Blue Cord

Something has been bothering me about the intelligent design movement, so I thought I would take this opportunity to get it off my chest.

It seems to me that intelligent design boils down to nothing more than the old teleological argument for the existence of God dressed up with bad science.  The teleological argument, simply stated, says that if we found a complex item like a watch, we could assume the existence of a watchmaker.

But when I studied philosophy during my time as an undergraduate (at a Christian college, no less), I learned that the teleological argument does not serve as a proof for the existence of God.  For starters, the world is much more complex than a watch, so much so that we cannot begin to comprehend its overall design.  It is absurd, therefore, to think the we can grasp the idea of something that could create the world.

As a part of their teleological argument, IDers argue that the earth is specifically suited to life.  If the earth were slightly closer to or farther away from the sun, life could not exist.  If we did not have the right mix of elements, life could not exist.  And on it goes.  They say that the chances for such a perfect combination are too high to be chance.

But this overlooks (or purposefully ignores) the fact that the universe contains “billions and billions” of stars.  And according to the implications of Einstein’s theories, there could be any number of universes.  Even if the odds against life are a billion to one, we still end up with a large number of planets capable of sustaining life.

Some IDers also employ the cosmological argument for God.  They point to the fact that everything has a cause, so there must be a First Cause (to use Plato’s term).  But positing the existence of a First Cause makes no more sense than positing an infinite regression of causes.  Sure, our minds cannot comprehend an infinite regression, but neither can they understand the idea that a being as powerful as God can simply exist.  And if we are going to posit that some things “simply exist”, it seems more likely to me that some microbes could just happen than that God could just happen.

What I have said here is hardly a complete refutation of ID.  But while it does not address all their arguments, their arguments have been addressed by philosophers for centuries.  It is a shame, however, that we have to keep going back and having the same argument over and over again.  It would be nice if knowledge could move forward.

N.B.  I do believe in God, of course, but I believe in the God of the Bible rather than the God of the philosophers.  And I believe in that God for very different reasons than they do.

James Pate asked a question related to my post History and Narrative.  His question, simply put, is how can the Bible function authoritatively if there is nothing authoritative about the text itself.  He says that Barth seems to suggest that there is something authoritative in the text when Barth says that God chooses to reveal himself in the text.

Before addressing the question, I wanted to clarify something about Barth’s position.  When Barth says that God chooses to reveal himself in the text, he means that such a revelation occurs when the readers reads the text.  The revelation is not embedded in the text, so that it might be considered part of the character of the text.  Instead, it is something that happens when the text is read.  It has less to do with the author of the text than the reader.

To answer the question of how something can be functionally authoritative without having authority in itself, I would point to any number of examples of such a thing in the real world.  The President of the United States exercises power by virtue of his office, not because of anything inherent in the person elected.  We have certainly had examples of people in the White House  who hardly had anything within them to suggest authority (e.g., James Buchanan), but they still had the authority of the office.

One of the plus sides to dealing with a functional description of authority rather than talking about a text be authoritative a se is that it moves the center of the discussion to the place where it actually matters.  We can present as many arguments as we want about the Bible being authoritative, but if people don’t accept it as authoritative then it hardly matters.  On the other hand, if people reject all our arguments about the nature of the text but still treat it as authoritative, then the text will in fact be authoritative.

I am returning now to a series I began at the end of April on David Kelsey’s book Proving Doctrine.  This series got interrupted by Easter, little league games, and my trip to Tennessee, but I wanted to come back to it because Kelsey provides a helpful framework for considering questions of how we use the Bible in theology.  For an overview of Kelsey’s approach, see the initial post in this series.

In Kelsey’s third chapter, he looks at a second pair of theologians: G. Ernest Wright and Karl Barth, who approaches are quite different than those of Warfield and Bartsch.  For both Wright and Barth, it is the narrative of the Scripture that is central.

For Wright, history is the place that God is known.  God’s attributes are revealed by God’s actions, so what makes the Bible authoritative is the fact that it reveals God’s actions to us.  Not surprisingly, therefore, Wright is a big proponent of the idea of salvation-history.  The Bible provides us with a meta-narrative of God’s interaction with the people of Israel and later with the church.  The bolster his argument, Wright points to the fact that both the OT and NT contain numerous recitals of God’s acts in history.  The people of God recited the salvation-history as a way to understanding God.  Because the Bible is the one place that this salvation-history is narrated, it is the authoritative text for Christianity.

To answer the four questions:

• It is the narrative of Scripture that is authoritative.
• What makes it authoritative is the fact that it reveals God’s actions, which allows us to know God.
• The logical force is the force of confessional recitals of history that provide an overarching interpretation of the history of the world.
• The Bible is brought to bear on theology in a very direct way, although it is a two step process: the Bible reveals God’s actions which in turn reveal God.

One problem with this approach is that it means that revelation is not located directly in the text.  The Bible is only indirectly the locus of God’s revelation.  Instead, it is the history to which the text points that is the place where God is revealed.  This suggests that if the salvation-history could be known through other methods, the Bible would be irrelevant.

This same problem is not found in the work of Karl Barth.  Although Barth also sees God as revealed through actions, it is precisely those actions as narrated by the text that reveal God.  Barth points to the Gospels, which he says are interpreted history.  Obviously, Jesus did other actions, but it is precisely those narrated by the text that reveal who Christ is.  He notes that each of the Gospels has a similar narrative structure.  It is the story told this way (and not in other ways) that the story reveals who God is.

To turn to the four questions:

• What is authoritative is the narrative as narrative.
• What makes it authoritative is the fact that God chooses the reveal God’s self through the text.
• The logical force is the force of an encounter with God if and when God choses to reveal God’s self to the reader through the text.
• Scripture bears on theology in an indirect way as the theologian appeals to the patterns in Scripture.

Kelsey points out that this way of describing the authority of the text is difficult to asses.  The text becomes authoritative only when it is accepted by the church as authoritative.  If one accepts these texts, then the reality the narrate becomes important.  The downside to this is that there is nothing in the text that is automatically authoritative, which means the reason for accepting the text as authoritative must lie outside the text (i.e., one accepts the text because one accepts Christianity, not vice versa).  The upside to Barth’s construction is that is describes fairly well the way that the text traditionally has worked in the church.  It is a functional view of the text, as opposed to the appoach of Warfield, for whom it is the character of the text that makes it authoritative.

I cringe every time I see a book marketed as the “Bible” for a particular topic.  For instance, there is The Internet Bible, which supposedly discusses everything you need to know about the Internet.  For those who want to learn to program web pages the Microsoft way, there is the ASP.NET Bible.  You can find such “Bibles” for fishing, buying a car, cooking, dating, and just about any other topic your heart desires. The list goes on and on.

Apparently, the computer industry has also decided to co-opt the term evangelist as well. ¹  A technology evangelist is a person who promotes a particular method, platform, approach, or language.  If you have ever met someone who uses Linux, you probably know the type.  There is even a Global Network of Technology Evangelists.  I love the fact that the Wikipedia page on technology evangelists contains a disclaimer that it is not to be confused with televangelists.

Microsoft has even started hiring people and giving them the title of developer evangelist.   I have found a couple of people who describe themselves in this way (such as Alex Lowe) and Microsoft in New Zealand has a job posting up for a developer evangelist intern.

I have to say I have rather mixed feelings about this.  Language is always changing and it is by no means uncommon for terms in one field to be adopted by another.  Even the term evangelist in Greek was adopted by the NT writers from the area of royal messengers.  But this use of evangelism by the computer industry seems to be somewhat inappropriate.

In the NT, an evangelist is one who proclaims the good news / Gospel.  The two terms are related.  The good news that is proclaimed is the arrival of the kingdom of God in the person of Christ Jesus.  It is an announcement that has major implications for the entire world.

Compare this to what technology evangelists do.  They announce the coming of a new technology.  “Joy to the World, Microsoft .NET 3.0 is come!  Let earth receive the derived classes that can now be implemented!”  Somehow, the use of the term in the field of technology doesn’t quite obtain the same level of importance.  Paul could claim that the Gospel was given to him by God.  Although Bill Gates may think he has that much power, a Gospel authorized by him is much less impressive.

I think it is also interesting to compare the results of the two kinds of evangelists.  Those who proclaim the message of Christ call people to take up their cross and follow Jesus, even to death.  Technology evangelists call people to learn a new technology that will make their lives easier.  If you are not willing to die for the message you proclaim, you shouldn’t be calling yourself an evangelist.

Now, I am not arguing that this is an attack on Christianity.  Even though Bill Gates has stated that he has better things to do with his time on Sunday morning than go to church, I don’t see him as being involved in some kind of anti-Christian campaign.  While Windows Vista may be putting people through hell, Gates did make a bid to buy the Catholic church, so it all evens out.  Instead, this is simply another example of a business being willing to use any terminology they think will help them make a profit, even if it trivializes the terminology in the process.

1. This is not a new thing, but I only learned about it recently. [back]

Danny Zacharias has the 18th Biblical Studies Blog Carnival up and running at Deinde.  There were several good discussions in the biblioblogosphere in the month of May, such as the question of whether some publishers should automatically be excluded from academic papers and the issue of what to call the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible / Tanakh.  On the latter, anything is fine with me except First Testament.  Blech!

Kudos to Danny for a great carnival!