I’ll bite the stream

The post here began to spin an interesting tangent by some remarks partially by this guy.  (After posing the question below, he asked if anybody was interested in “biting the stream” which I found to be a pretty cool image and slole for the title listed above.)

To summarize: it might be useful, as we ponder whether Intelligent Design is a useful hypothesis to determine the distinction between the natural and the super natural. 

Even if this question turns out to be irrelevant to the whole ID debate, I think it’s an interesting question.  I’ve got a few guesses on the question.  I’ll throw them out in what follows and hope that others will jump in and share their own views.

At the most basic level, a simple analysis of  the words “natural” and “super natural” leads me to realize that the latter is above, beyond, or in addition to the former.   Supersonic speed are in excess of the speed of sound in the same way that whatever is supernatural is beyond what ever is natural.  (Sometimes we use the word “super” to imply very… As in something is supercooled if it’s very, very cold.  I don’t think that the use that’s happening here.)

People sometimes try to run a definition of supernatural wherein it’s basically any time the normal course of things is violated.  It’s natural for people to fall into the water, it’s supernatural for them to walk on water. 

I think it’s right to think about the supernatural as being beyond our expecations and predictions.  But I think if we go to far with this idea we end up with a picture of God like a teen ager, who just found new cheat codes for his favorite video game on the internet.  Everybody else is subject to the ordinary rules of the game but he put a funny word in somewhere and now his character has invulnerabality. 

I’m open to the idea that God grants occasional exceptions to the conditions he imposed on the universe.  But I don’t think that this is the fullest understanding of the supernatural.  I think this is probably a rather trivial subset of the class of supernaturality.

My thinking right now is the full definition of the supernatural is rooted in my assumption that the universe operates on laws that are too complex, sublime, and sophisticated for our puny little brains to comprehend.   This is sort of a “Is the light off in when you close the refridgerator door assumption”: It seems hard to imagine, by it’s very nature, how one could actually verify it.

I’m comitted to the idea that our intelligence is limited though.  I don’t think there’d many people who would dispute this.

We can point to people and animals of lesser intelligence, and claim that they can not comprehend things that we do.  Many of us can point toward smarter people, assume that they are speaking the truth, and admit “I have no idea what he means and I don’t think anybody could ever help me understand that.”

Given these propositons, it’d seem rather arbitrary if the complexity of the universe just stopped at the level of complexity of the human brain.  Therefore, my suggestion, is that the most common examples of the supernatural are those facts about the universe that will elude us because they are forever beyond our capacity to understand.

I think we’re beginning to nudge into this territority.   Physicists recognize that it doesn’t even make sense to say that light is both a wave and a particle at the same time they say it is a wave and a particle. 

The supernatural, then, is any thing which both true and currently not understood.    There are aspects of the supernatural that are changing.  Something which counted as supernatural to the ancients seems quite normal to us.  There are aspects that are eternal, forever beyond our ability to comprehend.

So there it is: my first attempt at the question.  What do you think?

 

Some arguments that need to be “Expelled”

The movie “Expelled” has refocused some attention on evolution, creation, intelligent design, etc.
And this attention makes me feel like somebody watching his kid at the high school talent show about to walk on the stage and publicly humiliate himself by doing something epically uncool like play a polka.
My embarassment is for my brothers and sisters in Christ. But it’s not that I want us to be the cool kids. I realize that we’re not supposed to be the cool kids. It’s because I believe real damage is being done to our credibility and this translates to damage being done to the testimony we give for Christ.
I am not arguing here with anyone’s right to dispute the evolutionary account. Nor do I take issue with somebody wanting to assert that they have a right to determine what their child learns.

The problem is that we are using tired, disproven arguments. We can do better. There are much more convincing arguments against evolution. These are a little more work. They will take more patience to understand. They will require a bit more background knowledge to explain.
I believe so strongly that if we’re not going to put this effort into the thing, we should just step out of the debate, because we are doing so much more harm than good. In this post I’m going to highlight the two most foolish objections we cite to evolution, then I’ll explore why I think it’s so important that we have our ducks in a row on this.

Argument #1 that we need to stop using:
Evolution is only a theory.
The problem is not that this argument is untrue. The problem is that it’s a meaningless claim. All science does is generate theories. Nobody is debating that evolution is a theory. When folks who oppose evolution say “Evolution is a theory” they usually want to say “Even scientists aren’t confident in evolution, that’s why they call it a theory.” Neodarwinian evolution isn’t called a theory because anybody is tenative or unsure of it. Neodarwinian evolution is called a theory because that’s what science does: make theories.
There is this idea that scientists develop a certain ammount of confidence in a theory, or they discover a certain ammount of evidence for a theory, and suddenly there is a graduation ceromony, and then idea that used to be a theory becomes a “fact” or a “law.”
That idea isn’t how it works. Most scientists are just as confident in the neo-darwinian account as they are in our other most basic understandings of the universe.
This argument is sometimes closely tied to the fact that we have not directly observed macro-evolution. This is again missing the point. The scientific method has operated on inferences in thousands of areas. In an awe-inspiring number of cases, we’ve ended up being right-on when technology caught up with our inferences and we became able to more directly verify our assumptions. (Two examples: background microwave radiation left over from the big bang and the relativistic theories about the passage of time when accelerating compared to the passage of time when not accelerating. Ask for details if you care to and I’ll explain.)

The closest we can reasonably come to rescuing this objection is to say something like this: “my issue is with evolutionary theory is that evolution is an understanding generated through the scientific method. Scientific understanding is always changing. Scientific conclusions are always tenative. As soon as a better explanation comes along we give up on or modify the old one. For centuries, for example, we thought we understood that gravity was a property inherent in matter. Just recently we’ve come to understand that gravity is actually a result of the ways that large masses warp the fabric of space-time itself. The truth I believe is rooted in an unchaning source, and is eternal.”

Argument #2
Life on earth can’t be a naturalistic occurence, it violates the laws of entropy.
I think I’ll put everybody (including myself) to sleep if I get into the nuts-and-bolts of this. If somebody believes that this is a valid argument and wants more details for why I believe it’s not, I hope they’ll leave a comment. I’ll be happy to draw this out. Put very briefly: people believe that the naturalistic account implies that reality is growing more organized with the passage of time; this is impossible because elementary physics state that systems grow more chaotic over time. The reason that this doesn’t work is that the overall system is growing more chaotic as the sun emits energies that warm the surrounding space; only a tiny fraction of this energy is actually captured by the biosphere through photosynthesis and getting used for the creation of order.

These arguments are so often-repeated and so easily defeated that it makes us look shrill and ignorant. If we’re going to claim to deserve a seat at the table of respectable academia, we ought to be prepared to perform at the level the rest of the table is performing at. When they respond (generally not very nicely) to our arguments, we need to work on not simply rehashing them over and over again.
Secular scientists would never even get to do science if they spent their time listening to and responding to every creation scientist who wants a debate with them. The fact that the creationists apparently can’t be bothered to look at the last 87 times that very same objection was answered doesn’t inspire the secular folks to want to make time to including the anti-evolutionist at the table.

We have quite a challenge in front of us. Of course it’s one we can achieve. But it is a challenge. The challenge is this: a secular scientist can be a jerk, or a hypocrite, or be unkind without jeapordizing his status as a scientist. More specifically, if Richard Dawkins is unpleasant, there is no good reason to think his conclusions are untrue.
On the other hand, if I’m claiming that Christianity is part of my motivation for disputing scientific claims, and then I act like a knucklehead, it’s a different matter. If I’m unkind in my public behavior, if I ignore what’s been said to me, if I’m too lazy to do my homework, my actions are demonstrating that my commitment to Christ is only skin-deep.
I understand the concern. Extremists on both sides potray neodarwinian evolution and biblically truth as mutually imcompatible. This leads people on one side of the divide to think that neodarwinian evolution has to go.
But the reasons that people came to Christ nearly always don’t have to scientific understanding. It’d be quite a challenge to find somebody who desperately longed for God but couldn’t commit because of the fact that the fosill record does not coincide with the order that things pop up in Genesis. (just for the record, that oder isn’t too far off.)
On other hand, I believe that there are millions who desperately long for God but who find that the people who claim to be his diplomats, emisarries, and spokespeople are intolerant, anti-intellectual, close-minded, and unloving. Even if we’ve never heard the words we all get the idea that “by there fruits you shall know them.” What do our fruits look like to somebody within evolutionary circles?

Who was Adam?

It would be easy to take the entire book of Genesis literally.  Assume six literal days.  Assume Adam was a single person.  Assume it all happened in a straight foreward manner.

It would be equally easy to dismiss it all as nonsense.  We know that man evolved.  We know that some elements of the chronology are out of order.  We know that the age that literalists have given us for the Earth doesn’t match up with what we know from other disciplines.

Of course, there is a third option.  Though the first two options are easy, they don’t satisfy.   I believe firmly and completely that the biblical account is divienly inspired.  I believe that God works through the evolutionary process. 

I wanted to explore this, this morning.  I wanted to offer some things that maybe God is trying to share with us through the book of Genesis. 

There are some interesting paralells in the chronology between the scientific and biblical accounts.  Both have the Earth start off a lifeless husk.   First come the waters and oceans.  Animal life begins in the oceans.  Land pops up.  Animals make it to the land.   The first human arrives pretty late on the scene.

(I want to be open about the fact that I have omitted some discrepancies.  I believe that the scientific and biblical accounts are remarkably consistent.  God didn’t want to write a science book when he wrote the bible, though.  They aren’t perfect.)

With the coming of Adam, things get particularly interesting,  Those who don’t see God as having a hand in the writing of the bible have to explain away a remarkable number of coincidences.  One of these is this: Clearly, the ancient Hebrews couldn’t have known much about our evolutionary ancestors.  And yet virtually every major differentiation between us and the ealier hominids is covered in Genesis: the development of language, nudity taboos, the development of monogamy, the use of tools for tilling the land, different social gender expectations.

On the other hand, people like myself who are skeptical about the literal-ness of all this owe an explanation: What does original sin mean?  What do the trees stand for?  What does the serpent represent?

These are huge questions.  I don’t know that I have them fully answered.  But we can’t just sweep them aside.  If we think that Jesus redeemed us from the Fall at the Garden of Eden, we can’t really understand His redemption if we don’t understand what that fall really was.

The best I can do with answering these questions is more vague than I’d like.  But for whatever it’s worth, here it is:

God used the evolutionary process with the inent of creating humankind.  He had incredibly special plans for us that included a much closer communion to Him than we currently enjoy.

This communion, like any communion, was a relationship.  The garden might have been a place.  But it was more importantly a way of existing in harmony with God. 

I’ll side with the traditionalists on the idea that the serpent represents Satan.  The understanding that Satan wanted to strike out at God by hurting him, that humanity itself was the closest thing to a weakness of God’s makes sense to me.  Satan couldn’t get at God directly.   So he went after God’s kids.

A relationship isn’t a relationship if both people can’t opt out.  A paradise is a prison if there’s not a door.  By definition, God could not have forced us into the sort of existence he wanted for us.  He had to give us a back door, a way out, or he would have had a prison, not perfection for us.

Satan and human weakness conspired.  We walked out the door that God had to leave open. 

And so God begins a string of statements about how the world is going to be.  He prophecies the coming of Jesus; Satan will try to strike at Jesus heel and Jesus will succesfully stomp on the serpent’s head.  

The other thing I think about, as I think about Genesis, is that in at least one way, Adam is one person.  Adam is me.

I have been offered amazing riches.  I have turned these down for foolish reasons.  I have disobeyed God and followed the serpent.