The Boneman

The little things are the big things...

As you may have noticed, I've been reading a couple of books by Malcolm Gladwell, specifically, "The Tipping Point" and "Blink."  His working thesis in both books is that the major movers in behavior and thought are not grand / macro schemes and theories, but small catalysts and subconscious reactions.  Both are fascinating reads that I commend to you all.

I have to confess that I tend to agree with him - and yet I find his project unsettling.  I've always been a big-picture / from 50,000 feet kind of guy.  I've always leaned towards Gestalt, but Gladwell is shattering that lens.  Instead of trying to see the totality of something to assess it, I need to look for smaller clues at a much lower level.

The implications of this are huge in business / marketing, theology, raising my kids, and pretty much every other area I operate.  Making the switch from the macro-strategic to the micro-tactical is going to take awhile - and it scares me because I have always found comfort in meta-narratives and integrative frameworks. 

Next post will be on how this is impacting my view of parenting.  Stay tuned...

Van Tilian Presuppositionalism Goes Mainstream?

I was amazed to run across this article (reproduced below) written by Paul Campos in last week's Orange County Register...  Is it possible that Van Tilian presuppositionalism has gone mainstream?!?!?

"Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence."

Why is Stanley Fish so much smarter than Richard Dawkins? That question occurred to me last week, while attending a lecture at which Fish, the well-known literary and legal theorist, did the thing he always does, which is to make the following point over and over again:

"No believer will find his faith shaken by evidence that is evidence only in the light of assumptions he does not share and considers flatly wrong."

Richard Dawkins is, I'm told by persons whose authority I accept on faith, a distinguished evolutionary biologist. He holds a chair at Oxford. He has won many prestigious academic prizes. By all conventional measures, Dawkins is an extremely intelligent man. So why does he seem incapable of understanding what Fish is saying?

Here is Dawkins on the evidence for religious belief: Such belief, Dawkins writes, "will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine."

Consider what Dawkins – the author of "The God Delusion" and, along with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens the most prominent of the current crop of evangelical atheists – is claiming.

He's claiming that if one draws up a list of things that Dawkins considers evidence for the existence of God, and another list of things Dawkins considers evidence for atheism, one list has nothing on it and the other list has everything else.

And he would, of course, be right. Dawkins is a true believer, and for the true believer literally everything is evidence for the truth of his belief. For example, Fish points to St. Augustine's advice when confronting something that appears to contradict Christian belief: the phenomenon should be subjected "to diligent scrutiny until an interpretation contributing to the reign of charity is produced."

That is, Augustine's first principle of sound interpretation is that an interpretation is sound if it confirms the truth of the Christian faith. Indeed, for the perfected soul – which Augustine points out again and again he himself is not – "diligent scrutiny" is unnecessary. For "the pure and healthy internal eye," he says, "God is everywhere."

Dawkins, whose atheism is every bit as zealous as Augustine's Christianity, employs the identical interpretive procedure to reach the opposite conclusion.

Now Dawkins will object that he, unlike the religious believer, is committed to the methods of "science," and will therefore change his mind when evidence refuting his beliefs appears – but it just so happens none ever has.

The striking naivete of this viewpoint becomes clear if one asks a simple question: What, for Dawkins, would constitute evidence of God's existence? Suppose an angel of the Lord were to appear before Dawkins, even as he was delivering another lecture on the delusion that God exists. Would such an experience change Dawkins' views?

Fish has spent his whole career pointing out why it wouldn't: not because of the nature of angels, but because of the nature of interpretation. As long as Dawkins remains who he is now, he will remain incapable of seeing an angel of the Lord.

After all, a genuine atheist must interpret such an event as a temporarily inexplicable hallucination, or a sudden psychotic break, or a clever technological trick – in short, as anything but evidence that atheism is false. (An atheist who questions the truth of atheism is ceasing to be a genuine atheist precisely to the extent that he is asking himself a genuine question.)

In other words, evidence must always be interpreted within the context of interpretive assumptions that necessarily determine what that evidence is understood to signify, and which by their nature are themselves matters of faith. Thus the only way someone like Dawkins will ever see any evidence for the existence of God will be if he loses his faith that he never will.

Reforming Reformed Thought

I recently ran across a great post at Reformed Blacks of America, on Reforming Reformed Thought.  I heartily recommend it to you, and hope to follow-up with my own comments soon...

You Gotta Have Faith

Over the past several months I have been asked the same question several times - "How do Christians reconcile scientific evidence, like carbon dating, with the creation story of the Bible?"  Now as you can imagine, this answer could go on for many pages, but I will attempt to cut to the chase...

When it comes to science and the Bible, we need to get something straight upfront.  Namely, we need to acknowledge that BOTH "religion" AND "science" involve underlying faith commitments.  For example, when it comes to the "science" of origins, we must make "assumptions" about the past.  One of the assumptions scientists make to extrapolate data backwards in time are certain rates of physical degradation.  Whether or not they assume a constant rate is irrelevant, because the point is that they must assume something.  They must posit or believe in something beyond what they can empirically demonstrate in order to make calculations.  These assumptions are faith commitments.

When someone says, "You have your faith, and I have my science," they are simply fooling themselves.  In an ultimate sense, we both have our faith.  If someone wants to reject the Triune God because they have faith that random collisions of impersonal matter resulted in this world, then that is up to them.  If someone wants to reject the Triune God because they have faith that matter and a vague god-force resulted in this world, then that is up to them.  As for me, I couldn't have such a staggeringly blind faith.  No, my faith commitment is corroborated at every point by the intricately personal world we live in. 

There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is miracle.   - Einstein

You heard the man.  You gotta have faith, but it shouldn't be stubborn or blind.

Mommy, where do morals come from?

At some point, we all ask the same question, "Mommy, where do babies come from?"  Unfortunately, by the time we know the answer to this question most of never really asked or wrestled with the question, "Mommy, where do morals come from?"

Well, where do morals come from?  Do they come from majority / cultural consensus, professional philosophers and ethicists, governmental agencies, or even "nature?"  Are morals just the subjective "stuff" humans create - like ethical putty in each individual's hands?

Most rational people seek some standard for morals beyond self because they know murder is not okay contingent upon individual or cultural circumstances.  The Nazis weren't right because they were in power or in the majority.  Some folks retreat to an ethic that runs along the lines of, "Morality is anything that doesn't violate another person's rights, person, or property."  Sounds good - and scores of undergraduates in secular colleges imbibe this thinking.  However, this thinking is so thin it doesn't even withstand an iota of scrutiny.

What rights should people have and who decides on what basis?  What does it mean to violate someone's person or property?  How much property should someone have?  Should there be communal limits to property ownership?  And so on...  The farther we press these kinds of questions the more we discover that this naive basis for morality always boomerangs back to self - which is the very recipe for anarchy or despotism.

Morals must come from God to have any basis or meaning - and not just the concept of God in general, but the Triune God.  Morals must come from the Triune God because He originally and eternally has existed in a community of love - and He alone knows what it means to live in a unity of peace, fellowship, sacrifice, and joy.  Humanity is a reflection of the unity-plurality of God and is made to live in bonds of love that reflect the Trinitarian fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Morals aren't subjective putty or arbitrary ethical emanations from a vague God-source / force.  Morals are the relational boundaries that reflect who God is in His Trinity - and who He has made us to be.

Unitarianism cannot offer this.  Buddhism cannot offer this.  Atheism cannot offer this - only Christianity can offer this.  Only God as revealed in Jesus Christ reveals to us what it means to be "good" and live in harmony with each other as we mutually sacrifice on one another's behalf.

Where do morals come from?  What is the fount of goodness that all men are called to emulate?  The answer is not a philsophical proposition, but a divine Person, Jesus Christ.