I haven’t posted on the Virginia Tech murders because the event is so horrible that I honestly don’t know what to say. I think anything I might try to say would be trite and opportunistic. I think all anyone can say right now is that we’re praying for everyone touched by this terrible evil.
An the ASA list, we have been discussing a post by Denyse O’Leary, on the Uncommon Descent ID blog maintained by her and Bill Dembski, which quoted from another thread on the ASA list.
I was very upset by Ms. O’Leary’s blog post because the thread it referred to from ASA list was started by someone with some honest doubts and questions about the relation of faith and science. Several people on the ASA list, including myself, tried to respond to that person in ways we thought might be helpful (and indeed I still hope they were helpful). Hey, we’re all in this exciting but sometimes nerve-wracking boat ride together.
I posted a comment on Uncommon Descent expressing my concern about this (actually my comment got unintentionally triple-posted because it was originally stuck in a spam filter). My biggest concern was what I perceived as a lack of sensitivity to the person who orginally was some thoughtful and troubling questions of us here on the ASA list. I then followed up on a couple of other comments relating to Aquinas and secondary causes.
My reward for this was to be summarily banned from Uncommon Descent — once again.
I would be lying if I were to say that I don’t care about being banned from Uncommon Descent. I do care, mostly because I’m an intense and competitive guy with an overly active sense of fairness. In another sense, I don’t really care — like the rest of us, I really should spend my time on more productive things than arguing with people on blogs (or email lists) anyway. So, yes, I’m ticked — but I’m not crying in my milk. I’ve been kicked out of fancier joints, I guess.
But what I care about most is Truth and the Kingdom of God. I don’t claim any great insight into either except for whatever grace God has given me. And in my humble estimation, the kind of thing represented by Denyse’s “Letter” and the resulting hoo-ha in the comments thereto advances neither.
I’ve no desire to step into yet another online culture war spitting match. Yet, I’d like the record to reflect my requests and thoughts about this to Ms. O’leary and Bill Dembski. Hopefully someone will take them to heart. So, I offer below for the record the comments I offered to them.
In doing this, I also append a little disclaimer: I do not consent to the quoting or reproduction of these comments in any forum unless they are reproduced in full. To do otherwise would be dishonest. Hopefully that’s scary coming from a lawyer.
Herewith the text of my letter:
Denyse and Bill,
I would love to have the opportunity to continue commenting on UD, but it seems that Bill has permanently banned me. Bill, I’d be most grateful if you’d remove that ban, or at least explain to me why it was made. I was certainly critical of Denyse’s post, but I think my criticism was fair and justified. Further, I think the point about secondary causes and Aquinas was a fair one.
I would at least like the opportunity to continue the discussion on secondary causes, which I think is an important one. Given your own recent post about “directed evolution,” Bill, I’d think you’d agree that the discussion of secondary causes and Aquinas could be helpful. You’ve stated publicly that people who believe in “directed evolution” are ID people. I, then, am an ID person, for that is what I believe, within the specific framework of Christian theology as informed by Aquinas and mediated by folks such as Torrance and McGrath.
Denyse, my biggest problem with your post was that it seemed terribly insensitive to the person who originally asked a genuine question about doubt on the ASA list. You apparently didn’t read the ASA list carefully enough, because half of what you attributed to George Murphy came from the person struggling with doubt, not from George. A number of people on the ASA list tried to offer helpful comments to this person, including myself, as my post on UD shows. Whether George’s specific comments were good or not could be debated (personally I very much appreciate George’s kenotic perspective on creation), but you did a grave disservice to everyone involved by simply yanking out a few lines as you did.
Do you have any problem, Denyse of Bill, with the resources I proposed to the doubting person? Do they suggest in any way the sort of capitulation to materialist philosophy or theological softness that you attribute in your post? Does recommending Angus Menuge’s book “Agents Under Fire” in any way suggest that I have even a tip of my big toe in the materialst’s camp?
Denyse, my second biggest problem with your post was that you did absolutely nothing to help the doubting person while she was on the ASA list. Where were your recommendations to her? What counsel did you give her? It strikes me as arrogant in the extreme to cherry pick from a discussion with a hurting person, to which you didn’t even contribute, and then to twist it into some false accusation about how the Church is going to pot. I have a major moral problem with that kind of opportunism.
Denyse, you suggested to me that I’m afraid of stating in public that I believe in a desiger-God; that I’m shying away from ID out of some concern for my career.
Denyse, I don’t know who you think you are to make a statement like that to me. You don’t know me at all. I’ve been an evangelical Christian for over 30 years; I graduated from an evangelical college; I was a litigation attorney in a major firm for 13 years, and now I’m a law professor. I have never hidden my faith; indeed, I’ve always proclaimed it openly in what I say, write and do.
You may note that I never use a psuedonym when I write online; that’s because I believe in letting my “yes” be “yes.” Visit my blog sometime ( http://www.tgdarkly.com/blog ) and tell me if I seem to be timid about proclaiming my faith in the gospel to a hostile world. More than that, as a worship leader in a local church, I spent hundreds of Sundays, one after the other, standing in front of groups of 800 or more people, mostly strangers, visibly and openly proclaiming that Jesus, the logos who made us, is Lord. Who are you to question my faith commitment when you have no idea whatsoever how I have publicly lived it out?
Trust me when I tell you that I’ve taken my professional and personal lumps for being open about my belief in Jesus and in my affirmation that there is “one God, the the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” For you to suggest that I’m somehow afraid of expressing my belief in a designer-God is unwarranted. If God wills for me to suffer for my faith in Christ, that ultimately is something I will rejoice in.
Finally, your unwillingness to engage the deeper theological questions arising from what “evidence” of design means is gravely disappointing. I’m sure you know — or maybe you don’t know — that the question of “natural theology” has been debated for centuries. It is NOT a capitulation to materialism to suggest that natural theology reveals little or nothing about the designer to unregenerate minds. I consider myself within the broadly Reformed tradition; plenty of great minds in that tradition, Barth not the least, have been leery of natural theology. And it is NOT a capitulation to materialsm to suggest that God ordinarily works through secondary causes — this, indeed, is a classical theistic position that ultimately is a defense against atheistic claims that God is the author of evil. Again, read Aquinas, particularly his Summa Contra Gentiles.
Bill and Denyse, I think the way you are handling your blog is a terrible shame. We could be having productive and interesting high-level discussions about things like Aquinas and Barth and the doctrine of creation, in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Instead, we get nastiness, misprepresentations, and censoring even of fellow Christians who affirm the reality of a designer-God!
And let me add this final thought, Bill: I’ve no illusions about my own influence in the world. You’ve never heard of me, and you don’t care who I am, so I’m another buzzing fly to be swatted away. But, I’d humbly suggest that I’m exactly the kind of person you should want to engage. I’m not one of the misanthropic blog trollers who often populate blog comments. I have deep evangelical roots, a fair amount of theological education, and as a law professor at a very good law school, over time, Lord willing I will have an opportunity to influence students and to serve as “salt and light” within the academic legal community. Do you think people like me will have any interest in supporting your ideas or work when we can’t even have a civil discussion about Aquinas and causation?
For what it’s worth,
Sincerely,
David W. Opderbeck
http://www.tgdarkly.com
I noticed this intriguing string of headlines in the “Religion” section of my local town paper this week:
“Presbyterians Plan Many Events.”
“Unitarians Set April Schedule.”
“Temple Israel Sets Upcoming Events.”
“Prince of Peace Sets New Schedule.”
Hmmm… and here the Town Council and Board of Education thought they were running things!
This continues the discussion on the ontology of information. Someone suggested that “information” has been shown by Rolf Landauer to be physical, and therefore not a thing-in-itself. I happened to have been reading some of Landauer’s work before this theological discussion for a law paper I’m working on right now relating to the legal regulation of information through intellectual property law (thrilling, I know).
The problem I see with using Landauer’s view of information is that it seems inseparable from a materialist metaphysics. Here is Landauer’s opening salvo in “The Physical Nature of Information,” Physics Letters, July 15, 1996:
“Information is not a disembodied abstract entity; it is always tied to a physical representation.”
He continues:
“our assertion that information is pysical amounts to an asertion that mathematics and computer science are a part of physics.”
Later, explicitly contrasting his view to (what he perceives to be) Christian theology and earlier scientific views derived from theology, he says:
“Our scientific culture normally views the law of physics as predating the actual physical universe. The law are considered to be like a control program in a modern chemical plant; the plant is turned on after the program is installed. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John I, 1), attests to this belief. Word is a translation from the Greek Logos “thought of as constituting the controlling principle of the universe.”
He concludes:
“The view I have expounded here makes the laws of physics dependent upon the apparatus and kinetics available in our universe, and that kinetics in turn depends on the laws of physics. Thus, this is a want ad for a self-consistent theory.”
Given the argument here in “The Physical Nature of Information,” which follows up on his “Information is Physical” (Physics Today May 1991), it seems to me that Landauer clearly is proposing a materialist metaphsics. I can’t reconcile that entirely physical view of “information” with the belief that, as we in the ASA have put it, “in creating and preserving the universe God has endowed it with contingent order and intelligibility, the basis of scientific investigation.”
I’ve been discussing with various people the nature of “information” and how the ontology of information relates to natural theology and intelligent design. Someone suggested that “information” should be understood as a thing-in-itself apart from matter and energy. He used money as an analogy: money is separable from the commodities it can purchase.
I thought that was an interesting analogy, but for the opposite point: that “information” is not a thing-in-itself, a given aspect of creation, but rather is socially constructed. Here are the preliminary thoughts I had about that, and about how it realtes to natural theology:
Wealth as an analogy for information is very interesting. It gets right to the heart of how I’m trying to think about this. Wealth, or better, a medium of market exchange, isn’t a thing-in-itself in the same sense as matter and energy. God created matter and energy such that they are fundamental properties of the created universe. He didn’t create “wealth” or any medium of market exchange in the same way.
Rather, wealth and currency are socially constructed by people. The only reason a dollar has any value is that society agrees that it has such a value. Absent the social contract, a dollar is a worthless piece of paper. God didn’t create money in the sense that he created matter and energy; He created people who in virtue of bearing His image are social beings; and in virtue of being social beings, people construct social realities that can include things like money. But those social realities aren’t a given in the way that matter and energy are givens. People couldn’t “agree” that matter and energy no longer exist and thereby make it so; but people could (and often do) agree to construct markets without currency, and thereby make it so.
I am beginning to think of “information” the same way: as a social construction, not a given fundamental property of the universe such as matter and energy. We can only properly speak of “information” in the universe in the context of its construction in social relationships.
I think this social view of information has implications for natural theology, but I haven’t really worked this out. In short, if information is a social construction, we should not expect to be able to separate a message from its social context. God may be communicating something about Himself to us through nature, but we will only truly recognize that message in the context of relationship with Him. We can’t speak of “information,” then, as an independent property of the universe that could be detected and measured by just anyone, like matter and energy. “Information” can only be constructed in a social context; genuine information about God can ultimately only be constructed in a social context appropriate to that sort of exchange — the Church. Any effort to construct a natural theology apart from the presuppositions of faith expressed in the community of the Church will therefore fail.
Does anyone have a more “objective,” non-social view of what “information” is as a thing-in-the-universe? If so, can you think of a better, non-social analogy (other than something like money)?
I love the late Stan Grenz’s work. Recently I started reading his systematic theology, “Theology for the Community of God.” His introductory chapter, “The Nature and Task of Theology,” is a gem. Here is what he says about theology that centers on propositional revelation, what he calls the “concordance” view of theology:
Despite its positive contributions, the concordance understanding of theology has one decisive flaw. It does not give adequate attention to the contextual nature of theology. Theological reflection always occurs within and for a specific historical context. Consequently, all theological assertions are historically conditioned. In contrast to the assumption of propositionalists, by its very nature theology is a contextual discipline.”
Yes! He continues, on the relation between Theology and Truth:
Theological systems do not provide a replica, a ‘scale model’ of reality. Their propositions are not univocal. Hence, no one system can claim to be an exact verbal reproduction of the nature of God or of the human person and the world in relation to God. Rather, the theologian seeks to invoke an understanding of reality by setting forth through an analogous model realities which may be mysterious, even ineffable. In this process of understanding, a systematic theology can be helpful, insofar as it is an appropriate analogue model able to assist us in grasping the profound mystery of reality. In this sense, a theological system is always a human construct.
Again, yes! He then concludes this about the “ongoing nature of the theological task”:
“Theology is a contextual discipline. Theologians do not merely amplify, refine, defend, and deliver to the next generation a timeless, fixed orthodoxy. Rather, by speaking from within the community of faith, they seek to describe the act of faith, the God toward whom faith is directed, and the implications of our faith commitment in, for, and to a specific historical and cultural context.”
Once more, yes!
I read this very brief but lovely essay by C.S. Lewis this evening: “On Obstinacy in Belief.” (I found it in a collection of Lewis’ essays which includes “The World’s Last Night”). In about fifteen pages, Lewis answers the same questions Dawkins keeps asking today about Christian belief. What people like Dawkins miss is that faith is relational, not merely rational, and that it is a particular relationship with this God, not with “god” as a concept. A snippet from the conclusion:
Our opponents, then, have a perfect right to dispute with us about the grounds of our original assent [to the Christian faith]. But they must not accuse us of sheer insanity if, after the assent has been given, our adherence to it is no longer proportioned to every fluctuation of the apparent evidence. They cannot of course be expected to know on what our assurance feeds, and how it revives and is always rising from its ashes. They cannot be expected to see how the quality of the object which we think we are beginning to know by acquaintance drives us to the view that if this were a delusion then we should have to say that the universe had produced no real thing of comparable value and that all explanations of the delusion seemed somehow less important than the thing explained. That is knowledge we cannot comunicate. But they can see how the assent, of necessity, moves us from the logic of speculative thought into what might perhaps be called the logic of personal relations. What would, up till then, have been variations simple of opinion become variations of conduct by a person to a Person. Credere Deum esse turns into Credre in Deum. And Deum here is this God, the increasingly knowable Lord.
This month’s First Things includes a short essay by Gilber Meilander on immigration policy. There is no direct link yet on the FT site. I guess I went on a little FT binge this morning. Here is another bit I sent in to the correspondence section, this one on Meilander’s piece:
Peter C. Meilaender’s thoughts on immigration policy (“Immigration: Citizens & Strangers,” May 2007) are careful, balanced — and devoid of any Biblical, prophetic passion for the poor strangers among us. Meilaender concludes that we must “weigh carefully our obligations toward both curent members [of our society] and outsiders, duties particular and universal.” Our “particular” duties, Meilaender reminds us, are to our own families and local communities (as he puts it with more rhetorical panache, to “the aged father in need of regular attention, the cousin whose husband is way fighting in Iraq, the fellow parishioner who has lost his job”).
Well, yes. And yet in the “careful weighing” we are supposed to be doing before welcoming the stranger, Meilaender never explains why the proper metaphor is a set of scales that represent a zero-sum game. How does a broad and welcoming immigration policy detract from the resources available for us to employ in our local communities? The reality is that immigration is a dynamic social and economic force that creates economic growth and enriches communal life. Not the least benefit of this dynamism is that many immigrants from the global South bring with them a fresh and fervent religious vitality that we in the more prosperous North often leave behind in our zeal to preserve our social privileges.
In the February First Things, Jordan Hylden, a self-identified young evangelical, responds to Tony Campolo’s recent book, “Letters to a Young Evangelical”. In the correspondence section of the current First Things, Campolo responds and Hylden adds a sur-reply.
Hylden is right about one thing: Campolo’s book is frustrating because it suggests that the moral substance of some social issues, such as abortion, is fuzzy, when it is not. What Campolo should say is that there is not necessarily one “evangelical” political approach to such moral questions (and even then, Campolo should better represent why there is perhaps justifiably a relatively broad consensus within evanglicalism on the general politics of some of these big moral questions).
But overall, Hylden’s criticism is unfair. This is even more evident in his correspondence with Campolo in the current issue of FT, in which Hylden lamely bashes not only Campolo, but also all things emergent — even to the tiresome point of dropping Brian McLaren’s name as a scare token.
I sent this in to FT’s correspondence section — let’s see if it gets published:
Jordan Hylden’s zeal to bash the emerging church movement, Tony Campolo, and all else that fails his sniff test, is a shame. When Hylden suggests Campolo and the emerging church movement “have had the courage to emerge from worn-out things like Christian doctrine,” he apparently is oblivious to the work of theologians such as the Stan Grenz, John Franke, Scott McKnight, Leslie Newbiggin, James K.A. Smith, and others, who identify with or whose work informs much “emergent” thinking.
I wonder whether Hylden has any idea, for example, about the potential connections that James K.A. Smith has identified between the robust theological movement of Radical Orthodoxy and emergent sensibilities? And does Hylden have any notion of how John Franke, an Origen scholar, is reaching back into the Patristic tradition to find fresh ways of revitalizing evangelical hermeneutics and theology? Can Hylden trace Newbiggin’s missiology to the emerging church’s missional posture towards contemporary postmodern culture? Apparently not. Hylden is instead content merely to whisper the scary words “Brian McLaren” into the inquisitor’s ear.
Hylden seems equally oblivious to the devastating impact a generation of political and theological crankery has had on American evangelicalism. Hylden self-identifies as a young evangelical, but he seems not to care that the angry, spitting rhetoric of some of evangelicalism’s so-called leaders has made many young believers — as well as, sadly, most young unbelievers — wonder what all of this has to do with the Jesus who sacrificed himself for the world in love on the cross.
Tony Campolo and the emerging church can indeed be frustratingly obtuse sometimes. It would be wonderful if Campolo, McLaren and other emergent leaders would “speak the truth in love” about clear “traditional” social-moral issues such as homosexual practice and abortion. But I, for one, am thankful that someone is willing to expose how far contemporary Western evangelicalism, for all of its goods and blessings, seems to stray sometimes from the central “good news” of the gospel. And I’m not even so young anymore.
Any ROFT’ers (“Readers of First Things”) here might like to know that Ted Davis’ excellent review of Owen Gingerich’s book “God’s Universe” appears in the current issue of First Things (though there is always a delay before print version goes to web). Good to see an ASA leader’s voice in this important journal! I’ve not read all of Gingerich’s book, but from what I’ve read, as Davis notes in his review, Gingerich’s book is a delight. Gingerich affirms the compatibility of faith and science and supports the classical Christian notion of design, while carefully distinguishing some aspects of the “strong” ID program and avoiding polemics.
There is also, BTW, an interesting discussion going on at the FT website concerning physicist Stephen Barr’s (and others’) observations about quantum indeterminacy and free will. Barr’s Modern Physics and Ancient Faith is likewise a delight.
And, if you’re not a ROFT’er, you should be!