A Strange Reversal

It is relatively common in certain Christian circles to find some aspect of the natural world which seems too complicated to be explained by natural causes, name it a miracle, and consider this proof for God's existence. The "intelligent design" movement seems to consist in large part in such reasoning. The atheist who attempts to refute this approach tries to show that the example can be explained by the normal course of the natural world.

But note how strange of a terrain these apologists thus occupy: such Christians have given themselves the burden of attempting to prove that creation is characterized by inconsistencies, breakdowns, and other gaps in its operation, while the atheist is given the task of defending a consistent, rational, well-ordered, and smoothly functioning universe.

It should come as no surprise that the atheist, tasked with defending the work of the divine creator, gets the better of these exchanges.

Meeting Amelia

We finally made it up to visit Ben, Rachel, and Jory on Friday and meet the newest member of the family, Amelia Grace. She is three months old already and a sweet, talkative little cutie.

As an additional bonus, Rachel's birthday was Saturday so we got to help celebrate. We made chocolate creme pie as a birthday dessert to follow a delicious barbecue dinner by Ben.

The following are pictures from a Saturday morning walk along the AIM trail; it was a beautiful day and so nice to be in the mountains.

We had hashbrowns, eggs, bacon, and blueberries for birthday breakfast before saying good bye and heading off to more great celebrating with another wonderful person with a May birthday.

A Creationist Error

I.

We live in a world of many remarkable characteristics, and one such characteristic of this world is that it contains honeybees. Whence did these delicate and complicated little creatures come? Biological research in the past hundred years or so has discovered that creatures such as honeybees emerge through a stunning process of variation and selection that accumulates over generations. We might imagine other explanations, though. Perhaps great magi from the lost city of Atlantis designed honeybees through an arcane art, or aliens from afar sent them to this planet in suspended animation on a spaceship.

These different explanations have a noteworthy feature: they exclude one another. If flower-loving aliens designed honeybees using advanced biological technology and planted them on this planet, then they did not emerge from related terrestrial insects through a process of biological evolution (and vice versa).

II.

What about God? Here we enter into a different ontological realm, for the Christian account affirms God's transcendence. Clever aliens and natural selection are both examples of natural causes -- physical entities or processes in the world which push up against each other in complicated ways. Natural causes may act in combination or isolation, but to the extent that one is causally efficacious, the other is not. The Christian belief in God, however, is an affirmation of that which is not creature but transcendent creator. God is not one cause among many causes, like unto it in kind, which is occasionally operative; rather, God is the "first cause," as the tradition says: the ground of all being.

Consider the rosebush, which blossoms beautifully. Does the rosebush cause itself to blossom, or does God cause the rosebush to blossom? The question is nonsensical, for it confuses two orders: it either mistakes the rosebush for something very much like a god, an alternative Prime Mover competing with God in the blossoming business, or it mistakes God for something very much like a rosebush, an alternative set of chemical processes that could commandeer the blossom. We must say that the rosebush blossoms of its own nature, and this is precisely the way in which God is the cause of its blossoming.

While this is a feature of a Christian religious sensibility, it is not necessarily a feature of all such sensibilities; we might imagine a religious outlook for which this is not the case. Someone who worships Zeus, for instance, might believe that Zeus is a part of the natural world, one creature among other creatures. If Zeus, strolling through the garden and displeased with the bare and thorny bush, invokes his magical powers and forces a blossom to appear, we would be quite right in saying that Zeus, not the rosebush, caused the blossom; the previous season, when the bud burst open naturally, we would not attribute it to Zeus' power. Zeus is the sort of "god" who is the same type of thing as a rosebush, or a clever alien, or a process of natural selection (albeit a rather powerful member of this broad type).

III.

The other day, I viewed part of a recent film that rehashed some familiar anti-evolution tropes. Reflecting upon it afterward, I am bothered by a more fundamental error upon which the general approach of the film seems predicated and which much of the anti-evolution movement seems to share: the assumption of a mutually exclusive antagonism between God and nature. For such people, if honeybees have natural causes, then they are not created by God. But such a view totally misunderstands the activity of creation and the distinction between creator and creature.

IV.

Take the following two facts:

• The Scriptures clearly teach that God is the creator of rainstorms: God causes the rain to fall.
• Modern meteorology claims that rain is caused by various differential atmospheric forces (pressure, temperature, etc.).

What are we to conclude? If you are the Zeus worshiper mentioned above, then one of the two is wrong. Modern meteorology is antagonistic to your religion, for Zeus is the master of thunder and lightening. You might reject meteorology entirely, believing the word of Zeus to be a surer foundation for knowledge than the methods of the sciences. Alternatively, you might begin a research program intended to demonstrate that the meteorologists are all wrong: if we do meteorology the right way, we discover that thunderstorms are far too complicated to be the result of natural processes, so rainfall really points to the activity of Zeus, etc. You will be distressed to discover that some of your children, recognizing the antagonism between "secular meteorology" and belief in Zeus, choose to reject the latter instead of the former, and you will redouble your efforts to inculcate absolute fidelity into your young. You will start campaigns to keep meteorology out of schools, or at least to "teach the controversy" between meteorologists and worshipers of Zeus.

If you believe in the Christian God, however, your situation is entirely different. The Christian God is not a cause among other causes, but rather the ground of causality as such. God does not bring rain in the manner of differential pressure zones, mad scientists with weather machines, or Zeus' thunderous wrath, but in the manner of creatio ex nihilo. That modern meteorology has discovered some of the causes behind rainstorms is of no theological consequence to the Christian. Contemporary science studies the interactions between created things, among which God, as creator, is not numbered.

V.

Christian theology notwithstanding, when some people learn that honeybees emerged into this world through a process of biological evolution, they think that this threatens or excludes God's creative work -- that divine and natural action are mutually exclusive and antagonistic. (Some respond to this by rejecting Christianity; others respond by rejecting biology.) But if such people are right, then God does not cause rosebushes to blossom, since we have natural causes for that. God is not the creator of German Shepherds, since even the most committed opponents of science recognize that species to be evolved from wolves. Likewise, God does not cause the rain to fall (or, alternatively, every evening weather report is an assault upon religious truth).

Christianity has always insisted upon the struggle against idolatry, against gods made by human hands in our own likeness. I worry that those who see a fundamental exclusivity between the activities of divine creation and the activities of the created order have inadvertently slipped into the trap of conceiving God as something very much like Zeus: a thing among other things in the world, and ultimately a hyperbolic projection of ourselves.

There may or may not be scientific difficulties with modern biology, and there may or may not be theological difficulties with modern biology. Ultimately, however, to insist that God created honeybees neither confirms nor denies, neither simplifies nor complicates, their evolutionary history.

Mother's Day

I'm so thankful for my mom. She has taught me so much through the years and been a great role model and friend. We are a lot alike in many ways, and I'm not as much like her in some ways I wish I was, but I can always count on her to listen and be supportive and encouraging. It was nice to be able to celebrate Mother's day with her and my sisters on Sunday; I love you Chandler girls and think you all are wonderful mothers.

Grapefruit

I hate to see good fruit go to waste, especially if it's free. Joshua and I had been occasionally picking grapefruit from my parent's tree for awhile, but no one else had been eating it and it needed to get picked. So last Sunday we picked everything could that was left on the tree. It ended up being a good amount of fruit.

I washed most of it Friday afternoon, leaving just the grapefruit in the paper bag to use fresh. As you can see from all the blotches on the fruit, a lot of it was pretty damaged by frost, but it still makes great juice. Yesterday, I worked through the grapefruit I had washed. I was planning to try canning it, but because of the frost damage I ended up with a lot more juice than fruit. So, I filled 8 pints with juice and put those in the freezer, then processed 4 pints of fruit following these directions and using grapefruit juice as my canning liquid.

One of the pints didn't end up sealing, so we had some with breakfast this morning. I was nervous that it wouldn't be very good because cooking grapefruit seems like such a bad idea, but it turned out just fine.

Blueberry Picking

We got to go blueberry picking on Friday. It was a cooler day and next week we are supposed to hit 100 for the first time of the season, so we figured we better go quickly. It was a great day for picking berries.

 I asked the boys to smile for my picture; Evan ran away and I got this from Micah:

Emery is a good little picker and blueberry eater.

 The kids liked finding little places to sit, pick, and eat among the blueberries. We ended up with a total of 32.5 pounds of berries, and they sure are tasty.

 On our way back we stopped at Orange Works for lunch. Everyone was shocked to discover that I hadn't been there before. The sandwiches were good and of course we had to get some of their famous ice cream.

They always have orange ice cream and one other flavor. This time it was Heath. Both were delicious.

Family Photo Shoot

 We took advantage of everyone being in the same place at once to take a family photo last weekend.

I say that I take these before photos to make sure everything is set up and the lighting looks good and such, which is true. But they are also fun to look at sometimes. I like how in this one most of the group is focused on Solace, but notice how Lamar is in the back fighting with the plants.

Thesis Project Update

The final round of proof reading is complete, the last items of paperwork have been submitted to the library, and the document has been sent off to the printers.

Pages: 98

Words: 22,543

Average Words/Sentence: 22.1

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 13.3

Christianity and Enmity, part 2

In part 1, we looked at two interpretations of the command to love one's enemies. In the end, both approaches transform the command into its opposite: "do not love your enemy." The first interpretation -- "love your enemy, because that's a way to really get 'em good" -- denies the first term of the command, suggesting that you are not really to love them. The second interpretation -- "love your enemy, because (or so that) they be not your enemy" -- denies the second term of the command, suggesting you are not to love one who is really your enemy.

I am interested in exploring a third interpretation:

• 3. Love your enemies, for every great strength desires a great opponent against which to test itself and over which to prevail.

Unlike the other two interpretations, this one is able to do justice to both "love" and the "enemy." Every power wishes to assert itself, and to the measure that we possess a power of life and of spirit, that strength wishes to test and express itself against that which resists. When two lives are complementary, there is friendship; when two lives have no bearing upon each other, there is indifference. It is precisely when two lives contradict and resist each other that enmity arises.

<extended example> If I am a miserable basketball player, Michael Jordan and I would not even qualify as opponents; he is simply my superior, and there can be no real struggle between us. Any serious athlete desires not only a real opponent, but furthermore the best possible opponent, for it is only in such a circumstance that winning is meaningful. Imagine a religious basketball player who prays for his opponents before the game. Only the most pathetic athlete could pray that his enemy be defeated, become badly injured, etc. Likewise, it would be absurd for a player to pray that the members of the opposing team join his side and begin shooting baskets for his team. Rather, a serious athlete prays for his opponents, that they will perform at their maximal level and offer to him the greatest challenge. </extended example>

The one who opposes and challenges us with the greatest strength -- the one who is most truly our enemy -- is therefore the object of a profound gratitude, respect, and love. The love that one harbors for one's enemies is thus not merely wishful thinking; rather, it has a firm basis in the reality of one's relation to the enemy. Under this interpretation, unlike the other two, "love your enemies" means something like it says: having a deep and authentic love for those with whom one is truly at enmity.

Easter

We enjoyed celebrating Easter with the Kerrs this year. We started the day at a sunrise service, followed by breakfast, and then another service at 9:30am where we got to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. What a great way to start the celebration.

I always like to see what is growing in Dave and Gayle's backyard. This time I was taken by these beauties. I couldn't resist taking a few pictures under the arbor.

We had goat for Easter dinner. Dave had marinated it overnight, but he wasn't going to be home in time to start cooking it, so Joshua got to sear it on the barbecue then put it in the oven. It was supposed to cook for about two and a half hours.

 Imagine our surprise when Dave pulled the goat leg out of the oven after just an hour and it was already at 180! We prepared the rest of the food as quickly as possible and Joshua made a run to the store to grab some chicken to barbecue in case the goat was inedible.

This little cutie has been growing like crazy since we last saw her.

We sat down to enjoy a delicious dinner together and were pleased to discover that the goat turned out well. It was a little overdone, but we enjoyed it and would like to try it again. We have no idea why it cooked so quickly since we double checked everything and it was what the recipe said.

He is risen indeed!

Christianity and Enmity, part 1

"But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: that you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust."

There are two very different senses in which the injunction to "love your enemies" is commonly taken.

• 1. Love your enemies, for by loving them you may "heap burning coals upon their heads," as the saying goes: love is an effective weapon with which to attack them.

We flinch away from this interpretation, because it eliminates the "love" in loving one's enemies. After all, a "love" which is merely a tactical ploy in the attempt to injure another seems a sham, hardly worthy of the name. One gives a display of something like love in order to offend, inflict guilt, etc. Under this interpretation, "love your enemies" means "do not love your enemies," because it denies that you are to love.

• 2.a. Love your enemies, for by loving them you will come to realize that they were never in truth your enemies; we must recognize each other as fellow creatures beloved by God.
• 2.b. Love your enemies, for by loving them you may win them over and they will no longer be your enemies but reconciled to you through love.

But this interpretation, which may initially strike us as much more palatable, actually harbors a greater violence than the first. Here it is the "enemy" in loving one's enemies that is eliminated. This interpretation denies the obligation to love the enemy as an enemy. We do not love our enemies at all, for we love only on the condition that the object of our love is not an enemy. One might go so far as to think that a love which addresses only and precisely the one who is not an enemy is not a love at all, at least in the robust sense. After, even sinners and tax collectors, as they say, do that. Under this interpretation, "love your enemies" means "do not love your enemies," because it denies enmity to the object of love.

Christianity and the Poor, part 2

There are at least two ways to understand the dictum, "blessed are the poor."

The first is to understand it as a proclamation of the universal scope of beatitude. When composed by early Jewish polytheists, the Scriptures extol the God of Abraham over the other gods who, though no less real, are less powerful or beneficent; when composed by a conquering kingdom, the Scriptures speak of a God of war and conquest whose banner is victory and strength; when composed by a people in exile, the Scriptures speak of a God who will one day wield justice against oppressors, giving hope to the downtrodden; when composed by first century peasants living under imperial Rome, the Scriptures speak of a God who blessed the poor and weak. That is to say, God meets us where we currently are, bringing divine love into whatever the situation in which we find ourselves. "To the poor I say, 'yes, you also, even you, are blessed.'"

The second is to understand it as a preferential and exclusive manifestation of God's nature. The conquering Israelites were simply wrong, because God is not on the side of the strong, but of the weak (or, more subtly, the conquering Israelites were "really" weak in some hidden way). God despises those of strong, noble, and abundant life, or at least has little care for them. Rather, it is those who are beaten and downtrodden who have a monopoly on God's favor. "To the poor I say, 'though you seem on the losing end now, in the end you will be the only winners.'"

Despite its flaws, it is not difficult to see how the second interpretation prevails. To those who suffer long under oppressive condition, there is a pervasive feeling of impotence, of the inability to command and order one's life how one wishes, of powerlessness to throw off one's enemy. The words, "blessed are the poor," however, hold promise: the resentment of the oppressed finds a foothold, a weapon to wield against the foe. The one whose desire to seize control and turn the tables cannot find expression resorts to the threat of an eternal table-turning: "I suffer under you now, but God is on my side, not yours; you will suffer and I will be exalted for eternity." The beatitude of the poor, understood exclusively, becomes the last, ultimate, and sweetest revenge of the impotent.

As this interpretation becomes increasingly popular, however, it gradually infects others. For the poor, the doctrine satiates the frustrated desire for revenge and thus offers kind of comfort, but for those who strive for excellence and enjoy an abundance of life, the doctrine becomes outright poisonous. If divine beatitude rests upon the poor alone, then one must become impoverished, one must impoverish oneself.

The doctrine also perpetuates itself with a kind of self-feedback loop. Those who are misled into believing that Christianity demands sickliness and abasement and respond by rejecting Christianity rather than the richness of life are taken as proof that Christianity cannot be embraced by anyone but the poor.

Thus, the resentment of the sick triumphs over the healthy. If you are not among the impoverished, there exists a whole repertoire of techniques you can employ to enfeeble yourself. People will tell you grateful stories about how life was stripped from them, making them poor and finally, therefore, blessed by God. You will sing songs about how much you desire to be brought low and made miserable. You will begin to feel guilty for your strength.

To those who are healthy, this doctrine is pernicious, for it demands one face the impossible alternative of forsaking God and damning oneself or forsaking life and sickening oneself. To those who are poor, too, this doctrine is pernicious, for it replaces the hope of redemption with an affirmation of perpetual misery.

Ultimately, what begins as a proclamation of universality, that the love of God is so extravagant that it reaches even to those who are suffering and downtrodden, is transformed into its precise opposite: the love of God is so restricted that it extends only to the poor.