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