The human measure of divine characteristics has always been interesting. Earthly expressions of damnation and wrath know no bounds. You’ll not struggle to find believers who will judge a person worthy of hell without equivocation if a particular sin goes without repentance or is committed too many times. No matter what the extenuation in circumstance, the conception of God’s punitive measures does not struggle to exceed imagination.

Unfortunately this abundance of imagination doesn’t tend to extend to God’s mercy in the same degree. Time and again religious wisdom reaches beyond even the cruelest levels of human sadism to warn others what God is capable of for punishment. These punishments can come in return for something as taking God’s name in vain inadvertently in the moment, or ascribing to the wrong religion despite an honest desire and attempt to be close to God.

Imagine what these religious leaders would deem as the Godly punishment for putting Jesus to death? Continuous physical and spiritual torture notwithstanding, the punishment for simply not believing is harsh enough let alone cruelly going after God in human form. If the punishment for blasphemy is eternal damnation, what is the cost of killing God?

Fortunately for them Jesus’ divine standard of mercy deemed them worthy of forgiveness. As Jesus lingered close to death his final words regarding his tormentors was a plea for exactly that: Forgive them father, they don’t know what they are doing.

Dare to believe God’s love and mercy are more than you can express. Moreover, dare to share such a message with others. You may find your faith in your own salvation strengthened.

Awkward humor aside, McGrath explains the concept lucidly. More often, though, he gives insufficient background for his discussion. He writes helpful summaries, but he doesn’t preview his material to give the uninitiated reader a helping hand although, at about one hundred pages, he was not pressed for space. Ostensibly he does not want to bore his fellow scholars, but these sections would be easy skimmed and would not detract from the work at all.

Perhaps McGrath was picking his spots. At the beginning he does take his time trying to disabuse the reader of his modern monotheistic sensibility. He tells us that when we contrast Judaic “monotheism” with the “polytheism” of the ancient world, we’re imposing our current lexis anachronistically. His coverage of the nature of monotheism (he’s able to stay with the language after no little caveat) as seen from the relevant Jewish literature is excellent, though at times it looks as if he muddies the waters unnecessarily, only to clear them up for us later.

McGrath is not as careful discussing the terms “god” and “worship.” The modern denotations are very hard to shake, and we read those words differently than the ancients read elohim and proskunesis. No doubt he was avoiding working in the biblical languages, but it would have been helpful here, even though he does cover the breadth of usage of the words. There’s no introduction into the rabbinic material or his brief detour into textual criticism, which remains opaque in his hurried coverage. It’s this kind of oversight that makes McGrath only moderately successful at writing to the lay audience.

But that’s about as much bad as I can come up with. The book is otherwise a much needed 100-page punch to the gut. McGrath, with others, agrees that liturgical practice is an important defining factor of monotheism, but he goes a step further in specifying sacrificial worship. This is a key insight. He plays on it later on, but I wish he had drawn out the idea at this earlier point. Following the first two chapters, which focus on Judaic background, McGrath discusses monotheism in Paul’s letters, John’s Gospel, and the Book of Revelation. His treatment of those commonly-cited texts is informative and iconoclastic, a must-read on the issue of early Christian worship. Chapter six covers the “Two Powers Heresy,” though I found it unnecessary and would have preferred to see him use the space to develop his other ideas.

Good scholarship is not just about laying out the evidence and questioning preponderant opinions, but coming up with explanations. McGrath does not leave us wanting. Here’s a line of thinking that comes up in a few places scattered throughout the book. Speaking of John’s logos and its close relation to God, he says:

It was only after significant changes in world view had taken place, probably connected with the development of a clear doctrine of creation out of nothing, that it became urgent to sort out exactly where the dividing line between God and creation should be drawn. And so it was that Arius and other non-Nicenes said “between God and the Logos,” while Athanasius and the Nicenes said, “between the Logos and creation”[....] As I have noted, however, to expect John to answer a question that was only raised later is rather unfair. Yet it was this very question which led to the (re)definition of monotheism by Christians in the trinitarian terms we are familiar with today and by others in monistic terms. Prior to this, there apparently was no problem. (McGrath, 69)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I know it would make more of an impact than it does had the author published with a firm with wider and deeper roots than the University of Illinois Press. I’m happy to recommend it here and hope that it gets the readership it deserves.

The ID movement is officially agnostic about the identity of the D/designer, but that’s a bit disingenuous. None of them are working under the assumption that the designing mind will turn out to be just another biological life-form. As it puts us in an endless regression of designers, I’m going to speak to the capital-D theory. Much of the work done under the Intelligent Design label is scientific in some sense. A small handful of scientists have written books and papers that are at least academic enough that I don’t understand them, so I admit that investigating the question under ID does involve doing science. What I claim is that the hypothesis itself is not really scientific. Let me explain.

Criteria for scientific viability

There are three really good criteria for evaluating a potential science such as memetics, psychoanalysis, or Intelligent Design: explanatory power, experimental success, and fecundity.  Explanatory power is the ability of a theory to explain a breadth of phenomena. The atomic theory of magnetism has greater explanatory power than the tiny-invisible-purple-rope theory of magnetism (TIPR-theory, for short) because the latter is obviously ad hoc and unconnected to the rest of the world. It might explain why two pieces of metal are attracted to each other, but not much else. A scientific hypothesis should do more than answer a single question. It should provide an interpretive model of the world, even if only a small piece of it.

Experimental success as a criterion is obvious, and it goes without saying that a theory must be testable to be evaluated at all. Even though I made it up, I’m at a loss as to what kind of experiment would be a fitting test for TIPR-theory, particularly if I further qualified the tiny invisible purple rope as undetectable by modern means and not causally related to anything detectable. If it were testable, it would need to succeed in predicting the results of multiple experiments, or at least explain why it didn’t do so; and we’re back to explanatory power.

Fecundity is related to the first two criteria, and it has to do with the ability of a theory to generate new questions and experiments. The atom hypothesis leads both up and down the chain of hard sciences, to physics and chemistry, provoking questions and suggesting experiments. A classic example is the prescient ‘discovery’ of non-extant elements, filling in the periodic table with the identity and properties of materials known only through the model. TIPR-theory, in contrast, wishes simply to end the questioning. It suggests no new directions. Here’s the important part: This is because of the kind of thesis that it is, not because it’s wrong. And if it turns out to be right, remember that I came up with it. © Todor 2009.

So what about Intelligent Design? I think it’s a fantastic answer, of far-reaching explanatory power; but by its very nature it’s a poor question. Science thrives on questions, accepts answers only provisionally, and digs for deeper ones. If an ultimate answer is reached, science comes to an end, for there is no where else for it to go. This is precisely what finding Design, or the Designer, means. The capitals indicate an ultimate explanation, not a provisional one. This is not analogous to finding a watch and inferring a designer, because that answer to the question, Why is this as it is?, provokes the question, Where did the watchmaker come from? ID theorists stop at Design. It’s simply the nature of their thesis. Science may lead a researcher to the question, Is this Design?, but it cannot adjudicate an affirmative answer.

Here I have to revise an earlier statement. I’ve not yet seen ID people really investigate questions so much as debunk certain answers. They have done an excellent job at exposing the problems of the consensus view of the origin and diversity of life, but little has been done to build a rival hypothesis, a different interpretive model that makes better sense of the data. The explanatory power of ID is breathtaking, but there are no forthcoming experiments for it, and it doesn’t seem to be spawning other scientific work. This is not because there is no Designer, but because ID ends the scientific process.

Full-fledged ID science?

This is all a bit abstract, but I think it can be cleared up looking at it practically. What would we expect to see if ID were a science? Rather than just exposing holes in other theories, which itself is a big part of the process, there would be measurable work done in building rival models. I would think there is enough money in the social movement to set up think tanks, institutions (The Discovery Institute is more of  a public relations arm for the movement), or endowed fellowships (at a sufficiently conservative school), and a peer-reviewed journal where ID scientists would publish papers working out precisely where the Design is, how we know it when we see it, what experiments should be performed, and how the results of other experiments should be reinterpreted. Is Design at the level of species? phylum? DNA? Can there be multiple levels of Design? There are a lot of questions, and nothing resembling a consensus in the literature available to me. What is more, an emerging consensus should start to show greater experimental success than rival theories—it should simply work better.

Don’t get me wrong, what they’re doing now is ok. I’m happy to see anyone throw stones at Goliath—it’s better for everyone in the long run—and if the Discovery Institute and others can get him to fall, all the better. Maybe there’s an Einsteinian revolution in the offing for biology. But right now the Intelligent Design movement is pouting about being disrespected in the scientific community. If you’re doing good science the work speaks for itself, and you don’t need to be in the good graces of the National Academy of Sciences. So either do the science better than everybody else, or start playing a different game.

I feel like mainstream Christianity missed a trick when it came to the financial crisis. Imagine the chord that might have been struck with the greater public had there been someone front and centre in visible televangelism ranting about keeping the lamps trim and how consumerism was out of control. Even without a soothsayer, if large tracts of Christian communities had emerged unscathed from the financial crisis, the claim to God inspired wisdom around matters of finance would have greater resonance in public discourse. However, a large cross-section of society, Christian and not, were touched by the financial crisis. You can bet there were a fair few financial traders who take a pew on Sunday who were caught out by the collapse.

Indeed, in the lead up to the current global financial woes, one of the more prominent themes in visible Christian discourse has been prosperity preaching. Now, I’m not against prosperity, but the problem is that the prosperity in prosperity preaching comes across predominantly as monetary.

Prosperity in a spiritual relationship surely bears its blessings spiritually first and foremost. Being spiritually blessed is its own reward and should surely be seen as separate and having no connection to financial means. In terms of what sustains a person, in a Christian dynamic it’s fitting that bread is the metaphor for what a person should be careful about focusing on in living day to day.

Mainstream Christian discourse could do better to make the distinction clearer. Financial means aren’t a necessary or promised part of the package of spiritual prosperity. Many communities through history have found ways to unite through times of material drought and maintain great spiritual prosperity despite the hardships suffered. Unfortunately the message that comes across in some Christian circles is that monetary ‘blessings’ are a fruit that proves spiritual prosperity. However, as the financial crisis showed, money doesn’t mean you’re spiritually prosperous, so it should follow that we should never see monetary means as evidence of spiritual prosperity, even if the person is a Christian.

In fact, if anything monetary means shouldn’t be seen as a blessing in reward for a strong walk with God, but a heavy responsibility to be exercised with wisdom to benefit those in need. Otherwise the temptation can be to acquire objects that exemplify spiritual prosperity through monetary blessing, even while fundamental spiritual aspects of a person’s life fall by the wayside. This approach typifies part of what brought us the financial crisis in the first place, the desire to exude success through acquisition, done quickly rather than thoughtfully.

If the Christian community can knuckle down and keep the lamps trim, a great foundation can be laid for future prosperity. Gains can be made with hard, humble work, rather than an ethic that falls in too easily with capitalistic mores that don’t lean far enough towards clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. Perhaps in lowering our monetary expectations for ourselves, we can learn to better share our abundance with those in need. This doesn’t need to be a straight transfer of money. It could be as simple as sacrificing potential earnings through time spent helping others to help themselves using our experience and expertise. It is this human to human contact which has the greatest chance of building spiritual prosperity, so much greater than writing a cheque.

Money is an evil we have made necessary, not a necessary spiritual tool gifted to us from God along with life since the time of Adam. There are enough of us whose parents did much to enrich our lives with a lot less than what many of the rich have done for the children we regularly see exemplifying excess and wayward behaviour in the media. This is not to say that being rich is bad for children, only that monetary means aren’t necessary for good children. Perhaps now is the time to double our efforts to extol a trimming of the lamps. Let others get excited over recoveries that may or may not eventuate. We can keep a constant ethic of conservative consumption, tied to spiritual prosperity, that people can take comfort in no matter what the financial conditions. What better way to prepare for any future financial storms?

At stake are questions of religious hypocrisy, religio-economic and -educational stereotypes, and even the very morality of religion, Christianity in particular. Science does a far better job at insulating itself from politics than religion does. Religion wallows in it. Nevertheless, even when someone is speaking from the hallowed halls of science, we still have to think carefully about what we read and watch for agendas just as closely. The “democratization” of news in the age of the Internet, and more recently “Web 2.0,” has increased our awareness of effect of mediation: the news is most certainly filtered, it’s only the degree that’s in question. With the plurality of sources available we can even filter it ourselves, pumping only the sources that agree with our point of view.

But in this case there is further complicating factor beyond the media. Those involved in higher levels of study in the sciences or the humanities know that there generally is a significant disparity between the state-of-the-art in the academy and the state of public understanding. This is a fitting subject for Concrete Academic, I should think. Scientific findings have to be interpreted, and when they are not contextualized responsibly—forgive me this cliché—a little knowledge can become a dangerous thing.

So much for the preface. The study, “Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States,” is only fourteen pages long, so it is worth reading. The authors begin by noting the influence of religiosity in the debate over sex education in school, and the importance of such education along with contraception, as opposed to teaching “abstinence only,” for lowering the birth rate. Given this, the relationship between religiosity and birth rate should be examined. After reviewing a few previous studies, which did not speak univocally, they explained their own research.

So far so good, but now a couple of things give me pause. First, they did not do their own field work but rather mined existing data. Sometimes this is necessary, and it’s certainly easier logistically, but it’s harder to get fix on what you’re looking for. The data they worked with came from two separate banks: birth rates from the Center for Disease Control, and a poll on religious feelings by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (plus another, negligible, to control for income). Both were done at the state level. Using one study they compiled a ‘religiosity score’ for each state, and then using the other they looked at birth rates for teens. The hard statistical work came in correlating the numbers. They no doubt did good work with what they had. But this is not a very close look at the issue. Certainly it is not close enough to account for a plurality of sociological factors, such as the propensity for the religious to marry younger than the irreligious.

The authors admirably warn against over-interpretation of their statistics at the end of the paper, so much so that one wonders about the usefulness of the work. I think it is suggestive, but far from impressive. The media’s coverage of it wasn’t either. It’s hard to fault the AP and others for reporting the ‘facts,’ which they did, but they lacked sufficiant context. The professionals reading the journal know how to weigh the article, and they speak the language well enough to understand what the authors can and can’t do with it; the general public does not. This requires us as readers to be aware of our own ignorance and to be modest in drawing conclusions.

The first thing to say about Ruse’s embarrassment is that when you’re used to navigating the labyrinths of philosophical argument nearly every statement that isn’t written in logical notation just isn’t quite good enough. Let’s remember that very intelligent people are being swayed by Dawkins’ apologetic. But it’s quite true that in the trade, or among those who have cut their teeth on philosophy of religion, Dawkins isn’t a worthy standard bearer to follow Bertrand Russell or Antony Flew. Keep in mind, too, that the spokesmen for “New Atheism” are not interested in debating within the University, but without, appealing to a broader public that have otherwise been ignored by the atheist intelligentsia. Their works are, naturally, on a much more accessable level. Four hundred pages of The God Delusion takes as long as reading one hundred pages of Flew.

Nonetheless, even accounting for a different audience, why are Dawkins’ arguments so shallow by comparison? One’s ability to speak intelligently, learnedly, about a subject is directly proportional to the amount of time spent thinking deeply about it. Dawkins is exceptionally good at talking about evolution—he’s spent a lifetime at the cutting edge of theoretical biology. But he has not thought much on religion, despite writing such a popular book about it. His only deliberation has been about how evil religion is and how unscientific. That’s simply not enough. Serious thinking involves working the problem from multiple sides, questioning your own work, and taking others’ arguments at their best. I have no doubt that when he published his many other critically-acclaimed books Professor Dawkins sent proofs to the smartest people he knew that disagreed with him. I don’t think he did so with his atheist manifesto. Even since its publication it seems he has not listened to the criticisms of Oxford colleagues Alister McGrath and John Lennox, nor strictures from within his own camp (see “godless ilk” above).

The upside for those on the side of the angels is that popular atheism has absorbed, as one would expect, only the easiest bits of Dawkins, and the “religion is stupid” argument need not bother them. The downside is that “religion is stupid” is so easy it’s ubiquitous, and this intellectual crutch for those who are atheist irrespective of the arguments can lock the theists into a similarly infantile response. The atheist position can seem so poor, relying on sheer loudness, that the believer comes to think that there is no argument.

The theist can make the same mistake that stumbles Dawkins: not taking the other side seriously. So committed is the believer to his worldview (no more or less than Dawkins) that no credit can be given the opposition without feeling one’s knees buckle, as if every argument not immediately dismissed brings one closer to the precipice of unbelief. This can make for an impoverished faith. There is no weakness in admitting a good argument, and doing so doesn’t mean accepting it as entirely convincing. Instead of stones for stumbling, they can be steps to a more introspective and ultimately more robust theism.

Dawkins’ problem is assuming that there can’t possibly be a reason for thinking any differently than he does. Easy mistake to make.

Many religious and cultural traditions have a variation on this principle. There is a practical and social benefit to according the guardians of our youth proper respect. Ideally, bonds are sown in communities between youth and elder that cement unique values and behaviours designed to foster social harmony and the passing of wisdom through generations.

As with any social network, the system is not without its flaws. Elders compete with other influences for the attention of youth. The divide of perspectives through generations sees huge splits not just between age, but other factors like education and technology that also shape ideology. However, the lessons of elders that do leave their impressions hold a strong sway over a person as they progress beyond youth and become elders themselves. Indeed, with all the tensions that are traditional between elder and youth, the ideas that breach the divide and hold firm can only do so with a lasting, profound impact.

Consider, then, the youth that rages against a parent, particularly on ideas around religion. The youth loses the parent to premature death, but finds meaning in the religious lessons left behind, and becomes a devout evangelist in adulthood. Their ideology is somewhat conservative because the parent’s reaction to their rebellious youth was to extol the stricter aspects of faith as a protection against the whims of human desires.

Consider the youth that enjoyed a closer relationship with their parent based on their accord on religious principles. No matter what tensions existed in the realms of political and other issues, the youth has always felt the warm embrace of their parent symbolized chiefly in the harmony of their religious ideals. The youth’s religious upbringing was somewhat liberal, emphasizing the joy of acceptance in divine love and tolerance through humility of the ego. If anything, this upbringing was the parent’s reaction to their relationship with their own parent, which was far more distant.

Who is right when the two meet and debate ideology? Both see in the other elements that either disrespect the memory of a lost parent or undermine the close connection currently held with a parent. Worse, they see in each other the pratfalls of religious perspective that were exactly what their parents tried to shepherd them from in their youth. To varying degrees this issue exists as a stumbling block to harmony not only across lines of religion, but also denominations within religions.

One can make the case that both need to think twice before being too critical of the other. Much joy can come from sharing that which brings strength to our spirit. However, pushing that too hard on others who are already sustained in their walks can demand a dishonouring of a fundamental relationship not just in society, but religion. Paul takes this principle a step further in Romans 14, showing that the desire to force discipline on freedom or tear down discipline with freedom can dishonour a fundamental relationship between human and divine. The personal standards we set for ourselves aren’t always a necessity for others, even if they stem from our spiritual walk.

Honouring our mothers and fathers doesn’t end with blood ties. We may find our ties better bound in society if we took greater steps to respect the way others honour their mothers and fathers.

There is a strain of theology that is little more than humanism trying to be transcendent. There are no texts to be burdened with, no propositions to be understood, and few absolute moral imperatives. This makes it wonderfully ecumenical since any religion properly thinned out can affirm it. From the standpoint of this existentialist theology, all religions are talking about the same thing, just using different metaphors. Even God is thinned out, removed of personhood, and completely inoffensive. He is not a “he,” because that implies a personal, sexed, limited being, whereas God could be nothing less than Being itself, so ineffable that the best thing a theologian can do is sit in silence.

What’s particularly interesting about this book is that it looks like a bit of offense from a rather defensive religious position. The appeal of this kind of thinking is that it sidesteps the charging bull of criticism leveled at all religious traditions, but particularly Christianity, since the Enlightenment. All of the nice parts of a religion, such as “do unto others…”, are kept, and all of the less easily defensible parts are disavowed. The difficulty then becomes the fact that once you so rob religion of its content, there is not much to talk about: you can’t refute it, but you can hardly recommend it either. Armstrong is trying to do just that. She wants to say that there really is a role for religion in this scientific age, even though what she offers is so unspecified that it’s manifest equally in ancient cave paintings and opera.

In and of itself, not so bad. But it looks like she rewrites a bit of history in her image to get there. I’ll return to that if I get a closer look at the book.