Something to think about

Here's a little of the stuff that has been running around in my brain for a bit and I was wondering if you guys might have some ideas about it.
Any who...here goes...
Why do we in western civilization think that the impersonal (i.e laws of physics etc) are a more direct route towards an explanation for events rather than a personal cause? For example if I were to tell some one that the reason something falls doesn't have to be because of gravity, it could be because it wants to or something else wants it to. But when these other plausible explanations are offered then Occam's Razor is invoked to discount them because they are more complex then simple impersonal forces. Why are they simpler? What makes them preferable? Jus a question to get responses to.

Adieu.

The Liberal and the Christian: A Cautionary Tale

Once again, as we do every 2 years, we’ve come around to another election cycle. After a few surprising and devastating defeats, the liberals have chalked their lack of success up to one group: the evangelical Christians. It seems that these evangelical Christians can’t seem to make a right decision when it comes to politics, and quite monolithically vote Republican. After their loss in 2004, their new plan was to start picking off evangelicals, pushing them towards liberalism.

Now, most of the politicos live and die as secularists, which is why they have felt the wrath of the Christians these past few cycles, and so they have cast about for anything that might help them get into the Christian graces. The golden ticket to this wonderful candy land seems to be a social morality, or the desire of most Christians to make the world as convenient as possible with out all those non-prosperous-non-Christians around. The problem they have is using this ticket aright. Being secularists, they wield it like secularists. Not once have I actually heard a liberal use Christian language like they believe it. Rather they use it to prove how stupid and uneducated those who believe in a higher and better being are. When dealing with social morality, they divorce the spiritual implications of what Christ says and focus only on the physical aspects of it. “See Jesus fed the masses, if you were really a Christian you would want to feed the masses as well.” “When Jesus said that we should love our enemies, he probably meant that we shouldn’t kill them.” “Jesus was a Liberal.” All of these monuments of deep thoughts from the bottom of an expensive Chianti are actually said and printed in our current culture. They even sound good on the surface but scratch the surface and all you get is a superficial “Jesus was a hippy and God is an opiate” spirituality that dismisses the spiritual as idiotic.

But it wasn’t always so, there was once a time when the Christian spoke of the conservative side as the devil’s side. When liberalism, or at least progressivism, was seen as the best idea for the church to get behind to bring about a better world. This magical world existed not eons ago or even with the advent of Christ, but rather was only 80 or so years ago. The church was involved in a fight over what seems to have been the death-knell for the modernists (liberals) called the Social Gospel.

Those familiar with that concept may look askance and wonder why I mention this heresy in the same paragraph as Christians, but believe me at this time it wasn’t just Modernists that voted and pushed for progressivism, the conservatives did as well. J. Gresham Machen, the man that stood up and killed the Social Gospel and Modernism would have a lot to answer for if he was alive today and his voting record was known.

But what happened with the progressives at the death of the Modernist Church is the cautionary tale for conservatives today.

The death of the Modernist Church took a while, and while it was dieing its standards where taken and stripped of all spiritual moorings and made into an humanist/secular philosophy.

When Gresham defined Fundamentalism (He had more drinking, smoking and dancing in his than Fundies today could even imagine) he coalesced a group around his thought that we know of today as Evangelicals. For anyone who still believed that the Bible was something more that a comic book and that God and Jesus actually existed this was the only place to go. But for a long time they were so busy with trying to sort things out that politics was left without the Christian view for a while.

During this Christ free time the ideas that had started as Liberal Theology and over escatatilized Christianity finished their move to the totally secular left. As secularists they tried their darndest to excise any vestiges of Christian morality from their view and to set it up on the shaky legs of some modernist/post-modernist ethic. The one thing that they didn’t excise however was the dignity of man, the foundational belief of their kind and the impetus for all actions.

But that was it, all else, particularly the balancing ethic of the importance of God as compared to man, was thrown over to lighten the morality boat and allow them to actualize their vision. But they went a bit too far and woke up the slumbering Christian when, in the name of a woman’s dignity they allowed for the killing of babies.

Roe vs. Wade will be seen as the turning point for liberals for a long time to come and will eventually be the death of them because they can’t drop it. By the time that abortion came down the pike, Liberals had so obscured their original Christian heritage that when Christians woke up and began to fight it was a surprise to them that such an animal still existed.

But they did and they still do in growing numbers every cycle and the Liberals have just lately woken up to the fact that they need to be courted not belittled. But it is too late and the courting will fail because they have gone so far away that Christians can only see their moral failings, and are able to completely separate anything they may as a pure accident.

But the end of the progressive or liberal wing in America is about 4 years away. They are already dead now, but we are just waiting for the death-throes to be over with. Conservatives have caution this is you’re your possible fate. Christians vote with you right now purely for moral reasons and the social issues are a by-product that many of them have to swallow for a greater good. You are right now the lesser of two evils that we need to get along with to get rid of the big problem right now.

There was a time back in the 60’s when the Republican party was fighting for its life and a man named Goldwater out maneuvered a lady by the name of Rand so that the moral conservatism became the defining characteristic rather than economic conservatism. This is why Christians are with you, but if you reverse Goldwater’s victory then you have lost us.

Remember, it is important to us that the non-prosperous-non-Christians still get dealt with. To us humans still have dignity and if that is lost to you, then we are lost to you

Ra-ra re kick 'em in the knee, Ra-ra ras kick 'em in the ...er...other knee

This will just be a quick post.

To the most honorable gentleman on the other side of the isle:

The problem I have with science is not that it actually produces stuff. In fact I think that is its one good purpose.

But we must be careful not to smile at the Soilent Green that solves the worlds hunger problem and ignore Mr. Heston running around falling on his knees yelling at how we get it.

There is one main problem with science that I want to fight, and it splits into two things. When we talk about science it is a cloak for the main problem which is the epistemology that under-girds it.

It started out as foundationalism. We have to fight this theory of knowledge as anti-Christian and theologically unsound. The whole of foundationalism is bases on the ability of man to find a foundation that we then can build knowledge on in a layered and terraced manner.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn does a good job of dismantling this myth. By showing that what happens as we “progress in scientific knowledge” is that we overthrow the past knowledge and start over. The only thing we keep from the past is the technology

Our knowledge is wrapped up in all kinds of things that we only have a shadowy inkling of. And to place a “foundation” under it is purely arbitrary and quite false.

The second thing that usually comes up when one attacks the foundation of science the target usually moves to the outcome of it. The epistemology slides from foundationalism to pragmatism. This school’s epistemology is so joke worthy that I don’t think I need to do much on it.

The thing to use as a defense of science isn’t either of these, but it is a part of one. Make a case that it helps and is one of the best tools for fulfilling the dominion mandate (which I applaud my esteemed colleague for starting) with out appealing to either of these epistemologies and we will get somewhere.

Any ideas on a new epistemology?

That nasty little thing called science

First off I must apologize for this because it will be wholly inadequate simply because of the hugeness of the topic, but I will try to set the case.

When ever one decides to look at and evaluate Christianity it must always be done with the dominate philosophies of the time in view. For example one can’t understand the fights and tribulations the early Church went through about the Trinity without understanding the Greek idea of substance and being. Further one must understand the categorical thinking of Aquinas to get anything from the theology of the Middle Ages. When we read these earlier Theologies it is painfully obvious that this is true, the language they use, the arguments they choose, and the choice of final arbiter of disputes on interpreting the Word all seem strange to us.

But the real problem for us isn’t looking back, but looking at our own world and seeing what is there. The language of the Theologies of today seems comfy and logical. The reasoning makes sense to us. The reason is that it is a product of our own situation: they talk like me.

Our language is full of the modernist philosophies that were birthed by Descartes. This language is all about the testing of things according to the abilities of the human mind. picked up in a different way the English thinkers of this time brought about a language concerned with testing the human experiences against each other. The fight went on till Hume killed the idea that our perceptions mean anything other than what we want them to and Kant made the human mind nothing more than a plausibility structure factory.

What a large portion of Western Civilization has done with the final two thinkers is to put them on hold till they can be dealt with by another customer service rep. And once every generation or so some one picks them up and tries to answer them before slinking away leaving them listening to Kenny G for another twenty years.

Due to the inability to answer the last thinkers in the line, their main focus, epistemology, has stalled. Indeed it’s startling to me how little cogent work one can find on the subject within the last two centuries. Instead the focus now has changed to ethics and its several subjects including aesthetics. But the language of truth has stalled.

Where it stalled is in the fight between the rationalists and the empiricists. Both of these worked from the same foundationalist system and understanding of humanity. Where they differed is in the idea of what must change to fit the other. The rationalist placed mind over matter and stated that the physical world must be changed to function as we think it should and the empiricist said that our mind must change to fit how the world functions. These two combatants reach an uneasy truce in the Scientific Method.

Thus science became the new big thing based on a combination of logic from the continent and observation from the island. Christianity was eventually caught up in this storm of scientifiying and eventually it became the system for every one.

Our name for this was Modernism and it started out with a good name. But over time thanks to the Germans (it’s always them isn’t it?) it slowly became the object of hissing and pulling faces that it is today. The change was gradual but in the end the scientific method became the lens by which the Bible was interpreted. As a result things began to fall inside of revelation. First it was the History of the Bible, then the Science and finally the Religion. What has remain relatively unscathed until the last 20 years or so was the morality of the Bible.

The foundation of these attacks has been that of science. What follows is just an example and then what follows that is what I see as the more biblical and faithful way of dealing with it.

Let’s just look at the errors in the biblical text that are thrown at Christians. Most of them come from six books and their interactions: I and II Samuel, I and II Kings and I and II Chronicles. Now most of the errors are according to this form: “I Kings so and so says that twenty five people died, I Samuel says the same number were killed and II Chronicles says the number was thirty. Answer that and remain consistent if you can, Ha, Ha, Ha, Heh Heh.” The foundation for this entire claim is the scientific assumption that all truth is Factual Truth. If one is to speak anything true it must be absolutely consistent with each and every fact. We don’t talk or think like this but it is the standard that is placed for us to meet.

Faced with this what does the modern Christian do? They go back and examine every bit of evidence that can be gathered and posit all sorts of theories on how 25 = 30 and fights the Modernist on the Modernistic turf. What effectually happens is that we give up the idea that the standard for truth they posit is false. In effect the Christian assumes that the Enlightenment compromise of the Scientific Method and its standard for truth is correct.

The irony of the situation is that the solution that I would posit would be called caving in to the modernist and giving up the truthfulness of the Bible. Here is my answer: Your wrong you silly idiot. What you are doing is placing a standard of truth that the Biblical writer had no conception of and would scoff at. Ancient history was written for the same reason that good literature is written today; to prove a point, not necessarily a factual one as if they were writing a field report, but also spiritual and moral ones. Your standard of truth is a poor one that you cannot even meet in any one of your attempts so stop foisting the burden you can’t bear on to others as well you Pharisees. (Now they might not get the last reference but its therapeutic to say.)

Alas what would I be accused of by the common Christian? Simply that I had taken the Bible out of the realm of factual testing and as a result given up the fight on its inerrancy, the same thing that all those liberals did in Germany that led to this problem. I deny that and say rather that they assumed the truth of their secular histories and denied the biblical one based on the Enlightenment epistemology. I actually deny that their secular histories can be true according to a Biblical epistemology and that the Biblical history is true despite their factual fetishes.

Now on to my claim that the Church of today uses the Enlightenment as a crutch.

For conformation just go up to a random Christian and use this example and wait for your response. Better yet try this one. (I recommend a cigar or pipe and some small amount of alcoholic beverage be present for this will be long and they keeps the nerves from fraying.)

Tell them that all that gravity is Newton’s Zeus and that what the Greeks did to explain the world with their Pantheon, scientists do with their “natural forces” and physical theories. Even to the point of personalizing them. Gravity cannot “cause” a book to fall because that is and active verb that requires a personal agent to perform. Rather the cause of the book falling is God telling it to. He doesn’t work through middle managers, He does everything by Himself, what we call gravity is just His normal way of acting.

See how that goes over and then think about it.

Peace Out

Johanns de Selincio

The first topic

Ok guys i should have my First post done by this evening or tommorrow morning. i have been dealing with some other stuff that has taken up most of my time. again sorry and i will get this going soon. thanks. johanns