I'm Honored!

NT Wrong recently made a list of bibliobloggers and ranked them, and listed me as #1. I am puzzled and perplexed, honored and overwhelmed, touched, bemused, bewildered and just a tad overwhelmed! Thank you for bestowing this honor upon me! May your own blog speedily rise 14 ranks!


To put this in perspective, let me clarify (1) that this ranking is based merely on site traffic, (2) may be a fluke unlikely to be repeated on any other month, and (3) share the following disclaimer posted by NT Wrong: "In Biblical Studies the ability to write meaningful pieces that only you and, maybe, one other person in the world understand is the zenith of achievement. The Biblioblog Top 50 is thus no indication of the worth or otherwise of the blogs involved."

Be that as it may, this is the first time he's done this, and he listed me as #1, and I am truly honored.

Elsewhere around the biblioblogosphere, Mark Goodacre continues his series on dating New Testament documents, Antiquitopia continues to ask whether the Bible is socialist, Pisteuomen reflects on Halloween, Kata Ta Biblia questions NT Wrong's blog labels, while Jim West believes he deserved the #1 spot. C.Orthodoxy, Threads from Henry's Web and Notes From Off Center have posts on worshipping the golden calf. Ben Witherington has posts on The Changeling and the James ossuary. Chrisendom has a post on Bultmann and the incarnation.

Cosmos, Nature, Culture: A Transdisciplinary Conference

There is a call for papers for the Metanexus conference "Cosmos, Nature, Culture: A Transdisciplinary Conference" to be held in Phoenix, Arizona, July 18 – 21, 2009. Those academics who are interested in the relationship between religion and science should definitely take a look.

Around the Blogosphere

Stephen Law and AIG Busted continue the discussion of the historicity of Jesus (and Fred Anderson considers Robert Price on both Jesus and Superboy). Pisteuomen wants bibliobloggers to meet in Boston in November. Antiquitopia continues reading the socialist Bible. Drew Tatusko wishes you a Biblical "trick or treat". Bible Films Blog has an entry on Ebert's book about The Last Temptation of Christ. Bob Cornwall is all agog about dispentationalism. Use Your Head draws attention to evolution week on Teachers TV. Nancey Murphy asks whether persons have souls. James Crossley blogs about Jesus in an Age of Terror and Loren Rosson's review of How Did Christianity Begin?

Hubble's Back!

Bad Astronomy points out the return of good astronomy, as Hubble comes back online and gives us this photo:

Elsewhere around the blogosphere, Sandwalk responds to John Pieret about naturalism and God, while Michael Bird notes that the Carrier-O'Connell debate about the resurrection has begun online.

Around the Blogosphere

The discussion of whether Jesus existed has spread to C.Orthodoxy. Experimental Theology discusses the existence of Hobbes. Jason explains why you should vote - especially if your name is [insert name here].

Scotteriology explains why Barack Obama should be viewed as the Lord's anointed one. Jesus Creed discusses racism in Christian theology. NT Wrong explains his categorization of biblioblogs. Shuck and Jive highlights the usefulness of NT Wrong's list of biblioblogs for stalking Bible scholars. Jim Davila, Claude Mariottini and Biblia Hebraica highlight what may be the oldest Hebrew inscription yet found. Abnormal Interests and Jim West note another interesting discovery: this seal. Biblia Hebraica also notes the developments in the forgery trial focused around, among other things, the James Ossuary. Balshanut continues blogging the Documentary Hypothesis (focusing this time on challenges to it). Crypto-Theology focuses on Paul and postmodernism. Antiquitopia has several interesting posts including one on the Bible and socialism and another with an article on science and Hinduism.

Open Parachute writes about Einstein's God. John Pieret blogs about natural method. The Austringer points us to an interview with Lauri Lebo in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sandwalk explains how to cite blogs.

200,000

Exploring Our Matrix just passed the 200,000 visitors mark. Thank you for visiting!

Historical Arguments and Skepticism

I've been having quite the interaction on this blog recently about the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus. More recently, Stephen Law has joined in and responded to me on his own blog. I know there are a lot of readers of this blog with some background in historical study including several who work on Biblical history. What do you make of the interaction thus far? When I've failed to persuade some of my dialogue partners, is it because of my inept presentation, or their inordinate skepticism, or the simple fact that a historical judgment isn't based on only one piece of evidence, or something else?

Around the Blogosphere

Michael Barber has a great quote from B. F. Streeter on form criticism. Deepak Chopra may be worth quoting on the subject of the upcoming election. The Austringer tells us what we can do to help support science education in Texas and warns of more Discovery Institute misinformation. NT Wrong separates bibliobloggers into liberal and conservative categories. Undeception talks about the lake of fire in Revelation. The latest Christian Carnival is up at Fish and Cans. Chet Raymo reflects on the dark night of the moral soul. Metacatholic revisits last Christmas' discussion of Q. Ben Witherington continues his series on the postmodern mind. Matt Kelley challenges James Dobson's claim to be a Biblical literalist. Loren Rosson surveys How Did Christianity Begin? Balshanut discusses the Documentary Hypothesis.

Dreaming about LOST

Last night I dreamt I was on the island. Behind everything that was going on there was an artificially intelligent computer. I don't think my subconcious mind managed to contribute anything to unravelling the mysteries of LOST.

A student of mine, on the other hand, is making better progress. He started watching only recently on DVD, and so he has yet to experience the pain of having to wait a whole week for the next installment.

Here are some thoughts he sent me:

Hey Dr. McGrath,

So I was reading your blog this morning and I came across a link to the following image,

http://lost.cubit.net/pics/2x17/blastDoorMap.jpg

which is of course the invisible ink map on the blast door that Locke sees in Season 2, but what caught my attention was the reference in the bottom left corner where it says, "Low relevance to Vallencetti related research activity." Now I had come across Vallencetti (or Vallenzeti) references before in relation to an equation that predicts when humanity will destroy itself. So I did a little digging (and stop me if this is old news to you as it probably is), but apparently there was something called the "Lost Experience" that culminated in a video making reference to the famous #'s "4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42" as being the outcome obtained when this equation is ran. Further investigation led me to something called the "SPIDER PROTOCAL" which apparently is the source of the "virus" that Rousseau mentions her crew getting. In a memo that was unveiled during the "Lost Experience" it was revealed that the testing of the virus had been originally done on an island with "unique properties" but that the man in charge wanted to move away from using the island as the primary test sight and so moved to other locations (as is revealed in the video I mentioned previously which shows testing taking place in Sri Lanka; it can be found here). The whole purpose of the DHARMA initiative then was to try and alter the numbers in this equation and thus prevent humanity's destruction. The Hanso Corporation, which seems to have some connection to Widmore, started the DHARMA initiative and seems to still be active in trying to bring about the alteration of the Vanzetti equation, perhaps the real reason Widmore is trying to find the island, in order to continue the research. One thing this might explain is why there was so much fuss made about the virus early on in the show and then not mentioned again. If part of what the DHARMA initiative was doing was introducing this virus to natives of the island it might be the primary reason that the island required that they be purged (hence Ben and Richard gassing all the DHARMA people). Rousseau's team was probably infected by this virus before testing was moved off the island, and this could also explain why the hatches are marked with "QUARANTINE" if the virus was being used on the island natives.

It is interesting to me that the island (or whoever is controlling the island) seems to be acting against the DHARMA initiative. Ben says that they are the "good guys" and that Widmore and his people are the "bad guys," but exactly what he means is not entirely clear. Obviously he isn't trying to hide the island from Widmore to prevent it becoming a tourist attraction as he claimed to Locke, but perhaps he is trying to protect the island from undergoing further DHARMA initiative related testing (though if DHARMA is really trying to save humanity one wonders why he would want to stop them). This "war" that seems to be going on between Widmore and Linus is also interesting in that it had apparently been restricted to certain rules as was implied when Linus says to Widmore that he "changed the rules" when he killed his daughter Alex. I still don't fully understand who Ben is or what his role is. He seems to lead the islanders and can speak with Jacob but Miles seems to imply in his conversation with him that he is incredibly powerful saying "don't treat me like one of them (meaning the crash survivors), I know who you are and what you can do!" and subsequently demanding 3.2 million dollars, a sum that Linus doesn't seem too upset in agreeing to pay. So why does Ben have so much money and power? We saw his back story and his origins are humble to say the least, and so his rise must have been meteoric as he wasn't much older in the present than he was when he killed all the DHARMA people. Obviously you can't answer those questions but this is what I am pondering at the moment.

Anyway, that is probably just review for you but I wanted to throw in my 2 cents on the subject. I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic and perhaps any other details I might be missing.

Let me (and him) know what you think!

Did Jesus Exist On YouTube

OK, I admit it, a better title would be '"Did Jesus Exist?" on YouTube'. Be that as it may, I decided to upload a video addressing some of the points that I've been trying to make in recent discussions on this blog and elsewhere about the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus. Here's the video:

Two points are perhaps worth emphasizing in writing here as well. First, claiming that Jesus existed does not mean, from a historian's perspective, claiming that Jesus who existed was precisely as described in the New Testament. The specific evidence relating to specific details has to be treated on a case by case scenario.

Second, I am getting the impression that there are interesting parallels between the "Jesus was a myth" approach and Young Earth Creationism. Both turn to pseudoscholars as sources for their claims while ignoring the mainstream of scholarship. Both seem to reflect the views of people who are less than fully familiar with the relevant evidence. And both seem to think that showing that something could theoretically have been the case is enough, without showing why their proposed scenario does better justice to the evidence than competing explanations.

I look forward to your comments and feedback!

I Slept Through Class

I didn't sleep through class. But I did get an e-mail about a site called "I Slept Through Class". The site offers students an opportunity to upload and download class notes.

Are other educators aware of this? Do you think this is good news or bad? Will it encourage students to sleep through class, or to collaborate in ways that may in fact be helpful to their getting the most out of their college experience?

Stephen Barkley Reviews The Burial of Jesus

Stephen Barkley has posted a review of The Burial of Jesus on his blog and on Amazon.com.

Obama Revelations

It seems like the frenzy of interest in the possibility that Obama is the antichrist is increasing as election day draws closer. I've had more hits than usual on my blog today, most of them from people searching on search engines for keywords like "Obama Revelations 13". Presumably they are looking for Revelation 13 rather than "revelations" in the generic sense.


Most of them have ended up at my post "Left Behind with Obama". I think that post remains useful, but I also hope that those interested in this subject will also take a look at my post "How I Know Barack Obama is Not the Antichrist".


I hope those who read these posts will find them persuasive. But I do hope that those who continue to think that Obama could be the antichrist will therefore vote for him or otherwise simply not vote, lest they stand in the way of the fulfillment of prophecy!

Crisis Cartoons

There were two cartoons posted on blogs recently, related to the current economic crisis in the United States, that seemed worth sharing.

The first is from the Kenyan Daily Nation (HT Kouya Chronicle):

The second I found at Shuck and Jive:

Messiah vs. Myth: Did Jesus Exist? A Response to Tom Verenna

I've begun a "bloggersation" with Tom Verenna, on the subject of the existence of Jesus. I hope that in future posts, Tom will call me James. Otherwise, I'll come back and edit this post and call him something more than simply "Tom"! :-)

In his reply to an earlier post of mine to which I pointed him, to get the conversation started, he objects to my appeal to authority (pointing to the consensus of most historians) and to my pointing out that a particular viewpoint (namely that Jesus did not exist) tends to be characteristic of atheists whose area of expertise is not in the historical study of Jesus, or of early Christianity, or of first century Judaism or some comparably relevant discipline. In response to these points, I will simply state that one has to begin somewhere, and it cannot be expected that in a blog post one will not assume either what others have researched, or what one has said elsewhere on one's blog or in print. I certainly have no objection to investigating something that is a consensus opinion - I've done it myself, and that is how knowledge increases! But at present, I do not feel the need to re-examine the consensus that Jesus in fact existed, and here is why.

I said in the post to which I pointed Tom that the crucifixion provides strong evidence for the existence of Jesus, since being executed by the foreign rulers over the Jewish nation would have been considered by most to mean automatic disqualification as a candidate for being the Messiah. I stand by that argument, and in response to Tom's points in his post, I'll elaborate further.

First, I consider the appeal to Isaiah 52-53 to be rather ironic. While Christians down the ages have pointed to this passage as a prophecy about Jesus, critical scholarship on Isaiah has highlighted that the servant in Deutero-Isaiah is explicitly said to be Israel (Isaiah 44:1), while critical scholarship on the New Testament has highlighted the paucity of evidence for early Christians appealing to this part of Isaiah as a prophecy of the crucifixion. It is, at best, a passage that could be viewed as a prophecy with the benefit of hindsight, but scarcely seems to provide a sufficient basis for someone inventing a crucified Messiah. The only Messiah in Deutero-Isaiah is Cyrus (Isaiah 45:1). It may be, as Tom suggests, that the story allowed the Gospel authors to create a passion narrative in the absence of historical witnesses. But that does not negate the argument already presented for there having been a real individual who was crucified about whom the later Gospel author created their (at least partly fictional) stories.

I also wish to make one further point before going to sleep. It seems hard to make sense of the stories about Jesus simply as the work of writers of fiction. This is not to say that there is not indeed fiction in them. But I am persuaded that in those cases it is "historical fiction", the creation of stories about an actual figure who existed, set in the time in which that person existed (although often inevitably featuring anachronisms reflecting the author's own time and perspective). Be that as it may, it is unclear what the aim of such an author would be. Is it simply to tell a story of a failed Messiah? The beginning of the Gospel of Mark seems to exclude that option, since it speaks of "good news about Jesus the Messiah", even as Jesus himself throughout the book tells people not to speak publicly about him as Messiah. The notion of an "anointed one" is firmly rooted in the Jewish hopes for a restoration of the kingship and priesthood. Jesus as depicted in the Gospels does not fulfill what most Jews hoped for from such figures. The question that remains is why someone would invent a story from scratch about a figure, claim that this individual is the Messiah and that the story is good news, and then present the individual as failing to fulfill the expectations of such an anointed one.

It may be that all that needs to happen is for Tom or someone else to present the case to me that has persuaded them, and I will be won over to the logic of that position. In the mean time, I remain persuaded that the Gospels reflect the attempt to make sense of how a real figure Jesus, who had been crucified by the Romans, could still be the Messiah in spite of this fact. This seems to me to make better sense of what they contain, rather than the proposed alternative, which seems to envisage the Gospels inventing a Messiah from scratch who then requires a whole lot of explanation and commentary to justify the claim. Would it not have been much simpler to invent a Messiah who did do the things that were expected of him? Or to simply write a vague work about a human being yet to come, as is done in the Similitudes of Enoch, and then one could identify anyone who lived up to the role as being the fulfillment of what was predicted?

I've changed my mind about a lot of things related to the Bible over the years, and there is no reason in principle why I couldn't change my mind about this. But so far I remain unpersuaded by the evidence and arguments made for the figure of Jesus being a pure invention. And once again, to be clear, this is not to claim that there were not stories invented about Jesus. Clearly there were - outside the canon, I think everyone would agree, even while some would dispute there being such within the New Testament. But the stories were invented about a historical figure, rather than the figure himself having been invented.

The Problems with Antiantisupernaturalism

In a discussion of The Burial of Jesus, which advocates the use of historical methods to investigate historical questions, I encountered the accusation that this approach reflects the "antisupernaturalism" of historians.

I am convinced that this accusation is unfair, for two reasons. First, it is not simply historians who ask for more impressive evidence for more unusual claims. Few of us would treat claims made by individuals alive today, both of whom claimed to be pregnant, and one of whom claimed there was no human father, with the same degree of credulity or skepticism.

Second, excepting perhaps some Pentecostals, most Christians today share this "antisupernaturalism", and indeed are part of the reason for it. If you are a Christians, and you don't want society to treat claims to miracles with skepticism, why don't you simply go out and demonstrate them in the manner the apostles did? Why do you not say to the lame "In the name of Jesus I say to you get up"? Why do you not pronounce a curse of blindness on your religious opponents? Why do you not provide the sort of evidence of the supernatural that you claim to believe in texts and want historians to accept today?

It is Christians who require belief in Biblical stories about miracles, while showing through their actions that they do not believe them themselves in any practical sense, who are the problem, and not those who admit they do not and seek to honestly explain how our worldview has changed from ancient times, and legitimately so.

The Uncensored Bible

I won't go into details about the book by John Kaltner, Steven L. McKenzie and Joel Kilpatrick, The Uncensored Bible: The Bawdy and Naughty Bits of the Good Book (HarperOne, 2008), both in order to allow readers to get the full possible enjoyment of the book, and to keep my blog G-rated. The book could be described as a survey of current scholarship proposing interpretations of various passages involving sex, toilets, S&M, beer-making, depression, and various other elements that many readers of the Bible (and a far greater number of people who revere the Bible but rarely if ever read it) would find surprising to find within its pages. In many cases, the proposed interpretations are found by the authors to be unpersuasive; nevertheless, the book takes discussions from scholarly journals and other academic sources and presents them for consideration in a manner that is not merely accessible but entertaining, full of innuendo, double entendre, puns, and outright comedy. And the focus is entirely on the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, which will make the book more acceptable to Christian readers who can cope with Old Testament sex but might find New Testament sex too much to bear.

Black Belt Librarian

I want to highlight a new blog created by a librarian at Butler University, Brad Matthies, who is also a friend of mine. The title is "Black Belt Librarian". It should warn you, before you go over there and start stirring up trouble, that the black belt is no mere metaphor.

The Black Belt Librarian has already taken the time to blog about our recent discussion on campus about The Burial of Jesus, as well as the "big questions" that have also been a focus of recent posts here.

So go over and take a look. Perhaps even leave a comment...if you have the courage!

Philosophical Attack Ads

If you are growing tired of attack ads as election day draws near, there is only one remedy: watch amusing attack ads that don't feature any of the current presidential candidates, but instead feature famous philosophers. Here are two that a colleague in philosophy brought to my attention:

Kant Attack Ad



Kierkegaard in '08

How Dishonorable Was Jesus' Burial?

I received a question from someone who is reading my book, asking the following:

I'm just curious if you've read two articles that argue against McCane's thesis of a dishonorable burial. William Lane Craig ("Was Jesus Buried in Shame: Reflections on B. McCane's Proposal," Expository Times, 115, 2004, 404-409 ) argues against McCane directly, and Jodi Magness ("Ossuaries and the Burials of Jesus and James" JBL, 124, 2005) 121-54 argues that if Jesus was buried in a criminal burial area he would have been buried in the ground, and a tomb like Joseph's would only have been a private tomb.

Here's what I wrote in reply:

Having decided to write the book for a general audience and not include footnotes, I ended up not interacting with some of the possible objections that could be (and have been) raised. The point that a dishonorable burial would more likely have constituted burial in a trench/dirt grave is an important one. I'd say we don't know quite as much as we'd like about burial practices, as Raymond Brown points out (it was Brown who persuaded me that Mark depicts a dishonorable burial, even before I encountered McCane's work on the subject).

It is, ultimately, the account in Mark (and what later Gospels do to it) that persuades me that Jesus was not buried with the honor his followers believed he was due. The reference to being anointed beforehand and to women seeking to do so after the fact seems to me to be sufficient indication that, if nothing else, anointing was left undone. And it seems from both Mark and John (albeit in different ways) that this fact troubled at least some Christians.

In short, I think it may be possible that there were even less honorable burials one could be given, but the evidence from the Gospels suggests that Jesus' burial was, at the very least, less honorable and less complete than Christians felt he deserved.

Around the Blogosphere

Stephen Mathesen discusses how evolution can inspire faith. Chet Raymo asks what the heavens proclaim. The contrast between the two is striking. Jesus Creed discusses original sin and Adam. There's a video on YouTube about "stupid design" (HT Daniel Florien).

Paleojudaica highlights an article about Jewish mysticism. SF Gospel argues that Heroes is misnamed. Ken Schenck blogs about Scripture and money. Ben Myers reviews Christ, History and Apocalyptic.

NT Wrong has a bootleg (shhhh!) recording of a debate about theodicy between Bart Ehrman and N. T. Wright. Abnormal Interests not only discusses Anson Rainey on Hebrew origins, but also announces that he will host the next Biblical studies carnival.

Religiously-Inflected Science Fiction

Sojourners magazine has two pieces highlighting works of science fiction that explore religious themes: "This World and the Next" and "Spiritually-Inflected Science Fiction". In addition, Paul Levinson has his latest post up about Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I love the way the show is exploring the parallels between programming an artificial intelligence and raising a child. A terminator from the future seems to be trying to develop its own Skynet, presumably before the original one can be developed. I think what is going on is that there are AIs in the future that want peace with humans, and they want to alter the past (our present) in order to give the first genuine artificial intelligence a better upbringing, so that it won't decide to destroy humanity. And so they've enlisted the help of a child psychologist! What a great show!

Keith Ward, Big Questions in Science and Religion 7: Is Science the Only Sure Path to Truth?

This chapter is subtitled "Can religious experience count as evidence?" and provides an interesting intersection between Ward's book and my own recent one, The Burial of Jesus. Ward begins his chapter by writing "In most religions, there is an important place for experience. In fact, if there were no distinctively religious experiences, it is doubtful if religions would exist" (p.162).

My own view about Easter (since there has been some confusion about it around the web) is as follows. First, it is fair to say that I am "agnostic" about what happened to Jesus' body, and that I don't think it matters, since I doubt most Christians, had Jesus been burned at the stake or had his remains thrown to dogs, would believe that such a death prevents resurrection. It is also my view that religious experiences were what persuaded the early Christians that God had vindicated Jesus beyond the grave, and I am unpersuaded that the earliest experiences contained the tangible element found in later stories (such as those in Luke and John).

It is interesting to note that there is strong evidence that the initial "Easter experiences" (whatever form they took) left the disciples with doubts (see Matthew's account, for instance) and still fearful. It was a powerful experience of the sort that Christians continue to have today, a "born again experience", such as Acts 2 describes, that led them to be emboldened and go forth to proclaim their message. There is no doubt that religions mediate transformative experiences. The question is what such experiences prove. In my own case, I've felt compelled to acknowledge that my own religious experience cannot be used to prove that a body placed in a tomb almost 2,000 years ago had this or that happen to it.

Science is beginning to examine the neuroscience of religious experience. At one time, I would have found such investigations threatening. But now I realize that, since religious experience is a type of experience, it would make no sense to claim that it has nothing to do with the brain. But the subjective aspect, the qualia of religious experience, is different from a neurological perspective.

Ward helpfully keeps a balance on the relationship between science and truth. He writes, "science is not the only path to truth, though it is a necessary path to one sort of truth, truth about publicly observable, mathematically measurable, law-like behavior of physical objects" (p.167). If one does not allow for other sorts of "truth" (or whatever one thinks they should be called), then there is a danger: "In its concern to render all respectable knowledge value-free, it removes virtually all historical, political, ethical, aesthetic, personal, legal, and philosophical topics from the area of knowledge and deposits them in the dustbin of personal opinion or even illusion" (p.173).

Ward has a helpful discussion of the lack of certainty in the domain of historical study (p.178), and the same applies to much or all of the humanities and social sciences, to varying degrees. Ward also helpfully discusses the possibility of a common core of religious experience that may exist in spite of the different interpretations and expressions of it in varied religious and cultural contexts.

Let me conclude with a quotation. "To believe in God is primarily to believe in the objectivity of value and purpose. That view is not based on evidence but is an axiom that makes a life of faith - of seeing all experience in the light of such objective value and purpose - possible...There is no possibility of public verification of religious experiences. But public verification is only possible where there is sensory experience of a common material environment. We cannot publicly verify any statements about feelings, thoughts, motives, and intentions or, in general, any data of personal consciousness. Tests for the authenticity of religious experience lie in consonance with other knowledge, internal coherence, and conformity with the occurrence of similar experiences by others" (p.189).

More Scammers Spamming

It has been a while since I've posted about scam e-mails, but a couple have made it past my spam filter in recent days, and so I thought it might be worth warning the gullible out there. If you receive either of these, please don't be stupid enough to think that some random individual has singled you out to give a large sum of money to. It is a scam to get your personal information, and perhaps more.

Below are the two e-mails. One came from "Mr.West Tom" frdayff@eircom.net with the title "Contact My Pastor Immediately". The other came from "Nadine C. Bruce M.D." nbruce@neoucom.edu

_______________________

Dear Friend,

I am very happy to inform you about my success in getting that fund transferred. Now I want you to Contact Pastor Peter Daniel on his email address below and receive your compensation of $250,000.00 USD Dollars from him.

NAME:Rev. Peter Daniel
EMAIL:rev.pdaniel@live.fr)
Tell:- 229 95 71 94 32

Kindly reconfirm to him the following below information:

Your full name...............
Your age......................
Your address.................
Your occupation...........
Your country.................
Your Sex......................
Your Phone number.......
Your City.......................

Note that if you did not send him the above information complete, he will not release the Bank Draft to you because he has to be sure that it is you.
Ask him to send you the total sum of ($250,000.00 )USD Bank Draft ,which I kept for you.


Best regards,

Dr Desire Uzoma

_______________________

HSH Nordbank AG
Hong Kong Branch
Level 31, Three Pacific Place
1 Queen's Road East,
Hong Kong.

Good Day To You,

I am Mr.Jun Huan of HSH Nordbank AG, Hong Kong. I have an obscured
business suggestion for you. In November, 1999, Ahmad Fahmi an
Indonesian, a contractor with the Iraqi Government and also a
businessman, made a time investment of US$24.5M as secured growth
funds for (60) sixty calendar months in my Branch. This investment has
matured and has been lying in our Bank reserve for the past two years,
and under the Hong Kong banking laws, any time Investment unclaimed
after three years will be turned over to the Hong Kong Government
purse.

Upon maturity several notices were sent to him and no response came
from him. Early This year, it was later discovered that the Ahmad
Fahmi and his family were killed in a convoy attack in Musol, Iraqi on
22nd Aug, 2004. After further investigation it was also discovered
that Ahmad Fahmi did not declare any next of kin in his official
papers including the paper work of his Bank deposit. And he also
confided in me the last time he was in my Office that no one except me
knew of his deposit in my Bank.

Against this backdrop. I will like you as a foreigner to stand as the
next of kin to Ahmad Fahmi so that you will be able to receive this
funds. I have contacted an Attorney that will prepare the necessary
document that will back you up as the next of kin to Ahmad Fahmi and
also the rightful beneficial to the funds. After you have been made
the next of kin, the Attorney will also fill in for claims on your
behalf and secure the necessary approval and letter of probate in your
favour for the transfer of the funds to your nominated bank account.We
are going adopt a legalized method and the Attorney will prepare all
the necessary documents.Please endeavour to observe utmost discretion
in all matters concerning this issue. What is required from you at
this stage is for you to provide me with your full names, address,
direct telephone and fax numbers to enable my Attorney commence his
job.

Reply strictly if you are interested with the requested information
via my personal email address hshjunhuan12@hotmail.com to enable
the Attorney commences his job immediately.

Sincerely,

Mr.Jun Huan.
hshjunhuan12@hotmail.com

LOST Season 5 Trailer

Here's the first trailer previewing season 5 of LOST:

HT IO9

Around the Blogosphere (Israelite Origins, Egypt, and the Brain)

There are two articles in Biblical Archaeology Review about Israelite origins by Anson Rainey: "Inside, Outside: Where Did the Early Israelites Come From?" and "Shasu or Habiru: Who Were the Early Israelites?"

Since the Israelites, according to the Bible, are supposed to have spent time in Egypt, it is appropriate to be able to point to a number of posts about Egypt, too. Ferrell Jenkins has a post on temples along the Nile. Sepher Ha-Bloggadah is up to the first plague. Toothface has an amusing cartoon that features Egypt. Claude Mariottini has a post on the tenth commandment (supposed to have been picked up on the way from Egypt). And Irenic Thoughts has a thought from a fourth-century Christian in Egypt.

There's also interesting science news. New Scientist has a piece on creationists moving their battle to the brain. Jesus Creed has an entry on evolution and fundamentalism. Nina Munteanu has a post on artificial intelligence. Greenflame is seeking recommendations of movies about religion, science and technology. Chet Raymo muses about mysticism. John Pieret blogs about brain drain.

Last but certainly not least, Bob MacDonald has a round up of recent blogging about resurrection.

Unseen Footprints

The Burial of Jesus (and a recent review of it) have been mentioned on Lingamish. Just for clarification, the post there says:

"his body later dumped in a common grave" - I think that something like this is what happened.

"where the disciples then retrieved it and gave it a proper burial" - I am persuaded that the disciples wanted to do this but am also persuaded that they were unable to. Had they been able to, I think they would have told a different story than the one found in Mark. Indeed, the way that later Gospels rewrote the story in Mark shows how much they wished they could have done this.

At any rate, if there's one thing that both David and I agree on, it is that there is inevitable uncertainty about some things that we wish we could be certain about.

Resurrection and the Gothic Theologian

I joined briefly in a discussion on Theology Web, and one of the other participants has reposted some things I wrote and his reply on his own blog, The Gothic Theologian. Those interested in talking about 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection, and related subjects, but who may (like me) not be "orthodox" enough for the discussion on Theology Web, may want to pay a visit to the Gothic Theologian instead!

Happy Birthday Universe!

According to the time scale calculated by Bishop Ussher based on the genealogies in the Bible, the earth was created 6011 years ago tomorrow.

Here's why I think trying to calculate anything to do with history or science based on Biblical genealogies is a bad idea. And here's a link to a review by Peter Enns of a book arguing the case for an old earth from an Evangelical perspective.

HT Open Parachute

The Two Witnesses

I've decided to share an e-mail I received recently, for the interest/entertainment of readers:

Dear Prof. McGrath,

I am writng to you because from what I have read about you on the Internet you are interested in biblical prophecy in terms of research and verification.

I have identified the two witnesses that are mentioned in The Bible in Revelation 11:3. The story is fairly long and detailed so I would like to say that I would be interested in talking to you about the two witnesses so that there would be an academic record of my accounting of the two witnesses.

The two witnesses were John Lennon and Paul McCartney. I do realize that this probably seems a bit out of the ordinary but I can prove that what I am saying here is correct.

I have also identified the prophecies of the two witnesses and they are also very radical in nature. The two witnesses came and prophesied about events that are related to Revelation 12 and 13.

I would like to be interviewed by either you or a member of your staff, etc. with the goal being that my accounting of the two witnesses can have some academic grounding. I am sure that once I fully explain the two witnesses that you will be unable to prove my accounting of them wrong. I would be happy if you would agree to interview me personally or if you wanted to have a student conduct the interview. I really have no preference. I would also like to come and talk about the two witnesses to one or several of your classes that you are currently teaching.

I am not interested in receiving any compensation for the interview or for coming to give a presentation to any of the classes you are currently involved with. I simply wish to make the prophecies of the two witnesses known in an academic arena. It is what I believe that I am supposed to do at this point.

I'm sure that you must have some questions before you make a decision. I would be more than happy to answer any questions you may have either through email or by phone. If you wish for me to call you please send me a phone number that you can be reached at. I live in the Chicago, IL area and would also be willing to travel to your campus to talk to you as well.

Well, I know that the content of this email is fairly out of the ordinary. However, I am correct in what I am saying. I only wish to convey to you what I know know about the two witnesses. It is quite astounding, really, what they did and how they did it. The prophecies that they delivered are quite profound as well.

Please write back and let me know if you are willing to hear me out, in whatever forum you feel most comfortable with.

Sincerely,

XXXXX

All I have to add is that fans of Ringo Starr and George Harrison should be outraged...

Review of The Burial of Jesus on Chrisendom

Nelson Moore has done a guest post on Chris Tilling's blog Chrisendom, a review of The Burial of Jesus. Do take a look, as the review as a whole provides a nice summary of the book's key points. I'll just share the conclusion here:

"The Burial of Jesus by James McGrath is definitely worth purchasing and reading. For those unfamiliar with how historical work is done in Christian academic contexts, McGrath provides a wonderful primer. If you are a biblical scholar, you may find this book very valuable as a resource to share with friends or students who are looking to understand historical scholarship. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this work."

Thank you Nelson and Chris for doing this!

Beware of the Cylons

This was too funny not to share. It will probably only make sense to Battlestar Galactica fans, but that's everyone who reads my blog, right?

HT Galactica Sitrep

The Bible In A Minute

A former student suggested I should show this to my class on the Bible. I'm not sure about that, but I definitely thought it was worth sharing here!

Naturalism

As I've been blogging Keith Ward's recent book The Big Questions in Science and Religion, I've also been reading Naturalism by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. The book, in essence, argues that strict naturalism is opposed not merely to a dualist view of human beings, but to theism.

Many of the same issues that plague Ward's discussion of this topic appear here, only in far worse form. At one point the authors, after quoting Jaegwon Kim on mental causation of bodily movements, write "For the most part, we will simply assume in this chapter that causation of physical events by teleologically explained mental events, which is the ultimate target of the causal closure argument, is causation by events involving souls" (p.29).

Their argument seems to me to be the equivalent of arguing that a computer must have a soul, because the computer can open the CD drive. Of course, they would probably respond that in such a case the computer has been programmed to be able to do that. But isn't there good reason to believe that the human brain, which has some abilities "hardwired" at birth, is capable of being "programmed" - what, in popular parlance, is referred to as learning?

The questions of interiority, qualia, experience, and spontaneity are important ones, but they are not the same as the question of causing motion through "mental events".

The analogy between the soul and God plays a key role in the book, and the authors are concerned that, unless one leave room for the human soul, then a divine personal agent acting in the world will lose its plausibility at the same time. As I said in an earlier post, it seems better to reason from the known to the unknown, and to use our (clearly rudimentary, partial and inadequate) understanding of the human "mind" in thinking about God, rather than vice versa.

The authors are quite correct in highlighting our uncertainty about key issues: "We remain radically in the dark about how consciousness might emerge as something physical from nonconscious, nonmental parts" (p.76). The key question at this stage cannot be "Has science explained subjective human experience?" but only "Has science provided evidence that strongly suggests that our subjective experience arises as an emergent phenomenon from brain activity?"

The book's attempt to begin with consciousness as the fundamental, ultimate reality has a long history in both Western and Eastern thought (pp.83-85). But all those systems of thought were formulated before our modern understanding of the brain, and it should not be surprising if new information required longstanding notions to be rethought. Nonetheless, the authors' point seems fair when they write that "The conflict between naturalism and theism is not a matter of different scientific theories of events within the cosmos, but of conflicting overall philosophies of the cosmos itself" (p.102).

Finally, I have reached the conclusion that positing the existence of God does not help much with moral reasoning. The fundamental problem in ethics is how one gets from "is" to "ought". And if there is a personal God who is eternal and has certain values, it would seem that this is still only an is statement. The deity in question may have the power to punish all who fail to adhere to the divine values, but they are still values that merely happen to be the values of the deity. There is nothing that turns them into values one "ought" to hold to, unless the desire to avoid punishment is felt to be a sufficient basis for adhering to a certain morality. Positing either God or the soul may or may not help us make sense of our own experience, but neither allows us to sidestep the Euthyphro dilemma, which asks whether right and wrong are defined by the gods or are universal principles to which the gods themselves are subject.

Crappy Student Writing

A colleague of mine sent around the following, which I thought I would share with a wider audience, since I know many educators read this blog:

Why Do they Turn In Crap?

1. They Don’t Spend Enough Time.

The typical student waits until the last minute to write an essay. She has worried and procrastinated but spent no time thinking and planning until she sits down to compose. Her writing process becomes her entry into the thinking process. Rather than actually frame and introduce a topic, the introduction is the warm-up, which is why we see so many introductions containing all the points the student wants to make. There is either no thesis or some vague and murky statement that never appears again.

The rest of the essay is the record rather than the product of the student’s thinking. Because she is doing her pre-writing as her writing, paragraphs are often randomly organized and internally haphazard, containing more generalizations without backing because that is all she has at this point, generalizations.

Toward the end of the essay, you may notice greater precision and momentum, leading to what the student felt at the time was a resounding clash of thunder—“finally, an idea”!—often in the very last paragraph. The student is happy to be done with this chore, satisfied with that great idea that came to her in the last paragraph and either too sleepy or to rushed to read the whole thing over again to, at the very least, check for typos.

Sometimes, our best students, who think and write well, turn in these “drafts” and we think, “Well, there are some great ideas here and some highly sophisticated, even elegant writing.” Even though we can’t say for sure what the student is saying, we reward what seems to be intellectual merit.

2. They Are Not Doing the Reading.

Studies of how college students organize their time indicate that most students simply do not complete all of their reading assignments. If they are not reading and relying only on lecture or class discussion, they may not have enough knowledge to write on the topic.

3. The Writing Assignment is too Vague, too Demanding, too Boring, or there is insufficient time or space in the syllabus to complete it.

I know that I have given out bad assignments. Usually, my assignments are bad when I have dreamed up what I think is a creative, ambitious assignment but I really don’t know what I want from them or why I am asking them to do it. With these “new” assignments, it’s a good idea to write them yourself to see what the problems will be for the students.

4. Students don’t think the professor is an audience. They do not feel they are writing to communicate anything to anyone who cares.

For them, school based writing has always been an exercise, a hurdle, a way of proving that you have been paying attention, rather than a communicative act. So they don’t put much time into writing and don’t know how to anticipate what readers need. That “drafty” essay they turn in has no sense of audience because the student was writing to think, not to communicate with a reader.

Preventing Crappy Student Writing:

I don’t have all the solutions to these problems, naturally. If any of you have found ways to encourage better writing, please share with us.

But these strategies do help, in most cases:

1. Give students an example of the kind of writing you are expecting from them. They tend to think that we all have different expectations. We need to all emphasize the same criteria. (This is what I neglected to do for my class this semester!)
2. Talk to them about the importance of writing more than one draft.
3. Encourage them to visit the Writer’s Studio (or equivalent at your institution) with your assignment in hand.
4. Show your writing assignment to the Tutoring Director and some tutors (if your instutition has them) and ask for their feedback.
5. Make the class, and you, the audience for student writing. Ask students to exchange their essays with each other before turning them in. You can ask for peer review, but I find just asking them to exchange and read a few of their peers’ essays on the day they are due gives them a chance to see how their peers write.
6. Try not to elevate grades. If you hate to write a D or F on an essay, leave it off, give comments or complete a grading rubric and ask for a revision. Meet with the student to make sure he knows what needs to be done.
7. For mechanical errors, I mark one example and leave the rest for the student to find. If they can’t find them, then obviously they don’t know what is wrong. If they find them, then you know they know but are just being careless.
8. When making comments, it is really best to identify the problem but not to rewrite anything. Don’t do their work for them.
9. If you feel that correctly diagnosing writing problems is outside your area of expertise, seek help.

Keith Ward, Big Questions in Science and Religion 6: Is It Still Possible To Speak of the Soul?

In many respects I found this chapter the most interesting and at the same time the most frustrating. On the one hand, Ward helpfully points out ways in which the notion of the soul that earlier Christian thinkers had in mind, for instance Aquinas, were far more in keeping with the Biblical/Semitic tradition than one might have expected. For instance, Ward asserts that Aquinas would have considered that one cannot simply substitute a new body and yet speak of it being the soul of the same person.

Ward is rightly concerned to counter reductionist views of human beings and of consciousness. One of the best quotes in the chapter is the following (p.152):

It is a poor argument to say, "We are just like computers. Computers are not conscious. Therefore, we are not conscious." The argument should be: "We are conscious. We could, in principle, make computers just like us. Then computers would be conscious, too."

At times, however, it was unclear whether or not Ward is happy with a non-reductive physicalism, with an account of the mind as an emergent property. It depends what he means when he argues for the reality of the soul as something not reducible to something else. Does he regard it as a separate substance? Or is he simply saying it exists in the same sense that one may legitimately say that software exists, without denying that on another level the CD-ROM in your hand can be described in material terms that would not do justice to the reality of the software perpective, and yet would nonetheless be correct in its own terms?

Our conscious perspective is not reducible to a description of what is happening in our brains. But it is not at all clear that this demonstrates that one must add a soul (or a mind) as "a separate something" that is added on, as opposed to these being the subjective experience of these material realities.

Ward states at one point (p.160) that "Believers in God seem to be committed to the possibility of at least one consciousness, that is, thought and intelligence, existing without a body. God has no body...So, theists seem bound to accept the idea that there can be conscious states without bodies." But if neuroscience suggests that the soul is an emergent property of human beings, might it not be appropriate to rethink our doctrine of God, rather than hold onto a traditional view of humans on the basis of an aspect of classical theism that may itself be modelled on those earlier understandings of the soul?

The truth is that on this subject, too, great minds (whatever those are!) disagree, whether their area of expertise is in neuroscience, biology, philosophy, theology, psychology or something else. And so the key point is not to pretend we have a view that is the definitive answer, but to continue to explore and to seek ways of doing justice both to the importance of ongoing scientific discoveries, and to the reality of our subjective experience and its importance.

When Christians Disagree: Church and State

Today in my Sunday School class we finished our introductory topic on the Bible in the "When Christians Disagree" series. We looked at the example of circumcision, which in Genesis 17 is quite plainly said to be a permanent and absolute condition of membership in the covenant people, even for those not actually descended from Abraham. We then turned to Acts 15 and looked at how the church (or at least part of the church) decided that it was going to do something different than what a plain reading of Genesis 17 would require. Reading Acts and Paul's letters as Scripture, it can be hard for Christians to put themselves in the situation of the time in which they were written, when these texts were not yet Scripture, and were making the case for something that seemed to many to represent a departure from Scripture.

In Acts 15, as also in Galatians, the argument seems to allow experience to trump Scripture. God had shown acceptance of Gentiles by pouring out the Holy Spirit on them while uncircumcised. If God had accepted them in this way, who are we to impose other requirements upon them? To get a sense of how this argument seemed to many Jewish Christians in the first century, one may usefully compare the topic of homosexuality, in connection with which many today might make a similar argument...

As we turn to various topics on which Christians disagree, there are other factors beside the Bible that we'll need to consider, such as reason, tradition, and experience. The Bible can of course be thought of in different ways: as a source of writings which are authoritative on Christian doctrine and practice, or as a source or writings which allow us to see examples of how the earliest Church worked through issues, themselves making use of Scripture, reason, tradition and experience.

The biggest news is perhaps that we have chosen our next major topic for the "When Christians Disagree" series: "Church and State". It was on our list, and seems particularly timely (we'll probably finish with the topic in early November). We will begin next week. We did not have a chance to discuss what we'd read to prepare, but I'd suggest that, in addition to the Ten Commandments and some of the places where Paul and Revelation mention those in authority, we should also read the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, since that is a key component in the distinctive form that debates on this topic take in an American context.

The Bible as Science Fiction

IO9 suggests that it is time for sci-fi versions of familiar Bible stories. That could be interesting. If one ventures outside the Bible slightly, one gets books like 1 Enoch which already fit the genre. Enoch's "ascension" shows the same sort of pre-modern cosmology I talked about in my last post, although the parallels make it more natural to talk about his "abduction".

Of course, the Left Behind movie also fits the genre - when I watched it (before teaching a course on Revelation, since I suspected I might get asked about the series by students), I kept expecting Mulder and Scully to show up and investigate what was going on.

All kidding aside, however, this provides a nice opportunity to ask a key question raised by the last few posts. How do you "translate" stories from the Bible into your own worldview today? How do you update the cosmology, if at all? It is one thing to notice the differences between the ancient cosmology assumed by the authors of the Bible and our own. It is another to figure out how (if at all) one can bridge the gap and appreciate the message expressed in the context of that ancient worldview, and perhaps even re-express its meaning for our time.

Naive vs. Conscious Literalism

In a recent post I mentioned the distinction Marcus Borg makes between naive and conscious literalism. At heart, the difference is as follows. Naive literalism involves someone (e.g. a Biblical author) treating something as factually true because he or she has no reason to believe otherwise. So, for instance, in the case of the ascension, why wouldn't Luke depict Jesus as heading straight up into the sky? Presumably, had Luke lived today, he would have either described the scene differently, or mentioned dilithium crystals.

Conscious literalism means taking something written by a naive literalist, while having information (whether scientific or historical) that was not available to that ancient author, and deliberately choosing to ignore the more recent developments in our knowledge and understanding, and instead treat the naive literalist's description as entirely factual.

Does this help make clear not just the difference between the two, but why the latter is so very problematic?

Is the Gospel of Thomas Gnostic?

Judy Redman wants to know what you think, so please pay a visit to her blog and participate in her poll!

Keith Ward, Big Questions in Science and Religion 5: What Is The Nature Of Space And Time?

"The ascension is harder to believe in than the resurrection."

Someone made the above statement in a conversation we were having, and I immediately thought of something mentioned in chapter 5 of Keith Ward's book The Big Questions in Science and Religion. After discussing briefly some traditional notions of time and space in cosmologies of previous ages, Ward writes (p.107), "We now know that, if [Jesus] began ascending two thousand years ago, he would not yet have left the Milky Way (unless he attained warp speed)".

I then found myself thinking about Iron Man - specifically, the scene where Iron Man is fighting another "iron man" in the upper atmosphere and asks him how he dealt with the problem of freezing. A literalist might want to ask Jesus the same question. Many Christians emphasize that the risen Jesus returned to a physical, bodily existence. But not only his appearance in locked rooms, but his apparent lack of any need for oxygen, defiance of gravity and resistance to the cold and radiation of space suggest that whether one opts for extreme literalism or approaches the Bible using the historical critical method, the outcome may be the same, namely to question whether there is any sense in which Jesus in the post-Easter period may be said to exist physically. Sure, we can discuss whether or not he was manifested or experienced physically, but that is not the same as saying that he is inherently physical and/or bodily.

This discussion takes us quite far from the primary focus of Ward's chapter in certain respects, but in others it highlights one of Ward's key points, as for instance when he writes (p.109), "Sacred space is primarily symbolic space, and it is possible that the literalization of such symbols already presages a loss of archaic religious sensibility." The idea is that literalism, far from being a quest to preserve the past understanding of sacred texts and ancient cosmology, badly misconstrues them. Conscious literalism is always something significantly different than naive literalism, as Borg helpfully points out.

The key focus in this chapter of Ward's book is that the language traditionally used about God and spiritual things has been explicitly acknowledged by theologians then and (for the most part) now as being metaphorical, symbolic, pointers to a reality that is infinite and indescribable. Attempts at literalism do not, therefore, simply lead to bad science and cosmology. They represent a radical departure from what religion has meant in the past, too. The irony is that those who claim to be "literal" also claim the label "conservative", and yet the approach of fundamentalists is thoroughly modern and departs from the historic perspective of their faith tradition in important ways.

Keith Ward, Big Questions in Science and Religion 4: Do the Laws of Nature Exclude Miracles?

Ward's chapter 4 deals with a perennial issue at the interface between religion and science: miracles. Ward rightly points out that laws of nature are mathematical descriptions of aspects of the universe and not "laws" in any usual sense in which that word is normally used. Indeed, one might note the irony that such language seems to imply reference to a Creator, or more precisely, a Legislator.

As for whether miracles break natural laws, they need not do so any more than human actions do. Particularly those who view God as in some sense embodied in the universe, then there is no more violation of a law of nature were God to lift an object than were I to lift my arm. Yet although Ward seems at times to like this way of thinking of the God-world relation, we'll need to revisit this subject when we get to his discussion of the "soul". But certainly there are process theologians who are "religious naturalists". This too is a subject to which we'll return.

There is no scientific impossibility to miracles. The issues are matters of philosophy and of whether there is (and can ever be) sufficient evidence to justify believing that a miracle occurred. And on that subject, reasonable people have disagreed, and continue to do so, such as when the dead return to life, or the Red Sox win the World Series.

Scholarly Publishing

Since I know lots of academics in different fields read this blog, I thought I'd ask a question of particular interest to us. How do (or would) you list publications on your blog that are aimed at a general readership but are not for that reason lacking in academic value or scholarly content?

Many of us write such books and articles at one point or another. It is rather straightforward to distinguish between peer-reviewed journal articles and other articles, be they in magazines or newspapers. But in the case of book it seems that there are university presses, and trade or popular presses, but in between there are also other publishers that publish books that are genuinely scholarly as well as ones that are less so.

Do you list books in the latter category, ones that are scholarly but aimed at a wider readership, in a separate place on your CV, or do you simply lump your books together, knowing that those interested merely in finding out what you've written won't care, while those who are interested in evaluating your scholarship will know the difference anyway?

Does anyone have any additional information to share on whether, and to what extent, manuscripts submitted even to trade presses, if they are works of non fiction by academics, get submitted to some sort of peer review? Or is there only editorial review in such cases?

On a final note, clearly what counts as publishing in terms of one's academic career are peer reviewed publications, and that should remain the case. Yet decisions about publication in traditional print format often involves not just peer review, but editors who must take factors like marketability and sales into consideration, and in the case of journal articles, the limited number of articles that can fit in a given issue. It will be interesting to see whether academic publishing moves more in the direction of print-on-demand (with or without a subsidy or fee) for books, and open access web-based venues for articles. The technology is there, and lots of people who need to "publish or perish" might feel more at ease knowing that their work on some obscure but important topic can be published in a peer reviewed venue based only on its academic value, and not on whether any other person then alive actually would want to pay to read it.

Keith Ward, Big Questions in Science and Religion 3: Is Evolution Compatible with Creation?

This chapter begins by noting that many religious worldviews take for granted that things are getting and will continue to get progressively worse, not better. Ward then moves on the the view in the medieval epoch that the cause of anything must be greater than the thing caused. It took the Enlightenment era's newfound openness to the possibility of historical change and progress to foster the exploration of evolutionary ideas.

Unless one is committed to taking some parts of the Biblical creation accounts literally (no one successfully takes them literally in their entirety, whatever they might claim), then there is no fundamental incompatibility between evolution and creation. God may be the ground of the whole universe which includes evolution, or God may bring into existence the universe that evolves life, or God may in some sense be or be embodied in/as the evolving universe, or some other relationship. Ward argues (pp.68-69) that it is important to distinguish between creation (the idea that the material universe depends for its existence on something that transcends it) and creationism (which in practice usually means pseudoscience - that's my statement, not Ward's). In a similar way, Ward takes a favorable view of positing "design" as a way to account for the character of our universe that produces life and allows it to evolve, but not of seeking specific instances in which a Designer "intervened" to "tinker" (again, that's my way of putting it).

When discussing the concept of God one might adhere to in the context of an evolutionary universe, Ward emphasizes that "the idea of God has not been fixed for all time by some philosopher or religous text a thousand years or more ago. Like ideas in science, ideas of God change, and they are capable of changing again, if developments in knowledge require it...It will not be surprising if modern knowledge of evolution prompts us to make some revisions to our idea of God" (pp.76-77). Ward notes as one example the evidence that we have not fallen from some golden age of primordial innocence. But ultimately, the questions about how one thinks about God (if at all) in the context of our current scientific worldview are philosophical, rather than something biology or other scientific disciplines themselves can answer.

I will end by pointing out that the universe contains suffering, and that raises issues for religious belief. Evolutionary theory does not create this problem, and by placing suffering and death in the context of the "creation" of sentient life forms, it may make the process seem worthwhile. Of course, the objection may be raised that it would have been better to skip directly to such life as us without the long and painful road that got us here. But we cannot claim to know that that is in fact possible. It may be that, unless organisms arise through a process ultimately originating in the realms of quantum uncertainty and building up slowly from there, then there simply cannot be sentient free beings. We do not know. Religious faith cannot demonstrate any more than science can whether some other universe could exist in reality. But an important point, in my view, is that religious faith not seek either to excuse God or ourselves for the existence of suffering, nor seek to deny its reality. We must stand shoulder to shoulder with those who cry out in pain at the meaninglessness of life in the face of suffering, and not offer religion as a pill that makes the suffering better, but as something that makes us want to alleviate it wherever and whenever we can.

Ironic Sans: A New Hope for the 2008 Election

Thanks to Bad Astronomy for making me aware of the Ironic Sans blog, full of amusing stuff, from this poll, to campaign materials like the following:

And to help you prepare for the real election on November 4th, there's this useful tool:

Around the Blogosphere

Chet Raymo has begun blogging about Ken Miller's book Only a Theory. Brian Switek surveys reactions to Darwin's Descent. Clashing Culture hosts the Carnival of Evolution. Jessica Palmer asks if you are sure the earth is round.

April de Conick blogs about early Jewish and Christian polytheism. John Drury ponders what happens to funerals if Wright is right. Jim West and Mark Goodacre highlight the return of Bible and Interpretation.

de-Conversion asks how much doubt is too much. Dan Messier reviews Religulous.

You can also check out how Blog Action Day 2008 is going.

The Matrix and Revolutions

It is blog action day, with the theme of poverty. One way people and societies attempt to address poverty is through revolutions. One type of revolution that fits with the theme and title of this blog is...Matrix Revolutions.

The concept behind the Matrix films is a fascinating one. If one treats the matrix as a symbol of society, what is suggested is that this human creation in fact also turns around and enslaves us. And when we think we are managing to fight against it, it turns out that even that effort at rebellion is simply part of the way the system works.

Societies have a certain status quo. When one individual's amassing of wealth or power begins to impinge too much on others, equilibrium is threatened. Revolutionaries and heroes may rise up. But "the One" is always counterpart to another "one" who is doing the opposite. And revolutions never seems to lead to anything other than a new society with a new status quo. The Matrix films thus ask the really profound question of whether society is not something greater than us, which exerts a controlling influence over its component individual human beings that there is no way we can genuinely transform society in a profound and genuine way.

If we want to address the issue of poverty, it will take radical changes to the ways things are done. Has our global society taken on its own autonomous existence to an extent that we are merely like cells in its body, capable of rebelling but not capable ultimately of transforming this "organism" into something else?

The Matrix movies don't hold out much hope. When Neo confronts Smith and restores the system, he is most likely where he would have been if he had gone through the other door. If he had chosen a different pill earlier, someone else would have become "the One".

But pessimism is appropriate only if we think society is something from which we need to be free. If we embrace being part of society, and view some "matrix" as inevitable and indeed necessary, then we can stop seeking to escape or destroy and work to transform.

We cannot escape being part of some matrix. But if we come to understand it, as Neo does symbolically in the movies, then there is hope that we can make whatever matrix we are in a better place for all its inhabitants.

Blog Action Day: Poverty and Biblical Economics

Today is Blog Action Day 2008, and this year's theme is poverty, so I thought it would be interesting to blog about "Biblical economics". There is a long history of appealing to the Bible to justify economic practices, such as the notion that the commandment not to steal places a divine stamp of approval on the notion of private/personal property. And of course, were it not for such arguments, the alliance between conservative Christianity and Republican values would be completely inexplicable.

Yet there is much more in the Bible that is often overlooked from this perspective. If one considers the legislation about the Jubilee year in Leviticus 25, what one finds there is quite far from the notion of private property. Indeed, the land is emphatically said to belong to Yahweh, and about once per generation, the land would return to its original owner.

I do think Christians ought to be concerned about poverty and social justice, which is emphasized in the Bible to such an extent that it can be baffling how it is ignored by such large numbers of Christians. But perhaps a key reason is not a failure to notice what the Bible says, but confusion about how to apply it. Reinstituting the Biblical "year of Jubilee" would not help alleviate poverty. Wealth is amassed rather than land, and presumably it would make no sense to suggest that dollar bills should return to their original owners once every 70 years. Our economic system is very different than that of the ancient economy for which the author of Leviticus sought to offer a solution.

An interesting case in point is the Bible's condemnation of usury, of lending with interest. There is probably no better example of the selectivity nearly all Christians today practice when it comes to the Bible. But for those of us who are aware that we are not trying to practice the whole Bible and don't think it makes sense to do that, this is less of a problem. Modern banking and loans depend on interest, and were all lending with interest illegal, many people who are slowly but surely buying their homes would never have been able to do so. The point of the laws against usury is to protect the poor, and the challenge for Christians, as for all people concerned with issues of poverty and social justice, is to find creative ways of addressing these issues in a world very different from that in which the Bible's laws were crafted. Would a world without a stock market (and thus without modern retirement pensions), without banks, and without mortgages really be more just? The challenge is to find ways of ensuring justice and fairness.

The early Christians tried communal ownership, a form of what has sometimes been called "love communism". If we assume that Luke's portrait of the church in Jerusalem is accurate, then we can perhaps draw the following conclusion about this early Christian attempt at communal property: it doesn't seem to have worked. Paul not long after had to try to get the churches in other places to help the poor Christians of Jerusalem.

Approaching matters of economics from a Christian perspective today does not and cannot mean to emulate precisely what past generations of Christians did. It can and perhaps must mean to identify key principles about love and compassion, justice and combatting poverty, that we must then seek to work out in our own very different context and situation. And that, perhaps, is why so few Christians do anything more than give a little and pray a little when confronted with the injustices of our time. To do anything more will involve research, creativity, and most likely much trial and error.

But for those who truly embrace the principle found in Christianity and elsewhere, that we are to do to others what we would want done to us, then doing nothing is simply not an option.

Henri Pognon, Inscriptions mandaites des coupes de Khouabir

Another classic work on the Mandaeans has been made available on the Internet Archive: Henri Pognon, Inscriptions mandaites des coupes de Khouabir.

Professor Wikipedia

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

HT Targuman

Heroes, Angels and Monsters

Last night's episode of Heroes raised a lot of interesting subjects with its God-talk. First, there was Angela Petrelli mentioning that those who were involved in the attempt to give abilities artificially were "attempting to be better than God".

The whole notion of "playing God" is double edged, but one rarely hears talk of trying to "outdo God". On the one hand, this series suggests that evolution in its divine beneficence endowed some people with remarkable, god-like abilities. On the other hand, it did not give them to everyone, and sometimes the abilities seemed more like a curse. On the one hand, nature contains the potential for technology, genetic modification and other human advances. On the other hand, until we discovered ways to intervene through science, humans suffered at the mercy of nature. There is a definite ambiguity in our relationship to the rest of the natural world, of which we are a part. But the discovery of evolution confirms the Gnostic hunch that we are not the direct creations of a supreme deity, but cobbled together by a tinkerer, who turns out to be inferior in some ways to the Demiurge of the Gnostics. This can be liberating when it comes to thinking about science. We can certainly try to outdo nature, without feeling the need to assume that the natural order is created directly by God in its present form with the commandment or that we leave it as we found it.

Heroes also explored the nature of religious experience in a world in which beings with supernatural powers roam the earth. Nathan Petrelli has been having visions, and was convinced (and may still be) that he is doing God's work. But in fact these visions are being given to him (and to the speedster) by someone else with an ability, Matt Parkman's father. This was a key part of the dilemma Descartes wrestled with, namely that in a world populated by angels and demons, the latter could well deceive someone in to thinking the world is other than it is. Religious experience, in the context of a world populated by malevolent as well as benevolent spiritual beings, cannot guarantee the truth of religious beliefs any more than science or history can.

If Heroes doesn't get you to grasp the nature of this problem, you can always try the Bible. Take a look at 1 Kings 22:23...

Rena Hogg, Kenneth Bailey and Oral Tradition

Anyone who followed the interaction between Jimmy Dunn and Theodore Weeden about the claims Kenneth Bailey made about oral tradition in Arab society, may be aware of an example Bailey appealed to in support of his case for "informal controlled oral tradition". He mentions a story about missionary John Hogg recorded in the biography of him written by Rena Hogg, his daughter, a story that was still circulating when Bailey visited the area in which Hogg had worked after many decades had passed.


Rena Hogg's biography of her father is available for download at the Internet Archive, and so those wishing to engage in further research on this topic can get much easier access to key primary source material than might otherwise have been possible. The title of the biography is A Master Builder on the Nile.

Chris Heard reviews Intelligent Design

I don't normally pass on reviews from Review of Biblical Literature on my blog, since I assume that most readers who would be interested in them receive them anyway. But the latest issue has a review of Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski & Michael Ruse in Dialogue (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007) by Chris Heard, which will be of interest to those outside of Biblical studies.

Discussion of The Burial of Jesus at Butler University

Pizza Lunch Discussion
Wednesday, October 22nd, 12:00 – 2:00, Jordan Hall 340, Butler University

What is the relationship between history and faith?
In the rush to get from the story of the crucifixion to the story of the resurrection, have readers tended to miss some important details about what happened in between?
Has contemporary American Christianity become too focused on the afterlife?

Come join us for a discussion of these and other subjects touched on in the new book The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith (BookSurge, 2008) written by Dr. James F. McGrath, associate professor of religion at Butler University.

Dr. McGrath has a limited number of copies available for those wishing to read the book before the discussion. Copies are available for $10 each from Dr. McGrath or $12.99 each on Amazon.com.

Pizza and other refreshments will be provided.

Leap of...What?

I thought about calling this post "Go Take A Leap" but then decided against it.

When we're younger, leaps of faith are all the rage. Take a stand for something you believe to be true, whether your religious tradition or your favorite band. As both Blaise Pascal (sort of) and Neil Peart put it, "You bet your life". We take a leap of faith in the sense of choosing something to believe in, and believing in it passionately.

As we grow older, something else often becomes more important. Valuing other people, spending time with those we love, cherishing moments rather than arguing about ideas - even if ideas remain important to us (and I'm not saying they shouldn't), values can come to take a more prominant place.

To value human beings, to defend their freedoms just as you would want yours defended, to protect their right to explore their own path in the way you want to be allowed (and hopefully encouraged) to explore yours - such things also take a leap, a committment beyond what can be proven. No amount of evidence can prove scientifically that human beings are valuable. Ultimately it comes down to a leap, but this time it is not a leap of faith (at least not in the modern sense of that word), but a leap of love, of compassion, and of kindness.

Kierkegaard famously spoke of a leap of faith that involves the "suspension of the ethical". I think rather, ultimately, it comes down to (or should come down to) making a leap that creates and sustains the ethical.

You may or may not have taken a leap of faith. Are you ready nevertheless to take a leap of love?

Blog Action Day: October 15th, 2008

I just wrote my blog action day post for this year, and set it to be published at 12:01 am on October 15th. This year's subject is poverty. Do consider blogging on that subject then!

New Review of The Burial of Jesus on Amazon

There is now another review of The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith on Amazon. I invite you to take a look, and once you've read the book, I hope you'll post your own review there!

Keith Ward, Big Questions in Science and Religion 2: How Will the Universe End?

This post continues my review of (perhaps here turning more into a dialogue with) Keith Ward's most recent book, The Big Questions in Science and Religion.

This chapter's title, like the previous, could be understood to make an unjustified assumption, in this case that the universe will end. It could well be the case (as in many Eastern traditions as well as streams of Process theology) that there has always been and will always be some universe. Ward once again does more justice to the range of possibilities than the chapter's title might lead one to expect.

An atheist once asked me to consider the question "What would it take to make you lose your faith?" It is a question that it is important to ask, since it helps us if nothing else to determine whether our faith is unfalsifiable and thus, as philosophers would put it, "not even false". Asking this question can also help us identify what is central to our faith and what is not. (Of course, an atheist can always ask the reverse question, "What would it take to cause you to have faith?"

The answer I gave then was that, were it to be possible to travel triillions of years into the future and see whether anything still existed, then the failure of anything (even God) to continue to exist would lead me to conclude that we live in a completely naturalistic universe that just happens to exist, and one day will just happen not to. Of course, if such time travel is possible, then time travellers will be able to go into that distant future and cause something to exist then. Be that as it may, I suppose what I'm proposing is a form of John Hick's idea of "eschatological verification". There is, however, an important difference. My "faith" is not primarily a conviction that certain propositions about spiritual realities will be true. It is rather a conviction that existence is meaningful. What would ultimately undermine my faith is not a demonstration that God has different attributes than I might have imagined, but a demonstration that existence is meaningless. And for me to be persuaded that existence is meaningful, something must at the very least continue the legacy of that which exists today. There is no need for me to exist forever as a separate personal entity. But something must.

At times it might seem that Ward might be sympathetic to this way of viewing things, since he talks of a cosmic goal of the universe evolving persons (and perhaps eventually becoming personal itself), which does not necessarily depend on the ongoing existence of human beings. Yet elsewhere he suggests that for the universe to have a goal that is realized, then the problem of evil must be dealt with, and nothing other than a resolution of the problem for the specific individuals who suffer will suffice (pp.51-52).

In this context, Ward makes some rather striking affirmations about "millenarianism" and considers that this understanding of the Book of Revelation is harder to reconcile with scientific cosmology than the young-earth creationist understanding of Genesis is. And so he states, on the one hand, that "If millenarianism is part of Christianity, then Christianity and modern cosmology cannot be reconciled" (p.56), while immediately after that he adds, "Millenarianism, however, has never been part of the teaching of any mainstream Christian church" (p.57).

Scientific cosmology cannot answer the question of whether there are spiritual realities, but it can help religions avoid making claims that are patently false about factual matters of literal truth (p.57). And this seems to be where Ward leaves the matter. If one believes in God, then believing the universe has a purpose or goal of some sort seems a natural corollary. And the existence of God or spiritual being "seems to be a matter that takes us beyond science, though not beyond the possibility of reasoned debate" (p.58).

In my own most recent book, The Burial of Jesus, I suggest that the excessive claims to certainty about and excessive focus on the afterlife in Christianity in the United States today, coupled with the egotism of American culture, actually is an unhealthy combination. For ancient Jews and then Christians, the doctrine of the afterlife was a development based on the conviction that God exists and is just, and will thus reward those who suffer and give their lives rather than be unfaithful to God. But we today may ask not only whether the idea of an eternal existence of our individual egos makes sense, but whether unending life in fact manages to right the wrongs of this life.

Whatever you may think about this last topic, there is certainly an irony in the fact that the highly developed Christian doctrine of the afterlife, with its origins in the conviction that God will deal with injustice, leads some Christians in our time to consider it appropriate to ignore injustice in this life as not mattering, because heaven is all that matters. This is so far removed from the various viewpoints one finds expressed in the New Testament on this topic, that it is hard to believe how widespread it is precisely among those who call themselves "Bible-believing Christians".

So what would it take to make you lose your faith, or find faith? And does the notion of an afterlife help keep your faith plausible, or is it one of the implausible things that makes faith problematic to you? Please share your thoughts on these subjects!

Christians and Obama

CNN reports the following about a minister speaking at a McCain rally:

A minister delivering the invocation at John McCain’s rally in Davenport, Iowa Saturday told the crowd non-Christian religions around the world were praying for Barack Obama to win the U.S. presidential election.

“There are millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah—that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their God is bigger than you, if that happens,” said Arnold Conrad, the former pastor of Grace Evangelical Free Church in Davenport.

If this is evidence of anything, it is the twisted American Evangelical idea that Christian values are the same as Republican values.

Many Christians want Obama to win, not primarily because he professes to be a Christian himself, but because he has plans regarding the economy and health insurance which are in line with the teachings and emphases of the Bible, and yet are part of a key blind spot in conservative Christianity's vision of the Bible.

It is to McCain's credit that, for the most part, he has denounced a number of recent instances of hate speech and false claims made about Obama. (In the video that follows, are people in the crowd really shouting what it sounds like?!)

The most bizarre thing of all is not that many Christians are opposed to Obama. What truly boggles the mind is that anyone could in essence shout "Execute him! Crucify him!" and think that they are standing on the side of Christianity.

Religious Worldviews and the Candidates

It is interesting that religious significance is being attributed to both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin by individuals and communities that are very different, but have in common a tendency towards extremism.

On the one hand, BuzzFlash goes so far as to suggest that Sarah Palin is a "Manchurian Candidate" representing a theocratic brand of Apostolic Pentecostalism (HT Rev's Rumbles):

On the other hand, Louis Farrakhan's Messianic view of Barack Obama is being highlighted by conservative sources like Uncommon Descent:

It seems advisable to not jump to conclusions about either candidate interpreting their role in the same way that some religious communities are. I suspect that most Americans, even the devoutly religious, would not like to vote for either a theocrat or someone with a Messiah complex. And so if the views expressed by these preachers could be attributed to the candidates in question, then there's a reasonable chance that Ross Perot might win by write-in vote.

LOST Season 5 Spoilers Revealed (sort of)

For those who want to know what will happen in season 5 of LOST, just watch this video (which also addresses the question whether you can review at TV show you've never watched):


HT Aldenswan (if the embedded player doesn't work, the original can be found here)

Do You Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right?

Tomorrow I'll be a guest at a discussion on campus about "whether others have to be wrong for us to be right." In essence it will be about matters like convictions, Evangelicalism and pluralism. It is part of the "Big Questions" series sponsored by the Center for Faith and Vocation.

I for one am a critical realist, and really find it disappointing when someone says that all views are equal. That, to my thinking, simply shows that the person who says it doesn't care very much about the topic. I prefer people who have convictions and believe there are views that correspond more or less closely to an actual "truth" or reality, but who also have the humility to realize that their own perception may not match up as closely as they would like it to.

I don't think that most who are in the mainline to progressive part of the religious spectrum are necessarily less "evangelical". I think that most conservatives and liberals are "evangelical" about those convictions that they consider important.

Nor are all matters equal. Some questions posed in the natural sciences have right or wrong answers about which we can be as certain as it is possible to be. Some matters in history are really rather certain. When it comes to values and convictions, the Golden Rule may well not be susceptible to scientific or historical "proof", but that need not mean we should loosen our grip on it. Other matters - symbolic language we use to talk about God, for instance - may be appropriately considered "highly uncertain" from many of those same perspectives, but that may not undermine the importance of the symbol as a guide to live by. In addition to the question of whether there is such a thing a "truth", it is important to recognize that there are not only different kinds of truth, but also differing degrees of certainty within each category.

I will, of course, blog about the event at some point, once it is over. By the way, tonight I finished watching Vantage Point (hence the image), and am trying to think of ways to use it as an illustration...

The 401 Keg Plan

This is circulating via e-mail and on the internet and so I thought I'd share it:

If you had purchased $1,000 of AIG stock one year ago, you would have $42 left.

With Lehman, you would have $6.60 left.

With Fannie or Freddie, you would have less than $5 left.

But if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have had $214.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

It's called the 401-Keg...

Christian Century Blogs

As I begin this post, Exploring Our Matrix has been part of the Christian Century blog network (CCBlogs for short) for just under three hours. I thought I'd introduce new readers from there to my blog, and regular readers from here to that network.

For those new to Christian Century and its blogs, this magazine is to the Christian mainline what Christianity Today is to Evangelicalism. Christian Century reflects the widespread approach to Christian faith that sees it as essential to engage and embrace science and our developing knowledge in all fields. It also reflects a committment to engaging injustice and societal issues. Read their "About Us" statement for more information, and browse the site and the blogs.

For newcomers to this blog, my name is James McGrath, and I'm associate professor of religion at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. I attend Crooked Creek Baptist Church (an American Baptist church), where I teach an adult Sunday school class that is currently engaged in a series on "When Christians Disagree". I've written three books: John's Apologetic Christology (Cambridge University Press, 2001), The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith (BookSurge, 2008), and The Only True God (forthcoming from University of Illinois Press, 2009). My interests (and thus subjects I blog about) include religion and science, evolution, creationism and intelligent design, science fiction, Biblical studies, and the historical figure of Jesus.

Why Gnostics Shouldn't Vote Republican

If you are a Gnostic and are thinking of voting for McCain, I should remind you of an important Scripture reference. In the Gospel of Philip 80 it says:

"one must not give help to those who are well off"

This is the translation by Marvin Meyer in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2007) p.182. Other translations render the saying differently, but this wouldn't be the first time that those reading different translations drew different conclusions about how to put their faith into practice.

Loving the Biblical Scholar in Your Life

Michael Halcomb of Pisteuomen has created a gem of a book with a narrow but important audience. The title is Loving the Biblical Scholar in Your Life for Dummies, and it can be downloaded for free.

Biblical scholars reading this will surely want to share this with the special someone in their life.

Thanks Michael!

Colbert's Classroom

In an interview with Stephen Colbert in today's newspaper, it mentioned that something he likes to do and hopes to begin doing again soon is teach Sunday school. Now that would be a fun class to attend!

Apparently this is old news, but I wasn't aware of it until today.

I wonder if he'll be willing to regularly offer some Sunday school clips online somewhere. There's nothing like laughter to help people cope with thinking about tough questions and challenging topics!

Keith Ward, Big Questions in Science and Religion 1: How Did The Universe Begin?

This is the first post in a series blogging my way through Keith Ward's most recent book, The Big Questions in Science and Religion. The first chapter is entitled "How Did The Universe Begin? (Is There An Ultimate Explanation For The Universe?)" Before I even managed to post on this topic, it was drawn to my attention that the question as posed seems to slant the issue in a particular way.

To be fair, Ward's understanding of divine creation, in keeping with Aquinas and other famous Christian theologians, is not focused on God giving a temporal start to the universe, but on the dependence of the universe on God for its existence, not merely for its beginning (if it had one). But given that he adds this qualification, it might have been appropriate to drop the "how", since even if the evidence for the "Big Bang" suggests that our visible universe was once much hotter and denser, there is no way to know whether this holds true of a wider universe, or of other universes, that lie beyond the range of what we can ever hope to see or detect. So the question of whether the universe had a beginning, and if so in what sense, remains an unresolved issue in cosmology.

Ward takes an interesting approach, one that is particularly appropriate when writing for those familiar with and interested in the Biblical texts relevant to creation. He begins with the Babylonian epic, which begins with a "great deep" from which gods themselves arise. Then he brings in the Genesis story, assuming without adequate justification that the deep, which also features in the Biblical account, is the creation of God, whereas there is a longstanding Jewish tradition of regarding it as simply having always been there, an idea important nowadays in Process Theology.

Ward, for those unfamiliar with his writings, is a Christian of a Liberal/Progressive sort, who is open to being critical of his own tradition as well as embracing insights from others. And so it is not surprising that he proceeds to consider "Three Problems with the Biblical Story", including the most obvious, which is "Where did God come from?" His answer is that God, as traditionally understood by theologians, is more like the "formless deep" of the Babylonian epic, from which everything else arises, than many might think. He quotes Boethius' description of God as the "infinite ocean of being" and adds his own reference to God as "a sort of limitless reservoir of all possibilities" (p.12).

Ward's discussion of the possibility that what ultimately exists and "simply is" is consciousness leads quite naturally to a discussion of Indian ideas of origins. Indian philosophy explored the same basic subject as Descartes, but rather than it leading to a radical individualism and skeptical empiricism as in the Western tradition, it led to the conclusion that since the existence of consciousness cannot be denied without self contradiction, pure consciousness is what is really real and the ground of all other existing things.

The question of whether there is an ultimate spiritual reality is the heart of the matter, and religious traditions differ on whether this is a disembodied, purely spiritual reality that preceeds material existence, or rather a spiritual aspect of material existence. In either case, it would seem that there is no way to demonstrate that reality is one way or the other to the satisfaction of all. Those who experience reality as having a spiritual aspect will find explanations of origins in such terms plausible; those who do not, will not. But certainly the discussion of necessity as a philosophical concept is interesting if ultimately frustrating, and the question of why anything exists at all remains an intellectual puzzle whether one is asking it about the universe, pure consciousness, or a personal notion of God.

We consider these questions in the middle of cosmic history, without direct access to either the beginning or the end of existence, and were we in a position to see the beginning or the end, Ward suggests, it might be rather obvious one way or the other whether there is anything corresponding to creation and purpose in the universe. "But we, living in the middle of this cosmic drama, cannot see either its ultimate origin or its end" (p.27).

Ward sees it as a key component of a religious outlook that spirit can exist without embodiment. Process theologians would disagree, and would argue that the universe may be thought of as God's body, and that God was never bodiless.

My own inclination is to respond to our current understanding by suggesting that, just as the "spirit" or "soul" of human beings seems to be an emergent aspect of our organism's complexity, what is meant by "spirit" and "God" on a universal scale may likewise be something "emergent" or at least a reality that is not a separate substance alongside the universe, but the way it all relates together. But I shall say more about this when I get to Ward's chapter on the soul. For now, I will simply observe that, from a reductionist standpoint, you are not reading my words on this screen. There are no words on the screen, only flickering pixels. Your mind interprets them as words. But your mind is likewise something which, no matter how minutely you were to be dissected, no scientist could pinpoint. Our sense of self emerges from the reality of our being in all its complexity. If that is how we now understand the human spirit, should we not think of Spirit in a similar way? This may well seem inadequate to future generations who know and understand far more than we do. But it seems an appropriate expression in terms of our current understanding of the universe and of ourselves.

Free International Critical Commentaries

The newer batch of ICC commentaries on the Bible are fantastic and are, not surprisingly, not available for free. But the earlier series, many volumes of which remain valuable in spite of being nearly a century old, can now be found on the Internet Archive.

Turning to these volumes is far better than merely browsing random web pages looking for information about a passage from the Bible. So I'm posting this, in the hope that in particular students, teachers and ministers looking for useful online information may become aware of these resources and put them to good use.

HT Awilum

Ending Palin's Apocalypse

This post has just one aim: to drive the annoying video about "Palin's Apocalypse" off the bottom of the screen and safely into the realm of "older posts" where visitors to this site will not be forced to hear it begin every time they visit.

Those who want to find it can always find it here.

Quote of the Day (Tina Beattie)

"Those of us who care for the integrity of religious faith have a corresponding duty to resist religion's power" (Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2007) p.145).

Post 1000!

This is the 1,000th post, and so I decided not to have it be about anything else other than the fact that this is the thousandth post.

Thank you for reading! Of the 1,000 so far, which is your favorite? :)

What Would a Maverick Do? Watch Saturday Night Live!

Saturday Night Live's version of the debate. If you haven't seen it yet, enjoy!