Hello everyone,
Here is my long overdue blog entry on our July meeting. My apologies ahead of time--I am horrible at taking notes, so my summary here will not be as detailed as Scott's usually are! If you have any corrections or additions to my summary, please be sure to post them in the comments!
First, as an aside...there were several inquires at the meeting about ASA membership and joining ASA. The main ASA page is here: www.asa3.org. Their membership information page is here: http://www.asa3.org/ASA/joinASA.html. They have several different categories of membership which are designed to accommodate people of many different faith/science backgrounds, so I encourage everyone to check it and to join! Also, the ASA listserv is open to both members and non-members; you can sign up for it here: http://www.asa3.org/ASA/EmailASA/index.html. There is a link to the listserv archives from that page if you want to get a sense of the discussions before signing up for it.
Okay, back to the meeting! We had a good turnout--myself (Christine), Kendall, Hannah, Christina, Andy, Kevin, Ivan, Leslie, and Ed were all there at some point during our ~2.5 hour discussion. Incidentally, so was Albert Einstein--Star Pizza happens to have had a very large picture of him on the wall above the table where we were seated! :)
We decided to discuss one of the articles in the latest issue of PSCF, entitled "Artificial Intelligence and the Soul", by Russell Bjork (text not yet posted on the ASA website). Central questions which were addressed included the following (in no particular order):
What is artificial intelligence? Bjork makes a distinction between "strong" and "weak" AI, the latter of which refers to domain-constrained computers that can perform tasks in a way the is equal to or better than humans could perform them (i.e. Deep Blue beating humans at chess). Strong AI was defined as a form of sentient, self-aware intelligence, as in the sci-fi characters such as Commander Data and C3P-O, which could be considered a "person". Bjork, in his article, is concerned with strong AI.
What is the nature of the soul? The soul could be thought of as being dualistic or monistic. Dualism refers to humans possessing a "supernatural" component which is wholly independent of the natural world and which is directly created and given by God through some type of "ensoulment" process. Monism could be thought of in 2 ways: the more materialistic/atheist viewpoint whereby all that which is makes "us", "us" derives from the structures and biochemistry of our brain, and humans are completely reducible to these components. Or, monism could be seen as a phenomenon which, while it derives from our brain structures and biochemical make-up, is yet more than this--it is not reducible to these components. It could be summed up in the phrase: "you don't have a soul, you are a soul". Bjork favored this last approach as the best approach and one which is most consistent with the Hebrew/Biblical understanding of "soul". Still another viewpoint would distinguish a difference between "soul" and "spirit", such that a soul is monistic, but that humans do have a supernatural component which is the "spirit".
What is the "image of God" and what defines our relationship and uniqueness as humans? Relatedly, what possible range of reactions/positions could Christians have when it comes to trying to create artificial intelligence? Bjork argues that there is no inherent conflict with the development/creation of strong AI, and that our unique "status" as humans has nothing to do with our constituency (that is, what makes "us", "us"; or in other words, our rational, emotional, etc. characteristics), but has to do with the grace of God bestowed on us--that He has chosen to be in a personal relationship with us and has given us the responsibility for stewardship/dominion of the earth.
Key discussion points included:
Kevin, Hannah, and Christina expressed skepticism that strong AI could ever be achieved? Indeed, do our attempts constitute a form of the Tower of Babel story, in which case God would not allow us to develop strong AI? Others suggested that it was the spirit behind the construction of the tower, rather than the tower itself, that was sinful. So, if the spirit behind the development of strong AI is not sinful, then God would allow us to develop it. Indeed, is the creation of strong AI part of our task as "partners in creation" with God, part of our stewardship?
Andy argued that an emergent (non-reducible monism) understanding of the soul was consistent with the Biblical passages in Genesis...but then, isn't there yet something supernatural in us? Christine asked what that component was? Emotions? Rationality? If our emotions, for example, are affected by psychiatric drugs (say, for the treatment of depression), then doesn't this suggest these characteristics are rooted in our physical being? Andy was unsure...will have to think about it some more...Ivan noted that from his experience, he has seen deep, spiritual transformations of friends and relatives--but these are not due to physical causes.
If strong AI were created, could they be Christians? Ed noted that our understanding of such a question is not that different from whether or not sentient aliens (if discovered) could be Christians? He made the point that to a large extent, only they themselves could tell us if they had come to experience a personal relationship with God. But, Biblical evidence would point to a welcoming of other creatures and life forms who have been called by God into a relationship--for example, Christianity was explicitly expanded beyond Jews to include Gentiles. Christine and others also pointed out that this raises another question about what is "artificial intelligence"--what about intelligent creatures artificially created through cloning, or perhaps those that might evolve from any synthetic lifeforms we create. Are these also to be considered "artificial intelligence"?
If we do create AI, what will they're relationship to humans be? Christina and Hannah wondered if they would see us an enemy, like in sci-fi films such as The Terminator. Christine wondered if conversely, they might see us as god, since we would have brought them into being? Others wondered about this--if we become god, so to speak, through secondary causes (for God is our primary cause), then would there also be tertiary causes, and so on, if those lifeforms brought into being new forms of artificial intelligence?
Okay all, that's the highlights of what I remember from the meeting. Again, comments/discussion are invited and encouraged!!
Friday, August 1, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Houston ASA Meeting Notes May 10th, 2008
Hi, Gang! Here’s the proceedings of our latest meeting, today May 10, 2008
Proceedings of Houston Section meeting
2008-05-10
by Scott E. Robinson
The Houston-area ASA bunch met on Saturday May 10th at Star Pizza where we’ve been meeting for many years now. We had a small crowd - four of us: Ed Nelson, Kevin Crosby, Nathan Scallon, and Scott Robinson.
Chapter Status – Coming!
Scott updated the group on our application for ASA chapter status (aside from the fact that Randy Isaac already regards us as a chapter). Christine Smith agreed to be the assistant leader of the group, so we were able to satisfy the requirement of two members in leadership. Scott wrote and signed a letter requesting chapter status and sent it to Christine, who added her signature and sent it on last week - so presumably, our chapter status is in the mail.
Fox P-2
Ed’s daughter Nicole is home from college and would have joined us but she’s only home briefly very busy. She is working with a researcher at Howard Hughes Medical Center on the genetic basis of language in birds. The same gene involved in learning speech has been found in birds and many mammals including humans. Called Fox P-2 (sic?), it’s a gene that regulates the expression of other genes which somehow make language learning possible. It was discovered because an inbred family in England, who had proved unable to learn language, were all found to possess damaged copies of this gene.
Scott was hoping to ask her about evolution. On that topic, Ed noted that scientists no longer distinguish between macro and micro evolution. Scott said he’s undecided about the feasibility of macroevolution, but has yet to see the evidence that genetic information can increase by naturalistic means, and was hoping to ask Nicole about that. Ed said he trusted that scientists had such evidence, because they’ve all studied it very intently, and Scott didn’t dispute that, just said he would believe the evidence once he’s seen it.
Expelled
We briefly discussed the movie Expelled, by Ben Stein, which all of us have seen already. We all thought it had done a good job in some ways, but not in others. Kevin thought the constant linking of Darwinism to Nazism and Communism (implied by the constant use of the Berlin Wall image) was overstated. Any theory could be used to justify wrongdoing, and Ben Stein does acknowledge in the movie that not all evolutionists went as far as the Nazis. Scott thought Stein did a far better job than Michael Moore had done, of quoting people fairly and presenting a balanced case, but things he’d read on the Web after seeing the movie made it sound as if some of the dismissals and tenure denials of ID advocates were not specifically for their ID ideas. He’d also heard of a case last year involving the Texas Education Agency (which governs school boards in Texas) where their press contact person was allegedly forced out due to an anti-ID statement she made. So perhaps it cuts both ways.
Ed said he regarded ID as a failed theory, more of a philosophy than a testable theory, a theory looking for evidence. Kevin asked, isn’t a hypothesis by definition a theory looking for evidence? Scott and Kevin thought ID is a theory that hasn’t succeeded yet.
Ed said that the furor over how God did it is irrelevant to the discussion anyway. His personal belief is that accounts like the story of Noah are some sort of myth, or at least have mythic overtones, and that it doesn’t matter for his faith, since his faith is founded on the perception that there is a God Who made us and this creation for a purpose because Ed sees His hand at work all around us. Arguing that such a view is supernaturalism and science does not countenance such ideas, is hardly credible when scientists assert, as a Scientific American writer recently did, that there are 400 million universes embedded in the space around us. That’s as supernatural as anything in the Bible, Ed said. That got us on the topic of cosmology and cosmic origins. Kevin noted that it’s not intellectually fair for atheist scientists to base their belief on things they believe will be discovered in cosmology and consider the issue settled. Mormons assert that the Book of Mormon will eventually be proved true by scientific discoveries too, even though all scientific evidence is against it today. Kevin said they say, “Anytime now… anytime now,” and simply cling to faith.
Main discussion
The May/June Perspectives issue hadn’t reached us yet, and in March we discussed the two articles from the March issue that interested us, so we had no specific topic to cover. Scott brought an article of interest from Missions Frontiers magazine, by the U.S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena, CA, which he skim-read to the group.
The U.S. Center for World Mission was founded 30 years ago with the help of two missionary statesmen, Dr. Ralph Winter and Dr. Donald McGavran, veteran missionaries to Guatemala and India. Their emphasis on seeing humanity in terms of cultural groupings called “people groups” instead of political or geographic groups, and their focus on planting churches in each group, has had a huge influence on Protestant missionary thinking.
Mission Frontiers magazine can be found at www.missionfrontiers.org. . The March-April 2008 issue is devoted to considering why so many Christians in America are falling away, and suggests that the same thing could happen in Africa and India. In Africa, Scott said, Christianity is described as being “a mile wide and an inch deep,” because it hasn’t changed the lives of the people or their conduct. Both tribes in the genocide in Rwanda were majority Christian. Nigerian Christians, animists and Muslims are equally corrupt in politics, business, and personal conduct. Bible teaching hasn’t penetrated far. Of course, they learned their practice of Christianity from the Western missionaries who brought it, and this Mission Frontiers issue suggests that there was an anti-intellectual streak in what the missionaries brought.
The article Scott summarized is titled “Britain’s Evangelical Awakening - an Anti-Intellectual Faith and the Tragic Consequences”, by Jonathan Rice. He published an expanded version in 2005 as “The Descent into Unbelief: When Christendom Produces Cultists, Mockers and Atheists,” in the Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal, Vol. 29:2 and 29:3, Berkeley, CA, November, 2005.
The author told how he had stayed up all night reading a book that caught his attention: The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians, by Ian C. Bradley (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976). The Christians in Victorian England were responsible for sweeping social betterment: they ended the British slave trade, abolished infant sacrifice and the practice of sati in India, banned child labor and similar practices in England; started the world’s first “animal rights” group, rehabilitated prostitutes, accomplished sweeping prison reforms, and more. Perhaps no other group of Christians in history has improved society as much in such a short time.
The book describes the foibles of the Victorian Evangelicals as well as their tremendous triumphs; however, it ends on a tragic note in Rice’s opinion, because many of the Evangelicals lost their children and grandchildren to agnosticism or atheism. How is that possible? Rice says “All throughout [the book’s] pages, we see glimpses of English Evangelicalism’s serious weakness: anti-intellectualism. It comes out in the many accounts of … how they forbade their members to read “secular” novels and discouraged them from patronizing “secular” art and music (Mozart and Beethoven)…
“True Christianity, they believed, did not entail entering the marketplace of ideas. They did not think it worthwhile to intelligently engage the skeptics, German Biblical critics, agnostics and atheistic philosophers of their day. Instead, they claimed, God had called them to a purely practical faith: to send forth missionaries, to help the poor and downtrodden, to better peoples’ manners… In fact, a popular belief of theirs was that one could only prove the existence of God by looking deep within one’s own conscience (pietism at its worst!). When, by the mid-1800s, much of Evangelicalism became influenced by the rise of proto-fundamentalist groups, any fading hope of a ‘life of the mind’ was dashed to pieces.”
Scott pointed out that the deadly liberal theologies of German Biblical critics such as Wellhausen were just coming out in this period, and the British Evangelicals did nothing to challenge them. What if they had!
The article quotes the book saying that while some children and grandchildren of these amazing Evangelicals kept the faith, “an alarmingly high number deserted the Evangelical fold.”(p. 194 of the book). Three of William Wilberforce’s sons became Roman Catholics; a fourth became non-evangelical Anglican; but the real tragedy, says Rice, is that many others abandoned Christianity altogether.
The article tells the sad stories of some of these children of Evangelicals, who loved Jesus as children, and had crises of faith when grown up, when confronted with evidence that “tore their belief away”. Several remained moral and godly, just didn’t believe in God anymore. Others chose much less godly lives, even living in extramarital relationships – a real affront at the time. Others came under the spell of occultists and joined the “New Age” cults of the time. Speaking of one of the more poignant cases, Rice says,”What sickened me most was the fact that Evans lost her faith through reading the works of Hennell and Strauss! At this point in history, those men are no longer taken seriously. their works have been completely refuted… In our time, some people lose their faith over the Jesus Seminar, but… [r]ight off the top of my head I can think of at least three books… which solidly refute the theories of the Jesus Seminar… Why didn’t the nineteenth-century English Evangelicals produce solid responses to Strauss and others? Why were they so lazy in this area when they were so diligent in every other aspect of life? Why did a whole generation have to be robbed of their faith in Christ? …True, Evans and all the others were adults, accountable to God for their actions and beliefs. But from a Biblical perspective, they were also sheep whose shepherds had failed to protect them from savage wolves.”
Even more shocking, Rice tells how he discussed the tragedy the next day with an Indian colleague, VIshal Mangalwadi, the next day. Vishal said that today’s Indian church is failing its members in the exact same way. One Hindu journalist/politician used his connections to run a series of full-page attacks against the gospels in The Asian Age newspaper, “using old, outworn. nineteenth-century arguments against Christianity. A few weeks later, one Christian leader gave a pathetic, insipid reply in the op-ed section of the Asian Age, but that was it.” The rest of the Indian church, including well-paid bishops and well-funded seminaries, said nothing. Rice lists several other published attacks on Christianity, History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1989), Psychology of Prophetism (ca. 1989), Missionaries in India (1994), and more recently Harvesting our Souls (date not given). The Indian church has allowed these intellectual attacks to go unchallenged. Rice notes that the bishops and seminaries might be afraid they would be beaten or stoned for speaking out, but speculates that some of “the same anti-intellectual laziness” which shipwrecked the faith of the descendants of the English Evangelicals might be at fault. Rice assures us that Indian young people and Christians all over India have read these attacks, and wonders how many of them have already lost their faith “because no one in the church bothered to give them an answer.”
It’s a good question. Rice concludes by saying that the English Evangelicals and today’s Indian church will answer at the Judgment Seat of Christ for not protecting the sheep in their care. He hopes the Indian church will wake up before that happens, and defend the sheep in their care.
Kevin noted that in Methodist and Presbyterian churches he visited in the Clear Lake area recently, he met some members who expressed similar attitudes to those described in the article, i.e., that an intellectual defense of Christianity is neither necessary nor desirable – that attempting to intellectually defend the gospel is actually incompatible with relying on faith.
We were all a little sobered by the article. It elevates the importance of our little group’s purpose, which is exploring how to relate science and Christian faith. Apparently intellectual rigor is more of a key ingredient for a healthy Christianity than most Christians think.
Talk turned to other things and some had to leave early due to other commitments. Scott and Kevin chatted until 3:30, but not about science-faith issues.
Proceedings of Houston Section meeting
2008-05-10
by Scott E. Robinson
The Houston-area ASA bunch met on Saturday May 10th at Star Pizza where we’ve been meeting for many years now. We had a small crowd - four of us: Ed Nelson, Kevin Crosby, Nathan Scallon, and Scott Robinson.
Chapter Status – Coming!
Scott updated the group on our application for ASA chapter status (aside from the fact that Randy Isaac already regards us as a chapter). Christine Smith agreed to be the assistant leader of the group, so we were able to satisfy the requirement of two members in leadership. Scott wrote and signed a letter requesting chapter status and sent it to Christine, who added her signature and sent it on last week - so presumably, our chapter status is in the mail.
Fox P-2
Ed’s daughter Nicole is home from college and would have joined us but she’s only home briefly very busy. She is working with a researcher at Howard Hughes Medical Center on the genetic basis of language in birds. The same gene involved in learning speech has been found in birds and many mammals including humans. Called Fox P-2 (sic?), it’s a gene that regulates the expression of other genes which somehow make language learning possible. It was discovered because an inbred family in England, who had proved unable to learn language, were all found to possess damaged copies of this gene.
Scott was hoping to ask her about evolution. On that topic, Ed noted that scientists no longer distinguish between macro and micro evolution. Scott said he’s undecided about the feasibility of macroevolution, but has yet to see the evidence that genetic information can increase by naturalistic means, and was hoping to ask Nicole about that. Ed said he trusted that scientists had such evidence, because they’ve all studied it very intently, and Scott didn’t dispute that, just said he would believe the evidence once he’s seen it.
Expelled
We briefly discussed the movie Expelled, by Ben Stein, which all of us have seen already. We all thought it had done a good job in some ways, but not in others. Kevin thought the constant linking of Darwinism to Nazism and Communism (implied by the constant use of the Berlin Wall image) was overstated. Any theory could be used to justify wrongdoing, and Ben Stein does acknowledge in the movie that not all evolutionists went as far as the Nazis. Scott thought Stein did a far better job than Michael Moore had done, of quoting people fairly and presenting a balanced case, but things he’d read on the Web after seeing the movie made it sound as if some of the dismissals and tenure denials of ID advocates were not specifically for their ID ideas. He’d also heard of a case last year involving the Texas Education Agency (which governs school boards in Texas) where their press contact person was allegedly forced out due to an anti-ID statement she made. So perhaps it cuts both ways.
Ed said he regarded ID as a failed theory, more of a philosophy than a testable theory, a theory looking for evidence. Kevin asked, isn’t a hypothesis by definition a theory looking for evidence? Scott and Kevin thought ID is a theory that hasn’t succeeded yet.
Ed said that the furor over how God did it is irrelevant to the discussion anyway. His personal belief is that accounts like the story of Noah are some sort of myth, or at least have mythic overtones, and that it doesn’t matter for his faith, since his faith is founded on the perception that there is a God Who made us and this creation for a purpose because Ed sees His hand at work all around us. Arguing that such a view is supernaturalism and science does not countenance such ideas, is hardly credible when scientists assert, as a Scientific American writer recently did, that there are 400 million universes embedded in the space around us. That’s as supernatural as anything in the Bible, Ed said. That got us on the topic of cosmology and cosmic origins. Kevin noted that it’s not intellectually fair for atheist scientists to base their belief on things they believe will be discovered in cosmology and consider the issue settled. Mormons assert that the Book of Mormon will eventually be proved true by scientific discoveries too, even though all scientific evidence is against it today. Kevin said they say, “Anytime now… anytime now,” and simply cling to faith.
Main discussion
The May/June Perspectives issue hadn’t reached us yet, and in March we discussed the two articles from the March issue that interested us, so we had no specific topic to cover. Scott brought an article of interest from Missions Frontiers magazine, by the U.S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena, CA, which he skim-read to the group.
The U.S. Center for World Mission was founded 30 years ago with the help of two missionary statesmen, Dr. Ralph Winter and Dr. Donald McGavran, veteran missionaries to Guatemala and India. Their emphasis on seeing humanity in terms of cultural groupings called “people groups” instead of political or geographic groups, and their focus on planting churches in each group, has had a huge influence on Protestant missionary thinking.
Mission Frontiers magazine can be found at www.missionfrontiers.org. . The March-April 2008 issue is devoted to considering why so many Christians in America are falling away, and suggests that the same thing could happen in Africa and India. In Africa, Scott said, Christianity is described as being “a mile wide and an inch deep,” because it hasn’t changed the lives of the people or their conduct. Both tribes in the genocide in Rwanda were majority Christian. Nigerian Christians, animists and Muslims are equally corrupt in politics, business, and personal conduct. Bible teaching hasn’t penetrated far. Of course, they learned their practice of Christianity from the Western missionaries who brought it, and this Mission Frontiers issue suggests that there was an anti-intellectual streak in what the missionaries brought.
The article Scott summarized is titled “Britain’s Evangelical Awakening - an Anti-Intellectual Faith and the Tragic Consequences”, by Jonathan Rice. He published an expanded version in 2005 as “The Descent into Unbelief: When Christendom Produces Cultists, Mockers and Atheists,” in the Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal, Vol. 29:2 and 29:3, Berkeley, CA, November, 2005.
The author told how he had stayed up all night reading a book that caught his attention: The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians, by Ian C. Bradley (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976). The Christians in Victorian England were responsible for sweeping social betterment: they ended the British slave trade, abolished infant sacrifice and the practice of sati in India, banned child labor and similar practices in England; started the world’s first “animal rights” group, rehabilitated prostitutes, accomplished sweeping prison reforms, and more. Perhaps no other group of Christians in history has improved society as much in such a short time.
The book describes the foibles of the Victorian Evangelicals as well as their tremendous triumphs; however, it ends on a tragic note in Rice’s opinion, because many of the Evangelicals lost their children and grandchildren to agnosticism or atheism. How is that possible? Rice says “All throughout [the book’s] pages, we see glimpses of English Evangelicalism’s serious weakness: anti-intellectualism. It comes out in the many accounts of … how they forbade their members to read “secular” novels and discouraged them from patronizing “secular” art and music (Mozart and Beethoven)…
“True Christianity, they believed, did not entail entering the marketplace of ideas. They did not think it worthwhile to intelligently engage the skeptics, German Biblical critics, agnostics and atheistic philosophers of their day. Instead, they claimed, God had called them to a purely practical faith: to send forth missionaries, to help the poor and downtrodden, to better peoples’ manners… In fact, a popular belief of theirs was that one could only prove the existence of God by looking deep within one’s own conscience (pietism at its worst!). When, by the mid-1800s, much of Evangelicalism became influenced by the rise of proto-fundamentalist groups, any fading hope of a ‘life of the mind’ was dashed to pieces.”
Scott pointed out that the deadly liberal theologies of German Biblical critics such as Wellhausen were just coming out in this period, and the British Evangelicals did nothing to challenge them. What if they had!
The article quotes the book saying that while some children and grandchildren of these amazing Evangelicals kept the faith, “an alarmingly high number deserted the Evangelical fold.”(p. 194 of the book). Three of William Wilberforce’s sons became Roman Catholics; a fourth became non-evangelical Anglican; but the real tragedy, says Rice, is that many others abandoned Christianity altogether.
The article tells the sad stories of some of these children of Evangelicals, who loved Jesus as children, and had crises of faith when grown up, when confronted with evidence that “tore their belief away”. Several remained moral and godly, just didn’t believe in God anymore. Others chose much less godly lives, even living in extramarital relationships – a real affront at the time. Others came under the spell of occultists and joined the “New Age” cults of the time. Speaking of one of the more poignant cases, Rice says,”What sickened me most was the fact that Evans lost her faith through reading the works of Hennell and Strauss! At this point in history, those men are no longer taken seriously. their works have been completely refuted… In our time, some people lose their faith over the Jesus Seminar, but… [r]ight off the top of my head I can think of at least three books… which solidly refute the theories of the Jesus Seminar… Why didn’t the nineteenth-century English Evangelicals produce solid responses to Strauss and others? Why were they so lazy in this area when they were so diligent in every other aspect of life? Why did a whole generation have to be robbed of their faith in Christ? …True, Evans and all the others were adults, accountable to God for their actions and beliefs. But from a Biblical perspective, they were also sheep whose shepherds had failed to protect them from savage wolves.”
Even more shocking, Rice tells how he discussed the tragedy the next day with an Indian colleague, VIshal Mangalwadi, the next day. Vishal said that today’s Indian church is failing its members in the exact same way. One Hindu journalist/politician used his connections to run a series of full-page attacks against the gospels in The Asian Age newspaper, “using old, outworn. nineteenth-century arguments against Christianity. A few weeks later, one Christian leader gave a pathetic, insipid reply in the op-ed section of the Asian Age, but that was it.” The rest of the Indian church, including well-paid bishops and well-funded seminaries, said nothing. Rice lists several other published attacks on Christianity, History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1989), Psychology of Prophetism (ca. 1989), Missionaries in India (1994), and more recently Harvesting our Souls (date not given). The Indian church has allowed these intellectual attacks to go unchallenged. Rice notes that the bishops and seminaries might be afraid they would be beaten or stoned for speaking out, but speculates that some of “the same anti-intellectual laziness” which shipwrecked the faith of the descendants of the English Evangelicals might be at fault. Rice assures us that Indian young people and Christians all over India have read these attacks, and wonders how many of them have already lost their faith “because no one in the church bothered to give them an answer.”
It’s a good question. Rice concludes by saying that the English Evangelicals and today’s Indian church will answer at the Judgment Seat of Christ for not protecting the sheep in their care. He hopes the Indian church will wake up before that happens, and defend the sheep in their care.
Kevin noted that in Methodist and Presbyterian churches he visited in the Clear Lake area recently, he met some members who expressed similar attitudes to those described in the article, i.e., that an intellectual defense of Christianity is neither necessary nor desirable – that attempting to intellectually defend the gospel is actually incompatible with relying on faith.
We were all a little sobered by the article. It elevates the importance of our little group’s purpose, which is exploring how to relate science and Christian faith. Apparently intellectual rigor is more of a key ingredient for a healthy Christianity than most Christians think.
Talk turned to other things and some had to leave early due to other commitments. Scott and Kevin chatted until 3:30, but not about science-faith issues.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Synthetic life?
Hi all,
Here's a link to a Houston Chronicle article on "synthetic life":
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5383487.html
The science-faith debate is already going in the comment section...
I think this issue will have huge implications in the future on just about everything we do, both practically and philosophically/theologically. To be honest, I'm rather nervous about how this all will evolve (pun intended :b ). What do you all think?
In Christ,
Christine
Here's a link to a Houston Chronicle article on "synthetic life":
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5383487.html
The science-faith debate is already going in the comment section...
I think this issue will have huge implications in the future on just about everything we do, both practically and philosophically/theologically. To be honest, I'm rather nervous about how this all will evolve (pun intended :b ). What do you all think?
In Christ,
Christine
Monday, September 17, 2007
Humans specially created or descended from non-humans?
Here's a post to extend the discussion from our last meeting (Sept. 8th) and hopefully reach a conclusion - at least a consensus. Or at least to get some more thinking on the subject.
Instead of restating what we said at the meeting, I'll only give the gist: RTB's testable creation model proposes that humans are not descended from previous creatures, but wre specially created with their own genome. Francis Collins, in his new book, The Language of God, points out that in the human genome there are errors or blunders where functional genes have gotten accidentally inserted in non-functional areas and transmitted by inheritance, and that the same non-functional copies exist in the same places in the human and mouse genome. Why would a Creator add the same non-functional blunders to the human genome that were introduced in the mouse genome in the same places? In some cases, it is even partial genes and not whole genes that are repeated – things that could never function, according to Collins. It was much more reasonable to take this as evidence that humans descended from non-human ancestors and inherited their genome mistakes too.
The objections at the meeting were (please correct me if I don't get it right)
1. that RTB’s model didn’t require humans be created de novo without ancestors;
2. it is more likely that those regions had to be there for some reason we don’t understand yet. Similarities between our genome and other species’ don’t require common descent.
Okay, here's more detail on those points:
1. RTB's testable model does assert humans were not descended from earlier primates.
I checked Hugh Ross' latest book, Creation as Science, and he says on page 156 that "The RTB creation model predicts that as geneticists look deeper into the genomes of the great apes and the hominids that preceded humanity..., they will continue to confirm that the human species is genetically distinct, not linked through natural evolutionary descent to other primates. The RTB creation model predicts that future genetic research will attest humanity' uniqueness - a special creation in whom the Creator made appropriate use of similar or identical genetic designs He already optimized for other species." (italics mine.)
2. Collins points out (The Language of God, pp. 134 - 136) several observations pointing to common descent between mouse and human genomes:
a. The order of genes along the human and mouse genome match over considerable stretches of DNA - in one case cited, virtually all the genes of human chromosome 17 match mouse chromosome 11. The order of genes can be critical to their function, of course, but biologists have a hard time imagining it to be critical over an entire chromosome.
b. What I was trying to describe are AREs ("Ancient Repetitive Elements") in genomes. These are repeated genes which have been copied into non-functional parts of the genome and thus been deactivated. In some cases, only a fragment of the gene is copied, not the whole thing, so the gene is certainly non-functional. It's not a case of us not understanding how it works; it cannot work. Of course, I have to trust Collins for that. I don't know enough about genetics to check that statement. The interesting thing is, one can find the same fragmentary AREs in the same places in the human and mouse genomes. Collins says, "Unless one is willing to take the position that God has placed these decapitated AREs in these precise positions to confuse and mislead us, the conclusion of a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable." (p. 137, op. cit.).
NOTE: Hugh Ross' book argues that chimpanzee and human comparisons are based on several fragments of the genome and not the whole thing. The same might be true of the mouse and human genome, though Collins says he picked it because the mouse's is the next most completely sequenced. Or, maybe there are other details Collins isn't giving, about the AREs. I'm not saying this is conclusive, but if it is actually true as described, I think it is a really strong argument that humans' bodies are descended from non-human ancestors.
c. Collins notes that the human chromosome pattern is virtually identical to the chimpanzee's and the gorilla's and orangutan's, with one exception: We have a very long 2nd chromosome and only 23, while the others have 24 chromosomes, all shorter. Human chromosome no. 2 has long been suspected to be a fusion of two chromosomes in a common ancestor. Genome sequencing supports that theory, by showing that right where human chromosome 2 should have been fused, it has genetic sequences which are otherwise found only on the tips of primate chromosomes. Seems like another strong argument for humans' descent from a previous ancestor.
NOTE: Hugh Ross on p. 156 of Creation as Science also says that the comparisons between chimp and human genomes is not as good as claimed. He says the published numbers are from comparison of fragments which "by common sense" ought to be similar, and that "the most complete comparisons to date indicate that the degree of similarity is more like 85 to 90 percent." Collins in his book cites a 100% similarity between the regions that code for protein, and a 98% similarity in the segments between genes (p. 127).
Instead of restating what we said at the meeting, I'll only give the gist: RTB's testable creation model proposes that humans are not descended from previous creatures, but wre specially created with their own genome. Francis Collins, in his new book, The Language of God, points out that in the human genome there are errors or blunders where functional genes have gotten accidentally inserted in non-functional areas and transmitted by inheritance, and that the same non-functional copies exist in the same places in the human and mouse genome. Why would a Creator add the same non-functional blunders to the human genome that were introduced in the mouse genome in the same places? In some cases, it is even partial genes and not whole genes that are repeated – things that could never function, according to Collins. It was much more reasonable to take this as evidence that humans descended from non-human ancestors and inherited their genome mistakes too.
The objections at the meeting were (please correct me if I don't get it right)
1. that RTB’s model didn’t require humans be created de novo without ancestors;
2. it is more likely that those regions had to be there for some reason we don’t understand yet. Similarities between our genome and other species’ don’t require common descent.
Okay, here's more detail on those points:
1. RTB's testable model does assert humans were not descended from earlier primates.
I checked Hugh Ross' latest book, Creation as Science, and he says on page 156 that "The RTB creation model predicts that as geneticists look deeper into the genomes of the great apes and the hominids that preceded humanity..., they will continue to confirm that the human species is genetically distinct, not linked through natural evolutionary descent to other primates. The RTB creation model predicts that future genetic research will attest humanity' uniqueness - a special creation in whom the Creator made appropriate use of similar or identical genetic designs He already optimized for other species." (italics mine.)
2. Collins points out (The Language of God, pp. 134 - 136) several observations pointing to common descent between mouse and human genomes:
a. The order of genes along the human and mouse genome match over considerable stretches of DNA - in one case cited, virtually all the genes of human chromosome 17 match mouse chromosome 11. The order of genes can be critical to their function, of course, but biologists have a hard time imagining it to be critical over an entire chromosome.
b. What I was trying to describe are AREs ("Ancient Repetitive Elements") in genomes. These are repeated genes which have been copied into non-functional parts of the genome and thus been deactivated. In some cases, only a fragment of the gene is copied, not the whole thing, so the gene is certainly non-functional. It's not a case of us not understanding how it works; it cannot work. Of course, I have to trust Collins for that. I don't know enough about genetics to check that statement. The interesting thing is, one can find the same fragmentary AREs in the same places in the human and mouse genomes. Collins says, "Unless one is willing to take the position that God has placed these decapitated AREs in these precise positions to confuse and mislead us, the conclusion of a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable." (p. 137, op. cit.).
NOTE: Hugh Ross' book argues that chimpanzee and human comparisons are based on several fragments of the genome and not the whole thing. The same might be true of the mouse and human genome, though Collins says he picked it because the mouse's is the next most completely sequenced. Or, maybe there are other details Collins isn't giving, about the AREs. I'm not saying this is conclusive, but if it is actually true as described, I think it is a really strong argument that humans' bodies are descended from non-human ancestors.
c. Collins notes that the human chromosome pattern is virtually identical to the chimpanzee's and the gorilla's and orangutan's, with one exception: We have a very long 2nd chromosome and only 23, while the others have 24 chromosomes, all shorter. Human chromosome no. 2 has long been suspected to be a fusion of two chromosomes in a common ancestor. Genome sequencing supports that theory, by showing that right where human chromosome 2 should have been fused, it has genetic sequences which are otherwise found only on the tips of primate chromosomes. Seems like another strong argument for humans' descent from a previous ancestor.
NOTE: Hugh Ross on p. 156 of Creation as Science also says that the comparisons between chimp and human genomes is not as good as claimed. He says the published numbers are from comparison of fragments which "by common sense" ought to be similar, and that "the most complete comparisons to date indicate that the degree of similarity is more like 85 to 90 percent." Collins in his book cites a 100% similarity between the regions that code for protein, and a 98% similarity in the segments between genes (p. 127).
Proceedings of ASA Houston Section Meeting, Sept. 8, 2007 - please review and comment
For all who were there, please review and comment/correct/supplement as appropriate. I publish on the e-newsletter at the end of Sept.
I'm making the two preliminary discussions into blog posts on their own, so we may continue the discussions.
- ser
Proceedings of the Houston Section of the ASA OK-TX Section
September 8th, 2007
There were six of us: Christine Smith, Bruce Koons, Andy Coleman, Kevin Crosby, Roger Rowe, and Scott Robinson. We started at 12:00 and were still having a lively discussion at 3:40 when Scott’s family arrived to take him away, and the meeting adjourned.
We introduced ourselves, since Kevin was new and Christine hadn’t met everyone yet. Then we chatted about a few subjects before our main discussion.
Evolution or Special Creation for Humans
The topic of Reasons to Believe came up, and Scott noted that RTB’s Testable Creation Model proposes that mankind was specially created, not evolved, and wondered what Hugh Ross would say to some arguments about that from Francis Collins’ new book, The Language of God. Collins points out that in non-coding regions of the human genome (98.5% of it) there are errors or blunders, where functional genes have gotten accidentally inserted and therefore made non-functional, and that the same non-functional copies exist in the same places in the human and mouse genome. Why would a Creator add the same non-functional blunders to the human genome that were introduced in the mouse genome through generations of mutations? In some cases, it is even partial genes and not whole genes that are repeated – things that could never function, according to Collins. It was much more reasonable to take this as evidence that humans descended from non-human ancestors and inherited their genome mistakes too.
The others didn’t buy that. They thought that RTB’s model didn’t require humans be created de novo without ancestors. They also thought it more likely that those regions had to be there for some reason we don’t understand yet. Similarities between our genome and other species’ don’t require common descent.
Natural Selection Can’t Account for Human Altruism
Scott is reading Collins’ book, The Language of God. He said that the main reasons Francis Collins gives for his becoming a Christian were the inability of naturalistic science to explain the existence of the Moral Law and the universal human tendency to yearn for something (C. S. Lewis called it “Joy”) beyond this world. Natural selection couldn’t account for either of these. He drew much of his thought from C. S. Lewis. However, he also gave one other argument, that natural selection cannot explain human altruism. We discussed this in our group at length.
Scott brought an article from Natural History magazine describing investigations into altruism in amoebas which come together to create a multicellular fruiting body when food becomes short. Some amoebas form the spore-generating body, some form the stalk. Only the genes of the amoebas in the spore-generating body get passed on. A mutation that let an amoeba always join the spore-forming body would soon dominate the population and destroy the “altruism.” Christine objected that altruism requires thought and choices, and this didn’t qualify. Scott replied that this is Darwinian or biological altruism, and may have a slightly different definition from human altruism. However, to Darwinists human altruism has to be explainable by natural selection just as all other traits of all species had to be.
Preliminary indications were that altruism (the tendency of amoebas to join the stalk) was associated with a gene that was also associated with a very vital function, so that if the gene turned off, the amoeba would lose the tendency to join the stalk but also be fatally crippled and not survive.
Darwinists don’t have a problem explaining “altruism” in social insects, in which all members work toward the good of the Queen, because they are all monoclonal – all are her children and all have the same genome, and are therefore all working to perpetuate the same genome. However, among humans that isn’t true. If I save someone’s life and die in the process, his genes are passed on, not mine, and that means altruism in humans should be selected against by natural selection. It’s a real puzzle, according to Collins.
Christine proposed that communal, or group, behavior does confer survival value on the group, helping all their genomes tend to survive, and therefore communal behavior does get selected for. Altruism in humans could be just a sharpening of that same instinct. Christine thought that God gave humans the Moral Law to intensify and extend that instinctive communal behavior to all humans – building on the inborn communal behaviors, but giving humans something that is not all due to natural selection.
That is where we left it when the food was done and it was time to commence our main discussion.
Main Discussion
For our topic of the month, we discussed an article Christine suggested, “Thinking Critically and Christianly About Technology,” by Dr. Ken Funk, who is associate head of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University (PSCF, September, 2007, pp. 201-211).
We read over the article first, then started discussing it. Here’s an outline of the article’s main points
He is advocating that we make careful, systematic value judgments about technology by Christian principles. One cannot separate technology from the practitioner of it – the very root word, techne, means technique or process in Greek.
Funk proposes a hierarchy, or priority order, of three fundamental principles by which to value technology:
1. Technology ought to facilitate our communion with God and the fulfillment of our moral obligations to Him.
2. Technology ought to facilitate the preservation and improvement of human welfare and the fulfillment of our moral obligations to people.
3. Technology ought to facilitate the preservation of the natural world and the fulfillment of our moral obligations to God’s lower creation.
Funk then points out four ways in which technology subtly promotes negative behavior/values. He argues that “technology amplifies and exacerbates our own human tendency toward evil… It creates an environment in which speed, power, and efficiency dominate our thinking and the ends to which it propels us become merely matters of personal choice, one being equivalent to any other. Technology’s many great successes encourage us to trust in our own capacities to solve our own material problems and to elevate our own material conditions, as if we were independent of God’s power and grace. Technology distracts us from the higher good and conditions us to attend mostly to the lower good. Technology not only changes the material world. In these and many other ways, it changes us morally, and not for the better” (p. 207).
Funk proposes a checklist of questions as the first draft of a guide to thinking critically and Christianly about technology. We never got to it, but it’s a very interesting table, on p. 208 of the article.
I took up note-taking after a few points had already been covered, but here’s what I caught:
Roger observed that if the world is going to end very soon, as he believes, then it won’t matter if we use up the resources on the planet. There would be no sense in trying to save them for later, since there will be no later.
Scott and Andy pointed out that Interior Secretary Watt under Reagan made the same point, and was roundly criticized for it. Even Christine (who was not alive then) had heard of Watt.
Christine thought we still have a moral obligation to steward the earth’s resources whether Jesus is coming back in a day or 1,000 years. She and Roger discussed it a bit more.
Roger asked Christine if she thought the world as a whole was doing better or worse on earth stewardship than we were 20 years ago. Christine thought we were. Bruce noted that the U.S. is leading the way, too. Scott was surprised. Christine said it depends on which area you consider.
Roger remembered that everyone used to dump their used motor oil on the ground after changing it. These days, you’d never do that. Bruce recalled that 20 years ago there was more oil entering the ocean from all the used motor oil dumped on the ground, than from all the oil spills at the time. He also remembered smelling the refineries every day in Houston, 20 years ago. Now that smell doesn’t reach him, though he and his wife haven’t relocated in that time.
Roger noted that some of the conservation we practice now is due to technology. Some things were impossible 30-40 years ago without bankrupting the country.
Andy noted that the U.S. didn’t sign the Kyoto agreement because India and China weren’t required to sign. Christine corrected that slightly – they were signatories, but they had no target quota to shoot for, just made a pledge that they’d reduce emissions.
Roger thought the pendulum would swing the other way on global warming in the future, as science learns its true causes. The earth as a system is always changing, something non-geologists don’t easily grasp. Christine noted that she is also a geologist, and understands the earth changes, yet she thinks it makes sense to reduce carbon emissions from a stewardship perspective for two reasons:
1) Global warming is happening very fast. It’s hard to believe it’s natural.
2) We have very little time to adapt to the changes in crop patterns, coastlines, etc – even changing political boundaries.
Roger noted that the last glacial period ended fairly rapidly, and the ice melted quite quickly at the end of that time. Since then, the rate of glacial retreat has tailed off but is still occurring. Still, it’s a very slow rate compared to the end of the last Ice Age.
Andy cautioned, however, that once we figure out the true causes, it might be too late to do anything about it, if human activity really is the cause. It wouldn’t be prudent to do something about it now, just in case.
Christine said that the idea that human activity is changing the climate is nothing new. The idea was advanced 100 years ago, and has been studied since the ‘50s and ‘60s. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has published a consensus document taking into account the opinion of the majority of scientists and governments, which makes it fairly conservative in its assertions. It says human activity is the major driver of climate change now.
Bruce noted that on the Internet, one can find a document signed by a panel of 500 scientists, dissenting from that view. He knows because he was one of the signatories. That was a few years ago. He’s not a climate expert, but he was skeptical of it and the highly politicized nature of the debate then.
Christine asked Bruce what evidence it would take to convince him that human activity was driving climate change? Bruce answered that he’d need to see credible estimates of the contribution of all natural causes. Volcanoes put out considerable CO2, for example. It is very difficult to accurately estimate the amount of CO2 contributed by each natural source.
Christine noted that the historical data shows a clear correlation between the rise in global temperature and global CO2. The IPCC report asserts that the temperature increase can’t be accounted for by the total of natural CO2 sources. When human contributions are added, it becomes much closer to the observed temperature increase.
Roger was skeptical. If they can’t model a hurricane for 5 days into the future, how can they model the entire earth? Christine responded that weather and climate are different things, and regional and global scale are different as well.
Bruce asked if CO2 is still increasing. Christine said yes it is, worldwide. Scott asked if that was because of China and India. Christine said it is. Soon China will pass the U.S. as the largest greenhouse-gas emitter, at the rate they’re growing.
To return to the article, Scott said, once one understood what was really going on climatically, one would apply the three principles in this article to help decide what to do. It was interesting to Scott that the first principle was individual, the second group-oriented, and the third nature. He wondered if that reflected a Western cultural bias. Christine said the author did state that principle 1 included group communing with God as well as individual, so probably not.
Christine was interested by Funk’s section on the “Illusion of Human Sovereignty”, i.e., that technology’s success makes people think they can do anything, given enough time and resources. Andy noted that he’s often thought of technology as undoing the Fall.
Roger noted that our high living standards will evaporate if there is an economic crash, such as many people predict for the U.S. economy in 10-20 years. We don’t have any “right” or entitlement to this high living standard, and it may be ephemeral.
Christine thought Roger’s observation fit well with the section on p. , “Promotion of Subsidiary Goods.” To explain the author’s point, Christine took the example of computers. They are a tool by which we do much more than we could without them, but because of that, the computer itself becomes exaggerated in importance, and pursued as a “good” in itself. Scott tried to sum it up by saying that computers freed up peoples’ time, but instead of using that free time for more communion with God (the highest of Funk’s 3 principles), they used the free time to improve computers to gain more free time to improve computers to gain more free time, etc.
The author’s right when he points out that all technology brings some bad along with the good. Chips implanted in pets are really handy. Now some are suggesting implanting them in disadvantaged people to help them keep their records; but other people are objecting that the potential for misuse of that technology is too great for it to ever be used. Andy noted that the iPod is handy, but one can listen to any music on it – good or bad.
At this point, the discussion was still lively, but Scott’s family came to take him away (it was already 3:40, past our quitting time), and the meeting broke up after that. Evidently we all found Dr. Funk’s article to be very stimulating. Good choice, Christine!
Blog Entry Coming on Global Warming
After the meeting broke up, Christine offered to find some information on global warming for our next meeting, and Scott suggested that it would be good if she could find something that addresses the skepticism Roger, Bruce and Scott share: We are all skeptical that we can really tell whether human activity has raised the temperature, eliminating all other causes. She offered to put it on the blog when she finds it. That should generate some postings and discussion!
I'm making the two preliminary discussions into blog posts on their own, so we may continue the discussions.
- ser
Proceedings of the Houston Section of the ASA OK-TX Section
September 8th, 2007
There were six of us: Christine Smith, Bruce Koons, Andy Coleman, Kevin Crosby, Roger Rowe, and Scott Robinson. We started at 12:00 and were still having a lively discussion at 3:40 when Scott’s family arrived to take him away, and the meeting adjourned.
We introduced ourselves, since Kevin was new and Christine hadn’t met everyone yet. Then we chatted about a few subjects before our main discussion.
Evolution or Special Creation for Humans
The topic of Reasons to Believe came up, and Scott noted that RTB’s Testable Creation Model proposes that mankind was specially created, not evolved, and wondered what Hugh Ross would say to some arguments about that from Francis Collins’ new book, The Language of God. Collins points out that in non-coding regions of the human genome (98.5% of it) there are errors or blunders, where functional genes have gotten accidentally inserted and therefore made non-functional, and that the same non-functional copies exist in the same places in the human and mouse genome. Why would a Creator add the same non-functional blunders to the human genome that were introduced in the mouse genome through generations of mutations? In some cases, it is even partial genes and not whole genes that are repeated – things that could never function, according to Collins. It was much more reasonable to take this as evidence that humans descended from non-human ancestors and inherited their genome mistakes too.
The others didn’t buy that. They thought that RTB’s model didn’t require humans be created de novo without ancestors. They also thought it more likely that those regions had to be there for some reason we don’t understand yet. Similarities between our genome and other species’ don’t require common descent.
Natural Selection Can’t Account for Human Altruism
Scott is reading Collins’ book, The Language of God. He said that the main reasons Francis Collins gives for his becoming a Christian were the inability of naturalistic science to explain the existence of the Moral Law and the universal human tendency to yearn for something (C. S. Lewis called it “Joy”) beyond this world. Natural selection couldn’t account for either of these. He drew much of his thought from C. S. Lewis. However, he also gave one other argument, that natural selection cannot explain human altruism. We discussed this in our group at length.
Scott brought an article from Natural History magazine describing investigations into altruism in amoebas which come together to create a multicellular fruiting body when food becomes short. Some amoebas form the spore-generating body, some form the stalk. Only the genes of the amoebas in the spore-generating body get passed on. A mutation that let an amoeba always join the spore-forming body would soon dominate the population and destroy the “altruism.” Christine objected that altruism requires thought and choices, and this didn’t qualify. Scott replied that this is Darwinian or biological altruism, and may have a slightly different definition from human altruism. However, to Darwinists human altruism has to be explainable by natural selection just as all other traits of all species had to be.
Preliminary indications were that altruism (the tendency of amoebas to join the stalk) was associated with a gene that was also associated with a very vital function, so that if the gene turned off, the amoeba would lose the tendency to join the stalk but also be fatally crippled and not survive.
Darwinists don’t have a problem explaining “altruism” in social insects, in which all members work toward the good of the Queen, because they are all monoclonal – all are her children and all have the same genome, and are therefore all working to perpetuate the same genome. However, among humans that isn’t true. If I save someone’s life and die in the process, his genes are passed on, not mine, and that means altruism in humans should be selected against by natural selection. It’s a real puzzle, according to Collins.
Christine proposed that communal, or group, behavior does confer survival value on the group, helping all their genomes tend to survive, and therefore communal behavior does get selected for. Altruism in humans could be just a sharpening of that same instinct. Christine thought that God gave humans the Moral Law to intensify and extend that instinctive communal behavior to all humans – building on the inborn communal behaviors, but giving humans something that is not all due to natural selection.
That is where we left it when the food was done and it was time to commence our main discussion.
Main Discussion
For our topic of the month, we discussed an article Christine suggested, “Thinking Critically and Christianly About Technology,” by Dr. Ken Funk, who is associate head of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University (PSCF, September, 2007, pp. 201-211).
We read over the article first, then started discussing it. Here’s an outline of the article’s main points
He is advocating that we make careful, systematic value judgments about technology by Christian principles. One cannot separate technology from the practitioner of it – the very root word, techne, means technique or process in Greek.
Funk proposes a hierarchy, or priority order, of three fundamental principles by which to value technology:
1. Technology ought to facilitate our communion with God and the fulfillment of our moral obligations to Him.
2. Technology ought to facilitate the preservation and improvement of human welfare and the fulfillment of our moral obligations to people.
3. Technology ought to facilitate the preservation of the natural world and the fulfillment of our moral obligations to God’s lower creation.
Funk then points out four ways in which technology subtly promotes negative behavior/values. He argues that “technology amplifies and exacerbates our own human tendency toward evil… It creates an environment in which speed, power, and efficiency dominate our thinking and the ends to which it propels us become merely matters of personal choice, one being equivalent to any other. Technology’s many great successes encourage us to trust in our own capacities to solve our own material problems and to elevate our own material conditions, as if we were independent of God’s power and grace. Technology distracts us from the higher good and conditions us to attend mostly to the lower good. Technology not only changes the material world. In these and many other ways, it changes us morally, and not for the better” (p. 207).
Funk proposes a checklist of questions as the first draft of a guide to thinking critically and Christianly about technology. We never got to it, but it’s a very interesting table, on p. 208 of the article.
I took up note-taking after a few points had already been covered, but here’s what I caught:
Roger observed that if the world is going to end very soon, as he believes, then it won’t matter if we use up the resources on the planet. There would be no sense in trying to save them for later, since there will be no later.
Scott and Andy pointed out that Interior Secretary Watt under Reagan made the same point, and was roundly criticized for it. Even Christine (who was not alive then) had heard of Watt.
Christine thought we still have a moral obligation to steward the earth’s resources whether Jesus is coming back in a day or 1,000 years. She and Roger discussed it a bit more.
Roger asked Christine if she thought the world as a whole was doing better or worse on earth stewardship than we were 20 years ago. Christine thought we were. Bruce noted that the U.S. is leading the way, too. Scott was surprised. Christine said it depends on which area you consider.
Roger remembered that everyone used to dump their used motor oil on the ground after changing it. These days, you’d never do that. Bruce recalled that 20 years ago there was more oil entering the ocean from all the used motor oil dumped on the ground, than from all the oil spills at the time. He also remembered smelling the refineries every day in Houston, 20 years ago. Now that smell doesn’t reach him, though he and his wife haven’t relocated in that time.
Roger noted that some of the conservation we practice now is due to technology. Some things were impossible 30-40 years ago without bankrupting the country.
Andy noted that the U.S. didn’t sign the Kyoto agreement because India and China weren’t required to sign. Christine corrected that slightly – they were signatories, but they had no target quota to shoot for, just made a pledge that they’d reduce emissions.
Roger thought the pendulum would swing the other way on global warming in the future, as science learns its true causes. The earth as a system is always changing, something non-geologists don’t easily grasp. Christine noted that she is also a geologist, and understands the earth changes, yet she thinks it makes sense to reduce carbon emissions from a stewardship perspective for two reasons:
1) Global warming is happening very fast. It’s hard to believe it’s natural.
2) We have very little time to adapt to the changes in crop patterns, coastlines, etc – even changing political boundaries.
Roger noted that the last glacial period ended fairly rapidly, and the ice melted quite quickly at the end of that time. Since then, the rate of glacial retreat has tailed off but is still occurring. Still, it’s a very slow rate compared to the end of the last Ice Age.
Andy cautioned, however, that once we figure out the true causes, it might be too late to do anything about it, if human activity really is the cause. It wouldn’t be prudent to do something about it now, just in case.
Christine said that the idea that human activity is changing the climate is nothing new. The idea was advanced 100 years ago, and has been studied since the ‘50s and ‘60s. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has published a consensus document taking into account the opinion of the majority of scientists and governments, which makes it fairly conservative in its assertions. It says human activity is the major driver of climate change now.
Bruce noted that on the Internet, one can find a document signed by a panel of 500 scientists, dissenting from that view. He knows because he was one of the signatories. That was a few years ago. He’s not a climate expert, but he was skeptical of it and the highly politicized nature of the debate then.
Christine asked Bruce what evidence it would take to convince him that human activity was driving climate change? Bruce answered that he’d need to see credible estimates of the contribution of all natural causes. Volcanoes put out considerable CO2, for example. It is very difficult to accurately estimate the amount of CO2 contributed by each natural source.
Christine noted that the historical data shows a clear correlation between the rise in global temperature and global CO2. The IPCC report asserts that the temperature increase can’t be accounted for by the total of natural CO2 sources. When human contributions are added, it becomes much closer to the observed temperature increase.
Roger was skeptical. If they can’t model a hurricane for 5 days into the future, how can they model the entire earth? Christine responded that weather and climate are different things, and regional and global scale are different as well.
Bruce asked if CO2 is still increasing. Christine said yes it is, worldwide. Scott asked if that was because of China and India. Christine said it is. Soon China will pass the U.S. as the largest greenhouse-gas emitter, at the rate they’re growing.
To return to the article, Scott said, once one understood what was really going on climatically, one would apply the three principles in this article to help decide what to do. It was interesting to Scott that the first principle was individual, the second group-oriented, and the third nature. He wondered if that reflected a Western cultural bias. Christine said the author did state that principle 1 included group communing with God as well as individual, so probably not.
Christine was interested by Funk’s section on the “Illusion of Human Sovereignty”, i.e., that technology’s success makes people think they can do anything, given enough time and resources. Andy noted that he’s often thought of technology as undoing the Fall.
Roger noted that our high living standards will evaporate if there is an economic crash, such as many people predict for the U.S. economy in 10-20 years. We don’t have any “right” or entitlement to this high living standard, and it may be ephemeral.
Christine thought Roger’s observation fit well with the section on p. , “Promotion of Subsidiary Goods.” To explain the author’s point, Christine took the example of computers. They are a tool by which we do much more than we could without them, but because of that, the computer itself becomes exaggerated in importance, and pursued as a “good” in itself. Scott tried to sum it up by saying that computers freed up peoples’ time, but instead of using that free time for more communion with God (the highest of Funk’s 3 principles), they used the free time to improve computers to gain more free time to improve computers to gain more free time, etc.
The author’s right when he points out that all technology brings some bad along with the good. Chips implanted in pets are really handy. Now some are suggesting implanting them in disadvantaged people to help them keep their records; but other people are objecting that the potential for misuse of that technology is too great for it to ever be used. Andy noted that the iPod is handy, but one can listen to any music on it – good or bad.
At this point, the discussion was still lively, but Scott’s family came to take him away (it was already 3:40, past our quitting time), and the meeting broke up after that. Evidently we all found Dr. Funk’s article to be very stimulating. Good choice, Christine!
Blog Entry Coming on Global Warming
After the meeting broke up, Christine offered to find some information on global warming for our next meeting, and Scott suggested that it would be good if she could find something that addresses the skepticism Roger, Bruce and Scott share: We are all skeptical that we can really tell whether human activity has raised the temperature, eliminating all other causes. She offered to put it on the blog when she finds it. That should generate some postings and discussion!
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Climate change: Human vs. non-human
Hi all,
Since the extent to which climate change is human induced was a point of discussion during our meeting today, I thought I'd post a few resources which address this questions:
From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
http://www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm: About the IPCC
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html: This is the IPCC's 4th Assessment (2007), from Working Group #1, discussing the physical basis for climate change.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch09.pdf: Chp. 9 of the assessment, which specifically addresses the role of anthropogenic forces and other influences.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4_UncertaintyGuidanceNote.pdf: This explains some of the probabilistic terminology used.
From the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6290228.stm: This is where I'd read that a study concluded that solar output has been decreasing recently. I'll grant you that the BBC sounds somewhat biased and that they aren't exactly the best source of info... :)
From the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison:
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/: Haven't explored this too much yet, but looks interesting!
Well, I'd like to post more, but I've got to get to our church potluck in a few minutes...I'll try to get back to post more later; in the meantime, I suppose this is good starting point for debate :)
In Christ,
Christine
Since the extent to which climate change is human induced was a point of discussion during our meeting today, I thought I'd post a few resources which address this questions:
From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
http://www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm: About the IPCC
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html: This is the IPCC's 4th Assessment (2007), from Working Group #1, discussing the physical basis for climate change.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch09.pdf: Chp. 9 of the assessment, which specifically addresses the role of anthropogenic forces and other influences.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4_UncertaintyGuidanceNote.pdf: This explains some of the probabilistic terminology used.
From the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6290228.stm: This is where I'd read that a study concluded that solar output has been decreasing recently. I'll grant you that the BBC sounds somewhat biased and that they aren't exactly the best source of info... :)
From the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison:
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/: Haven't explored this too much yet, but looks interesting!
Well, I'd like to post more, but I've got to get to our church potluck in a few minutes...I'll try to get back to post more later; in the meantime, I suppose this is good starting point for debate :)
In Christ,
Christine
Monday, July 23, 2007
New levels of complex organic chemicals found
Two groups of Astronomers have announced the discovery of longer chain carbon molecules in the vast space between stars. the chain length is eight carbons, with a hydrogen atom. These findings are only the second time an anion has been found in space.
Astronomers hope this will lead to the discovery of even larger organic moleculess in space.
The question in reference to faith is perhaps this: How to make sure that those who follow these important developments in science do not make the fallacy of concluding that molecules in space negates the existance of God?
http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2007/biganion/
Astronomers hope this will lead to the discovery of even larger organic moleculess in space.
The question in reference to faith is perhaps this: How to make sure that those who follow these important developments in science do not make the fallacy of concluding that molecules in space negates the existance of God?
http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2007/biganion/
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