For the benefit of people in the audience and for simple access for anyone else who’s interested, I’m posting my paper and slides for tomorrow’s talk. I hope you find these helpful and/or interesting.
“No end to the mystery”: Scientist-as-prince, scientist-as-scientist, and what one has to do with the other in Lost in the Cosmos
[Cross-posted at Into All The WWWorld]
The final plenary session speaker at the Christian Scholars’ Conference is Ted Peters. Peters is a systematic theology professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s task force on genetics, and author of Sacred Cells?: Why Christians Should Support Stem Cell Research.
20.13
Francis Collins is asking a question: In vitro fertilization is OK by more traditions, and we’ve got lots of in vitro embryos sitting around. What do you think about us using them, even if you’re a staunch embryo protection person but want to use the embryos we already have, since they’re already been created? For that matter, and on the other hand, how are embryo protection people being consistent when they say in vitro fertilization is OK?
Peters: Some Catholics do in fact say we should oppose use of in vitro embryos because, in so doing, you participate in the original sin (of creating the embyos artificially?). “I want to say ‘Get a life!’” (?!) He then went on to say that, yes, Francis, that’s a great idea, potentially very ethically helpful, and I think that’s what’s already happening in some places.
20.00
Takeaways from Peters:
19.58
Singapore has a helpful policy: only use young embryos (<14 days), use surplus embryos when possible, or get special permission on a case by case basis. Apparently no one has gone for the last option. He’s making the point that the religious discussion has affected the secular policy.
19.56
He’s giving the theological foundations of this framework of beneficence by talking about eschatology and Jesus as healer. Quick survey of stem cell research beliefs in other traditions (he’s flying now–apparently he’s almost out of time): Jews and Muslims are for stem cell research, by and large. How about Christians? He’s going really fast, and his slides only give the groups not their positions. RCs against, Orthodox against, Anglicans and Episcopalians generally for (“to the extent that I can get them [to give me a position]“), … OK, I give up, he’s just going too fast. Presumably he’s written this down somewhere.
19.52
A third framework (I’m not sure I’m exactly tracking with his outline): nonmaleficence and beneficence. He’s explaining these with respect to the Good Samaritan. The priest and the Levite did no harm (nonmaleficence), but the Samaritan did good (beneficence).
19.50
I’m continuing to be unimpressed with Peters’ explanations of stem cell science. I’m not following his discussion of chimeras. He gave an example about DNA testing from sperm samples. Totally didn’t follow.
19.47
Peters’ point: this anti-Brave New World argument looks like the Vatican argument, but it’s not, it’s a secular philosophical argument.
19.47
Leon Kass from U. of Chicago (“That means you know he’s smart”) says we’ve got a slippery slope here, from “Yuck!” to “Oh?” to “Gee Whiz” to “Why not?” This is the anti-playing-God framework, but it came not out of a Christian context but, I guess, a sort of pagan context (appeals to Prometheus, etc.). Brave New World dehumanizes us, Kass says. “What does human mean for Kass? What it really means is family life. Families should have mommies and daddies and children … [and] death is a part of life.”
19.44
Those scientists are causing us to “fall into sin,” according to a Der Spiegel article after Dolly. Note the theological language in a secular context.
19.42
OK, back to Dr. Polkinghorne’s heart attack: “Suppose we take on of his skin cells … and activate that … and produce a stem cell line with his genome.” Can we do DNA nuclear reprogramming? Scientific researchers generally appreciate the possibility (they find it “appealing”) of making stem cells without destroying an embryo. Apparently it turns out you could form a baby from these cells, which Peters hopes the Vatican doesn’t realize and reverse their position that adult stem cell research is morally permissible.
19.39
Another thought is the 14-day position: When you get to the adherence of the uterine wall, that’s when for the first time you’ve got individuation. This happens at roughly 14 days in. This looks like a good candidate for a moral threshold if you’re willing to take your clues from nature. Conservative Catholics who oppose abortion but support stem cell research hold this view.
19.37
He’s now taking a shot at John Breck, an Orthodox theologian who makes a claim that the Orthodox Church has “always taught that human life begins at conception.”
19.36
The Vatican has done the most thorough job of thinking through the issues of embryo protection, he says. He’s going to walk us through JP2 and Benedict’s thinking: Egg from mother gets penetrated by father’s sperm, creating a unique genome not shared with anyone else. God then imparts a brand-new soul to this fertilized egg, they say. The genome is “crying out for the addition of a spiritual soul”–this was JP2′s theological anthropology. The soul is what gives us dignity, the imago dei, etc. And you cannot violate the dignity of this ensouled person. But notice that this theology was formulated before the abortion controversy, with nothing to do stem cell research. It was applied to the stem cell controversy, but note the differences, including that we’re not talking about a mother’s body in stem cells.
19.32
Peters thinks non-compatible shots were being shot across the related parties at each other. He’s giving three bioethical frameworks produced by the ethics board:
19.31
Peters wants us to pause and ask if Newsweek got the issue right: stem cells research vs. (pro-life people?–he switched the slide).
19.30
The ethics committee at Geron had been in place two years before human embryonic stem cells were isolated. Peters was on it. “You may not like what we do, but you can’t deny that we were there.”
19.29
He’s showing a Michael West slide now explaining why West is interested in human cloning: “From deep within my soul, I erupted in an explosion of anger; ‘This won’t happen!’ I shouted out loud at the thought of death. This was the most profound experience of my life. I realized it was simply not in my nature to accept death or be defeated by it.”
“Most scientists don’t talk that way,” Peters notes. But he’s “part of mix” when it comes to stem cell cloning.
19.26
Scientifically, he’s pointing out, the Dolly controversy was misunderstood. Willmot (sp?) didn’t want to create duplicate animals. Seriously, he’s going really fast, I think not taking the time to explain the science as carefully as the other speakers have (though maybe I’m just experiencing it this way because this is the area I know the least about).
19.23
Oh dear: Peters is proposing a thought experiment where Professor Polkinghorne has a heart attack. Could he be treated by foreign stem cells? Of course not.
19.22
Scientific preliminaries: We get human embryonic stem cells from a fertilized egg in a petri dish providing totipotent cells with a full complement of the genome. You could make a baby or any kind of tissue out of these cells. Days later we have the blastocyst surrounding … he’s going too fast: here’s a similar diagram from Wikimedia Commons.
19.19
These science are promising, he notes, the possibility of a new picture of human well-being and flourishing.
19.19
Peters points out that the goal of stem cell research is regenerative medicine, which will apply to a long list of problems plaguing the human body (spinal cord injury, MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc.).
19.18
He’s now showing cartoons showing two disparate viewpoints: one with science running off with the ethicists following from far behind, and the other espousing the opposite view (scientist: “I’m having a hard time getting any work done with all these ethicists hanging around”).
19.17
Peters is summarizing Knud Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas, both students of Heidegger. I’m getting started slow, so I missed his exact point, but he wants us to keep in mind the difficulty in supposing that science can be an interpretation-less enterprise. I’ll try to keep up better as we go along.
19.15
Peters is giving a history of the founding of UC-Berkeley, which was apparently originally named (the town named for the school that would be founded there?) for Bishop Berkeley (another Anglican) who said that science and religion would be harmonious in this great new land (ouch, not yet, huh?).
[Cross-posted at Into All The WWWorld]
This morning’s plenary speaker at the Christian Scholars Conference is Simran Sethi, a prominent environmental journalist who got her start at MTV News. I know much less about Sethi than the other speakers here, practically nothing in fact. But she’s got an impressive CV and should be an engaging speaker. The topic of her presentation is “Our Daily Bread: Food, Faith, and Conservation.”
15.15
We’re now discussing taking up a collection for the people of Joplin, especially students and faculty at Ozark Christian College.
15.13
She’s giving the genuinely touching personal wrap-up now, admitting that this has been a challenging presentation for her. She’s quoting biblical sources and yesterday’s “Augustine” quote from Collins about unity, charity, etc. (someone told me yesterday that it can’t be traced to Augustine). The plea is for us to look at the issues of climate change and creation care, to think critically about our food system, and to ask ourselves if this is the best answer. Cool McKibben quote to the effect of “There is no silver bullet, only silver buck shot.” When I was getting a “precautionary principle” link, I missed a cool thing about Kant and examining the intentions of Monsanto, etc., which was I think the boldest part of the presentation.
15.08
“Hungry people in the developing nations have no right to choose,” is our logic, she’s pointing out. They should, I’m extrapolating here, be desperate enough to eat whatever we have to offer, even if it’s dangerous. And it is, very likely: she’s now citing a first-of-kind study about “[m]aternal and fetal exposure to pesticides associated to genetically modified foods” in Quebec. These toxins are in the animals, in the meat, and int he blood of humans, including “humans who aren’t even here yet.” So back to the precautionary principle (this is a technical term you may not be aware of if you haven’t followed the technology, science, and policy wars, see here).
15.03
Grant says solution to hunger problems are to double or triple yields. Pollan asks “yields of what?” Sethi thinks the best way to tackle these problems is to let farmers save their seeds. (I missed connection between these two ideas, sorry.)
15.01
What’s are the implications of GMOs and “terminator seeds” (GURTs) which don’t reproduce (Farmers will have to buy them every year)? Monsanto is talking up the ownership themes, which Sethi finds theologically problematic. Huh, the environmental discourse around this is known as “seed sovereignty.” Love it. Also, Monsanto’s CEO’s name is Hugh Grant.
14.59
The point of contact between man and nature is spiritual. She’s riffing on Matthew 31-33 metaphors. “Christ doesn’t say ‘the kingdom of heaven is like a chariot race’ … The kingdom of heaven is like a grape vine.” Food patents work directly against this spirit.
14.57
Public policy should follow the precautionary principle, she and other advocates maintain. But this hasn’t gone well. Monsanto has grown in proportion to GMO adoption. They control the seeds. It’s not germane to her argument that Monsanto created Agent Orange, she notes. She doesn’t want to give the impression that multi-national corporations are bad. That’s why she has a grad degree in business. She would want to celebrate Monsanto if they were doing good things, because “Man, they’re big. When they do something, the world changes.” But that’s not the case. They present themselves as feeding the world, but most of the crops they create are commodity crops generating bioplastics and biofuels. But “whoever controls the seed controls the food system.”
14.54
Up to 70% of packaged goods in the U.S. contain GMOs, mostly in corn and soy, which are a huge part of our diet, Pollan points out. Hehe, the only person in the room who raised his hand when she asked if this was surprising “is also wearing a DNA tie.”
14.52
GMed cotton sounded like it would be a good idea, since 25% of insecticides were being used on cotton. But, constant exposure to the toxin in this cotton has created an evolutionary pressure for insects to adapt resistance. “The engineered crop is no longer resistant to the pest it was designed to kill.”
14.50
GMOs and non-GMOs can cross-pollinate (“that’s what nature does; it tries to be fruitful”). But this drift (out-crossing) actually turns out to be detrimental. This doesn’t just contaminate local organic farms. It has also led to Monsanto, et al., to sue small farmers whose crops have been so contaminated. There’s a patenting of life forms going on.
14.48
She’s talking about Pluots, plumb-apricots that she would call “part of God’s plan” that any horticulturalist could do. Using recombinant DNA technology is of a different quality, and this couldn’t happen naturally. She describes this strategy of “man’s plan.”
14.47
“To understand the world as God’s creation is to understand … our accountability to God as tenants.” We can’t destroy what has been so richly provided to us. Our works should be “in harmony with the laws that produced them.”
14.46
She’s now moving onto GMOs (genetically modified organisms). She’s prefacing it with an admission that she longs for a silver bullet even though there isn’t one. But she’s saying that GMOs are, at the very least, not that silver bullet. Investors and many others have come to that conclusion, but she humbly disagrees, citing (in part) conflict of interest among the big seed makers. Do these practices honor life and stewardship, she asks? Simple asnwer: these GMOs feed people. But her point is that it’s not that simple.
14.44
The highest rates of obesity correlate quite compellingly with the highest rates of food insecurity. Telling a compelling story about the urban food desert in Sugar Hill, Harlem.
14.42
Insecticide endosulfan is a chemical cousin of DDT and was only recently banned. It’s an endocrine disruptor with risk of accumulation. 1.4 million pounds were used in the U.S. EPA is missing the point in saying small amounts are OK: what about the people handling it? What about people drinking nearby water? Why all the fuss, including the push to exempt Global South farmers who couldn’t afford substitutes? It was a multi-million-dollar industry, of course (I missed the exact number).
14.39
Agricultural chemicals can cross the placental barrier, studies say, so farm workers and city dwellers alike are doing great harm to, at the very least, their children.
14.38
“Monocultures deplete the soil of important nutrients: diversity creates harmony.” She’s very theological/philosophical, notice. Lovely speech and lovely visuals. Just as we could tell yesterday that Collins is a scientist (and now bureaucrat), we can definitely tell Sethi is a journalist.
14.36
Hehe, quoting “Good Crop, Bad Crop.” Its analysis of Green Revolution: farms had to adapt to seed variety rather than the other way around.
14.35
“Our food is oily,” both in terms of food shipping and petro-chemicals, as she noted before. Plus we’re “growing” plastics and fuel (ethanol, etc.). Many farmers feel like they can’t afford to grown anything but corn. Price volatility makes us incredibly vulnerable (and more so people who depend on us) with our one-crop economy. Historical and contemporary parallels: Irish potato famine, “rice crisis” in Southeast Asia. We’re pushing out crops that came about by “the methods of diversity” for a “one-size fits all” solution controlled by seed companies, etc., who want to maximize yield, not nutritional value (for the most part).
14.32
Food inflation hurts the least among us, she’s noting “the worst form of taxation on the poorest of the poor” (she’s quoting someone).
14.30
Food First Institute realized years ago that world farmers were producing four pounds of food per person per day. The fact that we won’t have enough of it is a much more recent occurrence. She’s noting that her home country of India has great poverty along with the most Forbes-list billionaires of any country in the world (think I have that right).
14.28
It’s going to be a luxury to have food at all “and as people of any faith … we should find this unacceptable.” Anglican Bishop Jeff Davies argues that overpopulation and overconsumption are our two greatest sources of environmental harm. [Lots of Anglicans are popping up at this conference, this one is happy to note.]
14.26
Talking about European e coli. Pointing out the petro-chemical inputs and transportation costs of our food practices and whether our answers about the global food market are misleading and detrimental. Food prices could double in next ten years, analysts say.
14.25
She just read a lovely excerpt from David Mas Masumoto about peaches and the coming of summer. Modern farming puts us out of touch with this spirit, and it’s causing us to be filled with a spiritual longing.
14.22
Sethi has an M.B.A but nevertheless has strong critiques for Big Agribusiness. Farm subsidies mostly help diversify these large corporations.
14.20
“How many of you come from agricultural states?” We have a luxury in that we can know a bit more about where our food comes from. Although we’ve lost 300,000 small farms in this country (?!).
14.19
“Eating is an agricultural act,” says Wendell Berry. “I just started growing my own food this year,” and it’s a humbling experience.
14.17
“Everyday meals carry with them sacramental power.” We know that food is a part of spirituality, a reflection of “what we hold sacred.” “We know that God dwells in the host, but can we bring [Christ] into the Big Mac?”
14.16
Need a food ethic that believes that the earth itself is sacred (“or very good”).
14.15
She’s having trouble with the slides “I’m ‘Girls Gone Wild’ with the clicker here.” [Laughs.]
14.15
She’s not a Christian but a believer (Hindu): “The food and the eater of the food are both forms of divinity.” Talking about Prince Siddhartha’s food experiences and discovery of the middle path between self-mortification and (missed the other exact term).
14.12
“We all eat,” she says. And “our food system is in great disrepair.” And–this is intriguing–she thinks faith-based efforts will be what helps bring about a solution to the food system problem.
14.11
Sethi says she’s a “an unlikely fit,” neither Christian nor scholar, used to seeing a lot more hippies in the audience.
14.10
The Provost of ACU (I think) is giving the introduction: Sethi is a “Top Ten Eco-Hero of the Planet” according to The Independent. She blogs on environmental matters, including on her efforts to “green her own home.” Sethi is “impatient” in her advocacy, saying we need to get way past new light bulbs and reusable bags.
[Cross-posted at Into All The WWWorld]
I really dug the live blogging thing this morning and am going to keep it going for this afternoon’s Francis Collins address. You probably know that Francis Collins was the director of the Human Genome Project and is now the director of NIH. He is also an Evangelical Christian and the founder of the BioLogos Foundation, about which there have been several sessions today here at the Christian Scholars Conference. Same two notes as with the Polkinhorne lecture: (1) Read from the bottom, obviously. (2) Forgive my EDT time stamp; the talk began at 4 p.m. PDT.
20.25
Just got a much more interesting question about continuing human evolution, and whether we should be a part of it. He gave a cool answer about recent human mutations (why pre-historical white people didn’t get rickets). As for whether we should be a part of it (genetic engineering), he had both scientific (what if we screw up the germ line?) and theological (playing God, etc.) answers.
20.21
Wow, someone just got up and asked a really hostile question about macro-evolution. Collins is giving a kind, careful answer about why we ought to expect the gaps in the fossil record. Now he’s moving on to the point about the genomics evidence, which the questioner obviously either doesn’t get or is choosing to ignore. This is a very classy answer, classier than my characterization of the questioner (who also said that lead would be gold but for “one electron”–a comment that evoked a meaningful look from a molecular biologist I met earlier today).
20.18
Final slide was Augustine: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” A nice note to end on given how this topic is usually treated.
20.17
Another interesting question: Even if you accept Nowak’s evolutionary altruism, “the fullest and noblest expression of altruism are a scandal to evolution.” Even if we can explain truly radical altruism in evolutionary terms, this won’t bother Collins, who thinks it’s conceivable that God brought it about via evolution like everything else. A final point: if the Moral Law is purely a consequence of purely blind evolution, then there is no absolute God and evil (this is the “Can we be good without God?” question).
20.12
He’s talking now about Adam and Eve with respect to Denis Alexander’s book Creation or Evolution: Do We Have To Choose?
Options
20.06
OK, now he’s back to fast-and-loose apologetics, dismissing giant arguments with single PowerPoint bullets. “Isn’t evolution a purely random process? Doesn’t that take God out of it?” is a considered objection that oughtn’t be dealt with in ~10 seconds. A careful reading of what Dawkins is rightly saying requires this, in my opinion.
20.04
He’s telling the story of founding BioLogos (bios = life, Logos = Word = Jesus), a foundation that creates a meeting place of people interested in these questions. In my opinion, his proposal that BioLogos replace “theistic evolution” is flawed. He explains why he did it (to appeal to evangelicals who don’t like the “theism” playing second fiddle to “evolution”), but I think it’s an inappropriate term because it’s replacing theistic evolution, not Christic evolution. We’re excluding the other theistic religions in our choice of a term that need not exclude them.
19.59
He’s doing a cosmic history now. First, God was an awesome mathematician, fine-tuning the universe to give rise to complexity. Here’s the crux of his argument: “After God’s plan for evolution, in the fullness of time, had prepared a … [sufficiently large brain]” [he changed the slide] we were endowed with rationality (created in God’s image) and eventually fell…
19.57
[Sorry, just lost my connection for a few minutes.] Now he’s doing the Adam and Eve question. We’re from a pool of about 10,000 ancestors (definitely not just one or two), and we definitely have a common ancestor with Neanderthal (then a bottleneck of one or two would be very strange).
19.49
He’s showing the computer-generated, genomics-based “tree of life” that coheres so well with Darwin’s own drawing (one of the neatest parts of his book), though he admits this won’t meet the creationist “special creation” argument.
19.48
[After the clip:] “If you think that was rehearsed, you’re wrong. All he said was, ‘You’re Collins? I’m gonna get you.’”
19.46
Collins is doing great, way funnier than most Colbert guests. Just the right level of pushing back and playing along.
19.43
“Evolution is your friend,” he said to Colbert. “Evolution is God’s plan for giving upgrades.” Opposable thumb? Upgrade! Bigger brain? Upgrade! Love it.
19.42
He’s showing a hilarious Bizarro cartoon about Goldfish Crackers. Another good laugh from the audience. Now we’re seeing “one of the scariest moments of his life”: when he was on The Colbert Report: “Sorry, God doesn’t speak DNA, he speaks English.” This clip is pretty funny.
19.38
NIH is “Steward of Medical and Behavioral Research for the Nation,” according to slide. He’s talking with some laughs about a Sam Harris editorial that opposed his appointment: “Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?” He took this as an opportunity to point out the differences between science and scientism. He’s noting that this has not generally been his experience in this position. He says he’s treated very well by scientists, though some think he has a “weird streak.”
19.35
Talking about “The Cancer Genome Atlas,” looking at genomic changes in major types of cancers. Definitely feeling like I’m at a scientific conference. He’s got lots of touching anecdotes about individuals he’s worked with. New targeted gene therapies are “not carpet bombing but smart bombing.” “Beverly’s doing great,” though not everyone does (their genetic misspellings are different).
19.33
Interestingly, the cost of sequencing base pairs followed Moore’s Law for quite a while but is now getting cheaper faster. Within three years, it’s going to cost about ,000 to sequence an individual’s entire genome. “Not a bad cost curve” from 0 million (I think he said). While I’ve written this, he’s been talking about therapies for rare diseases with genetic risk factors. His job is to push such insights into “new diagnostics and new therapeutics as fast as we can.”
19.29
Talking about all the different genome projects that they did after the human. Showed a great picture of the Nature cover with the dog genome article. It’s a picture of dogs looking up at the famous picture of Crick and Watson pointing at their double helix model.
19.27
The big question, he says: “Isn’t evolution incompatible with faith?” He never had the knee-jerk Christian response to the world evolution because of not being brought up in a conservative Christian household.
19.25
Slide describing what he missed when he was “falling in love with second-order differential equations”:
Nature provides some interesting pointers to God
He just said Dawkins admits that “that fine-tuning thing” is the argument from believers that bothers him the most (though “none of them bothers him very much”).
[By the way, this presentation is basically a chapter-by-chapter summary of Collins’s book.]
19.19
Just got a chuckle that his anthology of writings on faith and belief covers writers “from Plato to Polkinghorne.” Giving his testimony: Jesus is the bridge to a God who is “good and holy” though he, Collins, was not. Another common Collins theme: “book of nature” to complement the book of faith.
19.16
As in his book, Collins is giving a very narrative presentation, talking about his move from atheism to Christian faith via his experiences in medical school. He was impressed by the power of the “psychological crutch” belief seemed to be for his calm, but very sick, patients.
19.13
He just gave an explanation of why the “all your mind” thing creeped into Matthew 22:36-37 when compared to Deuteronomy. I think he’s wrong. It’s not for emphasis, it’s because in Hebrew you think with your heart.
19.11
“Adam and Eve with no clothes on is a lot better than DNA,” he says, commenting on a Time Magazine cover. Anyway, “For me, this [genome science + religion] is a coherent whole,” he says.
19.10
Topic: “Reflections on the Current Tensions between Science and Faith.” Collins is very tall. One of Collins’ themes both earlier today and now is the worshipful nature of science as practiced by Christians. Apparently as a presidential appointee, Collins was very difficult to get here. They’re apparently not allowed to do all sorts of public speaking that may appear to be representing the government.
19.08
NIH budget is billion. I’m actually surprised it’s not larger. Introducer is now telling a personal story about Collins’s “bedside manner” when getting badgered by eager (and disturbed) students after a lecture Collins gave at the C.S. Lewis Society (Foundation?). “Dr. Collins is a consummate bridge-builder, healer and friend.” [Applause.]
19.06
Hehe, Collins at Yale (?) was “relentless gene hunter.” Stirring reminder that the genome is 3 billion letters long. Talking about Collins’s careful consideration of ethical and legal issues around genetics. Hehe, I believe he just said within like two sentences that Language of God was published in 1910 and was on bestseller list for 20 years.
19.03
Introducer is talking about the Human Genome Project, his coming to love molecular biology, and then his decision to go to medical school.
[Cross-posted at Into All The WWWorld]
I’m going to live blog the John Polkinghorne address at the Christian Scholars Conference. Two notes: (1) Read from the bottom, obviously. (2) Forgive my EDT time stamp; the talk began at 11 a.m. PDT.
15.15
Now an organizer is reminding me that I won’t be able to go to Polkinghorne’s second Saturday session because it overlaps with mine. Grrr…
15.14
Question: You gave an argument for the resurrection of Jesus Christ at a lecture you gave at a public university. I said to the atheist who organized your talk “That’s the first time I’ve heard the gospel preached in this place.” So I have a testimony, not a question.
Answer: Well thank you. It’s been great fun being here.
15.13
Question: My wife is a biologist, and one of her favorite quotes is attributed to ? (I have heard this quote recently): “I’m afraid that when we ascend to the top of the mountain, we’ll find the theologians already there.” Do you think spending lives denying the importance of theology is part of what’s going on in their meanness toward it?
Answer: No, not really (essentially). The quote is silly because scientists ask scientific questions and theologians ask theological questions. We work in complementary ways.
15.10
There’s another reason: biologists see a much more ambiguous picture of the world. Biologists see wonderful fruitfulness, but they also see the wastefulness and blind eyes and ragged edges of the evolutionary process. “We as believers have to take that absolutely seriously.”
15.09
He’s making an interesting point here about how the biologists are going through right now what physicists have already gone through, this idea of a mechanistic universe. Physicists have emerged on the other side of that process, and he thinks that will happen to biologists as well.
15.08
Question: Why is it that so few scientists are believers given all the discoveries about our surprising and open universe?
Answer: I don’t think there’s a general answer to that. “Physics looks at a world that is full of wonderful order.” There’s a “cosmic religiosity to be found among physicists,” even if they’re not traditionally faithful. Einstein felt like a “child in the presence of the elders,” and so on. But he said he saw he saw no evidence for the personal God of theism. “Of course, that’s not surprising, because he wasn’t looking in the right place.”
There’s far less openness to religious belief among biologists. One of the reasons is this terrible bickering over evolution. (He said some fairly unkind thing about supposed servants of the God of truth here, which I quite catch, unfortunately.)
15.05
Question: Do you think philosophy of science is a good resource for those of us working on science and theology?
Answer: Yes, there’s a certain cousinly relationship between all these disciplines. “I think philosophy is a wonderful handmaid. Like all scientists, I’m a bit wary of philosophy. They so often come up to us and say, ‘I’ll tell you what you’re really doing.’”
15.04
A note to Americans: British academics prefer to be called “Professor So-and-so” rather than “Dr. So-and-so.” Don’t I have that right?
15.03
There’s no universal epistemology either. The appropriate question about a proposition isn’t “isn’t it reasonable?” (quantum physics wasn’t) but “what makes you think that might be the case?” Theology also needs to take this outlook. Need to be willing to be bottom-up thinkers, beginning with our experience. The problem with the top-down approach is that clear and certain ideas so often turn out to be “neither clear nor certain.” Dual nature of Christ is, of course, a more perplexing claim than the dual nature of light. But the continuing worshiping experience of the church continues to offer answers to the question “what makes you think that might be the case?” And so, for this and other reasons, we still need theology in the modern university. Full stop. (I’ve missed a few things in here, of course.)
14.58
Realism commends itself because of the “stubborn recalcitrance” of nature. It just does not want to conform to our evolving understandings of it. There’s no universal rationality.
14.56
As in physics, successful theories in metaphysics also needs to offer us a certain explanatory power. “Atheists are by no means stupid, and many are genuine truth seekers.” But, in P.’s view, the theistic view is more properly explanatory.
14.55
Two metaphysical traditions from the West: (1) naturalism — takes existence of nature as their basis, and (2) theism — takes existence of a divine creator as basis. Nature seems to point beyond itself. Wonder is a pointer toward that second view, P. says. These are not knock-down arguments, he notes.
14.52
“Intuitive powers of perception” made Einstein’s discoveries possible. Desirable metaphysical properties motivated him, notice.
14.50
“Exercise of judgment” is too important to science to overlook. “We know more than we can tell,” Polanyi says. There’s a sense in which science is an art.
14.49
I don’t know MacIntosh, but what P.’s saying about him sounds a lot like Thomas Kuhn to me.
14.48
“Natural history ends and science begins precisely when we interrogate the world from a particular point of view.” Our theoretical science has to be open to correction. The process is a subtle mechanism, subtler than Popper would have us believe (P. sides with MacIntosh’s idea of a research program).
14.45
Both religion and science, Polkinghorne says, are shooting for “reliable insight” not “indubitable proof.” The term “proof” is used way too often. Even in mathematics, Goedel showed, we can’t expect systems to internally derive themselves (I’m not getting that phrasing quite right). So even mathematicians have to take a certain leap of faith.
14.43
[Lost track of how we got here…] Whitehead’s “fellow-sufferer” observation meets the problem of suffering head on, though of course it doesn’t solve it.
14.43
Notice: Theorizing in theology is bound to be less successful than theorizing in science, because of the nature of what we’re talking about. And so we see Chalcedon, etc., merely draw off some boundaries about what we can say and what we can’t say and still be working within the same theory-space (my term).
14.41
Now let’s use Christology as an example of the pursuit of truth in the religious realm. The “phenomenology of early Christian belief” has to be assessed with appropriate scrupulosity (he does this in Faith of a Physicist). But after we do that, we can observe that what’s going on in that phenomenology is the construction of models. These monotheistic Jews played with models for what would describe their experience of Jesus.
14.38
So we’ve got two models: Bohr and Bohm. Polkinghorne says the choice between them has to be made for metaphysical reasons, since they’re empirically identical. While constrained by physics, the question between determinacy and indeterminacy is a metaphysical question.
14.36
Quantum physics has a probabilistic character, of course. We don’t know when a nucleus will decay. There are two possibilities: (1) there are all kinds of factors we can’t understand that are contributing to the time of decay, and (2) actual ontological indeterminacy. The early quantum physicists followed Bohr in adopting the latter. But Bohm in the ’50s made a more deterministic move that nevertheless makes the same predictions as the Bohr model.
14.34
Key point: It took a long time to get some theoretical machinery in place. His process is (1) phenomenology, (2) theory, (3) models. (I think I got these right.) Now to the point about realism: We’ve got to be quite convinced of the reality of these theories when, say, Dirac combines quantum mechanics and relativity and then makes “unforced” predictions about the physical world that turn out to be true.
14.31
He’s talking about the history of theorizing about the quantum lines of hydrogen, etc. I’m trying to take pictures.
14.27
Let’s return to the theme of “motivated beliefs.” “Indispensable role of theoretical interpretation” can’t look purely Baconian. “Truly insightful understanding is a much more complex activity, and exercise in creative imagination to see truly illuminating underlying patterns.” Einstein: physical meaning (?) has to be created. Einstein was pointing to the need for open, intuitive insight in describing reality. He didn’t brood on the failure of Michaelson Moorely (sp?), he thought about what it would be like to ride on a wave of light.
14.25
This project will leave us with a wide circle, and universities should embrace “this whole spectrum.” Universities are “loose affiliations” of researchers on narrow bands of this spectrum. Universities without theology departments are missing out on this perspective on truth-seeking.
14.23
Both are engaged by the great human quest for truth “attained through motivated belief.” (Helpful phrase, no?) “So theological questions receive theological answers given for theological reasons.” We can separate these as “how?” and “why?” questions. But their answers “must be consistent with each other.”
14.22
“Science has achieved its great success by the modesty of its ambition.” It concentrates on process not on value and purpose. But we know these latter things are “both meaningful and necessary.” Scientist: “the kettle is boiling.” A different kind of answer: “The kettle is boiling because I’m making tea. Would you like some?”
14.21
Encounter with “sacred reality” is what is meant by revelation. “Bible is not divinely dictated textbook set forth in propositional terms.” Bible is “more like a laboratory notebook in which are recorded” spiritual experiences.
14.19
Theology is concerned with “interpersonal encounter” and “transpersonal encounter with the sacred reality of God.” Here “testing” has to yield to “trusting.”
14.18
We meet reality at different levels with different kinds of experience in both science and religion. We reach “high degree of intersubjective agreement” in science because the way we approach the world is based in experiments.
14.17
Hehe, “My [scientist] friends do not want to commit intellectual suicide. Of course, neither do I.”
14.17
“Enormous explanatory success of science” says that the interpretive circle involved in science is virtuous rather than vicious. Scientists who reflect on their methodology generally say that their perspective is that of “critical realism.” Einstein feared that the Uncertainty Principle created a bit of a monster of the world. He made the mistake, Polkinhorne says, of confusing reality with our experience of it [I think this is his gist. I’m still getting the hang of the live blogging workflow…].
14.13
test
14.00
Conference organizer is giving an overview of the conference, it’s theme (“The Path of Discovery: Science, Theology, and the Academy”), and its special guests.
Provost of Pepperdine University is now welcoming us as well. He’s quoting a Wesley hymn about the pairing of knowledge and “vital piety.”
Learning from third introducer that Polkinghorne studied under Dirac. It’s also apparently inappropriate to call him “Sir John Polkinghorne” because he’s also ordained.
Polkinghorne: People say science is about facts and religion about opinions. The latter is about personal preference, they say. There are two bad mistakes in this judgment, he says. The first is a mistaken idea about scientific discovery. No interesting facts are not already interpreted.
“It would seem…” from the traditional Judeo-Christian perspective that the universe was created by God “[i]n the beginning” and consists, fundamentally, of “the heavens and the earth” (see Genesis 1:1). You may be surprised to learn how difficult it is to say much more than that without stepping into highly contested theological territory. Below we’ll let the Bible speak for itself about creation, but it’s important first to introduce just what kind of world the ancients looked to their religions for an explanation of.
A three-tiered cosmology
The biblical authors seem to have understood the world with respect to a three-tiered cosmology, “with the earth sandwiched between the firmament of God’s dwelling place above, and the underworld controlled by evil powers below” [1, 39]. New Testament scholar Gregory Riley elaborates:
The physical universe as the ancients perceived it was small, much like a sphere half filled with water, upon which floated the flat disk of the earth. There was water everywhere else–above the heavens, around the earth, and below, flowing around the underworld … The whole universe was immersed like a giant bubble in a boundless, uncreated, primeval ocean of saltwater. The earth itself consisted of nothing more than Egypt or Greece or Mesopotamia and its neighboring lands; in the center stood the city of Babylon for the Babylonians, Nippur for the Sumerians, Delphi for the Greeks, and and Jerusalem for Israel. [2, 27]
You can see a beautiful artist’s rendering of this cosmology here.
Once you have the ancient conception in view, you start to notice traces of it throughout the Old Testament. The prophet Ezekiel, for instance, pronounces the following fate for the doomed prince of Tyre:
They shall thrust you down to the Pit,
and you shall die a violent death
in the heart of the seas. (Ezekiel 28:8)
The writers of the psalms also espouse this worldview, envisioning God as a Cosmic Orderer who “rule[s] the raging of the sea” and “still[s]” its rising waves (Psalm 89:9). In the Book of Job, God is even said to “walk[] on the dome of heaven” (Job 22:14).
Whether or not this cosmology served for the ancient Hebrew people as “a prescientific attempt to understand the universe” or as something more purely poetic and evocative, the biblical writings bear its stamp. This is especially true of the creation narrative itself, to which we now turn our attention.
The days of creation
Take a moment to read Genesis 1:1-19, either in the New Revised Standard Version text below or in a translation of your choosing. This passage comprises the first four of the six days of creation–seven if you count the following day, on which God rested. We will examine the latter days, and the alternative creation account in Genesis 2, in the next lesson.
In the beginning when God created* the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ 7So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. 8God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. 16God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (Genesis 1:1-19)
What do you notice about the passage? Well, hopefully the making of the “dome in the midst of the waters” on the second day jumped out at you for starters, not to mention the emergence of “dry land” on day three. There’s our ancient cosmology at work.
More importantly, note that the various aspects of that cosmos come into being at God’s command. “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” This is obviously a key aspect of the theistic account of the universe: it has a finite existence that depended on God’s providential sustenance. The Gospel According to John in the Christian New Testament makes this point rather more explicitly when it says “without him, not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). The “him” is Christ, “the Word” who “was with God” and who “was God” (John 1:2). (If you haven’t read the prologue to John’s gospel, 1:1-18, treat yourself and do so now. There’s probably no more concise or beautiful summary of Christian doctrine anywhere.) So our religious picture is one where God wills creation into being. (NOTE ABOUT CREATIO CONTINUA?)
And then there are those momentous words that usher in both Genesis in John: bereishit in Hebrew, en archē in Greek, “in the beginning” in English. As we shall see, much hinges in our conversation between science and theology on what we make of these words. At face value, though, their implication is simple enough. The world, the universe, the cosmos–it had a beginning, a starting point. The idea of a finite universe puts Judeo-Christian thinking in fairly marked contrast with the idea, long popular in philosophy, that matter is eternal. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas addresses Aristotle’s objections to that effect in his famous teaching on creation. It is to another point in that teaching that we go to finish our brief gloss on the religious understanding of the cosmos.
Creatio ex nihilo
Before considering whether the universe indeed had a beginning, Thomas asks a set of questions related to just what creation even means. His conclusion is one we might not expect based on what we read above in Genesis. Thomas says that the universe was created ex nihilo, “from nothing.” But recall what we read above, that “2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters.” What earth? What face? What deep? What waters? This description doesn’t sound very much like nothing.
What do we make of this? Well, the going is difficult, partly because that first phrase, “a formless void” is enigmatic in the original Hebrew: tohu wa bohu. Tohu is reasonably straightforward and has meanings associated with waste, desolation, and nothingness elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. Bohu, on the other hand, appears only three times, all of them in conjunction with tohu. (COMMENTARY)
Summary
To tip our hand a little bit, we hope you’re getting the message that to put forward a religious position on cosmology and creation theology is actually no simple task–and is certainly not so easy as merely quoting the relevant portions of scripture. But we believe it’s reasonably accurate and faithful to summarize the traditional Christian account of the universe as follows:
The universe has a certain structure, which was created over a certain period of time, and at the beginning of time, by God, who willed it into being and continues to will its sustained existence.
We will next describe the scientific account. As we do so, be thinking about what we’ve discussed here, and try to anticipate for yourself some of the contested, or at least apparently contested issues.
![St. Thomas Aquinas. By Sandro Botticelli.Aquinat at de.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Aquinat.jpg "St. Thomas Aquinas. By Sandro Botticelli.Aquinat at de.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons.")
“It would seem…” from the traditional Judeo-Christian perspective that the universe was created by God “[i]n the beginning” and consists, fundamentally, of “the heavens and the earth” (see Genesis 1:1). You may be surprised to learn how difficult it is to say much more than that without stepping into highly contested theological territory. Below we’ll let the Bible speak for itself about creation, but it’s important first to introduce just what kind of world the ancients looked to their religions for an explanation of.
A three-tiered cosmology
The biblical authors seem to have understood the world with respect to a three-tiered cosmology, “with the earth sandwiched between the firmament of God’s dwelling place above, and the underworld controlled by evil powers below” [1, 39]. New Testament scholar Gregory Riley elaborates:
The physical universe as the ancients perceived it was small, much like a sphere half filled with water, upon which floated the flat disk of the earth. There was water everywhere else–above the heavens, around the earth, and below, flowing around the underworld … The whole universe was immersed like a giant bubble in a boundless, uncreated, primeval ocean of saltwater. The earth itself consisted of nothing more than Egypt or Greece or Mesopotamia and its neighboring lands; in the center stood the city of Babylon for the Babylonians, Nippur for the Sumerians, Delphi for the Greeks, and and Jerusalem for Israel. [2, 27]
You can see a beautiful artist’s rendering of this cosmology here.
Once you have the ancient conception in view, you start to notice traces of it throughout the Old Testament. The prophet Ezekiel, for instance, pronounces the following fate for the doomed prince of Tyre:
They shall thrust you down to the Pit,
and you shall die a violent death
in the heart of the seas. (Ezekiel 28:8)
The writers of the psalms also espouse this worldview, envisioning God as a Cosmic Orderer who “rule[s] the raging of the sea” and “still[s]” its rising waves (Psalm 89:9). In the Book of Job, God is even said to “walk[] on the dome of heaven” (Job 22:14).
Whether or not this cosmology served for the ancient Hebrew people as “a prescientific attempt to understand the universe” or as something more purely poetic and evocative, the biblical writings bear its stamp. This is especially true of the creation narrative itself, to which we now turn our attention.
The days of creation
Take a moment to read Genesis 1:1-19 , either in the New Revised Standard Version text below or in a translation of your choosing. This passage comprises the first four of the six days of creation–seven if you count the following day, on which God rested. We will examine the latter days, and to the alternative creation account in Genesis 2, in the next lesson.
In the beginning when God created* the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ 7So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. 8God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. 16God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. (Genesis 1:1-19)
What do you notice about the passage? Well, hopefully the making of the “dome in the midst of the waters” on the second day jumped out at you for starters, not to mention the emergence of “dry land” on day three. There’s our ancient cosmology at work.
More importantly, note that the various aspects of that cosmos come into being at God’s command. “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” This is obviously a key aspect of the theistic account of the universe: it has a finite existence that depended on God’s providential sustenance. The Gospel According to John in the Christian New Testament makes this point rather more explicitly when it says “without him, not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). The “him” is Christ, “the Word” who “was with God” and who “was God” (John 1:2). (If you haven’t read the prologue to John’s gospel, 1:1-18, treat yourself and do so now. There’s probably no more concise or beautiful summary of Christian doctrine anywhere.) So our religious picture is one where God wills creation into being.
And then there are those momentous words that usher in both Genesis in John: בְּרֵאשִׁית in Hebrew, ἐν ἀρχῇ in Greek, “in the beginning” in English. As we shall see, much hinges in our conversation between science and theology on what we make of these words. At face value, though, their implication is simple enough. The world, the universe, the cosmos–it had a beginning, a starting point, a time, as Thomas Aquinas put it, “.” This puts the Judeo-Christian thinking in fairly marked contrast with Greco-Roman thought, …
One consequence of a universe that depends on God
Creatio ex nihilo
asdf
The first thing we need to know about the Bible’s cosmology is that the ancient Hebrew understanding of the world was not intellectual but mytho-poetic, just like those of neighboring cultures in the Ancient Near East [1, 1-2]. By mytho-poetic, we mean that these cultures’ thinking issued “more out of imaginative fancy than out of logical inference or disciplined inquiry” [2, 702]. So we shouldn’t be surprised if the creation accounts in Genesis don’t exactly read like a Stephen Jay Gould essay; that’s not how the people who wrote them thought. They thought like storytellers, in the best sense of that word. We shall have more to say on this point when we bring the biblical account into conversation with the scientific one. But even at this point, it is important to understand the following: though the biblical authors write in such a way as to give explanations for the way things are in the world [2, 702],
Indeed, what those stories most resemble is the Babylonian creation myths that describe the origin of the universe in terms of a “struggle between cosmic order and chaos.” Scholars are fairly sure these Babylonian myths, famously published by English Assyriologist George Smithin in 1876 under the title The Chaldean Account of Genesis, predate their Hebrew counterparts in the Old Testament. Although this discovery shook the world of the religious establishment, who had long taken the Genesis stories as “‘gospel truth’ and sober fact,” it eventually led Christian thinkers clarify [Anderson1-3]
So the mouse-over text of today’s xkcd (“Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at ‘Philosophy.'”) has inspired a little playful procrastination. I’d love to put together one of those fun xkcd-style info graphics (the ones with results of interesting little Internet experiments, e.g. “Numbers,” “Regrets,” “Dangers,” etc.) with the results of some collective poking around. Data so far (from myself, Katy “Southside” Huff, Matt Waldron, and Eric “Wolfman” Howell):
“xkcd”: 19 clicks
“Kadevu”: 21 clicks
“Walker Percy”: 27 clicks
“Kevin Bacon”: 13 clicks
“Wisconsin Badgers”: 27 clicks
Also, can someone who knows more about graph theory than I do give us some vocabulary to flesh out the kinds of data we can gather (or wish we could gather)? For instance, Matt Waldron asks via Twitter “I wonder what the longest non-loop answer is (i.e. was the furthest ‘point’ from Philosophy)?” His point about loops (graph theory: “cycles”) is an interesting one. Has anyone found a cycle yet? I thought I had one in the Percy chain, but it turns out there are separate articles for “Meaning (philosophy of language)” and “Meaning (linguistic).” (This is one of those moments where I wish I were a better programmer and could just start writing code to explore all these questions. I’d also need to not be on the clock with someone else’s money, which may actually be all that is stopping me.)
Anyway, if you’re looking for a few minutes off from whatever you doing (I myself am determined to finish my Walker Percy paper for the upcoming Christian Scholars Conference), please consider checking out a few articles’ paths to “Philosophy” and report back!
I’ve not made it a secret that I don’t much like Northern Virginia. Mostly because one almost has to drive to get anywhere, and the traffic is as bad as any place I’ve traveled stateside except maybe Chicago. So it feels very good to be in new, albeit temporary, environs after my second year of seminary at VTS.
Granted, I haven’t scored quite as awesome a set of gigs and digs as last summer. But I am excited, for my first stop, to be back in a college town for a while. I’m currently living in New Haven, CT, a couple of blocks from Christ Church, where Kristin is an intern with St. Hilda’s House.
New Haven, I am learning with good help, is an admittedly troubling place. It goes well beyond a mere case in point of Town and Gown Syndrome to a level of wealth disparity that is truly heartbreaking. I’ve been lucky to spend some time this past year at the bright spot that is St. Martin de Porres Academy (Kristin’s intern site) and to hear about several others from her colleagues. But there’s a lot of darkness too. Indeed, the most common sign I see even here in the comparatively serene Chapel West Special Services District is a warning about constant video monitoring.
With that important preamble, though, I will say that it has thus far been close to heavenly for this very lucky wannabe academic to get to work here. With support from the Evangelical Education Society of the Episcopal Church, I’ve got a nice sublet (see below), decent Yale Library privileges, and five weeks to dedicate to developing an online curriculum module for a course on the conversation between science and theology (you can follow my progress at intoalltheWWWorld.org, the site I’m starting to host the course materials–and I hope others in the future).
It’s about three blocks to morning prayer and another three to my adopted office, so I count myself extremely blessed and will plan to leave my car put as much as possible. I will, however, be taking to the skies in a couple of weeks, to give a paper on Walker Percy at Pepperdine’s Christian Scholars Conference and hopefully make some contacts with potential reviewers for my course.
More to come on these later opportunities, but the next legs of my summer will take me to Camp Webb (most of July), Camp Oliver (living at home for the first two weeks of August that will feature a diocesan internship of some kind and my parents’ joint 60th birthday party!), and Camp Campbell (catching some baseball in KC with the Turner House crew).
Sublet photos (living room, kitchenette, bedroom, hallways with icon/”mendicant” summer mascot):
My systematic theology professor recently made a comment about the preaching Christians hear this time of year, to the effect that it was a kind of a shame that few Easter sermons share the power and specificity of your average Good Friday sermon. She continued, that, rather, “Easter needs to be this great truth, and the death is the narrow gate by which we enter into this great hope. So we should reflect on this treatise [Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Soul and Resurrection] in order to read someone seized by that conviction and to become seized by it ourselves.”
This sermon, which I preached yesterday at St. John’s, was basically my attempt to take her, and Nyssa, seriously. It was a bit of a departure for me (very little humor, lots of difficult imagery), but I got the impression that it hit home for a lot of people. “Good sermon–but heavy” was a representative comment. There’s kind of a glaring transitional error in one of the footnotes (where some of the stuff I had to cut for time and cohesion ended up), which error I hope you’ll indulge because I don’t feel like regenerating the PDF.
————————-
Second Sunday in Easter:
Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31
Take a minute, if you will, to be aware of your body. Closing your eyes might help. Notice how you’re sitting. Feel the way your legs are crossed, or not. Take a deep breath and imagine your rib cage expanding as you do so. Keep your eyes closed and think of a time when you were glad to have a body, to be a body: Imagine lying in the sun or floating in the ocean or being tickled by a parent or hugged by a friend. It’s OK to think about such things in church. Now think of a time when you felt estranged from your body, when it stopped working properly or caused you great pain or somehow just didn’t feel right. Perhaps you’re feeling this way today. Perhaps you’ve felt this way for a long time. [Pause.] OK, open your eyes as you feel so moved.
This little reflection is an Easter reminder to us all that our bodies are real, and they matter in this life and the next. They are an integral, not an extraneous, part of who we are. I am not, to use one writer’s expression, simply “a ghost in a machine.”i Indeed, one thing our Christian tradition is clear about is that our bodies are part of what it means to be human.
And so I take as my text this morning John 20:25: “So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’”
The apostle Thomas—let’s just call him Thomas, rather than “Doubting Thomas,” that unfair nickname we give him when we read this story each year —Thomas seems to understand all this body stuff profoundly. “If Jesus is really risen,” Thomas says, “he has a body, a distinctive body, a body I will recognize by its wounds and a body I want to see and touch for myself.” If anything, we sophisticated modern types are the ones who should consider adopting the apostle’s moniker. It’s Doubting Kyle who so often ducks out of commenting on the apparent impossibilities of the bodily resurrection. “Show me the marks,” the apostle Thomas says faithfully. “Please don’t even mention the marks,” comes my tepid modern reply.
But I think the real reason we’re afraid to talk about the physical reality of the resurrection has to do with our bodies, not Jesus’ body; with our marks, not his. After all, our profession of the resurrection is nothing more or less than the claim that the God who fashions us can re-fashion us and that in the case of Jesus of Nazareth this refashioning has already occurred. That’s no small article of faith, I grant you, but it’s roughly on par not only with the Doctrine of Creation but with plenty of other things we Christians more readily believe. For instance, we don’t do nearly as much hand-wringing about the Incarnation, the idea that God became vulnerable by being born into the world God created: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.”ii Now there’s a passage we can get behind.
No, I think we’d all be keener on the resurrection if we made ourselves a little more available to the realities of bodily human suffering, to the ways we need resurrection. It’s not easy, but I think we owe it to ourselves and to our brothers and sisters to take account of the breadth and depth of our need to be healed, refashioned, perfected, resurrected. If we can’t acknowledge the pain and woundedness in the world and in our very bodies, then of course the Easter message of hope will fall flat in the face of our apparent reality. If we try to pretend we don’t carry this pain, then it’s hard for us to imagine being set free from it. And so I ask us this morning, what and where are the wounds that mark these bodies [gesture] that God promises to raise?
Well, war inflicts such marks with cruel regularity. I watched this week an ABC News clip about the “Wounds of War” in Libya.”iii It was heartbreaking footage from early in the Civil War, taken aboard the first ship carrying wounded rebels to Turkey for treatment. Broken arms and legs were common, and the reporter spoke briefly with an amputee in tears and a wounded and bereaved mother for whom even tears seem finally to have failed. For each of those injured bodies sailing from North Africa, probably hundreds more now lie wounded, or dead, on battlefields and in the streets. And it is the very hopelessness of those persons—of many of the living and of all of the dead—that speaks to the power, the audacity, of our Easter proclamation. We claim that God can in some way, we know not how, make things right in the fulness of time—“bind[ing] up the broken-hearted”iv in this life and raising up the broken-bodied “at the last trumpet.”v It’s almost too foolish to believe. Yet many who have born such marks for themselves do believe it, and some carry this hope precisely because they have born the marks as well.
Other human indignities lead to marks that differ greatly from a bullet wound or amputation. Those who have seen, in person or in images, the distended stomachs of the chronicly malnourished are no more likely to forget the sight for the lack of blood or bandage. And those who have lost their hair during chemotherapy are no less marked by their illness than if the tumors themselves were actually visible. Of course, we could go on bearing witness to these marks, as many in this world and some in this room do each day because they have no other choice. The point is, we are not ourselves so far away from the powers of death and darkness that Jesus descended into to vanquish.
Let me now ask your forgiveness for raising this dread imagery on a Sunday where I, at least, am accustomed to having a light-hearted laugh at Thomas’ expense before going on to revel in the joy of a disciple reunited with his resurrected Lord and God. As I said, I think Thomas is on to something in his insistence that we must behold the wounds before we rejoice in their being overcome. But the good news we acclaim in the Easter season, the very best news our faith has to offer, is that the final word will be that rejoicing. And so we look to the stories—in scripture, and in our lives—of what that hope looks like. These stories can be touchstones for us. They are markers that point to Easter joy when all other hope has drained away.
One such story—no more than a moment really—took place for me earlier this year in the library at Virginia Seminary. I was doing some reading from a book the Episcopal Church publishes for use in ministry with those who are sick or dying. Having lost one grandparent to Parkinson’s Disease with dementia and another to Alzheimer’s, I was drawn to a prayer called “In Loss of Memory.” As many of you know, the marks of dementia are a terror to behold, so bad at times that it seems like the person we know is already gone, changed into someone we scarcely recognize. Working with dementia patients during my summer hospital chaplaincy had recently forced me to confront the memory of these wounds my grandparents carried in their last years. And so I think God had specially prepared me to hear to resurrection hope in the following prayer: “Holy God, you have known me from my mother’s womb, and have been with me throughout my life. Protect me and keep me safe through all the changes that may come. Since I am sealed as Christ’s own, help me to trust that who I am will never be lost to you.”vi I read that prayer, and I just started to cry. The promise that God held in care and would restore these people I love—that the mutations in their brains were, in resurrection hope, temporary conditions—this came as a balm for my wounds as well. Hope for the hopeless—that is the power of the gospel for all of us.
Of course, none of us knows exactly what the resurrection will be like.vii Unlike Thomas, we can only guess, because, unlike Thomas, we don’t get to witness it on this side of our own resurrection. We can’t yet see for ourselves the kind of change that God wrought in Jesus and will bring about in those Libyan amputees, in the victims of the tornadoes down south, in my grandparents, and in each one of us. We can’t yet witness the reforming of our very bodies and the transformation of the marks of our suffering. But we can bear witness to those marks—and to our Easter hope about their fate. In the meantime, “Blessed are [we] who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”viii
iWalker Percy, “The Delta Factor” in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, And What One Has to Do with the Other (New York: Picador, 2000): 9.
iiLuke 2:11.
iiiDavid Muir, “Wounds of War Bring Libya Together” on World News with Diane Sawyer (New York: ABC News, 2011): http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/wounds-war-libya-rebels-flee-president-obama-gadhafi-us-13288087 (accessed April 27, 2011).
ivIsaiah 61:1.
v1 Corinthians 15:52.
vi“In Loss of Memory” in Ministry with the Sick or Dying, Burial of a Child (New York: Church Publishing, 2000): 77.
vii Will our wounds, too, be changed but not erased, becoming “mark[s] of honor” as St. Augustine speculated? To be fair, he was talking about the bodies of the martyrs, so I’m being a little presumptuous here. I also like St. Gregory of Nyssa’s image of the “draw[ing] together” of the parts of our former bodies so that “the rope of our body will be braided [together] by the soul,” which evokes in me the further image of the re-coiling and repairing of mutated DNA. I myself like the idea that a resurrection body that still bears marks is no less “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,” to borrow those words we heard in 1 Peter. St. Augustine, The City of God: Volume 2, Marcus Dods, ed. (London: T&T Clark, 1871): 514; St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1993): 68.
viiiJohn 20:29b.
