Re: [asa] Lawrence Krauss Defends New Atheism

Cameron -

I'm in general agreement with what you say here. Certainly the ancient Israelites & people of the NT saw some events - generally the ones that get labelled "miracles" - as special acts of God, in distinction from God's everyday work of providing food, &c. & as in the latter case there seems to have been little concern about how God did those things, what connection there might be between God's actions and what creatures (plants &c) do, there wouldn't be any reflection on how God might act differently in the former (special) case. We of course do think about those matters & in fact have to if we want to give a coherent account of the Christian faith in a scientific world.

Some distinction between "general" & "special" providence may be necessary but that disinction isn't necessarily sharp. I.e., there may be cases in which it's unclear which category we'd want to put a particular phenomenon in. & the general/special distinction needn't correspond to fundamental differances in the way in which God acts. I.e., while there may be events that in a sense are "violations of the laws of nature," there's no reason to think that all "special providences" are in that category while all "general providences" take place in accord with those laws.

& whether or not an event is considered a "miracle" or a "special providence" depends on its context and on the function it serves. With a few exceptions, biblical miracles (I use the term in a poipular sense here) are either revelatory or salvific, or both. If at some point in the 9th century B.C. freakish atmospheric conditions had produced from a clear blue sky a bolt of lightning that fried one of the oxen of a Hebrew peasant before his eyes it would, of course, have produced fear & awe & would have been a 9-day wonder, but probably wouldn't have been seen as a "mighty act of God" & become part of the religious tradition in the same way that whatever happened on Mt. Carmel in Elijah's contest with the priests of Ba`al did in I Kg.18 - & that in spite of the fact that the pious peasant would have believed that YHWH had done it. (Needless to say I'm not claiming to have explained what did happen on Mt. Carmel, though that's a not implausible speculation.) The biblical story would be distinguished from the hypothetical one not in what happened but in the circumstances of the event.

Shalom
George
http://home.roadrunner.com/~scitheologyglm

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Cameron Wybrow
  To: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 2:59 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Lawrence Krauss Defends New Atheism

  George:

  I agree with you entirely that a tentative view about how God normally acts in the world is vital. One of my problems in these discussions is that I find that the view of many people here about how God normally acts in the world to be about as clear as mud, and when I ask probing questions aimed at achieving more clarity, I often get deflection, ambiguity, etc., leading to a thickening and darkening of the mud.

  I agree with you also that the original meaning of "miracles" was "marvellous deeds", not the later philosophical concept of miracles. So people need to be clear when they are talking about miracle in the sense of "darned unusual occurrence" (however explained), and when they are talking about something else, e.g., such a notion as "violation of the laws of nature".

  So, yes, any given Biblical miracle might be a "darned unusual occurrence" without being proof of any "violation of the laws of nature". On the other hand, we mustn't get too technical, and abandon common sense. In the Biblical writers' minds, these "darned unusual occurrences" were treated as evidence of special (as opposed to general) divine activity. Any good Jew believed that God always sustained the heavens, the seasons, etc.; but there is no question that a virgin birth or a man walking on water were understood by the Jew as carrying a meaning beyond that of the normal expressions of God's divine activity and power. Indeed, the narrative emphasis put on these exceptional events would otherwise make no sense. So, while it would be anachronistic to say that the Virgin Birth or the crossing of the Red Sea involved "violations of the laws of nature", it would be foolish to go in the other direction and say that the Biblical writers understood such events no differently than they understood the rising of the sun every day. Of course, you are a good Biblical scholar and know all this already, but I do find it irritating when many TEs write as though there is no important difference between "God's normal activity" and "God's special activity". Clearly the Bible devotes a considerable amount of space to God's special activity. In fact, though God's normal activity is always present, it has attention drawn to it mainly in the poetic books (Psalms, Job, etc.), whereas the main narrative portions of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels draw much more attention to God's special activity, tying it closely to the history of Israel. Whether we should call God's special actions "miraculous" in a Humean sense is debatable; but no adequate Biblical theology can be written which does not distinguish in some respects between normal and special actions of God.

  In reference to evolution, this is why I find it necessary to continually ask whether macroevolutionary change ought be understood in terms of general or special actions of God (or a combination). But I find stout resistance to any attempt to even formulate the question, as if people would prefer that the question not be asked. I don't understand how intellectually serious people can live without at least a tentative or provisional answer to this question, but apparently many TEs can.

  But to return to the Bible, my own view, which is set forth in a scholarly book about the Hebraic idea of nature (which I have mentioned in other posts), is that the idea of "laws of nature" is nowhere near fully developed in either the Old or New Testament, and that the Hebrew mind considered the boundaries between nature, man and God to be much more open or fluid than either the Greek philosophical mind or the modern mind considers them to be. Thus, it is very hard to think of God as "violating the laws of nature" in a Hebraic context. So I am always a little worried when some modern writer says that this or that notion of nature (e.g., the Newtonian) is "Biblical". I think it is true that Christianity greatly influenced the modern idea of nature and hence the rise of modern science, but "Christianity" includes much more than the Bible. The Bible, taken in isolation, would never have produced modern science, any more than Homer's poems would have produced modern science. You can't have modern science without a clear idea of "nature", and neither the word "nature" nor the concept of nature is part of Hebraic discourse about the world. The Christianity which produced modern science was a Christianity which had long since synthesized Greek and Hebrew ways of thinking; it had incorporated the concept of "nature" within the Biblical understanding of the world, and by doing so had expanded and transformed that Biblical understanding into something that was more than merely Biblical.

  As for Ken Miller, I have never found his theological remarks to be anything but shallow, and ditto for those of Ayala. And while I think that Francis Collins is a nice guy, I'm not sure that his theological remarks (at least, the ones found in his famous book) rise much above the level of Miller or Ayala in profundity. Being a scientist, even a great scientist, plus being a devout Christian does not guarantee that one will be a very good theologian on the subject of evolution. The most publically celebrated TEs -- Miller, Collins, Ayala -- are certainly not very deep theologians.

  Cameron.

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: George Murphy
    To: Ted Davis ; asa@calvin.edu ; Nucacids
    Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 1:01 PM
    Subject: Re: [asa] Lawrence Krauss Defends New Atheism

    IMNHO there are a couple of things that any Christian who wants to talk about science-theology issues needs to do before speaking or writing about these matters. (1) Have some clear, though perhaps tentative, view about how God normally acts in the world. (2) Have some understanding of what is meant by the term "miracle."

    (1) I would urge everyone to read Chapter 12, "God and Nature," of Ian Barbour's Religion and Science, in which he discusses 9 theologies of God's role in nature, tether with corresponding models. (In the earlier edition of this book, Religion in an Age of Science he included an "existetialist" theology, which I wish he hadn't omitted here.) Barbour is clear about his own preference for a process theology but he discusses what he sees as its weaknesses as well as its strengths - as he does for the other theologies. You may not be completely satisfied with any of these views or you may want to combine aspects of more than one - as I do. But having an idea of different options, & some idea about what seems best, is crucial for a theological understanding of evolution as well as other matters.

    (2) The fundamental meaning of "miracle" is something that people marvel at, that evokes amazement. Use of the term in that basic sense says nothing about how God may have acted to bring about the event in question or, indeed, anything about God at all. (Cf. Al Michaels' "Do you believe in miracles?" about the US-USSR hockey game at the 1980 Winter Olympics.) There is a

    strong Christian tradition that only those phenomena should be called "miracles" that are completely beyond the capacity of creatures & therefore must have been brought about by direct (i.e., unmediated) divine action. But this is a very restricted use of the word. It means, e.g., that if God brought about the Exodus by use of unusual but "natural" winds (cf. Ex.14:21) then we would have to say that there was nothing "miraculous" about it.

    There are several ways of thinking about miracles, ranging from that classic view through God's use of extremely rare "natural" phenomena, "coincidences" of varying degree of improbability to God's use of "loopholes" in the laws of physics required by Goedel's theorem. & there's no need to insist that one type of understanding fit every event we want to call a miracle.

    Someone on this thread yesterday (I think) suggested that if Ken Miller had suggested a "natural" explanation for the virginal conception of Jesus, Krauss would have said "Then you don't believe that it was a miracle!" The appropriate response to that would have been, I think, "What do you mean by "miracle?" - & then (time allowing) to set out roughly what I said in the previous 2 paragraphs. The primary purpose of this would be to make it clear that there are coherent ways of understanding the virginal conception of Jesus (& other "miracles"). But it could also serve to show not only the superficial knowledge of Christian theology held by most atheists but also the reason why they need to know some theology if there criticisms are to be taken seriously.

    Shalom
    George
    http://home.roadrunner.com/~scitheologyglm

     
    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Ted Davis" <TDavis@messiah.edu>
    To: <asa@calvin.edu>; "Nucacids" <nucacids@wowway.com>
    Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 11:04 AM
    Subject: Re: [asa] Lawrence Krauss Defends New Atheism

> This is very helpful, Mike, thank you for point us to it. I had suspected
> that there was more to this exchange than Krauss was saying. It's hard to
> develop/defend the "mystery" response in a forum like that, without being
> given the luxury of (say) 5 to 10 minutes of uninterrupted time, and that
> could have been a factor as well. I'm still not overly impressed with the
> kinds of things that Miller and many others say, relative to larger
> questions about science and religion, but if he said what is reported here
> I'm more in sympathy with his answer than I was simply from reading Krauss.
> (No surprise there.)
>
> Here is an excerpt on the miracle issue from Polkinghorne's newest book,
> "Theology in the Context of Science," which I'm reviewing for "First
> Things." It gets at part of what Miller is getting at, according to the
> quoted paragraph below.
>
> Concerning the evidence for the resurrection, P quite rightly says (p.
> 141), "I believe that all truth-seeking people should be willing to consider
> this evidence seriously. I do not pretend that in the end all will turn out
> to weigh that evidence in the same way that I do. There are many less
> focused considerations that will influence judgement about so significant
> and counterintuitive a matter. Those with an unrevisable commitment to the
> sufficiency of a reductionist naturalism will follow David Hume and simply
> refuse to countenance the possibility of the miraculous, whatever the
> alleged evidence. Those of us who are Christians will be influenced in our
> conclusions by what we affirm to be our contemporary experience of the
> hidden but real presence of the risen Christ, encountered in sacramental
> worship. What I do claim is that Christian theology can be open and willing
> to accept the challenge to offer motivations for its beliefs, in the spirit
> that is so natural when that theology is being done in the context of
> science. In that context, detailed historical analysis of the kind that N.
> T. Wright gives in *The Resurrection of the Son of God* is much to be
> welcomed."
>
> In short, P and Miller both confess that reason has its limits; they would
> also say (no doubt) that reasonable people can believe things that reason
> cannot demonstrate. This is true (IMO), but atheists like Krauss don't
> accept the second part, and often project an attitude and tone that also
> seems to reject even the first part (about the limits of reason). What is
> needed here, culturally, is more genuine tolerance for that difference of
> opinion. Religious people are obviously capable of plenty of intolerance --
> often (ironically) directed toward equally religious people who differ on
> some of the details -- but in this particular case I do think it is the
> irreligious people who carry the lion's share of the blame. Philosophers as
> smart as David Hume and scientists as smart as Richard Dawkins differ with
> Hume and Dawkins about matters such as this, and it's incumbent upon
> fair-minded unbelievers not only to admit this but also to accept this.
>
> At the same time, it's incumbent on some of the brighter religious folk
> (I'm thinking of those who write books and articles attacking aspects of
> mainstream science) to see the value of a via media such as that offered by
> Polkinghorne and others -- i.e., to see the value of religious thinkers who
> do not believe that atheists are necessarily wicked (in the sense of being
> any more wicked than religious people) or stupid or obstinate (for not
> seeing or for refusing to see evidence for design), but who do believe that
> theism is a more persuasive metaphysical framework for science than atheism.
> Miller is probably in this category, and Collins also. John Lennox (an
> Oxford mathematician who is now involved with debating atheists) certainly
> is.
>
> A very large number of religious believers, in my experience, find such an
> open-minded approach inadequate -- either inadequate for their own faith
> (they want more certainty than it is capable of providing) or inadequate for
> apologetics (since it can't be used to beat atheists over the head in
> cultural warfare). However, quite a few highly educated believers (such as
> academics or pastors or attorneys and other professionals) do seem attracted
> to such an attitude. I don't think it's a case of "mushy accommodationism,"
> as some seem to think; rather, I think it reflects the way the world
> actually looks to them, from where they sit both intellectually and
> socially. Certainly there isn't anything "mushy" about such a view --
> people like P, Lennox, Keith Ward, or Bob Russell are as smart as any of
> their critics. Nor do I find it "accommodationist" in a negative sense of
> that word, simply to see the difficulty of bringing closure to debates about
> metaphysics: it reflects a reality about ultimate beliefs and those who are
> willing to discuss them.
>
> Ted
>
>>>> "Nucacids" <nucacids@wowway.com> 7/1/2009 5:01 PM >>> wrote:
>
> A helpful update about Miller. Someone wrote:
>
> "Incidentally, I was at the panel where Krauss confronted his fellow
> panelists about the virgin birth, and Miller had an interesting answer.
> Miller said he could just say it's a mystery, in which case he'd be open to
> attack for not being scientific. Alternately, he could discuss the prospects
> for parthenogenesis in mammals, in which case, Krauss could turn and say
> "see, you don't think it's a miracle."
>
>
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Received on Fri Jul 3 08:17:17 2009