The Quodlibeta Evolution Quiz

So. You’ve read 'The Selfish Gene'. You’ve skim read Jerry Coyne’s ‘Why Evolution is True’ and you’ve looked at the pretty pictures in Douglas J. Futuyma’s Evolution textbook. Now you have done all the preparation needed to be able to take on those dumbass Christians on the internet and leave devastating comments on their blogs. But first, why not take our ‘Quodlibeta Evolution Quiz’ and test out your knowledge.

Q1 - Who said ‘It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist'?

A) The Pope (whilst sniggering)

B) The Archbishop of Canterbury (whilst rattling the collection pot)

C) Charles Darwin in a letter to John Fordyce

Q2 - Gregor Mendel is renowned as ‘the father of modern genetics’, but what was his profession. Was he ?:

A) A freethinking enlightenment ‘Philosophe’

B) President of the British Rationalist Association

C) An Augustinian Monk

Q3 - Francisco Ayala, Ken Miller, Joan Roughgarden and Simon Conway Morris:

A) Are dirty lying Xian apologists

B) Who?

C) Don’t understand evolution and need to have passages from the selfish gene quoted to them

D) Are leading figures in the study of evolution who are also deeply religious

Q4 - Theodosius Dobzhansky played a key role in shaping the modern evolutionary synthesis. Which line appears in his essay ‘ Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution’ ?

A) “I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way.”

B) “Now stop worshipping the sky fairy”

C) ‘Both the pro-science Christians (as if Christian bullshit is scientific) and the Muslim terrorists share pretty much the same childish beliefs - heaven, a god fairy, various miracles, supernatural magic’

Q5 - The word ‘creation’ and it's cognates is used in 'On the Origin of Species'

A) Over 100 times

B) With a heavy dose of irony

C) With ‘LOL fu Xians!’ written next to it

Q6 - When the Oxford Anglo-Catholic, Aubrey Moore read ‘On the Origin of Species’ his reaction was to say:

a) ‘Oh Sh*t we’re rumbled!

b) Whose kneecaps do we have to split to stop this from getting out!

c) That there was special affinity between Darwinism and Christian faith, remarking that Darwinism appeared, and, under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend'

Q7 - R.A Fisher made some of the most important contributions to evolutionary biology of the 20th century and put the study of the subject on a quantitative footing. He was also:

A) Editor of ‘The New Humanist’

B) An advocate of Logical Positivism.

C) A deeply devout Anglican who, between founding modern statistics and population genetics, penned articles for church magazines’.

Q8 - When Richard Dawkins says ‘The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference’, he is expressing:

A) His own personal metaphysic

B) The bleeding obvious

C) Cutting edge science

Q9 - Richard Dawkins was made a professor at Oxford.

a) For his outstanding contributions to science

b) For bullying creationists

c) Because some rich guy he had never met paid the university a large sum of money

You get extra points for linking the Church of England to the September 11th attacks and accusing us of systematic brainwashing.

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Where I Stand on Evolution

I occasionally get emails about evolution or intelligent design, so I thought I'd do a post about what I think the Christian response to these issues should be.

Even today, over 150 years after the first publication of On the Origin of Species, many people are concerned about the implications of evolution. I hope this post will help to show that evolution is not nearly as threatening as many Christians assume. On the contrary, I think that it reveals to us something about how God went about His work of creation.

There are some atheists who believe that there is a conflict between science and religion. Richard Dawkins is most famous for this. Unfortunately, there are also Christians who think evolution and Christianity are incompatible. These Christians, who are usually called “creationists”, claim that Darwinism contradicts the book of Genesis in the Bible. Worse, they agree with Richard Dawkins that evolution actually implies atheism because it shows how life on earth could have arisen without being designed by God. Some Christians have become more hostile to science because they believe it contradicts religious faith.

So Christians with experience of science need to explain why Darwinism is not an argument for atheism. Instead, we need to show that evolution is the way that God has chosen to bring about the infinite variety of life on earth. And we need to understand that He has chosen this method for very good reasons.

One of the difficult issues that Christians must grapple with is the question of why God gives us so much freedom. He lets us do the most appalling things to each other because He knows that only if we can do evil will we appreciate and understand good. Many people would rather live in a universe where God kept a tighter reign on us and where we simply could not abuse our freedom. If that was the case, we would never have to grow up because we would never have to face the consequences of our decisions.

Evolution is the extension of that freedom to the whole of nature. God did not individually create each species. Instead, He provided a mechanism under which organisms could develop in a vast number of different directions. Thus the beauty of the natural world is not a product of divine dictate but the result of a process that God initiated when He ordained the laws of science. The universe as a whole is undetermined and free. It has to be that way if our own free will is to mean anything at all. Again, people look at the consequences of this freedom and wish things were more restricted. But God has decided true liberty is something that He should extend to all His creation, not just to us.

You will often hear it said that evolution is random. This is false and not a single biologist believes it. The process of natural selection is anything but random, but it is still undetermined in its outcome. That is why evolution can be so incredibly fruitful as a creative process and why, I believe, God has used it to generate all the variety around us.

Evolution supplies science with a theory that explains, given some form of primordial life form, how there came to be all the wide diversity of life we see around us today. Although many questions remain unanswered, experimental evidence has accumulated to the extent that very few scientists question this conclusion.

The only alternative is the controversial theory “Intelligent Design,” first suggested by the biochemist Michael Behe in his book Darwin's Black Box. He said that the internal structure of a living cell is so complicated that it could not possibly have evolved on its own. In fact, he goes further and says that many cellular structures are ‘irreducibly complex’. This means that there is no way that they could have evolved in the small steps required by Darwin’s theory. “Intelligent Design” theory claims that the irreducible complexity of cells points firmly to them having been designed. And since Behe is a Christian, it is clear that the designer that he has in mind is God.

Michael Behe's book certainly hit a raw nerve among biologists, largely because he is absolutely right in pointing out the limits to current knowledge. There is no evolutionary pathway that we know of that could have led to the complex machinery of the living cell. However, this does not mean that no such mechanism exists. There were four billion years of evolution before any multi-cellular organisms appeared. As bacteria can reproduce in as little as ten minutes and given the number of single-celled creatures that the Earth could have supported, I'm convinced that the evolution of these structures happened by naturalistic means. Besides, as science has advanced, we have begun to explain how some of the cell’s machinery could have evolved and we can be confident that the rest will eventually yield to a Darwinian explanation.

An even bigger puzzle is the origin of life itself. Not only is their no current scientific explanation for this, but we hardly have an idea of what such a theory could look like. Some Christians have seized on this scientific vacuum to assert that in the absence of an explanation, God must have done it.

So how did God do it?

I disagree that the origin of life or the complex internal structure of cells are evidence for direct divine intervention. Effectively, such an argument would claim God must have stepped in to fit together the right molecules to create cells or life itself. This is both a tactical and a theological mistake. Tactically, such 'God of the Gaps' arguments are a bad idea. They give atheists a chance to parade a victory for all-conquering science if a naturalistic explanation is later forthcoming. Theologically, as I shall now explain, they belittle the creative power of God.

Many scientists think that the chances of life naturally arising are very small. But I expect that under the right conditions the naturalistic appearance of life is going to be a certainty. Why? Because we know God created this universe precisely so that it should have sentient life in it. Life is built into the very fabric of the cosmos - it is the thing that the laws of physics were designed to produce. Thus if life were impossible and God was required to intervene to invent it, that would mean His original creation was flawed. If He has to jury-rig the universe to achieve his aims, He is not the designer we had always thought He was.

The same applies to the complexity of cells. We can be sure that they could have evolved because God ordained the laws of nature to make this possible. That our puny minds cannot conceive of how He managed to do this is no reason to assume that He could not.

Philosophically, I think that Christians should value science because it tells us so many wonderful things about God's great creative work. So, when scientists find out how life started (which I fully expect them to do), far from being a victory for naturalism, it will be the final nail in the coffin of the preposterous idea of atheists that this universe is just a random fluke.

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Nicole Oresme and the Moving Earth

One cannot demonstrate by any experience whatever that the heavens move with diurnal motion; whatever the fact may be, assuming that the heavens move and the earth does not or that the earth moves and the heavens do not, to an eye in the heavens which could see the earth clearly it would appear to move; if the eye were on the earth, the heavens would appear to move’.

Nicole Oresme

It is one thing to propose that the earth rotates upon it’s axis and orbits around the sun. We know that Aristarchus of Samos and Seleucus of Babylon attempted to do this in antiquity without very much success. It is quite another to answer the arguments against such a proposal, many of them formidable. Accordingly there is no evidence of anyone in the Middle Ages trying to say that the earth moved around the sun with an annual motion. This breakthrough would not come until Copernicus’s De revolutionibus and even then, few contemporary astronomers espoused his proposals.

Nethertheless, we do find people in the Middle Ages talking about diurnal motion of the earth, a very contentious issue because of the absence of any visible effects of the earth’s rotation on solid objects; or even the clouds above the earth’s surface. The first indication of this is a curious comment by William of Conches, the Chartrean master in the first half of the 12th century who was very interested in natural philosophy. In his Dragmaticon Philosophie between William as the philosopher and the Duke of Normandy, the Duke asks him what he thinks about this idea that the earth is in motion. William replies saying that:

‘you must be under the influence of that crazed philosopher who is always in a frenzy before lunch and drunk after lunch’

..the implication being that because this unnamed scholar is drunk all the time he feels the earth moving under his feet. The Duke presses William of Conches for a better reason for proposing the stability of the earth, so the philosopher says that the earth is made of earth, and earth is not a mobile element like fire. Therefore it makes no sense to have the earth in motion. Taking a common sense view, who would actually think that the earth is actually moving since we don’t feel it move at all. The mystery here is about whom is William talking about. All we can say is that it looks like someone was raising this question in the twelfth century (and was written off as a drunkard)

The topic comes up again in the fourteenth century under the guidance of Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme. Buridan noted that, as observers, we can only ever observe relative motions. We cannot really know absolute motions. So if, for example, we happened to be in a boat going along a coastline, we really don’t know whether the boat we are in is moving or if the coastline is moving alongside us. Nonetheless, Buridan rejects the idea that the earth is rotating, based on the fact that if you shoot an arrow straight up in the air, it falls back to the ground exactly where you shoot it from. Clearly if the earth were actually rotating, the arrow should be left behind as the earth rotates under it.

His younger contemporary Nicole Oresme later argued that the arrow experiment doesn’t prove anything. This is because the arrow also has an impressed horizontal force which it picks up as it is shot from the earth which keeps it moving along with the earth. Moreover, Oresme uses a second argument based on what things look like on a moving ship (this is similar to the arguments that Galileo would use 250 years later). Oresme says that if we are on a ship which is moving and we move our hand up the mast and down the mast, for any observer which happens to be on the ship, the hand looks like it is moving straight up and straight down. However, to an observer who is not on the ship, it looks like there is also a horizontal motion. They would see the combination of the ship sailing along and the motion of the hand. The observer would therefore see two different things from two different vantage points. Moreover all the motions that we can do on the moving ship look the same to the sailors on the ship, whether the ship is moored in a dock or is saling fast on the ocean. What Oresme is doing here is something we would recognise today as ‘frames of reference’. This is important in physics of motion. Oresme also notes that it is much more economical if the earth turns once every 24 hours, rather than having every other celestial sphere do that motion themselves.

In the end however, after a long logical disputation, Oresme rejects the possibility of a moving earth. Before doing this he concludes that there is simply no way to decide the issue via logic and reason and therefore falls back on the more common sense, Aristotelian and Biblically supported answer. In a sense Oresme’s decision here is about the wider issue of using reason to answer very difficult questions where the evidence is ambiguous In one passage he says:

‘What I have said here, by way of diversion of intellectual exercise can in this manner serve as a valuable means of refuting and checking those who would like to impugn our faith by argument.’

By this he means that reason is a very powerful thing, but there are limits to what reason can actually show us, like it cannot tell us whether the earth moves or not. Similarly, if it cannot answer a physical question about the world, we have to be very careful about the use of reason in discussions about theological articles of faith. Oresme has therefore used rational arguments to show the potential insufficiency of rational argument.

Although Buridan and Oresme had concluded that the earth did not have diurnal motion, their arguments did reduce the debate to a stalemate and had removed most of the objections. Arguments strikingly similar to theirs would later appear in the work of Copernicus in defence of the heliocentric system, a fact which seems to be lost on 'know it all' Amazon reviewer Viktor Blasjo, who says:

Contemporary fashion requires that Buridan and Oresme be called "brilliant" and "even more brilliant" respectively (p. 66), when they were in fact perpetuating anti-science by maintaining that the question of the earth's rotation "is scientifically indeterminate" (p. 68), and should be decided on the basis of the bible, the "Aristotelian principle that rest is a nobler state than motion" (p. 65), or whatnot. As above, then, they turn away from science towards arbitrary speculation (though admittedly while claiming that they do the opposite).

Now what was that I was saying about it being a bad idea to project your own personal ideology back onto the past?

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Not Even Remotely Scientific Behaviour !

'whether it ought to be conceded that the Holy Spirit could be increased in man [that is] whether more or less [of it] could be had or given’

Peter Lombard

'For whether it commences from zero degree or from some [finite] degree, every latitude, as long as it is terminated at some finite degree, and as long as it is acquired or lost uniformly, will correspond to its mean degree [of velocity]. Thus the moving body, acquiring or losing this latitude uniformly during some assigned period of time, will traverse a distance exactly equal to what it would traverse in an equal period of time if it were moved uniformly at its mean degree [of velocity].'

William of Heytesbury

I was amused to see Richard Carrier’s horrified reaction to the suggestion that Thierry of Chartres’s commentary on Genesis had anything to do with science. For Carrier, Thierry’s effort - which attempted to set out the creation of the world using Platonism and Aristotelian logic – ‘isn't even remotely scientific behaviour’ and ‘almost in every way exactly the opposite of doing science’. In fact it is so the antithesis of science it even confirms Jim ‘no beliefs’ Walker’s graph of ‘scientific advancement’ which depicts the Christians of the early to high Middle Ages as a bunch of indolent, sub-literate, bible bashers.

This is to miss the point by a couple of million light years. What we recognise today as modern science did not exist in antiquity and the Middle Ages. What did exist were inherited beliefs about nature; theories concerning the origins and structure of the cosmos; speculations about the motions of celestial bodies, the nature of elements, diseases and health and explanations of natural phenomena. These were the ingredients which would eventually develop into modern science.

Furthermore, the natural philosophers of this period were not like modern scientists, though we are often guilty of projecting our worldview onto theirs. Their explanation of the natural world was inseparable from their philosophical views, their religious beliefs and their theological assumptions. The full historical picture is therefore highly complex because science, philosophy and theology are so inextricably entwined. If we want to understand it, we can’t simply go back through the past giving ‘gold stars’ to those who conform to our expectations and red lining those who don’t. It is true that if you submitted Thierry of Chartres's Hexameral treatise to the scientific journal ‘Nature’ today it would doubtless be dismissed as ‘hand-waving’ and ‘kookery’; but in the context of the early Middle Ages these commentaries provided a framework and a context in which natural philosophy could be done and they undeniably furthered the study of the natural world.

Another good example from the Middle Ages is what we would today recognise as the science of the kinematics (dynamics, or causes) of motion. As documented by Edward Grant in ‘The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages’, this actually seems to have developed out of a purely theological speculation made a couple of centuries earlier. In the middle of the Twelfth century, the theologian Peter Lombard asked a question about how grace or charity could be increased in a person. Could a person become more filled with grace or more charitable?, or as Peter put it ‘whether it ought to be conceded that the Holy Spirit could be incread in man [that is] whether more or less [of it] could be had or given’. His answer was that, since grace and charity are gifts of the Holy Spirit, they are absolute quantities and cannot vary. This means that when a person becomes more charitable it is only because of his participation in absolute charity.

All theologians who wanted to get a degree in theology had to write a commentary on Peter Lombard 'Sentences' and this meant addressing this question. One commentary posed an alternate answer which disagreed with Peter Lombard’s original conclusion, one proposed by the Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus (John the Scot; Scot in this case meaning Irishman). Scotus was born around 1265 and died in 1308. His argument was that charity could be added incrementally; in fact every quality in a person could be added or diminished incrementally. This idea would come to be known as the notion of the intention and remission of quality. After this was proposed it came to be applied to Aristotelian notions of quality, but also to motions of place.

Aristotle had said that there were three kinds of motion. Motion of place, from point A to point B. Motion of quantity, when the quantity of something changes; and motion of quality, for example when an apple turns from green to red. Once the notion of intention and remission had been applied to notions of quality (the amount of grace or charity in a person) it could also be applied to motions of place; or in other words an object moving from a to b or moving with increasing speed. This meant that speed could count as a ‘quality’ and we can therefore add speed with conceptual validity. As time went on, the scholastics who debated this point became less and less interested in the theological and ontological aspects and more interested in the mathematical aspects of qualitative change.

In 1330 a group we have touched on before called the Oxford calculators began to use the intention of remission of qualities to talk about local motion. Three of these are William of Heytesbury (who according to Carrier, failed to ‘[advance] the sciences in any important way’ so best not bother reading about him), John Dumbleton and Richard Swineshead. These were all scholars at Merton College Oxford. They defined for the first time, notions of uniform velocity, uniform acceleration and they tried to get a handle on the notion of instantaneous velocity (velocity at one given instant during an acceleration. Uniform velocity was defined as the traversal of equal distances and equal instances of time and that uniform acceleration was the addition of equal increments of velocity added in equal intervals of time. This is pretty much the modern definition, except expressed in a slightly different way.

They also devised the mean speed theorem (which according to Carrier’s definition is a ‘renaissance’ invention; and in any case, it wasn’t used properly until the scientific revolution when some Gibbon-eque ‘scientific values’ mysteriously permeated society and ousted the faithheads; in any case Archimedes probably came up with it, we just don’t have the evidence yet and arguments from silence are invalid etc etc..).

The mean speed theorem goes something like this. Assuming that there is uniformly accelerating motion (a body going from zero to say 60 miles an hour) a body will travel the same distance in the same time as another body moving at a constant velocity which is the mean between the starting velocity and the final velocity of the first object. In other words, if we have an object that is starting at a speed of zero and it goes to a speed of eight, it will traverse in a given interval of time in the same space as a body moving with a velocity the mean between zero and eight (four). William of Heytesbury’s version from ‘Rules for solving sophisms’ goes as follows:

“For whether it commences from zero degree or from some [finite] degree, every latitude, as long as it is terminated at some finite degree, and as long as it is acquired or lost uniformly, will correspond to its mean degree [of velocity]. Thus the moving body, acquiring or losing this latitude uniformly during some assigned period of time, will traverse a distance exactly equal to what it would traverse in an equal period of time if it were moved uniformly at its mean degree [of velocity].”

Why is this at all important? Firstly this set the foundations for kinematic motion. The truth of the mean speed theorem was proven geometrically by (among others in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) Nicole Oresme in 1350 and Oresme’s proof, which appeared in ‘On the Configurations of Qualities and Motions’, was well known thereafter. This was significant because as God’s Philosopher’s shows, Oresme’s proof of the mean speed theorem appeared 300 years later in 1638 as the fundamental axiom of the new science of motion in Galileo’s ‘Two New Sciences’. Part of Galileo’s work is therefore rooted in the work of the Oxford Calculators, who in turn were dependent upon the result of an obscure theological question, first propounded by a ‘woo merchant’ called Peter Lombard in the middle of the twelfth century. This example shows us how enormously far a succession of ideas can move and develop from their original source. An enquiry about the nature of the Holy Spirit, grace and charity eventually contributed to a fundamental axiom of kinematics.

We therefore need to take an extremely wide view when reading the history of science. You cannot simply go through intellectual history, isolating things we recognise as scientific. If you do that, you completely miss the historical context and the causation behind things. You miss an enormous amount of the influences that come in and originate from what we would today segregate as non scientific activity. Sure, it might be 'not even remotely scientific behaviour'; but so what?; appearances can be deceptive.

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Return of the Dark Ages

In the latest round of the historical feud between Mike Flynn and Jim 'No beliefs' Walker, Richard Carrier has waded into the fray with a recent blog post 'Flynn's Pile of Boners'. It makes essentially the same argument as Jim Walker did (although whilst calling his commentary 'wildly erroneous' and trying to distance himself from him) and puts forward a sort of a 'thinking man's Christian Dark Ages'. Although this exchange has involved some 'face palm' moments, I am pleased to see that Jim Walker has at least gone from this:

To this:

Ok, it's not much of an improvement, but at least his presentation skills are improving.

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Contexting

Here's another book series that looks fascinating and yet disappointing: Cambridge Philosophical Texts in Context. The idea is to collect together in one volume various (shorter) texts that led up to or resulted from a seminal work in philosophy. I think it's a wonderful idea; it would really whet one's appetite to dive into a particular work.

That's the good news. The bad news is that they've only published two books so far, the last one appearing ten years ago. They have volumes on Descartes' Meditations and Berkeley's Principles and Dialogues. I have the Descartes volume, and the only other book listed as forthcoming is on Kant's Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals, but it hasn't come out yet. I was so disappointed when I saw this. I'd love to see a volume for Husserl's Logical Investigations.


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Yes Virginia, there are flat-earthers

There are some good essays online on the flat earth myth -- the belief that people thought the earth was flat prior to Columbus. I recently linked to this post by M&M, here's another, and here's one James wrote. Humphrey wrote a couple of excellent blogposts on it here and here. The go-to book for all of this is Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians by Jeffrey Burton Russell (you can read a short essay by Russell here) who traces the myth to about 1830 when Washington Irving wrote his "history" of Columbus.

Rather than add to what they wrote, I'd like to address a parallel issue. Once non-Christians started ridiculing Christianity as promoting a flat earth, some Christians sought to defend their faith by ... accepting a flat earth. The most prominent defender, in the mid-19th century, was Samuel Rowbotham, who wrote the book Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe. Rowbotham compiled dozens of evidences supporting his claim that the earth was flat and stationary, such as lighthouses that could be seen from further away than they should if the surface is curved, cannonballs fired straight up from moving platforms (demonstrating that the earth is not moving), etc. To this day there is a flat-earth society which defends this kind of thing. Here is a list of flat-earth literature available to read online. A list of resources by and about flat-earthers is here.

I collect flat-earth literature. It seems to me to be an extreme example of Christians reacting to the conflict myth by letting secularists tell them what to believe, another example being contemporary defenses of geocentrism, something which has gained support among young-earth creationists.

That leads me to my main point: I think young-earth creationism is another example of Christians letting secularists define Christian belief. I don't think it's on the same level as belief in a flat-earth for the simple reason that, throughout history, many of the holiest Christians believed the earth and universe to be young. Nevertheless, the history of young-earth creationism in the last 50 years reveals it to be a reaction rather than a reasoned response, in a very similar fashion as belief in a flat earth was a reaction against the forces of secularism. I submit that this is not an appropriate way for a Christian to act. You can't love the Lord with all your mind if your theology is based on knee-jerk reactions. Moreover, it leads to two deplorable situations: first, as I've already mentioned, where the dictates of one's faith are actually made up by people trying to mock it. As I've mentioned before, I don't think it's wise to let those who deprecate our faith define it for us. Second, it creates a rather large stumbling block for belief in Christianity. If that's what you have to believe in order to be a Christian, then it just obviously fails the smell test.

There are plenty of parallels between young-earth and flat-earth literature. Both make their claim the linchpin to orthodoxy, so that disagreeing with them leads to the denial of central doctrines. Both locate the problems of contemporary society in the rejection of their claim. Both claim that the denial of their claim makes God into an incompetent Creator. Both claim that the denial of their claim is a purely recent phenomenon. Both explicate their claim via bluster and a feigned over-confidence. Etc.

To illustrate that last point, I have a flat-earth book entitled A Reparation: Universal Gravitation a Universal Fake by C. S. DeFord, originally published in 1931, that begins thus:

To me truth is precious. I love it. I embrace it at every opportunity. I do not stop to inquire, Is it popular? ere I embrace it. I inquire only, Is it truth? If my judgment is convinced my conscience approves and my will enforces my acceptance. I want truth for truth's sake, and not for the applaud or approval of men. I would not reject truth because it is unpopular, nor accept error because it is popular. I should rather be right and stand alone than to run with the multitude and be wrong.

Methinks he doth protest too much.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Dude, stop digging

OK, remember that post by Michael Flynn refuting one of the more inane atheist websites? Someone told them about it, and they tried to write a rebuttal. You'll think I'm joking, but they actually claim that Flynn's list of references doesn't count because you can't read them online. "This is the world of the internet and Flynn provided no links for his readers to check his sources. They just have to believe that he got his information correct." Well, either that or, you know, read the books.

Fortunately, we're not left to our own resources in debunking their deep learning because Flynn has done it for us. Here's part 1 and part 2. Flynn's also blogging at the TOF Spot so you can read the same posts there as well (part 1; part 2).

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Hollywood pantheism

Here's an interesting review of the SF movie Avatar. It suggests that the religion of the natives is pantheism, "Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now". The review reminds me of something C. S. Lewis wrote in Miracles:

Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist's God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance. ... And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back -- I would have done so myself if I could -- and proceed no further with Christianity. An "impersonal God" -- well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads -- better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap -- best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband -- that is quite another matter.

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Quote of the Day

"Any comparison of Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 to pagan divine birth stories leads to the conclusion that the Gospel stories cannot be explained simply on the basis of such comparisons. ... For what we find in Matthew and Luke is not the story of ... a divine being descending to earth and, in the guise of a man, mating with a human woman, but rather the story of miraculous conception without the aid of any man, divine or otherwise. As such, this story is without precedent either in Jewish or pagan literature."

Ben Witherington III
"Birth of Jesus"
Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels



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