From: Joel Cannon (jcannon@jcannon.washjeff.edu)
Date: Fri Apr 11 2003 - 15:55:15 EDT
I thank Don for his thoughtful and honest reply. We all experience
doubt in different degrees and for different reasons.
While I do not want to dishonor Don's honesty, I would like to raise
several points related to what he has said.
First, I think that he would acknowledge that needing to deal with
doubt by recourse to fine-tuning or other "design" arguments makes the
Christian claim that God reveals himself most clearly in Jesus less
credible.
Second, the bible and Christian tradition holds that the primary sphere
of YHWH's revelation is in human history. More particularly,
Christians believe that YHWH revealed himself in the history of
Israel, and has revealed hiself most clearly and most decisively in
Jesus of Nazarath. To be complete, I should add that Christian
tradition and the Bible also talk about having confidence because of
through the Holy Spirit (the experience of God).
If God's actions in history and Jesus are the ways YHWH has chosen to
reveal himself, isn't that the most natural way for us to a) deal with
doubt, and to b) engage unbelief? If people are going to make a
decision to accept or reject Christianity, lets make sure as
Christians that their decision hinges on the proper criteria. I can
respectfully accept a person saying that she has looked at Jesus and
decided Christianity is not true. I cannot accept as valid a person
saying that I have observed impersonal forces and randomness in the
universe, therefore Christianity is false. Its a logical non-sequitar.
Perhaps a problem here is that we are too prone to treat Jesus as some
abstract human figure preserved withing our tidy doctrine who delivers
timeless truths, and who is largely, if not completely, disconnected
from the particularities of the Palestinian Jew and peasant who was
crucified by the Romans as an insurrectionist.
In this vein three authors who have been very helpful to me in making
Jesus more credible, and less easily dismissed have been Kenneth
Bailey (Poet and Peasant, Eerdmans), N.T. Wright (Jesus and the
Victory of God), and Richard Hayes (The Moral Vision of the New
Testament, and Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul). Bailey
brings the proverbs alive because he lived in the Middle East for many
years and because of that can reveal many of the cultural nuances in
the parables that were obvious to people in NT times but are lost to
us. Jesus fits and is more impressive when placed in his original
context. Similarly Wright's strength is his knowledge of Roman and
Jewish history and the various mindsets/worldviews that the Jewish
people of Palestine. The events (at least most of them) make more
sense with this background and Wright's insight.
Third and finally, the intelligent design defense (and the Dawkins
attack) and Don's sense of assurance from fine-tuning are based on an
assumption of what God must be like (ironically ID's and Dawkins' are
the same assumption). In making assumptions about God we are arguably
likely to be wrong. Assumptions about God are to a large extent
socially conditioned and ephemeral. As evidence for this, consider the
fact, that at the time of Isaac Newton Christians considered the
impersonal laws that Don finds to have "taken away" the witness of
nature were themselves the evidence of intelligent design. Isaac
Newton said, "Gravity may put ye planets into motion but without ye
divine power it could never put them into such a Circulating motion as
they have about ye Sun, and therefore for this as well as other
reasons I am compelled to ascribe ye frame of this Systeme to an
intelligent agent." (Quote from Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of
Modern Atheism, p. 134). (Note: astromers can now explain quite well the
(nearly) cicular orbits of the planets)
The assumptions can also be self-defeating. Consider that the metaphor
that energizes Richard Dawkins, and gives evolution its anti-Christian
traction was William Paley's watchmaker (hence the title of Dawkins
book, "The Blind Watchmaker"). Paley, like Newton, felt that
Christianity could be best justified (or defended) without reference
to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, or anything else Christian. The reaction
when Paley's assumption concerning how God must have acted turned out
to be wrong was that Christianity was false. Now, rather than
discussing Jesus and God's acts in history, we have Christian lawyers,
engineers, mathematicians, and who knows what else staking the gospel
on their ability to do evolutionary biology better than professional
evolutionary biologists. Each time they attempt to argue, they
reinforce their opponents' mistaken assumption that the person of
Jesus is irrelevant the question of God's existence. They are
defending Paley not the gospel (or their image of what Paley
was---sorry Michael Roberts---Paley was arguably much deeper than his
modern descendants).
Enough,
Blessings!
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