Does Nature Have Meaning?

Does creation reveal its meaning to us or do we confer meaning onto it?

This is an important question. If we believe that creation is given to us by God and reveals its God-given meaning to our senses and intellect, then we will be more likely to respect it. But if we believe that nature isn't created by God, then it has no God-given quality that we are bound to respect. It is reduced to raw materials that we may manipulate. We can give it any meaning we want.

Now which worldview is more likely to take better care of the earth and use biotechnology for human good?

Grace Before, Mercy After

Before the fall God gave Adam more than he deserved. After the fall he gave him the opposite of what he deserved. Before the fall there was grace, after the fall grace took the form of mercy.

Why Richard Dawkins Needs to Get His Science from iCarly

I was recently watching a rerun of the preteen television show iCarly with my children, and lo and behold Albert Einstein was quoted by Spencer:

The thing that can't be proved is the scientific nature of science itself.

I couldn't believe my ears, and I thought I would have to wander through the rest of my life wondering if I had really heard Einstein quoted on a preteen pop-culture tv show. Then I remembered we had just acquired the modern technological marvel called DVR. So I grabbed the remote from my kids and re-round iCarly. They thought I was going to change the channel. So when my seven year old daughter's cries of protest changed to surprise: "What are you doing dad?" I realized that I actually had heard Spenser quote Einstein.

This just goes to show you the relevance of pop culture to those still stuck in modernity.

I say this because Richard Dawkins, whose stuck in the Enlightenment, obviously needs to get his science from iCarly. This is because he and his friends, like Christopher Hitchens, seem to assume that science does not involve faith. But it is really an act of faith to rely on our sense perceptions.

The scientific method proceeds by observations from our senses, and these are interpreted by our minds. To accept that these are reliable impressions of reality and that our mind interprets them accurately is to assume a lot. It is again an act of faith. This faith is justified, I would argue, if and only if our sense perceptions were designed to interpret reality. Otherwise faith in our sense impressions and our interpretations of them is unfounded. Thus, Dawkin's position is not only based on faith, but on an unfounded faith.

So what if Richard Dawkins was made to sit down and watch a kids show, and all of a sudden he thought he heard Einstein being quoted. Could he "believe" his ears? Yes, but only if they were designed to pick up sound waves, and if his brain was designed to interpret the meaning intended by the source of those sound waves. But this kind of confidence in science would lead to the God of Christianity, and that would be unbelievable, wouldn't it?

A Child's Education

Why is a child's education so important?

Augustine writes:

Virgil certainly is held to be a great poet; in fact he is regarded as the best and the most renowned of all poets, and for that reason he is read by children at an early age--they take great draughts of his poetry into their unformed minds, so that they may not easily forget him, for, as Horace remarks,

New vessels will for long retain the taste

Of what is first poured into them (City of God I.3).

What I Have Written, I Have Written

Quod scripsi, scripsi.

Order in this Order

We know things left to themselves tend toward disorder. So who put the order in this natural order?

Augustine, Distributism, & Empire

In preparing to teach on on Augustine's City of God I ran across the following passage:

Let them see the possibility that good men really shouldn’t rejoice at the expanding of the empire.[1] … ; and human affairs being thus more happy, all kingdoms would have been small, rejoicing in neighborly concord; and thus there would have been very many kingdoms of nations in the world, as there are very many houses of citizens in a city. Therefore, to carry on war and extend a kingdom over wholly subdued nations seems to bad men to be felicity, to good men necessity…. [Victory] would have surely been the case if, instead of a stone on the capitol,[2] the true King of kings and the Lord of lords would have dwelled there and been known.[3]

Augustine believed that the city of God was the last best hope for the city of man. The Roman Empire was too big for its own good and had gotten to where it was by being bad. Rome did not conquer because it had to wage just wars, but because it worshipped Jupiter. It hurled its lightening bolts around the Mediterranean until they began to short circuit.

The Barbarians had been biding their time and now, a la St. Jerome, the city of man that had taken the world was about to be really taken. Too bad they hadn't worshipped the true king of heaven (at least until lately and even then half-heartedly). Maybe then they would have stayed small and neighborly. Trying to do too much as an individual or a nation only diminishes you. Stay small and beautiful. Empires are for chumps.

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[1] Trans. mine: Videant ergo ne forte non pertineat ad uiros bonos gaudere de regni latitudine. The rest is Dod's trans. unless noted otherwise.

[2] Statue to Zeus/Jupiter.

[3] Trans. mine: Quod profecto haberetur, si non lapis in Capitolio, sed uerus rex regum et dominus dominantium cognosceretur atque coleretur.

The Individual Good vs. the Common Good

Someone has said that after all other motives for art have been discarded, the only one left was self-expression. The Greeks were motivated by the idea of beauty as perfection. The Romans were into gritty realism. The glory of God motivated Christendom art. In fact, most medieval artists didn't even sign their art. The Renaissance recovered the Graeco-Roman portrayal of man but, in the light of Christendom, saw him as made in the image of God. The Romanticists were motivated by nature as the ideal place for man.

Things start to fragment from there. After Christendom the center doesn't hold. Without a conception of the glory of God and man as made and then remade in God's image, man is set adrift. When there is no king in Israel, everyone does what is right in his own eyes. Man's view of himself and the world begins to depreciate until the only thing left is money and experimentation.

Patrick Deneen the author of Democratic Faith (click on the blog title) said in a Mars Hill Audio interview (volume 91) that when he asks his students to define democracy the most common set of answers has to do with the freedom of the individual to pursue his preferences. This is democracy as self-expression.

Deneen points out that this is much different than what Aristotle meant when he defined democracy as "rule and being ruled in turn." Everybody took a turn, even the poor, in Athenian democracy. Today, with the church relegated to the margins of society, it's up to the individual to find or make his own meaning.

The church has been told that it can make no claim on any world except its own. The individual is left to himself. He wanders with no commonly held view of human nature. There is nothing intrinsically bad or good for him. There is only what he wants. In this way, there is no common good there is only the individual good.

Instead of democracy preserving the common good, it is reduced to protecting our individual conceptions of the good. This means the individual can do anything he wants as long as he doesn't physically harm is fellow man. The liberty to swing my fist ends at my neighbors nose. This impoverishes democracy by handing it over to our appetites for sex, money, and power. "It's just business" is really insidious when you think about it.

Gravitas

I lifted this quote from Doug Wilson's blog:

The old seminary professors used to speak about a necessary trait for pastoral ministry called gravitas. It refers to a soul that has developed enough spiritual mass to be attractive, like gravity. It makes the soul appear old, but gravitas has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with wounds that have healed well, failures that have been redeemed, sins that have been forgiven, and thorns that have settled into the flesh. These severe experiences with life expand the soul until it appears larger than the body that contains it (Barnes, The Pastor As Minor Poet, p. 49).