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Today’s been a great day so far, if you rate your days on cool blog posts that you’ve read. It’s also a great day if you consider the weather, which is why I’m taking the afternoon off. But, that’s beside the point. Here are three good reads for a great Friday:

Shock: First Animal on Earth Was Surprisingly Complex

Earth’s first animal was the ocean-drifting comb jelly, not the simple sponge, according to a new find that has shocked scientists who didn’t imagine the earliest critter could be so complex.

Essentially, rather than the simpler organism evolving into the more complex, the complex comb jelly came first.  The comb jelly has both connective tissues and a nervous system, so if this is now thought to be the first multi-celled animal, it disrupts the previously-accepted tree of life.  Perhaps they’ve simply been looking at the wrong tree…

An interview with Ben Stein about Expelled

Some guy named Jerry interviewed Ben Stein. It’s an interesting little interview, and Ben talks a bit about his views about Darwinism and the Holocaust:

Because I had always had very serious anger about Darwinism, because I think Darwinism led to the Holocaust. I think this belief that there are superior and inferior races, and that the superior races had a moral duty to eliminate the inferior races was one of the main building blocks of Nazism and the Holocaust, and I never thought that had gotten out enough.

And, his thoughts about the current state of the scientific community:

I would say to Eugenie Scott, Yes, you are right; in reality, science is what the scientists say it is. That is the reality of the situation, but it’s not a good reality. It’s not a reality that advances knowledge. It’s not a reality that advances the frontiers of man’s understanding of the universe or even of the human body. Eugenie Scott, you’re right, in the sense that you say, “We’re the boss, do what we say.” And that is usually how life operates; the boss gets to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. As Bob Dylan said, “The princes make the rules for the wise men and the fools.” And in this world, big science are the princes. We’re asking for a world where there aren’t princes and kings. We’re asking for Thomas Jefferson’s world, where there is freedom of speech for everyone, where people can say, “Look, you have no proof of this. You’ve never seen a single mammalian species evolve into a separate species. It’s never been seen. So why don’t you give us a chance to give our explanation? You’ve never seen how a cell got to have a million moving parts. Let us give our explanation. You’ve never seen how the laws of gravity got created. Let us give our explanation. You’re right, Eugenie Scott, you’ve got all the power right now. We agree, you’ve got the power. We’re just little dinky nothings, just asking for what Thomas Jefferson asked the King of England for—freedom of speech, freedom of representation, freedom to make our points. We’re just little dinky nothings, but we have truth on our side.” Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of history is long, but it inclines towards truth.”

You don’t have to agree with him, but if you’re interested in what Ben himself thinks and why he made the movie, it’s a good little interview.

Things you can say about a line

… a religious person could look at a line and say it is a car and you could not argue with them. They would just say you have to see the car by faith and that only atheists see a line because they don’t believe in religion. This is what you call a circle argument which is not a line as I have said already. This is why science and religion don’t mix. Science wants a line and religion wants a car or maybe a nice house. There is no use arguing.

It’s a “must read,” one of the more brilliant megaphysical pieces I’ve read in a long time. And, a great thing to read on such a great Friday. I’m going to go enjoy the sunshine now.

I find that I sometimes have issues with what Michael Spencer has to say over at internetmonk.com, but I do appreciate his willingness to think outside of his particular box. He comes from a Southern Baptist background, I believe, although he considers himself “post-evangelical.” As with all of us, it’s very difficult to completely shake off the grid we were raised in, so I think we would see the same thing still from very different viewpoints. But then, sometimes I find him very much right on.  In his post from yesterday, he makes some very good points concerning how many evangelicals approach evangelism, contrasted with how Jesus approached it:

I think it’s telling that the two most prolific evangelism programs in evangelicalism both approach their audience with questions that Jesus never used.

“Do you know that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?”

“If you were to die tonight, and God were to asked you, why should I let you into my heaven, what would be your answer?”

He points out that Jesus merely proclaimed the Kingdom of Heaven, which had very different connotations than our dangling Heaven on a stick (my terminology). Spencer continues:

Evangelicalism is a religion of decisions and transactions. Jesus proclaims the arrival of the reign of God. There are decisions to be made, but reducing the Gospel to a decision to accept “God’s plan for my life” or giving the right answer to the question of how to go to heaven seems to have moved well past what Jesus was doing in his earthly ministry.

He’s been reading NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope, which I think probably prompted the post, although the thinking is obviously his own. I don’t think what he says is necessarily new, but it bears repeating.

My own take

My own background, as my faithful readers know, is Lutheran. After being “evangelized” away from the Lutheran church in my early 20s, I have lived among the evangelicals for about 30 years, however I never really became one of them. I’ve adopted the term “Lutheran expatriate” for lack of any better description.

When I first found myself in college (actually, I didn’t really find myself until a few years later), I hung with various campus groups, including InterVarsity and Campus Crusade. I was terribly turned off by the CC bunch, who were bound and determined to get me to say their little prayer; no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t convince them that I was “saved.” I stopped going there after a couple of weeks, and did my best to avoid them after that. So, from that time on, the line “Did you know that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?” became somewhat of a joke for me.

While I appreciate the point Michael Spencer is making, I now have to say that I think the question is valid; not only that, but years later it became one of my basic messages. I think that it is absolutely true that God loves you and does indeed have a wonderful plan for your life. The problem is not in the question, it’s in the application.

God’s plan is not just to get you into Heaven (or saved from hell). Have you ever noticed that while Jesus definitely emphasized the spiritual kingdom rather than Earthly interpretations (as the Jews did), his plan was to get people into Life, not into Heaven. “The Kingdom of Heaven is within reach.” That didn’t mean that they’d all be dead soon, it meant that you could reach out and touch it; it was here, it was now, it was happening.

With Jesus’ death and resurrection, he didn’t just buy us tickets to Heaven; he began the re-creation of the world. Everything changed. The reality of the resurrection (for everyone) was one thing that became reality. The second was the “pouring out” of the Holy Spirit “upon all flesh.” It’s a brave new world. We don’t even realize it, but we can’t comprehend a world without the Holy Spirit (and I believe that applies to non-Christians as well). God’s plan is for us to step into the ongoing re-creation of everything, where “with God, all things are possible.”

Live the resurrection! God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

I’ve got to admit it’s getting better
A little better all the time
(it can’t get more worse)
- Lennon/McCartney, “Getting Better”

You could say I’ve lost my faith in science and progress…
- Sting, “If I Ever Lose My Faith”

Most people in the Western world probably know who Charles Darwin is, and understand that that he had something to do with formulating the theory of evolution. If they haven’t learned about him in school, they’ve seen his name inside the little walking fish emblems on many cars. It seems lately that he has become something of a poster child for evolution, scorned by some and sainted (in a matter of speaking) by others.  If he were still alive, he’d probably be wishing people would stop talking about him and leave him in peace.

A few days ago I wrote about the arrogance that is attached to modernism, still the pervasive worldview in the West. Modernism, I think, is essential to our current understanding of science, or at the very least is so intertwined that it’s hard to tell them apart. As I wrote, I think this is true of much Evangelical theology as well, where elements of the scientific approach to knowledge has permeated our thinking. Modernism, growing out of the Enlightenment and the rediscovery and molding of Greek philosophy, focused knowledge on the part rather than the whole, on the individual rather than the community. As a result, you could say that Modernism often fails to see the forest for the trees. Modernism also brought us the myth of objectivity, and the fundamental belief in progress.

In NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope, he discusses the myth of progress and it’s impact on the church as well as on society. He had this to say about Darwin, and the rise of Darwinian thought:

… Darwin was himself not so much the great new thinker, coming from nowhere to his radical new idea, but rather the exact product of his times, one particular high-water mark in the onward rush of liberal modernist optimism, himself the product of a particular evolution of Western thought. The eagerness with which his ideas were embraced and reapplied not only in the narrow biological sphere in which they belonged but also in far wider areas such as society and politics indicates well enough the mood of his times.  …  Evolution, in this more general sense of progress, was already widely believed; it was a deeply convenient philosophy for those who wanted to justify their own massive industrial and imperial expansion; Darwin geve it some apparent scientific legitimacy, which was quickly acted upon and which, within half a century, had been used to justify everything from eugenics to war.  

Wright talks about how this notion of progress - that change is ultimately for the better, and that the future is necessarily better than the past - was adopted by the church as well as by science, and social Darwinism became the social gospel, the belief that the meddling of the church could solve the problem of evil. Not that social work (what we call the mercy ministries) isn’t good, but we can see every day in the news that we as a race - and even as Americans - are no less evil than we were 150 years ago.

What I am asking myself is what is probably the foundational post-modern question (or at least should be): “If we were able to remove the elements of modernism, what would we have left of Christianity, and of science?”  It’s one thing, of course, to ask this question (i.e. “deconstruct”) of Christianity, but altogether another thing to ask this of science.  Without the foundational worldview of modernism, could science survive?  If so, what would it look like? 

I have some thoughts, and I think that especially in areas like quantum physics, where cause and effect sometimes breaks down, we are beginning to see some of this.  To quote from yet another song, “The times, they are a changing.” If Darwin was a product of his times, what kind of scientist is a product of our time?  These are some of the things I think about when I should be sleeping.