Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Evolution and the Separate Problems of Teleology and Human Consciousness


"Nagel believes that (currently unknown) teleological laws of nature
might mean that life and consciousness arise with greater probability than
would result from the known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology."


Thomas Nagel in his newest book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, has asserted that neo-Darwinism in its present form is incomplete without its own correspondent metaphysical element called teleology to complete it. By which is meant that without some form of externally imposed guidance, or pre-disposition, Darwinian evolution could not have happened as it has, providing life-and-light within creation's processes. However, as has been shown in our previous discussions of evolution, the process itself is fully capable of obtaining the results we see (and experience) today without any superimposed external processes to the system itself - including that of God Himself (from a scientific standpoint, and not a biblical one). That it is fully self-contained, and self-evolving, to the stage and state that it is presently found to be in, as per the design of our Creator-God. Who cannot be found by science but gives to science its own forms and meaning as it studies His handiwork and creative re-imaging. And, I think, finds God daily should it look with the eyes of faith and not proof. But, strictly speaking, God is unprovable, even scientifically, which is a poor answer to give any who would see God everywhere - but then again, this is the mystery of the unfathomable God of the universe hidden to the eyes of nonbelief. To one, a rock appears as a collection of cosmological debris collected to the earth by gravitational pull and random chance. To another, it bears the imprint of God's holy majesty and wonder. Verily, truth and wonder, meaning and expression, lies in the eyes of the beholder, does it not?

If, however, what is meant by the term "teleology" is that element of God's Sovereignty which guides and directs the ever-evolving majestrarium of nature towards the creation of life and renewal, the Christian Evolutionist would then be in complete agreement. We would, however, statedly observe it to be a divine teleology implicit within the overall plan and direction, guidance, formation, maintenance, and sustenance, of creation by the Creator-God as set within the larger teleological process of divine redemption. A process that utilizes all the elements, and processes, of evolution, but that also supersedes those elements in some mystical fashion heretofore unexplained when observing the biologic, cosmologic, and sentient forms of life. An implacable process bearing the imprint of the Creator in all facets of its birth, being, and future possibilities, when perceived through biblical revelation. But when observed scientifically, can only be seen by the purely physical processes of evolution itself - and not the Creator Himself - as famously observed by Stephen Hawking, a British cosmologist, who searched the vast voids of heaven to prove the absence of God.


As such, God's Sovereignty has been interplayed here at Relevancy22 with the ideas of Relational Theism, free will and sin (please see the appropriate sidebars to the right of this web blog as further reference). We have especially worked through the area of God's divine Sovereignty in the Science sections under cosmology and evolution, human development and consciousness. So that, according to Thomas Nagel, avowed atheist  and naturalist, Darwin's theory of evolution is not without that (theological) element of teleology, which, as a Christian, I take to mean the "directive purpose and imaging of a Sovereign God who places life-and-consciousness within a living, evolving, system (the cosmos) constituting both sentient and non-sentient, living and non-living, matter." Matter void of the imprimatur of God to the scientific researcher, but everywhere bearing that same imprint to the eyes of faith.

On the other hand, though we have already accepted and integrated the concept of God's Sovereignty within the strict definition of evolution itself without relying on the need for some other additive (metaphysical) property (whether it be teleology, or something else) as proposed by Nagel, there is yet another evolutionary element that he has noticed. It is the metaphysical element that Nagel deems as human consciousness. That, in itself, is as much - and more - a difficult process to align with Darwinian reductionism as its metaphysical twin of teleology. To which Nagel finds many interpretive roles but none that satisfies human existence within its dialogue of evolutionary progress by casual chance and destructive circumstance. Any previously posited ideas of evolutionary human development along the lines of conciousness has left Nagel with the nagging feeling that something still is missing. Ideas like conceptual behaviorism, physical identity theory, causal behaviorism, and functionalism, to name a few. Each, in their own way, addresses consciousness, but not in a way that is fundamental in Nagel's view of teleological structure.

As a Christian Evolutionist, part of the solution we have found here seems to be come through Edward O. Wilson's novel studies in eusociality (or, eusocialism) which gives rise to the evolutionary idea of survivalism through super-cooperation and personal sacrifice as determined by group selection. A non-prominent trait that would counter-balance the older, more primal Darwinian idea of individual selection found within all living species. Which then might explain the conscious traits of reason and value, and even objective moral truth (which has been subjectively internalized by a group). And it is to this idea of eusociality that the article below has neglected to take into account, if we were to hold to a stricter account of evolution as its own process set apart from outside interference, when thinking through the quality we know as consciousness. Moreover, it is realised that Wilson's concept of eusociality is a relatively new concept (2012) and as such, may have been overlooked by both Nagel and/or the article's reviewer.

Overall, for the Evolutionary Creationist, the concept of God's Sovereignty partnering with a creation He has (and is) forming does not release us from the idea of God's integral involvement with His creation. Quite the contrary. Even as the idea of Natural Theology notices the same (cf. Part IV below). Not only did God decree evolution as the process by which life may come, but so also continues its maintenance and sustenance through actively partnering non-coercively with this same divinely initiated process. So that, in the end, there is a supernatural (as versus natural) teleology that is unfolding. A teleology of redemption to a creation become corrupted by corruptible indeterminacy and free will as originally planned, initiated, and implemented by God within the ancient foreknowledge and wisdom of His holy councils. Full-well knowing that with indeterminacy and free will must also come His respondent decrees of redemption, renewal, rebirth, reclamation, regeneration, revival, reconstruction, and resurrection. This is what would set a Theist apart from a Naturalist - one who would see within nature, nature's God, and not the god of Nature itself. One who would refuse transferring God's ontic being and qualities into the  very essence and activity found resident within God's own creation circumscribed in His divine image. Hence, though nature reflects God, in itself it is not God, no less than we ourselves who are made in our Creator-Redeemer's image.

Amusingly, the confluence of these many ideas seems to mystify the naturalist scientist and philosopher alike. Causing some to deny it, and others to question if there isn't something more to Darwinian evolution's materialistic reductionism (which is a very good question to ask). And while it is best to continually lean towards the evolutionary idea of a creation that is complete in itself, as a theology (and as a teleology) we know that that cannot be the case. For our Creator-God Redeemer is creation's image, identity, sustenance, guide, and ground-of-being. Thus, by small, infinitesimal degrees, this same God nudges creation towards both life and light using the tools He has set in place (evolution), or is setting in place (such as consciousness, group selection, eusociality, redemption, etc). So that, by whatever process we name it, God is there, resident within-and-without the parameters of His creation as its God. Its Creator. Its Redeemer. Whose God is our God in His majesty and wonder.

So that, for the Evolutionary Creationist, the biblical doctrine of Sovereignty is always the implied - and latent - concept behind any evolutionary theory of creation. One in which a theist can sympathize with all natural nontheists questioning the absence of any metaphysical synergies found within an evolutionary concept of creation built primarily upon materialistic processes devoid of its crucial complementary process of teleology. A metaphysical concept that is central to, and gives meaning to, the very process of evolutionary creation itself. An observation that does not go unnoticed by the Christian evolutionist holding a similar view of evolutionary process and construction, but recognizing that this teleological process is supernatural in its natural occurences, and flows under the heading of God's sovereignty.

In conclusion, I am including several previous articles from Relevancy22 that revisits each of the issues I've addressed in my composition above, to help provide a more complete theology behind the topics involved (mostly found in the words and phrases which I have emboldened). They are given as helps towards further discussion and debate. However, to these several articles will be found many, many more (at least 10% of the articles written here have been on the intensely interesting subject of evolution) to which I would encourage further discovery and assessment. Thank you.
R.E. Slater
January 27, 2013
How God Created by Evolution:
A Proposed Theory of Man's Evolutionary Development
http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2012/01/resolving-genesis-story-between.html





What Do We Mean by God as "Creator-Redeemer"?
http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2012/11/evolutionary-creationism-what-do-we.html





Can the 5-Point Calvinist Really Say, "Jesus Loves Me This I Know?"
A Discussion on Indeterminacy and Free Will




Eusociality and the Bible, Part 2 of 2
Which came first - human consciousness or eusociality?
Or, put another way, which created which?

Edward O Wilson



John Caputo: Towards a Radical Theology, Not a Radical Atheism:
A Review of Modern Atheism, Atheology and Divine Inexistence




Index to past articles on "Science & Religion"






by H. Allen Orr
February 7, 2013

by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press, 130 pp., $24.95


‘A Sun of the Nineteenth Century’; cartoon from Puck magazine showing Charles Darwin
as a shining sun, chasing the clouds of religion and superstition from the sky, 1882



1.
[Nagel's Posited Concept of Teleology]



The history of science is partly the history of an idea that is by now so familiar that it no longer astounds: the universe, including our own existence, can be explained by the interactions of little bits of matter. We scientists are in the business of discovering the laws that characterize this matter. We do so, to some extent at least, by a kind of reduction. The stuff of biology, for instance, can be reduced to chemistry and the stuff of chemistry can be reduced to physics.

Thomas Nagel has never been at ease with this view. Nagel, University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, is one of our most distinguished philosophers. He is perhaps best known for his 1974 paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” a modern classic in the philosophy of mind. In that paper, Nagel argued that reductionist, materialist accounts of the mind leave some things unexplained. And one of those things is what it would actually feel like to be, say, a bat, a creature that navigates its environment via the odd (to us) sense of echolocation. To Nagel, then, reductionist attempts to ground everything in matter fail partly for a reason that couldn’t be any nearer to us: subjective experience. While not denying that our conscious experiences have everything to do with brains, neurons, and matter, Nagel finds it hard to see how these experiences can be fully reduced with the conceptual tools of physical science.

In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel continues his attacks on reductionism. Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem “is not just a local problem” but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” If what he calls “materialist naturalism” or just “materialism” can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life. And if it can’t explain life, then it can’t fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. Subjective experience is not, to Nagel, some detail that materialist science can hand-wave away. It’s a deal breaker. Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived.

As Nagel makes clear in the subtitle of Mind and Cosmos, part of what he thinks must be reconceived is our reigning theory of evolutionary biology, neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism maintains, or at least implies, that the origin and history of life can be explained by materialist means. Once the first life arose on earth, the fate of the resulting evolutionary lineage was, neo-Darwinists argued, shaped by a combination of random mutation and natural selection. Biological types that survive or reproduce better than others will ultimately replace those others. While natural selection ensures that species constantly adapt to the changing environments around them, the process has no foresight: natural selection responds only to the present environment and evolution cannot, therefore, be aiming for any goal. This view, Nagel tells us, is “almost certainly false.”

Before creationists grow too excited, it’s important to see what Nagel is not claiming. He is not claiming that life is six thousand years old, that it did not evolve, or that natural selection played no part in this evolution. He believes that life has a long evolutionary history and that natural selection had a part in it. And while he does believe that intelligent design creationists have asked some incisive questions, Nagel rejects their answers. Indeed he is an atheist. Instead Nagel’s view is that neo-Darwinism, and in fact the whole materialist view elaborated by science since the seventeenth century, is radically incomplete. The materialist laws of nature must, he says, be supplemented by something else if we are to fold ourselves and our minds fully into our science.

His leading contender for this something else is teleology, a tendency of the universe to aim for certain goals as it unfolds through time. Nagel believes that (currently unknown) teleological laws of nature might mean that life and consciousness arise with greater probability than would result from the known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.

Scientists shouldn’t be shocked by Nagel’s claim that present science might not be up to cracking the mind-brain problem or that a profoundly different science might lie on the horizon. The history of science is filled with such surprising transformations. Nor should we dismiss Nagel’s claims merely because they originate from outside science, from a philosopher. Much the same thing happened when natural theology—the scientific attempt to discern God’s attributes from His biological handiwork—gave way to Darwinism.

It was the philosopher David Hume who began to dismantle important aspects of natural theology. In a devastating set of arguments, Hume identified grievous problems with the argument from design (which claims, roughly, that a designer must exist because organisms show intricate design). Hume was not, however, able to offer an alternative account for the apparent design in organisms. Darwin worked in Hume’s wake and finally provided the required missing theory, natural selection. Nagel, consciously or not, now aspires to play the part of Hume in the demise of neo-Darwinism. He has, he believes, identified serious shortcomings in neo-Darwinism. And while he suspects that teleological laws of nature may exist, he recognizes that he hasn’t provided anything like a full theory. He awaits his Darwin.

Mind and Cosmos is certainly provocative and it reflects the efforts of a fiercely independent mind. In important places, however, I believe that it is wrong. Because Nagel’s book sits at the intersection of philosophy and science it will surely attract the attention of both communities.1 As a biologist, I will perhaps inevitably focus on Nagel’s more scientific claims. But these are, it appears, the claims that are most responsible for the excitement over the book.

I begin by considering the reasons Nagel believes that materialist science, including neo-Darwinism, is false. I then turn to his alternative theory, teleology.

2.
[Evolutionary Theory's Refutation of Teleology]

Nagel believes that materialism confronts two classes of problems. One, which is new to Nagel’s thought, concerns purported empirical problems with neo-Darwinism. The other, which is more familiar to philosophers, is the alleged failure of materialism to explain consciousness and allied mental phenomena.
Nagel argues that there are purely “empirical reasons” to be skeptical about reductionism in biology and, in particular, about the plausibility of neo-Darwinism. Nagel’s claims here are so surprising that it’s best to quote them at length:
I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?
Nagel claims that both questions concern “highly specific events over a long historical period in the distant past, the available evidence is very indirect, and general assumptions have to play an important part.” He therefore concludes that “the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense.”

This conclusion is remarkable in a couple ways. For one thing, there’s not much of an argument here. Instead Nagel’s conclusion rests largely on the strength of his intuition. His intuition recoils from the claimed plausibility of neo-Darwinism and that, it seems, is that. (Richard Dawkins has called this sort of move the argument from personal incredulity.) But plenty of scientific truths are counterintuitive (does anyone find it intuitive that we’re hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour?) and a scientific education is, to a considerable extent, an exercise in taming the authority of one’s intuition. Nagel never explains why his intuition should count for so much here.

As for his claim that evolutionary theory is somewhat schematic and that it concerns events that happened long ago, leaving indirect evidence, this is partly true of any historical science, including any alternative to neo-Darwinism, e.g., the one that Nagel himself suggests. In any case, a good part of the evidence for neo-Darwinism is not indirect but involves experiments in which evolutionary change is monitored in real time.2

More important, Nagel’s conclusions about evolution are almost certainly wrong. The origin of life is admittedly a hard problem and we don’t know exactly how the first self-replicating system arose. But big progress has been made. The discovery of so-called ribozymes in the 1980s plausibly cracked the main principled problem at the heart of the origin of life. Research on life’s origin had always faced a chicken and egg dilemma: DNA, our hereditary material, can’t replicate without the assistance of proteins, but one can’t get the required proteins unless they’re encoded by DNA. So how could the whole system get off the ground?

Answer: the first genetic material was probably RNA, not DNA. This might sound like a distinction without a difference but it isn’t. The point is that RNA molecules can both act as a hereditary material (as DNA does) and catalyze certain chemical reactions (as some proteins do), possibly including their own replication. (An RNA molecule that can catalyze a reaction is called a ribozyme.) Consequently, many researchers into the origins of life now believe in an “RNA world,” in which early life on earth was RNA-based. “Physical accidents were likely still required to produce the first RNA molecules, but we can now begin to see how these molecules might then self-replicate.

Nagel’s astonishment that a “sequence of viable genetic mutations” has been available to evolution over billions of years is also unfounded.3 His concern appears to be that evolution requires an unbroken chain of viable genetic variants that connect the first living creature to, say, human beings. How could nature ensure that a viable mutation was always available to evolution? The answer is that it didn’t. That’s why species go extinct. Indeed that’s what extinction is. The world changes and a species can’t find a mutation fast enough to let it live. Extinction is the norm in evolution: the vast majority of all species have gone extinct. Nagel has, I think, been led astray by a big survivorship bias: the evolutionary lineage that led to us always found a viable mutation, ergo one must, it seems, always be available. Tyrannosaurus rex would presumably be less impressed by nature’s munificence.4



3.
[The Problem of Consciousness]

While Nagel’s worries about neo-Darwinism are misplaced, he’s on somewhat firmer (or at least more familiar) ground when he turns to mental phenomena like consciousness. These are, after all, separate problems. A science might explain the evolution of life but leave consciousness—the subjective experience of the saltiness of popcorn, the shock of cold water, or the sting of pain—unaccounted for. Consciousness is Nagel’s big problem:
Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science. The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything.
Nagel’s story here starts, as it must, with Descartes. As Nagel writes, Descartes posited that matter and mind are “both fully real and irreducibly distinct, though they interact.” Given this, science was, from the outset, concerned solely with matter; mind belonged to a different domain. While scientists happily toiled under Cartesian dualism, giving rise to a recognizably modern science, philosophers often demurred. Instead, thinkers like Berkeley favored various forms of idealism, which maintains that nature is at bottom mind. Under idealism, then, any reductionist program would be in the business of collapsing matter to mind.

Nagel argues that as a result of a rapid shift whose causes are unclear, these idealist philosophies were “largely displaced in later twentieth-century analytic philosophy by attempts at unification in the opposite direction, starting from the physical.” This approach likely seems natural to most of us. But we live with a tension. Though the materialist program of reducing mind to matter would appear the properly “scientific” approach, we haven’t the slightest idea how it would work. And it’s not for lack of trying. Philosophers have, Nagel reminds us, attempted many ways of tying mind to matter: conceptual behaviorism, physical identity theory, causal behaviorism, and functionalism, to name a few. To Nagel all these approaches have failed “for the same old reason”:
Even with the brain added to the picture, they clearly leave out something essential, without which there would be no mind. And what they leave out is just what was deliberately left out of the physical world by Descartes and Galileo in order to form the modern concept of the physical, namely, subjective appearances.
Nagel is deeply skeptical that any species of materialist reductionism can work. Instead, he concludes, progress on consciousness will require an intellectual revolution at least as radical as Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Nagel’s chapter on consciousness is a concise and critical survey of a literature that is both vast and fascinating. He further extends his survey to other mental phenomena, including reason and value, that he also finds recalcitrant to materialism. (Nagel concludes that the existence of objective moral truths is incompatible with materialist evolutionary theory; because he is sure that moral truths exist, he again concludes that evolutionary theory is incomplete.)

Nagel concedes that many philosophers do not share his skepticism about the plausibility of reducing mind to matter. And I can assure readers that most scientists don’t. I, however, share Nagel’s sense of mystery here. Brains and neurons obviously have everything to do with consciousness but how such mere objects can give rise to the eerily different phenomenon of subjective experience seems utterly incomprehensible.

Despite this, I can’t go so far as to conclude that mind poses some insurmountable barrier to materialism. There are two reasons. The first is, frankly, more a sociological observation than an actual argument. Science has, since the seventeenth century, proved remarkably adept at incorporating initially alien ideas (like electromagnetic fields) into its thinking. Yet most people, apparently including Nagel, find the resulting science sufficiently materialist. The unusual way in which physicists understand the weirdness of quantum mechanics might be especially instructive as a crude template for how the consciousness story could play out. Physicists describe quantum mechanics by writing equations. The fact that no one, including them, can quite intuit the meaning of these equations is often deemed beside the point. The solution is the equation. One can imagine a similar course for consciousness research: the solution is X, whether you can intuit X or not. Indeed the fact that you can’t intuit X might say more about you than it does about consciousness.

And this brings me to the second reason. For there might be perfectly good reasons why you can’t imagine a solution to the problem of consciousness. As the philosopher Colin McGinn has emphasized, your very inability to imagine a solution might reflect your cognitive limitations as an evolved creature. The point is that we have no reason to believe that we, as organisms whose brains are evolved and finite, can fathom the answer to every question that we can ask. All other species have cognitive limitations, why not us? So even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.

To McGinn, then, the mysteriousness of consciousness may not be so much a challenge to neo-Darwinism as a result of it. Nagel obviously draws the opposite conclusion. But the availability of both conclusions gives pause.


4.
[Nagel Proposes a Natural Theology to that of Supernatural]

Given the problems that Nagel has with materialism, the obvious question is, What’s the alternative? In the most provocative part of Mind and Cosmos, he suggests one, teleology. While we often associate teleology with a God-like mind—events occur because an agent wills them as means to an end—Nagel finds theism unattractive. But he insists that materialism and theism do not exhaust the possibilities.

Instead he proposes a special species of teleology that he calls natural teleology. Natural teleology doesn’t depend on any agent’s intentions; it’s just the way the world is. There are teleological laws of nature that we don’t yet know about and they bias the unfolding of the universe in certain desirable directions, including the formation of complex organisms and consciousness. The existence of teleological laws means that certain physical outcomes “have a significantly higher probability than is entailed by the laws of physics alone—simply because they are on the path toward a certain outcome.”

Nagel intends natural teleology to be, among other things, a biological theory. It would explain not only the “appearance of physical organisms” but the “development of consciousness and ultimately of reason in those organisms.” Teleology would also provide an “account of the existence of the biological possibilities on which natural selection can operate.”

Nagel concedes that his new theory isn’t fully fleshed out. He hopes merely to sketch the outlines of a plausible alternative to materialism. It’s unfortunate, though, that Mind and Cosmos is too brief to allow consideration of problems that attend natural teleology. For it seems to me that there are some, especially where the view confronts biology.

Darwin himself wrestled with attempts to reconcile his theory with teleology and concluded, reluctantly, that it seemed implausible. While Darwin published almost nothing on such philosophical matters they loom large in his correspondence, particularly with Asa Gray, an American champion of evolution and a Christian. Gray, like Nagel, wanted to believe that, while Darwin had identified an important force in the history of life, nature also features teleology. In particular, Gray suggested that the variation provided by nature to natural selection biases the process in desirable directions.

Darwin, though sometimes vacillating, argued that Gray’s reconciliation was implausible. Exercising his uncanny ability to discern deep truths in prosaic facts—in this case the artificial selection of a pigeon breed by a few fanciers—Darwin wrote Gray:
But I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about Design…. You lead me to infer that you believe “that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines”.—I cannot believe this; & I think you would have to believe, that the tail of the Fan-tail was led to vary in the number & direction of its feathers in order to gratify the caprice of a few men.5
Here’s another problem. Nagel’s teleological biology is heavily human-centric or at least animal-centric. Organisms, it seems, are in the business of secreting sentience, reason, and values. Real biology looks little like this and, from the outset, must face the staggering facts of organismal diversity. There are millions of species of fungi and bacteria and nearly 300,000 species of flowering plants. None of these groups is sentient and each is spectacularly successful. Indeed mindless species outnumber we sentient ones by any sensible measure (biomass, number of individuals, or number of species; there are only about 5,500 species of mammals). More fundamentally, each of these species is every bit as much the end product of evolution as we are. The point is that, if nature has goals, it certainly seems to have many, and consciousness would appear to be fairly far down on the list.

Similarly, Nagel’s teleological biology is run through with talk about the “higher forms of organization toward which nature tends” and progress toward “more complex systems.” Again, real biology looks little like this. The history of evolutionary lineages is replete with reversals, which often move from greater complexity to less. A lineage will evolve a complex feature (an eye, for example) that later gets dismantled, evolutionarily deconstructed after the species moves into a new environment (dark caves, say). Parasites often begin as “normal” complicated organisms and then lose evolutionarily many of their complex traits after taking up their new parasitic way of life. Such reversals are easily explained under Darwinism but less so under teleology. If nature is trying to get somewhere, why does it keep changing its mind about the destination?6

I’ll be the first to admit that these problems may not be fatal. But they represent the sorts of awkward facts that occur immediately to any biologist. Minimally, they pose serious challenges to teleology, challenges that deserve, but do not receive, consideration in Mind and Cosmos.

5.
[Concluding Thoughts]

I will also be the first to admit that we cannot rule out the formal possibility of teleology in nature. It could turn out that teleological laws affect how the universe unfolds through time. While I suspect some might regard such heterodoxy as a crime against science, Nagel is right that there’s nothing intrinsically unscientific about teleology. If that’s the way nature is, that’s the way it is, and we scientists would need to get on with the business of characterizing these surprising laws. Teleological science is, in fact, more than imaginable. It’s actual, at least historically. Aristotelian science, with its concern for final cause, was thoroughly teleological. And the biological tradition that Darwinism displaced - natural theology - also featured a good deal of teleological thinking.

The question, then, is not whether teleology is formally compatible with the practice of science. The question is whether the practice of science leads to taking teleology seriously. Nagel may find this question unfair. He is, he says, engaging in a “philosophical task,” not the “internal pursuit of science.” But it seems clear that he is doing more than this. He’s emphasizing purported “empirical reasons” for finding neo-Darwinism “almost certainly false” and he’s suggesting the existence of new scientific laws. These represent moves, however halting, into science proper. But science, finally, isn’t about defining the space of all formally possible explanations of nature. It’s about inference to the most likely hypothesis. And on these grounds there’s simply no comparison between neo-Darwinism (for which there is overwhelming evidence) and natural teleology (for which there is none). While one might complain that it’s unfair to stack up the empirical successes of neo-Darwinism with those of a new theory, this, again, gets the history wrong. Teleology is the traditional view; neo-Darwinism is the new kid on the block.

None of this is to suggest that evolutionary biology will not, someday, change radically. Of course it might; any science might. Nor is it to suggest that materialism represents some final unassailable view and that teleology or, for that matter, theism will inevitably be spoken of in the past tense by many scientists. It is to say that the way to any such alternative view will have to acknowledge the full powers of present science. I cannot conclude that Mind and Cosmos does this.

  1. Nagel’s work has long attracted the attention of both philosophers and scientists. Indeed the careful reader will notice that I’m mentioned in his new book as a scientist-participant in a workshop that he organized on some of the topics covered in the book; many of the other participants were philosophers.
  2. The field of “experimental evolution” is concerned with watching evolution as it occurs. Because of their short generation time, microbes are the focus of much of this work.
  3. While I’ve heard this concern before, I must admit that I think I only now understand it.
  4. This is not to say that adaptation is rare or that natural selection doesn’t modify the DNA sequences of species. Even species that ultimately go extinct have experienced many previous bouts of successful adaptation.
  5. November 26, 1860; see www.darwinp roject.ac.uk/entry-2998. Historians of science do not all agree that Darwin wholly banished teleology from his thinking; see the exchange between James G. Lennox (1993, 1994) and Michael T. Ghiselin (1994) in Biology and Philosophy.
  6. It’s true that organisms are on average more complex now than they were three billion years ago. But as biologists have long recognized, this doesn’t require any inexorable bias toward complexity. If life starts from a floor of zero complexity, it can on average only get more.



Index to past discussions -

Index to past articles on "Science & Religion"






Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Yet Another Great Book to Read: "Creation Made Free - Open Theology Engaging Science"


Creation Made Free:
Open Theology Engaging Science
 
 
Comments
 
Open Theology offers an advantageous framework for engaging the sciences. With its emphasis upon creaturely freedom, relationality, realist epistemology, and love, Open Theology makes a fruitful dialogue partner with leading fields and theories in contemporary science.
 
In Creation Made Free, leading proponents of open theism explore natural and social scientific dimensions of reality as these dimensions both inform and are informed by Open Theology. Important themes addressed include evolution, creation ex nihilo, emergence theory, biblical cosmology, cognitive linguistics, quantum theory, and forgiveness.

“One of the most significant theological movements of our day, Open theism bridges evangelical commitment and mainline concerns. The leading Open theists come together in these pages to listen and to respond to the sciences. In their respect for the empirical results and their resistance to flat-footed naturalism, these essays model the 'creative mutual interaction' of theology and science in its most sophisticated form.
 
- Philip Clayton, Ingraham Professor, Claremont School of Theology


“Open Theology presents a more mutual interactive account of God's relationship to creation than that given by classical theology. The essays in Creation Made Free provide a wide-ranging survey of the diversity, promise, and problems of this important twentieth-century development in theological insight.”

- Revd John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS


About the Author
Visit Amazon's Thomas Jay Oord Page

Thomas Jay Oord is Professor of Theology at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho. He is the author of numerous books, including A Turn to Love (2009).
 
Thomas Jay OordThomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. He is the author or editor of about twenty books, and he is professor at Northwest Nazarene University, in Nampa, Idaho. Oord is known for his contributions to research on love, altruism, open and relational theology, issues in science and religion, Wesleyan/Holiness/Church of the Nazarene thought, New Evangelical theology, and postmodernism. He is or has been president of several scholarly societies. Oord blogs frequently at his website: http://thomasjayoord.com
 
 
About the Book
 
Amazon Listing
  • Paperback: 280 pages
  • Publisher: Pickwick Publications (2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1606084887
  • ISBN-13: 978-1606084885
 
 
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
 
Format:Paperback
 
Creation Made Free is a solid contribution to the study of open theology engaging science. Tom Oord has done a superb job assembling expert contributors to this important work. I highly recommend it to anyone who hails from a theological tradition that has failed to address God's desire for a significantly free creation. Creation made free is a book that opens the door to biblically based possibilities that may not be discussed in classical theism. Readers will benefit from wide ranging discussions in cosmology, evolution, creation, epistemology and practical theology. In short, you get a lot of bang for your buck!

On a personal level I have always struggled to bridge the gap between science and faith with my understanding never going beyond the surface. In Creation Made Free, Tom Oord invites his readers into four major discussions that include very helpful introductory remarks. The information found in each section will challenge both the academic and the novice. Common misunderstandings are dealt with along with the dreaded myth-information that swirls about open theism. I personally have benefited from this book, and I think you will too. Best of all, I came away with renewed appreciation for God's significantly free creation and love for the one who made it so.


* * * * * * * * * * * * *
 

4.0 out of 5 stars Exploring the Intersections of Open Theism and Modern Science May 28, 2011
By Brian
Format:Paperback

Creation Made Free is a book edited by Thomas Jay Oord that explores the intersections of open theism and modern science. Thirteen different theologians reflect on different aspects of this topic, so this book is beautifully nuanced. (I'm very biased in favor of edited books because of the diversity of thought.) While this book diverges from its focus on science from time to time, it's theological reflection is refreshingly insightful and evocative without being overly academic or pedantic. Therefore this book is worth a brief-yet-comprehensive review/overview.
 
Karen Winslow argued that "the earth is not a planet" in the Bible (26). When the authors of Genesis write about "all the land" they are not talking about planet earth. Instead they are describing the limited part of the world that they knew. So, for example, the big flood would not have destroyed the entire earth in a global sense, it would have simply destroyed the entire world of the author. Winslow uses this info to make her ultimate point: the scientific knowledge of the authors of Scripture was very different than the scientific knowledge of modern people. The authors were writing out of a different context as well as writing for a different context. Therefore Winslow said: "To try to force the Bible into categories of modern science creates an unnecessary opposition between theology and science" (24). After removing the awkwardness between the science of the modern and ancient worlds, she drives home her point about what that means for our reading of Scripture today: "Recognizing and appreciating what the Bible does not say is as important as understanding what it does say" (27).
 
Thomas Jay Oord tried to reconcile science and open theism by suggesting that God works through the process of evolution in a way that is "slow, indirect, and sometimes painful" (36). He suggests that Jesus revealed a God who is "self-sacrificial and non-coersive" and therefore "does not overrule or dominate creatures" (35). God gives humans - and all living things - freewill and agency. This freedom brings with it the risk of evil happening since God doesn't force anyone or anything to do the right thing. While God is the most powerful being in the universe, God doesn't invade the integrity of other creatures out of God's self-giving love for the creatures. Here Oord tried to walk a fine line between process theology and his own open theism.
 
Michael Lodahl wrote about how Christianity is more open to the scientific worldview than Islam due to Islam's higher understanding of God's sovereignty. Islam tends to be committed to the absolute sovereignty of God. While the Quran gives humanity some agency over their lives (58), the Quran is also understood as a perfect revelation by an all-powerful God to a passive people. Lodahl then argued that such an understanding of God "surely undercuts the scientific endeavor" (65). He then went on to argue that Christianity is able to support the view of open theism because the incarnation (God in the form of a dynamic human) and Holy Spirit (God's presence in our midst). For Lodahl, open theism makes Christianity more supportive of modern science than theologies like Islam that hold to the idea that God's power is absolute.
 
Anne Case-Winters argued that God's ongoing presence in the world means that the world is continuing to be created and re-created by God. For her, the "incarnation is not the exception to the rule but the sign of what is really the case about God's relation to the world" (71). God has been and always will be present and active in the world. This point is important for Case-Winters because she argues that God creates and sustains the world through "the processes of the natural order" (82). In and through all things, God beckons each creature away from evils and toward their best potential. In some ways, this essay seemed to be suggesting that process theology is better than open theism.
 
Brint Montgomery wrote about how "God functions as Cosmic Mind after the creation of an ordered, material universe" (97). This essay was the least relevant and evocative in the book.
 
Clark Pinnock argued that God creates and re-creates the world through the process of evolution. He rejects the idea of "episodic divine interventions" because it brings back a "god of the gaps" (103). Instead he upholds the idea that God is continually active and creating. He wrote: "Evolution is opening the future up as God is calling the universe to reach beyond itself to a new creation" (108). Because God is always re-creating the world, each moment is "pregnant with hope" (110). Pinnock ends with an evocative thought: "Ours is a world capable of becoming the kingdom of God." The purpose of our lives is to carry forward the values of the divine project. Sin is the refusal to participate in it. One can think of the omega point, not as a rigid goal, but as God's vision for the world and what the process can become" (110).

Craig Boyd suggested that the earth isn't a perfect, static world, but instead, it's a good, dynamic creation where God is continually at work. For him, evolution is the story about how God creates and re-creates the world. As creatures act and react, God needs to adjust and readjust the vision for the journey forward. He ended by writing: "Creation is more like a song that begins with a simple melody. As it continues, the musicians improvise here and there with variations on the theme...God's song of creation is a song open to possibility, novelty, and ever-increasing goodness and beauty" (124).
 
Gregory Boyd argued that "evolution may be seen as a sort of warfare between the life-affirming creativity of an all-good God, on the one hand, and the on-going corrupting influence of malevolent cosmic forces on the other" (127). Boyd's reflections were the most judgemental, including two places where he said readers need to agree with him in order to be biblical (132, 139). This essay went too far down the doctrinaire rabbit hole.
 
Alan Rhoda wrote about God's decision to give humans freewill and the subsequent openness of the future because of that choice. Instead of a determined future, there is a "branching array of possible futures" (151). Rhoda goes on to propose analogies that describe God's relationship to the world: Theatre Director (brings out the best in the actors), Discussion Leader (helps students explore wisdom), Persian Rug-Maker (adapts the design as needed), Master Composer (helps autonomous musicians to find harmony together), and Expedition Leader (brings tools and resources - including the ability to change plans). Rhoda then used game theory to suggest that God plays games with many different people, with many different skill levels, so the strategy that God uses to play the game is different in each new game. The one constant feature in this game theory analogy is that God wants to find a win-win for every game. Clearly all of these analogies are used to illustrate the creativity and rationality of God with humanity.
 
Alan Padgett argued that God's knowledge is supreme (without knowing the future) and God's providence is powerful (without being coercive). In this essay, Padgett adds some much needed nuance to the discussion of God's foreknowledge and sovereignty.
 
Richard Rice used his essay to suggest that God's forgiveness of humanity demonstrates God's ability to resourcefully bring about transformation. God isn't naive. Bad things happen. But God is able to forgive people for their sins and then bring about change for the better. This means "the future is always open to new possibilities" (214). By emphasizing God's ability to bring about transformation, "Open theism keeps open the possibility of a future in which God's purposes for all God's children are fullfilled" (217). In the end, forgiveness is the foundation for hope.
 
John Sanders wrote about how we come to know, understand, and describe God through our embodiment as creatures. There are many different kinds of metaphors for God in the Bible but most of them are personal, relational metaphors. He then argued that "mutual relationships are the ideal form of relationship between God and humans" in Scripture (233). People seem to relate best to images of God as personal. Sanders used a quote from John Calvin to make his point: "God cannot reveal Godself to us in any other way than by comparison with things we know" (219). Humans relate well to a humanly God.
 
Dean Blevins argued that the continuously emerging world is a result of the ongoing transformations that God brings about through God's loving relationship with the world. Out of God's love for the world, God is intimately involved in the world, even at the quantum level. Our relationship with God is based on "co-relationality" and a "co-determinative" process whereby the world is co-created with God. In this process, God is aways leading us toward creative transformations in the future.

Creation Made Free is a great book for exploring Christianity's relationship to science, introducing open theism in general, or comparing process theology to open theism. If none of those topics seem worth exploring, then this would be a very boring book. But if any - or all - of those topics sound intriguing, then this book just might be an edge-of-your-seat theological thriller. Since I experienced this book as a thriller, I hope there will soon be a sequel!
 
 
 

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Christian Education in a Postmodern Age

Let's just say that I'm beginning to be more hopeful for the outlook of Christianity when reading of yet another academic who sees the problems and knows something must be done. As I read through Hawthorne's article below its hard not to note the themes we've been ringing time-and-again through these past many months. Perhaps after all, it is possible to witness again the ancient faith of Jesus being resurrected from the too-diligent hands of man back into the Spirit's wondrous grasp. Let's continue to pray for a postmodern (and Emergent) vision for the church of Jesus Christ.
 
R.E. Slater
January 29, 2013
 
 
 
Christian Higher Education in a Postmodern Age
Framing a Positive Vision for Evangelicals and Higher Education
 
by John W. Hawthorne
January 2013
 
Last weekend I drove from Michigan to Massachusetts to attend the North Shore Writers Retreat sponsored by Eastern Nazarene College. It was a great time, with presentations by Karl Giberson, Peter Enns, Alissa Wilkinson, Jonathan Merritt, Lil Copan, John Wilson, and hosted by Jonathan Fitzgerald. Some of these people I’ve followed over the years. Others were Facebook friends I’d never met in person.
 
There were some very good between-sessions conversations about Christian Higher Ed. We had attended such schools and/or taught at them. We all shared some similar questions about the unique challenges of the Christian university.
 
I came away from the last session with Jonathan Merritt reflecting on two ideas he shared. First, he said that the postmodern world is drawn to story and operates inductively - where the modern world operates deductively through argument. I need to be far more attentive to the stories of my students and my colleagues to really build an image of what Christian higher education can look like in the future. Jonathan’s other point that struck home: It’s not enough to draw attention to a problem; you have to offer the compelling alternative.
 
On the drive home and in the midst of starting the Spring semester Thursday, I’ve been thinking of my arguments about Christian Higher Ed. What I’ve argued is that the past models aren’t sufficient and if we don’t change we run the risk of alienating a generation. But change to what? What does the non-negative vision look like?
 
The past few days have had me focused anew of the shortcomings of evangelical culture, and by extension, the universities that exist within that culture. On Thursday, Rachel Held Evans posted this blog titled The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart. Drawing on language from Mark Noll’s 1995 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, she argues that there’s a real challenge with compassion when “right belief” fosters ambivalence to suffering. Friday, Peter Enns posted a blog also building on Noll’s book. Pete suggests that a problem for evangelical academics is that we can be “free” to pursue ideas as long as they don’t lead to un-comfortable conclusions. Last night I finished The Great Evangelical Recession by John Dickerson. Dickerson makes some interesting points that have been made elsewhere but ties them together in some useful ways. He draws comparisons between the housing bubble and the exaggerated influence of evangelicalism and suggests a number of structural factors that present great risk (loss of youth, segmentation, financial strain, lack of discipleship, etc.). Today I read Ron Sider’s The Scandal of Evangelical Conscience. Sider effectively documents the statistical similarities between evangelicals and the broader culture on a range of issues like divorce, sexuality, abuse, finance, materialism, and so on.
 
Taking these pieces as a package, I’m left with a vision of American Evangelicalism which is 1) struggling, 2) culturally uncertain, 3) insufficiently prophetic, 4) interpersonally harsh or condemning, and 5) often very afraid. If these diagnoses are even half on track, this suggests some hard days ahead for traditional evangelical institutions.
 
So what’s the positive alternative? It’s fine to suggest “don’t be those bad things” but that doesn’t provide us much to go with. Dickerson calls for a return to biblical authority and a focus on discipling. Sider (like N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, and many others) suggests we need a better understanding of how Jesus was initiating a Kingdom and not simply providing a way to get to heaven.
 
There is something about Kingdom language that can be of value to Christian higher education. I’ll unpack some of these thoughts in future posts. For now, let me suggest that the key is to see the Christian university as a place where the Kingdom is in operation. This doesn’t occur in separation from the larger culture as it did in past times. It occurs because we embrace the theological significance of Jesus’ model of sacrificial love, of challenging pharisaicalism, of reaching out to the powerless, and of building a community that takes Paul’s body metaphors seriously. Toward the end of his book, Sider writes, “Indeed, the church ought to be not just different but far ahead of the rest of society.” That’s something I’m continuing to ponder about the Christian University.
 
Jonathan Fitzgerald, who did such a fine job organizing the Writer’s Retreat, just published an e-book titled Not Your Mothers Morals: How the New Sincerity is Changing Pop Culture for the Better. I really think his idea of the New Sincerity has power. It’s something for us to consider in Christian higher education. We need to present the world as sufficiently complex, to investigate our past positions without abandoning our faith commitments, and above all to tell the truth.
 
Spring Arbor’s Concept contains the phrase “total commitment to Jesus Christ as the perspective for learning“. I’m coming to realize that this phrase is far more complicated than “What Would Jesus Do?”. It’s not just affirming a Christian identity. It’s really seeing about seeing the Kingdom that Jesus saw. The more we can learn to do that, the stronger our educational perspective will be.
 
 
 

Devising a Meaning for "Landfill," by Daughter

 
 
 
The Deconstruction of the Self before the Risen hands of the Spirit

A postmodern emergent tries to steer away from the dualistic tensions created between love and hate, flesh and spirit, man and God, whose allusions seem only to bring meaningless loss and pain by their acts of distinction. But rather we must find a resident interconnection between broken-ness and risen-ness that makes all one within the broader spectrum of humanity's joys and misery. By our own hands we seek the allusion of the well-being of our souls and yet, too often, we bring upon ourselves the very seeds of neglect and ruin we wish to avoid. Measured carelessly, if not unmercifully, upon ourselves, by the lies we tell ourselves in self-delusion and careless fantasy. However, in Jesus is the truer mirror of our reflection. A mirror willing to attest to the poverty of our ruin against the uplift of God's embracing love in the midst of our own personal ruin. Who meets us in the ruin and pain we know-and-feel to create a spiritual healing within our shattered lives on the very basis of our torn brokenness. A brokenness that God can use in our lives. For without its affects we will never seek A-nother beyond the otherness of ourselves.


To look up from the bottomless depths of our own personal landfills and dirt pits to there find the heart of God yielding His own broken body and soul thrown upon the same by an unforgiving humanity. A humanity that we stand within before a Redeemer-God who patiently interlocks His own past experience with our own present experience to recreate an open future that would release the poverty of our spirits. A future that would take the landfills and dirt pits we find ourselves ruthlessly cast upon to yield its own rich, earthen loams, measured out by a water that cleanses, and an altar that can call the dead to life. To a life renewed, rebirthed, revived, reclaimed, and restored.

 
Yes, love and hate are profoundly personal, but from each strong experience must we die to self, so sure of its ways, its schemes, its plans and assurances. For without brokenness and pain there can be no resurrection of our souls. Only the smells of rot and surety of death. A death that dies instead of a death that makes alive. That causes the soul to rise with a Savior from pain and ugliness when at-the-last overcome by the landfills of a its own brokenness. Or blinded by its own actions that have put to death afresh the Prince of life, as all have done, and must do, if personal deconstruction should come, and must come, before resurrection occur. Renewal lives all around us though we see it not. But it must begin we where are and not where we think we should be.
 
So then, let pain hurt. And let bitterness remain. Each as fresh memories to death's door we each must enter through - if only to discover the broader paths of life and love, healing and hope, found in the Prince of Life, our forerunner and redeemer. Who measures out each man's life by the power of His Spirit - mighty to reclaim any man or woman who would yield heart and soul to the freshly consecrated altars of new life and light in Jesus. For without death there can be no life. And without a personal deconstruction there can be no reconstruction. Not of ourselves nor of our churches and communities. The cross of Calvary shows this oft-ignored truth. Let us not deny our pain, but accept its horribleness while allowing God's love and grace to change all within the depths of our scarred lives.
 
R.E. Slater
January 29, 2013
 

Landfill, by Daughter
 
 
 
 
Lyrics

 
Throw me in the landfill
Don't think about the consequences
Throw me in the dirt pit
Don't think about the choices that you make
Throw me in the water
Don't think about the splash I will create
Leave me at the altar
Knowing all the things you just escaped

Push me out to sea
On the little boat that you made
Out of the evergreen
That you helped your father cut away
Leave me on the tracks
To wait until the morning train arrives
Don't you dare look back
Walk away, catch up with the sunrise

'cause this is torturous
Electricity between both of us
And this is dangerous
'cause I want you so much
But I hate your guts
I hate you

So leave me in the cold
Wait until the snow covers me up
So I cannot move
So I'm just embedded in the frost
Then leave me in the rain
Wait until my clothes cling to my frame
Wipe away your tear stains
Thought you said you didn't feel pain

Well this is torturous
Electricity between both of us
And this is dangerous
'cause I want you so much
But I hate your guts

I want you so much
But I hate your guts

Well this is torturous
Electricity between both of us
And this is dangerous
'cause I want you so much
But I hate your guts

I want you so much
But I hate your guts.

  

"I think the layered meanings in this vid are self-evident. Let's just say what
you see on the surface goes down a bit into our societal angst."  - re slater