Undeception

Consider divine action in the origin of the world to be like the strokes of a cue stick in a game of billiards. Label the balls into three groups using the words “heavens,” “earth,” and “living organisms,” and let the 8-ball represent humans. The young earth creationist depicts the Creator making single shot after single shot with no miscue until all the balls are off the table. No doubt, that is remarkable. A progressive creationist sees the opening stroke that breaks the balls as the Big Bang. All of the balls labeled “heavens” and “earth” are sunk by this initial shot. Then God sinks those that signify living organisms and humans individually. That is even more impressive.

Evolutionary creationists claim that the God-of-the-individual-shots (or “gaps”) fails to reveal fully the power and foresight of the Creator. According to their view of origins, the breaking stroke is so finely tuned that not only are all the balls sunk, but they drop in order, beginning with those labeled “heavens,” then “earth,” followed by “living organisms,” and finally the 8-ball, the most important ball in billiards, representing humans. And to complete the analogy, the Lord pulls this last ball out of the pocket and holds it in His hands to depict His personal involvement with men and women. Is not such a God infinitely more talented than that of the anti-evolutionists? Is His eternal power and divine nature not best illustrated in the last example?

from Evolutionary Creation, by Denis O. Lamoureux (pp. 94-95)

I have been musing lately about how my stance on the creation/evolution controversy would impact other areas of theology if applied consistently. The stance I’m referring to is my conviction that viewing the history of the natural universe as a string of miraculous interventions into nature is hopelessly misguided. I have argued that the atheistic science apologists and the fiat creationists find themselves in agreement on a falsehood, namely that there’s either a natural or a supernatural explanation for the physical phenomena of the cosmos. While agreeing in principle with those two groups, the God-of-the-gaps philosophy known as Intelligent Design tries to bridge the gap a bit and posits an admixture of natural and supernatural explanations that end up sounding arbitrarily inconsistent: the leading ID advocates accept common descent as predicted and confirmed by the scientific method but paradoxically insist that the theory of evolution is insufficient to explain natural phenomena without the aid of Someone/something (nah, just Someone) else whose interventions must remain unrecoverable by the scientific method. One is left wondering where the natural explanations stop and the supernatural ones begin, or even why one must stop for the other to begin.

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Setting: Joe returns home after work to find a package on his doorstep: it’s a present from his friend Jim in Milwaukee! How thoughtful of him! He opens it up to find a book on origami, a topic of common interest among the two and their mutual friends in the Origami Club. Overjoyed, he calls Jim up.

Joe: How can I ever thank you!

Jim: Don’t worry about it – I found it at a bookstore down the street.

Joe: This book has always been too expensive for me to buy.

Jim: I know, but since I could afford it and I knew you needed it–

Joe: I can’t thank you enough, Jim! You drove all the way to Boston to deliver it!

Jim: I’m sorry?

Joe: I said thanks for making that long trip to get it here. That’s means more to me than the book itself!

Jim: Well Jim, of course I didn’t actually drive it there.

Joe: Oh, Jim, tell me you didn’t buy an airplane ticket just to bring me this book! What a friend you are! Wait’ll I tell Simon…

Jim: Uh, Joe…I just sent it Media Mail®. Didn’t you see the packaging? What’d you expect? I’m a Postal Service manager!

Joe: Pretty sly, Jim. Way to test my faith in your friendship! But as you see, I’ve passed! Besides, I just remembered that Larry told me you were going to be hand-delivering me a present, so I guess this was it! You see, I know enough about you to realize that you’re much too good a friend to just send it through the mail – why, my present could have gotten lost in the shuffle! No, you’re much too conscientious for that. Plus, you’re not a liar, so what you told Larry must have been true. Oh, Simon is gonna be so jealous!

Jim: I sent a copy to Simon and the other club members, too. And as for Larry, I told him I was bringing it with me to the post office rather than putting it in the mailbox. Either he got mixed up a little on the details or you misunderstood him. But anyway, I did pay for insurance on it – I would have gotten it to you one way or another, you know.

Joe: Unbelievable. I just realized what happened: you rode along in – or maybe even drove – the mail truck just to make sure it got here! Probably wanted to make sure it didn’t run out of gas or make a wrong turn anywhere. Pastor Duane always said that mail trucks can’t get anywhere without running into some problem or other. So the fact that the package arrived at my doorstep is proof positive that you intervened to make sure the delivery happened without any hitches. That’s it, isn’t it? Whaddaya wanna bet that Simon swallows your clever cover story hook, line, and sinker! He never did like you as much as I do.

Jim: You’re not listening to me: I sent it through the mail because I of all people am aware of the contingencies of mail travel. Besides, I mostly just wanted you to enjoy the book, you know.

Joe: Heh heh…all right, good stuff, but you better tone it down or Simon and the others definitely won’t believe me. I think you might have covered your tracks too well, Jim! Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you get the proper credit: I’m going to get Mike, Bill, and Phil to verify that you were in the mail truck, and then–

Jim: Joe, I’m telling you, I just sent it through the mail, normal channels, and I didn’t have to personally interfere with the delivery.

Joe: But Larry said–

Jim: Joe, just enjoy the book, ok? And you know, if I am not telling you the truth about this now, why should you believe what I supposedly told Larry?

Joe: But–

Jim: Who are you going to believe? What you think Larry heard me say or me?

Joe: <long pause> You sly dog! Almost had me there! Now let me see what kind of honor I could give this gift of yours…how does a museum and theme park sound?

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The New York Times has published an article on the results of a genetic study that sought to show the genetic interrelationships of the peoples of Europe. This is fascinating to me as an Indo-European linguist and someone interested in the early history of Europe. Looking at the map provided in the article, I see that the Europeans as grouped according to their genetic heritage correlate strikingly with the reconstructed language families and with the conclusions of archaeology – or should I say “intelligent historical linguistics” and “intelligent archaeology”? (Sorry, couldn’t resist a dig. Or the bad pun!)

Naturally, the speakers of Germanic languages are closely related. It is also not surprising that the Celtic peoples in Ireland have overall interbred with the Germanic peoples who have displaced them, but it is quite interesting that they share such a close relationship with the continental people of the Netherlands and that both these are tangential to France, whose old name Gaul is related to “Gaelic” because of its ancient Celtic population. The Celtic languages are almost extinct, but as they were assimilated rather than wiped out, their genetic inheritance is still noticeable enough to detect relationships between those who remained on the continent and those who broke off and populated the British Isles.

The close grouping of most Romance language speakers on the genetic map belies the geographic spread of Portugal and Italy as expected, but those not well read in medieval European history would be surprised that the French population overlaps with the populations of Germany and Austria much more than with the other Romance groups. This is quite expected, however, and would have been predicted by anyone who knew that the name “France” is derived from a Germanic tribe called the Franks. Ancient France was the hub of a lot of activity; populated by Celts in the time of Julius Caesar, it was invaded and taken over by the Germanic peoples early in the Christian era. Because the Holy Roman Empire situated itself in France, the language of the Romans, Latin, became the official language of the region, so that what we have in France today is an admixture of Celtic and Germanic people speaking an Italic language. I would be interested to how much the contiguity and overlap of the Italic/Romance people groups on the map is a result of relatively recent geographical proximity and how much is attributable to the proposed prehistorical relationship between the Celtic and Italic people/languages (Italo-Celtic is a popular, but not uncontested, subgrouping of Indo-European).

And of course I would be remiss not to point out the position of Finland on the genetic map. Their noticeably divergent genetic stock is not explainable in simply historical terms, but it’s completely understandable given the separate linguistic history of the Finns and the other Europeans: Europeans are descendants of the Indo-Europeans, and the Finns are rather descended from a group of people whose language family is usually called Finno-Ugric. The fact that Hungarian, the “Ugric” half of Finno-Ugric, is spoken by people genetically indistinguishable from the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe is only marginally remarkable because they have not been isolated geographically as have the Finnish, but I don’t know enough about that language family and its history to make any more comments.

Looks like the Chinese have been found out – but they’ll probably never admit it.

It seems one impossibly young-looking female gymnast from China’s team was described in a state-run news report last year as being only 13 years old, which would make her ineligible for the Olympics this year and her contributions illegitimate.

Okay, so the Chinese government’s crooked. No surprise. But the reason I’m posting this is that quotes like the following in the AP article I read had me scratching my head as I skimmed through it:

Chinese authorities insist that all three are old enough to compete. He herself told reporters after Wednesday’s final that “my real age is 16. I don’t pay any attention to what everyone says.”

If the age reported by Xinhua was correct, that would have meant He was too young to be on the Chinese team that beat the United States on Wednesday and clinched China’s first women’s team Olympic gold in gymnastics. He is also a favorite for gold in Monday’s uneven bars final.

At first I chalked up the gender disagreement and capitalization “error” to be translation errors. Obviously, if I had either 1) stayed apprised of the gymnastics competition or 2) read the intro of the article closely, I would have noticed that the gymnast’s name is He Kexin.

Note: I regularly break what seems to be an unwritten law for blogging that says that, except for minor editorial fixes, one shouldn’t edit posts that add new information without some kind of notification. I have added a little more material to this post to make my arguments more clear; my position remains the same, whereas my explication of my position has hopefully been augmented.

Ah, the infamous, dreaded, and hitherto confusing “unpardonable sin”. What is it? Well, until this week I didn’t know.

Ironically, I first encountered the interpretation I am about to present when hearing someone dismiss it in favor of the interpretation quite popular in evangelical circles nowadays, which is roughly as follows.

Looking at the immediate context of Jesus’ statement on the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, we see that the Pharisees were attributing the miraculous works of Jesus to Beelzebub (Mat 12.24), charging Jesus with simply carrying out Satan’s orders. But instead of responding with an angry outburst or a pronouncement of doom upon the Pharisees, Jesus first deconstructed their argument logically (vv. 25-29) and then delivered the surprisingly magnanimous statement,

“And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” (vv. 31-32)

Now, so far I’m in agreement with this interpretation. The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is defined as rejecting the works of the Holy Spirit and condemning them as evil. But the majority of Protestants don’t allow you to believe that Christians can lose their salvation, so the inference is made that this must be something that is done by unbelievers; additionally, the majority of Christians have believed that the sins of unbelievers are not forgiven anyway. So they tie these things together: the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is simply rejecting the call of the Holy Spirit to salvation. Naturally I thought it was strange that the two men I heard advocating this belief last week are Reformed and so ostensibly don’t believe the Holy Spirit “wastes” his calling on the non-elect. However, not being Reformed myself, my own problem with this interpretation has always been that it seems tautological and smacks of having been retrofitted to match evangelical soteriology. In effect, it paraphrases Jesus’ statement as, “God will forgive any sin you commit (grant salvation to you) except for the sin of not asking forgiveness (accepting salvation).” What a convoluted way of saying something so simple! If that’s what it means, Jesus’ words disguise and lend a solemn air to an altogether obvious and trivial message.

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