Which day did God create life on Mars?

Remember that meteorite from Mars that was discovered in Antarctica? It had fossilized bits that looked a lot like biogenic material, specifically bacteria. At the time there was a lot of debate about these fossilized structures; did they just look like bacteria, or were they actually evidence of extraterrestrial life? That was in 1996, but thirteen years later more rigorous testing suggests that the structures are indeed fossilized bacteria.

Source: NASA


It remains to be seen whether that conclusion will be borne out by further research. But assume for the time being that we do have proof that there existed (exists?) life on Mars, in some primitive form.

My own hunch is that the creationist camp should be worried about this conclusion. How does it fit in with the Young Earth Creationist history?

Sure, a "literal" interpretation of Genesis doesn't require God to only have created life on earth. But extraterrestrial bacteria adds a level of oddity to the YEC story. God created all life on earth, plus some titchy bacteria on Mars that hung around for a bit before dying out over the course of 6,000 years?

On the other hand, other Christian views will have an easier time accepting the existence of such life; it simply shows that God has created a universe with the immanent natural processes necessary to create life.

Dear Lord and Father of All Mankind

This hymn was played almost non-stop during the last few weeks of spring, leading up to graduation. During the turmoil of finishing my honors thesis, completing all the requirements to graduate, and attempting to make plans for the upcoming year, this was the song that really got me to slow down and enjoy God.

The first time I heard it was in the movie "Atonement". The whole movie is marvelous, but there's a particular scene halfway through that is particularly notable. One of the main characters comes across the British retreat to the beach at Dunkirk in WWII. Historically, it was a miracle that over 300,000 soldiers were evacuated on short notice and with few resources. But for nine days, the British army lay stranded on the beach with little hope of rescue.

For a brilliant and spectacular four and a half minutes, "Atonement" shows us a single tracking shot of the mess and misery of the British army at Dunkirk. Close to the end of the scene, the camera slowly revolves around a group of soldiers arranged as a choir in a worn-down gazebo, and they sing the last two lines of this hymn. It's a haunting moment, memorable for the bold plea for the "still small voice of God" in the unlikeliest of situations

It is very nearly worth the price of a rental just to see this scene.

As for the hymn, it has a lovely melody. And as I'm in another season of high stress, researching schools for next fall, I find it necessary to pray the last two verses often.

Dear Lord and Father of All Mankind

Dear Lord and Father of all mankind
Forgive our foolish ways
Reclothe us in our rightful mind
In purer lives Thy service find
In deeper reverence, praise

O Sabbath rest by Galilee
O calm of hills above
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
The silence of eternity
Interpreted by love

In simple trust like theirs who heard
Beside the Syrian Sea
The gracious calling of the Lord
Let us like them, without a word
Rise up and follow Thee

Drop Thy still dews of quietness
Till all our strivings cease
Take from our souls the strained and stress
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace

Breathe through the pulses of desire
They coolness and Thy balm
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire
Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire
O still, small voice of calm

-John Greenleaf Whittier and Frederick C Maker

Some clarification on Christian Hedonism

I can't say I've ever read anything substantial by John Piper. I read his blog every now and then, and large excerpts from his books, but I haven't done the simple courtesy of reading any of his works in its entirety. On the other hand, I have a long list of friends and acquaintances who love his stuff, and have been spiritually fed by his pastoring.

Helpful bonding tip: if you meet someone who professes to be a Calvinist, ask her what her favorite John Piper book is. She will talk about it for hours.

Because of this I have a passing knowledge of the theology he's known for. The one everyone talks about is his Christian Hedonism (although I have seen that label less frequently as of late; maybe we all decided it was too distasteful-sounding), articulated famously as "God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in him".

This famous phrase has always struck me as sounding both profoundly true and deeply wrong; exactly why that is hasn't been revealed to me quite yet.

What's always puzzled me is how this is reconciled with Piper's Calvinism, specifically his belief that God exhaustively determines everything that occurs and his belief that God eternally reprobates those who end up in hell.

Since God's righteousness is also defined by Piper as "God's concern for his own glory", and the people in hell are predestined there by God in accordance with his righteousness and for his own glory, then we have the curious conclusion that everyone in hell is maximally satisfied with God. That is, the conjunction of Christian Hedonism (as articulated by Piper) and Calvinism's belief that the reprobate persist in hell to the glory of God, leads us to conclude that they are most satisfied with God despite their damnable state.

It's almost a kind of reductio argument; absurd conclusion, so we can reject a premise. Personally I would be fine with negating the Calvinist premise, but that's not the point of this post.

Piper answers my question in an old post at Desiring God (the entire thing is well worth reading):

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. And I don't want to turn that against the fact that God does indeed glorify his wrath by punishing justly those who refuse to be satisfied in him.

....

Mercy shines, wrath shines, justice shines, patience shines, grace shines—the totality of the rainbow of God's perfections shines most brightly because there are some who refuse to be satisfied, thus calling forth his wrath, and there are some who glut their satisfaction on him, calling forth his grace and glory.

So I guess the answer to my question about "God being most glorified when we are most satisfied in him" is this: it depends. Are you elect or reprobate? If the first, God's most glorified in your satisfaction with him. If the latter, then God's most glorified in your eternal weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Apparently there is an implicit conditional there, although I have yet to hear anyone say it aloud. It takes a nice sounding aphorism and turns it horrible rather quickly. It fits in the long tradition of Reformed language-bending: Piper uses the narrow sense of "we" in his phrase (to mean "we elect"), like Paul uses the narrow sense of "all" in passages like 1st Timothy 2:4 (to mean "not all").

If it were said aloud, I wonder if it would be so popular a catch-phrase among evangelicals.

Who doesn't love reading some bad writing?

Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?

So begins "Delina Delaney", a novel by Amanda McKittrick Ros. A quick read of her wikipedia page will reveal that she garnered some notoriety for her awful writing. The Inklings, the Oxford literary club of whom C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein were members, used to have competitions to see who could read larger sections of her books without laughing.

If you're like me, you wanted to read one of Ros's novels right after finishing her life history on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, all her books are out of print. Amazon has various copies starting at around $250. Until some brave publisher re-releases her works, I'm afraid we'll have to be satisfied with the enticing snippets of her writing that can be found on the internet. With what little material I have been able to find, I have deduced that Ros was overly-fond of alliteration. From the same novel:

She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness.

If bad writing is the sort of thing that amuses you, the short-lived Bad Writing Contest, which ran from 1995-1998, is a source of similar fun. I'm not sure why it ended after such a short run, but I can't imagine it was for lack of material.

Things that aren't funny anymore: #5

Any reference to:

"Lysdexia"

or someone being:

"Lysdexic"

The strategic landscape of the creation/evolution debate

The future of the creation/evolution debate has captured my attention for now, and I'm intrigued by the directions that it may take this century. I firmly believe that one of the most beneficial things that the church in America can do for the Gospel in the 21st century is lose the baggage of young-earth creationism. I say "the church in America" because it is a socio-cultural anomaly that young-earth creationism survives almost exclusively in American evangelicalism, while the rest of the Christian world somehow bypassed that issue entirely. In no other nation in the world do we find that a majority of citizens believe that the world is less than 10,000 years old, with all animals being created in the forms that they can be found in today.

There are a lot of interesting historical and sociological bases for the creation/evolution divide in America, and untangling that attachment in evangelicalism will be no easy task, if it ever occurs. I had written before that at least part of this attachment can be attributed to the construction of a biblical narrative that places great importance on a reading of Genesis as literal, natural history. A year later, I actually think that it is the greatest reason that people have for clinging to young-earth creationism. Unless evolutionist Christians (can't say how much I wish there was a better term to use) can produce a credible narrative of God's workings in and purposes for the world within the contexts of both the Bible and natural history, then we lose the propaganda war and inroads cannot be made into mainstream evangelicalism.

It will no longer do to argue, as I have before, that the young-earth creationist story is not an essential part of the evangelical Gospel; for many evangelicals (I suspect a majority), the young-earth creationist story is an indispensable part of the Gospel that they preach. Wrapped up in the evangelical narrative of history is the idea that creation was hunky-dory in the beginning, and then the Fall happened. Preaching the Gospel requires preaching about sin, and for American evangelicals that means teaching young-earth creationism. Sin is inextricably linked, in the young-earth creationist story, to the Fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Decades of science education has failed to significantly change the pervasive presence of young-earth creationism within American evangelicalism. I believe that the way young-earth creationism is tightly packaged with the Gospel itself is the best explanation for this failure. The strategic pressure is on evolutionist Christians to clearly articulate and defend a historical narrative, consistent with scripture and theologically sound, that deprives young-earth creationism of its privileged place in the evangelical Gospel message. Anything less dooms the creation/evolution debate to more decades of stagnation.

Climate change and Evolution: "Look at the evidence"

I count many climate-change skeptics among my friends and acquaintances. I also can't help but notice that this group is uniformly conservative in political affiliation, which is a suggestive correlation to my sociological side (but I would never be so careless, in the absence of statistical support, as to infer anything more than an accidental relationship...*cough*). Myself, I'm inclined to think that the threat of human-effected climate change is a real danger. The reason? There seems to be a decent consensus among the scientific community. Not to say that there aren't objectors, and well-credentialed ones at that. But I'm comfortable siding with the majority viewpoint in the meantime.

Similarly, on the subject of creationist/evolutionist views of natural history, I side with the overwhelming majority of scientists (Christian, atheist or otherwise) who reject creationism as the folly of biblical literalists. This is a slightly different situation than than the climate-change debate; the consensus is far clearer, and the dissenters much less credible. Additionally, I am much more confident in my own understanding of the various sub-issues and arguments associated with this matter. But ultimately, I stand my opinion on the credibility of others who know better than I do, and better than I could.

So I've outlined two issues that I stand in substantial disagreement with in relation to most of my family and friends. And now the main point of this blog post: The one response I get when I have occasion to voice my views is that "I should look into it" myself. The implication, of course, is that they have done so. "I've looked at the evidence; if you did the same then you would change your mind".

Here's my response: I can't look at the evidence in such a way as to have a truly informed opinion. Is this evasive? I think it's just establishing a reasonable epistemological standard. I cannot reasonably be expected to have the ability to become educated about these issues, since I don't have ten years of discipline-specific schooling available to spend. That's why I am deeply suspicious of people who claim to have "looked into it myself". What did you look into? Why should I think you (or I) have the capabilities necessary to understanding and critically thinking about these issues? Not to say that we should be fatalistic about understanding issues. But why pretend that we're educated at a level appropriate to have an informed opinion, when really we're just accepting the declarations of experts? I try to read up on these issues out of interest, but at the end of the day I'm just going with what the majority is saying.

So am I an intellectual lemming? Have I "sold out" to the academic establishment? I like to think I'm just following common-sense: there are people who are better educated and learned than myself in certain disciplines. Why should I presume that half an hour on Google will make me an informed speculator on the area of knowledge that they've dedicated a lifetime to? Besides, most of the time we accept the opinions of experts over our own anyway. It seems that the only instances when we don't, there are other issues at stake (political and ideological in the climate change debate, theological in the creation/evolution debate).

Incidentally, that's one appealing aspect of philosophy as a discipline: theoretically there is no privileged access to philosophical knowledge. Sure, there's technical jargon and background knowledge necessary for understanding philosophical questions, but if you have the ability to think you should theoretically be able to engage in philosophy (at varying levels of competence, to be sure). This strikes me as a different state of affairs than the accessibility of other disciplines. If I tried to critically assess a geology or meteorology paper in an academic journal, the accessibility of the information is technical in a way that is different than philosophy.

This post isn't meant as an argument for believing in climate-change or evolution (although I'll admit it's strongly implied that we have prima facie reasons for accepting both). It's just my take on the idea that we can truly investigate some of these issues ourselves. What we really end up doing is taking the word of experts. And I'd like to suggest that, if you don't accept the opinion of the expert majority (as in the cases I've used above) then you might want to consider what's making you accept the opposite perspective.

My Dawkins Dilemma

Next Thursday Richard Dawkins, biologist and author of "The Selfish Gene", "The God Delusion" and more recently "The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution", will be speaking on the University of Washington campus. As a public figure of the New Atheist movement, Dawkins was an object of admiration for many people I met at the UW. I read many of his articles and books over the course of my undergraduate education, and he is a fine writer and public speaker. My opinion of him changes drastically when he strays from biology to ideology.

So here is my dilemma:

Reason for going: I'm sure that it will be an entertaining and thought-provoking presentation.

Reason for not going: I don't want to give the impression that I approve of biologists selling millions of books on the force of ignorant rhetoric and piss-poor philosophy.

Granted, his talk his supposed to be concerning his newest book about the evidences for evolution, and not his usual anti-religion vitriol. But I am skeptical that it will remain focused solely upon biology, of which he is indisputably an expert, rather than rabbit-trailing into religion (and religious) bashing. And that's a shame; a scientist of his caliber could go a long way in showing young earth creationist crowds the overwhelming evidences for evolution. But his forays into sophomoric philosophy and ideological foot-stomping just cements the perception of a science-faith divide, which has the effect of affirming young earth creationists in their perspectives rather than changing them.

Old people rule

Some of my favorite things to read are news articles that feature the classical literary theme of "Old people showing uppity young punks what's what". From the Seattle Times, "Hitler poster provokes Edmonds incident":

As a child in Armenia, Henry Gasparian witnessed firsthand the horrors of Nazi Germany. Two uncles were killed, his father wounded and a brother starved to death during the German invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union. So when Gasparian, 70, of Edmonds, saw a poster of President Obama with a Hitler mustache near the entrance to the Edmonds Farmers Market on Sept. 5, he admits that his reaction was "personal and emotional."

He's being charged with two counts of fourth-degree assault for allegedly grabbing and pushing the people who were handing out political pamphlets around the sign. In his defense, the kids were LaRouchies, and I'm not sure that assault isn't a proportional and appropriate response to being accosted with poorly photoshopped flyers and newspapers written in fluent moron.

The police report says that Gasparian yelled at the LaRouche activists from his car, "flipped them off" and repeatedly yelled obscenities. The activists told police that he returned on foot and assaulted them without provocation.

Given his personal history, I understand his reaction. Heck, I kind of feel like the police should have lent him a can of mace and let him go nuts. Although its possible that my personal feelings towards LaRouche kids are clouding my analysis of the situation.

Bonus video of Buzz Aldrin punching out a Moon Hoax conspiracy theorist who was harassing him:

Some tactical advice for complementarians

I got a chuckle from this list today. Maybe more than a chuckle; at least a guffaw or two. I thought it was a wonderfully clever satire on all the "practical" reasons for not ordaining women into leadership positions. My favorite might be number 2 on the list:

Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep paths, repair the church roof, change the oil in the church vans, and maybe even lead the singing on Father’s Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the Church.

Of course, I could already imagine the objections being raised against this list (meant in humor, but still written to drive home a point). I can even imagine the best objection to the list, which isn't a bad one: it's ten straw men fallacies that don't get to the heart of the debate about gender roles in the church. Most complementarians would appeal to scripture as the basis for their beliefs. Still, I've heard lots of "practical" reasons for the complementarian position, and in this post I want to advise my complementarian brothers and sisters to avoid them if they want to appear credible.

I've generally stayed away from the complementarian/egalitarian debate because I haven't read enough to own an informed opinion. However, I do lean egalitarian, based simply on my own intuitions. In particular, I have no instinctive problem with women being in leadership (ordained or non-ordained) positions within a church. This goes against the teachings of all the churches I have attended my entire life, but that's just my gut instinct on the issue.

Let's be honest, the only reason to believe women are unfit for leadership in ministry is if you think scripture teaches this. Otherwise, common-sense would tell you that there is nothing about being a woman that would preclude someone from being a good leader. If it turns out that scripture does teach that women are somehow ontologically unfit for leadership, then we have to bite the bullet and say that scripture goes against our common-sense, and so much the worse for common-sense (this isn't rare, since scripture teaches all sorts of things that go against our common-sense: a crucified Messiah, a God that has emotions, etc).

But, practically speaking, there's no reason to presume that men are more fit for spiritual leadership than women. And I would venture to say that anyone who believes otherwise clearly does not know any women. But the problem that arises here is that we want practical reasons to support our scriptural conclusions. If scripture says that women are not fit for spiritual leadership, there must be practical signs in everyday life that support this. So we come up with all sorts of truly idiotic and stereotypical reasons for denying women the pulpit ("Attractive women onstage will distract the men; women are too emotionally fragile to lead effectively*; women belong in the home...etc").

I'm from Seattle, and the local Pope has publicly said that women are more gullible and easily deceived than men. How a woman could sit in the congregation, listen to that and come back the next week is utterly mysterious to me.

When people turn to these reasons, it just reeks of desperation. It also likely reveals some subdued misogynist tendencies that finally get an agreeably Jesus-wrapped outlet. Since I don't think any of the "practical" reasons for denying women positions of authority in the church hold up to scrutiny, and in fact are just plain lousy, my advice is to step up and bite the bullet. Say "I believe scripture says this, contrary to experience and common-sense" and leave it at that. Drop the "practical" reasons by the wayside because they just make you look like holdovers from the Victorian age of feminine science.

So here's a basic tactical tutorial, as I see it, for those who believe women shouldn't have leadership roles in the church. It's in three bullet points, because I'm a good Baptist who believes that all things should boil down to three bullet points:

1. There's one good way to go about defending your belief that women should not be ordained as ministers or leaders in the church: scripture.

2. If you resort to any "practical" reasons, then it looks like you're avoiding the uncomfortable truth that what you think scriptures says and what human experience tells us don't sync up.

3. If your first reasons for denying women leadership roles in the church are "practical" reasons, then all you have done is reveal your own misogynistic tendencies thinly veneered with biblical justification.


*Feminist history of language lesson for today: the word "hysteria" comes from the Greek word for "uterus", since it was commonly assumed that the onset of severe panic attacks could be attributed to disturbances of the uterus (the obvious corollary being that men were not susceptible to such weaknesses).