This new song, Wind and Waves, is one I was working on at the beach this past summer. The recording is mostly finished, though there are a few little things that need to be cleaned up.
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Author: David Opderbeck
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Christmas Songs!
A selection of Christmas songs I mixed. Listen to those voices!
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Desire
This morning I read Psalm 145, which says
The Lord is faithful to all his promises
and loving toward all he has made.
The Lord upholds all those who fall
and lifts up all who are bowed down.
The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food at the proper time.
You open your hand
and satisfy the deisres of every living thing.
This was a wonderful selection because I’ve also been reading about Radical Orthodoxy’s emphasis on Christian desire. As James K.A. Smith puts it in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy,
human desire is not the result of a lack or privatation but rather plentitude and excess — a positive movement toward God. Desire, then, is not the negative craving for a lack but the positive passion characteristic of love…. Here we see a marked difference between a properly Christian account of desire and the erotic paradigm adopted by contemporary evangelical worship, which operates according to a logic of privation and construes God as yet another commodity to satisfy a lack.
This is great stuff. I love contemporary worship for its freedom and missional aspects, but Smith is right that our worship songs too often make us sound like sailors who’ve been away from the ladies too long, rather than people whose love of God, reflecting God’s love for them, leads them to constantly delight in His presence.
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Photo Blog — NYC, A.M. – P.M.
In before sunrise….
Home after dark ….
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Information and Design
I’ve been having an interesting conversation in an email forum with some relatively well-known ID advocates. The question under discussion is whether “information” is an ontological category separate from matter. One person suggested that transferring computer data from one hard drive to another shows that information is separate from matter; another mentioned one person telling a story to another. Here are some thoughts I had (for convenience I use the names “Ed” and “Dave” here):
But the information on Ed’s PC does not exist apart from the hard drives on which it is stored. And while it is true that the amount of information was essentially (though probably not perfectly) conserved in the transfer, that’s because it was a relatively small amount of information transferred a relatively short distance over a relatively short period of time into an identical medium. The amount of information would not have been perfectly conserved, for example, if it had been sent over the internet, because the necessary compression technology is lossy to some degree.
The information in Dave’s “story” is a good example of why information cannot be thought of as an ontological category. Stories are always bound by time, language and culture. It is impossible for you to tell me a story that perfectly and losslessly transmits to me all the information you are trying to encode in the story because I am not you. Some information is always lost because of the imprecision of language, the differences in our personal cultural and historical experiences, etc. This lossiness becomes greater as time increases — as our struggles to understand many of the ancient Bible stories about origins bears out.
What happens, then, to the information lost in the telling of the story? Is there any way to extract it from you without loss? Can we calculate the amount of information lost? I don’t think Shannon Entropy really works here, unless you buy into the concept of memetics, which I don’t. If you want to apply Shannon Entropy to cultural transmission, it seems to me you’re buying into an evolutionary view of culture that ultimately contradicts any meaningful Christian perspective.
Further, the “story” example illustrates that true “information” involves transmission, reception, and change. As Gregory Bateson put it, information is “a difference that makes a difference.” The data on Ed’s hard drive really is reducible entirely to matter until it makes some difference — by making his computer work, say, or by issuing in a document that human beings can read and act on. And until Dave tells me the story and it alters how I think, act, etc., the story is nothing but a neural pattern in Dave’s brain. It seems better to me to say that information is not an ontic entity; it is rather a term we use to describe change in ontic entities.
I’ve never understood ID to be primarily based on an essentially Platonic metaphysics of information. If it is, it seems to me that ID has an extraordinarily tough row to hoe. But I also don’t see why this is necessary. We could just as well say that certain patterns of producing change reflect the activity of purposeful, self-aware agents — such as the pattern of the “story” you might tell me, the patterns of the computer programs on Ed’s hard drive — or maybe the patterns of the physical laws, DNA, etc.
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Is the Church Necessary for Salvation?
In another discussion forum, someone asked, Is the Church a necessity for a personal relationship with God? I am not convinced. Are we saved by ourmembership of a church? Do we need to be a member to be ‘born again’? This person’s argument was that a Christian can and should discard “institutional religion.” My own thoughts follow:
I am not a Catholic, though I respect Catholic ecclesiology — for a billion or so Christians around the world, the ultimate answer is yes, the Church literally is necessary for salvation. Coming from more of a Reformed perspective, at some point I have to respectfully disagree with my Catholic brothers and sisters here. Yet, I don’t think this should result in an ecclesiology that guts the Church of any significance in the economy of salvation. The lines evangelicals like to draw between salvation and sanctification perhaps are too sharp sometimes. Membership in a local church body does not save, but saving faith produces the desire and need to fellowship in a local church body. The local church body absolutely is essential to the ongoing progress of a believer’s sanctification, and the fellowship, maturity and service that happen in a local church body are part of the ongoing process of an individual believer’s salvation. Being “born again” isn’t merely a one-time transaction, it’s an entry into lifelong fellowship with Christ and into the community of the Church, over which Christ is head.
My site is finally back up again. There was some sort of problem with my database. Hopefully during the few days I was offline I didn’t lose my vast readership :-b
Hopefully sometime around Christmas I’ll have version 2.0 of this site up and running. I want to keep the blog going, but I’m also planning to incorporate it into a bit of a more fully-featured site, a Through a Glass Darkly journal / community of sorts, with stories, commentary, photography, art, podcasts, videos and such from me and from others. I’ve registered a unique domain for this. Stay tuned — and if you have any of the foregoing you’d like to submit for the new site, please send them along. I hope this will be a sort of “open source” project, so any submission would be non-exclusive — exposure and no downside!
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Christians and Legal Theory
My friend Jeff started a series on thinking about the law, with a post titled “What is Law?” Jeff summarized a basic approach to law as follows: the law is a collection of rules.
This is a popular understanding of “law,” but it’s a rather reductionist, formalist definition. See legal scholar and Legal Theory Lexicon maven Larry Solum’s definition of formalism, which just about exactly describes law as a collection of legislated rules that judges must apply more or less directly.
Formalism is of course a viable theory of law, and it figures prominently in neconservativism. But it is subject to some compelling critiques from legal realism and instrumentalism. Legal realism says that even when judges purport to act according to formalism, they really are making the law as they want it to be. Instrumentlism says that the encoded law should be interpreted and applied according to its purposes rather than strictly according to its encoded language. Instrumentalism and realism, then, would not see law primarily as a set of written, encoded rules, but would see it more in terms of what judges and juries actually do in application.
If you are looking for a descriptive theory of what actually happens in the legal system rather than a prescriptive theory of what should happen, I’d suggest that you have to pay careful attention to realism and instrumentalism.
Of course, formalism and realism are only two ways to look at law. You also need to consider social contract theory, as expressd by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, and as presented in a contemporary Kantian form by Rawls. Rawls’ view is more prescriptive than descriptive, but in many ways it also decribes the deep Lockean roots of U.S. law as found in the U.S. Constitution. Essentially, Rawls’ view is that law should reflect what individuals who know nothing of the circumstances of other members of society would want for themselves. This basic core of rights and protections then forms the minimal social contract rules required for a just society.
Then there’s Ronald Dworkin’s “legal holism.” For Dworkin, law is not a set of discrete rules, but is a “seamless web” of social relations, such that the judge must go beyond a particular set of propositions to decide any given case.
All of these theories are essentially liberal theories of law (liberal here meant in the classical sense of essentially democratic). You also have to consider theories of law that primarily derive from notions of authority, particularly the medieval concept of the divine right of kings, and eastern concepts of law that derive authority from the social order. And, you need to consider dialectical theories of law drawn from Marxism, as well as the dialectical theories represented by the critical legal studies movement.
If you are looking for a particularly Christian jurisprudence, I’d suggest that you can’t stop at formalism, realism, social contract theory, legal holism, or authority or dialectical theories. You need to consider the Thomistic natural law tradition. In that tradition, law is not a set of man-made rules. True law is that which conforms to the deeper divine law woven by God into creation. In my scholarship, currently I’m exploring what I think is a deeper and perhaps even more truly Thomistic and Aristotelian rendition of natural law theory, which is called virtue jurisprudence. But then of course you need to consider some of the Reformed critiques of natural law theory and the common grace jurispurdence of Kuyper and others. And then there are anabaptist and other peace traditions, reflected in folks like Hauerwas and Glen Stassen. (An excellent anthology on Christian legal theory came out last year for intrepid readers.)
This little survey is only the tip of a big iceberg. Legal theory and jurisprudence is endlessly fascinating, and for the Christian thinker, demanding subject. Unfortunately, evangelicals are often quick to settle on formalism as the “right” theory of law. Formalism has advantages and disadvantages, and can’t be seen as the end of the discussion.
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40th Birthday
Tomorrow I turn 40. This can’t be possible. Where did my 20’s go? My 30’s?
Forty seems like an age when it all should come together. Finances should be secure; career should be booming; leadership should be exercised widely and sagely. At forty, a man should be a paragon, a master tactitian, a rock, a sterling example. Younger foes should quail before a forty-year-old warrior’s hard-won skill; older foes should flee before his authoritative courage and still-unbowed strength.
The real forty year old steers his horse confidently over the mountain pass, lights up another smoke, and picks a bright-eyed path into the deep, lush meadows in the next valley. The real forty year old doesn’t stumble past thirty nine like a drunken teenager. He isn’t licking thirty-nine years of unhealed wounds. His pockets are lined with silk, not lint. He owns a tuxedo that still fits. None of his dress shirts have shrunk; he still enjoys wearing fine ties; he is crisp and snappy, not seedy. He has realized his youthful goals and now plans greater, bolder adventures. He does not pine or long or wish or what-if or doubt. He knows.
So I am not really turning forty. Really, I’m still fifteen. Fifteen, afraid-yet-ambitious, cocky-yet-uncertain, focused-yet-scattered, whole-yet-shattered. But fifteen and loved and secure in love. Loved by wife, by children. Laughing out loud with the “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” jumping and dancing with three little lives, our inheritance. And yes, loved in Christ, by the immanent-yet-hidden God, revealed logos, awesome Father, mysterious pneumos. Surrounded by ineffable love.
Not really fifteen then, and not really forty. Something else, undefined by calendrical time.
An entry on Evolution News and Views criticizing a lecture by Francis Collins caught my eye. I’ve previously offered some of my own criticism of Collins’ new book. However, the ENV criticism, I think, was unfair, and reflects a serious theological problem with some “strong” ID arguments.
On the ENV site, Logan Gage argues that Darwinism is fundamentally incompatible with theism, because Darwinian evolution is “unguided and unplanned”:
If Darwinian evolution–by definition–is “unguided” and “unplanned,” then Collins’s view seems logically incoherent. How can a process be both “guided” and “unguided” (or “planned” and “unplanned”) at the same time? Either evolution is “unguided” as the Darwinists contend, or it is guided in some way—which means that the Darwinian view of evolution must be false.
For the notion that Darwinian evolution is “unguided” and “unplanned,” Logan cites a letter sent to the Kansas State Board of Education by some Nobel laureates, which states that “evolution is “the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.” Logan argues that Collins’ “theistic evolution” position is incompatible with the popular view of Darwinism identified in the Nobel letter.
Logan’s criticism is unfair because, to the extent the Nobel laureates meant “unguided” and “unplanned” in a metaphysical sense, their position is not a scientific view about evolution, nor is it what someone like Collins means by “evolution.”
Whether God guided and planned evolution (if and to the extend evolution happened, a question I’m not addressing here) is a metaphysical question that is not addressed by evolutionary science. When evolutionary science speaks of planning, guidance and randomness, it means that the natural processes involved suggest no statistical correlation with any influences external to those natural processes. Even within that context, evolution is not “random” in the sense that anything at all can and does happen — evolution happens within a framework of deeper natural laws, including the laws of genetics and inheritance. As some evolutionary theorists, such a Simon Conway Morris (a Christian) observe, the operation of these laws can give rise to remarkable regularities, including the convergence of different pathways on a relatively small number of sensory organs and body plans.
I would agree with Logan, then, that if the Nobel laureates were using “unguided” and “unplanned” in a metaphysical sense, they were stepping far beyond the bounds of evolutionary science, and were suggesting something that is utterly incompatible with theism. It isn’t clear to me whether that was the sense intended. It certainly is not the sense in which someone like Francis Collins uses terms like “random” in relation to evolution.
If “random,” “unguided” and “unplanned” with regard to evolution are understood simply to mean “uncorellated with any external causes,” I don’t see how this is inconsistent with a theistic understanding of creation. As I sit here in New York typing this today, it is raining lightly outside. Meteorologists can explain this weather pattern fully in naturalistic terms. It is an “unguided,” “unplanned,” and “random” pattern, in the sense that there is no way to correlate the pattern with any external causes. It is of course an orderly pattern, based on deeper natural laws, which makes it explainable and to some extent predictable. But it can be explained solely through the apparently unguided process of natural laws.
I say “apparently unguided” because, as a Christian, I don’t believe for a moment that this weather pattern is “random” or “unguided” in a metaphysical sense. I believe in a God who is sovereign over all creation, upon whom all creation depends, and in whom all creation is held together. God didn’t merely wind up the processes that led to the rain in New York today and let them go off randomly on their own — He is above and in and through them completely as sovereign creator and sustainer. The fact that I can’t directly perceive or correlate God’s will and action in this regard with the rain I observe doesn’t mean God is elided or elidable.
In fact, this is exactly what I expect within the rich framework of the Christian doctrine of creation. I don’t expect God ordinarily to manifest Himself in miraculous ways that contradict the deep natural laws He established and sustains. Indeed, the very orderliness and normality of the everyday working of creation is one of the principal reasons I can make reliable observations and rational judgments, and is a central expression of God’s wisdom and beauty.
Given that I think and feel this way about the rain in New York, why should I think or feel differently about the natural processes through which living organisms change over time? There is no theological reason to think God should act or manifest Himself differently with respect to living organisms in relation to natural laws than He does with respect to processes such as the weather. In fact, there are very good reasons to suspect He would not make such a distinction — the reasons of orderliness and beauty mentioned above.
Does this mean I settle the issue in favor of theistic evolution? No. There are, I think, hermeneutical questions about how to understand the language in Genesis 1 and 2 concerning God’s creation of the animals and of human beings. Does the phrase “after their kinds” require separate creation and a fixity of species? Does creation of Adam from the “dust of the earth” and creation of Eve from Adam’s “rib” require a separate, special creation of human beings? These are reasonable questions. There are also, I believe, reasonable questions about whether Darwinism completely succeeds scientifically on its own merits. There is very convincing genetic and fossil evidence, in my opinion, for gradual organismal change over time and the relatedness of different species. The mechanisms posited for such change — such as natural selection and genetic drift — however, often seem like hand waving to me. But I think it’s important to be clear about the issues, and the broad theological issue of God sovereignly directing creation is not one of them.