-i-
Roxanne, or "Roxy," as all her friends knew her, was more concerned about her eyeliner than the yellow line as she swerved into the opposing lane. Approaching the tunnel from the other end was a sleepy semi-truck driver.
Roxy was bound for Vegas, eager to see her name up in lights. Marilyn Monroe she wasn’t, but with a bit of judicious padding and truckloads of steely determination, she was sure the world would be bowled over by her irresistible charm.
But somewhere between the yellow line and the dark tunnel, her aspirations to greatness took an unexpected turn.
-ii-
Next thing she knew, she is standing, dazed and unsteady, with singed dress and tangled hair, in a washed-out no-man’s land, like a TV screen with the contrast knob turned to zero.
After a few moments, the fluffy mist began to dissipate, and in the near distance she saw a sparkling city, looking like Vegas, only bigger and brighter, with more moreness than ever before.
"Well I’ll be damned!" she said, bowled-over by it all. As she was gazing at this great glittery bauble in the sky, a white-suited, well-tanned gentleman approached her:
"My dear Roxanne," he said, in a mellifluous foreign accent, "your limousine awaits you!"
"How do you know my name?"
"Why, your reputation precedes you!"
"Oh, you silver-tongued devil you!" she exclaimed, blushing, giggling, and batting her eyelids all at once. "But did I really make it to the place upstairs?"
"Well, ever since the Copernican Revolution, up-and-down is pretty relative. But you might call this is a dream come true!" He then extended his arm, which she took, and walked with him to the stretched limo.
"Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like what’s-his-name in Fantasy Island?"
"It wouldn’t be the first time," he answered, with a wry smile and a twinkle in the eye.
-iii-
Inside the limo an angel choir was playing on the radio. Mr. Roarke, or whatever his name really was, offered her a glass of bubbly. Roxy couldn’t tell if the car was driving, gliding or floating in mid-air. When they arrived at the Ritz hotel, Roarke escorted her to the express elevator.
"Where am I going? she asked?
"The penthouse suite has been reserved for you," Roarke answered.
"All that for me?" she said?
"Is it not written, ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions’?" Roarke said.
The glass elevator seemed to ascend forever as they passed through the pink, puffy clouds on the way up. In the suite itself, a small army of beefy, bare-chested manservants tended to her every whim.
That night she stayed in the suite, to clean up and rest up after her accident. She took a champagne bath in her solid-gold bathtub and went straight to bed.
Combing out her hair in the morning, she found out that this was no ordinary comb, but a magic comb with different settings. Depending on which setting she chose, the comb would make her hair come out looking like Farah Fawcett, Maureen O’Hara, Jean Harlow, Veronica Lake, or Marie Antoinette.
She also discovered a pair of magic dance-slippers with several different settings that made her dance as well as Ginger Rogers, Eleanor Powell, Cyd Charisse, and Margot Fonteyn.
-iv-
The next day she went to the Monte Carlo casino. Roxy was given a million bucks worth of chips as seed money. Every hand she was dwelt was a royal flush. Every throw of the dice came up sixes. Every yank of the one-armed bandit hit the jackpot.
On the first night alone it took a dozen wheelbarrows just to haul all the loot back to the penthouse suite. After the first week, a whole floor of the hotel was set aside to store her winnings.
-v-
The day after that she went to Bloomingdale’s. Roxy was issued a Bloomingdale card with an unlimited credit line of credit. It took another dozen wheelbarrows to haul all the diamond rings and emerald earrings and jade bracelets and pearly necklaces and gold brooches back to the penthouse suite, not to mention three semi-trucks to transport all the fur coats.
Because she couldn’t bring herself to choose between the white mink coat, the brown mink coat, and the black mink coat, or between the mink coat with chinchilla trimming and the chinchilla coat with mink trimming, she bought the whole rack. Fortunately for her, the walk-in closet the size of an airplane hanger.
Due to rear-round climate control, the air outside stayed at 70 degrees day and night. So she had to lower the thermostat in her suite just to get a chance to wear her mink and leopard coats.
-vi-
The day after that she went to the Chez Piggerie restaurant. There she was delighted to find that every gourmet dishe had zero carbs. She could gobble down a twelve-course meal and never gain an ounce. What was more, she could swig as much bubbly as she liked and never wake up with a hangover.
-vii-
The day after that she went to see Christian Dior. Instead of taking her measurements and then tailoring a form-fitting dress, Dior handed her a catalogue from which she could simply pick out a slinky evening dress, and whatever dress she put on would magically conform her figure to the contours of Dolly Parton.
-viii-
The day after that, she went to the Sands, where she was invited onto the stage to do a concert. The microphone had ten different settings. Depending on which setting she chose, she would sound exactly like Julie Andrews, Marlene Dietrich, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, Loretta Lynn, Bernadette Peters, Barbara Streisand, Joan Sutherland, or Sarah Vaughn.
She even got to dance with Fred Astaire and Rudolf Valentino, as well as sing with Frank Sinatra and Evis Presley.
-ix-
The day after she went to see Richard Avalon. Here she sat to have her picture taken. She could have her picture taken with Cary Grant, Santa Claus, or Jesus. Well, it was really Jeffrey Hunter, but he looked just like Jesus is supposed to look.
She got to sit on Santa’s lap and ask for three wishes. And whatever she asked for was instantly granted by a band of winged chambermaids. "All this and Jesus too!" she shouted out loud!
Wherever she went she was feted like a diva, with an entourage of paparazzi and autograph-seekers. She was truly in seventh-heaven.
-x-
A week later she went back to the casino. Roxy was given another million bucks worth of chips as seed money. Every hand she was dwelt was a royal flush. Every throw of the dice came up sixes. Every yank of the one-armed bandit hit the jackpot.
-xi-
The day after that she went back to Bloomingdale’s. Once again it took a dozen wheelbarrows to haul all the diamond rings and emerald earrings and jade bracelets and pearly necklaces and gold brooches back to the penthouse suite, not to mention three semi-trucks to transport all the fur coats. The walk-in closet was getting to be a bit crowded.
-xii-
The day after that she went back to Chez Piggerie, where she had another twelve-course meal consisting of caviar, escargot and Brie for the appetizer; followed by fillet mignon, veal Marsala, venison, rack-of-lamb, Australian lobster, wild boar, king crab, grilled salmon, poached sole, scampi, and breast of pheasant; topped off with chocolate mousse, chocolate cake, chocolate ice cream, and French cheese for desert; and all washed down with five bottles of bubbly.
-xiii-
The day after that she went back to Dior to flip through the latest catalogue.
-xiv-
The day after that, she went back to the Sands to do another concert.
-xv-
The day after she went back to Avalon to do another photo shoot.
-xvi-
After a few more weeks of this, she summoned Mr. Roarke to her suite. "My dear Roxane," he said, "so very good to see you again."
"I wish I could say the same!"
"What’s the matter?"
"For the first few weeks I was afraid that living here was just too good to be true."
"And now?"
"And now I’m afraid that living here is just too true to be good."
"Whatevery do you mean?"
"Well, for one thing, I won the jackpot last night."
"What’s wrong with that?
"The lady sitting to my right won the jackpot as well, while the lady sitting to my left won the jackpot too! Where’s the fun in that?"
"I see your point!"
"Another thing--I can never turn off that damn angel choir! It plays day and night, everywhere I go--whether I'm in the limo, elevator, suite, casino, restaurant, nightclub…there's no off-switch. I can't even turn the volume down to get by beauty sleep!"
"Yes, I can see how irritating that might be."
"I feel like I’m caught between the devil and the deep blue see. If this is the best you can do, I’d rather be in that ‘other’ place, if you catch my drift."
"Where in hell do you think you've been all this time?"
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Shadow of Death
-i-
Starbuck was alone in his cell, feeding a pet rat, when the door swung open and another inmate was shoved inside.
"Looks like my dear captors brought me a cellmate to keep me company!" said Starbuck.
"Yes...considerate bunch, aren’t they?" said Hornblower.
"Guess that’s why nobody ever leaves--can’t beat the room service!" said Starbuck. "Cosmo and I were getting downright lonely before you showed up--ain’t that so, Cosmo?" he said, rubbing noses with the rat and assuming a baby-talk tone of voice.
"Cosmo, eh? Isn’t it dangerous to name a rat after our esteemed leader?" said Hornblower.
"Just between one counterrevolutionary and another, what’s a subversive like me got to lose?" Starbuck said, in mock-hushed tones. "Besides, the family resemblance is sooooo striking! No offense, Cosmo," he said, turning to the rat.
"Well, then, let me introduce myself. I’m Starbuck, Undersecretary of the Secretariat of Public Information...at least, that’s what I was before this terrible misunderstanding."
"Name sounds vaguely familiar. As for me, I was a gunnery sergeant in the People’s Republican Army. Hornblower’s the name."
"How’d you wind up here?" Starbuck asked.
"My CO screwed up and then screwed me over to cover his own screw-up. So what’s your story?"
"Don’t know for sure. They won’t tell me. Last month these two blue suited goons came for me, right there in my office, in front of God and everyone, and hauled me off. I suspect it was that smarmy new Assistant Undersecretary...the one I was assigned a few weeks before, who secretly denounced me--one of those...oh, you know...eager-beaver types...could cut his own throat on that steam-creased collar of his."
"Yeah, I know just what you mean. I always promote ‘em to the frontlines first to spend some enemy rounds before sending in my own boys," Hornblower said, in a wheezy, tobacco-saturated laugh.
-ii-
The door opened and yet another inmate was shoved inside.
"Another addition to our exclusive club!" Starbuck exclaimed, as all three shook hands. "My name’s Starbuck, and this here is Sgt. Hornblower".
"Call me Dunkelmann."
"So what did you to do deserve such an honor?" Hornblower asked.
"I was Deputy Director of the Directorate of Internal Security. Can't say why I’m here. They didn't tell me."
"No, they never give a reason, do they?" Starbuck interjected. "I was Undersecretary to the Secretariat, while Hornblower here was with the People’s Republican Army." Hornblower stood at attention and salutes.
"How long have they kept you here?"
"Going on two years now. Hornblower joined me a month later."
"What’s the disposition of your case?"
"I met with my lawyer a few times, but he dropped the case."
"What did he say?"
"You can’t defend yourself unless you deny the charge, you can’t deny the charge unless you say you were falsely accused; as soon as you say you were falsely accused, they say you’re impugning the system of justice, which proves you were justly indicted in the first place."
"Ah, yes, that’s the beauty of the system," said Dunkelmann. "Heads or tails, it always comes up off with their heads!"
"It gets worse. Even your lawyer can’t defend you without complicity. That’s why mine dropped out of sight," said Starbuck.
"It don’t ever pay to be right when the paymaster’s wrong!" Hornblower interjected, running a finger across his neck.
"So what do you guys to for fun and games," Dunkelmann asked.
"We’ve got a lovely view of the firing squad," said Starbuck, taking him over to the window. "On your left you can just make out the gallows. Unfortunately for us, the cell next door has a better view of the gibbet. And sometimes our caregivers even favor us with a beheading or two for holidays and other festivities."
"So there’s more than one form of execution?"
"They like a little variety to liven things up a bit," Starbuck continued. "If you’re just some run-of-the-mill subversive, they hang you or shoot you. It’s cheaper, you know. If you’re something special, then the guillotine awaits! And if you’re extra-special, they fry you alive. On a busy day the whole cellblock takes on that mouth-watering, hickory-smoked aroma!"
-iii-
"Hey, Dunkelmann. Looks like they’re bringing Starbuck back alive!"
Starbuck stumbled in through the door, shaken, sinking to his knees.
"What happened?" Dunkelmann asked. "Did you get a reprieve, a pardon, a..."
"Reprieve is too nice a word. They stayed my execution. That’s what they do around here: string you out while you hope against hope for a pardon, then schedule an execution, strap you in the chair, then cancel it at the very last minute—like a cat toying with a rat."
"At least you escaped the noose to live another day!"
"Yeah, if you can call this hellhole living. After all I’ve..." Starbuck jumps at a flash of light and crackling sound from the electrocution chamber
"Uh…after all I’ve done for the State, and this is how they reward me! I can’t tell you how many hours I spent..." Hornblower pantomimes a violin while Dunkelmann daubs imaginary tears. Starbuck rises to his feet and glares at both of them.
"What do you two think is so goddamn funny?" Starbuck demanded.
"Sorry, Starbuck," said Dunkelmann, "but sometimes you talk as though the universe were delinquent on your paycheck. How can you expect justice in a world like this?"
"That doesn’t make it one whit more fair!"
"I know how you feel, but it’s a funny feeling, all the same. Why do we so often feel out of our element? Does a guppy curse his fate because the water is wet?"
"He’d have plenty to gripe about if he had to swim in this cesspool of ours!"
"I don’t know. So often we act as if we were born for another world."
"Can’t spare a tear for either one of you, if you ask me!" said Hornblower.
"What’s that supposed to mean?" said Starbuck.
"You and Dunkelmann sent many a good man to an unjust death. You make the mistakes and make the foot soldier pay."
"I never condemned an innocent man to death!" said Starbuck, indignantly.
"Oh, yes...yes you did. No, not in so many words, of course, but every time you wrote one of your pretty little speeches for Cosmo, every time..." Another flash of light and crackling sound interrupted his train of thought.
"And every time Dunkelmann did the dirty work for Cosmo, you signed another man’s death warrant."
"Why you treasonous little scumbag!"
"Horny’s right, you know," said, Dunkelmann, lighting a cigarette. "We had it good at the expense of others. We had our little moment in the sun."
"More seditious speech! I can’t believe my ears!" Starbuck exclaimed.
"Don’t you think it’s time to drop the pose?" said Dunkelmann. "You played your dutiful role to the hilt, and look where it landed you?"
"If you never believed in the revolution, how could you serve in the Directorate all those years?"
"It’s not about believing, but surviving. We were both playing our part. The difference between you and me is I know I was play-acting the whole time. That’s the only choice in life--either play the fool or play another for the fool!"
"You dirty little hypocrite!"
"To the contrary, you’re looking at a man of moral consistency. I’m only hypocritical when I need to be!"
-iv-
Starbuck, Dunkelmann & Hornblower were playing cards, using cigarettes as chips.
"I call your cigarette and raise you half a butt," Hornblower said to Starbuck.
"Starbuck, you afraid to die?" Dunkelmann asked.
"Oh, I don’t know," said Starbuck, turning misty-eyed. "Death is such a natural part of life. Without death there is no life. We’re stardust gazing at stardust. When we die we return to the to the very stuff that gave us birth and being, and our mortal remains are...well are recycled to make a another generation of dusty stargazers--yes, billions and billions of dust particles composing billions and billions of dusty stargazers, all perched atop a speck of spinning stardust, and gazing at billions and billions of twinkling stars!
Dunkelmann folded his hands in mock prayer while Hornblower flapped his arms like angel wings.
"‘Scuse me for asking," said Hornblower, "but isn’t that just a pretty way of saying that when you die you turn to dog crap?"
"Now, now, my dear Hornblower," said Dunkelmann, patting him on the shoulder while assuming an indulgent tone of voice, "remember that our beloved Starbuck used to work for the Secretariat. They can make a dunghill smell like rose garden"
"Would you rather jawbone or place a bet?" said Starbuck, huffily.
"I fold," said Hornblower.
"You’re bluffing," said Dunkelmann to Starbuck.
"Try me!"
"I’m running low on cigarettes."
"I thought you had an outside source?"
"I did, until my contact fell out of favor with the Subcommissioner to the Commissar. I think he’s now in the prison block just down the hall."
"What’ll we do for a smoke?" Hornblower asked.
"Rumor has it the guy in the next cell has a rendezvous with Old Sparky this week," Dunkelmann answered in a low tone of voice. "Maybe we can bribe the guard to give us his leftover pack."
"So, what about you, Horny?" said Starbuck.
"What about what?"
"About your own appointment with Old Sparky? It’s only a matter of time, you know."
"Well, death is a damn bloody nuisance, if you ask me. But it’s no use our wasting any womanish fears and tears over the whole affair. Gird up your loins like a man! That’s what I say. Better to build on a firm foundation of unyielding despair. I was dead a...
"It’s your bet," Starbuck interrupted. Hornblower paused, tossing another cigarette into the kitty.
"Where was I?"
"You was dead!" said Dunkelmann.
"Ah, yes, that’s right, I was dead. How could I forget a thing like that! Anyway, as I was saying, I was dead all right--dead a billion years before I was born, and it never inconvenienced me a bit. After snoozing through the eons of time I woke up for a wink of an eye. I’ll die, but only ‘cause I got to live. For every one of me a million squiggly little sperm cells never had a damn chance."
Dunkelmann salutes Starbuck, behind Hornblower's back, who returns the salute.
"So, Dunkelmann, what about you?" said Starbuck.
"Sorry, but I don’t have any flowery speeches to make. This is my creed: first you die, then you rot! Direct and to the point!"
"Yeah, but you leave out all the spunk and all the valor," Hornblower objected. It’s not like we’ve got to face our fate like a dog. "Go not gentle into that good night, but rage, rage against the dying light!"
"’The boy stood on the burning deck’, and all that confounded crap?" said Dunkelmann. "You make it sound like the bloody charge of the light brigade!"
"And what if I do?" said Hornblower, voice raised and eyes ablaze. "Maybe we’re on a death march into a dawnless night, but we can summon the courage to lift a fallen comrade or give him a decent burial. That’s the true baptism by fire into the company of the blood-washed martyrs!"
"O may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence!" said Starbuck.
"Truth is," said Dunkelmann, "you two talk like a pair of drunken choirboys. Such high-flown speeches are for the living, not the dead. Come to think of it, wasn’t the Devil a demoralized saint?"
"It's not about you and me only, but about our part in the whole grand and glorious scheme of things," said Starbuck.
"Oh yes, yes, it is, it is about me, and me alone. That’s exactly what it’s about, all right! We’re all by ourselves out here, shivering in the lonely, cold, and silent spaces of black infinitude--from one end of nothingness to another. And we’ll all die alone, walking the valley of the shadow of death in single file.
Who are you two trying to impress, anyway? The stars? The tombstones? No one’s listening! The graveyard has no ears. The cosmos has no ears. You both got a great way of dressing up the corpse with your eulogies. But face it, guys, life’s a bad joke told by a dead comedian."
"Maybe we’re not all alone. Like, I mean...what about life on other worlds?"
"Guardian angels by another name. Or just another chain-gang doomed to die. What a pair you make--of fat and happy lab rats..." gesturing to the execution room, "but I’ve got news for you--the vivisection table awaits!"
"Really, my dear Dunkelmann," said Hornblower, "you do have a way of ruining a perfectly good game of five-card stud! If that’s how you feel, why not hang yourself and get it over with?"
"That’s a good question. Sometimes I think that suicide is the only question. The mistake was being born. The very first step was the fatal misstep, the original sin. My little pet rat was better off than me for never knowing any better. The only way forward is backward."
"So why don’t you cut your own throat?"
"Because I’m a coward--like everyone else."
Starbuck was alone in his cell, feeding a pet rat, when the door swung open and another inmate was shoved inside.
"Looks like my dear captors brought me a cellmate to keep me company!" said Starbuck.
"Yes...considerate bunch, aren’t they?" said Hornblower.
"Guess that’s why nobody ever leaves--can’t beat the room service!" said Starbuck. "Cosmo and I were getting downright lonely before you showed up--ain’t that so, Cosmo?" he said, rubbing noses with the rat and assuming a baby-talk tone of voice.
"Cosmo, eh? Isn’t it dangerous to name a rat after our esteemed leader?" said Hornblower.
"Just between one counterrevolutionary and another, what’s a subversive like me got to lose?" Starbuck said, in mock-hushed tones. "Besides, the family resemblance is sooooo striking! No offense, Cosmo," he said, turning to the rat.
"Well, then, let me introduce myself. I’m Starbuck, Undersecretary of the Secretariat of Public Information...at least, that’s what I was before this terrible misunderstanding."
"Name sounds vaguely familiar. As for me, I was a gunnery sergeant in the People’s Republican Army. Hornblower’s the name."
"How’d you wind up here?" Starbuck asked.
"My CO screwed up and then screwed me over to cover his own screw-up. So what’s your story?"
"Don’t know for sure. They won’t tell me. Last month these two blue suited goons came for me, right there in my office, in front of God and everyone, and hauled me off. I suspect it was that smarmy new Assistant Undersecretary...the one I was assigned a few weeks before, who secretly denounced me--one of those...oh, you know...eager-beaver types...could cut his own throat on that steam-creased collar of his."
"Yeah, I know just what you mean. I always promote ‘em to the frontlines first to spend some enemy rounds before sending in my own boys," Hornblower said, in a wheezy, tobacco-saturated laugh.
-ii-
The door opened and yet another inmate was shoved inside.
"Another addition to our exclusive club!" Starbuck exclaimed, as all three shook hands. "My name’s Starbuck, and this here is Sgt. Hornblower".
"Call me Dunkelmann."
"So what did you to do deserve such an honor?" Hornblower asked.
"I was Deputy Director of the Directorate of Internal Security. Can't say why I’m here. They didn't tell me."
"No, they never give a reason, do they?" Starbuck interjected. "I was Undersecretary to the Secretariat, while Hornblower here was with the People’s Republican Army." Hornblower stood at attention and salutes.
"How long have they kept you here?"
"Going on two years now. Hornblower joined me a month later."
"What’s the disposition of your case?"
"I met with my lawyer a few times, but he dropped the case."
"What did he say?"
"You can’t defend yourself unless you deny the charge, you can’t deny the charge unless you say you were falsely accused; as soon as you say you were falsely accused, they say you’re impugning the system of justice, which proves you were justly indicted in the first place."
"Ah, yes, that’s the beauty of the system," said Dunkelmann. "Heads or tails, it always comes up off with their heads!"
"It gets worse. Even your lawyer can’t defend you without complicity. That’s why mine dropped out of sight," said Starbuck.
"It don’t ever pay to be right when the paymaster’s wrong!" Hornblower interjected, running a finger across his neck.
"So what do you guys to for fun and games," Dunkelmann asked.
"We’ve got a lovely view of the firing squad," said Starbuck, taking him over to the window. "On your left you can just make out the gallows. Unfortunately for us, the cell next door has a better view of the gibbet. And sometimes our caregivers even favor us with a beheading or two for holidays and other festivities."
"So there’s more than one form of execution?"
"They like a little variety to liven things up a bit," Starbuck continued. "If you’re just some run-of-the-mill subversive, they hang you or shoot you. It’s cheaper, you know. If you’re something special, then the guillotine awaits! And if you’re extra-special, they fry you alive. On a busy day the whole cellblock takes on that mouth-watering, hickory-smoked aroma!"
-iii-
"Hey, Dunkelmann. Looks like they’re bringing Starbuck back alive!"
Starbuck stumbled in through the door, shaken, sinking to his knees.
"What happened?" Dunkelmann asked. "Did you get a reprieve, a pardon, a..."
"Reprieve is too nice a word. They stayed my execution. That’s what they do around here: string you out while you hope against hope for a pardon, then schedule an execution, strap you in the chair, then cancel it at the very last minute—like a cat toying with a rat."
"At least you escaped the noose to live another day!"
"Yeah, if you can call this hellhole living. After all I’ve..." Starbuck jumps at a flash of light and crackling sound from the electrocution chamber
"Uh…after all I’ve done for the State, and this is how they reward me! I can’t tell you how many hours I spent..." Hornblower pantomimes a violin while Dunkelmann daubs imaginary tears. Starbuck rises to his feet and glares at both of them.
"What do you two think is so goddamn funny?" Starbuck demanded.
"Sorry, Starbuck," said Dunkelmann, "but sometimes you talk as though the universe were delinquent on your paycheck. How can you expect justice in a world like this?"
"That doesn’t make it one whit more fair!"
"I know how you feel, but it’s a funny feeling, all the same. Why do we so often feel out of our element? Does a guppy curse his fate because the water is wet?"
"He’d have plenty to gripe about if he had to swim in this cesspool of ours!"
"I don’t know. So often we act as if we were born for another world."
"Can’t spare a tear for either one of you, if you ask me!" said Hornblower.
"What’s that supposed to mean?" said Starbuck.
"You and Dunkelmann sent many a good man to an unjust death. You make the mistakes and make the foot soldier pay."
"I never condemned an innocent man to death!" said Starbuck, indignantly.
"Oh, yes...yes you did. No, not in so many words, of course, but every time you wrote one of your pretty little speeches for Cosmo, every time..." Another flash of light and crackling sound interrupted his train of thought.
"And every time Dunkelmann did the dirty work for Cosmo, you signed another man’s death warrant."
"Why you treasonous little scumbag!"
"Horny’s right, you know," said, Dunkelmann, lighting a cigarette. "We had it good at the expense of others. We had our little moment in the sun."
"More seditious speech! I can’t believe my ears!" Starbuck exclaimed.
"Don’t you think it’s time to drop the pose?" said Dunkelmann. "You played your dutiful role to the hilt, and look where it landed you?"
"If you never believed in the revolution, how could you serve in the Directorate all those years?"
"It’s not about believing, but surviving. We were both playing our part. The difference between you and me is I know I was play-acting the whole time. That’s the only choice in life--either play the fool or play another for the fool!"
"You dirty little hypocrite!"
"To the contrary, you’re looking at a man of moral consistency. I’m only hypocritical when I need to be!"
-iv-
Starbuck, Dunkelmann & Hornblower were playing cards, using cigarettes as chips.
"I call your cigarette and raise you half a butt," Hornblower said to Starbuck.
"Starbuck, you afraid to die?" Dunkelmann asked.
"Oh, I don’t know," said Starbuck, turning misty-eyed. "Death is such a natural part of life. Without death there is no life. We’re stardust gazing at stardust. When we die we return to the to the very stuff that gave us birth and being, and our mortal remains are...well are recycled to make a another generation of dusty stargazers--yes, billions and billions of dust particles composing billions and billions of dusty stargazers, all perched atop a speck of spinning stardust, and gazing at billions and billions of twinkling stars!
Dunkelmann folded his hands in mock prayer while Hornblower flapped his arms like angel wings.
"‘Scuse me for asking," said Hornblower, "but isn’t that just a pretty way of saying that when you die you turn to dog crap?"
"Now, now, my dear Hornblower," said Dunkelmann, patting him on the shoulder while assuming an indulgent tone of voice, "remember that our beloved Starbuck used to work for the Secretariat. They can make a dunghill smell like rose garden"
"Would you rather jawbone or place a bet?" said Starbuck, huffily.
"I fold," said Hornblower.
"You’re bluffing," said Dunkelmann to Starbuck.
"Try me!"
"I’m running low on cigarettes."
"I thought you had an outside source?"
"I did, until my contact fell out of favor with the Subcommissioner to the Commissar. I think he’s now in the prison block just down the hall."
"What’ll we do for a smoke?" Hornblower asked.
"Rumor has it the guy in the next cell has a rendezvous with Old Sparky this week," Dunkelmann answered in a low tone of voice. "Maybe we can bribe the guard to give us his leftover pack."
"So, what about you, Horny?" said Starbuck.
"What about what?"
"About your own appointment with Old Sparky? It’s only a matter of time, you know."
"Well, death is a damn bloody nuisance, if you ask me. But it’s no use our wasting any womanish fears and tears over the whole affair. Gird up your loins like a man! That’s what I say. Better to build on a firm foundation of unyielding despair. I was dead a...
"It’s your bet," Starbuck interrupted. Hornblower paused, tossing another cigarette into the kitty.
"Where was I?"
"You was dead!" said Dunkelmann.
"Ah, yes, that’s right, I was dead. How could I forget a thing like that! Anyway, as I was saying, I was dead all right--dead a billion years before I was born, and it never inconvenienced me a bit. After snoozing through the eons of time I woke up for a wink of an eye. I’ll die, but only ‘cause I got to live. For every one of me a million squiggly little sperm cells never had a damn chance."
Dunkelmann salutes Starbuck, behind Hornblower's back, who returns the salute.
"So, Dunkelmann, what about you?" said Starbuck.
"Sorry, but I don’t have any flowery speeches to make. This is my creed: first you die, then you rot! Direct and to the point!"
"Yeah, but you leave out all the spunk and all the valor," Hornblower objected. It’s not like we’ve got to face our fate like a dog. "Go not gentle into that good night, but rage, rage against the dying light!"
"’The boy stood on the burning deck’, and all that confounded crap?" said Dunkelmann. "You make it sound like the bloody charge of the light brigade!"
"And what if I do?" said Hornblower, voice raised and eyes ablaze. "Maybe we’re on a death march into a dawnless night, but we can summon the courage to lift a fallen comrade or give him a decent burial. That’s the true baptism by fire into the company of the blood-washed martyrs!"
"O may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence!" said Starbuck.
"Truth is," said Dunkelmann, "you two talk like a pair of drunken choirboys. Such high-flown speeches are for the living, not the dead. Come to think of it, wasn’t the Devil a demoralized saint?"
"It's not about you and me only, but about our part in the whole grand and glorious scheme of things," said Starbuck.
"Oh yes, yes, it is, it is about me, and me alone. That’s exactly what it’s about, all right! We’re all by ourselves out here, shivering in the lonely, cold, and silent spaces of black infinitude--from one end of nothingness to another. And we’ll all die alone, walking the valley of the shadow of death in single file.
Who are you two trying to impress, anyway? The stars? The tombstones? No one’s listening! The graveyard has no ears. The cosmos has no ears. You both got a great way of dressing up the corpse with your eulogies. But face it, guys, life’s a bad joke told by a dead comedian."
"Maybe we’re not all alone. Like, I mean...what about life on other worlds?"
"Guardian angels by another name. Or just another chain-gang doomed to die. What a pair you make--of fat and happy lab rats..." gesturing to the execution room, "but I’ve got news for you--the vivisection table awaits!"
"Really, my dear Dunkelmann," said Hornblower, "you do have a way of ruining a perfectly good game of five-card stud! If that’s how you feel, why not hang yourself and get it over with?"
"That’s a good question. Sometimes I think that suicide is the only question. The mistake was being born. The very first step was the fatal misstep, the original sin. My little pet rat was better off than me for never knowing any better. The only way forward is backward."
"So why don’t you cut your own throat?"
"Because I’m a coward--like everyone else."
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Was Darwin wrong?
1. Since Jonathan Wells as written a review article, rebutting the "overwhelming evidence" or "vast body of supporting evidence" marshaled by David Quammen, I'll pass over that part of Quammen's article in silence.
2. What is the evidence for relativity? The article doesn't say. One argument I've often read is evidence of time-dilation. But is this evidence that time is not a constant, or only that the rate of a physical process is not a constant? These are two very different questions.
One problem with relativity theory is that it doesn't mesh with quantum theory.
3. What is the evidence for heliocentrism? The article doesn't say. Actually, the theories of Mach and Einstein on equivalent forces and equivalent reference-frames would seem to make it easier to defend geocentrism. I ran this very question by a professional astronomer I happen to know (John Byl), who confirmed my intuitions:
"Yes. According to general relativity one should get the same observational results, regardless of whether the earth is considered to be at rest, with the rest of the universe revolving about it, or vice versa. (See D.Lynden-Bell et al, "Mach's Principle from the Relativistic Constraint Equations", Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1995 Vol 272: 150-160)."
Geocentrism appears to be obviously false, but appearances are deceiving.
4. What is the evidence for plate tectonics? The article doesn't say. Einstein wrote a glowing forward to Charles Hapgood's book on polar shifts, Path of the Pole (Adventures Unlimited Press 1999), which is a rival theory to continental drift.
Robert Gange, the NASA scientist, is a critic of plate tectonics. See his article on "Continental Drift."
Walt Brown, who has a doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT, has a rather damning conversation with J. Tuzo Wilson, one of the founders of plate tectonics. www.creationscience.com.
5. What is the evidence for atomic theory? The article doesn't say. Isn't atomic theory bound up with modern-day particle physics, quantum mechanics, and string theory? Much of this is extremely abstract and counterintuitive.
A theory doesn't have to be true to be successful. Newtonian physics and 19C ether theories were very successful in their heyday.
Scientists often operate with such metascientific assumptions as uniformity and methodological naturalism. These are not empirical data. They are not derived from the evidence. Rather, they serve as an interpretive grid through which the evidence is filtered, and contrary evidence is screened out.
My purpose is not to take a position on the truth of falsity of Relativity or plate tectonics or atomic theory or heliocentrism. Quammen is trying to predispose the reader to accept Darwinism by appealing to various other theories which he takes for granted. And my point is simply that his softening-up exercise is question-begging. One theory is not a preparation for another theory on an unrelated topc.
It is true that Christians feel threatened by Darwinism. However, the Darwinist should feel just as threatened by Darwinism. The hard-core Darwinist denies the afterlife, moral absolutes, and consciousness itself. If true, he is trapped aboard the same burning and sinking ship as the Christian.
**********************
Thanks for calling my attention to Selbin's article in the Boulder Camera.
A few comments:
<< Selbin: Faith is outside realm of science >>
This way of framing the issue misses the point. The point is what may be known, and how it may be known. To draw stipulative lines in the sand assumes that we already know what is knowable before we look out the window.
<< School boards around the country are considering whether to put faith-based Intelligent Design alongside science-based evolution in science classes. >>
ID-theory is not faith-based. It reasons from science to God. That is why Dembski entitled his first book _The Design Inference_.
<< The recent re-election of an administration that advocates "creation science" and often makes political decisions on faith-based philosophies rather than on hard, cold reality. >>
What administration officials subscribe to creation science? Can Selbin name any? If he can, why doesn't he?
What political decisions have been made on faith-based philosophies? Again, where are the specifics?
<< Religion has a clear place in the home, in comparative religion courses and in churches, synagogues, mosques, etc., but it has no place in science courses. >>
This assumes, without benefit of argument, that science has no religious presuppostitions or implications. Why, only last week, I was reading a paper by a leading physicist (Don Page), entitled "Attaching Theories of Consciousness to Bohmian Quatum Mechanics" in which he said the following: "I personally also believe that a description of full SQM [Sensible Quantum Mechanics] or SBM [Sensible Bohmian Mechanics] world wold be simpler if one postulates the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent God as the Creator of this world, but of course this further extrapolation from direct conscious experience takes one beyond what is traditionally called physics to metaphysics."
Now, simplicity is a key criterion in scientific theorizing. If the "extrapolation" of God simplifies quantum mechanics, then that does have a place in science courses--to take but one example.
<< After the Supreme Court in 1987 banned the teaching of creationism in public schools on grounds of separation of church and state, creationists have changed their call for teaching "creationism" to the teaching of "intelligent design." Only the words are different. The so-called "theory" is not. >>
So it took 200 years after the ratification of the Constitution to discover that the teaching of creationism violated the separation of church and state? Doesn't this judicial finding seem a tad anachronistic?
Creationism and ID-theory are not the same. Just compare the standard creationist literature (e.g. K. Wise, _Faith, Form, & Time_; W. Brown, _In the Beginning_) with the standard ID literature (e.g., W. Dembski, _No Free Lunch_; M. Behe, _Darwin's Black Box_) to see the difference in methods, presuppositions, and content.
<< The claim by creationists that evolution is merely a theory, is quite simply, and outrageously, false. Evolution has been observed and very extensively established by thousands of scientists, many thousands of times over about 140 years and at sites around the world. The results have been published in thousands of independent articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Evolution, under attack by certain fundamentalist Christians, is very well established by scientific observations. >>
Notice that Selbin doesn't favor the reader with any concrete examples. Why is that? What does he mean by saying that evolution has been observed? Does he mean that the process of evolution has been observed in real time? Or does he mean that the results of evolution have been observed?
Again, is he talking about specialized adaptive variants, or the development of new organs and body-plans?
Of course, "peer-review" is becoming a euphemism for censorship, so the appeal is tendentious.
<< A theory must be able to do two powerful things. It must be able to satisfactorily explain what we already know, and it must be successful in predicting things we do not yet know. When scientists do not understand something, they set up observations and experiments and seek independent and reproducible results. When the proponents of ID (the creationists) do not understand or cannot explain something, they simply attribute the unknown to an even more, albeit magnificent and glorious, unknown, an "intelligent designer." . Science seeks answers without creating or tolerating myths or calling upon faith. There is nothing wrong or unsatisfying with faith. However, since it is by definition not based upon any evidence, it is outside the realm of science. This is the primary reason intelligent design should not appear in a science class. >>
First of all, the testability of ID-theory is discussed in ID-literature, if Selbin bothered to inform himself.
Notice, though, that he applies his two-pronged criterion to ID-theory, but not to evolutionary theory. Why the omission? Why the double-standard?
What predictions has evolutionary theory made? Have these predictions, if any, been proven true?
Punctuated equilibrium was proposed because Darwinian gradualism was falsified by the evidence. At least, that's what Gould and Eldridge thought.
Where has evolution been reproduced in the laboratory? I don't mean microevolution. I mean macro. Why doesn't Selbin give the reader any documented examples for their consideration?
Selbin says that the intelligent designer is unknown. Where is the supporting argument for this claim? There's a vast literature in apologetics, natural and philosophical theology to the contrary.
What "myths?" Could Selbin point the reader to a creation myth in the writings of Denton, Dembski, Behe, et al.?
In what sense is faith by definition not based on any evidence? What about the vast literature in apologetics, natural and philosophical theology?
<< But since the ID people require that all things must have a creator, I would ask them to explain to us: Who or what created the intelligent designer? >>
This is a straw man argument. ID-theory doesn't demand that all things have a creator. Notice that Selbin doesn't quote any ID-theorist who has said that. Here is a canonical definition which I pulled off the official website of the ID movement:
"The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."
For all his talk of evidence, Selbin offers no hard evidence for evolution, no references to the relevant literature. Likewise, he shows no evidence of having read any of the standard literature on ID-theory, much less apologetics, natural and philosophical theology.
So the whole exercise reeks of hidebound ignorance and prejudice parading as science.
********************
Thanks for the Time article:
The problem begins with a runaway court system. You have rogue judges, setting themselves above the law, pretending that the Establishment Clause means something it never meant.
And when judges play games with the rule of law, then this, in turn, forces the antievolutionary movement to play semantic games as well.
So the liberal establishment leaves the antievolutionary movement with a bad set of forced options, then faults the antievolutionary movement for exercising a bad forced option!
Another reason these debates keep cropping up is that the liberal establishment makes it as difficult as possible for Christians to opt out of the public school system. They try their damnedest to keep a captive audience, then whine and bellyache when the captives complain about the terms of their confinement!
I don't think that we should delete references to evolution in science textbooks. That simply stifles debate in the opposition direction.
To characterize this as a stealth attack is pretty silly. It's not as though the ID-movement is a secret society with a secret handshake, blood-pacts, and a code language. It's not as though ex-members who spill the beans end up floating down the river in varied states of dismemberment.
The ID-movement publishes books, runs public websites, sponsors public debates, holds public seminars, supplies expert witnesses in court and at public school board meetings, &c. There is no hidden agenda.
I don't quite see the point of who's funding the movement, although the distinction of being the "leading male-chauvinist pig author" was no doubt too good to pass up.
Dawkins holds a chair endowed by a cofounder of Microsoft (Allen). Is that a sinister connection?
It isn't at all clear to me that evolutionary establishment welcomes an intellectual challenge. To begin with, the battle between Gould and Dawkins got quite nasty. And even if they do welcome a good challenge, they only welcome a challenge within the evolutionary paradigm, and not a challenge to the evolutionary paradigm itself.
It is true that merely slapping the label of a "theory" on evolution doesn't amount to much, for not all theories are equal--some are better attested, and enjoy more explanatory power than others.
It is possible to agree on the facts, but disagree on how the facts came to be. Two oncologists might agree on their diagnosis, but disagree on cause or the treatment of cancer.
However, evolutionary theory places an evolutionary construction on the scientific evidence. It is not that the raw data point unambiguously in an evolutionary direction. Evolution is brought in to account for the pattern; not necessarily that the pattern of evidence is prearrange in a pat evolutionary pattern. Evolutionary theory, as I understand it, is an elaborate intellectual construct which pieces together diverse evidence from different dates and digs and places and so forth. The empirical pattern is pretty scattershot.
To take one example, classic evolution predicted a cone of increasing diversification. But one reason that Gould and Eldridge proposed punctuate equilibrium is that in sites such as the Burgess Shale, they saw the cone in reverse, with a decreasing cone of diversity.
Again, I'm no expert. But when I read articles like this, this sort of thing is constantly ignored or overlooked.
One of the problems with an article like this is that it mounts counterarguments that have already been addressed in the ID-literature. Take the following counterexample:
"Biologists see it differently. They say, for example, a primitive, light-sensing patch of skin--a forerunner of the retina--could help animals detect the shadows of predators."
Notice, first of all, that no chain of evidence has been entered into the record to show that this is, in fact, what happened. No evidence is adduced to show the incremental evolution from a light-sensitive spot to a functioning retina.
We're just told that maybe this "could" confer a survival advantage. Is that what passes for scientific evidence?
Moreover, the impression which the uniformed reader would derive from this counterexample is that no ID-theorist has ever tried to field this objection. Actually, this was brought up in one of the earlier entries into the debate:
"We are invited by Dawkins and Darwin to believe that the evolution of the eye proceeded step-by-step through a series of plausible intermediates in infinitesimal increments. But are they infinitesimal? Remember that the 'light-sensitive spot' that Dawkins takes as his starting point requires a cascade of factors, including 11-cis-retinal and rhodopsin, to function. Dawkins doesn't mention them. And where did the 'little cup' come from? A ball of cells--from which the cup must be made--will tend to be rounded unless held in the correct shape by molecular supports. In fact, there are dozens of complex proteins involved in maintaining cell shape, and dozens more that control extracellular structure; in their absence, cells take on the shape of so many soap bubbles. Do these structures represent single-step mutations?" M. Behe (Simon & Schulster 1996, 1998), 38.
This reply has been in the public domain for nearly a decade, yet the Time science writer trots out the evolutionary counterargument as though this has gone unchallenged and unanswered.
And this is one reason that the evolutionary establishment finds itself on the run. It doesn't think it has to answer back, has to acknowledge any intellectual challenge. If you don't jump into the fray, you lose by default.
Or take this statement: "All the think tanks want to do, they insist, is make the teaching of evolution more honest by bringing up its drawbacks. Who could argue with that? But the mainstream scientific community contends that this seemingly innocuous agenda is actually a stealthy way of promoting religion. "Teaching evidence against evolution is a backdoor way of teaching creationism," says Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education. "
Now, suppose, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Scott is correct. How is that responsive to the question of whether evolutionary theory is or is not problematic on its own grounds? This sounds less like science education than politics. Is it his position that even if evolutionary theory were problematic, the problems must be swept under the rug lest the creationist community exploit the theory's weaknesses? Is that how one teaches science?
When I was a kid in school, we were taught that the first job of a scientist is not to prove his theory, but to try to disprove his theory. In other words, the best way of proving it would be to see if it could resist disproof. But now, at least where evolution is concerned, the theory has been put under glass. Doesn't this begin to resemble the red-capped cardinals who refused to peer into Galileo's telescope for fear of the consequences?
I'm no scientist, but when I can take this and other such articles apart in the course of a few minutes, it merely reinforces the credibility gap.
****************
Chris,
You said:
<>
These are questions which rapidly spiral into nested complexities, so all I can do for now is to block out the basic answers. That will oversimplify matters, but we have to start somewhere. Let's begin at a macro level and get a bit more micro later on.
i) Christianity is a revealed religion. It stakes its veracity on its status as a revealed religion.
So it's a package deal--all-or-nothing. That's how the Bible presents itself as an object of belief. What is more, there is an inner logic to that presentation inasmuch as partial inspiration would defeat the very rationale for revelation in the first place.
Like it or not, a Christian is precommitted to certain propositions. That just goes with the territory.
ii) Some folks suppose that because the Bible was addressed to a prescientific audience, then it's okay to reinterpret Scripture in light of modern science.
But, for me, the reasoning is just the reverse. Because it was addressed to a prescientific audience, it must be understand at that level, for that was the level at which it was meant to be believed. To do otherwise would be anachronistic, like reinterpreting Dante's Aristotelian-Polemaic cosmology in light of Bohr and Einstein.
Whenever we interpret a document from the past, whether inspired or uninspired, we must assume the historical viewpoint of the original author and his implied audience.
To say that is not to say how we should interpret Genesis, but only to set a benchmark.
iii) As to the scientific evidence, my initial approach to science is via metascience. What is our philosophy of science? In particular, what is our theory of perception?
Our scientific theories are only as good as our theories of perception. So before we ever get to the scientific issues, we need to settle on our general epistemology.
Now, very roughly speaking, I'm in the camp of indirect realism. I don't believe that the mind has direct access to the external world. In my opinion, our mental representation is a correlate of the sensible world rather than a copy of the sensible world.
By way of comparison, the formula for deriving the Mandelbrot set is a correlate of the Mandelbrot set. Yet there is no resemblance between the appearance of the formula and the appearance of the set which the formula can generate--say, on a computer screen.
I've laid out my metascientific views in a couple of essays: one the recent essay "On knowing what we know," the other in the science section of my essay on "I'm glad you asked."
iv) In short, if left to our own devices, I don't know, when I look outside, what I'm actually seeing (or hearing or tasting or touching or smelling), for perception presupposes rather than penetrates the veil of perception.
v) At the level of sensation, there is no public world, only a private world. Yes, there is a public world which we all perceive, but our perceptions are private. The percipient is sealed away in his own, modular subjectivity.
vi) There is, though, one cognitive agent who enjoys an intersubjectival understanding of the world as it really is, in itself. That is the Creator of the world. He can and has disclosed himself to man, and, in so doing, his revelation operates, in part, as an external check on our filtered outlook.
vii) My scientific antirealism is just as sceptical of creation science as it is of evolution or modern cosmology or historical geology. So it cuts both ways. I'm an equal opportunity sceptic! In this respect, I'm not "following in the footsteps of much of the evangelical community today."
viii) As to molecular clocks and the like, I've addressed that question in my essay on "Tell me the time."
ix) Exegetically speaking, you will be unable to decouple the Resurrection from the historic fall of man, for 1 Cor 15 treats them as historically analogous and interconnected.
x) Is it possible to be a Christian and a theistic evolutionist? That question admits different answers. Theistic evolution is a logically coherent position--although guys like Gould and Dawkins don't think it very plausible.
And it is psychologically possible to affirm both. B. B. Warfield was a theistic evolutionist.
But, theologically speaking, these are incompatible beliefs. It is possible to hold inconsistent beliefs, but they are inconsistent--all the same.
xi) As to the fact of evolution--the fossil record, I can only speak as a layman:
a) A global flood would be a fossil factory. I'm not trying to place a more precise construction on its impact than that, because I have no way of knowing the extent or pattern of the evidence generated by such an event. But that does introduce a very large wild card into the deck.
b) Although I've read and viewed a lot of high-level popularizations of evolutionary theory, I've never seen the raw evidence. Instead, what I'm presented with is a smattering of evidence that has been arranged in an evolutionary pattern. The pattern doesn't exist in the natural record itself, as given in that actual order. Rather, miscellaneous odds and ends scavenged from different sites at different levels are cobbled together and fitted together with evolutionary theory driving the reconstruction of the evidence rather than the raw evidence driving the construction of the theory.
c) Darwinians habitually and deliberately blur evidence of macroevolution with microevolution. Of course, I realize that, from their standpoint, it's a natural continuum--that there is no hard-and-fast distinction. That, however, assumes an evolutionary take on the evidence.
What would the evidence look like if they were to scrupulously segregate microevolutionary evidence from macroevolutionary evidence?
d) The fossil evidence for evolution would be clear evidence of evolution if it presented an evolutionary trend. Yet Darwinians also tell us that evolution is, in the nature of the case, undirected, and, therefore, without any consistent linear progression.
Again, I've said a bit more about the particulars in my "I'm glad" essay.
I've covered a lot of ground here in a very short space. But I do have supporting arguments in some of supplemental material I've referred you to.
2. What is the evidence for relativity? The article doesn't say. One argument I've often read is evidence of time-dilation. But is this evidence that time is not a constant, or only that the rate of a physical process is not a constant? These are two very different questions.
One problem with relativity theory is that it doesn't mesh with quantum theory.
3. What is the evidence for heliocentrism? The article doesn't say. Actually, the theories of Mach and Einstein on equivalent forces and equivalent reference-frames would seem to make it easier to defend geocentrism. I ran this very question by a professional astronomer I happen to know (John Byl), who confirmed my intuitions:
"Yes. According to general relativity one should get the same observational results, regardless of whether the earth is considered to be at rest, with the rest of the universe revolving about it, or vice versa. (See D.Lynden-Bell et al, "Mach's Principle from the Relativistic Constraint Equations", Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1995 Vol 272: 150-160)."
Geocentrism appears to be obviously false, but appearances are deceiving.
4. What is the evidence for plate tectonics? The article doesn't say. Einstein wrote a glowing forward to Charles Hapgood's book on polar shifts, Path of the Pole (Adventures Unlimited Press 1999), which is a rival theory to continental drift.
Robert Gange, the NASA scientist, is a critic of plate tectonics. See his article on "Continental Drift."
Walt Brown, who has a doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT, has a rather damning conversation with J. Tuzo Wilson, one of the founders of plate tectonics. www.creationscience.com.
5. What is the evidence for atomic theory? The article doesn't say. Isn't atomic theory bound up with modern-day particle physics, quantum mechanics, and string theory? Much of this is extremely abstract and counterintuitive.
A theory doesn't have to be true to be successful. Newtonian physics and 19C ether theories were very successful in their heyday.
Scientists often operate with such metascientific assumptions as uniformity and methodological naturalism. These are not empirical data. They are not derived from the evidence. Rather, they serve as an interpretive grid through which the evidence is filtered, and contrary evidence is screened out.
My purpose is not to take a position on the truth of falsity of Relativity or plate tectonics or atomic theory or heliocentrism. Quammen is trying to predispose the reader to accept Darwinism by appealing to various other theories which he takes for granted. And my point is simply that his softening-up exercise is question-begging. One theory is not a preparation for another theory on an unrelated topc.
It is true that Christians feel threatened by Darwinism. However, the Darwinist should feel just as threatened by Darwinism. The hard-core Darwinist denies the afterlife, moral absolutes, and consciousness itself. If true, he is trapped aboard the same burning and sinking ship as the Christian.
**********************
Thanks for calling my attention to Selbin's article in the Boulder Camera.
A few comments:
<< Selbin: Faith is outside realm of science >>
This way of framing the issue misses the point. The point is what may be known, and how it may be known. To draw stipulative lines in the sand assumes that we already know what is knowable before we look out the window.
<< School boards around the country are considering whether to put faith-based Intelligent Design alongside science-based evolution in science classes. >>
ID-theory is not faith-based. It reasons from science to God. That is why Dembski entitled his first book _The Design Inference_.
<< The recent re-election of an administration that advocates "creation science" and often makes political decisions on faith-based philosophies rather than on hard, cold reality. >>
What administration officials subscribe to creation science? Can Selbin name any? If he can, why doesn't he?
What political decisions have been made on faith-based philosophies? Again, where are the specifics?
<< Religion has a clear place in the home, in comparative religion courses and in churches, synagogues, mosques, etc., but it has no place in science courses. >>
This assumes, without benefit of argument, that science has no religious presuppostitions or implications. Why, only last week, I was reading a paper by a leading physicist (Don Page), entitled "Attaching Theories of Consciousness to Bohmian Quatum Mechanics" in which he said the following: "I personally also believe that a description of full SQM [Sensible Quantum Mechanics] or SBM [Sensible Bohmian Mechanics] world wold be simpler if one postulates the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent God as the Creator of this world, but of course this further extrapolation from direct conscious experience takes one beyond what is traditionally called physics to metaphysics."
Now, simplicity is a key criterion in scientific theorizing. If the "extrapolation" of God simplifies quantum mechanics, then that does have a place in science courses--to take but one example.
<< After the Supreme Court in 1987 banned the teaching of creationism in public schools on grounds of separation of church and state, creationists have changed their call for teaching "creationism" to the teaching of "intelligent design." Only the words are different. The so-called "theory" is not. >>
So it took 200 years after the ratification of the Constitution to discover that the teaching of creationism violated the separation of church and state? Doesn't this judicial finding seem a tad anachronistic?
Creationism and ID-theory are not the same. Just compare the standard creationist literature (e.g. K. Wise, _Faith, Form, & Time_; W. Brown, _In the Beginning_) with the standard ID literature (e.g., W. Dembski, _No Free Lunch_; M. Behe, _Darwin's Black Box_) to see the difference in methods, presuppositions, and content.
<< The claim by creationists that evolution is merely a theory, is quite simply, and outrageously, false. Evolution has been observed and very extensively established by thousands of scientists, many thousands of times over about 140 years and at sites around the world. The results have been published in thousands of independent articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Evolution, under attack by certain fundamentalist Christians, is very well established by scientific observations. >>
Notice that Selbin doesn't favor the reader with any concrete examples. Why is that? What does he mean by saying that evolution has been observed? Does he mean that the process of evolution has been observed in real time? Or does he mean that the results of evolution have been observed?
Again, is he talking about specialized adaptive variants, or the development of new organs and body-plans?
Of course, "peer-review" is becoming a euphemism for censorship, so the appeal is tendentious.
<< A theory must be able to do two powerful things. It must be able to satisfactorily explain what we already know, and it must be successful in predicting things we do not yet know. When scientists do not understand something, they set up observations and experiments and seek independent and reproducible results. When the proponents of ID (the creationists) do not understand or cannot explain something, they simply attribute the unknown to an even more, albeit magnificent and glorious, unknown, an "intelligent designer." . Science seeks answers without creating or tolerating myths or calling upon faith. There is nothing wrong or unsatisfying with faith. However, since it is by definition not based upon any evidence, it is outside the realm of science. This is the primary reason intelligent design should not appear in a science class. >>
First of all, the testability of ID-theory is discussed in ID-literature, if Selbin bothered to inform himself.
Notice, though, that he applies his two-pronged criterion to ID-theory, but not to evolutionary theory. Why the omission? Why the double-standard?
What predictions has evolutionary theory made? Have these predictions, if any, been proven true?
Punctuated equilibrium was proposed because Darwinian gradualism was falsified by the evidence. At least, that's what Gould and Eldridge thought.
Where has evolution been reproduced in the laboratory? I don't mean microevolution. I mean macro. Why doesn't Selbin give the reader any documented examples for their consideration?
Selbin says that the intelligent designer is unknown. Where is the supporting argument for this claim? There's a vast literature in apologetics, natural and philosophical theology to the contrary.
What "myths?" Could Selbin point the reader to a creation myth in the writings of Denton, Dembski, Behe, et al.?
In what sense is faith by definition not based on any evidence? What about the vast literature in apologetics, natural and philosophical theology?
<< But since the ID people require that all things must have a creator, I would ask them to explain to us: Who or what created the intelligent designer? >>
This is a straw man argument. ID-theory doesn't demand that all things have a creator. Notice that Selbin doesn't quote any ID-theorist who has said that. Here is a canonical definition which I pulled off the official website of the ID movement:
"The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."
For all his talk of evidence, Selbin offers no hard evidence for evolution, no references to the relevant literature. Likewise, he shows no evidence of having read any of the standard literature on ID-theory, much less apologetics, natural and philosophical theology.
So the whole exercise reeks of hidebound ignorance and prejudice parading as science.
********************
Thanks for the Time article:
The problem begins with a runaway court system. You have rogue judges, setting themselves above the law, pretending that the Establishment Clause means something it never meant.
And when judges play games with the rule of law, then this, in turn, forces the antievolutionary movement to play semantic games as well.
So the liberal establishment leaves the antievolutionary movement with a bad set of forced options, then faults the antievolutionary movement for exercising a bad forced option!
Another reason these debates keep cropping up is that the liberal establishment makes it as difficult as possible for Christians to opt out of the public school system. They try their damnedest to keep a captive audience, then whine and bellyache when the captives complain about the terms of their confinement!
I don't think that we should delete references to evolution in science textbooks. That simply stifles debate in the opposition direction.
To characterize this as a stealth attack is pretty silly. It's not as though the ID-movement is a secret society with a secret handshake, blood-pacts, and a code language. It's not as though ex-members who spill the beans end up floating down the river in varied states of dismemberment.
The ID-movement publishes books, runs public websites, sponsors public debates, holds public seminars, supplies expert witnesses in court and at public school board meetings, &c. There is no hidden agenda.
I don't quite see the point of who's funding the movement, although the distinction of being the "leading male-chauvinist pig author" was no doubt too good to pass up.
Dawkins holds a chair endowed by a cofounder of Microsoft (Allen). Is that a sinister connection?
It isn't at all clear to me that evolutionary establishment welcomes an intellectual challenge. To begin with, the battle between Gould and Dawkins got quite nasty. And even if they do welcome a good challenge, they only welcome a challenge within the evolutionary paradigm, and not a challenge to the evolutionary paradigm itself.
It is true that merely slapping the label of a "theory" on evolution doesn't amount to much, for not all theories are equal--some are better attested, and enjoy more explanatory power than others.
It is possible to agree on the facts, but disagree on how the facts came to be. Two oncologists might agree on their diagnosis, but disagree on cause or the treatment of cancer.
However, evolutionary theory places an evolutionary construction on the scientific evidence. It is not that the raw data point unambiguously in an evolutionary direction. Evolution is brought in to account for the pattern; not necessarily that the pattern of evidence is prearrange in a pat evolutionary pattern. Evolutionary theory, as I understand it, is an elaborate intellectual construct which pieces together diverse evidence from different dates and digs and places and so forth. The empirical pattern is pretty scattershot.
To take one example, classic evolution predicted a cone of increasing diversification. But one reason that Gould and Eldridge proposed punctuate equilibrium is that in sites such as the Burgess Shale, they saw the cone in reverse, with a decreasing cone of diversity.
Again, I'm no expert. But when I read articles like this, this sort of thing is constantly ignored or overlooked.
One of the problems with an article like this is that it mounts counterarguments that have already been addressed in the ID-literature. Take the following counterexample:
"Biologists see it differently. They say, for example, a primitive, light-sensing patch of skin--a forerunner of the retina--could help animals detect the shadows of predators."
Notice, first of all, that no chain of evidence has been entered into the record to show that this is, in fact, what happened. No evidence is adduced to show the incremental evolution from a light-sensitive spot to a functioning retina.
We're just told that maybe this "could" confer a survival advantage. Is that what passes for scientific evidence?
Moreover, the impression which the uniformed reader would derive from this counterexample is that no ID-theorist has ever tried to field this objection. Actually, this was brought up in one of the earlier entries into the debate:
"We are invited by Dawkins and Darwin to believe that the evolution of the eye proceeded step-by-step through a series of plausible intermediates in infinitesimal increments. But are they infinitesimal? Remember that the 'light-sensitive spot' that Dawkins takes as his starting point requires a cascade of factors, including 11-cis-retinal and rhodopsin, to function. Dawkins doesn't mention them. And where did the 'little cup' come from? A ball of cells--from which the cup must be made--will tend to be rounded unless held in the correct shape by molecular supports. In fact, there are dozens of complex proteins involved in maintaining cell shape, and dozens more that control extracellular structure; in their absence, cells take on the shape of so many soap bubbles. Do these structures represent single-step mutations?" M. Behe (Simon & Schulster 1996, 1998), 38.
This reply has been in the public domain for nearly a decade, yet the Time science writer trots out the evolutionary counterargument as though this has gone unchallenged and unanswered.
And this is one reason that the evolutionary establishment finds itself on the run. It doesn't think it has to answer back, has to acknowledge any intellectual challenge. If you don't jump into the fray, you lose by default.
Or take this statement: "All the think tanks want to do, they insist, is make the teaching of evolution more honest by bringing up its drawbacks. Who could argue with that? But the mainstream scientific community contends that this seemingly innocuous agenda is actually a stealthy way of promoting religion. "Teaching evidence against evolution is a backdoor way of teaching creationism," says Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education. "
Now, suppose, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Scott is correct. How is that responsive to the question of whether evolutionary theory is or is not problematic on its own grounds? This sounds less like science education than politics. Is it his position that even if evolutionary theory were problematic, the problems must be swept under the rug lest the creationist community exploit the theory's weaknesses? Is that how one teaches science?
When I was a kid in school, we were taught that the first job of a scientist is not to prove his theory, but to try to disprove his theory. In other words, the best way of proving it would be to see if it could resist disproof. But now, at least where evolution is concerned, the theory has been put under glass. Doesn't this begin to resemble the red-capped cardinals who refused to peer into Galileo's telescope for fear of the consequences?
I'm no scientist, but when I can take this and other such articles apart in the course of a few minutes, it merely reinforces the credibility gap.
****************
Chris,
You said:
<
These are questions which rapidly spiral into nested complexities, so all I can do for now is to block out the basic answers. That will oversimplify matters, but we have to start somewhere. Let's begin at a macro level and get a bit more micro later on.
i) Christianity is a revealed religion. It stakes its veracity on its status as a revealed religion.
So it's a package deal--all-or-nothing. That's how the Bible presents itself as an object of belief. What is more, there is an inner logic to that presentation inasmuch as partial inspiration would defeat the very rationale for revelation in the first place.
Like it or not, a Christian is precommitted to certain propositions. That just goes with the territory.
ii) Some folks suppose that because the Bible was addressed to a prescientific audience, then it's okay to reinterpret Scripture in light of modern science.
But, for me, the reasoning is just the reverse. Because it was addressed to a prescientific audience, it must be understand at that level, for that was the level at which it was meant to be believed. To do otherwise would be anachronistic, like reinterpreting Dante's Aristotelian-Polemaic cosmology in light of Bohr and Einstein.
Whenever we interpret a document from the past, whether inspired or uninspired, we must assume the historical viewpoint of the original author and his implied audience.
To say that is not to say how we should interpret Genesis, but only to set a benchmark.
iii) As to the scientific evidence, my initial approach to science is via metascience. What is our philosophy of science? In particular, what is our theory of perception?
Our scientific theories are only as good as our theories of perception. So before we ever get to the scientific issues, we need to settle on our general epistemology.
Now, very roughly speaking, I'm in the camp of indirect realism. I don't believe that the mind has direct access to the external world. In my opinion, our mental representation is a correlate of the sensible world rather than a copy of the sensible world.
By way of comparison, the formula for deriving the Mandelbrot set is a correlate of the Mandelbrot set. Yet there is no resemblance between the appearance of the formula and the appearance of the set which the formula can generate--say, on a computer screen.
I've laid out my metascientific views in a couple of essays: one the recent essay "On knowing what we know," the other in the science section of my essay on "I'm glad you asked."
iv) In short, if left to our own devices, I don't know, when I look outside, what I'm actually seeing (or hearing or tasting or touching or smelling), for perception presupposes rather than penetrates the veil of perception.
v) At the level of sensation, there is no public world, only a private world. Yes, there is a public world which we all perceive, but our perceptions are private. The percipient is sealed away in his own, modular subjectivity.
vi) There is, though, one cognitive agent who enjoys an intersubjectival understanding of the world as it really is, in itself. That is the Creator of the world. He can and has disclosed himself to man, and, in so doing, his revelation operates, in part, as an external check on our filtered outlook.
vii) My scientific antirealism is just as sceptical of creation science as it is of evolution or modern cosmology or historical geology. So it cuts both ways. I'm an equal opportunity sceptic! In this respect, I'm not "following in the footsteps of much of the evangelical community today."
viii) As to molecular clocks and the like, I've addressed that question in my essay on "Tell me the time."
ix) Exegetically speaking, you will be unable to decouple the Resurrection from the historic fall of man, for 1 Cor 15 treats them as historically analogous and interconnected.
x) Is it possible to be a Christian and a theistic evolutionist? That question admits different answers. Theistic evolution is a logically coherent position--although guys like Gould and Dawkins don't think it very plausible.
And it is psychologically possible to affirm both. B. B. Warfield was a theistic evolutionist.
But, theologically speaking, these are incompatible beliefs. It is possible to hold inconsistent beliefs, but they are inconsistent--all the same.
xi) As to the fact of evolution--the fossil record, I can only speak as a layman:
a) A global flood would be a fossil factory. I'm not trying to place a more precise construction on its impact than that, because I have no way of knowing the extent or pattern of the evidence generated by such an event. But that does introduce a very large wild card into the deck.
b) Although I've read and viewed a lot of high-level popularizations of evolutionary theory, I've never seen the raw evidence. Instead, what I'm presented with is a smattering of evidence that has been arranged in an evolutionary pattern. The pattern doesn't exist in the natural record itself, as given in that actual order. Rather, miscellaneous odds and ends scavenged from different sites at different levels are cobbled together and fitted together with evolutionary theory driving the reconstruction of the evidence rather than the raw evidence driving the construction of the theory.
c) Darwinians habitually and deliberately blur evidence of macroevolution with microevolution. Of course, I realize that, from their standpoint, it's a natural continuum--that there is no hard-and-fast distinction. That, however, assumes an evolutionary take on the evidence.
What would the evidence look like if they were to scrupulously segregate microevolutionary evidence from macroevolutionary evidence?
d) The fossil evidence for evolution would be clear evidence of evolution if it presented an evolutionary trend. Yet Darwinians also tell us that evolution is, in the nature of the case, undirected, and, therefore, without any consistent linear progression.
Again, I've said a bit more about the particulars in my "I'm glad" essay.
I've covered a lot of ground here in a very short space. But I do have supporting arguments in some of supplemental material I've referred you to.
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Keeping ourselves unspotted from the world
The temptation of youth is to shoot for the moon, the temptation of age is to wax opportune. The young are far too otherworldly for the world below while the old are far too worldly for the other world above.
The political chameleon exemplifies the spirit of cynicism. He blends into the seasonal setting, whether snowy or stony. In the words of W. H. Auden, "Our researchers into Public Opinion are content that he held the proper opinions for the time of year; when there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went." Or as Groucho Marx more succinctly put it, "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
But the political stargazer exemplifies the spirit of utopianism. You can see this is Marxism, which is a secularized brand of Messianism.
You can see this in the social gospel.
You can see this in the overrealized eschatology of the Anabaptist, for whom there is no intersection between the city of God and city of man, but only a grand chasm separating Dis from the New Jerusalem.
You can see this in Platonism, with its hiatus between spotless universals and bespotted particulars.
As I've had occasion to say before, the lesser of two evils is not synonymous with the lesser of two sins. Every political candidate is a sinner, and there are degrees of personal evil.
Choosing between the lesser of two evils is not necessarily a choice between moral evils. If I see a wildfire approaching my home, and I don't have time to save both my five-year old son and the family dog, I have three choices:
i) I can throw up my hands and let nature takes its course, on the theory that any compromise is a moral compromise;
ii) if I were a member of PETA, I'd save the family dog, lest I commit the crime of speciesism my favoring my own flesh-and-blood;
iii) if I were a Christian, I'd sadly consign my pet dog to the flames while I fled with my son in arms. This is not a choice between right and wrong, but better and best.
The only solution is to have a carefully thought-out value-system. For further reflection, I'd refer readers to my essay (posted at Triablogue) on "The Art of Christian compromise," as well as:
http://www.chalcedon.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?p=55#55
The political chameleon exemplifies the spirit of cynicism. He blends into the seasonal setting, whether snowy or stony. In the words of W. H. Auden, "Our researchers into Public Opinion are content that he held the proper opinions for the time of year; when there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went." Or as Groucho Marx more succinctly put it, "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
But the political stargazer exemplifies the spirit of utopianism. You can see this is Marxism, which is a secularized brand of Messianism.
You can see this in the social gospel.
You can see this in the overrealized eschatology of the Anabaptist, for whom there is no intersection between the city of God and city of man, but only a grand chasm separating Dis from the New Jerusalem.
You can see this in Platonism, with its hiatus between spotless universals and bespotted particulars.
As I've had occasion to say before, the lesser of two evils is not synonymous with the lesser of two sins. Every political candidate is a sinner, and there are degrees of personal evil.
Choosing between the lesser of two evils is not necessarily a choice between moral evils. If I see a wildfire approaching my home, and I don't have time to save both my five-year old son and the family dog, I have three choices:
i) I can throw up my hands and let nature takes its course, on the theory that any compromise is a moral compromise;
ii) if I were a member of PETA, I'd save the family dog, lest I commit the crime of speciesism my favoring my own flesh-and-blood;
iii) if I were a Christian, I'd sadly consign my pet dog to the flames while I fled with my son in arms. This is not a choice between right and wrong, but better and best.
The only solution is to have a carefully thought-out value-system. For further reflection, I'd refer readers to my essay (posted at Triablogue) on "The Art of Christian compromise," as well as:
http://www.chalcedon.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?p=55#55
Monday, October 25, 2004
Now & then
You always have unbelievers who deny the historicity of the Bible. In our own day, the Jesus Seminar is the best-known example, but this is a perennial phenomenon.
Now, it's nothing short of amazing, when you consider how little interest the ancient world took in Israel or the NT church, and how little of this has even survived, that we have any corroboration whatsoever, much less as much as we do.
But despite that, you have unbelievers who deny the historicity of Scripture because it allegedly contradicts something in the ancient record.
Actually, the number of examples in which this is the case is, again, remarkably small (e.g., the census of Quirinius, the location of Ai). But to put this in perspective, imagine if, a hundred years from now, our knowledge of the Bush administration came from Michael Moore, the BBC or the NYT?
Even though I'm an American, contemporaneous in time and contiguous in place with the events, I have to spend more time than I like, and probably more time than I should, getting the facts straight. I've seen these events unfolding in live, real-time footage, and yet I still need multiple sources to correct for all the distortion.
To take another example, I'm a native of the Greater Seattle area. Some TV dramas are putatively set in Seattle, but for budgetary reasons are really filmed in Vancouver BC--with a few location shots to establish the putative setting.
I know Seattle like the back of my own hand. I don't have the same feel for Vancouver, but I've been there often enough that I can tell the difference.
Sometimes I tune into one of these shows just to test my memory. In one recent show, the pilot episode was obviously shot in Seattle, but the next episode was clearly shot in Vancouver.
Apparently, the director shot the pilot episode on site to fix the tell-tale landmarks in the viewer's mind, hoping that this splash of local color would carry-over when he pulled up stakes and moved the camera crew north of the border.
In another TV series, one episode was supposedly set in Spokane. But the greenery was much too lush for E. Washington.
On yet another TV, most of the show was filmed on location in Fall City, North Bend, and Snoqualmie, but the opening scene was clearly shot evidently shot elsewhere--on Whidbey Island, I was later to learn. A native would never mistake the Snoqualmie River for Puget Sound.
Now this sort of comparison demands a very broad and minute knowledge of the locale--not only in space, but also in time. If we were to go backward or forward 50-100 years, my indigenous knowledge would be useless--for the landscape and cityscape would be so greatly altered.
Canadian actors can often pass for Americans, but I can tell the difference between the American actor and the Canadian actor playing an American. The difference is very subtle. The Canadian accent isn't conspicuous, like the working class or uppercrust British accent. It's not that it sounds like something else--something identifiably foreign. Rather, it just doesn't sound quite like idiomatic American pronunciation. It's a bit classier…not as nasal or slurvian…the intonation and placement are a shade different.
Okay, my point is this: here we have so-called scholars, writing some 2000-3500 years after the fact, based on some historical or semi-historical source, which is, at best, within the general vicinity of the Biblical event, although it may be hundred or more years before or after the fact, and a hundred or more miles distant from the event. And that is even before we factor in the ancient historian's private bias or official agenda. Say, he's a court historian. Or a political rival of so-and-so.
It is quite possible, under such circumstances, that you could have a genuine discrepancy, or misidentification, between two sources (biblical and extra-biblical) without any prejudice to the veracity of Scripture.
Now, it's nothing short of amazing, when you consider how little interest the ancient world took in Israel or the NT church, and how little of this has even survived, that we have any corroboration whatsoever, much less as much as we do.
But despite that, you have unbelievers who deny the historicity of Scripture because it allegedly contradicts something in the ancient record.
Actually, the number of examples in which this is the case is, again, remarkably small (e.g., the census of Quirinius, the location of Ai). But to put this in perspective, imagine if, a hundred years from now, our knowledge of the Bush administration came from Michael Moore, the BBC or the NYT?
Even though I'm an American, contemporaneous in time and contiguous in place with the events, I have to spend more time than I like, and probably more time than I should, getting the facts straight. I've seen these events unfolding in live, real-time footage, and yet I still need multiple sources to correct for all the distortion.
To take another example, I'm a native of the Greater Seattle area. Some TV dramas are putatively set in Seattle, but for budgetary reasons are really filmed in Vancouver BC--with a few location shots to establish the putative setting.
I know Seattle like the back of my own hand. I don't have the same feel for Vancouver, but I've been there often enough that I can tell the difference.
Sometimes I tune into one of these shows just to test my memory. In one recent show, the pilot episode was obviously shot in Seattle, but the next episode was clearly shot in Vancouver.
Apparently, the director shot the pilot episode on site to fix the tell-tale landmarks in the viewer's mind, hoping that this splash of local color would carry-over when he pulled up stakes and moved the camera crew north of the border.
In another TV series, one episode was supposedly set in Spokane. But the greenery was much too lush for E. Washington.
On yet another TV, most of the show was filmed on location in Fall City, North Bend, and Snoqualmie, but the opening scene was clearly shot evidently shot elsewhere--on Whidbey Island, I was later to learn. A native would never mistake the Snoqualmie River for Puget Sound.
Now this sort of comparison demands a very broad and minute knowledge of the locale--not only in space, but also in time. If we were to go backward or forward 50-100 years, my indigenous knowledge would be useless--for the landscape and cityscape would be so greatly altered.
Canadian actors can often pass for Americans, but I can tell the difference between the American actor and the Canadian actor playing an American. The difference is very subtle. The Canadian accent isn't conspicuous, like the working class or uppercrust British accent. It's not that it sounds like something else--something identifiably foreign. Rather, it just doesn't sound quite like idiomatic American pronunciation. It's a bit classier…not as nasal or slurvian…the intonation and placement are a shade different.
Okay, my point is this: here we have so-called scholars, writing some 2000-3500 years after the fact, based on some historical or semi-historical source, which is, at best, within the general vicinity of the Biblical event, although it may be hundred or more years before or after the fact, and a hundred or more miles distant from the event. And that is even before we factor in the ancient historian's private bias or official agenda. Say, he's a court historian. Or a political rival of so-and-so.
It is quite possible, under such circumstances, that you could have a genuine discrepancy, or misidentification, between two sources (biblical and extra-biblical) without any prejudice to the veracity of Scripture.
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Giving Kristof the kiss-off
Mr. Kristof,
Your article on "God & Sex" calls for quite a number of comments. You begin with a leading question: "So when God made homosexuals who fall deeply, achingly in love with each other, did he goof?"
How does this fit into your general argument? Are you using this as a reason to support same-sex marriage? If so, how does it follow?
To begin with, what’s the connection between homosexual boyfriends and marriage? If it’s all about falling in love, then if they fall out of love, that will end the relationship. Ditto: lesbians.
So marriage would be a ball-and-chain to following their heart's desire--if "heart" is the operative organ in question. And, indeed, most homosexuals have open relationships with a variety of promiscuous or serial love-affairs or one-night stands.
Why cling to the hoary convention of marriage? Doesn’t that represent a throwback to those old Victorian hang-ups over sexual liberation? Surely your average catamite is more emancipated than that!
Your question also tries to set up a dilemma: How can Christians condemn homosexuals if God made homosexuals without condemning God in the process?
This bit of sophistry may trip up the unwary, but it’s a false dilemma. Why does a playwright invent the character of the villain or fall-guy? To serve as a dramatic foil or catalyst. Likewise, God raises up evil men like Pharaoh, Herod, Nero, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Caiaphas, Pilate, and others, to serve as so many pieces on his chessboard. They further his overarching designs.
Incidentally, your example conjures up the image of consenting adults. But to judge by the Catholic sex scandal, isn’t the pattern more commonly an older man and an underage boy?
Indeed, this isn’t limited to the Catholic sex scandal. There’s the Platonic school of pedophilia, as well as the cult of pederasty among the Pashtun of Afghanistan--not to mention NAMBLA. Examples, past and present, could easily be multiplied.
You then inform the reader that you’ve been researching the Biblical view of sodomy for the past couple of months. I’m always impressed by the infallible correspondence between your leftwing politics and your leftwing scholarship. It’s almost enough to make me suspect that something above the law of averages must account for so striking a coincidence.
Continuing with the opening moves, you say you "think it’s presumptuous of conservatives to assume that God is on their side."
Speaking for myself, I think it’s more presumptuous to assume that conservatives assume that God is on their side. In apologetics generally, as well as sexual ethics in particular, conservatives do not assume, they argue. They make a reasoned case for their position.
Of course, if your research were ever to stumble upon the opposing side of the argument, you would know this.
Incidentally, why do you bring up evolution in the context of same-sex marriage? What is the evolutionary rationale for homosexual rights? Does it confer a survival advantage on the species? Seems more like a survival disadvantage, wouldn’t you say? Homosexual "unions" don’t make babies, but they do make STDs.
Okay, this is all a warming-up exercise before you get to the point. You accuse Christians of cherry-picking their favorite verses when it comes to the Bible and sex.
And, suppose, for the sake of argument, that your allegation were true. What does that prove? If Christians are inconsistent, then what should they do about it? Inconsistency is a two-way street. You can relieve the inconsistency in a more liberal direction or a more conservative direction. You can deny the Bible outright or you can affirm the Bible throughout.
Parroting one of the popular strategies of the queer lobby, you say that the story of Sodom is about hospitality rather than homosexuality.
Now, even before we get into the details, this is, on the face of it, a false antithesis. Hospitality, or the lack thereof, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can only be inhospitable by doing or not doing something in particular. What concrete form does hospitality or its opposite take?
Suppose we were to say that Hansel & Gretel is about hospitality rather than cannibalism. Well, if you push it into a high enough orbit of abstraction, that is true. But I daresay most readers would feel that cooking little children alive is not the most hospitable way to treat a houseguest. If, for example, Nicholas Kristof woke up in a hot oven, smothered in blueberries and pie-dough, I rather doubt that he would be as patient of these fine Scholastic distinctions.
In fact, yet another strategy of the queer lobby is to admit that the story of Sodom is about homosexuality, but to draw the distinction, not between hospitality and homosexuality, but between consensual sodomy and homosexual gang-rape. Indeed, I know of no standard commentary on Genesis, be it liberal, moderate, or conservative, which interprets the episode as Platonic. Just consult Aalders, Baldwin, Brueggemann, Cassuto, Currid, Hamilton, Hartley, Kidner, Ross, Sailhammer, Sarna, Skinner, Speiser, Waltke, Wenham, Westermann.
You then introduce in Ezk 16:49-50 to bolster your case. But, among other things, the prophet condemns the citizens of Sodom for committing an "abomination." This is, of course, the very same word used to characterize sodomy in Lev 18:22 & 22:13. Now no Jew, conversant with Gen 19--which is about sodomy (even if you limit it to gang-rape)--as well as the Holiness Code--on the subject of sodomy--could miss the implication. Ezekiel is condemning the Sodomites in the very terms of the Holiness Code. The sin in question is the sin of sodomy.
What is more, rape and sodomy are separate sins in the Mosaic Law (Deut 22:25-27). Homosexual gang-rape would be an aggravated sin, a combination and intensification of two distinct sins.
Indeed, sins exert a mutual attraction. One sin draws another sin into its gravity well.
You claim that the classification of this sin is a theological innovation--dating to AD 11C. Actually, this interpretation can be documented in Philo, Josephus, and the OT Pseudepigrapha (e.g., Jubilees; Testament of Naphtali).
You then bring up the matter of Lot’s daughters. But this calls for a number of comments:
i) At most, Lot is placing the code of hospitality above the well-being of his own daughters. This doesn’t reflect Biblical ethics, but it does reflect the social mores of the time.
A Bronze Age Israelite would read this action at two levels. On the one hand, it is consistent with the honor-code of the ANE. On the other hand, it is inconsistent with the Mosaic code.
From the standpoint of a Bronze Age pagan, there is nothing morally shocking, either in the conduct of Lot or the conduct of the Sodomites.
Liberals like you can only take offense at this passage because you have been conditioned by the very value-system of Scripture which you now spurn and scorn.
It is easy for a modern-day reader to condemn Lot for the company he kept. And he is not above criticism by any means. But we must remember that in the Bronze Age, every city was a pagan city. Every city was a cesspool of pagan idolatry and immorality (e.g., Judg 19).
That is why God called Abraham out of Ur. That is why Abraham lived in tents.
ii) Lot may also be bluffing the Sodomites. His daughters were not merely virginal, but betrothed (19:14). So he is daring the mob to violate women who were engaged to two of their own citizens. Would their fiancées go along with that? This is a pressure tactic.
iii) You also miss the moral irony and symmetry of the narrative. In the beginning, Lot offers up his daughters to be gang-raped. In the end, Lot is gang-raped by his daughters (19:30-38). Poetic justice.
You then belittle the Mosaic ban on sodomy by linking it with other items in the Holiness Code, such as the dress code (Lev 19:19). You do the same thing with St. Paul (1 Cor 11). This is a popular tactic, but in several respects misguided:
i) You end your message on the "central message of love," but neighbor-love goes back to the Holiness Code (Lev 19:18), which you demean.
ii) In trivializing the dress code, you betray a shallow grasp of sociology. Fashion is all about making a statement, sending a message. People dress in a certain way to broadcast their social class, or their social alienation, or their occupation. They dress in a certain way to flaunt their sexuality, or muffle their sexuality, or blur their sexuality, or reverse their sexuality.
Dress codes can tell us quite a lot about cultural values. To be sure, some fashion statements are purely conventional. But others are more value-laden. One must judge on a case-by-case basis. Headgear is culture-bound, but hair is a cultural universal. Paul offers a number of reasons for his positions--some customary, others natural.
Incidentally, many women do look more winsome with long flowing hair. Why do you think Botticelli is so popular?
You say that 1 Samuel "can" be read to present David and Jonathan as boyfriends. Based on what? We need to keep several things in mind when we read this account:
i) Mediterranean men, as well as women, are very demonstrative. Have you never noticed this? You seem pretty provincial for a New Yorker.
ii) David and Jonathan were comrades-in-arms. This is where we get the word camaraderie. A military culture is characterized by machismo and male-bonding. This has nothing to do with sodomy. To the contrary, macho men are classic womanizers. The French Foreign Legion had its own traveling harem to service the men.
iii) You are ignorant of idiomatic usage, such as the political import of "love" (Heb.=aheb) in covenantal settings (e.g., 1 Kg 5:1).
You say that "Jesus never said a word about gays." By way of reply:
i) Even if this were true, it’s a red herring. On the one hand, Jesus reaffirmed the abiding authority of the Mosaic law (Mt 5:17-18). Yes, there are stated exceptions, but sex isn’t one of them.
On the other hand, he chose some of his disciples to speak on his behalf (Mt 10:40; Jn 13:20; 15:20). They speak with the same authority as the Master.
ii) Jesus reaffirmed the heterosexual archetype and prototype of marriage (Mt 19:4-6).
iii) Jesus cited, with evident approval, God’s judgment on Sodom & Gomorrah as a type of the final judgment to come (Mt 10:15; 11:23-24).
You say that the relation between the centurion and his sickly servant implies that they were lovers. Again, name me one standard commentary on either Matthew (e.g., Blomberg, Carson, Davies, France, Garland, Gundry, Hagner, Hill, Keener, Morris, Mounce), or Luke (e.g., Bock, Caird, Ellis, Evans, Fizmyer, Green, Johnson, Liefeld, Marshall, Nolland, Stein) which supports this contention.
You mention his statement about eunuchs. This is more cute than acute. Either you can't tell a hyperbolic figure of speech when you see it, or else you resort to ridicule when reason fails you.
You mention a couple of his statements about poverty and riches. Yes, riches can be a spiritual snare. This not a blanket prohibition against private property, per se, as is clear from the Biblical laws governing ownership and inheritance.
Anyway, how does this prove that Christians are guilty of cherry-picking Scripture? Are Christians disproportionately wealthy?
In fact, the usual smear from people like you is that "fundamentalists" are unlettered rednecks from Hicksville.
You also say that Rom 1 does not necessarily condemn lesbianism, for "it’s also possible that Paul was referring to sex during menstruation or to women who are aggressive during sex." By way of reply:
i) Name me one serious commentary on Romans that offers this interpretation (e.g., Barrett, Bruce, Cranfield, Dunn, Moo, Morris, Mounce, Murray, Sanday, Schlatter, Schreiner, Ziesler).
ii) Even if these interpretations were vaguely possible, sound exegesis is not about bare possibilities, but about what is probable.
iii) No, it can’t be about menstruation, for that could also happen in heterosexual activity, whereas the text is talking about homosexual activity--women with women.
As to who takes the lead, both lesbians and sodomites often impersonate the stereotypical interaction of straight couples, with one homosexual man or woman playing the part of the husband, and the other acting out the role of wife. This is reflected in a lot of sexual slang, viz., auntie, queen, bull-dyke, diesel-dyke, butchfemme. And these are just the printable usages.
iv) The parallel wording between Rom 1:26-27 leaves no room for doubt that homosexual activity is in view with reference to both genders.
Since you don’t believe in the authority of Scripture, why play these amateurish games? If you weren’t such a dilettante, and if you weren’t straining to prove a foregone conclusion, you could at least let the Bible speak for itself.
To say that "Paul disapproves of marriage except for the sex-obsessed" is a clownish caricature of his position. Paul points out that there are trade-offs between the single state and the married state. He also notes that marriage is less expedient at some times than others.
This is just sanctified common sense. But to judge by your article, sanctified common sense is the only kind of common sense left to us since liberal common sense is in such short supply.
You also labor under the mistaken impression that Paul is the only NT writer who condemns sodomy. Your ignorance is understandable. If you read only one side of the debate, and the very side which happens to have a vested interest in minimizing the Biblical evidence, you will only know what they want you to know, which isn't much. Yet it is highly likely that 2 Pet 2:7-8,10 & Jude 7-8 identify the sin of Sodom & Gomorrah as the sin of homosexuality.
Gen 2 doesn’t express the sentiment that it’s not good for the "human" to be alone. Yes, "adama" can either be a proper name ("Adam") or a generic designation ("mankind"), but in Gen 2 it is clearly a proper name, denoting a male human being.
What is more, the entire account is centered on the creation of a woman for the man.
However, in the interests of magnanimity, I wish to end my comments on a more generous note. To be an op-ed columnist for the NYT is was a shrew career move, for there are few fields which yield such princely dividends on such a miserly investment of fact. If you can't be a scholar, at least you can be P. T. Barnum.
Your article on "God & Sex" calls for quite a number of comments. You begin with a leading question: "So when God made homosexuals who fall deeply, achingly in love with each other, did he goof?"
How does this fit into your general argument? Are you using this as a reason to support same-sex marriage? If so, how does it follow?
To begin with, what’s the connection between homosexual boyfriends and marriage? If it’s all about falling in love, then if they fall out of love, that will end the relationship. Ditto: lesbians.
So marriage would be a ball-and-chain to following their heart's desire--if "heart" is the operative organ in question. And, indeed, most homosexuals have open relationships with a variety of promiscuous or serial love-affairs or one-night stands.
Why cling to the hoary convention of marriage? Doesn’t that represent a throwback to those old Victorian hang-ups over sexual liberation? Surely your average catamite is more emancipated than that!
Your question also tries to set up a dilemma: How can Christians condemn homosexuals if God made homosexuals without condemning God in the process?
This bit of sophistry may trip up the unwary, but it’s a false dilemma. Why does a playwright invent the character of the villain or fall-guy? To serve as a dramatic foil or catalyst. Likewise, God raises up evil men like Pharaoh, Herod, Nero, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Caiaphas, Pilate, and others, to serve as so many pieces on his chessboard. They further his overarching designs.
Incidentally, your example conjures up the image of consenting adults. But to judge by the Catholic sex scandal, isn’t the pattern more commonly an older man and an underage boy?
Indeed, this isn’t limited to the Catholic sex scandal. There’s the Platonic school of pedophilia, as well as the cult of pederasty among the Pashtun of Afghanistan--not to mention NAMBLA. Examples, past and present, could easily be multiplied.
You then inform the reader that you’ve been researching the Biblical view of sodomy for the past couple of months. I’m always impressed by the infallible correspondence between your leftwing politics and your leftwing scholarship. It’s almost enough to make me suspect that something above the law of averages must account for so striking a coincidence.
Continuing with the opening moves, you say you "think it’s presumptuous of conservatives to assume that God is on their side."
Speaking for myself, I think it’s more presumptuous to assume that conservatives assume that God is on their side. In apologetics generally, as well as sexual ethics in particular, conservatives do not assume, they argue. They make a reasoned case for their position.
Of course, if your research were ever to stumble upon the opposing side of the argument, you would know this.
Incidentally, why do you bring up evolution in the context of same-sex marriage? What is the evolutionary rationale for homosexual rights? Does it confer a survival advantage on the species? Seems more like a survival disadvantage, wouldn’t you say? Homosexual "unions" don’t make babies, but they do make STDs.
Okay, this is all a warming-up exercise before you get to the point. You accuse Christians of cherry-picking their favorite verses when it comes to the Bible and sex.
And, suppose, for the sake of argument, that your allegation were true. What does that prove? If Christians are inconsistent, then what should they do about it? Inconsistency is a two-way street. You can relieve the inconsistency in a more liberal direction or a more conservative direction. You can deny the Bible outright or you can affirm the Bible throughout.
Parroting one of the popular strategies of the queer lobby, you say that the story of Sodom is about hospitality rather than homosexuality.
Now, even before we get into the details, this is, on the face of it, a false antithesis. Hospitality, or the lack thereof, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You can only be inhospitable by doing or not doing something in particular. What concrete form does hospitality or its opposite take?
Suppose we were to say that Hansel & Gretel is about hospitality rather than cannibalism. Well, if you push it into a high enough orbit of abstraction, that is true. But I daresay most readers would feel that cooking little children alive is not the most hospitable way to treat a houseguest. If, for example, Nicholas Kristof woke up in a hot oven, smothered in blueberries and pie-dough, I rather doubt that he would be as patient of these fine Scholastic distinctions.
In fact, yet another strategy of the queer lobby is to admit that the story of Sodom is about homosexuality, but to draw the distinction, not between hospitality and homosexuality, but between consensual sodomy and homosexual gang-rape. Indeed, I know of no standard commentary on Genesis, be it liberal, moderate, or conservative, which interprets the episode as Platonic. Just consult Aalders, Baldwin, Brueggemann, Cassuto, Currid, Hamilton, Hartley, Kidner, Ross, Sailhammer, Sarna, Skinner, Speiser, Waltke, Wenham, Westermann.
You then introduce in Ezk 16:49-50 to bolster your case. But, among other things, the prophet condemns the citizens of Sodom for committing an "abomination." This is, of course, the very same word used to characterize sodomy in Lev 18:22 & 22:13. Now no Jew, conversant with Gen 19--which is about sodomy (even if you limit it to gang-rape)--as well as the Holiness Code--on the subject of sodomy--could miss the implication. Ezekiel is condemning the Sodomites in the very terms of the Holiness Code. The sin in question is the sin of sodomy.
What is more, rape and sodomy are separate sins in the Mosaic Law (Deut 22:25-27). Homosexual gang-rape would be an aggravated sin, a combination and intensification of two distinct sins.
Indeed, sins exert a mutual attraction. One sin draws another sin into its gravity well.
You claim that the classification of this sin is a theological innovation--dating to AD 11C. Actually, this interpretation can be documented in Philo, Josephus, and the OT Pseudepigrapha (e.g., Jubilees; Testament of Naphtali).
You then bring up the matter of Lot’s daughters. But this calls for a number of comments:
i) At most, Lot is placing the code of hospitality above the well-being of his own daughters. This doesn’t reflect Biblical ethics, but it does reflect the social mores of the time.
A Bronze Age Israelite would read this action at two levels. On the one hand, it is consistent with the honor-code of the ANE. On the other hand, it is inconsistent with the Mosaic code.
From the standpoint of a Bronze Age pagan, there is nothing morally shocking, either in the conduct of Lot or the conduct of the Sodomites.
Liberals like you can only take offense at this passage because you have been conditioned by the very value-system of Scripture which you now spurn and scorn.
It is easy for a modern-day reader to condemn Lot for the company he kept. And he is not above criticism by any means. But we must remember that in the Bronze Age, every city was a pagan city. Every city was a cesspool of pagan idolatry and immorality (e.g., Judg 19).
That is why God called Abraham out of Ur. That is why Abraham lived in tents.
ii) Lot may also be bluffing the Sodomites. His daughters were not merely virginal, but betrothed (19:14). So he is daring the mob to violate women who were engaged to two of their own citizens. Would their fiancées go along with that? This is a pressure tactic.
iii) You also miss the moral irony and symmetry of the narrative. In the beginning, Lot offers up his daughters to be gang-raped. In the end, Lot is gang-raped by his daughters (19:30-38). Poetic justice.
You then belittle the Mosaic ban on sodomy by linking it with other items in the Holiness Code, such as the dress code (Lev 19:19). You do the same thing with St. Paul (1 Cor 11). This is a popular tactic, but in several respects misguided:
i) You end your message on the "central message of love," but neighbor-love goes back to the Holiness Code (Lev 19:18), which you demean.
ii) In trivializing the dress code, you betray a shallow grasp of sociology. Fashion is all about making a statement, sending a message. People dress in a certain way to broadcast their social class, or their social alienation, or their occupation. They dress in a certain way to flaunt their sexuality, or muffle their sexuality, or blur their sexuality, or reverse their sexuality.
Dress codes can tell us quite a lot about cultural values. To be sure, some fashion statements are purely conventional. But others are more value-laden. One must judge on a case-by-case basis. Headgear is culture-bound, but hair is a cultural universal. Paul offers a number of reasons for his positions--some customary, others natural.
Incidentally, many women do look more winsome with long flowing hair. Why do you think Botticelli is so popular?
You say that 1 Samuel "can" be read to present David and Jonathan as boyfriends. Based on what? We need to keep several things in mind when we read this account:
i) Mediterranean men, as well as women, are very demonstrative. Have you never noticed this? You seem pretty provincial for a New Yorker.
ii) David and Jonathan were comrades-in-arms. This is where we get the word camaraderie. A military culture is characterized by machismo and male-bonding. This has nothing to do with sodomy. To the contrary, macho men are classic womanizers. The French Foreign Legion had its own traveling harem to service the men.
iii) You are ignorant of idiomatic usage, such as the political import of "love" (Heb.=aheb) in covenantal settings (e.g., 1 Kg 5:1).
You say that "Jesus never said a word about gays." By way of reply:
i) Even if this were true, it’s a red herring. On the one hand, Jesus reaffirmed the abiding authority of the Mosaic law (Mt 5:17-18). Yes, there are stated exceptions, but sex isn’t one of them.
On the other hand, he chose some of his disciples to speak on his behalf (Mt 10:40; Jn 13:20; 15:20). They speak with the same authority as the Master.
ii) Jesus reaffirmed the heterosexual archetype and prototype of marriage (Mt 19:4-6).
iii) Jesus cited, with evident approval, God’s judgment on Sodom & Gomorrah as a type of the final judgment to come (Mt 10:15; 11:23-24).
You say that the relation between the centurion and his sickly servant implies that they were lovers. Again, name me one standard commentary on either Matthew (e.g., Blomberg, Carson, Davies, France, Garland, Gundry, Hagner, Hill, Keener, Morris, Mounce), or Luke (e.g., Bock, Caird, Ellis, Evans, Fizmyer, Green, Johnson, Liefeld, Marshall, Nolland, Stein) which supports this contention.
You mention his statement about eunuchs. This is more cute than acute. Either you can't tell a hyperbolic figure of speech when you see it, or else you resort to ridicule when reason fails you.
You mention a couple of his statements about poverty and riches. Yes, riches can be a spiritual snare. This not a blanket prohibition against private property, per se, as is clear from the Biblical laws governing ownership and inheritance.
Anyway, how does this prove that Christians are guilty of cherry-picking Scripture? Are Christians disproportionately wealthy?
In fact, the usual smear from people like you is that "fundamentalists" are unlettered rednecks from Hicksville.
You also say that Rom 1 does not necessarily condemn lesbianism, for "it’s also possible that Paul was referring to sex during menstruation or to women who are aggressive during sex." By way of reply:
i) Name me one serious commentary on Romans that offers this interpretation (e.g., Barrett, Bruce, Cranfield, Dunn, Moo, Morris, Mounce, Murray, Sanday, Schlatter, Schreiner, Ziesler).
ii) Even if these interpretations were vaguely possible, sound exegesis is not about bare possibilities, but about what is probable.
iii) No, it can’t be about menstruation, for that could also happen in heterosexual activity, whereas the text is talking about homosexual activity--women with women.
As to who takes the lead, both lesbians and sodomites often impersonate the stereotypical interaction of straight couples, with one homosexual man or woman playing the part of the husband, and the other acting out the role of wife. This is reflected in a lot of sexual slang, viz., auntie, queen, bull-dyke, diesel-dyke, butchfemme. And these are just the printable usages.
iv) The parallel wording between Rom 1:26-27 leaves no room for doubt that homosexual activity is in view with reference to both genders.
Since you don’t believe in the authority of Scripture, why play these amateurish games? If you weren’t such a dilettante, and if you weren’t straining to prove a foregone conclusion, you could at least let the Bible speak for itself.
To say that "Paul disapproves of marriage except for the sex-obsessed" is a clownish caricature of his position. Paul points out that there are trade-offs between the single state and the married state. He also notes that marriage is less expedient at some times than others.
This is just sanctified common sense. But to judge by your article, sanctified common sense is the only kind of common sense left to us since liberal common sense is in such short supply.
You also labor under the mistaken impression that Paul is the only NT writer who condemns sodomy. Your ignorance is understandable. If you read only one side of the debate, and the very side which happens to have a vested interest in minimizing the Biblical evidence, you will only know what they want you to know, which isn't much. Yet it is highly likely that 2 Pet 2:7-8,10 & Jude 7-8 identify the sin of Sodom & Gomorrah as the sin of homosexuality.
Gen 2 doesn’t express the sentiment that it’s not good for the "human" to be alone. Yes, "adama" can either be a proper name ("Adam") or a generic designation ("mankind"), but in Gen 2 it is clearly a proper name, denoting a male human being.
What is more, the entire account is centered on the creation of a woman for the man.
However, in the interests of magnanimity, I wish to end my comments on a more generous note. To be an op-ed columnist for the NYT is was a shrew career move, for there are few fields which yield such princely dividends on such a miserly investment of fact. If you can't be a scholar, at least you can be P. T. Barnum.
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Holding the line on Holding-2
11. Quote: 'The negation idiom emerges from the Hebrew word lo, which transliterates as "not." On this matter, the principal study has been done by Whitney [Whit. Jer 7:22, 152], who describes the usage of lo in Jer. 7:22 as "a form hyperbolic verbal irony intended to intensify the contrast between what is present in the mind of the audience and what ought to be present." Whitney shows this idiomatic usage of lo elsewhere in the OT: Gen. 45:7-8, Ex. 16:8, 1 Sam. 8:7, 1 Sam. 20:14-15, Job 2:10, Jer. 16:14-15, Ezk 16:47 and Hos 6:6. His conclusion agrees with that of Feinberg [Fein. CommJer, 75]:
...The negative in Hebrew often supplies the lack of the comparative -- i.e., without excluding the thing denied, the statement implies only the prior importance of the things set in contrast to it.
Likewise, Laymon [Laym. IntB, 380]:
Hebrew idiom allows the denial of one thing in order to assert another, and the intention here is not wholly to deny but only to relegate to second place.
We therefore conclude with these scholars that Jer. 7:22 is in no way at odds with the Pentateuch. [X]'s case for disharmony is based upon his inability and/or refusal to grasp the passage in its socio-linguistic context, and it therefore fails to hold up under scrutiny.
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And thus we now pose the Calvinists another question: Is there any reason why the "not" in Romans 9:16 (as well as in a similar passage, John 1:12-13) should not be read in the same sense as the "not" in Jer. 7:22 -- as a negation idiom, not excluding the thing denied, but rather, stressing the prior importance of God's sovereignty in contrast? Given the Hebraic background, I think the burden is upon those who would read "not" absolutely rather than otherwise.'
i) John and Romans were not written in Hebrew to Hebrew-speaking Jews. The linguistic culture of 1C Jews is not all of a piece. According to Angel Saenz-Badillos, in A History of the Hebrew Language (Cambridge 1996), Greek was the lingua franca, while Hebrews was spoken by Judean Jews and Aramaic by Galilean Jews.
And what does Holding identify as the linguistic community of Hellenistic Jews like St. Stephen or the author of Hebrews?
ii) In this general connection, many of the ancients were multi-lingual. Are we to suppose that everyone whom Abraham came into contact with, in his far-flung travels, spoke the mother-tongue of Ur. Moses was at least bilingual (Hebrew, Egyptian), and his royal education may well have trained him in languages of the Levant and Mesopotamia. Did Solomon, the most cosmopolitan of kings, speak only one language? Paul was at least trilingual (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic).
You cannot acquire any conversational fluency if you are consciously translating from your mother-tongue to a second-language. There comes a point when you are no longer thinking in your native language. Kids from one linguistic community who play with kids from another linguistic community quickly pick up an idiomatic command of the second language.
For that matter, why assume that Jewish kids only heard one language at home? Because of interracial marriage, or polygamy, or because one or both parents were educated, or because of house-servants and house-guests, tutors, nurse-maids and field hands, kids could be exposed to more than one tongue from the cradle.
iii) Holding's thesis is self-refuting. If it's impossible for one linguistic community to get inside the mind of another linguistic community, then it is impossible for Holding to get inside the 'block-logic' of a 1C Jew.
iv) To invoke a Hebrew idiom does not discharge Holding of responsibility for showing if and how that idiom figures in any particular passage of Scripture. I'm sure, for example, that an antinomian would love to convert all the negations in the Decalogue to affirmations (you shall lie, you shall steal, you shall murder, you shall philander...).
Suppose we converted all the negations in Rom 1-3 into affirmations: no one is sinless=everyone is sinless.
12. Quote: 'In that light I am waiting for an explanation of how receiving grace somehow equates with "deserving" it. '
This varies with the theological system. In Roman Catholicism you have the category of congruent merit. In fact, this comes close to Holding's stated position: 'Sproul's observation that "if grace is obligated it no longer becomes grace" becomes essentially of no relevance once we are beyond the first round of "gracing."'
13. Quote: 'And a point I have yet to see explained as well is how making a decision qualifies as a "work." The Jews were forbidden to work on the Sabbath; did this prohibit them from thinking or making a decision? Is there any evidence that the Greek word behind "works" (ergon) ever refers to a thought or a decision? It is my earnest wish that an enterprising Calvinist will step to the plate and answer this question, for it seems to me that this is a flawed premise upon which the Calvinistic case rests.'
For starters, try Gal 5:19-21, where works of the flesh include a variety of iniquitous mental acts.
14. Quote: 'Our conclusion, such as can be reached prior to any possible answer to questions offered above, is that the U in TULIP is not grounded as much in Scripture as it is in Western philosophical assumptions and thought-forms being applied to Scripture.'
Isn't that exactly what Holding does when he glosses election in terms of Molinism and Rom 9 in terms of Aristotelian primary causality?
15. Quote: 'To speak of God doing A "because" of B implies a chain of causality that would be impossible for a being who transcends time ... indeed such would again be impossible for a timeless being, since a linear or logical order requires the passage of time to exist and be enacted.'
i) A logical order is an abstract object, not a concrete, spatiotemporal object.
ii) When God decrees the configuration of the world, he decrees ends-means relations, for causal-chains do exist in the natural world.
16. Quote: 'My question for Calvinists in this context would be, does it deny the sovereignty of God, His freedom to do as He pleases, to say that at times He may accomplish what He pleases through the most minimal of actions, and then allows what follows to take its natural course, because it likewise suits His purpose and will to do so? If so, how does this denigrate Him?'
This is a trick question. If God could accomplish his purpose by merely setting up the initial conditions, then that would not detract from his sovereignty. But this assumes the very answer at issue. You might as well ask if a painter can paint part of the canvass, then let the canvass fill in the gaps. A painting doesn't paint itself. Holding has no doctrine of creation. If a painter leaves the canvass half-finished, it stays half-finished.
17. Quote: 'Our commentary on irresistible grace is derived from what you might suppose to be an unlikely source -- David deSilva's Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity. deSilva shows quite clearly that the relationship between God and men is described in the NT in terms of an ancient client-patron relationship. What this means simply is that rich people give gifts and favor to the poor. God is the rich one (hence phrases referring to the "riches of his glory" [Rom. 9:23] have more meaning than we realize) and we are the poor folk.
Readers may find more details on this social system in deSilva's book, but for us the key is that the specific term at issue, grace, carried within the context of the client-patron relationship a certain meaning that is antithetical to Calvinist doctrine.
Consider these points [deSilva, 104ff]. The word grace was used "to refer to the willingness of a patron to grant some benefit to another person or group." Aristotle defined grace as "helpfulness toward someone in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped." So far, nothing unusual. Grace, all agree, is God's free gift. But there is more. "Grace" can also be used "of the response to a benefactor and his or her gifts, namely, 'gratitude'..." And this reveals a key point: one of the chief morals of this day was that "grace must be met with grace; favor must always give birth to favor; gift must always be met with gratitude." What this shows us is that, first of all and on a different topic, that of the relation of faith and works, our good behavior is an expected result of grace and not required for it. Second, related to our topic at hand, "there is no such thing as an isolated act of grace. An act of favor and its manifestation (the gift) initiate a circle dance in which the recipients of favor and its manifestations must 'return the favor,' that is, give again to the giver...To fail to return favor for favor is, in effect, to break off the dance and destroy the beauty of the gracious act." [106] Finally: "Neglecting to return a kindness, forgetfulness of kindnesses already received in the past, and, most horrendous of all, repaying favor with insult or injury -- these were courses of action to be avoided by an honorable person at all costs." [111]
From these insights it seems more likely that the paradigm of prevenient grace fits much better what the ancients would have understood to be the nature of the relationship between God and man. God gives grace; man responds -- if favorably, more grace is bestowed; if unfavorably, less is received. And therefore, Sproul's observation that "if grace is obligated it no longer becomes grace" becomes essentially of no relevance once we are beyond the first round of "gracing". The question of whether regeneration precedes faith would be answered, "Yes, it does, and faith is followed by more regeneration if accepted; then by more faith, and on it goes." And oddly enough, this is the picture we have always been given of sanctification in the life of the believer.
And there is more yet. The word "faith" in client-patron contexts [115] referred both to the dependability of the patron to do what he was entrusted to do, and the trust placed by the client in the patron. In this light, the familiar passage in Eph. 2:8-9 -- "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." -- takes on a meaning that is not very amenable to Calvinism. A key question is what "that" refers to -- what is the gift of God? Just grace? Or grace and faith? Calvinists conclude that "that" refers to both items, grace and faith, and there is nothing wrong with that grammatically (it is one option, not the only one), but in terms of the client-patron relationship, it simply doesn't wash. A patron gave a client grace; the patron did not give the client faith. Faith was the client's response to the patron's grace -- or, it referred to the "fidelity" and trust held by the client in his patrons. Thus Eph. 2:8-9 contextually cannot support the Calvinist position, unless we assume that Paul used these words in a way that would not have made sense to his readers. The "faith" is either our response, or else, if it is a gift of God, it means it is His "faith" in us -- or rather, using the word as the ancients would use it, it is the gift of fidelity God has given, His own fidelity in saving us as He has promised. The problem is that commentators on both sides view "faith" in terms of the modern definition which includes cognitive assent. But that is not what is in view in the client-patron template.
Faith, as we have noted elsewhere, contextually means loyalty within the client-patron relationship.
Finally, Calvinist commentators who speak derisively of the suggestion that Arminian views permit a "grace that fails to do what it intended" are offering a misplaced sentiment. By design, grace in a client-patron relationship would never be subject to "pass or fail" because the success was in the very act of grace itself, regardless of who accepted or rejected it. Dishonor and shame was upon the one who rejected the favor, and not a whit was taken from the giver as a result of the rejection. Their very graciousness was what brought them honor and glory (that is, public acknowledgment of worth and social value) -- which was not lessened or compromised by the negative reaction of ungrateful potential clients.'
i) I've only read the first chapter of DeSilva's book. The experience did not inspire me to intensify my acquaintance. There is nothing revolutionary here. It's a rehash of commonplace sociological concepts like shame culture/guilt culture, ascribed/achieved status, &c. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's hardly breaking any new ground.
ii) He claims that the shame culture rubric represents the 'primary axis of value' among 1C Christians and Jews. He offers next to nothing to substantiate this claim. He cites all of three little verses from Proverbs, plus a lot of stuff from the OT Apocrypha. Most of his supporting data comes, not from Scripture, but Greco-Roman writers.
iii) There's no doubt that Greco-Roman society was a shame culture. This is hardly a revelation. You could get that much just from reading about the dutiful Aeneas and the vainglorious heroes of Homer.
And, for this reason, a number of NT passages address themselves to the pagan honor-code. However, they do so, not to endorse the honor-code, or supplant it with another honor-code, but to subvert the whole framework. Salvation is by grace, not by ascribed status or achieved status.
iv) Notice Holding's bait-and-switch. Calvinism is wrong because it fails to take into account Hebrew block-logic; no, Calvinism is wrong because it fails to take into account the Greco-Roman honor-code. Okay, which is it? A Hebrew mindset or a Greco-Roman mindset? To paraphrase his (Holding's) criticism of Calvinism, DeSilva's conceptual scheme is not grounded as much in Scripture as it is in ancient Western philosophical assumptions and thought-forms being applied to Scripture.' Reading St. Paul through the Aristotelian lens of the Nicomachean Ethics is far from Mosaic morality.
v) A client-patron paradigm is so generic that it would be an easy matter to formulate a Reformed client-patron model, or a Pelagian model, or Deist model, or Muslim model, or Hindu model, or Catholic model, or what have you. A patron can make a donation, demanding nothing in return--or a loan, demanding repayment with interest.
vi) Holding uses this rubric as an all-purpose short-cut to the spade-work of detailed exegesis.
vii) He fails to draw any distinction between man-to-man patron/client relations and God-to-man patron/client relations. He further fails to draw any distinction between guilty clients and innocent clients. What does it mean to suggest that if God does us a favor, we do him a favor in return? This is the theology of heathen witchcraft.
viii) To talk about degrees of regeneration evinces conceptual confusion.
ix) Yes, you can redefine faith as faithfulness. And if you say that, you then have to say that we are justified, not by faith, but by our faithfulness. And if you say that, then you're right back to justification by works. This is not Paul, but Pelagius.
x) Yes, you can redefine faith as infused grace ('the gift of fidelity'). This is Romanism. And it fails to do justice to the vicarious character of justification, as articulated by Paul.
xi) No, a human patron cannot engender faith. News flash--God can do things man cannot!
xii) Holding defines faith inclusive as of trust, but denies faith as inclusive of cognitive assent. How can the client exercise trust in the patron unless he assents to the proposition that his patron is trustworthy?
18. Quote: 'In conclusion, I think it is clear that we are doing the Scriptures a disservice when we allow writers of the 16th century, or even the 4th century, to determine for us what men of the first century were thinking or saying. Neither Calvin nor Arminius, as far as may be seen, knew anything of Hebrew block logic or of client-patron relationships, which look to be essential keys to understanding important texts in this debate. '
i) Augustine (4C) knew nothing of client-patron relations? Wasn't Ambrose, a Roman aristocrat, his patron? Calvin knew nothing of client-patron relations? Wasn't Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, his patroness? One could multiply examples.
ii) And what is socio-rhetorical criticism if not an extended exercise in block-logic? It treats people, not as individuals, but as social units.
...The negative in Hebrew often supplies the lack of the comparative -- i.e., without excluding the thing denied, the statement implies only the prior importance of the things set in contrast to it.
Likewise, Laymon [Laym. IntB, 380]:
Hebrew idiom allows the denial of one thing in order to assert another, and the intention here is not wholly to deny but only to relegate to second place.
We therefore conclude with these scholars that Jer. 7:22 is in no way at odds with the Pentateuch. [X]'s case for disharmony is based upon his inability and/or refusal to grasp the passage in its socio-linguistic context, and it therefore fails to hold up under scrutiny.
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And thus we now pose the Calvinists another question: Is there any reason why the "not" in Romans 9:16 (as well as in a similar passage, John 1:12-13) should not be read in the same sense as the "not" in Jer. 7:22 -- as a negation idiom, not excluding the thing denied, but rather, stressing the prior importance of God's sovereignty in contrast? Given the Hebraic background, I think the burden is upon those who would read "not" absolutely rather than otherwise.'
i) John and Romans were not written in Hebrew to Hebrew-speaking Jews. The linguistic culture of 1C Jews is not all of a piece. According to Angel Saenz-Badillos, in A History of the Hebrew Language (Cambridge 1996), Greek was the lingua franca, while Hebrews was spoken by Judean Jews and Aramaic by Galilean Jews.
And what does Holding identify as the linguistic community of Hellenistic Jews like St. Stephen or the author of Hebrews?
ii) In this general connection, many of the ancients were multi-lingual. Are we to suppose that everyone whom Abraham came into contact with, in his far-flung travels, spoke the mother-tongue of Ur. Moses was at least bilingual (Hebrew, Egyptian), and his royal education may well have trained him in languages of the Levant and Mesopotamia. Did Solomon, the most cosmopolitan of kings, speak only one language? Paul was at least trilingual (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic).
You cannot acquire any conversational fluency if you are consciously translating from your mother-tongue to a second-language. There comes a point when you are no longer thinking in your native language. Kids from one linguistic community who play with kids from another linguistic community quickly pick up an idiomatic command of the second language.
For that matter, why assume that Jewish kids only heard one language at home? Because of interracial marriage, or polygamy, or because one or both parents were educated, or because of house-servants and house-guests, tutors, nurse-maids and field hands, kids could be exposed to more than one tongue from the cradle.
iii) Holding's thesis is self-refuting. If it's impossible for one linguistic community to get inside the mind of another linguistic community, then it is impossible for Holding to get inside the 'block-logic' of a 1C Jew.
iv) To invoke a Hebrew idiom does not discharge Holding of responsibility for showing if and how that idiom figures in any particular passage of Scripture. I'm sure, for example, that an antinomian would love to convert all the negations in the Decalogue to affirmations (you shall lie, you shall steal, you shall murder, you shall philander...).
Suppose we converted all the negations in Rom 1-3 into affirmations: no one is sinless=everyone is sinless.
12. Quote: 'In that light I am waiting for an explanation of how receiving grace somehow equates with "deserving" it. '
This varies with the theological system. In Roman Catholicism you have the category of congruent merit. In fact, this comes close to Holding's stated position: 'Sproul's observation that "if grace is obligated it no longer becomes grace" becomes essentially of no relevance once we are beyond the first round of "gracing."'
13. Quote: 'And a point I have yet to see explained as well is how making a decision qualifies as a "work." The Jews were forbidden to work on the Sabbath; did this prohibit them from thinking or making a decision? Is there any evidence that the Greek word behind "works" (ergon) ever refers to a thought or a decision? It is my earnest wish that an enterprising Calvinist will step to the plate and answer this question, for it seems to me that this is a flawed premise upon which the Calvinistic case rests.'
For starters, try Gal 5:19-21, where works of the flesh include a variety of iniquitous mental acts.
14. Quote: 'Our conclusion, such as can be reached prior to any possible answer to questions offered above, is that the U in TULIP is not grounded as much in Scripture as it is in Western philosophical assumptions and thought-forms being applied to Scripture.'
Isn't that exactly what Holding does when he glosses election in terms of Molinism and Rom 9 in terms of Aristotelian primary causality?
15. Quote: 'To speak of God doing A "because" of B implies a chain of causality that would be impossible for a being who transcends time ... indeed such would again be impossible for a timeless being, since a linear or logical order requires the passage of time to exist and be enacted.'
i) A logical order is an abstract object, not a concrete, spatiotemporal object.
ii) When God decrees the configuration of the world, he decrees ends-means relations, for causal-chains do exist in the natural world.
16. Quote: 'My question for Calvinists in this context would be, does it deny the sovereignty of God, His freedom to do as He pleases, to say that at times He may accomplish what He pleases through the most minimal of actions, and then allows what follows to take its natural course, because it likewise suits His purpose and will to do so? If so, how does this denigrate Him?'
This is a trick question. If God could accomplish his purpose by merely setting up the initial conditions, then that would not detract from his sovereignty. But this assumes the very answer at issue. You might as well ask if a painter can paint part of the canvass, then let the canvass fill in the gaps. A painting doesn't paint itself. Holding has no doctrine of creation. If a painter leaves the canvass half-finished, it stays half-finished.
17. Quote: 'Our commentary on irresistible grace is derived from what you might suppose to be an unlikely source -- David deSilva's Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity. deSilva shows quite clearly that the relationship between God and men is described in the NT in terms of an ancient client-patron relationship. What this means simply is that rich people give gifts and favor to the poor. God is the rich one (hence phrases referring to the "riches of his glory" [Rom. 9:23] have more meaning than we realize) and we are the poor folk.
Readers may find more details on this social system in deSilva's book, but for us the key is that the specific term at issue, grace, carried within the context of the client-patron relationship a certain meaning that is antithetical to Calvinist doctrine.
Consider these points [deSilva, 104ff]. The word grace was used "to refer to the willingness of a patron to grant some benefit to another person or group." Aristotle defined grace as "helpfulness toward someone in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped." So far, nothing unusual. Grace, all agree, is God's free gift. But there is more. "Grace" can also be used "of the response to a benefactor and his or her gifts, namely, 'gratitude'..." And this reveals a key point: one of the chief morals of this day was that "grace must be met with grace; favor must always give birth to favor; gift must always be met with gratitude." What this shows us is that, first of all and on a different topic, that of the relation of faith and works, our good behavior is an expected result of grace and not required for it. Second, related to our topic at hand, "there is no such thing as an isolated act of grace. An act of favor and its manifestation (the gift) initiate a circle dance in which the recipients of favor and its manifestations must 'return the favor,' that is, give again to the giver...To fail to return favor for favor is, in effect, to break off the dance and destroy the beauty of the gracious act." [106] Finally: "Neglecting to return a kindness, forgetfulness of kindnesses already received in the past, and, most horrendous of all, repaying favor with insult or injury -- these were courses of action to be avoided by an honorable person at all costs." [111]
From these insights it seems more likely that the paradigm of prevenient grace fits much better what the ancients would have understood to be the nature of the relationship between God and man. God gives grace; man responds -- if favorably, more grace is bestowed; if unfavorably, less is received. And therefore, Sproul's observation that "if grace is obligated it no longer becomes grace" becomes essentially of no relevance once we are beyond the first round of "gracing". The question of whether regeneration precedes faith would be answered, "Yes, it does, and faith is followed by more regeneration if accepted; then by more faith, and on it goes." And oddly enough, this is the picture we have always been given of sanctification in the life of the believer.
And there is more yet. The word "faith" in client-patron contexts [115] referred both to the dependability of the patron to do what he was entrusted to do, and the trust placed by the client in the patron. In this light, the familiar passage in Eph. 2:8-9 -- "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." -- takes on a meaning that is not very amenable to Calvinism. A key question is what "that" refers to -- what is the gift of God? Just grace? Or grace and faith? Calvinists conclude that "that" refers to both items, grace and faith, and there is nothing wrong with that grammatically (it is one option, not the only one), but in terms of the client-patron relationship, it simply doesn't wash. A patron gave a client grace; the patron did not give the client faith. Faith was the client's response to the patron's grace -- or, it referred to the "fidelity" and trust held by the client in his patrons. Thus Eph. 2:8-9 contextually cannot support the Calvinist position, unless we assume that Paul used these words in a way that would not have made sense to his readers. The "faith" is either our response, or else, if it is a gift of God, it means it is His "faith" in us -- or rather, using the word as the ancients would use it, it is the gift of fidelity God has given, His own fidelity in saving us as He has promised. The problem is that commentators on both sides view "faith" in terms of the modern definition which includes cognitive assent. But that is not what is in view in the client-patron template.
Faith, as we have noted elsewhere, contextually means loyalty within the client-patron relationship.
Finally, Calvinist commentators who speak derisively of the suggestion that Arminian views permit a "grace that fails to do what it intended" are offering a misplaced sentiment. By design, grace in a client-patron relationship would never be subject to "pass or fail" because the success was in the very act of grace itself, regardless of who accepted or rejected it. Dishonor and shame was upon the one who rejected the favor, and not a whit was taken from the giver as a result of the rejection. Their very graciousness was what brought them honor and glory (that is, public acknowledgment of worth and social value) -- which was not lessened or compromised by the negative reaction of ungrateful potential clients.'
i) I've only read the first chapter of DeSilva's book. The experience did not inspire me to intensify my acquaintance. There is nothing revolutionary here. It's a rehash of commonplace sociological concepts like shame culture/guilt culture, ascribed/achieved status, &c. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's hardly breaking any new ground.
ii) He claims that the shame culture rubric represents the 'primary axis of value' among 1C Christians and Jews. He offers next to nothing to substantiate this claim. He cites all of three little verses from Proverbs, plus a lot of stuff from the OT Apocrypha. Most of his supporting data comes, not from Scripture, but Greco-Roman writers.
iii) There's no doubt that Greco-Roman society was a shame culture. This is hardly a revelation. You could get that much just from reading about the dutiful Aeneas and the vainglorious heroes of Homer.
And, for this reason, a number of NT passages address themselves to the pagan honor-code. However, they do so, not to endorse the honor-code, or supplant it with another honor-code, but to subvert the whole framework. Salvation is by grace, not by ascribed status or achieved status.
iv) Notice Holding's bait-and-switch. Calvinism is wrong because it fails to take into account Hebrew block-logic; no, Calvinism is wrong because it fails to take into account the Greco-Roman honor-code. Okay, which is it? A Hebrew mindset or a Greco-Roman mindset? To paraphrase his (Holding's) criticism of Calvinism, DeSilva's conceptual scheme is not grounded as much in Scripture as it is in ancient Western philosophical assumptions and thought-forms being applied to Scripture.' Reading St. Paul through the Aristotelian lens of the Nicomachean Ethics is far from Mosaic morality.
v) A client-patron paradigm is so generic that it would be an easy matter to formulate a Reformed client-patron model, or a Pelagian model, or Deist model, or Muslim model, or Hindu model, or Catholic model, or what have you. A patron can make a donation, demanding nothing in return--or a loan, demanding repayment with interest.
vi) Holding uses this rubric as an all-purpose short-cut to the spade-work of detailed exegesis.
vii) He fails to draw any distinction between man-to-man patron/client relations and God-to-man patron/client relations. He further fails to draw any distinction between guilty clients and innocent clients. What does it mean to suggest that if God does us a favor, we do him a favor in return? This is the theology of heathen witchcraft.
viii) To talk about degrees of regeneration evinces conceptual confusion.
ix) Yes, you can redefine faith as faithfulness. And if you say that, you then have to say that we are justified, not by faith, but by our faithfulness. And if you say that, then you're right back to justification by works. This is not Paul, but Pelagius.
x) Yes, you can redefine faith as infused grace ('the gift of fidelity'). This is Romanism. And it fails to do justice to the vicarious character of justification, as articulated by Paul.
xi) No, a human patron cannot engender faith. News flash--God can do things man cannot!
xii) Holding defines faith inclusive as of trust, but denies faith as inclusive of cognitive assent. How can the client exercise trust in the patron unless he assents to the proposition that his patron is trustworthy?
18. Quote: 'In conclusion, I think it is clear that we are doing the Scriptures a disservice when we allow writers of the 16th century, or even the 4th century, to determine for us what men of the first century were thinking or saying. Neither Calvin nor Arminius, as far as may be seen, knew anything of Hebrew block logic or of client-patron relationships, which look to be essential keys to understanding important texts in this debate. '
i) Augustine (4C) knew nothing of client-patron relations? Wasn't Ambrose, a Roman aristocrat, his patron? Calvin knew nothing of client-patron relations? Wasn't Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, his patroness? One could multiply examples.
ii) And what is socio-rhetorical criticism if not an extended exercise in block-logic? It treats people, not as individuals, but as social units.
Holding the line on Holding-1
James Holding, who runs Tektonics Apologetics Ministry, has posted a rather lengthy critique of Calvinism.
I'll just content myself with commenting on what strike me as his major arguments. This will be a bit stream-of-consciousness because his own style is so free associative.
1. Quote: 'It is our contention that Romans 9 may be better understood in terms of the rubric of primary causality. But we anticipate the objection that we would be thereby reading into the text a concept not found therein. Our answer is that we would not expect it to be found within Romans 9 or any explanation offered by Paul -- because such an "explanation expectation" would be the product of a Western low-context mind rather than a Hebrew high-context one, like Paul's.'
Even if we were to accept this description of the Hebrew mind, this amounts to a preemptive admission that he's not doing exegesis on Rom 9. Instead, he's using the Aristotelian category of primary causality as an interpretive grid through which to filter Rom 9. But, in that event, this has nothing to do with what Paul meant. It doesn't even attempt to construe the text in light of original intent.
At this point there's nothing for the Calvinist to rebut. The Calvinist has exegeted Rom 9 (e.g., Murray, Piper, Schreiner). Holding has offered no contrary interpretation, based on text and context.
2. Quote: 'The thinking of the ancient Hebrew is not, as ours, concerned with precision. As Marvin Wilson points out in Our Father Abraham, "The nature of Hebrew [the language] is to paint verbal pictures with broad strokes of the brush. The Hebrew authors of Scripture were not so much interested in the fine details and harmonious pattern of what is painted as they were in the picture as a whole. Theirs was primarily a description of what the eye sees rather than what the mind speculates."'
This strikes me an obvious exaggeration. It depends on the subject-matter. It depends on what they're interested in. When it came to personal and social ethics, Jewish thinkers could get very detailed and draw very precise distinctions indeed.
As long as we're going to indulge in breezy generalities about the Hebrew mind, here's one from a more qualified source than Wilson:
'I once asked Prof. Harry Wolfson of Harvard U, a savant in ancient and medieval Greek as well as Jewish philosophy, how he evaluated the Greek mind, as exemplified by Aristotle, vis-a-vis the Talmudic mind. He replied, "if you compare a Greek philosophic treatise with a Talmudic tractate, obviously the Greek is orderly and easy to follow, whereas the rabbinic is disorderly and circuitous. But if you compare the mental horsepower of the Greek philosopher and the rabbinic sage, the latter is superior." That was not the answer I expected, but eventually I realized that Wolfson was right,' C. Gordon, A Scholar's Odyssey (Society of Biblical Literature 2000), 5-6.
3. Quote: 'In terms of theology, this means that God's existence is never argued, but assumed; "God is not understood philosophically, but functionally." God is thought of in terms of what He does.'
This is another exaggeration. Because the Bible is ordinarily addressed to the community of faith, it ordinarily takes the existence of God for granted; but when addressing outsiders, such as Isaiah's indictment of idolaters (Isa 40-48), the Bible does launch into an apologetic for the existence of the true God.
4. Quote: 'Wilson concludes, therefore, that the Hebrews would have had "little or no interest" in many issues we consider important, including the debate over free will and predestination.'
On the face of it, this claim is palpable false. For starters, just read Warfield's article on 'Predestination' (Works 2:3-67), in which he lays out quite a lot of the Biblical data on this topic.
5. Quote: 'Second, Jewish thinking, unlike our own, involved the use of what Wilson calls "block logic." In this item we explained some points about ancient Jewish and Near Eastern wisdom literature which has applicability here:
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The paradoxical nature of Ecclesiastes -- a book filled with statements regarded as being in tension (for example, on one hand mulling over the despair of life, then shortly thereafter encouraging the enjoyment of life) -- has been variously identified as being because Ecclesiastes is either a dialogue of a man debating with himself, "torn between what he cannot help seeing and what he still cannot help believing," [Kidner, Wisdom of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, 91], or else as the author's "challenge to the man of the world to think his own position through to its bitter end, with a view to seeking something less futile." I prefer the second interpretation, but in either case, the compositional principle is the same, and derives from the ancient Near Eastern methodology, which we might loosely compare to a Hegelian case of combining thesis and antithesis, to arrive at a synthesis; or else for sports fanatics to a game of tennis in which the ball is batted back and forth between opposing points to arrive at a consensus.
In this regard Ecclesiastes is related to other ANE literature with the same, or similar, content and methodology. Works like A Dialogue About Human Misery and Pessimistic Dialogue Between Master and Servant (on which, Murphy comments, the "dexterity the slave displays in affirming both the positive and negative aspects of a situation is reminiscent of [Ecclesiastes'] own style" -- Murphy commentary on Eccl, xliii] from Babylon; The Man Who Was Tired of Life from Egypt; and the book of Job from the OT, are all examples of this genre in which problems were discussed and resolved via dialogue. The modern Western mind has little patience with this sort of logical construction, and it is no surprise to see that critics have no appreciation for the implied intent of such literature: "Work out the problem yourselves," vs. "Give me an answer in a can, to go."'
i) Holding is extrapolating from one particular literary genre (wisdom literature) to Hebrew psychology. This is a huge leap of logic. It extrapolates from one genre to all genres, and then extrapolates from a literary genre to national character. Indeed, the fact that Bible writers alternate between different genres goes to show that they are not intellectually straight-jacketed.
ii) There is nothing Hegelian about Job or Ecclesiastes. In both cases, the existential problem lies with God's inscrutable providence. I have offered my own interpretation of both books in my essay on 'Vanity of vanities.'
iii) It should be needless to say that the dialogical genre is a staple of Western philosophy, viz., Socrates, Plato, Berkeley, Hume.
6. Quote: 'Hebrew "block logic" operated on similar principles. "...[C]oncepts were expressed in self-contained units or blocks of thought. These blocks did not necessarily fit together in any obviously rational or harmonious pattern, particularly when one block represented the human perspective on truth and the other represented the divine. This way of thinking created a propensity for paradox, antimony, or apparent contradiction, as one block stood in tension -- and often illogical relation -- to the other. Hence, polarity of thought or dialectic often characterized block logic." Examples of this in practice are the alternate hardening of Pharaoh's heart by God, or by Pharaoh himself; and the reference to loving Jacob while hating Esau -- both of which, significantly, are referred to often by Calvinist writers.'
i) There is nothing paradoxical about the hardening of Pharaoh The Bible cues the reader with a couple of programmatic statements (Exod 4:21-22; 7:2-3), the function of which is to supply a hermeneutical framework for what follows in the subsequent narrative. The text is flawlessly logical. The problem lies with careless readers like Wilson and Holding.
ii) The second illustration is even worse that the first. We would only have an antinomy of God was said to both love and loathe Jacob, both love and loathe Esau. Holding's illustration is simply incompetent.
7. Quote: 'Wilson continues: "Consideration of certain forms of block logic may give one the impression that divine sovereignty and human responsibility were incompatible. The Hebrews, however, sense no violation of their freedom as they accomplish God's purposes." The back and forth between human freedom and divine sovereignty is a function of block logic and the Hebrew mindset.'
i) I've already shown that block-logic is a fiction foisted upon Scripture by Wilson and Holding.
ii) But, assuming for the sake of argument, that block-logic is a feature or even fixture of Scripture, then should that not be normative for Christians?
Wilson and Holding are treating the logic of Scripture as a culture-bound casket which they are at liberty to bury in an unmarked grave. But the Bible-believing Christian is honor-bound by the logic of Scripture.
8. Quote: 'What this boils down to is that Paul presents us with a paradox in Romans 9, one which he, as a Hebrew, saw no need to explain. "..[T]he Hebrew mind could handle this dynamic tension of the language of paradox" and saw no need to unravel it as we do. And that means that we are not obliged to simply accept Romans 9 at "face value" as it were, because it is a problem offered with a solution that we are left to think out for ourselves. There will be nothing illicit about inserting concepts like primary causality, otherwise unknown in the text.'
What paradox? Paul repeatedly explains the relation between divine and human agency in terms of divine priority and purpose (9:11-18,21-23).
Instead of reading what Rom 9 is actually saying, Holding is superimposing his own harmonistic device on the text.
If you really think that Rom 9 presents a paradox, a paradox which Paul saw no need to relieve, then it is illicit of Holding to relieve the paradox.
9. Quote: 'The rabbis after the NT explicated the paradox a bit further. They did not conclude, however -- as is the inclination in the Calvinist camp -- that "a totally unalterable future lay ahead, for such a view contradicted God's omnipotence and mercy." They also argued that "unless God's proposed destiny for man is subject to alteration, prayer to God to institute such alteration" is nonsensical. Of course the rabbis were not inspired in their teachings. Yet their views cannot be simply discarded with a grain of salt, as they are much closer to the vein than either Calvin or Arminius, by over a millennium and by an ocean of thought.'
Let us remember that Rabbinical Judaism codifies the Pharisaic school of thought. It is therefore rife with synergism and merit-mongering. Yes, I know, Sanders would demure, but I've addressed the new perspective in my essay on 'Reinventing Paul.'
10. Quote: 'Consider this now as well with reference to Pilch and Malina's observation that in an ancient context, "mercy" is better rendered as "gratitude" or "steadfast love" -- as in, "the debt of interpersonal obligations for unrepayable favors received." Mercy is not involved with feelings of compassion, as today, but the "paying of one's debt of interpersonal obligation by forgiving a trivial debt." To say, "Lord, have mercy!" (Matt. 20:31) means, "Lord, pay up your debt of interpersonal obligation to us!" Far from being a plea of the hapless, it is a request to pay back previously earned favor from our client (God) whose patron we are.'
i) Yet another exaggeration. There are basically two forms of petitionary prayer in Scripture. One is where the suppliant calls upon God to remember his covenantal promises. The other is a confession of sin, and plea that God not judge us according to our sins, but be merciful.
ii) Even in the former case, we did nothing to earn God's covenant promises. This isn't back-pay for services rendered. To cast the divine party in the role of the client, and the human party in the role of the patron, is such a grotesque inversion of Biblical priorities that we might as well class it with other heresies such as gnosticism.
iii) Whoever said that the Reformed definition of divine mercy must ascribe certain feelings to God?
10. Quote: 'Consider again our example of the three worlds. There is no possible world in which all are saved. God as Prime Mover, He who in sovereign freedom chose one world over all the others possible, in this manner thereby in essence decrees as well who the elect and non-elect will be, without in any way removing our ability to freely choose. Remember that just because God knows we will do X does not mean that we must do X, as if by force.'
i) This, of course, is classic Molinism. Holding offers no exegetical support for such a position.
ii) He also ignores philosophical criticisms of Molinism, such as the grounding objection. In addition, some libertarians (open theism) are critics of Molinism. So the attack is not limited to the Reformed front.
I'll just content myself with commenting on what strike me as his major arguments. This will be a bit stream-of-consciousness because his own style is so free associative.
1. Quote: 'It is our contention that Romans 9 may be better understood in terms of the rubric of primary causality. But we anticipate the objection that we would be thereby reading into the text a concept not found therein. Our answer is that we would not expect it to be found within Romans 9 or any explanation offered by Paul -- because such an "explanation expectation" would be the product of a Western low-context mind rather than a Hebrew high-context one, like Paul's.'
Even if we were to accept this description of the Hebrew mind, this amounts to a preemptive admission that he's not doing exegesis on Rom 9. Instead, he's using the Aristotelian category of primary causality as an interpretive grid through which to filter Rom 9. But, in that event, this has nothing to do with what Paul meant. It doesn't even attempt to construe the text in light of original intent.
At this point there's nothing for the Calvinist to rebut. The Calvinist has exegeted Rom 9 (e.g., Murray, Piper, Schreiner). Holding has offered no contrary interpretation, based on text and context.
2. Quote: 'The thinking of the ancient Hebrew is not, as ours, concerned with precision. As Marvin Wilson points out in Our Father Abraham, "The nature of Hebrew [the language] is to paint verbal pictures with broad strokes of the brush. The Hebrew authors of Scripture were not so much interested in the fine details and harmonious pattern of what is painted as they were in the picture as a whole. Theirs was primarily a description of what the eye sees rather than what the mind speculates."'
This strikes me an obvious exaggeration. It depends on the subject-matter. It depends on what they're interested in. When it came to personal and social ethics, Jewish thinkers could get very detailed and draw very precise distinctions indeed.
As long as we're going to indulge in breezy generalities about the Hebrew mind, here's one from a more qualified source than Wilson:
'I once asked Prof. Harry Wolfson of Harvard U, a savant in ancient and medieval Greek as well as Jewish philosophy, how he evaluated the Greek mind, as exemplified by Aristotle, vis-a-vis the Talmudic mind. He replied, "if you compare a Greek philosophic treatise with a Talmudic tractate, obviously the Greek is orderly and easy to follow, whereas the rabbinic is disorderly and circuitous. But if you compare the mental horsepower of the Greek philosopher and the rabbinic sage, the latter is superior." That was not the answer I expected, but eventually I realized that Wolfson was right,' C. Gordon, A Scholar's Odyssey (Society of Biblical Literature 2000), 5-6.
3. Quote: 'In terms of theology, this means that God's existence is never argued, but assumed; "God is not understood philosophically, but functionally." God is thought of in terms of what He does.'
This is another exaggeration. Because the Bible is ordinarily addressed to the community of faith, it ordinarily takes the existence of God for granted; but when addressing outsiders, such as Isaiah's indictment of idolaters (Isa 40-48), the Bible does launch into an apologetic for the existence of the true God.
4. Quote: 'Wilson concludes, therefore, that the Hebrews would have had "little or no interest" in many issues we consider important, including the debate over free will and predestination.'
On the face of it, this claim is palpable false. For starters, just read Warfield's article on 'Predestination' (Works 2:3-67), in which he lays out quite a lot of the Biblical data on this topic.
5. Quote: 'Second, Jewish thinking, unlike our own, involved the use of what Wilson calls "block logic." In this item we explained some points about ancient Jewish and Near Eastern wisdom literature which has applicability here:
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The paradoxical nature of Ecclesiastes -- a book filled with statements regarded as being in tension (for example, on one hand mulling over the despair of life, then shortly thereafter encouraging the enjoyment of life) -- has been variously identified as being because Ecclesiastes is either a dialogue of a man debating with himself, "torn between what he cannot help seeing and what he still cannot help believing," [Kidner, Wisdom of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, 91], or else as the author's "challenge to the man of the world to think his own position through to its bitter end, with a view to seeking something less futile." I prefer the second interpretation, but in either case, the compositional principle is the same, and derives from the ancient Near Eastern methodology, which we might loosely compare to a Hegelian case of combining thesis and antithesis, to arrive at a synthesis; or else for sports fanatics to a game of tennis in which the ball is batted back and forth between opposing points to arrive at a consensus.
In this regard Ecclesiastes is related to other ANE literature with the same, or similar, content and methodology. Works like A Dialogue About Human Misery and Pessimistic Dialogue Between Master and Servant (on which, Murphy comments, the "dexterity the slave displays in affirming both the positive and negative aspects of a situation is reminiscent of [Ecclesiastes'] own style" -- Murphy commentary on Eccl, xliii] from Babylon; The Man Who Was Tired of Life from Egypt; and the book of Job from the OT, are all examples of this genre in which problems were discussed and resolved via dialogue. The modern Western mind has little patience with this sort of logical construction, and it is no surprise to see that critics have no appreciation for the implied intent of such literature: "Work out the problem yourselves," vs. "Give me an answer in a can, to go."'
i) Holding is extrapolating from one particular literary genre (wisdom literature) to Hebrew psychology. This is a huge leap of logic. It extrapolates from one genre to all genres, and then extrapolates from a literary genre to national character. Indeed, the fact that Bible writers alternate between different genres goes to show that they are not intellectually straight-jacketed.
ii) There is nothing Hegelian about Job or Ecclesiastes. In both cases, the existential problem lies with God's inscrutable providence. I have offered my own interpretation of both books in my essay on 'Vanity of vanities.'
iii) It should be needless to say that the dialogical genre is a staple of Western philosophy, viz., Socrates, Plato, Berkeley, Hume.
6. Quote: 'Hebrew "block logic" operated on similar principles. "...[C]oncepts were expressed in self-contained units or blocks of thought. These blocks did not necessarily fit together in any obviously rational or harmonious pattern, particularly when one block represented the human perspective on truth and the other represented the divine. This way of thinking created a propensity for paradox, antimony, or apparent contradiction, as one block stood in tension -- and often illogical relation -- to the other. Hence, polarity of thought or dialectic often characterized block logic." Examples of this in practice are the alternate hardening of Pharaoh's heart by God, or by Pharaoh himself; and the reference to loving Jacob while hating Esau -- both of which, significantly, are referred to often by Calvinist writers.'
i) There is nothing paradoxical about the hardening of Pharaoh The Bible cues the reader with a couple of programmatic statements (Exod 4:21-22; 7:2-3), the function of which is to supply a hermeneutical framework for what follows in the subsequent narrative. The text is flawlessly logical. The problem lies with careless readers like Wilson and Holding.
ii) The second illustration is even worse that the first. We would only have an antinomy of God was said to both love and loathe Jacob, both love and loathe Esau. Holding's illustration is simply incompetent.
7. Quote: 'Wilson continues: "Consideration of certain forms of block logic may give one the impression that divine sovereignty and human responsibility were incompatible. The Hebrews, however, sense no violation of their freedom as they accomplish God's purposes." The back and forth between human freedom and divine sovereignty is a function of block logic and the Hebrew mindset.'
i) I've already shown that block-logic is a fiction foisted upon Scripture by Wilson and Holding.
ii) But, assuming for the sake of argument, that block-logic is a feature or even fixture of Scripture, then should that not be normative for Christians?
Wilson and Holding are treating the logic of Scripture as a culture-bound casket which they are at liberty to bury in an unmarked grave. But the Bible-believing Christian is honor-bound by the logic of Scripture.
8. Quote: 'What this boils down to is that Paul presents us with a paradox in Romans 9, one which he, as a Hebrew, saw no need to explain. "..[T]he Hebrew mind could handle this dynamic tension of the language of paradox" and saw no need to unravel it as we do. And that means that we are not obliged to simply accept Romans 9 at "face value" as it were, because it is a problem offered with a solution that we are left to think out for ourselves. There will be nothing illicit about inserting concepts like primary causality, otherwise unknown in the text.'
What paradox? Paul repeatedly explains the relation between divine and human agency in terms of divine priority and purpose (9:11-18,21-23).
Instead of reading what Rom 9 is actually saying, Holding is superimposing his own harmonistic device on the text.
If you really think that Rom 9 presents a paradox, a paradox which Paul saw no need to relieve, then it is illicit of Holding to relieve the paradox.
9. Quote: 'The rabbis after the NT explicated the paradox a bit further. They did not conclude, however -- as is the inclination in the Calvinist camp -- that "a totally unalterable future lay ahead, for such a view contradicted God's omnipotence and mercy." They also argued that "unless God's proposed destiny for man is subject to alteration, prayer to God to institute such alteration" is nonsensical. Of course the rabbis were not inspired in their teachings. Yet their views cannot be simply discarded with a grain of salt, as they are much closer to the vein than either Calvin or Arminius, by over a millennium and by an ocean of thought.'
Let us remember that Rabbinical Judaism codifies the Pharisaic school of thought. It is therefore rife with synergism and merit-mongering. Yes, I know, Sanders would demure, but I've addressed the new perspective in my essay on 'Reinventing Paul.'
10. Quote: 'Consider this now as well with reference to Pilch and Malina's observation that in an ancient context, "mercy" is better rendered as "gratitude" or "steadfast love" -- as in, "the debt of interpersonal obligations for unrepayable favors received." Mercy is not involved with feelings of compassion, as today, but the "paying of one's debt of interpersonal obligation by forgiving a trivial debt." To say, "Lord, have mercy!" (Matt. 20:31) means, "Lord, pay up your debt of interpersonal obligation to us!" Far from being a plea of the hapless, it is a request to pay back previously earned favor from our client (God) whose patron we are.'
i) Yet another exaggeration. There are basically two forms of petitionary prayer in Scripture. One is where the suppliant calls upon God to remember his covenantal promises. The other is a confession of sin, and plea that God not judge us according to our sins, but be merciful.
ii) Even in the former case, we did nothing to earn God's covenant promises. This isn't back-pay for services rendered. To cast the divine party in the role of the client, and the human party in the role of the patron, is such a grotesque inversion of Biblical priorities that we might as well class it with other heresies such as gnosticism.
iii) Whoever said that the Reformed definition of divine mercy must ascribe certain feelings to God?
10. Quote: 'Consider again our example of the three worlds. There is no possible world in which all are saved. God as Prime Mover, He who in sovereign freedom chose one world over all the others possible, in this manner thereby in essence decrees as well who the elect and non-elect will be, without in any way removing our ability to freely choose. Remember that just because God knows we will do X does not mean that we must do X, as if by force.'
i) This, of course, is classic Molinism. Holding offers no exegetical support for such a position.
ii) He also ignores philosophical criticisms of Molinism, such as the grounding objection. In addition, some libertarians (open theism) are critics of Molinism. So the attack is not limited to the Reformed front.
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