Christianity is holistic
When, in an earlier dialogue _____, you told me that you agreed that empiricism is bankrupt when it comes to developing a workable ethic (that’s my way of stating it, not yours), I felt that this was an important point to touch upon. Personally, I don’t feel comfortable with a view of life that compartmentalizes my life, drawing hard and fast divisions between aspects of my inner life and the external world that I experience daily as a singularity, a unity. Whatever worldview I find myself committing to must take all of my experience, all of human experience, and make sense of it in a way that’s not radically counter-intuitive (though, it indeed may shock me at time and challenge me) and that doesn’t make nonsense of life.
Ultimately, I’ve concluded that Christianity is just that worldview. First, it validates and indeed gives grounding to my subject world, my hopes, fears, desires. It makes sense of my desire for justice, my sense of beauty, and the human longing for a world that “lives up to it’s potential.” But, on the other hand, I’ve found that my intellectual cravings are satisfied with the worldview presented in the Bible. No matter what objections I’ve throw at it, it stands up, none the worse for wear. It gives me a metaphysic that makes sense, and naturally flows into it’s own epistemology, and an ethic as well. Of course, it’s not an exhaustive list of how to run my life, but that’s exactly because the Bible doesn’t present us human as automatons. We apply the implications of scripture to aspects of life not directly addressed in its pages.
Here I’ll address a couple of lines of reasoning that I find compelling in favor of the Christian worldview. Now, here’s something important to keep in mind as you read this. If by “evidence” you only seek data that’s falls into an empiricist epistemology, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. I can’t be held to a standard that I reject. But, on the other hand, if by “evidence” you mean reasons for why I believe what I do, then I plan to give you that here. Hopefully I’ll communicate what I mean clearly in what follows. Here are the reasons I believe that Christianity is the only worldview that makes sense of human experience: 1) It gives philosophical grounding to assumptions, crucial assumptions, that we take for granted and live by everyday. 2) Without the overall structure of the Christian worldview, the entire enterprise of explanation is made into nonsense. And lastly, 3) it makes sense of who I am as a person, and the struggles of humanity that we see every day.
I realize that’s a lot to say, let alone defend in an email. Scores of books have addressed at least some of these points, and the ones that defend all three tend to be big books, so please excuse the brevity with which I’ll address them [which will begin in the next post] .
The following is from a letter I’ve been working on to a friend of mine. The topic is why I am a Christian, and what persuades me that the Christian vision of life is the true one. Naturally, being that this is a personalized letter, it will include parts that presuppose a constellation of other topics that my friend and I have spoken about. But, I still think the big picture will be fairly easy to find. (Also, you may also notice that, yes, I have reused sections from previously posted blogs and placed them in what I find is a more helpful overall context). So, here it is:
Please pardon the delay between posts. Unfortunately, this entry will have to be shorter that originally planned, for several reasons. First, A couple of commenters have recently posed challenges and critiqued my previous ID posts. This has lead me to write responses (that can be found in the comments sections of the ID entries). Also unfortunate is the fact that these replies have been rather short and have not fully addressed the questions of the commenter, a fact I’m quite aware of. And that leads to the second, and more pressing reason for the delay in my blogging: I’m getting married in less than 36 hours. The kind of fuller replies that this topic demands aren’t possible on my time schedule (for those of you that are married, I’m sure you can recall what the last week before the ceremony was like). So, here I’ll simply mention two points. The first is on what’s called the “explanatory filter” and the second is regarding the issue of falsification.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been hitting the books pretty hard. Mostly this has been done in preparation for an upcoming class i’ll be teaching in the fall semester on systematic theology. Of course, I also a few random titles that seemed to get my attention sitting on my shelves (you know how it is). I’m currently learning the hard way that certain passions (like this blog) have to take a back seat when other things arise (like professorial duties). I’ve been having to revisit old topics in prep for the class, while realizing that blog posts are going to be made less frequently (at least till I feel up to speed). Well, this is what I’ve been up do:
Designed or intended? Another gatekeeper objection to ID is that it proves too much. It proponent of ID are setting out to say that all things (especially biological systems) demonstrate some prior intentionality, then we can equally say that everything shows intentionality. This cell is here because it’s supposed to be here, etc. But an important distinction needs to be made here as well. “IDers” aren’t saying that everything is intended (though some may believe that), but rather than certain things are designed. That is to say, they draw a distinction between something being intended and something being designed. Here’s an example from William Dembski. Say I have a small stand-up mirror that I place on my desk. The face that I placed it on the desk means that it’s placement is intentional, I meant it to be put there. Now why I did so could be for a variety of reasons, I just needed to set it down; I had nowhere else to put it, etc. But, well the mirror’s placement is intended, it is not designed. On the other hand, had I placed the mirror on the table in just the right spot so as to deflect sunlight coming in to the room and blind the person behind me, that would be both intended (I meant to place it where I did), as well as designed.
could carefully observation the structure of Mount Rushmore and could firm that it bears the unmistakable marks of design (the hair, facial features, etc. all matching perfectly to actual human beings, and not just any human beings, but national leaders and no one else, and not just that but only American presidents, etc.). The designer nature of the monument is detectable, we can answer that question. But, knowing something is designed doesn’t necessarily tell us how it can designed, the modality question. Perhaps Rushmore was fashion through water drills, perhaps with picks, maybe it was crafted by lasers, or even a hammer and chisel (and lots of time!). These are all viable possibilities for someone who is aware of all the possible ways of carving into stone.
This theory of the development of life states that the complexity of life here on planet earth is perhaps the product of seeding from foreign life forms. He agrees that ordered structure of life on earth is too great to be the product of undirected, unpurposed forces. Instead he posits the possibility that, ahem, Aliens seeded, i.e planted in some form or other, the “seeds” of life in this planet.