden the ROTC sign.  I admit to being slightly taken aback: one presumes that people who attend conferences on theology are people who seek to behave morally, and I could see no moral justification for moving the ROTC sign.

So, before the conference got started, I walked up to him and said, “Are you the person who hid the ROTC sign?”  He said he was, and repeated his “non-violent” line, and laughed, like he thought I would agree.  I think he thought I was about to praise him.

Continue reading “The Left At Christian Universities, part 8: Violently Non-Violent”

Obama’s Embryo Destruction Extremism: Time for Obama’s Pro-Life Supporters to Face the Facts | Moral Accountability

Amidst the fawning press coverage of President Obama’s overturning of the Bush stem cell funding policy, it is important to understand a few basic facts about what he has and has not done.

First, the stories about this decision suggest Obama has restored federal policy to what it was before George W. Bush’s 2001 stem cell policy announcement. This is simply not true. The federal government has in fact never before-even under President Clinton-used taxpayer dollars to encourage the destruction of human embryos, as it will now begin to do. Obama’s decision is an unprecedented break with the longstanding federal policy of neutrality toward embryo research. Before 2001, not one dollar had ever been spent to support embryonic stem cell research, and when George W. Bush provided funds for the first time, he did so in a way that made sure tax dollars did not create an incentive for the ongoing destruction of human embryos. President Obama’s new policy will do precisely that: it will tell researchers that if they destroy a human embryo, they will become eligible for federal dollars to use in studying its cells; establishing an obvious and unprecedented incentive. And the president has not established any moral constraints whatsoever on funding: he has instructed the NIH to create the rules, so it’s safe to expect that they will permit not only the use of embryos “left over” after IVF, but also those created solely to be destroyed for research, including those created by cloning. This is well beyond what even most advocates of overturning the Bush policy have tended to argue for in public.

Second, the coverage suggests the Bush policy was a ban on embryonic stem cell research. In fact, again, the Bush policy provided federal funds for the first time, and it placed no limits on the conduct of embryo research with private sector dollars, except in requiring that those funds not be mixed with federal money. President Bush made clear that he believed embryo research was unethical, but his powers to act to constrain it were limited, and the policy he pursued sought to establish clear bounds for the use of taxpayer funds while at the same time encouraging the development of alternatives to the destruction of embryos. He believed-rightly, as it turned out-that if policymakers carved out the proper channels for this research, it could be directed away from unethical practices

And this brings us to the third missing piece of the stem cell story: the emergence of alternatives to the destruction of human embryos. In the early days of the stem cell debate, the hope that such alternatives might be found had been expressed by people on both sides of the argument. In 1999, President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission issued a report supporting federal funding of embryo-destructive research on the grounds that, as they put it, “in our judgment, the derivation of stem cells from embryos remaining following infertility treatments is justifiable only if no less morally problematic alternatives are available for advancing the research.” At the time, no such alternatives seemed apparent, and even when Bush announced his policy in 2001 the possibility of such alternatives was largely speculative. But in the last few years, researchers have made groundbreaking advances in the development of pluripotent cells (that is, cells with the ability to be transformed into the various cell types of the body and to proliferate, like embryonic stem cells) without the need to use or destroy human embryos. Such techniques are beginning to dominate stem cell science, and they avoid entirely the moral, and therefore the political, controversy inherent in the taking of nascent human life for research. They offer a path to genetically matched embryonic-like cells without the shadow of ethical abuse. It seems increasingly clear, therefore, that embryo destruction is not the only, or best, path to exploring the promise of pluripotent stem cells.

Fourth, it’s crucial to understand that whatever their source, the promise of pluripotent stem cells remains quite speculative and uncertain. Indeed, it now increasingly seems like the real holy grail for the treatment of degenerative diseases may be the employment of small molecules to transform cells from one type to another within the body of a patient: a different model of treatment altogether from the cell therapies that stem cell science was once expected to produce, though one that has emerged from the study of embryonic stem cells. No one knows which, if any, of these avenues will provide treatments and cures. What we do know, however, is that cells derived through the destruction of embryos left over after fertility treatment-the cells that President Obama’s executive order addresses-are far less useful, far less necessary, and far less appealing to researchers than they seemed eight years ago when the controversy surrounding federal stem cell funding policy began in earnest.

The president’s decision to take the unprecedented step of encouraging the destruction of human embryos with taxpayer dollars every day seems more removed from the scientific and ethical realities of the debate, and from the aspiration that underlay the policy he has chosen to end: that science and ethics might both be championed together, rather than set against one another.

Laughing at the Contradictions of Socialism in America

The six dialectical contradictions of socialism in the USSR:

* There is full employment, yet no one is working.
* No one is working, yet the factory quotas are fulfilled.
* The factory quotas are fulfilled, yet the stores have nothing to sell.
* The stores have nothing to sell, yet people got all the stuff at home.
* People got all the stuff at home, yet everyone is complaining.
* Everyone is complaining, yet the voting is always unanimous.

It reads like a poem, only instead of the rhythm of syllables and rhyming sounds, it’s the rhythm of logic and rhyming meanings. If I could replicate it, I might start a whole new genre of “contradictory six-liners.” It would be extremely difficult to keep it real and funny at the same time, but I’ll try anyway.

Dialectical contradictions are one of the pillars in Marxist philosophy, which states that contradictions eventually lead to a unity of opposites as the result of a struggle. This gave a convenient “scientific” excuse for the existence of contradictions in a socialist society, where opposites were nice and agreeable, unlike the wild and crazy opposites of capitalism that could never be reconciled. Hence the joke.

Then I moved to America, where wild and crazy opposites of capitalism were supposedly at their worst. Until recently, however, the only contradictions that struck me as irreconcilable were these:

Economic justice:

* America is capitalist and greedy, yet half of the population is subsidized.
* Half of the population is subsidized, yet they think they are victims.
* They think they are victims, yet their representatives run the government.
* Their representatives run the government, yet the poor keep getting poorer.
* The poor keep getting poorer, yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
* They have things that people in other countries only dream about, yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

Hollywood cliches:

* Without capitalism there’d be no Hollywood, yet filmmakers hate capitalism.
* Filmmakers hate capitalism, yet they sue for unauthorized copying of their movies.
* They sue for unauthorized copying, yet on screen they teach us to share.
* On screen they teach us to share, yet they keep their millions to themselves.
* They keep their millions to themselves, yet they revel in stories of American misery and depravity.
* They revel in stories of American misery and depravity, yet they blame the resulting anti-American sentiment on conservatism.
* They blame the anti-American sentiment on conservatism, yet conservatism ensures the continuation of a system that makes Hollywood possible.

More at the link. A useful intellectual exercise: see if you can come up with a similar list revealing inner contradictions in Capitalism. Or American Exceptionalism.

I think it will be difficult to do with the natural connection of those above, because there are simply fewer internal contradictions.

But I await any attempts with interest.

Stimulus Loophole Gives 300,000 Jobs to Illegals

An estimated 300,000 construction jobs paid for by the stimulus plan will go to illegal workers after leading Democrats removed a provision requiring verification of citizenship, a leading immigration expert tells Newsmax.

The House version of the $787 billion stimulus bill required verification of the legal residency of anyone put to work by its spending. But that provision was removed from the bill before members of Congress met to reconcile the House and Senate versions of the bill.

Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), tells Newsmax the verification provision was deleted by Democratic leaders even before the bill reached the conference committee, where differences between House and Senate legislation are normally ironed out.

This was first posted here the day before the election, November 3, 2008. Obviously, some of you didn’t listen carefully, and voted for Obama. So here it is again. Pay attention this time.  And ask yourself which of the politicians in Washington these days is rewarding the right people with your hard-earned tax money.

Milton Friedman is one of the all time brilliant economists. Ironically, he was at University of Chicago, the old stomping grounds of THE ONE. Here is a pretty old video… you can tell by how young Phil Donahue looks. And you’ll be able to tell, if you’re younger, that the hip discussions you’ve had in bashing capitalism and free markets are not new. You may not know anything much about the Soviet Union, because academics and teachers are mostly embarrassed at having been so wrong about it, so they didn’t bother to teach you about it, either.  Still, the points are very clear.

Milton Friedman – Phil Donahue