Animal clairvoyance

22 But God's anger was kindled because he went, and the angel of the Lord took his stand in the way as his adversary. Now he was riding on the donkey, and his two servants were with him. 23 And the donkey saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road, with a drawn sword in his hand. And the donkey turned aside out of the road and went into the field. And Balaam struck the donkey, to turn her into the road. 24 Then the angel of the Lord stood in a narrow path between the vineyards, with a wall on either side. 25 And when the donkey saw the angel of the Lord, she pushed against the wall and pressed Balaam's foot against the wall. So he struck her again. 26 Then the angel of the Lord went ahead and stood in a narrow place, where there was no way to turn either to the right or to the left. 27 When the donkey saw the angel of the Lord, she lay down under Balaam. And Balaam's anger was kindled, and he struck the donkey with his staff. 28 Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?” 29 And Balaam said to the donkey, “Because you have made a fool of me. I wish I had a sword in my hand, for then I would kill you.” 30 And the donkey said to Balaam, “Am I not your donkey, on which you have ridden all your life long to this day? Is it my habit to treat you this way?” And he said, “No.”31 Then the Lord opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way, with his drawn sword in his hand. And he bowed down and fell on his face. 32 And the angel of the Lord said to him, “Why have you struck your donkey these three times? Behold, I have come out to oppose you because your way is perverse[b] before me. 33 The donkey saw me and turned aside before me these three times. If she had not turned aside from me, surely just now I would have killed you and let her live.” 34 Then Balaam said to the angel of the Lord, “I have sinned, for I did not know that you stood in the road against me. Now therefore, if it is evil in your sight, I will turn back” (Num 22:22-34).

Many unbelievers regard that as one of the most fabulous stories in the Bible. They single out the donkey's supernatural ability to speak.

However, the account also credits the donkey with the ability to perceive the angel, which was invisible to Balaam. Are there other examples of animal clairvoyance? 

At one time, Michael Sudduth resided in a haunted house in Windsor Connecticut. At the time he and his wife didn't know they were buying a haunted house. It was a historic colonial home. After living there they discovered that it was haunted. And subsequently, they found out that the previous owners had the same experience. (I think Michael's experience in the haunted house, on top of his youthful dabblings with the Ouija board, is one of the things that pushed him off the deep end.) Among other things, he recounts the following:

The family dog (a golden retriever named Abbey) also seemed to sense something in the house. Early on she had some very strong reactions to something we could not see, much like she would if a stranger come to the house. She would go a particular spot in the house and look up and bark at something she had focused her eyes on. Sometimes she would stare down the stairs from the top of the stairs, as though she were looking at something in the foyer downstairs.
This happened in several places in the house, sometimes when we heard things and some- times when we had not. On one occasion Abbey became extremely aggressive, almost violent. She was really spooked by something. On at least two occasions, while I was teaching night classes, Jill had locked herself in the master bedroom with Abbey for fear that someone had broken into the house. Over time while Abbey continued to act as though she sensed something, she was not as disturbed, exactly as she behaved with guests with which she had become acquainted.

You might dismiss this as subjective, but Sudduth also recounts objective phenomena which collaborate the dog's clairvoyance. For instance:

One day after we had been in the house for a few months, Jill and I were having an argument about the house. At one point, Jill said: "We should just sell this damn house andleave!" Immediately a short umbrella we had hanging on the coat rack by the backdoor flew off the peg and landed about six feet or so from the door. The peg did not break. There was no door or window open. And the umbrella was still rolled up. This umbrella just launched itself across the room. We were speechless.

Out of curiosity, I wrote Dr. David Hufford. He's a college prof. at at the Penn State College of Medicine (Hershey), where he has appointments in Medical Humanities, Behavioral Science, and Family and Community Medicine. He's a world authority on old-hag syndrome, based on extensive original research (e.g. interviews, case studies) that he's conducted over the years. 

In your research, have you run across credible reports that animals, like pet dogs and cats, can perceive the unseen presence of "spirits." Sense the presence of personal entities which are invisible to human observers?

To which Dr. Hufford responded:

I have reports I consider credible. Most do not involve "hagging," but some do. I am convinced that this happens.

So there is corroborative evidence for animal clairvoyance, of the kind exhibited by Balaam's donkey. 

I should add that Rupert Sheldrake has done extensive research on animal telepathy:

http://www.sheldrake.org/Research/animals/

Running the race

6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. 7 For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; 8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways (Jas 1:6-8).

We are living in a period when hipster churchgoers make a virtue of doubt. Their attitude is mirrored by some Christian philosophers and theologians who consider doubting the Bible or various articles of the faith to be intellectually virtuous and healthy. 

It's striking to compare their attitude with the contemptuous, unyielding position of James, stepbrother of Jesus. But when James contrasts faith and doubt, what kind of faith is he referring to? One commentator makes a comparison:

Abraham, Paul says, "did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God" (Rom 4:20). Paul, of course, is well aware that Abraham did, in fact, doubt God's promise on at least one occasion, greeting God's promise about his son with laughter (Gen 17:15-18). Paul's point is not that Abraham never entertained any doubt about God's promise but that Abraham, over many years, displayed a consistency in his faith in God…[James] wants us to understand that God responds to us only when our lives reflect a basic consistency of purpose and intent: a spiritual integrity D. Moo, The Letter of James (Eerdmans 2000), 60-61.

And that certainly dovetails with what James says about Abraham. So the kind of unwavering faith that James is talking about isn't so much intellectual faith, but a life of faith.  Unswerving faith. Goal-oriented faith. A steadfast lifestyle in which we make decisions and lead our lives, day after day and year after year, according to God's promises.

God's promises set the goal, directing the course of our lives. We remain devoted to God throughout the ups and downs of life, throughout the confusions, losses, and disappointments. Throughout the times when we don't understand what God is doing. Throughout the silence, the dry seasons, the unanswered prayers. We get up the next day and continue in the same direction, in a single-minded pursuit of the distant, unseen destination. 

Dog years and human years

The prediluvians lived about ten times longer than a normal lifespan for us. That raises the question of whether they aged at a steady rate, but simply aged more slowly, or whether they matured sooner or later, stayed youthful for most of their life, while the pace of aging accelerated towards the end. In that respect it's interesting to compare human maturation/aging with canine maturation/aging:

http://pets.webmd.com/dogs/how-to-calculate-your-dogs-age?print=true

The inscrutable designer

One objection that's been raised to the design inference is the claim that if the designer is inscrutable, then that invalidates a design inference.

The strength of that objection depends, in part, on the identity of the designer. If the designer is the God of Christian theism, then to some extent he has disclosed his intentions. 

But let's play along with the inscrutability objection for the sake of argument. Suppose (ex hypothesi) that the designer is inscrutable. Would that invalidate the design inference?

i) One stock counterexample would be discovering an alien spaceship. The technology would be too advanced for us to figure out what the gizmos were for. Yet it would be absurd to deny that they were designed, just because the gadgetry is inscrutable to human engineers.

ii) Here's another counterexample. A common theme of SF stories is the intelligent supercomputer that takes over the world. As I kid I saw Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). It's about a military supercomputer. Shortly after it goes online, it discovers a Russian counterpart. The two systems devise a code language to communicate with each other. They do so by inventing a whole new branch of mathematics. Their code language is unintelligible to humans. 

The challenge is how to outwit a computer that's far smarter than its inventor. It has adaptive intelligence. It becomes exponentially more intelligent every minute. The smarter it becomes, the less analogous it is to human reasoning. Ever further removed from the originating source. Incommensurable. They lose any standard of comparison, for it's increasingly unlike human intelligence. Truly alien. 

In effect, the computer is inscrutable. Its superior intelligence renders it inscrutable to the intellectually inferior human (Dr. Charles Forbin) who designed it. They can't anticipate its next move. And they have to second guess themselves. 

Yet just because the AI machine is inscrutable, it would be absurd to say its actions don't reflect intelligence. To the contrary, it's the computer's daunting (artificial) intelligence that makes it inscrutable to less intelligent human observers. 

Bergoglio’s Gig: Devoutly Venerate This Painting.

Protectress of the Roman People

If peace breaks out in Syria, some Roman Catholics will believe it was because Pope Francis invoked this icon: the “Salus Populi Romani”, or the “Protectress of the Roman People”.

ROME, September 12, 2013 – With the passing of the days the extraordinary nature of the vigil presided over by Pope Francis in St. Peter's Square on the evening of Saturday, September 7 is becoming ever more perceptible.

First of all, the reason: a day of fasting and prayer to call for peace in Syria, the Middle East, and wherever there is war. With the participation not only of Catholics but of men of every religion and simply “of good will.” Not only in Rome but in many cities of the world.

Then the duration. One cannot recall a public vigil of prayer of four consecutive hours, from sunset to late into the night, in the constant presence of the pope.

Then the silence. Over the entire span of the vigil the recollection of the hundred thousand persons crowding St. Peter's Square and the surrounding areas was intense and emotional. In harmony with the accentuated austerity of the very presence of the pope.

Then, above all, the form that the prayer took on. It began with the rosary, the most evangelical and universal of the “popular” prayers, and with a meditation by Pope Francis. It proceeded with the adoration of the sacrament of the Eucharist. It continued with the office of readings - the nocturnal psalmody of the monks - with the reading of passages from Jeremiah, St. Leo the Great, and the Gospel of John. It concluded with the singing of the “Te Deum” and with Eucharistic benediction imparted by the pope.

Blomberg on Reza Aslan

http://www.denverseminary.edu/article/zealot-the-life-and-times-of-jesus-of-nazareth/

Literalism

The word "literal" is used a lot in debates over Bible history or Bible prophecy. Sometimes it's used as a term of abuse. We need to draw some distinctions:

i) There's a difference between literalism and a literal interpretation. Literalism is a hermeneutical system. A literal interpretation is often the correct interpretation, but not because our methods dictate a literal interpretation. 

ii) Literalism is culturally relative. What's figurative to a modern reader might be literal to an ancient reader. What's literal to a modern reader might be figurative to an ancient reader. Take idiomatic figures of speech like "shooting the bull." Someone for whom English is a second language might take that literally! 

When readers interpret the Bible "literally," what that usually means is what strikes them as literal given their modern cultural frame of reference. What they grew up hearing, seeing, reading, the media, social expectations about what's possible or real. So the "literal" sense is unstable. A form of reader-response criticism. What it means to the reader, given his plausibility structure.

iii) In that respect, literalism is frequently the opposite of original intent. Traditionally, the grammatico-historical method is concerned with recovering or ascertaining what the text meant to the author and his target audience. 

iv) In addition, readers often bring auxiliary assumptions to the text of Scripture. We can see this in debates over the flood. Secular critics of the flood raise scientific objections to a global flood. They map the world of Genesis onto the modern world, then drawn invidious comparisons. But in so doing, they unconsciously interject auxiliary assumptions into the ancient text.

When global flood geologists devise model flood mechanisms (e.g. impact event, hydroplate theory, catastrophic plate tectonics, eccentric orbital mechanics), they may say that they are interpreting the text literally, but at the same time they are recasting the text in light of their auxiliary assumptions. 

Likewise, they criticize local flood geologists on scientific grounds, viz. the ark can't travel upstream, the Mesopotamian flood basin can't contain a massive deluge, prediluvian man migrated to the far corners of the earth due to human longevity and fecundity.

And, of course, local flood geologists return the favor by attacking global flood geology on scientific grounds–objections which typically mirror secular critics. Conversely, they defend their own view by appeal to auxiliary theories, viz. extant Mesopotamian typology, a storm surge.

All sides to this debate help themselves to extrabiblical auxiliary hypothesis. 

v) As a rule, when we interpret the Bible and attempt to correlate Biblical events with a real world setting, I think it's best to make the fewest auxiliary assumptions, although that has to be counterbalanced by the simplest explanation. 

vi) Apropos (v), there are often uncertainties when we interpret an ancient text. There are more often uncertainties when we try to reconstruct the distant past. And when we try to correlate an ancient text with the past, that combines the uncertainties. So it's prudent to have more than one interpretive working hypothesis. 

I'm not suggesting we should artificially hedge our bets for purely pragmatic reasons. I'm saying that if there are genuine uncertainties, then we should make allowance for that fact, and have more than one interpretive option, where there is more than one reasonable interpretation or historical reconstruction. 

Ancient prophecy raises analogous issues. The idiom of ancient prophecies is often enigmatic for modern readers. And just as the distance past is indirectly inaccessible, so is the future. That's why it can be tricky to correlate a prophecy with its fulfillment in advance of the fact. And the same holds true for ancient histories about ancient events. It's the same thing in reverse. 

Married name

Traditionally, a woman takes her husband's surname when she marries. Of course, feminists find that oppressive. But retaining their hereditary surname is just as "patriarchal":

http://keithburgess-jackson.typepad.com/blog/2013/09/from-todays-new-york-times-3.html

80/20 arguments for God: intro

http://bnonn.thinkingmatters.org.nz/80-20-arguments-for-god-intro/

Lawrence Krauss' Behavior

From William Lane Craig's latest newsletter:

Where Was Abraham's Ur?

http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Documents/Ur.htm

Who's Actually Less Loving?

I just came across a study about the role of the Bible in the lives of Americans, through a link from J. Warner Wallace. You can read about the study in more depth here. Notice, for example, the sections on "Giving to Non-Profit Organizations". Take note of the contrast between how much particular groups give and how often those groups claim that they object to Christianity because it's unloving, divisive, hypocritical, etc. Here's an article by Chris Price on Christianity's historical influence on charity.

"…why do we not observe that it is their [Christians'] benevolence to strangers…their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done most to increase atheism [Christianity]?…For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans [Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us." (Julian the Apostate, cited in John Cook, The Interpretation Of The New Testament In Greco-Roman Paganism [Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002], 327)

Beyond good and evil

In the abstract, atheists assure us that it's possible, even preferable, to be good without God. But their moral footing is slippery when they shift to concrete cases:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/richard-dawkins-pedophilia_n_3895514.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

Redefining history

I'm going to repost some comments I left at Michael Kruger's blog:

[James McGrath] “Well, people often assumed that it was how sin entered the world. But when they did so, they often took the story in directions that are at odds with what the story actually says – including most notably turning the serpent into a supernatural angelic being.”

Actually, people in the ancient world often viewed “snakes” as supernatural beings. They believed in snake-gods, fire-breathing cobras guarding the Netherworld, &c.

“But I am not persuaded that Paul understood the text as you claim. He focuses on Adam only because Christ was one man and it makes for a nice contrast. If he were a literalist, he would have said ‘Just as through two human beings sin entered the world.’”

Here’s what Joseph Fitzmyer has to say: 

“Paul treats Adam as a historical human being, humanity’s first parent, and contrasts him with the historical Jesus Christ…Some commentators on Romans have tried to interpret Adam in this symbolic sense here…but that reading does violence to the contrast that Paul uses in this paragraph between Adam as ‘one man’ and Christ as ‘one man,’ which implies that Adam was a historical individual much as was Jesus Christ,” Romans (Doubleday 1993), 407-08.

This is despite the fact that Fitzmyer rejects the historicity of Adam and disagrees with Paul’s interpretation of Genesis. But even though he’s just as liberal as McGrath, he’s honest enough to let Paul speak for himself.

"And the fact that the ancient authors of Genesis thought that living things came into existence either when God formed them with divine hands, or through spontaneous generation at God’s command, has no more bearing than the fact that they thought the sky was a solid dome."

To say they thought the sky was a solid dome says more about McGrath’s naivete than theirs.

"It has nothing to do with anyone’s naivete, and has only to do with the meaning of Hebrew words."

i) To begin with, words can used metaphorically.

ii) Even liberal scholars dispute the solid dome interpretation (e.g. Baruch Halpern). John Walton now rejects the solid dome interpretation.

iii) The OT contains various passages attesting the fact that ancient Israelites knew thay rain came from rainclouds.

iv) Ancient Near Easterners could see for themselves that rain came from rainclouds.

“But it is noteworthy that at these points the poetic hyperbole of the psalmists is taken literally, while other things that are problematic like the Earth’s immobility are treated as metaphors, when the ancient Israelite assumptions if anything seem to have been the reverse.”

McGrath is so confused. He acts as if Ptolemaic astronomy supplies the background for the Psalms. But that’s grossly anachronistic. In the Psalms, the “Earth’s immobility” has reference to God protecting his people from catastrophic earthquakes, not celestial mechanics.

“But it is noteworthy that at these points the poetic hyperbole of the psalmists is taken literally, while other things that are problematic like the Earth’s immobility are treated as metaphors, when the ancient Israelite assumptions if anything seem to have been the reverse.”

McGrath is so confused. He acts as if Ptolemaic astronomy supplies the background for the Psalms. But that’s grossly anachronistic. In the Psalms, the “Earth’s immobility” has reference to God protecting his people from catastrophic earthquakes, not celestial mechanics.

No, not “convenient.” I gave a reason. Notice that McGrath has no counterargument.

I understand that you don’t care to interact with people who call your bluff, forcing you to fold and head for the nearest exit.

Notice McGrath’s modus operandi. Because his claims are indefensible, he resorts to adjectives (“Liars!”) and self-serving characterizations.

“I don’t think that any view which misrepresents evidence the way young-earth creationism and Intelligent Design do is compatible with the moral teachings of Christianity. If you reject the clear teaching of Jesus about truth in order to defend that ancient human beings were somehow prescient in their knowledge of modern science, there is really no way you can seriously call yourself a Christian, or your views Christian."

In the name of truth, McGrath is dissembling:

i) Does McGrath believe the Gospels are historically accurate records of what Jesus taught? Seems highly unlikely.

ii) And even assuming he does grant their accuracy, does McGrath believe that Jesus was the infallible Son of God Incarnate? Does he believe what Jesus said about hell, Jonah, Noah’s flood, the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, the creation account (Gen 1-2) in relation to marriage, &c.? Clearly not. He regards Jesus as a child of his times.

“Hebrews 7 reflects an ancient understanding of procreation, not a modern one informed by genetics and biology.”

Once again, McGrath is hopelessly confused. The author of Hebrews indicates that he’s speaking hyperbolically. How did McGrath manage to miss the parenthetical disclaimer (hos epos eipein)?

Needless to say, there are creationists and intelligent design theorists who work in the relevant scientific fields. Notice that in the name of honesty, McGrath can’t bring himself to honestly represent the opposing side. And, of course, his definition of “Biblical scholars” is anyone who thinks like him.

“Young-earth creationists (I say this as someone who used to be one) are only liars and people who repeat what liars say uncritically. That is incompatible with Christianity at its most fundamental level.”

Since McGrath thinks the Bible is riddled with falsehoods, what’s his standard of comparison for true Christianity?

“So too is inerrancy, which treats ancient authors or a book as though they have an attribute which belongs to God alone.”

In that event, we can safely disregard everything McGrath says as errant. After all, he’s only human.

“It is a form of idolatry”

By whose definition? The Bible’s? Or McGrath’s?

“I think Chris Heard’s suggestion, that the word (not used elsewhere in the Greek Bible) recalls the story of Adam.”

That makes precious little sense. Far more likely is that “God-breathed” is a metaphor for divine speech. Breath=spoken word. Therefore, Scripture is divine speech committed to writing.

“Historical questions are answered using the tools of historical study. The fact that texts happen to be part of a collection that is given the status of Scripture by this or that religious body is irrelevant to the answering of historical questions. What matters is historical evidence.”

i) And McGrath has said in the past that methodological atheism is a guiding principle of historiography. So he will automatically discount a miraculous report as unhistorical.

ii) He also begs the question of whether Scripture is, itself, historical evidence.

iii) Notice, too, how he acts as though the Bible is no different than the Koran or Upanishads. It’s just a collection of ancient texts that happens to be given the status of Scripture by a religious community. Nothing inherent in the nature of the text itself to merit that status. Rather, that status is merely ascriptive and sociological. Something conferred on it from the outside. This just tells you that McGrath lacks a Christian view of Scripture.

“We have letters from someone who had met Jesus’ brother. We do not have something similar in the case of Adam.”

Notice how McGrath excludes revelation and inspiration. He has a purely secular outlook.

“What we do have is a story the genre of which is made clear by the presence of a talking animal.”

i) The genre of Gen 2-3 isn’t different from the genre of Pentateuchal narratives generally, many of which are characterized by supernatural incidents and agents.

ii) And why does he classify the “snake” as a talking animal? In the ancient Near East, “snakes” could be numinous beings. Supernatural beings.

“But alas, some Christians have been indoctrinated that they are supposed to ignore everythign that they have learned about reading and literary genres when it comes to the Bible.”

McGrath is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He is imposing his secular perspective on Gen 2-3. But that confuses what he is prepared to believe with what the narrator was prepared to believe. The narrator doesn’t share his naturalistic worldview.

To take the genre into account means viewing the narrative on its own terms. Assuming the viewpoint of the narrator. That’s the polar opposite of what McGrath is doing. He views the world as a closed system.

Notice that McGrath is tacitly rigging the definition of history, by tacitly defining the historical method naturalistically. Yet that prejudges what did happen as well as what can happen. McGrath talks about the “available evidence,” but his “rules” filter out any evidence that doesn’t slip through his secular sieve. So his approach to reality is artificial. He doesn’t begin with reality. He doesn’t take the world as it comes to us. Rather, he begins with his “rules.” Rules that dictate in advance what reality is permitted to be like.

“Although as I have already said, I have no interest in interacting with Steve Hays again given his behavior on a previous encounter…”

McGrath was hoping to get off a few free rounds attacking Christianity, then escape without a nick. He wants to be free to make tendentious assertions that go unchallenged. He resents having to defend his tendentious assertions.

“…I would point out for anyone else interested in discussing this that there is no movement, even on the part of ultra-conservative Christians, to redefine the judicial system to allow for miracles and the conclusion that God simply wanted someone dead.”

That’s McGrath’s canned example. But notice that although he pays lip-service to the “available evidence,” he has stimulative rules that preemptively exclude evidence of the miraculous. So even if all the evidence pointed to the fact that “God simply wanted someone dead,” McGrath would default a naturalistic explanation despite all the evidence to the contrary. His rules precommit him to a false naturalistic explanation over a true supernatural explanation every time.

“We set up methods that deal with the ordinary.”

“The ordinary” is a euphemism for McGrath’s ignorance or inexperience. What’s extraordinary for McGrath may be ordinary for a Christian exorcist (e.g. Kurt Koch, John Richards, Gabriele Amorth), or a paranormal researcher (e.g. Stephen Braude, Rupert Sheldrake, Mario Beauregard).

For instance, M. Scott Peck was a famous psychiatrist trained in secular medical science at Harvard University and Chase Western Reserve. But towards the end of his career he performed two exorcisms. He didn’t originally believe in demonic possession. It was the empirical evidence of two patients that forced him to make that diagnosis. That was the best explanation of the evidence. Cf. Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist’s Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption.

“That they cannot reach verdicts about the truly extraordinary is simply part of the method.”

Notice how McGrath divorces methodology from truth. The method becomes an end in itself. It’s no longer about discovering the true explanation. For if the true explanation happens to be “extraordinary,” then the method discounts the true explanation out of hand.

McGrath uses methodology to mask his ulterior position. McGrath rejects Bible history, not on methodological grounds, but metaphysical grounds. He doesn’t think the world works in the way Scripture depicts. McGrath doesn’t believe those miracles happened. His metrology is based on his notion of reality.

“A Christian can obviously believe in miracles and also practice historical study. What they cannot do is claim that historical tools and methods, which assess probability, can judge an inherently improbable event (a parting sea, a resurrection) to be probable. This should not be controversial.”

That’s grossly simplistic and deeply confused. In what sense is a miracle like a resurrection or a parting sea “inherently improbable”?

i) It can be improbable in the sense that if nature is left to run its course unimpeded, then that event is highly unlikely (or even impossible).

ii) If, however, a personal agent (of sufficient power) deflects or redirects the course of nature, then that event is not improbable.

For instance, if Yahweh intends to part the sea, then that event is not improbable. To the contrary, the event is certain to happen under those conditions.

So is McGrath saying it’s “inherently improbable” that Yahweh intended to part the sea? How is McGrath in a position to know that?

McGrath’s definition of history is self-refuting. History is the past. History is whatever happened. If miracles occur, then historians had better make allowance for miracles. To say historians ought to disallow miracles is synonymous with saying historians ought to disallow the past.

Moreover, historical evidence for miraculous events isn’t in a class apart from historical evidence for other past events. Historians must rely on the same kinds of evidence.

It would only make sense for historians to exclude miracles from consideration if historians knew that miracles don’t happen. But that’s a metaphysical prejudgment. That can’t be settled by appeal to made-up rules.

McGrath needs to come clean. He lost his faith in Scripture. He’s moved from the far right end of the theological spectrum to the far left end of the theological spectrum. He disallows miracles, not because that commits some methodological faux pas, but because he doesn’t think they happen. So, if he were honest, that’s where he would engage the argument. But instead, he struggles to rationalize his apostasy by ad hoc definitions of history.

Notice McGrath’s bait-n-switch. The Bible doesn’t “show itself” to be errant. This isn’t “evidence from the Bible itself.” Rather, McGrath is imputing mistakes to Scripture based on his faith in some external sources of information, which he compares to Scripture. He applies criteria extrinsic to Scripture to Scripture. So he’s judging Scripture from the outside, not the inside. He disregards the self-witness of Scripture.

“Or for that matter any Muslim or Mormon who views their sacred text as self-authenticating.”

That comparison is confused on multiple grounds:

i) A document “viewed” as self-authenticating is not equivalent to a self-authenticating document. To take a comparison, suppose two students ask to be excused from class due to headaches. One student actually has a headache. And her experience is self-authenticating. She feels pained in her head. That’s not something she can be mistaken about.

The other student feigns a headache to cut class. She falsely claims to have a headache.

These are both self-authenticating claims, but they are hardly equivalent. The fact that a claim to self-authentication may be bogus doesn’t negate genuine cases of self-authentication.

ii) By the same token, McGrath fails to distinguish between different levels of justification. If I have a headache, I’m justified in believing I have a headache. That may not be sufficient justification for you to believe that I have a headache, since you’re not privy to my experience. Likewise, the self-authenticating character of the Bible may be sufficient for defensive apologetics even if it’s insufficient for offensive apologetics. It can be adequate for Christians, even if it’s unpersuasive to an outsider.

iii) Muhammad falsified his own claims to be a prophet when he appealed to the Bible to validate his message.

iv) Joseph Smith falsified his own claims to be a prophet when he claimed to translate an Egyptian document into English, and cited an Egyptologist who supposedly vouched for his translation. Well, we have the Egyptian document, which we can compare with Smith’s alleged translation. We also have a letter from the Egyptologist disowning Smith.

What makes McGrath imagine that Hindus operate with a concept of plenary verbal inspiration?

Keep in mind that Islam and Mormonism are Judeo-Christian heresies. Naturally they’re imitative. So what?

"Some of us think that what fallible human beings need most is to become mature, responsible, discerning individuals, and that if God had given what fundamentalists claim God gave, that would have been crumbs rather than bread."

Of course, that raises the question of what God McGrath believes in. Clearly not the God of Biblical theism.

Christianity, “Putin’s Bluff” and the Arc of Recent History

Stratfor has an article out this morning, entitled Syria, America and Putin’s Bluff. The title role for Syria is really that Syria is just an afterthought – there is a “Spy-vs-Spy” kind of thing going on, in which the US really holds all the cards vs a significantly weakened Russia.

Putin is bluffing that Russia has emerged as a major world power. In reality, Russia is merely a regional power, but mainly because its periphery is in shambles. He has tried to project a strength that that he doesn't have, and he has done it well. For him, Syria poses a problem because the United States is about to call his bluff, and he is not holding strong cards.

Puddleglum thinking

"What to Read: The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life" by Luke Barnes.

Prosperity preaching from the church of the poor

If you wish to up your chances that God will hear your prayer, just remember that you get what you pay for:

http://www.vaticangift.com/contents/en-us/d25.html

http://www.vaticangift.com/contents/en-us/d9.html

http://www.vaticangift.com/contents/en-us/d29.html

Investigating the Practice of Christian Exorcism

http://journalofchristianministry.org/article/view/10287

Dharma2grace

http://dharma2grace.net/

Doubts about Darwinism

From G.K. Chesterton:

It is very far from obvious that the first rudimentary suggestion of a horn, the first faint thickening which might lead through countless generations to the growth of a horn, would be of any particular use as a horn. And we must suppose, on the Darwinian hypothesis, that the hornless animal reached his horn through unthinkable gradations of what were, for all practical purposes, hornless animal. Why should one rhinoceros be so benevolent a futurist as to start an improvement that could only help some much later rhinoceros to survive? And why on earth should its mere foreshadowing help the earlier rhinoceros to survive? This thesis can only explain variations when they discreetly refrain from varying very much. To the real riddles that arrest the eye, it has no answer that can satisfy the intelligence. For any child or man with his eyes open, I imagine, there is no creature that really calls for an answer, like a living riddle, so clearly as the bat. But if you will call up the Darwinian vision, of thousands of intermediary creatures with webbed feet that are not yet wings, their survival will seem incredible. A mouse can run, and survive; and a flitter-mouse can fly, and survive. But a creature that cannot yet fly, and can no longer run, ought obviously to have perished, by the very Darwinian doctrine which has to assume that he survived.

An Introduction to Christian Belief

http://www.prpbooks.com/Systematic-Theology-An-Introduction-to-Christian-Belief-2348.html

Theistic science

Prominent atheist Jeff Lowder recently did a post on theistic scientific explanations:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2013/09/03/science-reply-to-wk/

Due to pushback from some astute commenters, he quickly got in over his head, so it looks like he's changed the subject to a new post. I'm going to quote some of the feedback:

Neil Shenvi • 6 days ago

• −

Jeff,
Your objections are interesting, and I'll have to chew on them for a bit. However, your main objection seems heavily predicated upon the idea that theism cannot be an 'explanation' at all unless it provides a mechanism. But can you explain (no pun intended) what you mean by a 'mechanism'? You seem to assume that any 'mechanism' must involve a naturalistic description of causation (hence your objection to the Antarctic markings example used by Meyer in his book). But, in the case of theism, such a mechanism is impossible since theistic intervention would necessitate non-natural causation.

Moreover, I would question whether a mechanism really is a necessary condition for any explanation. For example, in my own field of quantum mechanics, scientists will routinely invoke 'decoherence' or 'wavefunction collapse' as explanations for observed phenomena even when the mechanism for these processes is not known either empirically or even philosophically. Yet it hardly seems appropriate to dismiss these inferences as 'non-explanatory' simply because the mechanism of the interaction is unknown.
-Neil

Neil Shenvi Jeffery Jay Lowder • 6 days ago

• −

Jeff,
Thanks for answering. I'm stuck on the following remark:

"When I refer to "mechanism," I'm simply referring to a description of how the cause "did it.""

Since you're open to the possibility of supernatural causation, could explain what a 'how' description would look like in the case of supernatural causation? All of the 'how' examples that you list appear to be mechanistic descriptions of naturalistic chains of events. Take the origin of the universe, which theists generally take to be creation ex nihilo. Could you explain what a 'mechanism' would look like for the supernatural causation of Nature from non-existence?

"Not only is that mysterious by itself, but when combined with our ignorance about how the Designer designed life, it becomes even more mysterious."

I'm not sure this line of reasoning is valid. Even if we granted that we've only observed minds associated with physical brains, design arguments do not therefore depend on 'mystification.' For instance, we could equally argue that we've never observed a sentient mind 'not dependent upon a _human_ brain' or that we've never observed a sentient mind 'not dependent upon a carbon-based body.' But would we be forced to conclude that SETI is doomed to failure because any explanation it provides will merely 'mystify' the problem of the origin of extraterrestrial signals? Obviously not.

Or imagine that one day we discovered repeatable evidence that Ouija boards allowed real communication with some unknown, intelligent source. Would we stare at the reams of generated information and still say 'Well, claiming that some disembodied mind is the source of this communication is just mystifying the problem and is not an explanation at all'? It seems to me that an open-minded person, even if they lean towards physicalism, would have to grant that -in principle- there could be evidence that would lead us to infer the existence of disembodied minds. But if that is the case, we can't reject the very idea of a divine Designer as 'mystification'.

-Neil

Neil Shenvi Jeffery Jay Lowder • 5 days ago

• −

Hi Jeffrey,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your proposed solution doesn't seem to address the actual mechanism of supernatural causation. What you've provided is a description of a supernatural chain of events (side note: which is oddly similar to Mormon beliefs!) operating according to supernatural laws. But you haven't shown _how_ this supernatural chain of events leads to a natural event, which was the key point in question. What is the mechanism by which causes in the supernatural world can produce effects in the natural world?

It's also hard to tell exactly how you distinguish 'natural' and 'supernatural.' Why couldn't a naturalist simply subsume both 'natural laws' and 'supernatural laws' into some comprehensive description of Nature in two distinct, non-overlapping regimes, much like we've currently done with general relativity and quantum mechanics? It seems the naturalist would be fully within his rights to declare that we do not have 'supernatural causation' at all, but merely two different spheres of the natural realm.

On a related note, you had originally suggested that a lack of known purpose disqualified the design hypothesis as an explanation. And you provided just such a purpose in your hypothetical example of a legitimate supernatural explanation. But if we were to hypothesize that the divine Designer is, for instance, the God of the Bible, we would indeed have a purpose for his creation of human beings: to display His glory. We can reject this suggested purpose for the Designer, but how can we say that it is less meaningful than the purpose you offered ('Joe is really fond of the number 1 trillion') as a valid answer to the 'why' question?
-Neil

Neil Shenvi Jeffery Jay Lowder • 5 days ago

• −

"I thought that I did provide the actual mechanism for supernatural causation in my hypothetical example:"

In your example, Joe creates minds out of schmatoms. If you are approaching this problem from the perspective of substance dualism, then Joe is merely creating one non-natural entity (a mind) from another non-natural entity (a schmatom). So you haven't provided a mechanism for supernatural causation of a natural event.

On the other hand, if you're approaching this issue from the perspective of some kind of supervenience (as your original response suggested), then mental events are merely properties that supervene on physical entities. So you still haven't specified _how_ schmatoms cause or influence these physical entities. So either way, it doesn't seem like you've explained what a mechanism for supernatural causation would look like.

"The design explanations I've seen so far seem to be missing a statement about the designer's goals."

I'm sure that's not the case. Creationists always identify the Designer as the God of the Bible. But since this is a de facto objection, I don't think it's a major issue. We can always append a motive to the Designer's action which is surely no less plausible than 'Joe likes the number 1 trillion' and avoid this objection.
-Neil

Neil Shenvi Jeffery Jay Lowder • 5 days ago

• −

Jeffrey,
I'm now not sure why my previous objection doesn't apply. Since your proposal involves 'laws of supernature', I suggested that a naturalist could subsume both the laws of nature and the laws of supernature into one comprehensive description of Nature. You said that this move was impossible. But you just wrote: "The laws of supernature are such that, when schmatoms are configured into an atom interactor, certain vibrations of schmatoms have corresponding effects."

In your previous article, you defined Nature as "the spatio-temporal universe of ... [entities] which [are] the kind of entity studied by physicists or chemists." If schmatoms have the (spatio-termporal) vibrational properties you suggest and interact with the natural world, is there any reason why a physicist or chemist can't study them? After all, you have already fully characterized their vibrational properties, which is more than most string theorists can claim regarding their own field of study! But if schmatoms are, after all, natural entities, then they cannot provide examples of Supernatural causation.

So, as I and Rauss have both suggested, your definition of 'mechanism' is smuggling in the assumption of naturalism. But it's hardly fair to reject supernatural explanations as non-explanations because they fail to provide a naturalistic account of the supernatural causation!

Neil Shenvi Jeffery Jay Lowder • 4 days ago


−

Jeffrey,

"Schmatoms, which behave according to laws of supernature and which can causally interact with the universe despite not being a part or product of it, are supernatural entities."

Can you explain how 'schmatoms' are different than strings vibrating in 10-dimensional space or quantum mechanical wavefunctions? Why are these entities 'natural' while 'schmatoms' are 'supernatural'?

Neil Shenvi Jeffery Jay Lowder • 5 days ago

−

"As soon as you add a motive to the content to your hypothesis, you decrease its prior probability by decreasing its modesty and its coherence."

This seems like an odd objection, since your original claim was that design explanations ideally ought to include motives. It seems a bit unreasonable to suggest that design explanations should include motives and then penalize them for providing motives. However, I think that whatever the biblical motive loses in modesty, it more than makes up for in coherence. For instance, if God created the universe to display his glory, it explains not only the creation itself, but its habitability for life, the existence of sentient creatures, the existence of free moral agents, the existence of evil, etc...

"ID theorists go to great lengths to emphasize that the intelligent designer need not be the God of the Bible." 

Yes, it's lose-lose for ID theorists. If they supply a motive from the Bible, they are creationists. If they don't, you call them on the carpet! :-)

"You can't pick and choose and say that God's reasons are unknowable when you are responding to an argument from evil, but say that God's reasons are knowable when responding to de facto objections to theistic explanation."

This is where I think presuppositionalists rightly recognize the limits of natural theology. For a Christian who believes in special revelation, it is possible to 'pick and choose' in the sense that what God has revealed is knowable (his motives for creating the universe) but what he has not (his motives for allowing any particular instance of evil) is not. See Deut. 29:29 (which was the inspiration for Harvard's original shield) for a biblical exposition of this particular point.
-Neil
Rauss Jeffery Jay Lowder • 5 days ago

−

Jeffrey,
Given what you've said, the most reasonable arguments you can make against immaterial explanations are that they are insufficiently modular and not as predictable as physical phenomena.

But this hardly rules them out as explanations.

At best you can say they are not excellent explanations, but that is provided you have some sensible standard of how one measures explanations.

As it is, you're begging the question against non-physical explanations. That's certainly not fair.

Rauss Jeffery Jay Lowder • 5 days ago

• −

As it is, by demanding immaterial explanations resemble material explanations in behavior rules out by your very criteria the immaterial.

This unexamined, arbitrary criteria serves no other known purpose. We can both acknowledge this in the spirit of honesty.

After all, even the example you gave to Neil Shenvi sneaks in a reductionist account of immateriality.

Why must immaterial things be composed of something, ie schmatoms. Doesn't this presume a reductionist paradigm without evidence?

Richard_Wein • 5 days ago

• −

Hi Jeffery,

"Compatibility is like pregnancy: a person is either pregnant or not. There is no in-between. Likewise, evidence is either compatible with a hypothesis or it’s not."

On the contrary. Surely you've heard of such ideas as the "underdetermination of theory by evidence" and the "Duhem-Quine thesis". Inferences from evidence are not purely deductive. They always involve some element of non-deductive judgement. Hence the evidence never absolutely (deductively) falsifies a hypothesis. After all, any observation could in principle be just a hallucination! So evidence is never absolutely incompatible with a hypothesis. There can only be degrees of compatibility.

Now, you might say that it's better to use some other word here, and reserve "incompatibility" for the condition where one can strictly deduce the falsehood of one proposition from another (or set of others). But I don't accept that such a restriction is required by the ordinary meaning of the word. Perhaps philosophers consistently use "incompatible" in a stricter technical sense that is restricted in this way. If that's so (and I have my doubts) then evidence can never be incompatible with a hypothesis, in this strict deductive sense.

Personally I prefer to talk about the consistency of the evidence with a hypothesis (recognising that such consistency is a matter of degree). But I wouldn't object to anyone using the word "compatibility" instead, as long as they understand that compatibility (in this context) comes in degrees.

Incidentally, many apparently precise concepts turn out to be fuzzy to some degree, and pregnancy is one of those. The concept is not sufficiently well-defined for there to be an absolutely precise moment in time when a woman goes from being not pregnant to being pregnant, just as there is no precise moment in time when life evolved from non-life, or a precise moment in time when one species evolves from another species. So there is a brief interval when a woman is neither pregnant nor not pregnant; her pregnancy state is undefined.

Mistaking fuzzy distinctions for absolute dichotomies is in my view a major cause of error in philosophy.

Why Christian parents get nervous about evidence

http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2013/09/why_christian_parents_get_nerv.html

Manichean open theism

http://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/42/42-2/42-2-pp251-269_JETS.pdf

Creative intelligence

How important is the role of time in the debate between young-earth creationists, old-earth creationists, theistic evolutionists, and naturalistic evolutionists? 

i) By definition, the time-factor is a defining feature of young-earth creationism. That said, the time-factor is intrinsically important to naturalistic evolution in a way that's not the case for young-earth creationism. For young-earth creationism, the time-factor is inasmuch as proponents think that's what the Bible teaches, and what the Bible teaches is true. So the time-factor is important in association with other essentials, even though the time-factor may not be essential in its own right.

By contrast, millions and billions of years are a necessary condition of naturalistic evolution. That's because intelligence is a far more efficient problem-solving strategy than dumb luck. 

Take hacking someone's password or pin number. You could rely on dumb luck. Manually input random numbers. And it's mathematically possible that you'd luck out the very first time. But given the daunting number of possible combinations, it's more likely that you will die of old age before you hit on the right combination. 

Or you can do it the smart way. For instance, people often use memorable passwords and pin numbers. Something easy to recall because they associate it with something significant in their life, like a birthdate, address, name of a relative or girlfriend. And some of that information is in the public domain. So, rather than run all the possible permutations, hackers can sometimes take shortcuts.

But because naturalistic evolution is a mindless process, it takes enormous amounts of time to get lucky every once and a while. 

ii) Of course, that's, at best, a necessary rather than a sufficient condition. Naturalistic evolution has to get lucky surprisingly often. Take the theory of convergent evolution. Supposedly, evolution blindly developed echolocation on two separate occasions (bats, dolphins), the camera eye on three separate occasions (mammals, jellyfish, squids and octopuses ), and flight on four separate occasions (birds, bats, insects, pterosaurs). Placentals and marsupials are another example. One can ask how plausible that is. If this were a casino, security would be hauling you off to a soundproof room for interrogation–or worse. 

If an amateur poker player can stay in the game long enough, he will be dealt winning hands at random. The problem is that, for every winning hand he's randomly dealt, he's dealt many more losing hands. Even if he can afford the initial buy-in, dumb luck will exhaust his little pile of chips long before the next winning hand comes to him by chance. 

And that's another problem with naturalistic evolution. For every lucky break, how many times does natural selection deal itself a losing hand? How can evolution stay in the game? 

Dropping the metaphor, natural selection needs something to work on. Something to build on. How can a trial and error process succeed if it breaks down far more often than it builds a bridge? Where's the continuity? What keeps things going during a long losing streak? 

iii) In addition, evolution is supposed to be an incremental process. Steps rather than skips.  Intelligence can take intuitive shortcuts. Compare Capablanca with computer chess. Capablanca could just take things in at a glance. Great mathematicians (e.g. Henri Poincaré, Paul Cohen, Benoit Mandelbrot, Andrew Wiles) can solve problems through a flash of insight. Or take the physical intuition of great scientists (e.g. Newton, Einstein, Pauling, Feynman). Take thought-experiments like Einstein's train and Newton's cannon. By contrast, naturalistic evolution lacks foresight–or even sight. It just lumbers along. 

iv) Even if old-earth creationism (i.e. progressive creationism) is correct, it seems to be the right answer to the wrong problem. The real conflict isn't over time scales, but competing narratives. What fills the intervals of time. 

And it isn't just a question of sequential or nonsequential narration. The Bible tells a very different story of origins. Not just a question of when it happened, or in what order, but how and what happened. 

v) Some professing Christians take refuge in theistic evolution. But is that a satisfactory fallback position?

a) To begin with, what's the relationship between the theistic component and the evolutionary component? Are these independent or interdependent? Are they theistic evolutionists because they think there's convincing evidence for God's existence as well as convincing evidence for evolution, so they simply combine these two propositions? Or do they think God has an instrumental role in evolution?

b) Apropos (a), do they reject naturalistic evolution because they think a mindless process is unable get the job done? Do they think the only feasible form of evolution is guided evolution?

But if a natural process can't succeed without this deus ex machina, why believe in evolution in the first place? If you're invoking God to shore up deficiencies in evolution, isn't that a reason to scap the evolutionary paradigm? 

vi) The evolutionary worldview is at odds with the Biblical worldview. At best, theistic evolution says God front-loaded the process. But after that, it unfolds on its own. That's a noninterventionist deity. Essentially evolutionary deism.

By contrast, the Bible depicts an interventionist deity. And not just God. You also have interventionist spirits (angels, demons).

To be sure, the Bible also has a doctrine of ordinary providence. In Scripture, the relationship between miracle and providence is analogous to respiration. Respiration is normally an unconscious process. Self-regulating. An autonomic function. Yet it's possible for us to consciously control our rate of respiration. We can override the default setting. That's useful for swimmers and divers. 

Likewise, natural processes are normally automatic. Like a machine. But agents can intervene at will.  

vii) Another problem with theistic evolution is that if you accept evolutionary history, then it seems to be an utterly random process rather than a guided process. "Random" in the sense that world events are independent of what species need to survive. You have natural disasters that result in mass extinction of most species. Whether they survive or perish seems to be an accident of timing. Finding yourself at the wrong place at the wrong time. 

The process appears to be groping rather than guided. Uncoordinated. Indifferent to collateral damage. Like a twisted freeway interchange where most onramps and offramps abruptly end–dangling in midair. So many roads to nowhere. So many false starts. So may dead-ends. 

If God is directing the evolutionary process, he seems to be hopelessly lost. A driver without a map or compass–much less GPS–who tries out alternate routes to see which, if any, lead to the destination. 

The tower of Babel

http://butthesethingsarewritten.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-tower-of-babel.html

Be still

Be still, for the presence of the Lord, the Holy One, is here.
Come bow before him now, with reverence and fear.
In him no sin is found, we stand on holy ground.
Be still, for the presence of the Lord, the Holy One, is here.

Be still, for the glory of the Lord is shining all around.
He burns with holy fire, with splendour he is crowned.
How awesome is the sight, our radiant King of light!
Be still, for the glory of the Lord is shining all around

Be still, for the power of the Lord is moving in this place.
He comes to cleanse and heal, to minister his grace.
No work too hard for him, in faith, receive from him.
Be still, for the power of the Lord is moving in this place.