Some final modifications to the Epilogue were completed yesterday, and the post on Quotes from Francis Collins have now been expanded and completed with a brief review paragraph at the end.
New Section Published: [13] “Epilogue”
August 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The final page of the Journey has now been finished. This page was certainly one of the more difficult to write, which is the primary reason for the delay in publishing since the prior page.
Updated Section 5, “Reparations”, and Quotes from Collins
August 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Francis Collins provided an excellent summary of the status of Genesis, now added to both Reparations and Collins’ quotes.
Quotes from Francis Collins
August 21, 2013 by 13 Comments
I selected a few salient quotes from Francis Collins‘ book on evolutionary development and faith, The Language of God, which I would recommend reading alongside the resources already suggested by Ayala, Venema, and Falk (though Falk is better). Collins is a Christian and was the leader of the legendary Human Genome Project. His book is an apologetic for both evolutionary development and the Christian faith.
On supposed micro/macro evolutionary distinctions:
The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution is therefore seen to be rather arbitrary; larger changes that result in new species are a result of a succession of smaller incremental steps.
On the connection between evolutionary theory and medicine:
Truly it can be said that not only biology but medicine would be impossible to understand without the theory of evolution.
Quote from a Former Hero: Augustine
August 19, 2013 by 4 Comments
“There is another form of temptation even more fraught with danger… This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us on to try to discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, and which men should not wish to learn.”
~ St. Augustine. Quoted by McGowan, Dale (2011-02-15).
Parenting Beyond Belief (pp. 201-202). Amacom
I cannot but reflect that such repressive attitudes would have kept us in darkness without daybreak. The medicine which saved my daughter would not have been developed without the sustained drive of many minds who divorced themselves from such shackled “thinking”.
Quotes from a Former Hero: Luther
August 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom … Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism… She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets.
~ Martin Luther, Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142-148
There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason… Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed.
~ Martin Luther, quoted by Walter Kaufmann,
The Faith of a Heretic, (Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1963), p. 75
People gave ear to an upstart astrologer [Copernicus] who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.
~ Martin Luther, “Works,” Volume 22, c. 1543
We know, on the authority of Moses, that longer than six thousand years the world did not exist.
~ Martin Luther, “Lectures on Genesis”
These and further citations here.
Boomeranged
July 25, 2013 by 2 Comments
Agree or disagree? Consider the following quote:
Sometimes in order to find the truth, we must be willing to accept that other possibilities outside our current belief system could be true. We often get in our own way. Make a decision to fight against your biases and follow the evidence—wherever it may lead.
I for one agree. But from whence the quotation?
I happened to find it on a Christian blog, Explore God, where it stood somewhat glaringly out of place as a challenge for skeptics to reconsider their position. The blog on the whole seems to contain rather a great deal of amorphous and subjective muddle-mouthing about anything other than honest and objective inquiry.
On my own experience of late, the advice in the quotation seems more typically to be staunchly resisted by the faithful rather than embraced. And yet they/we proffer. And they/we posture. In my own case, I have followed the precept as well as possible. And I can’t help but muse just how badly a dedication to honest inquiry can backfire on the a priori conclusions which the faithful consider acceptable. It certainly backfired on me. At least, that is, on one view. Objectively, it worked precisely the way it should. It demonstrated that my own muddle-mouthing on the subject of faith was without factual basis. In the myth speak of us moderns, the above principle constitutes “the red pill”. And I cannot say that I would trade back for the chance at the blue.
And how many believers can claim to have walked this path? What would be required to support such a claim? One would have to arrive at an adverse conclusion (undesired), contra one’s bias, and on the grounds of objective (not subjective or existential) evidences. No friend or scholar has yet measured up to such criteria. Yet the skeptics do – and they are the ironic and ill-fitted target of this quotation in the first place. We have here a boomerang: an elegantly arcing trajectory that soars outward, finds no target, and returns promptly to the head of its hurler.
Bad Endings
June 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment
As time passes, I find that my sense of discomfort concerning claims of divine authority from our lecterns and pulpits declines, where it would seem that we affirm as the words of God the mere texts of men. Coming to such a realization at first throbbed a deep dissonance, and to some extent an abhorrence, at the idea that in good faith we were affirming words written contra. The emotion of this sense has ebbed a great deal. As I hear these echoing assertions in the pews with my family, it all seems relatively lighter. The stabs of fear and anger regarding our uttered blasphemies subside; for if our texts were not authored by God, we blaspheme in so saying. But blasphemy is, I suppose, a somewhat imaginary crime. Where it comes to no harm, I suppose our unfounded wish-thinking is harmless.
Quote: Michael Shermer on Belief & Reversals
June 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation.
As well, occasionally people form beliefs from a single revelatory experience largely unencumbered by their personal background or the culture at large.
Rarer still, there are those who, upon carefully weighing the evidence for and against a position they already hold, or one they have yet to form a belief about, compute the odds and make a steely-eyed emotionless decision and never look back… It happens, but it is as rare as a black swan.
~ Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
Section 12, “Moral Pivot”, Published
June 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Section 12, “Moral Pivot,” tackles the question of blasphemy in light of the altered understanding of what the ancient texts of Israel actually represent.
Section 11, “Faith Card,” Published
May 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Section 11, “Faith Card”, has been published. This section details a rearward evaluation of whether faith is a viable mechanism by which to discern truth and falsehood – i.e., whether it is a way by which we come to know truth or not.
Map of Jericho
May 23, 2013 by
Jericho Brisance has four major sections.
(1) Journey began primarily an extended letter for my friends and family, who will no doubt struggle to understand exactly why I have come to reverse my position on issues of faith.
(2) The active Blog follows below on this page.
(3) A menu section has been added for the long Paisley Series.
(4) Finally, the Bibliography provides resources for those who want information straight from the scholars.
Feel free to follow through WordPress or Facebook, and see the Jericho Pinterest and YouTube pages for collected multimedia.
Section 10, “Retrospective,” Published
May 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Section 10, Retrospective, has been published to the Journey, a rearward autobiographical evaluation of my path to date.
Read Complete: On The Reliability of the Old Testament, by K.A. Kitchen
May 21, 2013 by 2 Comments
Kenneth Kitchen’s volume On The Reliability of the Old Testament is a book important enough to the evangelical community that I think a full review is warranted. That is currently in the works. In the meantime, I think it is sufficient to note that Kitchen is cited by many for two main reasons: (1) he defends the historical basis for the OT, and (2) he provides ample and quotable criticism of scholars like Finkelstein.
However, even granting that Kitchen’s narrow minority views are correct, readers ought to beware that he does not land us in the place many seem to think. What he concedes to folks like Finkelstein, Silberman, Dever, etc., proves far more notable than where he disagrees. The ‘reliability’ that he defends is by no means the traditional view of the texts in question. And as he does so, he demonstrates that the biblical texts are entirely non-unique among their antecedent and contemporary pagan cousins. Kitchen defends a different mountain than the one on which evangelicals have planted their flag. Tall Tale Tellers the biblical chroniclers remain.
His chapter on Genesis, dealing with both the creation and the flood, is a breathtaking expansion of discussions only covered briefly in other books on Christian origins. I believe that I could have saved myself a great deal of effort and a great many books, had I simply read Kitchen’s chapter first. It is more evident on Kitchen than ever that the Genesis accounts are as fabricated as their cousins, and as blind.
Long survey pending.
Contending with Bart Ehrman
May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
This brief review of Dan Wallace’s critique of Ehrman does well at highlighting the rhetorical climate that surrounds the topic of biblical criticism. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the goal of much writing on the subject seems to be one of terminating further inquiry by the reader and rendering as dismissible the issues raised by scholars like Ehrman, Finkelstein, etc.
This post reviews an essay in the book Contending with Christianity’s Critics, the latest installment in the Ultimate Philosophy Challenge that I undertook some time ago. This time I’m looking at Daniel Wallace’s essay “How Badly Did the Early Scribes Corrupt the New Testament?”.
I was looking forward to Daniel Wallace’s essay, because it is the first to directly address a professional skeptic whose work I’ve seen*. Wallace speaks to Bart Ehrman’s arguments for scriptural corruption – that is, the position that the texts of the Bible as we have them are not the same as those penned by the original first-century authors. He doesn’t address Jesus Interrupted (the book that opened this Challenge), but Ehrman’s earlier book, Misquoting Jesus (MJ from here on). So I had some more Ehrman to read. I didn’t mind – he’s a clear and engaging writer, and it was nice to have…
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Quote: Kitchen on Jericho
May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
There has always been too much imagination about Jericho by moderns (never mind previous generations), and the basic factors have ironically been largely neglected. The town was always small, an appendage to its spring and oasis…
~ K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament
Quote: Kitchen Summarizing The Exodus
May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Cover of On the Reliability of the Old Testament
The Exodus and Sinai events are not hereby proven to have happened, or the tabernacle and covenant, etc., to have been made then. But their correspondence not just with attested realities but with known usage of the late second millennium B.C. and earlier does favor acceptance of their having had a definite historical basis.
~ K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament
Israel Finkelstein website
May 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Finkelstein seems ever to be a lightning-rod figure wherever traditional biblical views collide with current Syro-Palestinian archaeology. For convenience of referece, Israel Finkelstein’s website.
Quote: Churchill on Perserverance
May 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Never, never, never quit.
~ Winston Churchill
Inquiry and Ammo Hunts
May 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
It is perhaps by conditioning, perhaps by virtue of my profession and the long time that I have spent in subjugation to the inflexibilities of the physical world. Perhaps not; perhaps it is my religious background or my disposition from birth.
It becomes apparent to me how different in spirit my past year’s readings have been compared to the approach of others, who seem energetic in pursuing ‘research’ not for serious inquiry, but as an ammo hunt. There is a very significant difference between Investigation for honest inquiry, where the answer is not predetermined, an ‘investigation‘ for apologetics, in which the conclusion is known from the beginning and the only objective is to construct a rationale of support. I have no time for the latter – all energies have poured into the former, which remains the more difficult to summon.
Jericho Brisance 