In thinking about the goal of evolution (namely, the preservation and improvement of species), it struck me recently how self-destructive Christian Love is in such a world. Christianity's goal of Love toward God and people (as the Bible expounds it) is certainly odd in a world that is improved by survival at all costs. In a world where self-preservation is the goal, self-denial is self-destructive.
Christianity's goal is not ultimately to survive, but to Love as long as one does survive. In fact, believing the gospel rightly will have exactly the opposite effect that believing evolution will have: the more you believe the Christian gospel, the more you will be inclined to let go of not only possessions but also your life. The promise of Christianity is not that competition with other species will secure more for one in this life, but that competition with one’s own unbelief in the gospel of God will free one from the struggle with other human beings for survival and will free them instead to lay down their possessions and their lives in love for the improvement of other’s lives.
Christian Love is inexplicable in a world explained by evolutionary models of human origin. Yes, we fight, but not with our enemies; we fight with our own unbelief and we labor in love so that others may overcome their own unbelief. The fact that so many professing Christian lives do not look like this surely betrays the fact that they have not believed the gospel very much. One need not be born again in order to love money, sex, power, or comfortable life styles. One must, however, be born again before one will love God more than money, sex, power, and comfortable life styles, and therefore be able and willing to let them go for the sake of others (though they are good and can be used in good ways).
If I'm a Christian, sacrifice is love; if I'm not, I'm a mercenary, receiving wages for my sacrifice in the form of a good reputation, status as "humanitarian", public or private praise, or even (especially in the West) media coverage and its attendant fame (which is growing shorter and shorter these days). No doubt, my humanitarian efforts bring signficant good to those who receive it, and they will be thankful, but it is of no redeeming value in eternity, nor will it bring God the honor he so rightfully deserves as the One from whom such good things ultimately originate. That honor I will have taken upon myself, and in so doing I will have distracted people's attention away from God. And in distracting people from God, I will have placed myself in the Savior Spot-light, and I can do nothing to save people from the wrath of God that is coming against their sin, no matter how many people I feed or educate or rescue from disease or war-ravaged country-sides. As good as these are, I will have only postponed their own eternal destruction, and even denied that it is coming. And that is not love.
Of course, if you don't believe that such a reckoning is coming, you won't understand love the same way, and you will hold up a different criteria for what it means to love people. In the end, one must ask oneself, "How do I know what love is?" Be careful, though: to ask is not enough. One must find an answer if one is to actually love. If you think you are loving me, but you are really killing me (as euthanasia's proponents are literally doing), you may think well of yourself - but I won't. I might wish that someone with a better vision of love had found me before you did. Don't make those in need more miserable than they are: discover what Real Love is: God himself, in Jesus Christ, reconciling humanity to himself and turning them into people who can love to the death - their own.
19 May 2008
14 May 2008
Atheism, Evolution, Science, & Rationality - Part 2
In line with my last post, reading Dennett's book has provoked subsequent thoughts along other lines, one of which is how evolution, on its own terms, can explain why the survival of a species is a good or desirable thing. As I understand it, evolution is defined as the random genetic mutation of species and the natural selection of preferred mutations that result in the peferred mutations surviving in certain species while the species that lack preferred mutations go extinct.
I ask, "If we suppose that random genetic mutation took place, what interest would Nature have in perpetuating a particular species?"
The answer comes back, "So that ecological balance is achieved", or "So that life continues, or advances, or improves..."
I respond, "Why does Nature care?"
(Note the personification of Nature, or evolution, as though some metaphysical entity called Nature or Evolution is choreographing life's origins and perpetuity - sounds a lot like God to me).
In fact, we'd have to ask why Nature would have any notion of "improvement" at all? This is one of evolution's insurmountable challenges, it seems to me: how there exists any notion of better/worse, improvement/decline, etc. in or of a species. I dont' deny that we live with such notions today, but I do deny that naturalistic philosophy should produce them from it's own principles.
Evolution can't explain how it moves from what is to what ought to be; things like injustice and obligations simply gum up the bloody evolutionary works. In fact, it can't even explain how it moves from Nothing in the first place to Life in the second, but that's another issue. For now, I simply wonder why so many people who believe that evolutionary theory explains life's origins get so upset by earthquakes, hurricanes, and cyclones when it may just be (according to their own theory) Nature's way of eliminating the less desirable members of the human species.
The evil of evolution is seen in that last sentence; it is blasphemy to belittle the image of the glorious God so. Oh, that more people would lay down their evolutionary and atheistic idols and embrace the dignity given to them by being made in God's image! Not to mention the redeeming dignity of being "renewed in knowledge after the image of our creator," by believing in Jesus, the incarnate image of God.
I ask, "If we suppose that random genetic mutation took place, what interest would Nature have in perpetuating a particular species?"
The answer comes back, "So that ecological balance is achieved", or "So that life continues, or advances, or improves..."
I respond, "Why does Nature care?"
(Note the personification of Nature, or evolution, as though some metaphysical entity called Nature or Evolution is choreographing life's origins and perpetuity - sounds a lot like God to me).
In fact, we'd have to ask why Nature would have any notion of "improvement" at all? This is one of evolution's insurmountable challenges, it seems to me: how there exists any notion of better/worse, improvement/decline, etc. in or of a species. I dont' deny that we live with such notions today, but I do deny that naturalistic philosophy should produce them from it's own principles.
Evolution can't explain how it moves from what is to what ought to be; things like injustice and obligations simply gum up the bloody evolutionary works. In fact, it can't even explain how it moves from Nothing in the first place to Life in the second, but that's another issue. For now, I simply wonder why so many people who believe that evolutionary theory explains life's origins get so upset by earthquakes, hurricanes, and cyclones when it may just be (according to their own theory) Nature's way of eliminating the less desirable members of the human species.
The evil of evolution is seen in that last sentence; it is blasphemy to belittle the image of the glorious God so. Oh, that more people would lay down their evolutionary and atheistic idols and embrace the dignity given to them by being made in God's image! Not to mention the redeeming dignity of being "renewed in knowledge after the image of our creator," by believing in Jesus, the incarnate image of God.
Atheism, Evolution, Science, & Rationality - Part 1
I've begun reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenemenon and I find it frustrating. It's not the subject matter I don't like, but the style. Leon Wieseltier, in his NY Times review, expressed it nicely: "The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing." Yes, I object to evolution as the explanation for life's origin and sustainability, but even the NY Times got tired of hearing that evolution is the answer to every human phenomena, whether biological, social, economic, religious, or otherwise.
Dennett's assumption is that rational people are obligated to believe the reality of empirically verifiable phenomena. But what naturalistic principle of evolution obligates me to believe something that is empirically verifiable? Now, it may be true that not believing a scientific "fact" leads to my demise, and eventually to my species' extinction, but that's not Dennett's claim: he places his readers under some kind of moral obligation to believe him when he's proven something "empirically" or "rationally". Why should they? In the deadly competition between species that are struggling to survive, there can be no moral obligation of any kind; all that remains is the surviving species (and for it to get in line for the next struggle). Surely our horror in the face of such natural calamities as the recent cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China testify that our deep longing for meaning in life is more than mere evolutionary residue.
Christianity, however, makes no claim to be a non-natural religion, nor does it claim that natural phenomena are in conflict with God's supernatural (or supranatural) activity. Natural means (i.e. sexual intercourse toward procreation, digesting food toward physical growth, sensual observation and cognitive reflection toward learning) are everywhere affirmed and employed in the Christian faith. The medical advances alone that followed in the wake of the Enlightenment bear adequate testimony to the belief at the time that God had so ordered the world that natural explanations could be found for countless natural phenomena which would thereby provide widespread and acceptable remedies for disease, illness, and injury. Indeed, Christians have historically bound themselves earnestly to use as many natural means, in addition to prayer, for the relief of human suffering.
If we suppose that Dennett is able to explain every religious phenomena in purely naturalistic terms, the most it would prove is that religious phenomena can be correctly observed and explained (in scientific terms) but incorrectly understood by unbelievers. In other words, Christianity does not require a person to believe in Jesus before the secrets of human anatomy or oxygen or calculus open up to them. What it requires faith for is so that the believing person will see, in such secrets discovered by empirical methods, the purpose for which such secrets were entrusted to them: the honor of God and the good of humanity.
In the end, Dennett's faith in the verifiability of science is no more rational than anyone's faith in their own religion: both assume that when a truth claim is presented to the mind - whether it has been demonstrated empirically or logically - it is thus obligated to either embrace it or refute it - to neglect it is a moral foul.
Dennett's assumption is that rational people are obligated to believe the reality of empirically verifiable phenomena. But what naturalistic principle of evolution obligates me to believe something that is empirically verifiable? Now, it may be true that not believing a scientific "fact" leads to my demise, and eventually to my species' extinction, but that's not Dennett's claim: he places his readers under some kind of moral obligation to believe him when he's proven something "empirically" or "rationally". Why should they? In the deadly competition between species that are struggling to survive, there can be no moral obligation of any kind; all that remains is the surviving species (and for it to get in line for the next struggle). Surely our horror in the face of such natural calamities as the recent cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China testify that our deep longing for meaning in life is more than mere evolutionary residue.
Christianity, however, makes no claim to be a non-natural religion, nor does it claim that natural phenomena are in conflict with God's supernatural (or supranatural) activity. Natural means (i.e. sexual intercourse toward procreation, digesting food toward physical growth, sensual observation and cognitive reflection toward learning) are everywhere affirmed and employed in the Christian faith. The medical advances alone that followed in the wake of the Enlightenment bear adequate testimony to the belief at the time that God had so ordered the world that natural explanations could be found for countless natural phenomena which would thereby provide widespread and acceptable remedies for disease, illness, and injury. Indeed, Christians have historically bound themselves earnestly to use as many natural means, in addition to prayer, for the relief of human suffering.
If we suppose that Dennett is able to explain every religious phenomena in purely naturalistic terms, the most it would prove is that religious phenomena can be correctly observed and explained (in scientific terms) but incorrectly understood by unbelievers. In other words, Christianity does not require a person to believe in Jesus before the secrets of human anatomy or oxygen or calculus open up to them. What it requires faith for is so that the believing person will see, in such secrets discovered by empirical methods, the purpose for which such secrets were entrusted to them: the honor of God and the good of humanity.
In the end, Dennett's faith in the verifiability of science is no more rational than anyone's faith in their own religion: both assume that when a truth claim is presented to the mind - whether it has been demonstrated empirically or logically - it is thus obligated to either embrace it or refute it - to neglect it is a moral foul.
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