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.