On Mon, 28 Aug 1995, Gordon Simons wrote:
> Abstract: I first describe an attempt I made to convey to my church forum
> what is happening on the reflector forum. Secondly, I share - for your
> possible comments - a response made by one of our church forum members to
> what they were posted. - Gordie
>
> First part: my attempt to explain the reflector to my church forum
> ==================================================================
>
> With the cooperation of Loren Haarsma, I wrote the following to my
> church's forum:
>
> >> For several months, I have been a member of a discussion forum -
> composed mostly of Christians - which discusses questions linked to
> creation - with particular, but not exclusive, emphasis on origin-of-life
> issues. Few in that forum are up to speed on most of the topics discussed.
> This is part of the fun. But the activity is more than fun. I believe it
> is one of the many ways Christians can attempt to develop what Mark Noll
> calls the "evangelical mind."
>
> In trying to bring to the Blacknall forum something of what is going on, I
> have waited for a subject that I think many of us can understand without
> very much background information - and waited for a posting that seems to
> capture the essence of what is going on. The posting I've chosen is by a
> Christian at Tufts University by the name of Loren Haarsma.
>
> Besides letting us use his posting, Loren has graciously provided us with a
> "quick glossary" of terminology used in his posting.
>
> He writes, "Please also mention that it [his posting] was part of an
> ongoing discussion, composed in less than a day, and not intended to be
> 'publication quality.' "
>
> The subject of the discussion is made clear in Loren's abstract:
>
> ABSTRACT: Did the Bible's authors believe a flat-earth/"sky sandwich"
> cosmology, or does the language just "appear" that way? I think the
> ordering of the days in Genesis 1 suggests actual belief, rather than mere
> appearance.
>
> My plan is to post Loren's glossary now, and, in a day or two, repost his
> actual posting - as the second and last part of this posting. <<
>
>
> Second part: response of a church forum member to what was posted
> =================================================================
>
> The following are comments made by Pete Powers, a member of our church
> forum. Pete has a recently received PhD in English, from Duke University,
> and is currently teaching at George Mason University. With a bit of
> unease, he welcomes comments from folks on the reflector (which I will
> pass along to him). In this regard, he writes:
>
> "Sure, of course, I expect to be crucified, but that's Ok."
>
> Pete's comments follow:
>
> >> I'm not a scientist and generally view these arguments with some sense
> that I am glad someone else is concerned about it. The thing that keeps
> cropping up in these various postings that I am interested in is the
> notion of "the language of appearances" as if this somehow explained what
> was going on in Biblical discourse as opposed to scientific discourse.
> The problem with it, as I see it, is that the assumption seems to be that
> scientific discourse is not also a "language of appearances," as if
> somehow science can deliver to us the way things "really" are.
>
> I'm not sure this is so self-evident. The various scientific revolutions
> themselves suggest that science works within what could be described as
> kinds of faith assumptions concerning the nature of reality. Of course,
> the scientific community narrates these changes along almost exclusively
> technical lines: that is, "of course, now we have better mathematical
> calculations, better instruments, more money, more scientists, more
> knowledge." Changes in science are then just a matter of better and more
> science. Again, I would say it's not clear that this is the case--one
> could look to Thomas Kuhn (although he is somewhat controversial) and
> other historians of science to see that scientific revolutions aren't
> usually based on new and better instruments, but on dramatic shifts in the
> ways in which particular kinds of problems are approached, even shifts in
> the nature of problems themselves. The "new" calculations are often,
> even usually, attendant upon these philosophical shifts rather than
> causing them through the objective nature of science.
>
> It's therefore possible to imagine a world several hundred years from now
> in which people like us sit around and say, "Yeah, people used to think
> the earth was approximately spherical in shape." We would then proceed to
> cackle hysterically among ourselves at how ludicrous an idea this really
> was. Of course, imagining this statement as a hysterical joke requires a
> world with a significantly different understanding of physics, geometry,
> the nature of matter, time, and so forth, but I would hesitate to say that
> such a world couldn't exist. We may already be on the brink of radically
> altering our notions of geometry and shape through our attention to
> subatomic physics, and our notion of the nature of matter through
> attention to mathematical ideas such as dark matter, and so forth.
>
> None of this suggests that we can by some willful act of imagination go
> back to a flat earth cosmology that seems to me to be clearly in place in
> the bible. All I'm suggesting is that the language of appearances
> argument is a red herring since both scientists and theologians do their
> investigations within a hermeneutical circle created by the language of
> appearances. Theologians may be on firmer ground here since they are
> aware of it.
>
> This is why I think the creationists are misguided, because they think
> somehow that they can achieve some "truly objective" measurement that
> will show the "historical accuracy" of the biblical accounts. As long as
> they proceed in this manner they will be fighting a losing battle since
> this is the very ideology by which a scientific dogmatism has managed to
> be triumphant in the West for the past two hundred years or so. The task
> of the church might be--rather than seeking this spurious language beyond
> appearances--to seek to "save the appearances," that is, discover those
> forms of life within which the church can remain faithful to an earlier
> language of appearances within a newly developed language of appearances.
>
> My phrase "save the appearances" comes from Owen Barfield's book SAVING
> THE APPEARANCES, which I highly recommend for people concerned about these
> issues. I would go so far as to say that the effort to save the
> appearances has always been a primary task of the church, and is even
> discoverable within the bible itself. I would use the more common
> expression interpretation. Within the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures, for
> instance, we see the people of Israel grappling with radically altered and
> changing historical circumstance, most particular in trying to relate the
> theological experience of the Davidic Kingdom with that of the Babylonian
> exile. The Exile seemed to call into question the purposes of God as
> revealed to the Davidic Kingdom, and much of the prophetic scriptures can
> be seen as grappling with this apparent division. Similarly, In the New
> Testament, particularly in Hebrews and in Romans but elsewhere as well, we
> see the writers seeking to "save the appearances" by explaining how the
> new reality of the church is continuous with God's purposes for Israel
> despite what many took to be its radical break.
>
> These are not "cosmological" issues in the sense of the flat earth
> controversy, but they are similar since in both cases we are seeking a
> language that relates a radically new appearance in the world to the
> language of appearances by which we had previously understood God to work.
> On this score, interpretation is a fundamental act of faith since it is
> only through interpretation rather than through "objective measurement"
> that we are able to secure a meaningful continuity of our own experience
> with the purposes of God in history.
>
> As I said, I don't worry about these issues too much in a concrete way,
> but I do think the notion that the scriptures are using a more
> metaphorical and somehow less objective language will always be
> problematic since it lets the scientist assume that he has arrived at a
> truth without metaphor. This assumption is, I think, probably one of the
> metaphysical bases of idolatry.
>
> Peter Powers
> George Mason U <<
>
>
>