Arminian marionettes

Jerry Walls got wind of a post I did:

https://www.facebook.com/JerryLWalls/posts/10153709390210676?pnref=story 

For most internet Arminians I know, there's a chasm between their self-image and reality. 

i) To begin with, they claim to be oh-so loving, but if they dislike your theology, they instantly impute the worst possible motives to you. 

They aren't loving at all. It's just a flattering self-image. An acid test of love is how you treat people you disagree with, people you naturally dislike. In my extensive experience, internet Arminians almost uniformly fail that test. They turn John 3:16 into "For we so loved ourselves." 

They assume a maternal disapproving tone, like a first grade teacher berating a child and trying to make him feel bad. "Now Tommy, you should be ashamed! What would Mommy think!" 

ii) In addition, their behavior falsifies their claim to be libertarian free agents. All that Walls had to do was introduce the post by mentioning that it was written by a Calvinist, and their conditioned reflexes spring right into action. Arminians are so predictable, so Pavlovian in that regard. 

They have a preexisting narrative about Calvinists. All that's required to trigger the desired reaction is to begin with the word "Calvinist" or "Calvinism." That pushes their buttons. Once you begin with that word, everything else they read is filtered through their jaundiced lens. It's funny to see people who pride themselves on libertarian free agency who are so easily and irresistibly led by the nose. 

iii) I also see that annihilationists like Glenn Peoples and Peter Grice pile on. That's fine. Tells you something about the theological center of gravity over there. 

iv) Then you have the hypocritical reaction to satire. Yet Jerry himself posts satires of Calvinism. Take his "Joy to the World" satire a while back. Likewise, the Society of Evangelical Arminians posts many satires of Calvinism. 

But once again, that demonstrates the chasm between their self-image and reality. Their theological protestations notwithstanding, they don't believe in equal treatment. They say that because it makes them feel morally superior, but in reality they are pure partisans.

v) Then you have the faux outrage over a satire about hell. Do they feel the same way about movies like Drag me to Hell, or TV shows like Reaper, Brimestone, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer? 

vi) Notice how the whole conversation revolves around Calvinism. That's not because my post had anything to do with Calvinism or Arminianism. It didn't spoof his Arminianism, but his views on Purgatory and hell.

So why does their reaction fixate on Calvinism? That's because Jerry gratuitously recast the topic in terms of Calvinism, so when they read the post, they have "Calvinism" etched on their spectacles. They see it everywhere in the post even though it's nowhere to be found in the post. They are so suggestible. 

Just like puppets. That's their favorite metaphor for Calvinism (along with robots), yet they themselves act just like puppets. They are so easily manipulated. Jerry pulls their strings and they dance to his tune. 

vii) Apropos (vi), they are unable to draw an elementary distinction between fiction and real life. If I write a fictional story about someone going to hell, that must be because I think he's hellbound in real life.

Would any reasonable person draw that inference? No. 

But their Arminian programming has primed them to assume the worst. Their reaction is so…dare I say…robotic! 

One of them whined:

That little story made a lot of smoke but no fire. If you're going to do satire, the least you can do is make a point. All this does is arbitrarily say "Jerry Walls"—you know, that guy who's wrong about hell and purgatory. End of story. Rather disappointing.

That's because it never focussed on Walls. My little story parodies many things: ethnic stereotypes, the high school caste system, male adolescent fantasies, horror tropes (e.g. The Omen), &c. Walls was just a part of that.

Moreover, it was written for fun. Anyone who knows much about creative writing knows that it has its own momentum. A writer may just go with the flow. One thing leads to another. 

viii) Then you have the groupies who complain that if I wish to critique him, I should write something serious instead of satirical fiction. Of course, I've posted extensive of his material. But they make these uninformed attacks because they live in the bubble of internet Arminianism. 

ix) With rare exception, internet Arminians never disappoint my low expectations. 

Martin Milner

Martin Milner died a few days ago. I remember him from Adam-12, which I used to watch as a kid. It's a corny period piece, with dated jargon. Typical of Jack Webb productions, it took very idealistic and sanitized view of policing. And I expect the pacing would drag by contemporary standards.

It was notable for the onscreen camaraderie between Milner and co-star Kent McCord–which extended to offscreen camaraderie. They maintained their friendship right up to Milner's death. 

Milner was a bland, but likable actor who had a knack for making friends–due to the fact that his family moved frequently when he was a kid. Stationed at Fr. Ord, Milner befriended future actors David Janssen, Richard Long, and Clint Eastwood. His big break came when he won a gin rummy game with Jack Webb, who couldn't pony up at the time, but repaid him by giving him jobs. 

In fact, he made two popular buddy series: Adam-12 and Route 66. The latter had the added attraction of being in the road movie genre. That goes all the way back to ancient yarns like the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh (another buddy story).

Milner was very down-to-earth. As he said in an interview:

Mr. Milner had no illusions about his place in the Hollywood firmament and seemed not to be particularly concerned about it.

“The really big stars have a drive that made them into superstars,” he said in an interview with The Toronto Star in 1994. “They can’t turn it off when they have that success. I certainly was not driven by a great dedication that made me succeed or else.” 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/arts/television/martin-milner-dies-at-83-actor-made-his-name-on-route-66.html

In that respect he reminds me of Victor Mature, another actor who retired early after he made enough money to live on comfortably for the rest of his life.

Unlike many Hollywood actors, Milner was married to the same woman (for 64 years!) He made keeping his family together a priority:

Because filming was done on location around the country, Milner spent much of his time away from his home in Sherman Oaks, California, where his wife Judy and 1-1/2-year-old daughter Amy remained when the series started filming. On location in New Orleans for a month, he recalled phoning his wife. Judy informed him that their daughter had told her playmates that she did not have a father. As Milner put it in an interview with Silver Screen in February 1963, "she couldn't understand why I wasn't around. I had been gone for a month, and she figured I was gone for keeps."  It was then that he and Judy decided the family would stay together on this Route 66 adventure. Judy and Amy joined him for the remainder of filming for the season.  

Milner had a huge rack built on top of his new Chevy Green Briar sports wagon to carry luggage and belongings and built extra cribs or beds as needed to accommodate his growing family. While filming went on during the daytime, Judy dropped off and picked up Amy from preschools (a new one in each town), bought groceries, went to laundromats and dry cleaners, and shopped for two of her favorite things, antiques and pewter. 

http://army.togetherweserved.com/army/servlet/tws.webapp.WebApps?cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=Person&ID=343054

I don't know that he was a Christian. I've read he was a churchgoing Methodist, but that doesn't tell you much. However, his unpretentious life exemplified certain common grace values that are rare in his circles. 

"If God truly loves me, he must love those I love."

Who said this?

"If God truly loves me, he must love those I love."

a) Matthew Vines (homosexual activist)

b) Jonathan Merritt (homosexual activist)

c) Jerry Walls (Wesleyan philosopher)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eQKu3_9pgk&feature=share (@8:55)

Preformationism

From time to time I've read "scholars" opine that people in OT times (or primitive people generally) didn't think the mother made a constitutive contribution in procreation. She was just an incubator. Sometimes they describe it like preformationism, where the man injects homunculi into the woman. 

Now, for all I know, there were ancient people who thought in those terms. However, I'm skeptical about imputing that to ancient people or primitive people in general. It doesn't require a knowledge of modern embryology to sense holes in that theory. The evidence available to prescientific people made that theory dubious.

i) You don't have to be terribly observant to notice that family resemblance isn't confined to fathers and their offspring. Kids bear a resemblance to the mother as well as the father. Sometimes kids resemble one parent more than another.

I imagine that this even functioned as a prescientific maternity or paternity test. If, however, the mother was thought to make no positive contribution to the constitution of the child, why would it look like her at all? 

Jews were very concerned with maternity, paternity, and heredity (i.e. legitimate heirs). So that's something they'd pay attention to. 

ii) If men were thought to make the sole constitutive contribution in procreation, how could they beget females as well as males? Wouldn't you expect them to beget a version of themselves, what was most like them, if they alone made the constitutive contribution in sexual reproduction? After their kind (i.e. male=male)?

iii) Babies don't look like miniature adults. In addition, primitive people had the sad experience of miscarriage. And preemies look even less like miniature adults. 

iv) Finally, if ancient people ate bird eggs, that would acquaint them with stages of gestation. They'd find wild eggs at different stages of gestation. And the domestication of chickens antedates OT times.  

If they drew analogies between that and human pregnancy, it's inconsistent with preformationism.

I'm not suggesting that everyone wondered about these things. But the ancient world had its share of attentive, inquisitive people.

Gay demon couples

The next frontier in social justice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEKVSqX_cNQ

Revenge killings, honor killings, and Scripture

i) Some atheists as well as some Muslims say the Bible endorses honor-killings. The allegation is based on equivocal definitions. In Islam, if a female is raped, then she has brought dishonor on her kin. It's not the rapist who dishonored her or her kin. Rather, the rape victim dishonored her kin by allowing herself to be raped (not that she could stop it.) Therefore, it is not the rapist who is punished, but the rape victim.

Needless to say, the Bible doesn't begin to endorse honor-killings in that sense. 

ii) Now, there is a sense in which the Bible contains honor-killings, viz. Gen 34 & 2 Sam 13. These, however, are very different from honor-killings in the Muslim sense:

a) It is not the rape victim, but the rapist and/or his male kinfolk who is (are) punished. In the case of Gen 34, the rapist's male relatives are considered complicit in the crime.

b) These are honor-killings in the sense of revenge killings. Male relatives of the rape victim avenge their dishonored relative by exacting retribution on the perpetrator and/or his clan. 

So (a) & (b) operate with an honor code that's the polar opposite of Muslim honor-killings. 

iii) These are Biblical examples rather than Biblical commands. Descriptive rather than proscriptive. 

iv) I've read four commentators (Arnold, Chisholm, Vannoy, Youngblood) who classify Absolom's action as "murder." However, the account itself doesn't characterize his action as murder.

Arnold goes so far as to say his action was "totally unjustified." But this seems to be a case of commentators projecting their scruples onto the text rather than deriving that value-judgment from the text.

The Mosaic Law made provision for the avenger of blood–although that meant avenging a murderer rather than a rapist. But the point is, the Mosaic Law didn't treat a revenge-killing as ipso facto illicit. 

At a minimum, Absolom's action is mitigated by David's dereliction. Because David did nothing to punish the perpetrator, it was up to Absolom to defend his sister's honor. 

From an OT perspective, it's not clear to me that that's murderous or even culpable. At the very least, there were extenuating circumstances. In fact, I can imagine ancient readers who'd consider it dishonorable if Absolom didn't avenge the crime committed against his sister. Certainly David's failure in that regard is dishonorable. 

Falling off a motorbike

I expect this will be my last post on the late William Provine. Here's an arresting clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy43bFoLk6M

In the video he says:

Oh, I was a Christian but I never heard anything about evolution because it was illegal to teach it in Tennessee.

All that changed when he studied biology at the Chicago U:

I read that book so carefully, I could find no sign of there being any sign of design whatsoever in evolution and I immediately began to doubt the existence of a deity. 

i) It's puzzling to hear him say he never heard of evolution when he was growing up. If, say, he was attending a "fundamentalist" church, then you'd expect him to hear about evolution, since opposition to evolution is a defining feature of fundamentalism. 

Perhaps he just means he wasn't exposed to the "science" of evolution in school. When he took high school biology, evolution was ignored. 

Still, that's not what he says. 

ii) It's striking that he doesn't say he lost his faith because evolution conflicted with Genesis, but because it conflicted with design.

iii) It's naive for him to suppose that a secular textbook would even consider design in evolution. 

iv) But now to my main point: he grew up in the South; I grew up in the North. He grew up in the 40s-50s, I grew up in the 60-70s.

I can't recall a time when I hadn't heard of evolution. That was taken for granted by the pop media and general culture when I was a kid. I can't remember I time when I wasn't aware of evolution. The idea of evolution was something I subconsciously picked up through cultural osmosis.  

Conversely, in the churches I attended as a kid, I don't recall the creation/evolution issue ever discussed. I don't recall a single sermon on Gen 1-2. (I'm not saying that's a good thing.)

At some point, on my own, I became cognizant of a potential conflict between the two. 

The point, though, is that evolutionary theory could never have the shock value for me that it had for Provine. It was never a thunderbolt that knocks your socks off. 

Growing up, I had a casual knowledge of evolution and a casual knowledge of Genesis. But it was only after I became I Christian that I was motivated to think deeply about either one. 

In a sense, that took a lot of the psychological friction out of the issue. Because Provine apparently had no warning, it was like riding a motorbike on a hot day without a shirt. If you have an accident, there's nothing between your bare skin and the pavement. You leave skin behind as you decelerate. 

But for me, there was that preparatory "space". Just by knowing ahead of time about evolution, before I became a Christian, the conflict didn't precipitate a crisis. Even though I didn't have great answers at the time, advance knowledge of the conflict protected me from the raw sudden impact in a way that Provine wasn't spared. 

For good or ill, our upbringing is so influential. It predisposes us to view issues in a certain way. 

After the dust settles

As a teacher of evolutionary biology, I have seen a minority of students every year move from weakly held theism to a naturalist evolutionary position. Strongly religious students deepen their faith from my evolution course; the course regularly ends with more creationists than when it began. Students who are already naturalist delight in what they find in evolution. William Provine, "Evolution, Religion, and Science" The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (2006), 679.

That's very interesting. You'd expect a course like this to have a sorting action. 

The fact that some nominal theists lost their faith when they took his class is unsurprising. What's striking is that after the dust settles, "the course regularly ends with more creationists than when it began."

That's despite the fact that he proselytizes for naturalistic evolution. Despite the fact that he had an advantage over students by knowing more about the subject than they do.

Yet in spite of that pressure, more students moved into the creationist camp than the naturalistic evolutionary camp. 

There's a cliche about Christians losing their faith when they go to college. But some stand firm, and others people find their faith when they go to college. 

Does God heal?

I'm going to respond to philosophical theologian concering prayer and miraculous healing:

https://stephenjgraham.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/does-god-heal/

https://stephenjgraham.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/divine-healing-my-charismatic-deconversion/

i) I agree with him that there's lots of charlatanry and wishful thinking in the charismatic movement. 

ii) I agree with him that his mother-in-law's experience doesn't rise to the level of apodictic proof. 

That said:

iii) He seems to think that in order to credit a miracle, you must first rule out every alternative explanation. But surely that's not our general practice in assessing claims.

Take a missing person report. It's possible that they got lost in the woods and died. It's possible that they were murdered, and the killer concealed the remains. And it's possible that they were abducted by aliens. 

But reasonable people wouldn't say that unless you can rule out an alien abduction, you can't say it's more likely that they went missing because they were murdered or got lost. 

Why does he hold a miracle report to a standard where you must eliminate all other explanations before you are justified in crediting a miracle? He seems to think that unless the evidence for a miracle is unquestionable, it would be unwarranted to credit the miracle. 

But that's not an evidentiary standard we apply to other claims. In general, our explanations for a given event are provisional explanations. We allow for the possibility that that could be mistaken. But we don't make the possibility of error a condition for precluding that explanation, if that's what the evidence seems to indicate. 

Why not say, "In this case the evidence points to a miracle. That's the best explanation, given the available evidence-although it's possible that there's a natural explanation." 

Why does he give preference for a natural explanation unless you are able to absolutely exclude a natural explanation? Isn't he begging the question by presuming that supernatural events are less likely to be true than natural events?

iv) He says:

If healings were far more frequent…then we might have more reason to accept such healing instances as divine in origin.

I don't see how that follows. If healings were far more frequent, then it's easy to anticipate skeptics saying that just proves the placebo effect or spontaneous remission is more common than we suspected. Or that we live in the kind of universe where natural laws make that more frequent.

v) He doesn't furnish any evidence that people who suffer from chronic migraines randomly experience total spontaneous remission. He doesn't furnish any evidence that chronic migraines are responsive to the placebo effect. 

For all I know, that may be the case. But he just talks in abstract generalities. He doesn't furnish any specific evidence to that effect vis-a-via migraines. 

vi) Since his mother-in-law was routinely "in the emotionally charged atmosphere of a healing crusade or [charismatic]worship service," if the placebo effect is germane, why would that be a one-time experience for her? If, moreover, it was the placebo effect, then that would quickly wear off, but in her case, the cessation of migraines was permanent. 

vii) I don't see that the lottery is a good analogy. Although any individual is statistically unlikely to win the lottery, it is set up so that someone is bound to win the lottery. The lottery is designed to produce occasional winners. So that's not just coincidental. Although you have to get luckily to win the lottery, it isn't pure luck.

By the same token, the lottery is designed so that most most individuals will lose. That isn't just bad luck. 

viii) Is "spontaneous remission" a naturalistic alternative to a miracle? Is that an identifiable mechanism? Or is that just what doctors say when they don't have a scientific explanation? Does "spontaneous remission" have any explanatory value. Does that actually explain anything? Or is that a euphemistic way of saying the phenomenon defies natural explanation?

ix) The fact that it happens every so often doesn't ipso facto make that natural rather than supernatural. After all, if miracle occur, they happen every so often. That don't happen all the time. So infrequency is consistent with a miraculous explanation. 

x) Likewise, he classifies improved eyesight as one of those ailments that's subject to spontaneous remission. But he supplies no evidence to corroborate his claim. What does he mean by "improved eyesight"? Does he simply mean someone's testimony that their eyesight got better?

I had an older relative who was diagnosed with macular degeneration. She prayed about it, and her eyesight improved. Her opthalmalogist was stumped. 

Is macular degeneration is subject to spontaneous remission? 

xi) He raises a stock objection which is typically raised by atheists:

Which brings me to a second powerful point against believing in regular divine healing: confirmation bias. I’ve discovered that many people who believe in divine healings can recite a few examples of a person recovering from some disease or disorder. However, what they tend to forget are the many – vastly superior number – of occasions where the person prayed for does NOT get healed. Believers naturally remember the times when prayer has been “successful” and, forgetting all the “unsuccessful” prayers, they seem to have a tendency to think that they therefore have some powerful evidence for the efficacy of healing prayers, when in fact it’s a combination of coincidence and forgetfulness.

a) I might well agree with him that we lack evidence for regular divine healing. 

b) He makes the textbook mistake of supposing that "unsuccessful" prayers cancel out the evidence for "successful" prayer. But that's very careless. 

The identification of answered prayer isn't just statistical. It concerns specificity of need, timing, opportune convergence of causally independent events, &c. As Lydia McGrew recently put it:

There is almost never some crucial, falsifying _test_ that an hypothesis fails and is then no longer rationally believable, particularly if there is a tough web made up of a variety of reasons for believing that proposition. For example, even if you inexplicably stopped hearing from a family member at some point and never heard from him again for the rest of your life and could never figure out what in the world happened, you could well have sufficient _other_ evidence to believe that this family member did exist or had existed. (Old photographs, previous letters or e-mails from him, the memories of other people, etc.) 

Some event can be evidence for an hypothesis, but the non-occurrence of the event may have virtually no value as evidence against it. For example, my receiving a phone call seemingly from my brother is good evidence for his existence, but my not receiving a phone call of that kind is virtually no evidence at all against his existence. This is why arguments from silence are often so weak.

In sum, he's overreacting to his charismatic background. He got his fingers burned, so now he's afraid of matches.

Creation and extinction

The late William Provine was a leading evolutionary biologist. More substantive that Richard Dawkins. Here he explains why he thinks the impression of design in nature is illusory: 

Understanding evolution does not undermine many beliefs in god: deism, gods that work through natural phenomena, gods invented from tortured arguments by theologians or academics, and many others. Understanding evolution is, nevertheless, the most efficient engine of atheism ever discovered by humans. It challenges the primary, worldwide, observable reason for belief in a deity: the feeling of intelligent design in biological organisms, including humans.

The feeling of intelligent design disappears in the perspective of evolution…So, of the 50,000 or so species, all but twenty-five went extinct…Even with all the exquisite adaptations that smack of an intelligent designer, these vertebrates were poor survivors.  

Natural selection is not a mechanism, does no work, does not act, does not shape, does not cause anything…Natural selection is the outcome of a very complex process that basically boils down to heredity, genetic variation, ecology, and demographics (especially the overproduction of offspring, and constant struggle). The adaptations that evolve we call "naturally selected"…The process also virtually guarantees extinction when the environment changes sufficiently, which it often does. The intelligent design apparent in the adaptations has no inkling of environmental change. The pattern of extinction, however, is precisely what one would expect of the causes of natural selection.   

Every organism that has become extinct (about 99+ per cent of all species that have ever lived) was jam-packed with adaptations. Some of those adaptations became detriments to the organism when the environment changed and caused the organism to become extinct. The better an organism is adapted to a particular environment, the more certain it is that it will become instinct when the environment changes. Adaptations are hopelessly tied with extinction. The feeling of intelligent design in organisms must thus be tied to extinctions, too. That is why evolutionists give up on the feeling of intelligent design.  

The second reason why understanding evolution precludes the feeling of intelligent design is that evolution also shows no hint of progress. 

Each of these infectious agents has evolved as long as humans have existed. I can see no hierarchy whatsoever in the productions of evolution. Any deity that would work this way seems perfectly awful to me. The process that produced these very different pathogens and humans just happens, and speaking as if evolution "cared" about its production is unintelligible.  

These two reasons to reject the feeling of intelligent design in biological organisms are just a sample of compelling reasons. The famous evolutionist George C. Williams has written an essay on the evolution of social behavior, and concludes that social behavior in animals is nothing less than ghastly, and any hope we have as humans to have a decent moral world is to fight fiercely against the selfishness that evolution has produced in us. "Evolution, Religion, and Science" The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (2006).

i) On thing that's striking about this is how much is just a variation on the so-called problem of natural evil or so-called problem of animal suffering. A standard theodicy which fields that problem will already cover most of this ground. By the same token, most of this isn't uniquely evolutionary. 

ii) In YEC, God creates all the nature kinds at the outset. They diversify from thereon out. In OEC, God introduces natural kinds is staggered fashion. YEC is more synchronic, OEC is more diachronic. But in both cases, once made, natural kinds are subject to adaptation. Creationism allows for adaptation and microevolution. 

Mass extinction due to overspecialization and environmental change is not at odds with YEC or OEC. Even if organisms are divinely designed, they will vulnerable to extinction if their environment changes too fast or too drastically. Although evolution implies mass extinction, you can have mass extinction apart from evolution. Absent providential protection, you can have mass extinction even if evolution is false.  

iii) To take a comparison, our hitech civilization is utterly dependent on electricity. Our technology is junk without electricity. A natural disaster could render our technology useless. But it would hardly mean our technology wasn't designed.

iv) It's true that there's a tradeoff between specialization and adaptability. It's unclear why Provine supposes that's inconsistent with design. To be a creature is to have built-in limitations and inherent vulnerabilities. Even omnipotence can't make an unlimited creature. 

Different organisms exemplify different possibilities. Each design has distinctive advantages and corresponding disadvantages. That's not a design flaw. That's a necessary tradeoff.  

Variety is not inconsistent with divine design. Indeed, theists who espouse the principle of the plenum think variety is a virtue. God creates the greatest compossible variety. 

v) Perhaps Provine imagines that mass extinction is inconsistent with divine foresight and/or divine benevolence. To begin with, it is unclear, as a matter of principle, why the extinction of a species is problematic for theism but the extinction of an individual is not. A species is just a collection of individuals.

What if most organisms are temporary by design? God never intended for most organisms to be immort. And most organisms don't know what they are missing. They lack consciousness. In Biblical theism, immortality was never the common property of most lifeforms. 

That's only clearly reserved for humans and angels. It's possible that God will resurrect some animals–perhaps animals dear to sainted Christians. 

vi) Perhaps Provine thinks it would be pointless for God to create organisms that become extinct. But isn't there a sense in which everything at present becomes extinct when it becomes history? The past is what was, not what is. There's a sense in which the 19C is now extinct. It went extinct when it slipped into the irretrievable past. It no longer exists–at least not in our current timeframe. (This could also devolve into a debate over the A-theory and the B-theory of time.)

But does that mean history is pointless. It wasn't pointless to people at the time. It wasn't pointless for them. 

Is Provine viewing it from a retrospective standpoint? Is he suggesting that looking back on the past from our vantage-point, it is pointless? If so, what makes our perspective normative? What privileges the present perspective? Suppose you were to view it from a prospective standpoint. There's a sense in which the future is irrelevant to me. The year 2100 is irrelevant to me, if I'm dead by them. But the future is hardly irrelevant to people living in the future. 

vii) If there was no afterlife, then Provine would have a point. But natural history doesn't speak to that issue. 

viii) Provine fails to make allowance for the Fall. Humans are liable to illness, aging, and death due to the Fall. I agree with him that those conditions always existed in nature. The world at large was never Edenic. Life inside the garden was sheltered from those asperities.

Obviously, Provine doesn't believe in the Fall. But my immediate point is one of consistency. The phenomena he documents don't count as evidence against Biblical theism, for that's consistent with life outside the Garden. 

ix) Yes, the social behavior of animals is often ghastly by human standards, but that's because different species have different natures. What's morally decent or indecent is, to some degree, indexed on the nature of the creature. 

x) I agree with him that the evolutionary narrative is not progressive. But there's a sense in which creationism is not progressive. YEC is essentially cyclical. God creates natural kinds, which thereafter reproduce after there kind. Although there's some progression in the initial series of creative fiats, once that's complete, once the ecosystem is put in place, it continues as is. Periodicity rather than progressivity in the natural order. Yet that's hardly antithetical to divine design. 

In OEC, there's some progressivity. Creation occurs in stages. God initiates one stage at a time. After that plays out, that's replaced by the next stage. That's in part because they can't all coexist. Some organisms requires a different biospheric conditions. 

In OEC, natural history is analogous to human history. Just as you have distinctive periods in human history, with distinctive successive cultures, natural history is analogous. In OEC, man is phased in late in the curve, as the culmination of the process. After than you have the eschaton. It's like a transgenerational novel. If YEC is more cyclical, OEC is more epochal. In addition, although they diverge on the distant past, they converge on human history.

To Conservative Roman Catholics, “Pope Francis” is Like the Borgia Popes

Conservative Roman Catholics will take some comfort in this. To them, “Pope Francis” is like the Borgia popes – for all the havoc they caused, they are issuing no “teaching”. In fact, that is the message:

Conservative dissent is brewing inside the Vatican

In front of the camera, Burke said he would “resist” liberal changes — and seemed to caution Francis about the limits of his authority. “One must be very attentive regarding the power of the pope,” Burke told the French news crew.

Papal power, Burke warned, “is not absolute.” He added, “The pope does not have the power to change teaching [or] doctrine.”

And yet, many Roman Catholics are not so sure as Burke seems to be. The thought is that the door is still open to havoc; this pope can still move ahead in some “unauthorized” direction, and the “conservatives”" want to help out by taking matters into their own hands:

Burke’s words belied a growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast emerging as a culture war over Francis’s papacy and the powerful hierarchy that governs the Roman Catholic Church. …

On Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer shelter to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum-seekers risking all to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty.

Yet as he upends church convention, Francis also is grappling with a conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the church. In more than a dozen interviews, including with seven senior church officials, insiders say the change has left the hierarchy more polarized over the direction of the church than at any point since the great papal reformers of the 1960s.

The conservative rebellion is taking on many guises, in public comments, yes, but also in the rising popularity of conservative Catholic Web sites promoting Francis dissenters; books and promotional materials backed by conservative clerics seeking to counter the liberal trend; and leaks to the news media, aimed at Vatican reformers.

In his recent comments, Burke was also merely stating fact. Despite the vast powers of the pope, church doctrine serves as a kind of constitution. And for liberal reformers, the bruising theological pushback by conservatives is complicating efforts to translate the pope’s transformative style into tangible changes.

In reality, there is nothing new here. The liberals, as usual, want “change”. The conservatives, despite many centuries-worth of convoluted “developments” cry semper eadem. It's just one big happy family, with happy, happy, joy, joy, unity.

Faith Alone In Hilary Of Poitiers

Hilary of Poitiers' commentary on Matthew was recently translated into English by D.H. Williams (Commentary On Matthew [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012]). Williams, a patristic scholar who's a Protestant, thinks Paul's concept of justification through faith alone is found in Hilary's commentary. Hilary uses the term "faith alone" in some places when describing his view of justification, and some of his other remarks suggest the same concept without using that terminology. However, elsewhere Hilary makes comments that are suggestive of baptismal regeneration or some other form of justification through works.

Disputes over justification in the church fathers involve several issues. I want to outline some of those before going on to discuss Hilary's significance.

10 Public Officials Who Defied the Law Over Gay Marriage Mostly Silent on Kim Davis Case

http://dailysignal.com/2015/09/03/10-public-officials-who-defied-the-law-over-gay-marriage-mostly-silent-on-kim-davis-case/

Why We're Losing Liberty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIfgD6_hofI&feature=youtu.be

The will of the elites

First, progressives can never be taken seriously when they lecture about the “rule of law.” They couldn’t possibly care less about it. If they want “the law” to be obeyed, then why are they crucifying some clerk in some county in Kentucky while celebrating sanctuary cities? And why are they cheering her imprisonment for not signing her name to a piece of paper, yet remaining silent on the multiple felonies committed by Hillary Clinton? Why do they throw stones at a clerk who inconvenienced a few homosexuals, but defend a secretary of state who put our national security at risk by conducting classified business using a private server stored in a bathroom closet?

I mean, the rule of law? THE RULE OF LAW? Sorry for screaming, but I’m afraid my head might explode if I see or hear one more leftist use that term. Where were these progressive proponents of “law” when Barack Obama was illegally enacting the DREAM Act? Where were they when this administration unilaterally and illegally changed Obamacare repeatedly and without congressional consent? Where were they when the IRS was targeting conservative groups? Or when the Department of Justice was prosecuting journalists? Or when Obama was assassinating American citizens?

As a matter of fact, forget all of this, where were they — where was anyone — when this government was running weapons to Syrian terrorists through the consulate in Libya, which led directly to the assassination of an American diplomat, which the administration then lied about in front of the American people? We don’t even talk about that, do we? No, we’re too preoccupied with our mission to hunt down rogue pencil-pushers.

And I wonder how many of these solemn believers in “law” were the same ones making excuses for riots a few months ago? How many are offended by a woman refusing to file paperwork, but were sympathetic to barbarians who burned half a city to the ground?

The hypocrisy is absolutely staggering. These pious little preachers of “law” couldn’t actually give less of a damn about the law. This is about dogma. It always has been.

Second, speaking of which, the Obergefell v. Hodges decision had absolutely nothing to do with the law. Gay “marriage” was forced upon the states by five human beings in black robes sitting in a big stone temple in D.C. The Constitution, which clearly says nothing about gay “marriage,” was ignored. The consent of the people — many of whom live in states, like Kentucky, where the Constitution expressly defines marriage as between a man a woman — was not respected or even considered. If Kim Davis is a government official making up her own laws as she goes along, she’s only following the precedent of the federal government. The only difference is that her “made-up” law is the one that existed before a handful of federal judges made up a new one. So who is the lawless anarchist here?

Gay “marriage” is itself nothing but the will of the elites. It is as much a legal abomination as a moral one. Many people have said, “Well, gay ‘marriage’ is the law of the land, so that’s that,” but what they mean is, “Well, five people in Washington support gay ‘marriage,’ so that’s that.” No, that isn’t that. That’s tyranny. That’s injustice. That’s illegal. It might be true that the Supreme Court has, over time, seized the power to write laws and reshape ancient human institutions according to their radical liberal ideologies, but that doesn’t make it law. It might be “law,” but it isn’t law. Just as gay “marriage” might be “marriage,” but it can never be marriage. The whole thing is a travesty, a sham, an outrage.

So are we morally obligated to cooperate with the evil agendas and the rampant tyrannies of the federal government? Is a clerk in Kentucky, elected by the people of her county and subject to the Constitution of her state, morally required to respect the drunken dictates of judicial activists in Washington? Kim Davis says no. And I think it might be time for the rest of us to come to that same conclusion.

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/kim-davis-broke-an-illegitimate-evil-law-and-god-bless-her-for-it/

William Provine

Evolutionary biologist William Provine died recently. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi8_PsXKz8U&feature=youtu.be

http://www.uncommondescent.com/adminstrative/remembering-william-provine-1942-2015/

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/09/william_provine099031.html

They praise him for being a wonderful person, but according to his own worldview, there's no reason to be a wonderful person. I suspect much of his kindness was a residual effect of his former Christian faith and upbringing.

Likewise, I suspect he understood the drastic moral and existential cost of atheism because he had Christianity as a standard of comparison. 

I basically agree with him about evolution, although there are scientists (e.g. Rupert Sheldrake, Simon Conway Morris, Michael Behe, Michael Denton) who do think there's design in evolution.

He also suffers from the tunnel vision of people who measure everything by their particular specialization. Even if he believes evolution is true, and there's no evidence for design in evolution, that hardly means there's no evidence for God's existence. That disregards all the other lines of evidence for God's existence. 

Finally, I wonder if his labored speech was the result of treatment for brain cancer and the recurrence of his brain cancer.

Why Do Sources Not Refer To Jesus Until After His Lifetime?

People sometimes suggest that the absence of any sources writing about Jesus during his lifetime is a major problem. Why wouldn't anybody have written about him if he existed or, at least, if he was as significant as Christianity claims he was?

Other prominent religious leaders in Israel who lived around the same time, such as Gamaliel and John the Baptist, also aren't mentioned in extant documents dating to their lifetime. Many prominent philosophers and political and military leaders of the ancient world aren't mentioned in extant documents until after their death. There are a lot of potential reasons for that.

She's been married four times!

According to Arminian theologian Randal Rauser:

This brings me to an issue I’ve raised at several points in the past. So long as Christians apply to others different standards from those which they apply to themselves and their immediate belief community, they will not have a credible moral voice in the public square. 

Oh yeah, and as for that clerk Kim Davis, she’s been married four times. (To be fair, that’s three divorces before she says she became a Christian. But that doesn’t change Jesus’ above-mentioned indictment.) 

http://randalrauser.com/2015/09/christians-standing-against-gay-marriage-need-to-be-consistent-on-divorce/

I've discussed this once before, but now I'd like to approach it from a different angle. Rauser's objection is hardly unique to him, but it's even more inexcusable for him to use it because he is a reasonably sophisticated thinker who's capable of drawing intelligent conceptual distinctions when he wants to. But his desire to assimilate with the cultural elite in this case betrays him into shoddy logic.

Davis's marital status is a red herring. Why? Because this is not first and foremost about her. She's just an incidental player. One face of a cause far larger than herself. The question at issue is not her goodness, but the goodness of the cause which she–among so many others–happens to represent. The morality of a cause grounded is the principle, not the person. A bad person doesn't make a good cause bad.  

That should be obvious, but since so many people miss it, let's consider a few concrete illustrations:

Hitler, Mussolini, and FDR all had mistresses. Historians suspect Ike had a mistress. Would it therefore be reasonable to conclude that fighting for Nazism and fighting against Nazism were morally equivalent? Hardly. 

From what I've read, Gandhi was a pretty sleazy person. Does that delegitimate the cause of Indian independence? Why should it? That's something you must judge on the merits. If Gandhi were worthier, that wouldn't make the cause any worthier–and if he were less worthy, that wouldn't make the cause less worthy. 

I think it's safe to say that Dabney and Thornwell were more personally virtuous than Sherman and Grant. Does that mean the Confederate cause was more virtuous than abolitionism? What a non sequitur. 

From what I've read, Martin Luther King suffered from some glaring moral and theological deficiencies. (And, of course, the same could be said for some of his opponents.)

Does that discredit the Civil Rights movement? Not at all. King was never the standard of comparison. 

Causation and dualism

Traditionally, many Christians subscribe to substance dualism. That is to say, they think humans have an immortal, incorporeal soul. That's largely based on Biblical passages which indicate an intermediate state between death and the general resurrection. That when you die, you don't cease to exist. Consciousness survives brain death. And I think that's correct. 

A stock objection to dualism is that it's hard to see how one kind of substance (matter) can act on another kind of substance (mind) or vice versa. 

This is based almost entirely on the intuition that causation involves a point of contact. It can be direct contact between cause and effect, or it can be energy transfer that's transmitted through an intervening medium. A physical chain of cause and effect–like a game of pool or dominoes.  

Let's consider some comparisons. Alcohol is a mood-altering chemical. At least in theory, it's not hard to grasp how ingesting or imbibing a chemical substance can affect brain chemistry. Beer and brain are both physical substances.

Compare that to a hug. Hugs are mood altering gestures. But it's harder to explain how gentle, momentary pressure on the sternum can affect one's mood.

The stock explanation is appeal to oxytocin. A hug releases oxytocin, which has a chemical effect on the brain. 

And that may be true to some degree. However, to explain the effect of a hug by reference to oxytocin only pushes the question back a step, for you must then explain how a neuropeptide have that effect. Is a neuropeptide really responsible for all the varied dispositions that people attribute to it? For many people, a hug is deeply meaningful in a way that seems to be irreducible to stimulating one neuropeptide. 

It seems more plausible to explain the mood-altering effect of a hug as innate code language. We've been designed to interpret a hug as a social signal. 

In any case, the effect seems to be further removed from the physical cause in that instance than alcohol consumption. 

Be that as it may, let's consider one further example, which is even more detached from a point of contact: watching a movie or a game can be a mood-altering experience. It can make the viewer happy, sad, or mad. It can be exciting. 

What the viewer sees causes a mood in the viewer. But what is the nature of the cause? It doesn't act on the brain in any direct sense. 

Rather, certain images hold personal significance for the viewer. In a movie, he may relate to some characters. He cares about them. He becomes invested in what happens to them.

He can related to their situation. So he is drawn into the story, as if it was happening to him. 

It has an emotional effect on him, but that's a purely intellectual, interpretive exercise. Things we see can affect our mental states, not because there's a point of physical contact, but because they are significant to the viewer. That's a cause/effect relation between two disparate substances.