Entries Tagged 'Science' ↓

Protestant Biblical Interpretation is a textbook of hermeneutics, which the author defines as the “science and art of Biblical interpretation.”  This was assigned reading as part of my “Thinking Biblically I” class at Christus Rex Study Center.  There is a lot of good material in this book, and there are only a couple of untranslated German quotations.  The book is conservative and protestant in nature.  As such, it is critical of liberalism, neo-orthodoxy, and Roman Catholicism.  There are a couple of aspects of the book that I find questionable at points.  First, while Ramm defines hermeneutics as the “science and art” of Biblical interpretation, he seems to have little value for “the art.”  Again and again Ramm extols science and scientific interpretation.  I’m not sure that modern science is the best model for biblical interpretation.  Is it truly the case that engineers in general would make better interpreters of scripture than poets or chemists than musicians?  Ramm also tends to inflate the role of “scholars” relative to the interpretation of the Bible with a bit of a modernist chronological provincialism.  Scholarship is not the pillar and ground of the truth; the Church is.  Ramm seems to imply in a number of places that scholars are the ultimate arbiters of what is true (see p. 183).  God has made no promises about scholars, and the New Testament is very critical of the prideful Scribes.  In his wisdom, God has chosen to entrust his Word to the primary care of pastors and elders.  Again, there is a lot of good stuff here.  I found a paragraph in the Epilogue particularly wise and edifying: “There is a prevailing danger to let differences in interpretation interrupt the unity of the Spirit.  When differences are sharp, feelings are apt to run high.  With foreboding storm clouds of oppression billowing on the distant horizon, it is well for conservative Protestantism to discover bases of fellowship rather than divergence.  If we stand together in the great truths of the Trinity, of Jesus Christ, and of Salvation, let us then work out our interpretive differences in the bounds of Christian love and endeavor to preserve the unity of the Spirit.  A hermeneutical victory at the expense of Christian graciousness is hardly worth winning.”  Amen to that!  Grade: B+

It appears that my blog has a reader.  This is a banner moment in the history of my blog.  ;) This reader, whose handle is “pcamper” has posted a couple of comments on my post “Something from nothing?” from last October.  I have reproduced his most recent comment verbatim below:

Thank you for your response. What I actually have a problem with is belief in the supernatural. I do not live by faith now, but by reason and hope. The main reason I do not believe any more is the atrocities attributed to your “god” in the bible against innocent babies and children. He actually murdered babies (See 2nd Samuel, the baby of David and Bathsheba) as well as the firstborn males and the flood (if it happened) must have caused many babies and children to perish. My question to you then is: Do you ENJOY believing and praising a being who did these things to babies and children and who would send someone to be tortured just because they exercise their right to think for themselves? Also, I have a problem wth the concept of “hell”. There are christians who believe that even good people will be tortured if they do not believe. This is riduculous. Why would anyone deserve that kind of punishment? This is a being worse than Hitler. However, there are christians who do not believe in hell. So, my question to them is: If you do not believe that part of the bible is true regarding hell, then isn’t it just common sense that the rest of the bible is not true either.

As far as evolution, it makes more sense than some invisible being in the sky judging us. I don’t believe in sin anymore, I believe in right and wrong and always striving to do what is right.

I also believe in evidence. If you are an intelligent person, I cannot believe you think the earth is only 6000 years old. To me, science equals evidence without certainty and religion equals certainty without evidence. I will stick with the evidence without certainty.

As far as faith, I believe that blind faith equals blind obedience.

As far as the trinity, no one can explain that. It was decided upon at the council of nicea.

On the bible: I will quote Mark Twain who said that “most people are bothered by passages of scripture that do not understand, but I am bothered by the passages of scripture that I do understand.

Yes, it takes an incredible amount of faith to believe superstitious things, so I will stick with reason and hope instead of christianity.

In response, I have some comments and some questions:

1. pcamper’s claim that he doesn’t live by faith is epistemologically naïve to say the least.  Everybody lives by faith.  Faith is required to believe in anything, including evidence.  (In order to accept visual evidence, you need to have faith that your eyes are more-or-less representing reality accurately.)  The use of natural science requires faith that nature behaves in a law-like manner and that the laws don’t change willy-nilly from place to place or moment to moment.  The fact that he then goes on to say that he lives by reason and hope is especially delicious.  How can you have hope in something while not having faith in anything, unless you’ve got a really odd and arbitrary defininition of faith?

2.) Is it wrong to murder babies?  If so, how is that supportable on an evolutionist basis?  If evolution is true, then it’s survival of the fittest, and killing babies (who aren’t particularly fit) can’t be wrong.  In fact if your definition of the fittest is the one who leaves the most offspring (not uncommon), then it seems almost required by evolution that you kill other people’s babies whenever possible.  

3.) I also need to address the blasphemous accusation that God is a somehow a murderer.  God gives life and God takes it away according to his eternal decree.  The reason why men can’t do this (why it’s murder for men to do so) is that they don’t have the authority to take lives, including their own.  When one human being unlawfully takes the life of another, he is attempting to usurp God’s authority.  The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.  

In the case of II Samuel 12, the Lord’s causing the death of David’s son was not a bad thing for the son.  He went to heaven.  (See 12:23 “I will go to him, but he will not return to me.”)  Even if we didn’t have that verse to indicate this, it would be reasonable to believe this because he was a covenant child.   

In the other cases pcamper mentioned, these people were enemies of God as were their children.  In Adam, all rebelled against God and are deserving of Hell.  Refusing to submit to God of heaven is certainly worthy of the punishment of Hell.  It is worthy of immediate death, but God in his common grace continues to provide unbelievers with sunshine, rain, and crops.  The reprobate does not honor God as God, nor does he give thanks for these things.  There are no innocent or good people who die or go to hell.  No one is righteous, not even one.  I am therefore not one of those Christians who believe that good people are tortured in Hell.  There are no good people, and apart from the saving grace in Jesus Christ for His church, everybody would go to Hell.  God is perfectly just and the standard by which humans ought to define justice.  I believe that every jot and tittle of the Bible is true, including the verses about Hell, to answer pcamper’s question.

4.  I find it amusing that the only defense of evolution yet offered is that “it makes more sense than some invisible being in the sky judging us.”  If this is living by reason, I’d hate to see living irrationally.  pcamper has no answer to the something- from-nothing argument.  This is clearly self-contradictory.  Either you have evolution or you have the conservation of matter.  You can’t keep both of them and remain consistent.  Belief in evolution must necessarily overthrow the validity of natural science.

5. As alluded to in point 2, pcamper has no basis for believing in right in wrong.  I’m not denying that he does actually believe in right and wrong; I’m just saying that he has no philosophical warrant for doing so.  On an evolutionary foundation, there cannot be any such thing as right and wrong.  If everything is just matter in motion, how can anything be right and wrong?  Stalin understood this better than pcamper does.  Stalin was a consistent materialist.  He believed that killing 20 million of his own people was no different than mowing a lawn.  In order for pcamper to believe in right and wrong, he needs to be a hypocrite (saying he believes one way and acting in another) and borrow from the Christian worldview.

6.  pcamper states that he believes in evidence, but ironically offers none.  He doesn’t even offer an appeal to evidence, because evidence is damning to the evolutionist.  Evidence must always be suppressed or else the whole theory will unravel.  This is, of course, because all of the evidence indicates creation by the Triune God of the Bible.  This isn’t a tradeoff between evidence and certainty.  I have both on my side, and he has neither.

 7. “As far as faith, I believe that blind faith equals blind obedience.”  This is a complete non-sequitur.  Where have I advocated blind faith anywhere?  The evolutionist is the only one here with blind faith.  I have the revealed Word of God which provides the basis for my faith and the created order that corroborates this.  pcamper wants people to believe that something came from nothing, life came from non-life, intelligent from non-intelligent, and moral from amoral–all without shred of evidence to back it up.  I’m sorry, I just can’t take a blind leap of faith like that.

8.  ”As far as the trinity, no one can explain that. It was decided upon at the council of nicea.”  I’m not sure exactly what pcamper is trying to argue here, so I’ll have to give it my best guess.  I will readily grant that the Trinity cannot be understood exhaustively by any creature.  What I fail to see is why I must exhaustively understand something in order to believe in it.  Neither pcamper nor I understand anything exhaustively.  We don’t even understand ourselves exhaustively.  A common problem with unbelieving epistemology is that you must know everything in order to know anything.  Christians don’t have that problem.  I deny that you can’t explain the Trinity at all, and so does Nicea.    

Conclusion: pcamper’s main objection to Christianity is that he believes God is evil.  He accuses God of all these things but has no philosophical basis for making these accusations.  In order for him to argue against Christianity, he must implicitly concede that his evolutionary worldview is not true and that Christianity is true.  In order to object against God, he must borrow from the Christian worldview and adopt the Christian concept of ethical absolutes (albeit in a distorted manner).  pcamper has no leg to stand on here.

 pcamper, you have no reason for hope at all, even though you claim to live by hope.  What do you have hope in?  Objecting to the concept of Hell won’t keep you from going there, no matter how loudly you complain.  You are dead, but I believe in a God that can raise the dead.  God is calling men everywhere to repent and believe that Jesus Christ is Lord of all.  God has been in the business of saving hopelessly wicked men since the Fall.  He saved Saul of Tarsus (who was on his way to kill Chrisitians) and turned him into the apostle Paul.  Obviously this is all of grace and all of God–not of man’s autonomous free will.  Nobody chooses to repent and believe unless the Holy Spirit regenerates their heart.  Jesus is reigning now.  You can either bend the knee and be adopted as a son in His church, or you can perish.  I’d personally much rather see the former than the latter.

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the births of Abraham Lincoln, and Charles Darwin.  These are two of my least favorite human beings ever, and the fact that they were both born on February 12, 1809 makes that one of my least favorite dates.

Abraham Lincoln is the preeminent politician of modernity.  He was such a skillful, slick politician that nearly 150 years after his reign of terror, he still has the majority of the world fooled.  Lincoln wanted a war so he could consolidate power.  Every nefarious, warmongering assault on liberty and justice that the Bush/Cheney regime was guilty of pales in comparison to Lincoln.  Lincoln had a tremendous influence on the bloodthirsty 20th century totalitarian tyrants.  They learned from the master how to implement total war, curtail civil liberties, silence the opposition, maneuver themselves into wars, and increase their political power.  He ranks as my all time least favorite U.S. President.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution provided unbelievers an alternative to the creation account that had a façade of being “scientific.”  The implications of his entirely bogus and completely unscientific assertions led to a devaluation of human life that produced the unprecedented body count of the 20th century.  Darwin’s theories were thoroughly discredited shortly after his publication of On the Origin of Species, etc. but the truth never really mattered.  Evolution has always been about public relations and propaganda.  The evolutionists must run to the State to enforce and mandate the propagation of their theory because they know they can’t win honest debates.  Darwin wouldn’t have attained the fame he did unless T. H. Huxley shamelessly pimped his theory.  To this day the evolutionists use politics and manipulation to maintain their stranglehold on academia.  People who are critical of The Theory (all hail) had better keep their mouths shut or they will be denied teaching jobs, admission to graduate schools, professorships, research grants, and tenure.  The body count continues to rise, and the only reason people hold to The Theory is so they can delude themselves into thinking they have an intellectual reason for not submitting to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Many biologists, even most Christian biologists have stated that “microevolution” has been substantiated in antibiotic resistant bacteria and the like.

I dispute that such things have been observed. They have been inferred, but not observed.  (And I would say they were poorly inferred.)  I would argue that all you see is differential reproduction and not microevolution. One may want to define mircroevolution as differential reproduction, but in doing so he would be equivocating on what he means by “evolution.”

The danger of capitulating to this claim without evaluating it critically is that you essentially concede the argument to the evolutionist.  After all, what is “macroevolution” other than “microevoluton” over a period of millions of years?

I’ll give you a parallel. Supose a virus came along that killed everybody who had a positive Rhesus Factor for their blood type. About 84% of the human population has positive blood. This would likely wipe out several other genetic characteristics. (For example, 99% of China is RhD+.) Over time you will have a repopulation and this repopulation would all have RhD- blood (because RhD- is recessive). Would it be correct to say that humans had microevolved if this happened?  Of course not.  A bunch of people dying and not passing on their genes isn’t evolution—it’ just changes the relative prevalance of different genes that already exist.  Microevolution implies something new in the genome that wasn’t there before, especially if you ever want it to account for the eventual origin of the species.

There is a second problem with calling antibiotic resistant bacteria “microevolution” as well. This change in the relative population of bacteria was caused by an intelligent source, not pure chance. Although it was not the intended effect, this is similar to a dog breeder selecting out a particular characteristic for his dogs. (This also comes with unintended effects.) In the nature of the case, the true evolutionist has no basis for importing an intelligent factor that selects one characteristic over another. All you have is pure blind chance.

Every observed mutation ever has resulted in a sorting or loss of genetic information.  You will never get “amoeba to man” evolution that way, as man has more genetic complexity than the amoeba.  You also won’t get “amoeba to man” evolution by killing most of the existing amoebas.  You’ll just get a thinner amoeba gene pool.  If you want to call the differential reproduction due to loss of massive amounts of genetic material I described above “microevolution,” then I won’t quibble over words.  However, if that’s all you’ve got, then you cannot explain origins at all.  You will never get more advanced species this way, even if you had trillions of years and the whole universe was a thick soup of protein chains.

“Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.” -King Lear (I, i, 92)

How the heck can life start from abiological processes?

I believe this is the biggest problem with the theory of evolution. The belief that something can from nothing is at odds with everything we observe from science. In order for science to work, the principle of induction must have a sound basis. We observe much in nature that behaves in a law-like manner all the time. (i.e. If you drop a ball, it will fall to the ground all the time.) Believing that something can come from nothing undermines the possibility of the law-like world which science attempts to study.

But, evolutionists don’t just need to have something come from nothing once. It is the hallmark of the theory. In order for evolution to account for the existance of humans today, you need to make no less than four such leaps:

1. Something From Nothing – This is seen in the most popular cosmological theory of today, the Big Bang. There is no way to use the scientific method to account for the origin of matter ex nihilo, so the cosmologists just make it up.  As Christians we believe in the creation of matter ex nihilo, but it’s not a problem because our universe is sustained by a personal and omnipotent God.

2. Life from Non-Life – There was a time when many believed that life could begin from nonliving material, but since Pasteur, it has been a sign of ignorance to believe, for example, that maggots are spontaneously generated from rotting meat.

3. Intelligence from Non-Intelligent life – The evolutionist also needs to account for the advent of intelligence in non-intelligent life. How do you get from an amoeba to an intelligent humanoid? Something must come from nothing again.

4. Morality from Amoral Life – The last major problem that must be solved to explain humanity is how intelligent amoral life can develop ethical norms. How does a beast become somebody that stipulates that you ought not kill another of your own kind or copulate with your neighbor’s wife?

These are four huge leaps of faith. Each one, if it were true, would undermine the very possibility of scientific knowledge.

There are several other similar problems that embarrass the theory along the same lines. How do you go from cell-division to copulation as a method of reproduction. In order for this to happen, you would need the gradual evolution of genitalia over the period of millions of years. The genitalia would not be functional for reproduction during this period, so the organism would be handicapped in the race for survival. These non funcitoning organs would still need to be nourished, which would be a tremendous disadvantage in the quest for survival of the fittest. The same could be said about the respiratory and circulatory systems, vision, and every other human characteristic.

It takes an incredible amount of faith to believe these things.  I’ll stick with Christianity, thank you.

I once had an evolutionist state that she was puzzled that many Christians perceive evolution as an attack on the religion of Christianity and didn’t understand how there could be so much conflict between a religion and a particular scientific theory.  My answer was and remains that Darwinism isn’t science—it’s a religion.

Because Christianity and Darwinism are competing religions or worldviews, there can be no harmony between the two of them. The Bible teaches rather plainly that God created the heavens and the earth over the course of about six days, approximately six thousand years ago. (There are many Christians who will dispute this, but I think they aren’t reading the text of Scripture honestly and are self-consciously capitulating to Darwinism at the outset.)

More importantly than the age of the earth is the fact that the Bible teaches that there was no death before the sin of Adam and Eve. This is not a passing detail but one that is absolutely essential to Christian doctrine.  You could not have had billions or even millions of years of natural selection where the preferred races are preserved in the struggle for life.   In principle there can be no harmony between the Bible’s theory of origins and Darwin’s.  If Darwin is true, then the Bible is not and vice versa.  This does not mean that every particular bit of scientific reasoning performed by Darwinists is false or that all of the scientific reasoning of the Creationists is correct.  However, it does mean that every bit of true scientific knowledge tangled within the mess of the evolutionary framork supports Creation by the Triune God according to the scriptures.

The job of the Christian in these debates is to remain faithful to the teaching of scripture and then to perform an internal critique of Darwinism that shows that if it were true it would undermine the possibility of gaining scientific knowledge.

We have nothing to fear from actual experiments in the natural sciences.  These experiments must be within the limits of the scientific method by being repeatable, with measurable data.  Anything that cannot be tested by experiments using this method is beyond the bounds of natural science.  It is precisely because of these restrictions that Darwinism is not science but religion.

Darwinism is afraid of the evidence.  Darwinism attempts to build immunity to evidence into its theory structure.  (For an example of this, look at the idea of Punctuated Equilibrium as advanced by Stephen Jay Gould.)

Darwinism uses the coercive arm of the state in order to suppress opposition to its theories.  If you don’t think this is the case, then you’re still living in 1925.  Evolutionists essentially have a monopoly over academia. Non-evolutionist scientists are ostracized by this establishment. They are denied admission to graduate school.  Professors who oppose evolution are not granted tenure. Their papers are neither peer reviewed nor published.  There is a large political party (the U.S. Democratic Party) that has maintaining the mandated, exclusive teaching of evolution in government schools with compulsory attendence laws as one of the main tenets of their political platform.  What we have today is the Scopes trial in reverse.  Darwinism doesn’t just act like any religion; it acts like a very insecure religion that must suppress any oppositon to it by force.  To phrase the question in Yoda’s syntax: If so confident you are in your theory, why hide behind the government instead of defending it?

I plan on building upon my critique of Darwinism in the coming days.  If you would like to learn more about this debate, I recommend the following resources: Answers in Genesis, Michael Dention’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, and two lectures by Greg Bahnsen titled “Is Evolution Scientific?“  I’d go with Bahnsen first.