Archive for February, 2012

Eric Gill

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

Eric Gill (1882-1941) was a famous sculptor, engraver, designer of typefaces and drawer of some of the finest nude studies of the twentieth century. He was also a devout Roman Catholic.  His philosophy of life and work caused him to be critical of the welfare state that enabled people to retire into leisure and so deny them the need to fulfill their lives in creative work. He wrote about the tragedy of state-sponsored idleness and paid unemployment. Work, to Gill, was sacred. It was the vocation of man. Take away work, take away the incentive to work, the opportunity to work, and you take away the purpose of life.

His writings are worth quoting because they are relevant to the debate about the nature of mankind.

“The nature of man is likeness to God – for God created him in his image. He is a rational soul. The purpose of his existence is to know God, to serve God and to love God on earth and to be with him eternally in heaven. The manner of man’s existence is incarnation. He is spirit and matter…. It is the spiritual which determines man in his species….

It is significant that the rising of what we call modern science synchronized with the throwing off of spiritual authority. We have deliberately thrown off the ‘easy yoke’ and ‘light burden’ and have placed ourselves under the hard taskmaster of immutable and impersonal ‘laws of nature’, and this has been done in the name of freedom. The highest virtue we can attempt to claim is a stoical courage in the face of a meaningless concatenation of fortuitous circumstances. Such is the freedom of the sons of science.

Our fault is that we have sought freedom – we found an iron law of causality. We sought free-thought – we found psychological determinism. We sought free love – we found we had lost Love itself. Dear silly sheep, we have lost the Shepherd and found only the wolves.

We have thrown away free will. We do not like to be held responsible. We like to be treated as animals, automatons. When the psychologist says, ‘it is heredity, it is early environment, it is a complex’, we applaud. When Augustine says ‘it is sin’, we deride. The word ‘sin’ has become almost meaningless; it has become a sentimental word like ‘art’.”

Gill was contemptuous of consumerism, and of the industrialization of products. He was an artist who made his own way despite the tumultuous times in which he lived. His life and legacy are well worth studying. He should inspire us to live out our vocations according to our gifts and opportunities.

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Bad Reasons For Being An Atheist

Saturday, February 18th, 2012

I am always interested in the reasons people give for being atheists or agnostics. Raymond Tallis in an article in the magazine Philosophy Now writes that there are bad as well as good reasons for deciding to be an atheist.

The worst reason is that there is no evidence of God’s existence. It is a bad reason because nobody can agree what would count as evidence. “Miracles, scriptures can all be contested on empirical grounds …but for some people the fact that there is something rather than nothing, is sufficient evidence that there is a Creator who not only made the world but also made it habitable by and intelligible to us. Therefore the appeal to evidence, or lack of it, will always be inconclusive.”

“Another bad reason for being an atheist is hostility to religious institutions because of the delinquent behavior of believers, and more generally, on account of the evils that organized religion has inflicted on the world….So what? Even if the evils caused by religion were relevant to the question of the existence of God, we do not know whether religion is a net force for evil, despite the documented horrors… the jury must still be out over the net benefit, because we cannot run the course of history twice, once with and once without religion to determine whether religion has overall made us treat each other worse.”

Tallis admits that it can be argued that religion fostered scientific enquiry and moral laws that were beneficial to humanity. Also atheistic regimes have caused much evil in the history of the world. Focusing on criticism of religious institutions merely remind us of the corrupting influence of power.

So what is a good reason for being an atheist? For Tallis it is the incongruity between an eternal transcendent Creator powerful enough to have brought life into being in the universe, and a personal immanent Savior and Guide who is involved in the lives of his children. He finds the concept self-contradictory. Also the Shopping Mall of Theological Ideas is confusing and conflicting. To select one idea of God out of all on offer is impossible.

“So, whatever my actual reasons for being an atheist, intellectually the case does not rest on the lack of evidence for God, or the bad behavior of believers and religious institutions, but on the idea of God itself, which insofar as it is not entirely empty, is self-contradictory, and makes less sense than that which it purports to explain.”

He goes on to say that atheists don’t have “a complete and even a properly grounded understanding of what we are. For example, we do not understand consciousness – how it is that we are aware. Atomic materialism does not explain it…I also do not understand how it is that individually and collectively we make sense of the world – how knowledge is possible.” While he rejects “transcendent possibility arising out of my sense of the unknown….we should be grateful for the monuments of art, architecture, ritual and thought that we atheists owe to others’ belief in God.”

Tallis is puzzled by human beings’ ability to seek for knowledge and purpose and meaning in life when scientific evolutionary theory has no place for the mind except as a feature of the brain. He sees that man is more than an animal, but he is not able to accept that we are made in the image of God, with the ability to reason, imagine, and innovate. He also cannot accept the possibility of religious experience, of the work of the Holy Spirit in the individual, bringing him to faith. Human consciousness is the result of our divine creation.

Then there is the reality of Jesus Christ. Out of all the religions in the world Jesus is unique – the presence in history of the God-Man. Yet, he was not recognized as such by his contemporaries. It is by looking at Jesus that we gain a complete and grounded understand of what we are – the perfect human.

Tallis, at least, is honest enough to recognize the bad reasons for being an atheist, and to admit that he doesn’t know everything. He closes his latest book by being aware of the failings of a naturalistic viewpoint of his fellow atheists “from which we are seen as organisms whose significance is no different from that of any other life form.  Criticizing the Neuromania and Darwinitis that locates us entirely in the material world is the first step in the task of understanding the place of the human spirit in the great drama of existence and seeing more clearly than we do at present what it is to be a human being. There is no more important or exciting intellectual – or dare I say, spiritual – adventure.” (Aping Mankind, p.361)

Now, if only, he were open to seeing that human beings are both matter and spirit, body and mind, and are designed for eternal life, he would really find that he is embarking on an exciting intellectual and spiritual adventure.

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An Atheist Who Is Against Darwinitis

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

Raymond Tallis is a British medical doctor, who was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience. He has written over a dozen books of cultural criticism, philosophy of mind and philosophical anthropology. The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine named him as one of the top living polymaths in the world. He is also an atheist, but is scornful of many of his fellow atheists’ arguments against religion and theories of human identity.

I have just finished reading his latest book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. He attacks scientism: the mistaken belief that the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology and their derivatives) can or will give a complete description of everything, including human life. We are not just our bodies. Humans are more than just animals. Scientists are deluded if they have the notion that our consciousness, the self to which the successive moments of consciousness are attributed, our personality, our character, personhood itself, are identical with activity in our brains. He calls this belief Neuromania.

Contrary to what evolutionary psychologists have argued, our behavior is not just determined by our biology. “The reduction of human life to a chain of programmed responses of modules to stimuli overlooks the complexity of everyday experience and the singularity of the situations we find ourselves in, to say nothing of the role of conscious deliberation.” The human brain alone does not account for all our actions, our most private thoughts and our beliefs.

Religious belief is not the result of certain parts of the brain, so-called “God-spots”. We are not just “hard-wired” for religious belief.

Darwinism cannot give a satisfactory answer to the questions: how did consciousness emerge, and what is consciousness for, anyway? When Darwinists teach that natural selection is random, and that we have evolved without any intelligent design or purpose, they still have to account for the emergence of humans who have consciousness, and seek for meaning and purpose in their lives. The logic of human development presupposes purpose. Atheists cannot explain the fact that we are purpose-seeking beings. We have the need to ask “Why?” We seek reasons. We are rational beings. Random natural selection does not explain this feature of life.

Tallis protests too much when he opines, “As an atheist humanist I reject the idea that evolution has a goal. More particularly, I do not for a moment think it had us in mind as its destination and crowning glory….it is a mindless, pointless process…Darwin had argued that there was an alternative to a conscious, super-intelligent designer: the operation of unconscious, although non-random, natural selection over hundreds of millions of years.” He is going against his fellow atheists, like Dawkins, who see no purpose in the blind forces of physics. He claims that Darwinism leaves something unaccounted for.

“Isn’t there a problem in explaining how the blind forces of physics brought about (cognitively) sighted humans who are able to see, and identify, and comment on, the ‘blind’ forces of physics, even to notice that they are blind, and deliberately utilize them to engage with nature as if from the outside, and on much more favorable terms than those that govern the lives of other animals? On the Origin of the Species leaves us with the task of explaining the origin of the one species that is indeed a designer. How did humans get to be so different?…Something rather important about us is left unexplained by evolutionary theory. We are not mindless and yet seem to do things according to purposes that we entertain in a universe that brought us into being by mindless processes that are entirely without purpose. To deny this is not to subscribe to Darwinism but to embrace Darwinitis.”

Tallis addresses the issue of God rigging the outcome of evolution, but concedes that that notion would not be compatible with evolutionary theory.  He thinks that evolution is a shockingly cruel and inefficient process that has nothing to do with love, mercy or even common decency. It is no place for a God of love. He has a problem with the relationship between God and nature, and opts for eliminating God from the equation. He thinks that belief in a Creator is a man-made notion to explain why the world makes sense. However he is disgusted with those who would reject religion on the basis of a devastating reductionism. “In defending the humanities, the arts, the law, ethics, economics, politics and even religious belief against neuro-evolutionary reductionism, atheist humanists and theist have a common cause, and, in reductive naturalism, a common adversary: scientism.”

In another blog I will review his reasons for being an atheist, and why he thinks that other atheists give bad reasons. This book will keep the new atheists like Dennett, Dawkins, Wilson, Hitchens and Harris up late at night. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

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The Battle Ground of Life

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

This excerpt from Pennar Davies, Diary of a Soul, about life as a battle ground, is worth sharing.

“I saw great weakness and frailty in the face of one dear to me and I have been in the presence of a friend’s anxiety and sorrow. Our lives are battle grounds. The Dark Death, the Great Executioner, the General-in-chief of the cohorts of Hell, who can raise his terrible banner over every human body and parade with terrifying pride over every member. But the Christ will reign.

Oh Lord Christ, the Resurrection and the Life, the First-born from the dead, take this precious life into your breast. Jesus, who wept in the past, accept our tears as a witness to the strength of Eternal Love who insists on calling his dear ones out of the grasp of the dust. Consecrate our grief to the glory of the Name which is above every name.

The grief of the friend who is left is bitter. But the fierce anguish of the rent testifies to the strength of the partnership. The life together was not in vain: it is part of the Life together which is to eternity. Does not the cry ‘My God, My God, why have you deserted me?’ convince us that God never leaves us?

Oh Lord Jesus, King of the Jews, King of kings, King of the world, accept our homage; for in You there is every virtue and every praise. Your Cross is part of the fabric of the whole world, part of the pattern of man’s history, part of the witness of our conscience – the part which gives meaning and light to the whole.

We have been one in sin; we are one in untruth. But this is the oneness of hell, the deadly oneness which divides us against one another and against our selves! Deliver us from evil. Unite us in your Own Love.

We can see the false unity in the contempt of those who were passing by and saying: ‘Save yourself and come down from the cross’; in the words of the chief priest, ‘He saved others but he cannot save himself. Let us see the Messiah, the king of Israel, come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him’; in the blasphemy of the wrongdoer who was crucified with You, ‘If you are the Messiah, save yourself and us’; in the mockery of the soldiers, ‘If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.’ We see the divided humanity uniting to insult Your Love!

But you are interceding for us on the Cross. Oh the wonder of the universe, unite us for ever in the endless forgiveness which glorified heaven and earth.

Comfort all the Companions of the Cross this day. The needy, the sorrowful, the widow, the orphan, the one without hope and the one without succor – take us all. You who were lifted from the earth, draw us to Yourself. To whom shall we go but to You?”

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Jesus in the Flesh

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

Each morning I am reading portions of Diary of a Soul, by Pennar Davies. I came across it when I was in London before Christmas and found it recommended by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, who wrote the foreword. Davies (1911-1996), the son of a coal miner, was educated at the University College of Wales, at Cardiff, Balliol and Mansfield Colleges at Oxford, and Yale University, where he gained his Ph.D. He was a highly regarded Welsh Congregational minister and academic. Well known in the literary life of Wales for half a century as a prophetic preacher, historian, novelist, short story writer, poet and literary critic, he campaigned throughout his life for the Welsh language. His Diary has just recently been translated into English and become available to a wider audience.

His writing is very honest, and lyrical, as you would expect of a Welshman with their gift of lyrical speech. He is Christ-centered as well as personally transparent. Here is an example.

“The Gospels present the life of Jesus as something that is totally different to the ascetic life of John the Baptist. The Good News is something to be enjoyed to the full – that was life for Jesus, and he did not expect his disciples to follow the severe practices of John. He offended many of his religious contemporaries by eating and drinking, and eating and drinking often in the company of the disreputable. There is nothing ‘ascetic’ in his poverty and work. These originated in his being the Son of God and his saving mission and his evangelical values.

“On the other hand, the life of Jesus is very different from the picture of him that was formed in the imagination of the romantic poets and the liberal theologians. For these he was the apostle of the natural life and of the open air, a man who challenged the narrow standards of his age, a man who broke the rules by cherishing the glory of man and earth, a man who desired freedom for the inherent goodness of human nature.

“The truth is that the Lord Jesus Christ was, and is, a savior. He could see the true glory of man and earth – he could also see their need, he could see their corrupt condition, he could see that they were without hope apart from the Great Sacrifice.

“His personal life is, therefore, a pattern of freedom and dedication – freedom from the shackles of imperfect, corrupt, enslaving standards, and of commitment to the saving work.

“Freedom and dedication. To what degree does my personal life show that I belong to the Lord Jesus?

“It is pleasant to meditate on Jesus in the days of his flesh: what he wrote on the earth, the hands that blessed the children, the feet that walked towards Jerusalem, the back that sank under the cross, the eyes that looked at the penitent thief, the head which bowed in death. I shall endeavor in meditation to draw near to him and look at the weals and scars on his skin and hear his breathing and his laughter and touch his hand.

“He was a man of flesh and blood, the Divine Love shining on every gesture and word, on every scowl and smile.

“Oh Lord Jesus, oh Splendor of the Eternal, oh Fellow Man, draw me close to Yourself. You are the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. Oh Wonder of the Ages, you desire to be our friend. Accept my hand into Your hand. I will go with You every step of the way. Amen.”

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America’s Values

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

John Zimmerman, a Chapel member, has just published a timely book, AMERICA ADRIFT: RIGHTING THE COURSE, about the decline in values and what to do about it. I write on the back cover that his analysis of moral relativity in our culture is beyond question.  He marshals an impressive catalog of facts about our present situation in almost every area of life. However, unlike other writers who only trade in self-righteously denouncing our culture, he sensitively describes the problems and then offers inspiration and practical suggestions to turn people around, so that they can develop themselves, achieve their goals, and make a lasting contribution to others.

His first chapter addresses what happened to American values during his lifetime. His second chapter discusses the origin of values using his own experience. He is extremely candid about his own failings and the influence of his parents and his wife. His career as a management consultant enabled him to see the practical value of his convictions in the success and failure of leadership in businesses.

In chapter three he addresses improving values and their application. “Why are sound and uplifting values important? Values are the primary guide for decision making and behavior that lead to quality, fulfillment, and enjoyment of life – physical, mental and moral.” The chapter includes a how-to section to help you apply the examples and lessons to your life.

The last chapter gives many examples of what can be done by volunteers to promote values in youth. He encourages retirees to consider volunteering their time to give back to their communities. He challenges us all to contribute. He closes with these words: “The greatest reward you will ever receive is to know that someone in need has experienced an uplifting value system and quality of life you helped create.”

This a book I would want to give to my children, my grandchildren, and my retiree friends.

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