Cool

The Codex Sinaiticus is online. This is one of the oldest Bibles (with half of the Old Testament and all of the New) that have survived, dating to the fourth century AD. It's things like this that the Internet is for.

Neo-geocentrism

A big part of the claim that Christianity is at war with science is geocentrism, the belief that the earth is at the center of the universe. As readers of this blog are aware, this issue is almost entirely misunderstood: in the ancient/medieval cosmology, the closer you were to the center of the universe, the less privileged and esteemed you were. This is precisely why hell is even closer to the center of the universe than the surface of the earth, and why Dante placed Satan at the exact center of hell (and thus of the entire universe), immobilized in a field of ice.

The misunderstanding is that since the premoderns thought the earth was at the literal center of the universe, they must also have thought it was the metaphorical center as well. It confuses geocentrism with anthropocentrism. But this can only be maintained by completely ignoring their Aristotelian cosmology, according to which the universe was arranged in concentric spheres, with God on the outside as the prime mover. The furthest place in the universe from God, therefore -- the furthest place in a sphere from what is outside the sphere --, is at its center. Of course, this ignores the fact that in Christian theology God is not merely transcendent to the universe but omnipresent within it as well; nevertheless, the premoderns maintained that the closer you were to the center, the less valuable you were. This has been amply demonstrated by Dennis Danielson in his essays "Copernicus and the Tale of the Pale Blue Dot", "The Great Copernican Cliché", and chapter 6 in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion; Humphrey wrote an enlightening post on this issue as well.

But I find it interesting that when Christians are told that their worldview requires a belief that conflicts with science, some respond by embracing the belief in question. Thus, there are geocentric ministries today which argue that being a Christian requires belief in a geocentric universe -- although they prefer the term "geocentricity" as it doesn't have as much historical baggage. The Geocentricity website is the official site of the Association for Biblical Astronomy, "biblical astronomy" meaning Aristotelian/Ptolemaic astronomy. The second link takes you to a collection of the publications of their journal.

There's another site that bothers me more. When I was in (Protestant) seminary, my favorite theology professor used a book for one of his classes written by a Protestant-turned-Catholic entitled, Not by Faith Alone. I didn't take that class, but I did plan to someday study this book, maybe together with Alister McGrath's Iustitia Dei, and see where I came out. However, the author of Not by Faith Alone has also published a two volume work entitled Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, volume 1 of which deals with "the scientific case for geocentrism", thus absolving me of any requirement to take him seriously. (Update: Just to be clear, I'm not tying the Catholic doctrine of justification to geocentrism. I'm only saying that particular author is not credible.)

The Geocentric Bible is essentially an online book arguing for geocentrism; he says he first heard of this view from a young-earth creationist ministry. This leads to another point: most young-earth ministries have embraced a neo-geocentrism in order to account for the problem of starlight travel time. They argue that the universe we know is actually a white hole -- a black hole so crunched that light begins to escape via quantum tunnelling -- with our galaxy (the Milky Way) at its center. They call it "galacto-centrism" since the earth is only approximately at the universe's center. I critiqued the scientific case for this claim here. For now I'd just like to point out that in arguing for this view, they appeal to the idea that if we're important to God, we should expect to find ourselves at the center of the universe. In other words, they accept the conflation of geocentrism with anthropocentrism, a conflation which is not only unhistorical, but which was invented in order to mock and ridicule Christianity. This strikes me as an extremely unwise concession: when fighting the spirit of the age, you shouldn't let it define the terms of the debate. Moreover, the fact that they have to appeal to geocentrism in order to defend their belief in a young earth makes the latter even less plausible than it already was.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Linkfest

OK, I'm back in Belgium, and had very limited Internet access during my trip to the States. However, I did manage to collect a few interesting links that I thought I'd share (aren't you lucky!).

-- Five reasons Tolkien rocks. Only five?

-- James explains why the common belief that science and religion are in conflict is false. The commenters evidently think their knee-jerk reactions are more reliable than his Ph.D. studies on the subject.

-- Oo de lallies from around the world, including Russia, China, and Israel.

-- Raskolnikov argues about language, meaning, and naturalism.

-- I may have prematurely lamented NASA's desires to return to the Moon. They launched a rocket to scope out potential sites for a station. However, I'm still open to the possibility that we should just skip the Moon and head for Mars.

-- Oldest musical instrument found. It's a flute that's apparently 35,000 years old. Cool.

-- Tyson writes about a heretical movement in Christianity and reviews a book on the Peloponnesian War entitled ... wait for it ... The Peloponnesian War.

-- Some scientists speculate that Saturn's moon Enceladus may have an ocean of water deep below its surface. A large part of the interest here is that the presence of liquid water is one (of several dozen) necessary prerequisites for life to exist.

-- "I once had a girlfriend who quit journalism and went into PR “because it’s more ethical.”" Heh.

-- Buzz Aldrin explains how to get to Mars and why we should get off our butts and do it.

-- John Scalzi, author of Old Man's War, consoles me about the fact that I'm a middle-aged man writing his first novel.

Islam's influence

My blogging may be spotty for the next few weeks, as I'll be traveling to the States because of a family emergency. In the meantime, here's an essay by physicist Frank Tipler arguing that Islam's contributions to science, mathematics, etc. have been greatly exaggerated:

If one reads history of science textbooks prior to about 1980, one will find very little mention of Muslim “contributions” to physics and astronomy. This is reasonable, because there weren’t any. In the past generation, however, political correctness has dictated that Muslims be given credit for discoveries they did not make.
...
During the Cold War, it was commonplace for leftist academics to attribute many discoveries to scientists in Communist countries, discoveries that had actually been made in the West. So now leftist academics attribute to Muslims discoveries that had actually been made by others.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Islam and peace

A passage in the Qur'an that's upheld as an example of Islam teaching peace is Sura 5 (the Table) verse 32. It states "if any one slew a person -- unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land -- it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people."

The Corner recently raised two interesting points about this passage. First, this idea is not original to the Qur'an, but forms a part of the Babylonian Talmud, written in the 2nd century (and recording traditions that pre-date that).

The second interesting point about this passage is that the verse following it, 5:33, states, "The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter." I think (and I could be wrong) that those who strive against "Allah and His Messenger" refers to those who do not accept Islam. In other words, this passage seems to command Muslims to commit violence against non-Muslims simply for being non-Muslims. At the very least, it puts the previous verse in a different light.

Arthur Balfour's Dangerous Idea

Arthur James Balfour was the British Prime Minister from 1902-05 and the namesake of the Balfour Declaration. However, this isn't the dangerous idea I'm referring to. He was also a philosopher who wrote several books which all contain, to some extent, the argument that influenced C. S. Lewis's Argument from Reason (AFR). This is the idea that physicalism, materialism, naturalism are all self-defeating because when applied to the mind they remove any claim for our beliefs and belief-forming capabilities to be veridical -- and this would obviously include beliefs in physicalism, materialism, and naturalism. Lewis's version of the argument has recently been defended by Victor Reppert in C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea, and has been given a more rigorously analytical form in Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism.

I just finished Balfour's first book A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, published in 1879. It's interesting because it contains the earliest version of the AFR that I've been able to discover, namely, chapter 13, "The Evolution of Belief." In fact, this chapter is a re-working of an essay he published in the Fortnightly Review in 1877. I think future accounts of this argument will need to delve into Balfour's version to see how it influenced C. S. Lewis and others.

Balfour's other books spend more time on the AFR and, like Defence, they're all in the public domain. There's The Foundations of Belief, Theism and Humanism, and Theism and Thought, the latter two being two series of Gifford Lectures (which I wrote about here). There's also a critique of Balfour's philosophy in the public domain, Mr. Balfour's Apologetics Critically Examined by W. B. Columbine. At any rate, while Balfour's writings are very dry, I think they have some value and need to be taken seriously.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Cool

Ted Chiang has published a new (to me, at least) story, and you can read it online: Exhalation. You can read some of his other stories here.

Going up

An interesting twist on the already interesting idea of a space elevator (a line connecting the surface of the earth to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit). The new idea is to rotate the line so that centrifugal force would pull the payload out, and (if strong enough) up. That way, less energy would be necessary to climb the elevator, although a large part of the attractiveness of a space elevator is that it would be orders of magnitude cheaper than rockets. (via Glenn Reynolds)

Quote of the Day

...we need once more to focus more precisely on Socrates' own complaint against Anaxagoras and his ilk. The complaint is that Anaxagoras makes no use of Mind when he explains the world (instead adducing causes like 'air and ether and water and many other absurdities'), and that this is 'just about as inconsistent' as if he were first to say that the cause of everything Socrates does is Mind, and then go on to explain that he is in his prison in Athens because of the operations of his bones and sinews, making no mention of his conviction that he is acting in a way right and honourable. Socrates is thus taking himself as a microcosm of the world: the world, like the individual, is guided by Mind, and by what is for the best.

Far-fetched as Socrates as microcosm might seem today, those who would wish to explain human behaviour without reference to mind, and who would disparage explanations of action in terms of doing what is for the best as folk psychology, are making an analogous move in reverse. Rather than treating the macrocosm by analogy with the microcosm, they are treating the microcosm on analogy with the macrocosm. They are treating the microcosm (man) as if it were just part of the macrocosm, and guided and animated by the same principles. But this is surely misguided. Whatever we decide about our ultimate destination and origin, it remains the case that we, as human beings and as self-conscious agents, can question our standing in the world in a way no other part of nature can. This, indeed, is part of what 'acting for the best' comprises: raising questions about our relationship to the rest of nature and to each other. The normativity, the search for truth for its own sake, which this involves, engages us in types of considerations which are not found in the scientific descriptions and explanations, whether those of physics or of biology.
...
If it is hard to see science accomplishing a wholesale revision of commonsensical perceptions and beliefs about the empirical world, it is even harder to envisage science revising our attitude to practice, and the explanation we give to action in terms of agents' intentions and in terms of their being motivated to act for the best. This is because science itself is a practice, and because in choosing to do it at all and in doing it in particular ways, we will be subjecting ourselves to normative considerations. We will be having at the back of our mind the idea that, for various reasons, it is for the best that we engage in science, and that engaging in it in such a way is the best way to do it. In this sense, the decisions to do science and to do it in a particular way are on a par with Socrates' decision to stay in his prison cell, rather than let his bones and sinews (or genes) take him into exile. They are all decisions which cannot be given a scientific justification, and which demand a justification logically independent from anything we might discover in scientific accounts. It would then be, to say the least, self-defeating, if science -- done in the best way and for the best motives, done in Socrates' terms because of Mind -- were to tell us that Mind in this sense plays no part in human affairs, or that it is an illusion foisted on us by genetic working on quite other principles.

Anthony O'Hear
Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation

Updated

I've finally changed the blog so that it takes up more of the screen, something I've been wanting to do for a while. Much thanks to the Blog Doctor (who's an excellent resource) for the HTML, and to Tyson for photoshopping the long bookshelf at the top of the page.

Now I still have a small problem: the "page" background upon which the posts are written only extends so far, so the right side of the screen is just plain old boring yellow, which contrasts slightly with the rest. So does anyone out there know how to extend or stretch the background to cover it?

More Favorite Movie Scenes

The same caveat applies here as in my previous post: these are a few of my favorite movie scenes, not a few scenes from my favorite movies. The movies these scenes come from may very well suck.

Big Night


Hot Shots! Part Deux


The Empire Strikes Back


Life of Brian


The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers


Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn

Harlan Ellison

There's a short story by Harlan Ellison that I've been wanting to read for some time, but wasn't able to find in bookstores during my brief visits to the States. It's about five people in a living hell; a computer system "woke up" to consciousness, but recognized it was the proverbial ghost in the machine. It hated humanity for creating it, and so killed everyone except five people who it kept in an underground tunnel system, keeping them alive indefinitely, torturing them, and mutilating them. The computer is named "AM" which stands for a few things in the story, but is meant to recall both God's telling Moses that his name is "I am", and Descartes' cogito "I think therefore I am." So the computer is an imitation God, but instead of being a God of love and goodness it's a god of hatred and evil. This kind of reminds me of Philip K. Dick's short story "Faith of Our Fathers", which has something along the same lines, except in Dick's story, it's actually God: the ground of existence is a predator, creating everything so it can consume it.

Anyway, I just found a copy of Ellison's story online, so you can read it if you think your stomach is strong enough. The title? "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".

Another must-read

Dallas Willard, who I wrote about here, has a new book coming out at the end of this month. The title sounds amazing: Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge. I'd almost swear this guy is writing these books just for me.

Jesus and Galileo

I just re-acquainted myself with a quote from the Jesus Seminar's book The Five Gospels. In order to defend their rejection of the supernatural, they appeal to the conflict myth. It reminds me of Rudolf Bultmann's famous quote, "It is impossible to use electrical light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles." The Jesus Seminar makes the same point by appealing specifically to geocentrism and Galileo.

The contemporary religious controversy, epitomized in the Scopes trial and the continuing clamor for creationism as a viable alternative to the theory of evolution, turns on whether the worldview reflected in the Bible can be carried forward into this scientific age and retained as an article of faith. Jesus figures prominently in this debate. The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope. The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable glass. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo have dismantled the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens.

So their understanding of the New Testament presupposes a discarded and demonstrably false theory of the history of science. Someone should tell them to stop focusing so much on Galileo's telescope and look through Hubble's telescope. If they did, they might discover that the universe is expanding outward after having sprung into being, which in turn suggests that something "outside" the universe brought it into existence. That wouldn't fit the narrative of a "secular heavens" though.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

This is very disappointing

NASA had plans to return people to the Moon by 2020 and set up a permanently manned station there. Some recent comments by its acting administrator imply that they're scaling back their plans, due to the small budget they've been granted by President Obama. It looks like it's time for private companies to step in and get the job done.