Think1st: A Progressive Christian Blog

Ways of Knowing, Part 2

2005-01-29T16:37:00.000-07:00

What is knowledge? The traditional analysis, dating back to Plato and commanding the adherence of many great minds over the years, has been that knowledge can be defined as justified true belief (henceforth JTB). In other words, if I believe something, that belief is true, and I have some justification for believing it, then I have knowledge. Stated symbolically:

S knows that p iff:

(i) S believes that p

(ii) P is true

(iii) S is justified in believing that P.

If any of these conditions were missing, it was thought that knowledge was missing as well. Then along came a little three page tornado by Edmund Gettier, entitled simply “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” In it he pointed out how you could have a justified true belief that did not entail knowledge. His examples entailed someone having good reasons for believing something, which then led them to a further implication of that belief, which turned out to be true while the initial justified belief turned out to be false. Yet at the end of it you had a justified true belief.

Gettier’s first example went something like this: Jones and Smith both apply for a job. Smith comes to the following beliefs:

1) Jones will get the job. (This is based off the fact that the president of the company has told Smith that Jones will get the job.)

2) Jones has ten coins in his/her pocket. (This is based off the fact that Smith saw Jones count the coins in his/her pocket and then put them back in.)

3) Therefore, a person with ten coins in their pocket will get the job.

Smith believes #3 via a logically valid argument, and based off of justified beliefs. Now as it turns out, the president of the company lied to Smith and instead gives Smith the job. Also, unbeknownst to Smith, he has ten coins in his pocket. Therefore, Smith believes #3, is justified in doing so, and his belief is true. Yet we would not wish to say that he had knowledge.

In the years since this paper, epistemologists (philosophers who study knowledge) have made many attempts to solve what is now called the “Gettier problem.” Many of these have involved trying to find a fourth condition, in addition to JTB, that would get us a proper analysis of what knowledge is. So far no one theory has gained the consensus.

While many theories focus on evidence and proof as a key component for knowledge (i.e. “justification”), another line of thought seeks to study the mechanisms that produce beliefs, and to determine what it would mean for them to be able to give us knowledge. On these views, our third condition or cluster of conditions for knowledge would not be justification, but rather something else. These naturalistic accounts, also know as externalisms, seem to me to hold a lot of promise, none more so that the theory advanced by Alvin Plantinga, know widely as the theory of Proper Function, which outlines the things which provide “warrant” for a belief. According to Plantinga, if a person has a true belief that has been produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly, according to a design plan aimed at producing true beliefs, in a cognitive environment suited to those faculties, then they have knowledge. For example, if you believe that when you approach your car you actually see it, this will be knowledge for you if:

(i) You believe that you see your car.

(ii) You actually are seeing your car, not a mirage or a hologram.

(iii) You belief is produced by your visual cognitive faculty, that faculty is functioning properly, is designed to produce true visual experience, and is being utilized on earth, with sufficient lighting conditions being present, not during a black, cloudy, moonless night or an alternate universe where there are no light waves to produce the sensation of sight.

Given these things, you have knowledge that you see your car.

While this sounds pretty common sensical (indeed, Plantinga traces his own theory’s development back to the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid), there are some problems with it. My main concern deals with the way the major terms (proper function, a design plan aimed at producing true beliefs) in Plantinga’s theory are set up so as to presuppose theism. Of course Plantinga claims that either God or evolution could have produce these faculties, but then later spends the last several chapters of his work Warrant and Proper Function trying to demonstrate that proper function cannot be explained in purely naturalistic terms. You can’t have both.

What I propose is that, for our purposes, we replace the term proper function with sufficient function, a term that encompasses the actually reality faced by our cognitive faculties, as opposed to forcing us into either/or situations were faculties are either functioning properly or they are not, with no possibility of a gradient somewhere in between. Whereas proper function stipulates that our faculties must be working as designed, sufficient function claims they must be working well enough to do what we are asking of them. In addition to this redefinition, I would propose that instead of thinking of the design plan as having to be aimed at truth, we should think of it as regularly producing true beliefs. This takes us off theistic clouds, and back firmly on naturalistic ground. This does not mean we have to dismiss theism as a possibility, simply that we do not guarantee it by the way we define our terms.

Also, besides avoiding a guarantee of theism, the above way of defining our terms gives them a far broader range, allowing us to take into account that the cognitive faculties of certain beings might work better or worse than that of another being, or that specific faculties might be stronger or weaker between species, or even within individual members of a species. For example, if your eyesight is 20/20 and mine is say 20/70, we can both gain knowledge via our faculty of eyesight as long as my eyesight is sufficiently good enough to produce the true belief in question. In other words, 20/70 vision might not be considered proper function for a human being, or even typical/average function, but it can be considered sufficient function for the forming particular bits of knowledge, though it is perhaps not good enough for others. <>In the same vein, to say a faculty must be aimed at truth would preclude the possibility that a faculty could actually be favored by evolution for a completely different purpose. For example, it is possible that an elephant’s ears have mutated as they have due to the fact that they help in releasing heat, better allowing the largest land mammal to regulate its body temperature. A side effect may well be that elephants have even better hearing than they would have otherwise. However, their adaptation was not aimed at true auditory beliefs, but rather at better body regulation. On our new revision of Plantinga’s theory, however, it would be enough for the faculty in question to be able to regularly produce true beliefs, even if it was not entirely aiming for them.

Given these adjustments, I think we have the beginnings of a good working theory of what constitutes knowledge. We will need to examine how it incorporates our cognitive faculties, and how the way we form beliefs gives them varying degrees of warrant. Then we can begin to apply it to our many beliefs, and see which of them can be considered to be knowledge, and which cannot.

To restate the position, in conclusion: a person has knowledge if her belief is true and was generated by a suffiently functioning cognitive faculty(ies) having a design plan(s) that regularly produces true belief(s), and that generated that/those belief(s) in a receptive environment.

The NFL Picks: A Post-Christmas Tradition

2005-01-06T16:59:00.000-07:00

It is nice to be back home after a good holiday season! Here are my NFL playoff picks for this year:

NFC Wild Card:
St. Louis Rams over Seattle Seahawks, 28-20
Green Bay Packers over Minnesota Vikings, 34-31
Neat stat for this game and the NFC game on Sunday: In a playoff rematch where one team has already posted two wins over the other, 10 out of 15 times the team who has won the first two also wins the third. After this weekend I like it to be 12 out of 17.

Also, Minnesota can definately beat Green Bay, despite their recent troubles. I just doubt it will happen.

AFC Wild Card:
New York Jets over San Diego Chargers, 20-17
Indianapolis Colts over Denver Broncos, 35-21
The Chargers are vastly overrated in my book, and a team that can control the line of scrimmage will be able to beat them. I love my Broncos, but they may have the least chance of winning out of all the teams in this first round. Plummer must have a mistake free game to win, and I doubt that will happen.

NFC Divisional:
Philadelphia Eagles over St. Louis Rams, 24-7
Green Bay Packers over Atlanta Falcons, 35-14
Green Bay will trounce Atlanta if they get that far, while Philly will have more than enough for the Rams.

AFC Divisional:
Pittsburg Steelers over New York Jets, 28-10
New England Patriots over Indianapolis Colts, 28-27
Pittsburg will smoke any team they play, while the Colts will never beat a good Patriots team when it counts, though they will get close.

NFC Championship:
Green Bay Packers over Philadelphia Eagles, 27-24
Remember the Buffalo Bills? Or Minnesota Vikings? Those were good teams who could never get over the hump, and the Eagles are out of the same mold. A great regular season team without the talent to get over the top (unless TO plays).

AFC Championship:
New England Patriots over Pittsburg Steelers, 17-14
I like Pittsburg a lot, and they seem to be the superior team, but then that was also the case three years ago, and they lost to the Pats. It will be close, and I'll be cheering for the men of Cower, but I think the Pats will win it.

SuperBowl:
Green Bay Packers over the New England Patriots, 34-31
Vinaterri will tie it, but Farve will drive the Pack down for the last second win, and then ride off into the sunset. I like the Packers to come out of the weak NFC, and since nobody thinks the AFC will lose the SuperBowl, they probably will.

Happy Holidays!

2004-12-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post the first entry in Reimagining Genesis, but I haven't quite finished it off yet. I am leaving town for a little over a week, so I'll post it soon after the New Year begins. Have a great holiday season and thanks for reading!

Garbage Time: The Cruelty and Kindness of a Full House

2004-12-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

I love poker, especially Texas Hold'em, because of its potential to curse you with a bad beat and then turn around and allow you to rake in a huge pot when the same beat hits your opponent. Last week I had two experiences with full house hands, one that knocked me out of the money during an online tourney, the other which doubled me up during a home cash game.

First the bad. I'm playing an online event at pokerroom.com, with about three hundred other people. After a few hours, about twenty-five of us remain, and I'm sitting about nineteenth with $4800 in chips. Out of the big blind I look at AKs (Ace-King suited), while the person to my left folds, and the next player, with about $7000 in chips, puts out a $1200 bet, exactly double my big blind. The table folds around to me, and I decide to just call, figuring my opponent to be on a mid-level pocket pair (9's or T's), and knowing I'll need to hit the flop.

The flop clobbers me over the head, 9-A-A. I have just hit trip Aces, and figure that a bet will scare my opponent off, so I check to him, hoping to re-raise him. He throws out $2000, and I re-raise all-in (I had about $3600 left), and he calls me, showing pocket jacks. I figure I am about to double up to $10k, which would place me in fifth and in great position to reach the final table and make a good payoff. Turn brings a 7. River -- J! He hits his full boat, knocking me out, only four spots off the money. Wow! I go from conservatively being able to gain five times my entry fee, to being out of luck.

Jump ahead to three days later, this past Saturday. I'm playing my weekly cash game with friends. I had been up and down all night, but then hit a streak of hot cards and sat about triple up for the night. A few hands earlier I had pulled off a beautiful bluff, pushing a conservative player off his pair of aces on the river, representing a flush while actually holding a 2-7off! (the worst hand possible in hold'em, for those who don't know). 2-7 had been hitting the flop all night, and we had all been joking with each other that we were going to push with it -- so I did!

After bluffing this player out I showed the table my cards which accomplished exactly what I wanted it to: the whole table thought I had been playing bad cards all night, and they were now determined to call my future bluffs! I could sit back, play great stuff, bet it up, and expect callers.

About an hour after this, I am dealt J6 out of the big blind, and check the bet when it reaches me. Flop comes 6-3-J. I've flopped two pair, and decide to slow play it, hoping a pocket AJ or KJ will bet out big so I can come over the top. A person opposite me, who had almost as many chips as I did, doubles my bet. The table folds out to me, and with a smile I double his bet. He re-doubles back, and I call, thinking I can push him further on the turn. The turn brings another 6, giving me a full house! Only pocket 6's or pocket J's could beat me, so I bet four times the big blind into my opponent, who doubles my bet. I then triple his raise, and he goes all-in. I call immediately, flip over my boat, and he screamed in frustration after showing his A6. A ten hit the river, and I finished my night on a high note, taking out my biggest challenger.

The full house giveth and taketh away... one of the reasons Texas Hold'em is such an amazing game!

THE NOTES to Re-Imagining the Creation Stories: Genesis 1-2

2004-12-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

(These are my first glance notes comparing the two creation accounts in the book of Genesis. I thought I would post these, and the my commentary first glance notes before publishing my actual blog on this section Genesis, in order to give you a chance to see part of my study process and how the notes are applied to make an article.)

Staring Points:
Gen 1: An empty wasteland (tovu wobovu, better translated this way than “a formless void”) with darkness covering the deep, and a wind from God sweeping over the water.

Gen 2: A land with no agricultural crops, but with a stream rising up from the ground, but nobody to till the ground.

Common Ground: Both picture untilled, unorganized land in need of cultivation.

Differences: One pictures an entirely unorganized Cosmos, the other pictures a wild land that simply hadn’t been cultivated yet.

What Gets Created:
Gen 1: D1) Separate -Day and Night; D2) Separate the sea from the clouds - The Sky; D3) Separate Water from Land - Dry Land and Natural Plants; D4) Lights to separate the day and night – Sun, Moon, and Stars “set in the dome” “for signs and seasons”; D5) Sea Creatures and Birds – “blessed with the ability to multiply” “fertility”; D6) Land Animals, Humans “made in the image of God” “To have dominion” not “to rule over” as mentioned of the Sun, Moon, and stars. They are given “Plant yielding seed and tree with seed in it’s fruit”, but are not “given” the animals. The Totality of creation is “very good”, not just people specifically.

Gen 2: 1) Man formed from the dust of the ground, breathing the breath of the LORD God into him (see Gen 1:30), in order to till and keep the garden (v. 15); 2) The garden is planted in the east, in Eden (man placed there), and also trees bearing fruit, as well as the “tree of life” and the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”; 3) Partners for man formed – the animals! Man names the animals, but does not find a partner. 4) Woman made from man’s rib (not out of the ground like everything else).

Common Ground: Both emphasize that man is made to cultivate the land, both mention the creation of humans, animals, and plants. Both emphasize that living things are made from “the ground” and also have, “the breath of life.”

Differences: The first account obviously focus on a much larger scope, emphasizing the separation of the various elements of reality, and framing creation within an ordered week. The second seems to assume most of this, emphasizing the creation of the man, the woman, and the animals. The order of the creation of the various elements are mixed about in the two accounts, the first having humanity created at the very end, the other having the creation of man and woman bookend the creation of animals and the garden. Also the second account tries to lay out the geography of Eden by reference to four rivers, while no mention of Eden is made in the first account.

What Commands are Given:
Gen 1: 1) The “let there be” commands (vs. 3, 6, 9, 11, 14-15, 20, 24, 26); 2) “Let [the lights] be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years” (v. 14); 3) the blessings – “be fruitful…multiply…fill” (vs. 22, 28); 4) “Have dominion over…” (v. 28); 5) an implied “command” in 2:3 which refers to the Sabbath.

Gen 2: 1) “Eat freely of every tree…” except for “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” because it brings a death sentence. 2) IMPLIED: to till the garden of Eden (v.8); 3) IMPLIED: the naming of the animals (v.19); 4) IMPLIED: the union with the woman (v.22). All the IMPLIED commands seem to assume that the man just would do the things the LORD God wanted him to do – that it was in the nature of man to till the garden, to name the animals, and to unite with the woman. Therefore the LORD God did not need to expressly command the man to do those things. However he did see fit to tell him to keep his hands of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, almost as if there was an expectation that the man would want to go right after it!

Common Ground: The gift of fruit trees for food, as well as the need for humankind to take care of and cultivate the land and watch over the other living things.

Differences: Only the second account even mentions the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, much less the command to stay away from it. In the first story, creation is accomplished by commands of God; in the second the LORD God actually forms things from the ground or other existing material.

Who Does the Creating:
Gen 1: God (Elohim).

Gen 2: The LORD God (YHWH Elohim).

How it ends:
Gen 1: With God seeing that his creation is “very good” and then resting on the seventh day. (1:31-2:4a)

Gen 2: With God bringing the woman to the man. (2:22-23)

Garbage Time: The Top 10 Songs of 2004

2004-12-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

A quick word about this top ten, and the ten honorable mentions that follow it: I did not include classical, jazz, vocal, instrumental, or rap. I will post a classical/vocal top 5 and a rap top 5 at a later time.

So here's my top ten favorite hip-hop/rock/country songs from the past year!

10. "Penny and Me" - Hanson
9. "Ocean Ave." - Yellowcard
8. "Take Me Out" - Franz Ferdinand
7. "1985" - Bowling for Soup
6. "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)" - Big and Rich
5. "My Happy Ending" - Avril Lavigne
4. "Let's Get It Started" - The Black Eyed Peas
3. "She Will Be Loved" - Maroon 5
2. "Yeah!" - Usher, feat. Ludacris and Lil' John
1. "The Reason" - Hoobastank

I only included one song per group, but several artists with a top ten song had several others that could have easily made it. Those would be Usher (Burn and Confessions, Pt 2), The Black Eyed Peas (Shut Up and Hey Mama!), and Maroon 5 (This Love). Switchfoot came damn close to the top ten with both Meant to Live and Dare You to Move. Other notable songs were Feelin Way Too Damn Good (Nickleback), My Immortal (Evanescence), and Give a Little Bit (Goo Goo Dolls).

Garbage Time: Holy Mother of God!

2004-12-08T17:10:00.000-07:00

According to a new Newsweek poll released earlier this week, “Seventy-nine percent of Americans believe that, as the Bible says, Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary, without a human father.” Further, 67% say they believe the entire Christmas story as presented in the Bible to be literally true, and 55% believe every word in the Bible to be accurate. Another 82% believe Jesus to be God or the son of God. Most disturbing of all, a whopping 62% favor teaching “creation science” alongside evolution, while more people favor the idea of teaching only creationism (43%) than disagree with the idea of teaching only creationism (40%).

Wow. How can evangelicals complain about secularity in America in the face of numbers like those? More than four out of every ten people you meet on the street believe that evolution should not be taught in school. Eight in ten believe Jesus to be a god of some sort. Nearly the same number believes in the virgin birth. Above all, these numbers demonstrate a complete lack of critical thinking on the part of most Americans when it comes to religion. I’m not surprised at this: at no level of our educational experience are we really challenged to think through our beliefs anymore, much less toss some of them aside. Let me give you an example dealing with the creationism issue.

When I took freshman Biology the professor began the class by assuring everyone that we would not be criticizing creationist views, and that science could not disprove religion because of its faith basis. That’s true, as far as it goes, but I think we can all agree that demonstrating a particular teaching of a religion to be wrong is a very different thing from trying to disprove the very idea of religion. When people proclaim the earth to be 6,000 years old, they have made a scientific claim. When they deny that natural selection can produce the kind of complexity we see all around us, they are making a scientific claim. When they claim the fossil record disproves evolution because no missing link between humans and apes has been found, they are making a scientific claim. Allowing them to hide these views under the protective shield of religion misses the point entirely. Their opinions should be thrust into the public arena and summarily humiliated and defeated. Ignorance has always been the enemy of science in the past, so why stop fighting it now?

The course did teach an evolutionary view of biological development, but when you preface the course by permitting your students to continue believing a religious view of natural origins, making no challenge to it at all, presenting no discussion of how evolution differs from it, then you have failed to engage students at the very level where they need to be challenged.

Most students leave classes of this sort either believing that modern evolutionary theory does not exclude special creation (which it does), that a creationism/evolution mutt can be created (it cannot), or that the refusal of their instructors to engage in a debate with creationism indicates the inability of evolution to withstand the challenge (nothing could be further from the truth).

The scientific community has come to a crossroads because they have refused to kill creationism (and any supernaturalism for that matter that makes empirical claims) once and for all – instead they treat it as a separate issue and think they can box it off to the side, thereby not hurting the feelings of the sensitive, religious people who might otherwise throw a fit. As a result, soon many rural school districts will start (in some cases already have started) to both restrict the teaching of evolution (by putting cigarette style warning labels on text books, among other methods), and to begin teaching some sort of half-cocked creationism (like “intelligent design” theory). We must confront creationisms of all sorts head on, show how silly they are, and firmly declare that the overwhelming evidence, collected by men and women from hundreds of separate scientific disciplines demonstrates the validity of evolutionary theory, and that evolution needs no help whatsoever to explain our present existence.

We must also teach people to critically examine their religious beliefs in other areas. So many people believe in the virgin birth because they have never taken the time to think it over. According to the Bible, baby Jesus just popped into Mary’s womb, put there as an act of special creation by God, bypassing all natural processes. Oh by the way, this baby should be considered God in some sense too, who devised a way to put himself into human form and beam into the womb of a young girl. So the infant then becomes superhuman, like a mutant out of the X-Men comics, or Hercules and figures like him in ancient mythology. Yes, magic baby Jesus, the flesh-and-blood child of both Mary and God. Theologians have insisted over the years that the thing created in this mythic mish-mash must have been equally human and divine (meaning, in modern terms, he contained the genes of both God and his mom, originating in his mother’s egg, which must have been fertilized by the supernatural semen of God, or else combined with “God-stuff” in some other way).

If you can believe that, what can’t you believe? Evidentially there must be something, because while 79% buy into the virgin birth, and another 3% on top of that in Jesus’ divinity, only 67% believe the entire Christmas story to be true, with another twelve percent dropping off when the question deals with the accuracy of the entire Bible. Here’s what I want to know: which part of the Christmas story should a skeptical mind toss into the trash if not the virgin birth? There must be some person out there who can buy that, but can’t believe that an angel told Mary about it, because angels don’t exist. Or who doubts that an actual star guided the magi, because stars don’t move like that. Or who has suspicions about the slaughter of the innocents because no record, outside of the Bible, exists for it. But why would a person have reservations about these details, but not the biggest whopper of them all!

My best guess would be that people feel like they can deny the magi without committing the (according to Christianity) immoral act of denying Jesus. I think most people with a Christian background have been taught that denying the deity of Jesus means denying Jesus, period. Of course, denying Jesus supposedly carries a fairly severe penalty in the next life, but even if a religiously raised person doesn’t still believe in hell they will at least feel guilty about their lack of faith in Christ. The virgin birth as literal truth has become a central part of Christian dogma, whether you are Catholic or Protestant and denying it would signal a complete break from their faith for most people. So, perhaps against better judgment, they affirm it.

Another reason would be a total refusal to intellectually compare our beliefs about the distant, supernatural past with our opinions about modern day miracles. Most people who believe in the virgin birth would laugh if some teenage girl at their local high school claimed a similar occurrence. The current fascination of many charismatic Christians with modern day miraculous acts strikes much of the virgin birth crowd as weird, as does the recent auction of a grill cheese sandwich displaying the blessed mother herself. Why this doubt amongst the faithful? Which should be considered harder for the Almighty, making a sandwich or making a mutant, fully human/fully divine baby? Yet most people never skeptically compare the miraculous things they believe in with the ones they do not. Rarely does our society, with its disdain for the enlightenment and complete embrace of postmodernism, force them to.

So, kudos to Newsweek for having the guts to challenge a popular myth. The article on the rationale for the inclusion of the virgin birth myth in two of the gospels should be required reading for at least four-fifths of America. As the piece demonstrates, we can appreciate the Christmas stories without believing they actually took place.

Power Corrupts…
Looks like the disintegration of the Republican Party will soon begin in earnest. Howard Fineman dissects the issues that could lead to a rebellion against Bush by various factions of the GOP. The President cannot be considered a conservative on anything other than social issues, and when he becomes a lame duck after the 2006 elections, look for an all out war between moderate Republicans (a.k.a. Giuliani, McCain, Arnold) and the right wing of the Party (a.k.a. Frist, various House republicans, Jeb Bush). No one can stay in power forever, thankfully…

I Can Only Imagine: 2005 College Football Edition
I know the pipe dream of a Division I College Football playoff will never happen, but just imagine for a moment the following scenario:

Round 1: #8 Virginia Tech vs. #1 USC, Rose Bowl; #7 Georgia vs. #2 Oklahoma, Cotton Bowl; #6 Utah vs. #3 Auburn, Outback Bowl; #5 Cal vs. #4 Texas, Capital One Bowl. (Week before Christmas)

Round 2: Rose winner vs. Capital One winner, Fiesta Bowl; Cotton winner vs. Outback winner, Sugar Bowl. (Week before New Year’s)

Round 3: Championship Game, Orange Bowl (Early January, same as it is now).

Think about it: there would be no Texas/Cal controversy—it would be settled on the field. No whining from Auburn that they have no national title shot, or from their first opponent in this hypothetical playoff, Utah. An amazing rematch of the VTech/USC game from earlier in the year, and possibly a USC/Cal rematch to follow that! The seven top bowl games would be involved every year, with the top four rotating the championship just as they do now. You’d even still have the BCS, with the top 8 in the rankings getting in! And imagine the excitement this would create! Too bad it will never happen….

My guess as to how it would turn out: USC squeaks out a win over VT, while OU hammers Georgia, Auburn outlasts a game Utah team, and Texas/Cal play a very nasty, overtime classic with Cal winning on a two point try in the third OT.

Cal, spent from victory the week before, goes down to USC by two TD’s in the Fiesta, while Auburn bottles up OU and runs over them by 20 points in the Sugar.

In the championship, Auburn’s D holds tough for three quarters, and they build a ten point lead going into the fourth. Then USC comes to life, rattles off fourteen quick points, and holds off a last minute Tigers drive. Final, 21-17 USC.

I’ll post my actual BCS Bowl picks right before the games.

Hold ‘em Hand of the Week
I have KJ suited (clubs) pre-flop and check from the big-blind, leaving three of us to see a flop. Flop comes 7c-Jh-3c, presenting me with a King High flush draw, and the high pair on the board. Since we’re playing no-limit, I put out a five spot (a bet five times the size of the big blind) hoping to win with my Jacks right there, or at least force out other flush draws. I get one call, and the turn comes 8c. Thinking I have a huge hand, I check the bet to my opponent, planning an all-in over the top of him with my King-high flush if he bets. He tosses in a fifth of his stack, and I re-raise him all-in (he had me covered, but just barely) and after thinking about it for a while he calls, flipping over the Ace-high flush! He was sitting on the nut-flush, and had to think about calling! Ouch! That ended my night a little earlier than I had hoped, but made for a great hand.

Movie and Music Picks of the Week
For an entertaining if completely implausible movie, check out National Treasure, with Nicolas Cage. Nothing too substantial here, but a whole lot of fun and suspense. I’d put this in the same category as the Mummy movies, with both misusing the past to make good flicks with seductive, imaginative historical backdrops.

I just downloaded some Nora Jones songs off of iTunes, finally, and I love them! She has an amazing sound, which will completely sooth you after reading disturbing poll results like the ones above, or whatever else makes you as mad as hell! (Maybe this blog…) Sunrise seems to get the most play on radio, but Come Away With Me blows that away. A great song, so check it out.

Also, congrats to Usher on his eight Grammy nominations, and to Kanye West for receiving ten. Usher’s Confessions, Part 2 has to be a favorite to clean house this year, and it should be. Great, great music.

Coming Soon
Part 1: Reimagining Genesis, plus Part 2 of Book Dissection: The Meaning of Jesus, and Part 2 of Ways of Knowing and Knowing God. See you soon!

Book Dissection: The Meaning of Jesus

2004-11-30T22:02:00.001-07:00

(Note: I do not have permission from HarperCollins Publishers to print large excerpts of this book in this blog. If wish I did, because both authors express themselves very clearly and often poetically. I intend to outline and analyze this work: it will be up to you to read it.)

Let me say this at the outset: if you want to get a basic picture of how scholars look at Jesus, and you have little or no previous experience with New Testament study at an academic level, you cannot find a better introduction than this book. Even if you are well read, (perhaps you have plowed through Wright’s masterpiece Jesus and the Victory of God and/or Borg’s Conflict, Holiness, and Politics in the Teaching of Jesus and Jesus: A New Vision), this book so neatly summarizes the views of the leading British (Wright) and North American (Borg) Jesus scholars that I consider it indispensable. I read a lot of books, and rarely would I give any of them five stars. I’d give this one six.

The book breaks down into a set of eight topics, with Wright and Borg each writing an essay per subject. The two never directly rebut the individual essays of the other, though Wright does seem to make more of an effort to differentiate himself from Borg than Borg does from Wright.

A brief bit of background about the two men: Nicholas Thomas Wright currently serves as the Bishop of Durham and has been bouncing back and forth between pastoral and academic life for many years. Check out www.ntwrightpage.com for more information of his career and his vast body of work, much of which targets a non-scholarly audience.

Marcus J. Borg has for many years been the Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University (see his profile page here: http://oregonstate.edu/Dept/philosophy/borg.html). Both he and N.T. Wright were Oxford trained under George B. Caird, and like Wright he has authored many best selling books, including those for non-specialists.

The first section of the book deals with the question, How Do We Know Jesus?, with Borg leading off. For him a couple of dichotomies are important: the difference between history remembered and history metaphorized in the gospels (which he acknowledges as the main sources of our knowledge about Jesus), and the difference between the now cliché Jesus of history and Christ of faith. As Borg lays it out, the gospels contain some material that has its roots in actual past events, and other material which developed during the early days of the church and does not go back to Jesus himself. Similarly he differentiates between Jesus the flesh and blood person who lived thousands of years ago and Jesus the son of God who has been worshiped by Christians for centuries. Borg does not see the historical sides of the respective dualities as superior to the non-historical: he feels each serves the church in its own way.

He then lays out four lenses through which he sees the historical Jesus: 1) the gospels as a developing tradition; 2) Jesus as a Jew, and the need to study ancient Judaism; 3) Jesus and the origin of Christianity, with a need to focus on the social world of Jesus; 4) the importance of cross-cultural study of religion.

He then goes on to describe the importance of worldview for the study of Jesus, and his thoughts here will occupy the bulk of my comments on his chapter, so for the moment I will pass them over. He concludes with a two step method for historical Jesus research: 1) discerning the age of the material, and 2) setting the material in its historical context.

In summary, for Borg much of the gospel material cannot be considered historical, but still remains valuable in other ways. As we will see in the next segment of this blog series, Wright partially disagrees with this assessment.

All told Borg has many good points. In my view his emphasis on the need to separate the historical and metaphorical in the gospels ought to be adopted by all Christians who want a well thought out faith. Further, his refusal to link the value of biblical stories to their historicity ought to be applauded, and its example followed. I also like his and John Dominic Crossan’s shared emphasis on the social environment of Palestine at the time of Jesus, as well as his introduction of cross-religious study to Jesus research. As will been seen by his analysis of the actual material in later portions of the book, many of his thoughts on particular episodes of the life of Jesus are original and thought provoking.

One section of his chapter really bothers me a great deal, however, and I would like to examine it further here. In his brief, one page segment on worldview he divides all worldviews into two categories: religious and secular. Secular worldviews are defined as believing, “there is only ‘this’—and by ‘this’ I mean the visible world of our ordinary experience. “ (Borg and Wright 1999, 9) For the religious worldview, by contrast, “there is ‘this’ and ‘more than this’.” (ibid.,9) Borg calls the “more than this” part “the sacred.” For him, a religious worldview sees reality as being “grounded in the sacred.” (ibid.,9)

While modernity (which has become something of a curse word in academic circles today) according to Borg has been characterized by the secular worldview, which “is especially corrosive of religion…reduces truth to factuality…and raises doubts about…common religious phenomena such as prayer, visions, mystical experiences, extraordinary events, and unusual healings.” (ibid.,10)

While Borg as a young man had been fooled by this worldview, as he progressed into his thirties he began to see things in a different way, and indeed “saw that most cultures throughout human history have seen things differently,” and now expects that the secular worldview will soon, “seem as archaic and quaint as the Ptolemaic worldview.” (ibid.,9-10)

In the end this leads him to the very fashionable view amongst many conservative to moderate Jesus researchers that miraculous acts can be considered as historical events, which happened in the way they are described in the gospels. This perspective seems to be a way for non-evangelical commentators to show just how open minded and fair they are.

I cannot stand this passage for a multitude of reasons. The simple split between religious and secular worldviews vastly oversimplifies the situation, with one being based only on our ordinary experience and the other being a veritable Neverland of possibilities, where any number of wacky things can be expected to happen, apparently for no reason at all. Many philosophers have long criticized “god of the gaps” arguments, which replace scientific and intellectual endeavors to solve puzzles about our world with appeals to divine intervention. Yet here Borg presents an entire way of looking at the world which grounds it in something he calls “the sacred”, a poorly, if at all defined substance which can controvert any scientific laws we think we may have discovered at a mere whim. Borg relishes making reality “far more mysterious than the modern worldview” (ibid.,10) as if this could be considered a good thing. Honestly, if we are going to bring back visions and healings, wholesale, without trying to explain them based on the way the world works as described by science, why not bring back dragons, vampires, demon, angels, occult properties, platonic forms, reincarnation, and the whole lot? Pre-modern peoples all believed in these things, or in things like them. In fact, “most cultures throughout human history” have seen these things as being of the same reality as the sun, moon, stars, and our very own planet, as real as gravity, atoms, animals and evolution, as factual as the dirt we walk on and the air we breathe. But who the hell cares that they thought this! They were wrong. After all, they also thought at various times that cannibalism, humans sacrifice, infanticide, slavery, the subjugation and forced prostitution of women, the burning of heretics and the wholesale slaughter of weaker tribes were good things, while eating shellfish, breaking mirrors, exposing women’s heads, allowing people to practice faiths different from yours, winking and being a practicing homosexual were all bad. Does the fact that people believed these things in the past, or sadly, even in the present justify tossing the scientific worldview aside? I would hope not.

I find it funny that Borg uses the Ptolemaic worldview as an example of an outdated model of reality, because the last people to defend it, to the point of murder, were people who passionately held a religious worldview! If the secular worldview had not won out, I firmly believe people who refused to accept the entirety of the Bible as historical fact, like Borg, would still be burning at stakes.

To be fair, Wright denigrates the scientific, “secular” worldview as well. In an interview with Christianity Today, a very conservative Evangelical magazine, Wright said the following when asked about spiritual forces:

“I think we, in the western world, have often tended to dismiss as either nonexistent or irrelevant things that we don't understand. That's a very arrogant thing. People in many, many other parts of the world are perfectly aware that there are hidden forces in the world and around us, some of which are malevolent, and whatever language you use for them, you've got to do business with that stuff.” (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/123/23.0.html)

I respect these two men very much, and love their work, but if they think that calling those who do not believe in “mysterious” explanations for things that happen in space and time “arrogant” will somehow settle the argument they are deeply mistaken. Does Wright really think that people in some parts of the world have a special set of cognitive faculties that makes them “perfectly aware” of the involvement of demons and angels in everyday life, while we westerners have been silly to think that things like weather patterns, reproduction, disease, and nutrition might be better explained by science than by an appeal to a local god or goddess being angry or happy or whatever?

Surely neither man would want to voice support for the vast majority of stupid crap that people believed before modernity. Surely neither would want to live under the boot of the religiously focused inquisition. Nor be drafted into religiously motivated crusades and jihads, nor be burned alive on earth while looking forward to the same fate in a religiously based hell. Come on, can men of their stature really afford to open Pandora’s box all over again, simply because they want to get a warm feeling when they pray?

While Borg has not adequately described the secular worldview (which holds to many things outside of “ordinary experience,” while believing they have a natural explanation), he like so many others has not described at all the religious one, and has therefore allowed anything to be possible. I believe people have religious experiences, but not as Borg does that this can be construed as proof of a “sacred” realm, whatever that might be. I believe people believe they have been healed, but this does not mean the source of their healing must be attributed to divine intervention.

Let me say that I value highly religious/spiritual practices like prayer, meditation, and the study of sacred texts. I even believe we can have experiences of God, though in a very different sense than what has been traditionally believed (I will lay out my views on this in Part 3 of “Ways of Knowing and Knowing God”). We cannot assume that our religious experiences when we do those things mean that the world as we know it can be divided into physical and spiritual realms that interact in some unknowable fashion. I firmly believe that the physical world, described by modern science, is the world. It will do us no good to assume otherwise, and in fact, as the examples from the past listed above show, it may do us harm.

Borg seems to think that a secular worldview (one that believes in a so called closed universe) must exclude spirituality, but I disagree. Only if spirituality has to be based on our empirical senses and the logical conclusions we draw from it would this be the case. Yet we have other cognitive faculties like our emotions and imagination (both highly underrated in their importance in our evolutionary development) which allow us to see not only actualities, but possibilities, to not only receive information from other persons, but to empathize with them and make social connections, to not only physically interact but to love, value and understand one another, however imperfectly. Surely if our spirituality centers itself on these powers, not just on empirical truths, it can have great value, even if we believe that sub-atomic structures like those described in mTheory (popularly known as Super-String Theory), not “the sacred” ground reality. If we can somehow connect with God, even at the admittedly murky level of imagination and emotion (I suggest we connect with each other via these same pathways), and the divine can heal our hearts and soothe our psyche, surely that remains more important than God’s ability to heal our physical bodies?

I want to conclude with a couple of stories from my own pastoral experience. To protect identities, I will use fake names. I had an elderly lady (she was about 60 at the time) named Janice, in my very conservative Baptist church who believed in charismatic gifts like healing, tongues, and prophecy. After knowing her for only a short while, she told me the story of how she had been healed by cancer by a traveling team of charismatic evangelists. Her doctor had been amazed and could not explain why her cancer had receded. We both believe that she had been touched by the hand of God, and her experience further confirmed in my mind, at that time, that mighty works of God could still be expected.

Within six months of our conversation her cancer returned and as I left the church she went weekly for cancer treatment – “secular” treatment. (I have not since heard how that treatment progressed.) I love this woman with all my heart, and have more fond memories of her kindness and fellowship than of any other single individual from my pastorate. Yet her miracle did not last, because it never happened. We know shockingly little about the origins of cancer, much less why it recedes and attacks the way it does. Whatever the explanation for her short remission, I am confident God had nothing to do with it, beyond providing an emotional comfort.

On another occasion, right before worship service one morning--soon before I left my church in Texas to return to school in Wyoming--a panic stricken woman came running into the room we used as a sanctuary to tell us that a six week old child belonging to some people who had occasionally attended our church stopped breathing moments earlier and her parents were rushing her to the hospital in Granbury (about ten miles away). I stopped our services, and for one hour we prayed, individually, in groups, in every way we could, for God to “spare” the life of this little child. We quoted scripture, held hands, pleaded, begged. After service I rushed to the emergency room in time to comfort the family: their child had just died. About a week later I watched the child’s mother be physically dragged from the open coffin after the funeral service, screaming and weeping. As I did, a lady from my church whispered her disapproval of such behavior to me. “Why doesn’t she just have more faith in God? Doesn’t she realize her baby is in heaven with him? It is wrong of her to act like that.”

Perhaps as this mother took a final look at her precious baby she realized that the prayers of the saints for the mercy of God had left her child just as dead as it would have been had no prayers been lifted? Why bank on the mercy of God in the next, unknown life, when His power had proved too weak to match the passion of his people?

Am I saying that there can be no life after death? I don’t know, but if so it will be because of a progression in the power of God, or it will due to some other set of factors, the knowledge of which we do not have access to in this life. To expect that God’s job can be summed up as continuing our existence misses the point. Perhaps she cannot extend our lives in the way they are now, but surely she can enrich them. The response I gave to the mother at the graveside did not contain a condemnation for lack of faith in the questionable ability for God to bring her child back to life one day; rather I told her that when we suffer, God suffers with us, weeps with us, and can continually strengthen us in our time of suffering, until that time when we can come to accept the shortness of our lives and of those we love.

Perhaps in some way we live on in the mind of God, forever remembered and loved. Perhaps within his mind we remain somehow conscious. We can hope for this, and I see no harm in that. But to state this as an assured fact, akin to the reality of our own looming deaths cannot be considered anything but intellectually irresponsible. We can wish for that which we can only imagine, for things we cannot study and understand, but the reality of our wishing must be left uncertain. However, in this darkness of doubt, the light of God can constantly shine within us.

Most historical Jesus research has been done by people who are themselves interested parties to what they discover, and this has been the central complaint of those who doubt the veracity of the whole project. I believe such work can still be done, that the face of the Jesus of history can be further and further uncovered for us. If we try to bring the mythic into the historical, however we have proven the point of the critics. Both Wright and Borg would do even better than they have done if they would concentrate on the possible, not the imaginary, or at least to admit that such events cannot be given the same factual status that we give to Jesus’ actual existence and ministry. When tempted to believe in the miraculous healings of Jesus as history, we would do well to remember the actual history of Janice, a praying church, and a dead baby, and to focus on what we know God can do, not what we want him to do or to be. Let us love God and feel his love, while understanding it for what it is.

Ways of Knowing and Knowing God (Part 1)

2004-11-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

J.I. Packer’s Knowing God launched my theological education and in it Packer made a simple claim: knowing God should be our primary goal because that’s why we were created. That seemed easy enough, even if the pages turned slowly and with great difficulty for an early teen. One basic concept, a neat sentence that for years summed up the meaning of my existence: know God.

In many ways my obsession with gaining more knowledge started right there, because what could be greater than to know God as “he” truly is? To understand his complex, triune nature; to comprehend, if only in part his love. To be amazed by grace and to stand confident on the hard rock of his sovereignty. It appeared to be an amazing love affair, and I drenched myself in as many books on God and the Bible as I could find and understand. My Dad, himself being a fellow book glutton (to the tune of a 10,000 volume library that we moved about once a year), fed me all the information I could handle, and I became a very zealous Calvinist.

(As a quick aside for the unfamiliar, Calvinism is the belief that God has predestined all of history, and therefore controls it completely.)

Soon I began to teach the Junior High Sunday School class at my Father’s church, plowing through the Baptist Confession of Faith (which basically restated the more famous Westminster Confession, but without the sprinkling and infant baptism.) I went through the book of Genesis, relying heavily on classics like The Genesis Debate and Did Genesis Man Conquer Space (trust me, that book actually exists!)

All the while the way of knowing God became clear: study God’s Word (the Bible) and by learning it you will learn of the God who wrote it. God’s will for our lives could easily be grasped if we trusted the Word, not the world. I never thought to question this, because doing so would be the most immoral act one could commit. All my life the words “liberal” and “evil” were presented to me as synonyms, and still being a child, I never questioned that. Besides, the whole basis of my happiness rested on the Bible being true, being God’s words to us, and being the avenue by which I would come to know the Father.

At some point in our development, we finally question something we have long held to be true and discover that we no longer believe in it, at least not in the same way. For me, this came in two different ways: 1) my exposure to a book called Four Views on Hell, and 2) going with my Father and the deacons of our church to a Purpose Driven Church seminar.

What the hell, let’s tackle issue one first. (Yeah, I know, really sad pun…) As Part of his Wednesday night doctrine series, my Dad (hereafter, in all posts, “Oldie”, my nickname for him) went through this book with our church, covering a different view over each of four weeks. On week three we covered a view espoused by a man who would radically alter my life, Clark Pinnock, and the view goes by the name conditionalism (to those who wish to demean it, annihilationism). According to this theory of hell, people did not possess inherently immortal souls, but rather were kept in existence by God. Given this fact, coupled with his grace, God would not torture souls indefinitely in hell, but would destroy them completely, ridding the world of all evil. I thought that sounded kind of unique and out there. I like being “out there”, and so I soon liked conditionalism. It became my point of differential from those around me, a way to be unique without being a bad person.

The Purpose Driven Church conference turned my world completely upside down. Oldie had been struggling with a lot of divisiveness caused by some trouble makers within the church (at least from my perspective that’s what they were and that’s how they remain – coming after Oldie is probably one of the few ways to get me to hate you…but I digress.) All the church leadership, such as it was, traveled from Laramie (in southern WY, only half an hour from the Colorado border) to Casper, in the center of the state. There we joined about ten other church delegations in watching tapes of a guy named Rick Warren (not as famous then as he is now). For the first hour he described how churches are driven by many wrongheaded things, when they should be driven by God’s purposes – and then he named those purposes. I remember it as one of the few eureka moments in my life, when someone stated in a very simple way something that made perfect sense, and what’s more, something that hit very close to home. You’d have thought he had described our church, our situation, and more importantly our solution. He called on churches to be proactive about evangelism (the act of telling people about your faith in order to convert them) and to use it to grow. It hooked me, and I idealized both the book upon which the seminar was based, and its author.

However, I met a roadblock of resistance from Oldie: his Calvinism would not let him believe that we could convert anyone. Human effort made no difference because God through his irresistible grace brought men to salvation. The Spirit moved when it chose, not when we did. As a result, he refused to implement the changes the Purpose Driven Church advised, and this became the source of bitter disagreement between the two of us for the next three years (I was eighteen at the time, and it had been about three years since my introduction to conditionalism).

I reached a point of tension between my passion for the PDC and the promise it held of a fulfilling spiritual community, and my own belief in predestination. I began to view Calvinism in a different light, and it became increasingly unattractive. I began to seek out an alternative, which in the course of time would lead me back to Clark Pinnock and a book called the Openness of God.

More on that book another time. I know this little life story may seem like a diversion, but it has everything to do with the topic of ways of knowing and knowing God. It started me on an intellectual pilgrim where it became gradually alright to question more and more of what I had always been taught. It ultimately came to a place where it became clear that knowing God and knowing the Bible were not necessarily the same things. In fact, the later could be harmful to the former if careful measures were not taken.

I have no desire to exhaustively “debunk” the Bible: it’s been done, and to my taste done well, by others. However, I should note that many people still view the Bible as being perfect, even when taken in a strict, literal fashion (read with good old American common sense). It has errors, however, and they are not incidental and isolated from one another, but are systematic, weaved in throughout the collection as a whole. Here are a two of the problems:

1) All the biblical authors held to a special creation by God, and believed he created things as he wanted them to remain. The last part of that sentence cannot be overemphasized. Many of the moral arguments in scripture are based on the assumption of a created order, that life had been mapped out in God’s mind beforehand, and that he wanted each thing to take on a certain role. Paul’s argument against homosexuality in Romans 1 comes quickly to mind as an example of this, but it does not stand alone. Many times, throughout many different time periods, the men (and they were more than likely all male, an important point to keep in mind) who wrote the Bible made arguments that certain behaviors or practices were right or wrong because of the creation. (Another example, from the Hebrew Bible, or “Old” Testament, would be the Sabbath day being instituted on the seventh day of creation.)

However, while the hypothesis that the God with whom they felt a special spiritual/imaginative connection had created everything worked for ancient peoples, we now know this to be incorrect. The scientific community now almost unanimously holds that both life on earth, and the physical planet itself, have evolved from simple structures over long periods of time into more complex structures. In other words, the majority of men do not desire sex with women (and vice versa) because God created Eve out of Adam’s rib and wanted it to be that way; heterosexuals desire sex because natural selection has blindly chosen us to pass on our genes sexually, as opposed to asexually. That means our sexuality cannot be ascribed to God’s design, and therefore can be explored without offending God, all things being equal. That means that we can accept gay and lesbian people for who they are, and celebrate their love as beautiful, even if we don’t have those desires ourselves, because our sexuality can be found in our genes, not the purpose of God.

2) All the biblical authors held that God had actually, in fact audibly spoken to the great people of faith in the past (again, note that most of these individuals were men). They recorded God’s actual words in many cases (a.k.a. the Ten Commandments, the prophets, mostly found in the Hebrew Bible, etc…), in others were thought to have been guided by God’s own Spirit in an infallible way (Peter on the day of Pentecost, most of the New Testament scriptures), and finally in one special case were simply recording the words and deeds of God become man (Jesus).

Please understand this cannot be taken as akin to out sensation of divine presence when we worship, pray, and meditate. They believed not that they had a religious experience, but that they had heard the actual voice of God (emitted from his actual vocal chords?) telling them precisely what they should do and say. This idea, commonly referred to as special revelation (as opposed to natural revelation, what we can figure out about God on our own with our rational minds) permeates every part of the Bible – can we really believe it?

If someone claimed to hear God’s audible voice today you would consider them crazy. Does the fact that the biblical authors are removed from us by at least two thousand years make this typical response of ours any less valid? When a fundamentalist claims dogmatically to know the will of God on every subject, don’t we laugh at him/her? Don’t most of us look at our opinions on faith issue with far more humility than that, admitting that we could be mistaken? The authors of scripture would have none of that: they firmly believed that God spoke, not metaphorically but literally to them.

Yet if God can speak so clearly, why would he set up a middle man in the form of prophets, priests, and scriptures? Why not gather each new generation to a mountain every forty years and scare the hell out of them with his actual presence in time and space, his actual voice booming like James Earl Jones with words of wisdom for each situation our world finds itself in? Professing the mysterious ways of God here, as everywhere else, cannot be considered anything other than a copout. If God could speak to Moses audibly he could speak to all of us that way. He doesn’t however, and I firmly believe he would if he could, but he can’t. If God exists in reality (and I for one believe he does) then because of the nature of his being such forms of blunt communication with us are not possible.

So how can we know God, if not through holy books and holy men? Two options remain: 1) knowledge of God can be gained by rational arguments; and 2) knowledge of God comes from a spiritual cognitive faculty closely linked with our emotions and our imagination. Tune in next time for an exploration of both options!

An Outline of Things To Come

2004-11-22T20:23:00.000-07:00

Blogs are wonderful because they allow people like me to share random thoughts with the rest of the world, free from any obligation to be well outlined or fit into a set pattern of writing. While embracing this, I would like to have a few reoccuring features as well as my offbeat musings. Here then is an outline of what my posts will look like:

Reimagining Genesis

An examination of the book of beginnings, one of the most influencial and intriguing documents in the Bible. I will discuss some of the more fascinating scholarly debates on the book and offer some of my own interpretations of it. Also, I will present suggestions for Jews, Christians, and any other interested persons on the ways we can reimagine the text in order to come closer to God.

Book Dissection: The Meaning of Jesus

An appraisal of this accessible and often brilliant discussion of the historical Jesus and his relationship to faith by Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright. I will outline the two authors' views on Jesus, examine where they agree and disagree, and tell you my own evaluation of their positions.

Christianity Meets Reality

A look at some of the major issues confronting Christianity, many of them taken directly from the day's news. This segment will focus on what I see as the shortcomings of traditional Christianity, and its inability to deal with the current world situation. I will attempt to replace these views with ones more solidly based in reality.

Garbage Time

Masses of random thoughts, uncoordinated and all over the place. The fun stuff ,chaos theory in action, you know, everything else....

I should be ready to begin posting very soon. Thanks for checking in!

Coming Soon!

2004-11-21T22:38:00.000-07:00

Coming soon: A Liberal Christian philosophy major discusses a wide range of topics (from New Testament Studies to Epistemology to Politics to Sports and Entertainment to Whatever catches my intrest) from a skeptical/imaginative Christian outlook...Any suggestions or requests would be welcome. Hope to speak with you soon...