There’s a good little discussion brewing at Dawn Treader about applied ethics and Natural Law. One of the commenters feels that the Judeo-Christian approach to ethics — which he describes as “‘Because God Says So'” — is unsatisfying. This reflects, I think, a common misconception about how Christians derive ethical beliefs. Here’s how I continued the conversation.
This is my regular post for Every Square Inch. Our topic for discussion is “how do truth and love relate?” This led me to the famous passage on “love,” I Corinthians 13.
At first glance, it’s difficult to see how love and truth relate in this passage. “Love is patient; love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” (I. Cor. 13:4-5.) Doesn’t this tell us to ingore the truth sometimes for the sake of love? I can think of many wrongs that have been done to me over the years, often by friends and family, some of which continue to have lasting consequences. In a few cases, the perpetrator has never acknowledged the harm he or she did. The “truth” is that there is, in a sense, a “record” of these wrongs written into my life, whether I like it or not. Anyone who has lived more than a few years in this broken world could say the same.
So if love compels me to release the anger caused by these wounds, to purge the record, isn’t that the same as denying the truth?
I’ll be working on some changes to the site over the next few days. Stay tuned.
Last week we visited the neurologist with my youngest son. He is four years old, vivacious, smart and generally healthy, but he does not really talk. He mostly babbles and communicates with gestures. he has a history of nocturnal seizures, which had been under control but which recurred over the holidays. There is (thankfully) no apparent physical cause (such as a brain abnormality) for these problems.
It was an extraordinarily frustrating visit with the neurologist because she told us nothing new. The school where my son gets speech therapy had been “holding off” on a broader treatment plan until the neurological visit. The neurologist, however, seemed surprised by this, and bounced us back to the school. I know these people are trying to do their jobs as best they can, but meanwhile my precious little boy is not learning how to overcome his speech disability, and we are not being trained how to help him. Days, months and seasons go by with no firm diagnosis and nothing for us to hook into.
We need patience and support. There’s nothing more I would want than for my little boy to be healed. If that’s not God’s will, I want to do everything I can to help him become the person God wants him to be. If he is disabled his whole life, he is no less precious as a person. The hardest thing isn’t the shock that everything isn’t “perfect.” It’s the waiting for some concrete understanding of the “imperfection.”
Before I start to sound like I’m crying in my milk, let me say that I’m deeply thankful for my little boy and for all the other blessings I’ve received. Even when I despair that he’ll never learn to speak, or when I give in to the “big black dog” worries about deeper undiagnosed problems with his health, I’m grateful that God entrusted him to my wife and I, just as he is. There is so much pain in this world and so many people I know who have dealt with more immediate and severe losses, such as cancers and tragic fatal accidents. God is good; all His purposes are good; all His ways are good; and everything in this short life of mine is His, until we rejoice together in that better country He is preparing.
There’s an interesting article by Stephen Barr in this month’s First Things, entitled “The Miracle of Evolution,” in response to Cardinal Schonborn’s article The Designs of Science (Barr’s article is in the current issue, so there is no direct link to it yet on the First Things site).
Barr is a theoretical particle physicist at the University of Delaware. He also is a Catholic who is critical of intelligent design theory. His judgment about intelligent design theory is stated in his current article: “The Intelligent Design movement’s ‘design hypothesis’ is not a scientific one if we understand natural science to hae its traditional, ‘metaphysically modest’ goal of understanding the ‘natural order’ of the world.”
Here’s a sample of golf cliches and some good comebacks from this month’s Golf magazine. If you play golf, you’ve heard these cliches on the course, and you understand that busting your buddy’s chops is as important as chipping and putting.
Cliche: “That dog will hunt.”
Comeback: “It won’t after I run over it with my truck.”
Cliche: “Time to let the big dog eat.”
Comeback: “That reminds me — how was dinner with your wife?”
Cliche: “How’d that stay out?”
Comeback: “Because it was a horrible putt. Sorry, was that a rhetorical question?”
A couple of weeks ago I took the kids to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The museum’s collection of encaustic paintings from the Roman period in Egypt caught my fancy. These lifelike paintings were placed over mummies, as was the one in my photo. The man pictured here lived in the first century A.D. Look into his eyes, at his little mustache — he’s a regular guy, just like me. He was as real a man as I am. And yet, he’s been gone from this life for nineteen hundred years. Life is short.
Today the family went to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I’m a huge Narnia fan, so my standards for this film were high. The film didn’t let me down. It is a fabulous, mostly faithful portrayal of the book. The acting and graphics are top-notch, and the characterizations are generally spot-on.
The one place where I felt just a bit — just a bit — let down is in the characterization of Aslan. In the books, Aslan clearly is a picture of Jesus, probably one of the most amazing and deep pictures of Jesus outside the gospels. For the most part, the film captured Aslan’s mix of kingly power and sacrificial love. There is one critical scene, however, where Aslan explains to the children that the White Witch does not know the “deeper magic” of Narnia. In the book, it’s clear that the “deeper magic” isn’t somehow “higher” than Aslan. In that one scene in the film, Aslan almost slips into some kind of panentheism — the “deeper magic” is kind of like “The Force” and Aslan is beholden to it. Later in the film, though, Aslan roars that he was “there when it [the deeper magic] was created,” bringing things more into line with a Christology drawn from John 1.
But that’s just a quibble. Go watch the film, it’s fabulous. And, if you haven’t done so, read the books. They are life changing.
I’m grading exams and don’t have much time to blog just now, but someone brought a fascinating article in the prestigious mainstream science journal Nature to my attention. The article discusses the anthropic principle and the limits of the scientific method. The anthropic principle, in brief, is that the universe appears to be fine-tuned for life as we know it. As the Nature article observes,
if you believe the equations of the world’s leading cosmologists, the probability that the Universe would turn out this way by chance are infinitesimal — one in a very large number. “It’s like you’re throwing darts, and the bullseye is just one part in 10120 of the dart board,” says Leonard Susskind, a string theorist based at Stanford University in California. “It’s just stupid.”
Historically, secular physicists and cosmologists have viewed this as “dumb luck.” Recent proposals relating to string theory, however, suggest that our universe may be one of billions of alternate universes, such that the unlikely anthropic coincidence arose essentially inevitably as a result of the law of large numbers. String theory is hotly debated within scientific circles, however, both for substantive reasons (the math, which I would never pretend to understand, apparently is questionable), and because as the theory presently stands, it is not truly testable — in other words, it isn’t “science.”
Nevertheless, because the multiverse theory at least offers a non-supernatural hypothesis for the anthropic principle, some scientists are reluctant to abandon it as non-science. As one scientist interviewed for the Nature article put it, “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science.” In light of the discussions lately surrounding theology and science, this sounds familiar.
Because Nature doesn’t have free articles available for hyperlinking, in the spirit of “fair use” under the Copyright Act, I’m including the full text below.
I’ve been participating in a conversation about the Emerging Church and epsitemology, one of my favorite subjects, at Vos Regnum Dei. The text of the conversation thus far is below. Some good stuff to chew over.