T.G.I.F.
It is Friday, though while for me that means a weekend where I will still have to read, Emerson and Faust respectively, plus work on my pathetically behind online classes, it's still Friday. Sadly, my wife works every day this weekend and my son will be gone all day tomorrow for football. I get to hang around because I have to help emcee the annual stewardship dinner at my episcopal parish Sat. night. That last sounds like a line out of Garrison Keillor. I am a huge closet fan of Keillor's show and books, by the way. I get to either too infrequently, but Prairie Home Companion is as good as radio gets, especially on a cold weekend in the mountains as the oil lamps and woodstove window burn.
It isn't cold yet, but it will be. The change is coming even if it's a little behind at the moment. Oh yes, on that note, I'll be up at my mom's bringing down cedar rounds much of Saturday also. Free cedar is tough to pass up even at my age.
Enough dribble. I have a few moments to blog. Yesssss! To quote Napoleon Dynamite.
***
The comments to my post below are excellent. Alison, especially, opens up and shares a genuine spirituality. More spiritual than any essay of mine. There are times I think I should abandon even my lay attempts at responding to atheist skeptics, but I continue to want to write those kinds of posts because I struggle myself and I hope as I work through my own stuff it may help someone else. And because, to be honest, there is too often a smug arrogance in the skeptical community (I say this realizing I can be both) which overwhelms those of us outside. A good scientist, most scientists, will say that no hypothesis is ever proven; we simply arrive at greater levels of probable knowledge. Or perhaps in practice, the only thing science can make definitive pronouncements about is what can be observed reptetitvely in the lab. Even then, as my chemistry professor used to say, "We can't say that heat always flows from a warmer object to a cooler one, only that it has never been observed to flow the other direction." Even Bertrand Russell notes that thinking inductively, a chicken can be sure the farmer comes each day to feed it; this phenomena has been observed its entire life, until the day the family wants chicken.
Perhaps science gets its arrogance because it has worked so well with medicine, with descriptions of the macro and micro worlds, with harnassing energy, with making very ruthless weapons, sadly, when governments have requested them. And science has disproved buttloads of superstition in the last three centuries. To think back to an old Saturday Night Live skit, my stomach ache is not caused by demonic influence, nor by an imbalance of bodily humors due to a small toad living in my stomach, but by GERD, easily treated with one aciphex before bed each night.
Of course this doesn't mean science can make proclamations about what lies beyond its realm of inquiry. Nor that scientific knowledge hasn't led many individuals, including actual scientists, to religious faith. I think of the old fable of the six blind men each touching a different part of an elephant and trying to describe the animal. If they all didn't have access to the entire creature, but just the trunk, the tail, the side, a leg...each would seem universally foreign. Science has told us some good and true things about one part of a very large elephant. How large our race cannot say.
Now I am tired. I think a mini-nap, if I can pull it off, is in order. Mike will be home in an hour. I just wanted to drop in and say hello to the good people who pop in here.
On Education for Ministry, the lay theology class offered through the Episcopal church: so far (two meetings) this has been excellent. Very ersonal and open. A small group of motivated students. The view of scripture presented so far is scholarly, open-minded, and even literary. They recommend the four source theory for Genesis, the J, E, P, D thing I think von Rad may have come up with. In other words, Abraham could have been a real person...or not; the point is Genesis recounts God's dealings with mankind and does so from multiple perspectives later redacted. Abraham might have been a tribe, a clan, one person or a mythological reconstruction. For me, that kind of Christianity is where I have to start at least. Innerrancy, with all respect to those who hold to it, is simply not what I've seen so far in any of the bible's books (however many we count as belonging there). From what I've read of the scripture, however the Bible was inspired, it was not dictated word for word and the human element is blatant. For me, a rational approach to scripture, as opposed to a presuppostion that it is without error apart from its content, is a much better way to begin.
But now I'm really drifting off topic, whatever the topic was. Love to all who read and comment here.
mr. sleepy
It isn't cold yet, but it will be. The change is coming even if it's a little behind at the moment. Oh yes, on that note, I'll be up at my mom's bringing down cedar rounds much of Saturday also. Free cedar is tough to pass up even at my age.
Enough dribble. I have a few moments to blog. Yesssss! To quote Napoleon Dynamite.
***
The comments to my post below are excellent. Alison, especially, opens up and shares a genuine spirituality. More spiritual than any essay of mine. There are times I think I should abandon even my lay attempts at responding to atheist skeptics, but I continue to want to write those kinds of posts because I struggle myself and I hope as I work through my own stuff it may help someone else. And because, to be honest, there is too often a smug arrogance in the skeptical community (I say this realizing I can be both) which overwhelms those of us outside. A good scientist, most scientists, will say that no hypothesis is ever proven; we simply arrive at greater levels of probable knowledge. Or perhaps in practice, the only thing science can make definitive pronouncements about is what can be observed reptetitvely in the lab. Even then, as my chemistry professor used to say, "We can't say that heat always flows from a warmer object to a cooler one, only that it has never been observed to flow the other direction." Even Bertrand Russell notes that thinking inductively, a chicken can be sure the farmer comes each day to feed it; this phenomena has been observed its entire life, until the day the family wants chicken.
Perhaps science gets its arrogance because it has worked so well with medicine, with descriptions of the macro and micro worlds, with harnassing energy, with making very ruthless weapons, sadly, when governments have requested them. And science has disproved buttloads of superstition in the last three centuries. To think back to an old Saturday Night Live skit, my stomach ache is not caused by demonic influence, nor by an imbalance of bodily humors due to a small toad living in my stomach, but by GERD, easily treated with one aciphex before bed each night.
Of course this doesn't mean science can make proclamations about what lies beyond its realm of inquiry. Nor that scientific knowledge hasn't led many individuals, including actual scientists, to religious faith. I think of the old fable of the six blind men each touching a different part of an elephant and trying to describe the animal. If they all didn't have access to the entire creature, but just the trunk, the tail, the side, a leg...each would seem universally foreign. Science has told us some good and true things about one part of a very large elephant. How large our race cannot say.
Now I am tired. I think a mini-nap, if I can pull it off, is in order. Mike will be home in an hour. I just wanted to drop in and say hello to the good people who pop in here.
On Education for Ministry, the lay theology class offered through the Episcopal church: so far (two meetings) this has been excellent. Very ersonal and open. A small group of motivated students. The view of scripture presented so far is scholarly, open-minded, and even literary. They recommend the four source theory for Genesis, the J, E, P, D thing I think von Rad may have come up with. In other words, Abraham could have been a real person...or not; the point is Genesis recounts God's dealings with mankind and does so from multiple perspectives later redacted. Abraham might have been a tribe, a clan, one person or a mythological reconstruction. For me, that kind of Christianity is where I have to start at least. Innerrancy, with all respect to those who hold to it, is simply not what I've seen so far in any of the bible's books (however many we count as belonging there). From what I've read of the scripture, however the Bible was inspired, it was not dictated word for word and the human element is blatant. For me, a rational approach to scripture, as opposed to a presuppostion that it is without error apart from its content, is a much better way to begin.
But now I'm really drifting off topic, whatever the topic was. Love to all who read and comment here.
mr. sleepy
Comments
Good to hear your voice again. I only wish I was as coherent in my thoughts and understanding when I'm wide awake as you are on the verge of a nap. ;)