BioLogos is another voice in the creation/evolution discussion. The BioLogos foundation is founded by Dr. Fancis Collins, who is the lead geneticist for the Human Genome Project.

Unlike other Creation theory organizations, BioLogos holds the position that God works within nature and hence they support scientific theories of natural selection and theistic evolution in theological context. Whatever your thoughts are on this subject of creation and evolution, it is well worth listening to their perspective.

I don’t particularly have a problem with the idea that God could/may use evolution as we understand it, but my concern is that the description of ‘evolution’ from the scientific community (on a popular level) seems to infer a ‘purposeless’ process.

To imply ‘purpose’ into the process is to suggest more than what science can offer.

I have also always assumed that ‘random mutation’ was synonymous with purposeless, but I think this BioLogos short does a good job of showing the distinction.

BioLogos “Distinctions” from Three Light Pictures, LLC on Vimeo.

“We must believe something before we can know anything” - St. Augustine

Beliefs are never solitary. They are always dependent on other beliefs to be justified. It’s best to think of beliefs as a matrix of ideas.

When we solidify our beliefs, we may think of them as faith commitments. I like to think of faith as “belief + trust = faith.” But some prefer that this is not enough to be considered a truth claim… and therefore any real commitments must pass the test of scientific inquiry.

Some People will say that they rest their beliefs on Reason, as if rationalism is the true basis of knowledge. However, it seems to me that so much of what we pass as ‘reason’ relies so heavily on belief commitments. For example, if I am working on a math equation, I must rely on the logical certainty of math to believe I can come to a correct answer. If I didn’t trust math as a certainty, I would doubt the very possibility of finishing the equation.

The point I am making is that science, philosophy, physics, logic, etc… all rest on a set of presupposed beliefs. Some include the stability of nature; value of truth; what counts as testability; the laws of logic; etc…  In addition, the scientist and philosopher also have an interpretation of reality, such as how the world works, what is truth, what is moral, etc…  these are all faith commitments.

Reason is not separate from faith, it depends on faith.

A philosophical argument must rely on the assumption of the laws of logic. I must believe some things about the laws of the universe; about knowledge; about how I think things work, before I can make sense of an argument. I must believe before I can believe.

Crispen Sartwell is an Atheist and a Philosopher. But unlike the new atheists, he is a big proponent on this understanding of beliefs:

“That the atheist believes because of a neutral examination of arguments and the believer because of arbitrary emotional commitments is false, and it’s merely the atheist’s form of self-congratulation and other-disqualification. It is itself a mere self-serving dogma, and claims to have done what no person can do: abandon her own particularity and the burden of deciding what to believe.”…

“I propose an unreasonable and modest atheism, an atheism that relies not on supposed proofs and the lack thereof, but on a sense of the way the world is: an atheist faith.”
– Crispin Sartwell

To start, let me just say that I think there are good arguments to believe that God exists.

The problem is that the arguments that I think are so evident and powerful, are not always the case for somebody else. And in turn, some people are persuaded by arguments that I think are not very strong. What gives?

In addition, there are a lot of smart people that believe God exists and there are also a lot of smart people that do not believe God exists. Why is that?

The problem with ‘proving an argument’ is that proofs carry a property which is not often discussed. That is this thing called “Cogency.” Basically, not only does an argument have to be valid and sound, but it also has to be persuasive. And “persuasiveness” is subjective… everyone processes arguments differently based on how they view reality.

People develop a picture of the world and consciously or subconsciously commit to all sorts of truths. When an argument comes along… it is processed through this filter of reality. So people may disregard an argument simply because it doesn’t fit with their committed worldview.

Of course arguments can be a good thing; they are meant to challenge and shape your ideas. Sometimes persuasive arguments can even drastically change your worldview. But for most people… I would say this is probably unlikely. I am guessing that most people “believe” and then use rationality or arguments to reinforce their beliefs.

So if belief doesn’t come from rationality, where does it come from?
It arises from wonder; from a sense of justice; from a sense of eternity; from beauty; from life experiences, from self-awareness; from the Holy Spirit; from desire; etc…

Arguments and proofs may help people acknowledge and think about truth, but they are not a necessity for belief. And this is why I think that Christian evidentialists and certain Atheists (new atheists) are dishonest when they say that beliefs must be rationalized to be true knowledge. Reason and faith may very well go hand and hand, but reason is not a prerequisite for belief.

Video clip of the emergence band doing “Glory in the Highest.”
yea, that’s me on bass.

At emergence, we often discuss what it means to be counter-cultural, and with the start of passion week, I’ve been thinking about how subversive and counter-cultural Jesus was in his day. The cultural center-piece for Israel during Jesus’ day was the Temple, and it’s interesting how Jesus saw himself in relation to the temple. As N.T. Wight states… Jesus was a one man counter-temple movement.

The Temple was the place where one gained forgiveness
Jesus offered forgiveness to anyone in the street, apart from the temple system

The Temple was the place of worship
Jesus accepted worship

The Temple was the place of sacrifice
Jesus as the lamb of God, took on himself the sacrifice of sins

The Temple was the place of righteousness
Jesus offered an alternative way to be made righteous with God

The Temple was the place of God’s presence
Jesus spoke of his body as the temple

Jesus was the embodiment of the temple
Rather than reign from the temple, he claimed to be replacing the temple as the center-piece for the people of God.
He predicted and forewarned about the Temple’s coming destruction (AD 70).

“Jesus acted and spoke as if he was in some sense called to do and be what the Temple was and did. His offer of forgiveness, with no prior condition of Temple-worship or sacrifice, was the equivalent of someone in our world offering as a private individual to issue someone else a passport or a driver’s license. He was undercutting the official system and claiming by implication to be establishing a new one in its place.”
– The Challenge of Jesus, N.T. Wright

Many of us may have grown up thinking about what God must be like.

Having learned about God’s characteristics in our traditions, or by ministers or theologians, we have developed perceptions about God. We may have also learned about God’s divine attributes such as his omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence, etc… Even though we’d never seen God visibly, many of us felt like we knew him.

Then, for some of us… we became Christians.

And so when we discovered the person of Jesus and learned that he is the manifestation of God, we did something interesting: We started to apply our knowledge of God and try to fit that into the person of Jesus.

That creates all sorts of problems… first and foremost, we lose the humanity of Jesus for a golden Jesus that walks on air and carries a halo. A Jesus where temptation didn’t matter and limited knowledge was not possible for him… (yet the Gospels tell us otherwise).  I know there’s a whole Christological discussion about how that plays out from a trinitarian perspective (emptying of self, setting aside divine attributes, etc)… but the point of this post is not about the nature of God, but rather, how we perceive him.

Therefore when thinking about God, what if we start with Jesus and allow him to define our picture of God?

After all, if he is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), and the exact representation of his being (Heb 1:3), Then looking upon Jesus is in fact looking upon God. What if we started with Jesus, and then fit God into that? or another way of stating it is what if we allow Jesus to be our presuppositions of God.

I would argue that many of our theological problems would start to look different. What does the problem of evil and suffering look like with Jesus in the middle of that? What about the idea of a distant God? a God who doesn’t care? a God who supposedly uses natural disasters to portray his wrath?

If we start with Jesus… things start to look different.

A Worldview is essentially a  framework of ideas and beliefs through which an individual interprets the world and interacts with it. I think there are two different ways in which worldviews function. One is the systematic and the other is the narrative.

Systematic Worldviews
All the major religions and philosophical systems have what are propositional statements about reality. Questions like… is there a God? where did we come from? where are we going? etc… and you could find all sorts of charts and graphs that show you how these competing worldviews are similar and how they differ.

Some people may attribute these overarching ‘points-of-view’ to what they believe, but when applied to everyday events, ideas can easily get fragmented and/or appear too abstract. I would argue that belief propositions are much harder to contain and hold together.

Narrative Worldviews
Rather then statements of belief, a worldview can also function like a story. This I think, reflects more of how a person corresponds to life events. People tend to see their lives as a narrative, and so reality or beliefs in the form of story would have a deeper impact.

It’s interesting that the Jesus-movement in the 1st Century was not a movement based strictly on belief statements. Such as a credal formulas – do you believe in.. etc?. Rather, The Jesus-movement was the climax of the Israel story… of God’s kingdom breaking into history.

It was a narrative that reshaped the current narrative that people were already familiar with. Belief came in the form of story.

In a post-enlightenment world, we are fixated with formulas and therefore define our belief structures as such. It seems however, that the more intuitive viewpoint of reality, would be to see our story within God’s story. To allow our beliefs to be modeled by a narrative-shaped worldview.

Today when I was at my local video store, I noticed a huge selection of ‘new’ movie releases which followed a certain pattern. The images displayed here are actually just a sampling – I could have shown at least 10 more of these.

I’m not referring to the story-line, just the cover imagery and the visual theme. I’m also not passing judgment, just making an observation. It appears that the cultural attraction these days is ‘angry dudes with guns.’ People seem to like the vigilante style; don’t mess with me; I’ll kick your butt; check out my piece; and I’m angry about it; attitude in movies.

I get the whole James Bond ‘good stomping out evil‘ attraction, and I love superhero vigilante flicks as much as anybody. But James Bond wasn’t necessarily an angry tough dude; he was a slick guy doing his job. It seems like the extra added dimension these days is doing it with anger – punishing the villain with swagger.

I wonder how much of this type of ‘hero’ mentality filters into the cultural mind-set of how we perceive real goodness in life. Is goodness the idea of finally defeating your enemies? is goodness revengeful?

My wife had a conversation this week with somebody who argued that there are many evangelical Christians who are just waiting for Jesus to come back and cut his enemies to pieces (seriously stated just like that). He was referencing an article somebody wrote… who pointed to Tim Lahaye’s Left Behind series -  specifically the last of the books ‘kingdom come’ where Jesus does just that.

Are there Christians who really love the fact that Jesus will come back and destroy people in the end times? I actually don’t think the majority of Christians do ‘love that,’ of course you will always find some in all groups who do, but it’s not fair to generalize, and that was my wife’s point.

However, I do think that the cultural perceptions of how heroes are defined can be troublesome. I would caution that we don’t fit Jesus into our cultural paradigms of heroism. Victory by dying on a cross looks a lot different then victory by shooting up a casino of bad guys. It radically shatters our ideas of winning.

If we allow the culture to define Jesus, he may end up looking like this…