Post by BWIII. Pay attention, Robertson. Here’s a good response to the Hurricane Katrina tragedy. Instead of trying to figure out why, let us remember, as Witherington reminds of, the words of Ms. Ten Boom: “But what I do know is that no pit is so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.”

We will have about 60 people tomorrow morning over to our church for breakfast. We fed them tonight at our church picnic. Pray that we will show them that God’s love is deeper still as we serve them. May God be glorified and magnified above all else.

Links are provided on the sidebar to donate to Hurricane Relief. There are other charities mentioned both here and elsewhere that are very deserving. Michelle Malkin has that over 45 million dollars has been pledged so far. Many of the more “celebrity driven” sources of funds are slow to get involved with this. Whatever your view of what is happening in the Delta region, the human suffering is tremendous. I think about little things. For instance, if I couldn’t get my heart medication, I would be in a mess. (You can’t stop taking beta blockers suddenly) What about eyeglasses? Underwear? Simple medications for arthritis? Stuffed animals for kids? Socks?

We watched a video tonight on CNN where a reporter caught several law enforcement officers in a Wal-Mart….looting shoes.

The impotence of government in a complete social breakdown is amazing. There is a lot to be seen in the video of looters. If you don’t think all the rhetoric/music of resentment from certain quarters in this country turns into the looting we are seeing, you are blind. Taking all the guns from a Super Wal-Mart? Carjackings? Shoots fired at police? What is this all about? The underclass in a city like New Orleans live on the edge of a lot of things….including, unfortunately, the edge of humanity itself.

Picture of My Block

Well I finally found a picture near my apartment and did not like what I saw. As I was looking at the picture I was thinking that looks awful familiar. Then I realized it is about 40 yards from my place. I live on the third floor and am not worried about most of my stuff but our office for our ministry is on the first floor with all of my books and my computer. Oh well those things are always heavy to move anyway.

In the picture my apartment is behind the white house on the right. I know it could be much worse.

The bar these guys are passing is The Boot. It is the most poular bar for Tulane and Loyola students. They were filming some big budget movie there earlier this summer.

Good news, Taverners! And very timely. The journal Nature is publishing results of the chimpanzee genome project and, just as Darwin hypothesized, human beings and chimps are physiologically very similar. Genetically, chimps and humans share 99% of their genetic sequence in common. So the BHT is 99% human. I’ll take that anyday (especially since I only feel 23.6% human in the morning).

For Michael.

Rick is a geneticist, and a BHT Lurker.

Gentlemen,

The discussion re ID is interesting, but you are both missing (or overlooking) some serious concepts. One, there is a relatively constant rate of mutation in all genomes. As a plant breeder, I usually use 1 in 3×10e6 as an estimate of background mutation rate. This background mutation rate is the core of evolutionary “choice” by natural selection (NS). You need variation to enable NS to work; the variation comes from a baseline mutation rate. Cause? Good question: UV from the sun, natural radioactivity from the rocks, exposure to natural or synthetic compounds, genetic replication errors. All of these are real and contribute.

Josh, you waved the “big gap” flag earlier today. Valid consideration. Darwinists and neo-Darwinists like to think of evolution as occurring in tiny increments. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, that’s how it happens. But sometimes it occurs in great big steps. Creationists and ID proponents want to point to these as evidence for “design.” As a Christian, I can certainly see that perspective, and can praise God for His wisdom in creating those mechanisms and events. But that doesn’t negate His use of evolution as a tool.

I want to tell you a story that you probably haven’t read before. I’ve attached an article that was recently published in Nature. The work was done here at Penn State, by the grad student of a friend of mine. Here’s the quick version: during the past 250 years a new species of fly evolved in central PA. Two fly species, using two different plant species as food-host, interbred. The hybrid 1) was able to reproduce; 2) feeds on an entirely different host plant from its parental species; 3) looks and acts distinctly different from either parental species. What’s cool here is that you can date the evolutionary event because the new host plant is an introduced (and invasive) species, one of the Japanese honeysuckles (Lonicera), which only became resident in central PA within the past 250 years.

250 years is the blink of an eye in evolutionary time. On a typical evolutionary scale, 250 years is “appearing out of nowhere.”

This kind of event happens frequently in plant evolution. I’ve done it experimentally in my backyard. It happens less frequently in animal species, since interspecific hybrids are often sterile. Indeed, a sterile species really isn’t, since it can’t reproduce. But it does happen.

Good discussion, guys. Thanks.

Rick Grazzini

Praying for you Aaron.
I don’t know what you are doing while you are waiting to be let back in the city but FOCUS< http://www.focus2k5.org >is going to happen this weekend in FT. Worth Texas. The worship band is Watermark. This event always gets us hyped for the year at our BSM.

JS wrote:

But this is not what most Christian ID advocates want. They want ID introduced, not as a patch for weak points in the current theory, but to undermine evolution entirely. This is akin to teaching quantum string theory in high school physics for the purpose of making students doubt Newtonian mechanics, and I’m against it.

[cough]

I read enough of the “29+ evidences” to get the general idea. It’s well written. It’s clever. It’s also… well, consider:

Microevolutionary theories are gradualistic explanatory mechanisms that biologists use to account for the origin and evolution of macroevolutionary adaptations and variation. These mechanisms include such concepts as natural selection, genetic drift, sexual selection, neutral evolution, and theories of speciation. The fundamentals of genetics, developmental biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and geology are assumed to be fundamentally correct—especially those that do not directly purport to explain adaptation.

and then later:

No alternate explanations compete scientifically with common descent, primarily for four main reasons: (1) so many of the predictions of common descent have been confirmed from independent areas of science, (2) no significant contradictory evidence has yet been found, (3) competing possibilities have been contradicted by enormous amounts of scientific data, and (4) many other explanations are untestable, though they may be trivially consistent with biological data.

So, I guess, we start with the assumption that natural selection is the mechanism for speciation, and then lo and behold, we find that there is no contrary evidence for common descent. But wait a minute, because without even proposing an alternative mechanism, Michael Behe has made the case that natural selection can’t account for the kinds of adaptation required for speciation. The argument really boils down to saying that if you start with our assumptions, you reach our conclusions, and if you don’t start with our assumptions, then you’re not playing the game the way we like.

I suppose there are those who want to use ID as a shoe-horn for teaching creationism, that the world was actually made last Tuesday, world-on-the-back-of-a-giant-turtle-ism, or whatever. I’d agree that these things are harmful if taught as truth. But I submit that teaching macro-evolution to explain speciation as a fact without even mentioning that irreducible complexity poses a significant challenge to the theory is just as dangerous. Superstition is damaging, whether it’s “religious” or scientific. “Evolution” is a blend of scientific observation and philosophical “just-so” stories; it has had the effect, intended or not, of promotting, buttressing and protecting modernist world-view. That world-view is founded not on facts, but on a set of epistemological assumptions. It’s interesting that so many people are afraid of what will happen if those assumptions are challenged.

JS: I was under the impression that most bacteria that were resistent to certain antibiotics already were somewhat resistent. Then when all the rest are wiped out, the remaining bacteria multiplied, they spread the genes that make them immune to the antibiotics. Then, the only bacteria left were the ones spawned from the ones that were already resistent. I know about their ability to share some of their DNA to others, some of which carry resistence to antibiotics.

Maybe I’m wrong (I only had one elementary biology course in college), but neither of those options sounds like mutation.

We are praying for you aaron. I can’t imagine…

Those of you who asked on AIM….I told ya…yep, told ya….I told ya....

I must confess that while I found the exchange very useful, it was so more for what wasn’t said than for what was. By that I mean that my opening presentation, focused upon the very primitive tradition found in Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15:3ff, the lexical information and contextual usage of terms such as evgei,rw and avna,stasij, and Dr. Renihan’s discussion of passages in Acts where in Paul’s preaching the response always indicates that the apostolic message was clearly understood to be referring to physical resurrection, went basically untouched and surely unrefuted. It was odd to hear our guests in essence say that what happened to the corpse of Jesus is basically irrelevant; what will happen in the future regarding our own resurrection was likewise not considered central (Dr. Crossan does not believe in an afterlife anyway, and he refuses to argue about it).

I really don’t know what to write. This all seems like it is a dream. I think my area of town is one of the few areas that did not flood. I have a bad feeling about what they are going to find when they get the water out of the lower ninth ward and some parts of New Orleans east. I have yet to see any pictures of St. Bernard Parish and really think it is bad out there.
They have not been saying much but it would not surprise me if thousands were not dead. At night most of you can pick up wwl 870 am. It is a channel that can be heard all over the south and further on clear nights. It is local good news coverage.
I need to repent of my attitude towards the looters. It is really hard watching all the mess and then seeing people making it even worse.
I have no idea when they are going to let us back in to the city. I really did not need a vacation like this yet. I could see NOBTS on fox news and saw it had flooded there too. The whole Gentilly area looks like it has flooded around the seminary. I don’t really know what they can do with this many people who will not be able to live in their homes.
God is on his throne and I trust He knows what he is doing.

People think New Orleans is a city full of sin. That is very true but all cities are full of sin. It is also a city with tens of thousands of great people. A small percentage are responsible for the crime and the debauchery in the quarter but most are good folks. My heart hurts as I looked through pictures on NOLA.COM. Check the pictures out and pray for the victims of this storm and how we can minister to them.

There is a great shot of FBC new orleans from the link under Aug 31 “Katrina’s devastation 15 (AP) ” i think it is the first picutre.

Doug Wilson’s “Uninterested” post is being discussed around the web, and it’s not unusual to see this in the discussion threads.

I totally agree that God is uninterested in our past. Justified, as we all learned in Sunday School, means “just as if I’d never sinned.”.,,At the same time, I think God is VERY interested in how we, as regenerated and justified Christ-followers, continue to live.

The only way we can live the Christian life is COMPLETE ACCEPTANCE. Rewriting the Prodigal Son story with our own ending- accountants in place- won’t work.

The Bible’s purpose is not so much to show you how to live a good life. The Bible’s purpose is to show you how God’s grace breaks into your life against your will and saves you from the sin and brokenness otherwise you would never be able to overcome…religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the Gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you’re accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey’. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference. -Dr. Timothy Keller

Dale, wasn’t there a huge problem with the Red Cross post 9-11? I’ve been hesitant to give them anything because of that. The United Methodist Committee on Relief is helping. We have refugees (I hate typing that word) all the way here in Russellville.

I haven’t heard, but has there been any talk about opening some of the closed military bases to house people? Seems like some barracks would be better than nothing, especially since it may be months before anything gets done.

Michael writes: “A quick scan around the net leads me to believe we are going to soon hear about thousands dead in the Katrina aftermath, and New Orleans is about to become something we haven’t ever seen in America. Prayer and generousity are much needed. Perhaps some donation-oriented links, Kurt? NAMB? Samaritan’s Purse?”

I recommend that everyone consider donating to the American Red Cross.

pax,
Dale

Michael, I am ready for some good bar-brawling, I say let em bring it. They got nothing on us.

I mean who can bring charges against God’s elect, eh? :)

Hmmm, I saw that comic book cover not long after watching an SNL rerun on the E! Channel that featured a cartoon by Robert Smigel. I’m sure most of you remember “The Ambiguously Gay Duo.” And those two “heroes” on the comic book cover couldn’t help but remind me at least a little of Ace and Gary.

[A]s soon as biologists proposed the idea that environmental pressures could actually cause beneficial, information-increasing mutations (you know, since we have yet to see any actually occur)

Ha ha, good one, Josh. This is funny because everyone knows about antibiotic-resistant bacteria and new strains of viruses that appear from time to time. If that doesn’t count as “beneficial, information-increasing mutation”, then you’re obviously using some strange definitions of those terms.

There is a place for this discussion, but we can’t even have it until we have a basic understanding of the theory of evolution, the evidence for it, and the weaknesses in that evidence. Go read this enormous list of evidences for macroevolution, then we’ll talk. Species-creating evolution has been observed many times. The genome is crufty and hugely inefficient, not a model of “intelligent design”. Observed rates of change among animals are more than enough to account for observed species diversity. These are things the creationism and ID crowd don’t talk about much.

I reiterate: ID has a legitimate critique of evolutionary theory, or more accurately, the assumption that evolutionary processes acting without any interference at all can create life as we see it, and the underlying philosophical materialism. Like Alex said, it’s a better philosophy than it is a science. For example, the greatest weakness in orthodox evolutionary theory is the point of genesis—how do you get the first evolving organism? These and other questions have a legitimate place, but they need to be understood and taught as weaknesses and points of inquiry within a theoretical framework that is already universally accepted and will probably not change much.

But this is not what most Christian ID advocates want. They want ID introduced, not as a patch for weak points in the current theory, but to undermine evolution entirely. This is akin to teaching quantum string theory in high school physics for the purpose of making students doubt Newtonian mechanics, and I’m against it.

Really….I say we raise a toast to the haters. All of them. That they need to define themselves by imagining the BHT to be….....heck…..I don’ t have any idea WHAT they imagine the BHT to be :/ .......to the fact that others must caricature us to feel good about themselves….I’ll say “Here’s to them.” And thanks, Annie, for the comments. The BHT is not much of my doing anymore, and everyone is to be commended for the quality of the discussion.

I’m more moved by a note I got from one of you this morning. I’ve been preaching on “Evil” as a clue to the Gospel. (Os Guinness does this in Unspeakable.) The fact is that many within the communities of the fundamentalistic and the Truly Reformed do not recognize certain kinds of evil. I say this with no joy and with no fingers pointed. It is simply the truth.

I am particularly thinking about…
1) Evil that occurs in the name of right theology.
2) Evil that occurs in the exposure of what is deemed “evil” or “wrong.”
3) Evil that appears under the guise of “God’s Will.”

I could list other examples, but this is a problem with wider implications than you might think. Defending God’s way of “seeing” things is a dangerous business for fallen human beings. It doesn’t surprise me that the purveyers of slavery and aparthied were good Calvinistic folk, because it was so natural to look at some things and say, “God’s ways must be defended,” rather than to immediately question their own assumptions and practices. That depravity business can’t get out of hand and cause us to suspect ourselves. Oh no.

There are all kinds of heinous abuses going on in churches and Christian families right now that are being defended, overlooked and perpetuated in the name of God and rescuing the wayward from their erring ways. Its lamentable and serious. The BHT fellow who sent me the note should post about it if he/she chooses….and is willing to endure the barrage of poison that will ensue.

ON A MORE SERIOUS NOTE: A quick scan around the net leads me to believe we are going to soon hear about thousands dead in the Katrina aftermath, and New Orleans is about to become something we haven’t ever seen in America. Prayer and generousity are much needed. Perhaps some donation-oriented links, Kurt? NAMB? Samaritan’s Purse?

Kurt:Yeah, and I called him on that too in his comments section. That more than anything prompted me to post this.

What WAS he thinking when he did this thing?

Dadgummit Douglas, I was hoping we could like, not mention that on the Tavern today. :)

I actually find the stereotypical/racist depiction of the Japanese troops far more uncomfortable than the whole “Tavern Monkeys” thing.

We (evidently) made the cover of one of Pyromaniac’s faux comics…

Gives you a warm feeling, doesn’t it?

I suspect the oil companies are just taking advantage of the situation. Everyone expected the gas prices to shoot up because of the hurricane, and, by golly, they sure did, didn’t they? But, of course, that’s just a suspicion, because I’m suspicious of corporate America anyway.

My understanding is that the latest jump in gas prices is not a crude issue, but a refinery capacity issue. What with something like 95% of the Gulf coast’s refining capacity being shut down from the hurricane, there’s a major bottleneck in production.

Of course, that’s just what I’ve heard. I don’t know what “fair” increases would be. With capitalism, I suppose “fair” is what the buyers will pay.

Judson, do you have any insight as to the current price spike in gas?

Appropos of nothing:

1. Even a grown man will cry when he is compiling a list of destroyed books for the insurance company and actually begins to realize that, money be damned, there is simply no way to replace some of them.
2. A semester with a crappy teaching schedule is only 16 weeks long, but it seems longer.
3. The phrase “selling a house and buying another” should rank right up there with “just say no” as hopelessly harder than it sounds.
4. When one complains about such things in the face of the tragedy we have witnessed recently, one feels rather poopy-headed.

Hope everyone is well.

Public Utilities are price controlled as they have a de facto monopoly. Don’t oil companies enjoy the same situation? I can buy gas from maybe five suppliers, i.e., Cenex, BP, Tesoro, Conoco, SuperAmerica, Holiday…but how many manufacturers are there and are they working in collusion?

I ranted about gas prices a bit in my latest podcast. At one station I pass every day, the price of a gallon of gas has risen 35 cents from Monday noon to this morning at 7am. 35 cents per gallon! Put another way, that’s 14%. There is no way the costs to the oil companies have gone up 14% in the last two days. It is un-possible.

And there go the oil companies, posting record profits. Amazing.

Annie: The point of a hard-and-fast line is that it is not supposed to be ultimately tenable. Ultimately, the distinction between experimental science and the philosophy thereof is not going to hold, hence my qualification about this distinction not making up one of the “joints of the universe.”

However, I think the distinction is useful at this point, because the greatest strength (IMHO) of the ID movement is its philosophical critique of naturalistic evolutionism. The science part of the ID movement, however, is simply not mature enough.

In a sense, philosophical critique is even more devastating than straightforward “the data says otherwise” because a philosophical critique goes to the heart of how one interprets the experimental data.

All that said, Plantinga hasn’t weighed in on the ID movement (although I could ask him today what he thinks); however, he does think that science has no claim to total objectivity.

I have come across in the blogsphere a few snide comments made toward the BHT which made me want to express my affection for the tavern. I greatly enjoy the living diversity knited beneath the unity of the Gospel, the friendly and sometimes rowdy banter, the diversity of topics, one moment intense and intelligent and another boyish and humerous. Thanks to the bartender for maintaining a great atmosphere and giving this much-at-home soul a nearby watering hole.

That said, Alex – I have not read Plantiga’s book, but I find your hard-and-fast line between philosophy of science and science untenable. Methodology and methaphysical (or religious) bias certainly affect he way you search for, collect and analyze data. I agree that ID makes its strongest case in philosophy of science, but that case ought to and must carry over into actual science. It is at least worthy and necessary to investigate the last 200 years of science to see how philosophical biases have affected the course of experimentation and development of theory.

Josh and Jim – I echo your statements.

Josh – I read somewhere last night a bemoaning of all the time Lutherans spend changing the word “Father” into something more “neutral” and ignoring Jesus . . . would they be mistakingly attributing recent Episcopalian events to your church?

Given the interconnectedness of all events in a dynamic, physical system (such as the universe), how do we speak of God’s sovereign purposes as different in one event than another? Why is a hurrcane in New Orleans different from a gentle shower elsewhere?

BTW- I was told at breakfast this morning that NO deserves this because of all the immorality in that city. I asked how the old woman I saw crawling out of her attic specifically deserved this more than I do? I didn’t receive an answer.

David Heddle goes after The Derb. Josh would probably agree that Heddle is stronger in the science department than he is on Lutheran history. ;)

The problem many have with tying ID to evolution is that the theory of evolution by definition relies upon randomness as a foundational principle. ID, or theistic evolution ends up proposing guided randomness, which of course is a logical absurdity.

If evolution simply means slow change, then that’s not a problem. But that’s not what most people mean when they employ the term.

A photographer documenting the work of our brothers and sisters on the Mercy Ships.

Hey Josh,

If you go to that Cats in Sinks site, scroll to the very bottom, count up seven rows (currently) to where there’s two cats in a sink (one a tortoiseshell and the other a calico), that’s two of my online friend’s cats. :)

Thought I’d stop in. I still don’t have internet access at my house in South Bend, so that explains my lack of posting in recent weeks.

Anyway, I wanted to weigh in on the ID debate and reiterate a point that someone made the last time this topic arose in discussion. Science, as a collection of disciplines and methodologies being currently practiced should be distinguished from the philosophy of science as the critique and analysis of methodology and core scientific concepts. That being said, such a distinction should be recognized as purely pragmatic, and not something akin to the metaphysical “joints of nature.”

The difficulty with ID is that it seems to cross over this hard-and-fast distinction; or at least so it seems. The truth of the matter is that there is only a smattering of empirical data which characterizes the ID movement; most of it consists only in philosophical critiques of evolutionary dogma, making use of gaps in the data.

I really think that the ID movement at this point ought to be subsumed under the philosophy of science, rather than science proper.

All that being said, let me advocate an Augustinian view of the practice of science. Augustine saw human endeavors as falling within the boundaries of one of two cosmic civilizations: the city of God and the city of Man. Since science is a human endeavor, its practitioners are going to practice it in accordance with whatever city they live in (so to speak). Philosophical and theological critique makes people aware of their “citizenship,” and this is something the ID movement is doing quite well.

I am indebted to Alvin Plantinga’s article “Science: Augustinian or Duhemian” in Faith and Philosophy for articulating the above Augustinian view.

Still more thoughts on ID: There is, I think, a baby-and-bath-water problem with the idea that an understanding of evolution is foundational to biology, genetics, etc. Behind the idea lurks an inadvertent admission that one cannot challenge the “basis” of biology without also discrediting the observations that biologists make; this is patently absurd. Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews, and even atheists all make accurate observations about the material world every day, and some of them even come to correct conclusions based on those observations. Newton’s laws are still recognized, even though some of them are based on assumptions about the “irreducible complexity” of atoms that we now know to be mistaken.

What the naturalistic materialists really don’t want is to have the public exposed to a competing set of world-view assumptions that work with the observations. The reason they don’t want this is simple: They have faith in their naturalist-materialist religion, and they have used their influence to advance the idea that it is the One True Faith. The real problem for them isn’t that someone might prove a theory that God didn’t use monkeys to make men; it’s that if it were proven, or even possible, it would call much of modern practice into question. The problem isn’t that ID might eventually prove that some ideas by evolutionary biologists are wrong, it’s that the worldview behind ID might convict some evolutionary biologists who cheat on their spouses that they will have to answer to Someone for it.

Does anyone have an understanding of why there seems to be a ‘disconnect’ between the percentage cost rise of a barrel of oil and a gallon of gas? It seems to me that there should be a direct relationship between the two.

More on ID: There’s a basic question that gets skipped over by the opponents of ID, and it’s similar to the question that Josh posed. Put simply, the one thing proponents of macro-evolution don’t want to have to answer is: Why does Occam’s razor not apply to Darwinian theory? As Josh pointed out, it’s a lot less work for them to pigeonhole ID proponents with those with a more obvious anti-evolutionary agenda than it is to actually engage the idea of intelligent design and have to deal with the substantive problems it raises about “macro-evolution strictly by natural selection.”

As for JS’s comments, I’ll confess to being only a modestly well-read layman and not a formal biologist. I’ll respectfully disagree that evolution is “foundational” to understanding biology, but I think it’s fair for those of us who favor ID to acknowledge that many of us do have an agenda; specifically, we’re challenging the “prior commitment … to materialism” that evolutionist Richard Lewontin acknowledged. Whether advocating the introduction of ID into high-school biology is a good strategy for that is up for grabs. I personally don’t think it will work, but I think it also needs to be pointed out that what really bugs Derbyshire about ID is that not that it challenges his particular pet theory of origins, but that it challenges his (self-admitted) philosophical (and, we might as well say, religious) commitment to atheism and materialism.

(Note to readers: By “materialism”, in that last paragraph, neither Lewontin nor I mean what Christians commonly think of when they hear someone described as a “materialist.” Rather, I’m referring to what Francis Shaeffer described as the belief system based on the assumption of “the unity of causes in a closed system.”)

JS: How is macroevolution “foundational”, as you say? What about these fields requires an assumtion of macroevolution?

Setting that aside, in the final analysis Derbyshire is not arguing for evolution per se so much as he is methodological naturalism. THAT is the premise that ID denies, and wants to examine critically. And I say, what harm can come of that? Is that really too “complex” for high schoolers to understand? And given the state of how all science is taught nowadays (and especially as Derbyshire would have it taught), by the time you get to the level where you can “debate” Darwinism you’ve already bought too far into it to really debate it!

I don’t treat public-school support of ID as a fundamental requirement of the faith, but I do say that there is no valid scientific reason why ID (properly defined, as Derbyshire does NOT do in his article) cannot be discussed in science classes – except on the basis of (anti)-religious and (pro-)naturalistic prejudices.

Hate to disappoint everyone, but I agree with pretty much everything said in the Derbyshire article that Dale linked.

His basic point, which is an excellent one, is that Darwinian evolution is foundational to all modern biology. Simply put, you cannot get anywhere in modern genetics, biology, anatomy, medicine, and the like unless you assume some sort of macroevolution, and Darwinism, for better or worse, is the entry-level theory for understanding these things. Darwinism has its problems, but just like the article said they are problems that can’t really be understood until you understand Darwinism itself. If anything, ID is a better option for college-level discussion, with students who understand the standard evolutionary model well enough to be able to see why it’s “irreducibly complex.”

I also don’t understand why Christianity requires that I support teaching ID in schools. I believe in one God, the Father, the Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things, seen and unseen. I don’t believe that he did it in six days. I don’t believe that he couldn’t use textbook evolution to do it, and as Michael has ably argued elsewhere, you can’t make this an article of faith.

>Whenever I see something that is large, formal and impersonal I can’t seem to help but believe that it’s not on the right track.

There are always questions, but the questions are about the Jesus movement in whatever form it takes. Some of those questions are about big churches. Some are about small, dying churches.

“Large” is relative and not necessarily bad, but there will always be questions. “Formal” isn’t a bad thing in many case. It really depends, doesn’t it? And “impersonal” is pretty subjective. I think we’ve really overplayed the “let’s all be one big happy family who all agree and all smile and all do things together and….and….” I mean, no one can live up to the levels of “community” that some people insist must exist for the church to be legit.

It certainly isn’t the case that every small, personal, informal expression of religion is inherently more “Jesus-faithful” than other expressions.

Douglas: I thought that’s what I was reading, but I said….”Nah…...That just can’t be.”

I just read that response. And it’s downright frightening.

Do you realize what he’s saying here?

(T)he clause (“one baptism for the remission of sins”) may indeed mean exactly what you say it means! but rather than it being a sign of orthodoxy, it is a sign that by the year 381 the false doctrines that would eventually form the backbone of Roman Catholicism were already beginning to creep into the established church, which in turn would eventually motivate Luther to begin the reformation!

So the interpretation of this clause of the Nicene Creed as believed by Reformed, Anglican, Presbyterian, and (with caveats to be provided by Josh) Lutherans, is in error – in fact, the insertion of this entire clause in the Nicene Creed was in error!

I wonder what else in the Nicene Creed Mr. Abanes and those he defends would want to revise…

What does it mean to “always be ready to give a reason?” Such a good point by Glenn at Common Grounds, and a good post by the Jolly One.

The reason I’m looking at this issue (responding negatively to ‘successful’ churches) is that I’m beginning to have a reputation with a couple of friends/co-workers of ‘being against whatever is popular’. They are starting to look at it as a combination of rebelliousness and oppositional defiance (we are after all a human services agency and quick to diagnose).

But somehow I can’t shake Jesus’ model for ministry from my mind, i.e., small, informal and intimate. Whenever I see something that is large, formal and impersonal I can’t seem to help but believe that it’s not on the right track.

Back in the day when Billy Graham was the most visible evangelical in the world with a “successful” ministry, Malcolm Muggeridge quipped: “If Jesus had been as famous as Billy Graham is, we never would have heard of Him.”

Update: Re. Abanes on baptism. I live in Valvoline country and this sort of reasoning is what we might call “viscosity breakdown.” This is usually brought on by excessive red-lining.

Abane’s defense of the doctrine of “Get baptized with your family members” is all about why some of us can’t ever see ourselves as part of the evangelical/SBC mainstream. Is this what Christian baptism was meant to be? “This time, I REALLY REALLY mean it/understand it/get it.”

First of all, the policy on baptism at Saddleback is not as flip, casual, and stupid as Scott Hill is desperately trying to make it. Re-Baptisms are for people who: 1) were baptized as infants/children, but they never really accepted Christ and were baptized as believers; 2) want to experience baptism with a family member (or members) for whom they have been praying and who have finally accepted Christ; 3) lived in a backslidden state so seriously that their first baptism years ago was perhaps not valid because they doubt the validity of their first profession of faith prior to that initial baptism (this is often the case of people, for example, who were raised in churches and viewed their “Christianity” as just the thing to do).

I’m not offended at Abanes. I defend Wright, etc with my best posts as well. But this baptism thing is just beyond my ability to sit still. Just say, “We baptize anyone who professes faith or wants to be baptized or rebaptized, without any real pastoral concerns about quick baptism or re-re-re-baptism.” Just say, “That’s what we do.” Lots of Baptists do it, and those of us- Baptist or not- who believe Baptism is once are probably going to be briefly freaked out. No big deal.

Mr. Abanes either has a lot of time on his hands, or is some sort of designated blogwarrior for Saddleback. He replicated his big response (and is currently engaged in the subsequent comment wars) over at Challies’ post on the Fide-O article as well.

Biased against “the successful?”

I’m sure its an issue, but let’s revisit some things that tend to get lost in the evangelical mushy mush mush.

1) Those with huge numerical success are deemed leaders. Therefore, they have a higher accountability for what they do. If I find out that Saddleback baptizes anyone in a family who wants to get in the water with another family member (or friend), then that needs to be pointed out as horrendous. If I did that at OBI, we would baptize 20-30-40 kids every time we baptized one.

2) The claims of the successful need to be examined because the successful frequently exaggerate and lie.

3) The methodology of the successful is going to be marketed as “approved by God.” That’s not a sound assumption. It may be that the successful are simply doing a better job at entertainment, appeals to pride or bribery.

4) The leaders of successful churches frequently ascend to the level of “apostle,” without deserving it. It’s easy to look like a celebrity when you’ve got the numbers and the power of an instant audience.

5) They may be successful, but they have no authority over my church or my ministry. I don’t care how many books they’ve sold. I’ll be thinking for myself. I’m tired of the hype men telling me what to think and who to imitate.

Wow. Is Abanes a full-time blogger now? I’m surprised at the length of that response.

Take another look at the post from Fide-O that Michael linked. Richard Abanes responded in defense of Saddleback.

Which brings up an interesting (though somewhat collateral) point in my mind. Is there something about the very nature of being ‘successful’ that raises or should raise red flags in the minds Jesus’ followers?

I ask this because sometimes I react negatively to ministries for no other apparent reason that they are big, successful and the fact that everyone is fawning over them. Is there an inherent problem with minstries being this visible or is it simply my sin that’s giving me grief?

Has anybody been following the Pastafarian series (links here and here) that Boing Boing has been running to skewer opponents of teaching evolution in schools? Am I wrong to find it funny?

Looks like it made the NYT.

John Derbyshire blows a gasket over ID.

This article is so wrong on so many points. Not only does he misdefine ID, his counterproposal for what should be taught as “science” is jaw-droppingly naive. And these errors are couched in an insulting torrent of insults and ad hominems.

It’s articles like this that serve as a good reminder that “conservatism” and “Christianity” (or sometimes, even common sense) are not as closely joined at the hip as some may believe.

Scott Hill’s post at Fide-O (I know, I know) on “Things I Learned At Saddleback” pretty much confirms everything I’ve heard. I am particularly distressed that Warren is probably counting these “family” baptisms (and re-re-re-re-baptisms) as legitimate baptisms.

Write this down: The success claimed by pragmatists is always distorted. I’m not saying the numbers aren’t real. I’m just saying that their claims of Biblical faithfulness are, in general, bunk, and they know it. Pragmatism succeeds because it entertains. End of story.

On the dynamic planet: Let’s see, what did we NOT have before sin? Rain. Wind. Barometric pressure. Storms. Gravity. The earth’s crust. Oceans. Tides…..

Where are the BHT old timers these days? We hardly hear from you. Post, and let us know you are alive! Don’t make us say insulting things to draw you out! (SW)

Wyman, what they said.

In a couple of my posts below, I spoke of natural evil. I think it is entirely appropriate to speak of devastating phenomena like hurricanes as evil when they snuff out creaturely life (human and otherwise). Are such events a consequence of the human Fall? I don’t think so. To say with the Bible that God is remaking the heavens and the earth is not the same thing as saying that he is repristinating a set of prelapsarian laws of physics under which injury and death could not occur. The sinless Adam could stub his toe as easily as the sinful Adam. Since he had a body like ours, he felt the same kind of pain. I agree with Douglas that thinking otherwise would be adding unnecessarily to the articles of the faith.

So what does it mean that God is refashioning the heavens and the earth? I think it is something that we cannot yet imagine, but which is suggested and alluded to in Isaiah 65, for example, with the wolf and lamb grazing together. This is not a return to some previous idyllic state. This is the complete makeover of creation from the ground up. This is new biology, new physics, new culture. It is not rewinding the clock and starting again. It is blowing up the clock and recreating what “time” means altogether. What we’ve got now, pre- and postlapsarian has been declared “Very Good.” All creation praises God now. What’s coming is better, somehow.

What we know about the new heavens and new earth is very limited. We’ll be embodied. I suppose this means some sense of “space,” some kind of sensuousness, some kind of “time” (assuming that we can speak of these new bodies “moving”). Pain and death are eliminated. This is inconceivable in our present form of bodiliness. I cannot yet imagine an Earth without creaturely destructive events like earthquakes and volcanoes and global extinction events like comet impacts, much less mundane hurts like splinters. Shrugs

But I do believe part of our reconciliation mission is to point others to that time of salvation. We fight against natural evil even while recognizing it is God-ordained. Disasters are not a time to grow weak at the knees. They are times for defiance and courage and redoubled efforts to make manifest what the rule of Christ is all about. We work to defeat or at least contain death and destruction. We work for shalom in a broken city, a broken nation, and a broken people.

Michael, isn’t creation itself negatively influenced by the effects of the fall? Does Romans 8 apply? I think of the effects as being twofold, 1) the initial ‘fall’ and 2) mankind’s subsequent and persistent mistreatment of creation…i.e., ‘failure to appropriately steward’.

Wyman, I don’t manage a church but I do manage people (which is afterall what comprises a church)...who can be full of complaints. The short version of my input is that you are ‘spot on’ in your assessment.

Wyman asks: “Do any of you think it’s ok to refuse to listen to anonymous complaints that are filtered through others? In my own case, I have two deacons who routinely come to me and say, “Now, I can’t tell you who came to me, but there are some people unhappy about…” It’s almost always petty, but I am coming more and more to resent how folks use deacons and others to hide behind. The problem with it is that you never know the context of the complaint, whether or not the person is one of the few constantly unhappy people that every group has, and how many are, in reality, complaining.”

Wyman, I would refer you to Doug Wilson’s post titled Brief
Notes on Anonymity. He has been the recipient of many “anonymous” charges.

Perhaps we need to distinguish between an anonymous recommendation (“change the color of the carpeting to…”) and an anonymous complaint against an elder (1Tim 5:19).

But IMO, if someone doesn’t have the conviction to come forward and talk about something in the light, it should be ignored.

pax,
Dale

Jeff: I’ve read reports on Venezuelan prisons, and the only person I’d willingly send there is Osama bin Laden (except for the fact that Hugo would probably arrange for preferential treatment for him)...

Michael: As I’m sure you’re aware, the pet prooftext for that theory is Romans 8:20-21. Now, whether or not these verses acutally prove that the Second Law of Thermodynamics was not passed and signed into Law until Adam bit the apple is another thing entirely. It has been said that we cannot comprehend the pre-fall order of nature, and that to attempt to extrapolate back from our natural laws to before the fall is “uniformitarianism”, which is the “mother of evolution”. To me, this is not only unwarranted by the texts of Genesis (which state some differences between then and now, but nothing on the order of a whole different system of physics), but merely a call for blind faith in a matter where Scripture does not call for such faith.

BTW, the whole conversation yesterday was for naught. God did not cause Katrina. We did, via global warming. (JN)

Wyman: What they said. Scripture calls us to deal with our brethren face to face. If they can’t bring themselves to do that, then they have no real cause for complaint.

Tommy: For taste per dollar, I’m a big fan of 12-year Glenfiddich. I can get a 750ml bottle for less than $30 at pretty much any liquor store in town any time, and it’s fantastic stuff.

I tend to pour a couple of fingers into a tumbler and either (1) stir it with an ice cube for a few seconds before disposing of the ice cube, or (2) dripping in a few drops of water off of my fingertips.

That’s it! No more water than that for me. The water does change the taste, so it’s worth adding, but not too much. It probably helps that my freezer creates long thin ice cubes that are easier to use for stirring.

A 1:1 ratio of Scotch to water is just tragic, man. Sip more slowly, and keep it much more neat! {:)}

Michael: Thanks for the post from Wilson. It was fantastic. The grace of God is overwhelming sometimes, which is why it bothers me so much when folks minimize sin. (As I believe we do when we try to describe judgment as something deserved by other people.) To think that God loved me while I was His enemy—it’s breathtaking, for sure. Liar, thief, adulterers, and on and on—such was me. Worse, these are activities that I cling to despite God’s overpowering mercy and love for me. Like a dog to vomit, how can I do this? May I become as uninterested in continuing in those activities as God is in hearing about them!

Can we do something to speed this along?

Wyman: You are correct. You should not listen to second hand complaints. Your deacons should make it clear that it isn’t their function to listen to or relay these complaints. I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule, but you need to make it a rule. This kind of thing tears churches apart all the time. It has torn our church apart more than once, until we finally got a pastor (an interim, at that) who simply put his hand up and refused to hear them.

I love Spurgeon, but can anyone cite a passage that says natural processes of a dynamic planet are the result of the curse of sin? Don’t we have plenty of passages that say those natural processes are demonstrations of God’s power?

Wyman: a,b and c are absolutely dead on. I get anonymous notes from staff about things they don’t like in chapel, and it sends me through the roof. Nothing is less compatible with Christian community than anonymity. It’s cowardly, dishonest and usually a very distorted observation to begin with. Talk to me, by name, person to person, like a man. I’m not a dog.

A practical, and somewhat pastoral, question: Do any of you think it’s ok to refuse to listen to anonymous complaints that are filtered through others? In my own case, I have two deacons who routinely come to me and say, “Now, I can’t tell you who came to me, but there are some people unhappy about…” It’s almost always petty, but I am coming more and more to resent how folks use deacons and others to hide behind. The problem with it is that you never know the context of the complaint, whether or not the person is one of the few constantly unhappy people that every group has, and how many are, in reality, complaining.

I have found that in most cases when people do this, that (a) there are usually no more than 1-3 people who really complained, (b) it almost always ends up being a family member of the one complaining, and© it’s oftentimes the complaint of the person himself who just can’t work up the courage to complain openly and directly to you.

So this is what I’m tempted to do: I’m tempted to stop people from here on out who begin with, “I’ve had some people come to me…” and tell them that I either need to know who said it or that they need to refrain from passing it along, go back to the person who complained, and tell them to come to me directly.

I realize that we all need feedback, that I should be able to give an honest hearing to any complaint, anonymous or not (and I do so, by the way), and that I should be able to listen, but after a while that kind of thing just becomes unhealthy, manipulative, and infuriating. What do some of you think?

Tommy, the short answer to your Important Question (What should I do with my fine single malt Scotch) is given in Acts 20:35. You’ve got yourself some fine spirits there, my dear friend. So as not to lead our teetotalling brethren and lurkers astray, my suggestions for your grainy palliative are posted below. More »« Less

I hope Douglas Wilson won’t mind me quoting an entire blog post of his. It’s just a real gem. Go post it somewhere that people have to look at it and gasp.

Although we are a Christian people, we still have a tendency to hide from the sheer goodness of the gospel. One of the ways we have of doing this is to turn the word sinner into a technical theological one, meaning that no one is perfect, and despite this, any one can call on God through Christ. All of which is quite proper and correct.

But let us be more specific. We are gathered here in the name of Jesus Christ. As an assembly this size, we may say that we are not just here under the general term sinners—we are here as adulterers, thieves, liars, blasphemers, procurers of abortions, biters, devourers, Sabbath-breakers, committers of incest, Pharisees, homosexuals, pedophiles, cheats, jerks and creeps. Not only are such biographical items present here, we may safely say this sanctuary is crammed with them.

Now here is the good news. When it comes to receiving you in Jesus Christ, God is absolutely uninterested in whether such things have occurred. If one did not occur, then a bunch of the others did. But God couldn’t care less. Let me restate the key phrase that makes this such good news. Through what Jesus has done for us, God is absolutely uninterested in that part of your history.

Grace takes the breath away. As the Corinthians heard it, “Such were some of you.” But the safety-minded rush into to make this message safe for religious consumption—such were some of you. And rightly understood, this is quite proper, and so St. Paul himself emphasizes it. But the safety-minded don’t emphasize the same way Paul did.

We are God’s saints, holy and beloved. As such, we must always remember the ground of this, which is the biography of Jesus Christ, our good news. As for our biographies, every one of them has a host of pretty grimy chapters, which God found to be so boring that He skipped over them. Absolutely uninterested.

As this is a bar, I’d like some advice on how to drink a good Scotch. For helping a friend move, I was given a bottle of Glenmorangie, 15 year old single malt Highland Scotch (handcrafted by the sixteen men of Tain).

I tried it straight, and I’m not ready for that yet. I tried 1 ounce of Scotch/1 oz. of water – OK, but a little strong. Now I watered it down too much. So does anyone have some tried and true proportions with water or soda, or do I just need to stop being a sissy and drink it straight?

Tremper Longman III on the Divine Warrior. A very rich and important Biblical theme.

So Dale gonna get in my grill with the WCF. Harumph. In total frankness, Dale, I haven’t the slightest idea what WCF 3 and 5 mean by “second causes” religiously speaking. Yes, I think I have a grasp on its philosophical genealogy, but I would have a hard time explaining to someone who doesn’t already subscribe to the WCF why this Aristotelian/Scholastic distinction matters for their faith.

(Don’t worry, patrons. You heard me say ‘philosophical’ and now you’re backing, no, running, to the exits. I can hear the commotion over the wind noise generated by Katrina. Thx, but I have no desire to see everyone break out their duct tape and start wrapping their heads while I launch into a 10,000-word post. Well, actually I do have a desire to see that, but the virtual reality just isn’t as satisfying.)

I did not take an exception to WCF 3 or 5 mainly because I do not understand them. As far as I can tell, they are correct formulations of predestination and providence. But I don’t think I have to understand them to affirm God’s sovereignty, a concept which makes perfect sense to me. I know that God rules; I have no idea how he rules. Yes, by the word of his power, says the letter to the Hebrews. I still do not understand the “how” from this, for when I try to translate it into causal terms, the sort of terms that that involve appeal to evidence and observation, I get images of mouths and lips and the sounds of uttered words which are produced by the flexions of the vocal cords which modulate air passing over them, ... You may object that this is anthropomorphic imagery of a spiritual reality. Indeed. I’m still lost as ever about how causation works in the spiritual realm.

The natural order and humanly devastating phenomena that occur in it do not send me searching for an explanation. I do not need an account of efficient cause to trust God. Ultimately, that’s where these events send me. Not in search for reasons but clinging trustfully and fallibly to God’s good will. Meanwhile, Rachel’s advice is exactly the sort of thing that our “response” involves: binding up wounds, comforting the hurt, feeding, clothing, sheltering the homeless and displaced. Being Christ to others so that he is glorified.

/beating

Ten stages that churchgoers go through.

Pretty interesting. I can definitely say that I’ve been there to some degree or another. Any of y’all see yourselves in any of those phases?

Maybe the hurricane is an opportunity for humans to show the love and mercy of God to other humans.
John 9:1-3 (English Standard Version)
“As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
John 11:4 (English Standard Version) But when Jesus heard it he said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.

No need to apologize, Michael! I wasn’t offended, just trying to explain why I ran the risk of offending the barkeep.

As it is, I’m now going to ignore certain fellow patrons in much the same way I ignore Robertson, Falwell, and Phelps, and for much the same reasons. Beat Up On Me day? Gee, I bet Robertson was asking himself the same question a couple of days ago!

My tolerance for those who want to be God more than God does diminishes with each passing day. {:)}

Joel writes: “Now to the business at hand. Dale, I’m yellow-carding you (yes, I keep the yellow and red cards). When we start talking about God as a causal agent, even THE supreme Causal Agent, the First Cause, we have ceased talking about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and have snuck (sneaked) in the god of the philosophers (as Pascal put it).”

When talking about God’s Providence, I dropped automatically into the language of the Westminster Confession of Faith V:2—
“Although, in relation to the fore-knowledge and decree of God, the first Cause, all things come to pass immutably, and infallibly: yet, by the same providence, He ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.”

While you may not like the language of the WCF, I think that it adequately expresses the distinction between God and His creation. See WCF III:1—
“God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass:(a) yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin,(b) nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.”

So while a hurricane is a “second cause”, God Himself is the causal agent.

So, is this beat-up on Dale day?!? :)

pax,
Dale

PW: Sorry if I offended you. I reread the conversation three times and didn’t want it to escalate to a discussion of whether Dale was lying, because at that point I’d have to probably consider dead horsing what has been a good topic and a civil tone. I generally react to discussions here much like I would in my own classroom. Sorry if I played that one too close.