Quodlibeta--whatever you like

Figulus recommends this blog: Quodlibeta. Excellent mediaeval/classical studies by knowledgeable guys. Nice emphasis on the intersection and compatibility between science and religion.

I'm going to add it to our Blog Roll when I have some time. Until then, enjoy it from this link.

P.S: check out their post on Oresme and the moving earth!

Francis Collins to head NIH

But according to the New York Times, "Pick to Lead Health Agency Draws Praise and Some Concern." Well, how even-handed of them. There are two basic objections to Dr. Collins. The first is his very public embrace of religion.

Those two sentences have an eerie sound to them.

Egypt's pig cull

Unsurprisingly, it's exacerbating religious tensions. The oppressed minority Coptic Christians are the only ones raising pigs, of course. So even if Egypt's Moslems weren't intending to take an anti-Christian measure, it has been felt that way. Of course, there's no reason to cull pigs anywhere because of the swine flu--it's already made the jump to people, and the person-to-person transmission is what is causing the problem now.

I'm not sure about the reporter's description of relations between Christians and Moslems in Egypt as "usually harmonious." Actually, that may be true, but there's a lot of tension there, and it doesn't take too much to make strife bubble up.

Theology, Quantum Mechanics, and Chaos Theory

Well, that's neat. I've been developing some thoughts for a while now about taking chaos theory and quantum mechanics and applying them together to some theological questions. In particular, can God act directly in the world without violating His own rules of physics? I have no problem with this happening, and I assume that most miracles are a suspension of the laws of physics. But could God work within these laws to get a result that wasn't already set from the beginning of time? And thus, in a way that we wouldn't be able to detect or observe any breakdown in natural laws. Being a theistic evolutionist, this would work out nicely in having a divinely-directed natural selection, without the need for a suspension of "normal" evolution in any places, like Intelligent Design looks for.

My basic idea here is that the Heisenberg uncertainty relations between position and momentum, or between energy and time, and so on, give us small error bars on these variables. And in nonlinear systems (described by chaos theory) like much of the world is made of, small uncertainties grow into very large ones in a short time.

I've got to go now, but let me post these links to some related thinking that's been done in both science and religion:

Open theism and physics (I'm not convinced by Open Theism, but it's worth reading.)

Quantum Mechanics and the chaotic orbit of Hyperion (Really fascinating--I'd never heard of this before.)

The paper cited by the Discover article in the above link.

Why did Obama get more Catholic support than Kerry?

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting analysis.

A threat to Christianity from the "Resurrection Tablet"?

Michael Spencer isn't so sure. OK, so we've got a pre-Christian Jewish document possibly (there's some debate on the interpretation of the damaged text) talking about a messiah who will die and be resurrected in three days, and whose death will redeem Israel. And Christians are supposed to feel threatened by this?! The lay press (at least what reports I heard) has been framing this as a threat to the originality of Christianity. But if this translation were right, then it would at least in part shore up a major point Jesus kept trying to make: that people would have known who he was, if they'd only paid better attention to the scriptures. That much of it was laid out for them right there.

So in that respect, no, this is no threat to Christianity. Now, the fellow who's promoting this new interpretation of the stone (he's an outlier among those who've translated it) thinks that it puts an entirely different light on the Lord's Supper. That when Jesus said he came to save men from their sins, he was (in the tradition of the stone's text) really meaning that he would redeem Israel. Well, no. Let's assume for a minute that the new translation is accurate, and the redemption of Israel is a more earthly and literal and collective thing, and that Jesus was aware of this document or the belief that underlay(?) it. He still said rather explicitly that he saves men from their sins. It's a common frustration I feel when scholars in certain areas of the humanities treat historical figures as entirely trapped by the average of the beliefs and assumptions of their time. That no man strays from the mean. That there is no variation in human thought in a given time and place. And therefore if there was a thought that the Messiah would come to save the nation of Israel on this earth, Jesus couldn't have meant anything different than this.

[Groan.]

Anyway, see Spencer's post for lots of helpful links, including the translation.

Jenna Bush's wedding and the stone cross

Nice article on Jenna Bush's wedding at her parents' Texas ranch. One thing I noticed from the photo was the large, apparently stone, cross. I wondered if it were simply a temporary decoration for the occasion. The article clears that up: nope.

Jenna Bush and Henry Hager exchanged vows in front of a Texas limestone altar with an attached vertical limestone cross picked out personally by President Bush. The three-ton cross and altar are permanent and manmade from stone from a local quarry.

"My one contribution is to -- we put a giant cross made out of Texas limestone that will serve as the altar, but also serve as a landmark on our place for years to come," President Bush told ABC's Robin Roberts in an exclusive interview this week at the White House.

That's an interesting approach, and it speaks for the President's devotion. I've always liked the idea of worship services at home with the family (like is depicted in the beginning of Gone With the Wind), and this fits in that category. Reminds me of a smaller version of the one at the University of the South at Sewanee.

Re: E pur si muove

Figulus: it's unbelievable to me that there really are geocentrists out there in this day and age. (And, ironically, using such technology as the internet!) I've seen Robert Sungenis' website and read some of his arguments for it, and what strikes me about both him and the fellow you were debating is that they try to (mis)use some general principles of physics qualitatively but can't handle them quantitatively. You mentioned that General Relativity (GR) reduces to Special Relativity (SR) in the low-gravity/low-acceleration limit, which reduces to Galilean relativity in the low-velocity limit. The differences are incredibly small in the low-end case, so if we have a major problem there with Galilean relativity, we're going to have a major problem with the more sophisticated versions, too.

These guys have got to learn how to calculate. I doubt they can actually work their way through the numbers to get quantitative results from GR.

I had a student who had a similar problem last year--he's fascinated by physics, but he didn't have the math experience to go with it. So he'd come in and want to solve all kinds of cutting-edge problems conceptually, and his solutions would be wildly impractical. He knew some concepts, but he didn't know how to apply them to get actual answers. This year, he's taken all kinds of math courses and is starting again at the introductory physics level, and the difference is amazing. He gets the correct answers almost instinctively now, because he understands how to apply the concepts mathematically. And his flights of fancy are tempered by the mathematical reality. He's going to go on with great success now, I can tell. Grad school, definitely.

Religious liabilities for Presidential candidates

They're not what I would have figured. For all of those who assume that, say, being Jewish or Catholic would be a big liability in a Presidential candidate, it turns out these are among the smallest religious liabilities in the Pew poll:

[...] more people express reservations about voting for a Mormon (25%) than about supporting a candidate who is an evangelical Christian (16%), a Jew (11%) or a Catholic (7%).

Now, the focus was on Romney and what being Mormon will do for or to his candidacy. But the other three numbers are what struck me. "Evangelical Christian" (by which they probably mean active Protestants...I'm in such a church, but I never heard the term growing up, so I've always been a little confused about its meaning) is a bigger political liability than being Jewish or Catholic. One thing to take from this is: great news for Jews! More mainstream than the biggest religious block in the country. (Wow, actually.) The second is: for some Catholic bloggers (there's one particular one I've got in mind) who like to call anti-Catholicism as the "last acceptable prejudice" (especially in political fights), well, it's apparently not. Boy, the anti's on that one are less than half what they are for evangelicals. Wow, again.

Now, of course, just about everybody's faction likes to call opposition to them "the last acceptable prejudice." I've heard it for conservatives, Protestants, whites, Southerners, right-handers, etc. Just about any group that's not a racial or ethnic minority. (I made up the last one.) Fact is, there are lots of relatively mild and fairly accepted prejudices left in the country. Not to the point of being enshrined in law, of course. So claiming you're a member of the only group people can hate anymore isn't going to be true.

Astronomy and religion intersect.

Well, maybe not in those terms. But there's a nice astronomy/spaceflight comment on a religion blog I've gotten to like a lot, Boars Head Tavern. Joel Hunter likes this kind of stuff, he says, and he's posted a list of what he'd do if he were the NASA administrator.

One of my favorites:

* move mountains and work tirelessly and loudly to expedite the Constellation program–get Orion and the heavy lifter built–human mission to the moon no later than 2015 (c’mon, Kennedy got ‘em to do it in 7 years; we can, too)

Amen, brother! Let's get men back on the moon; it's been too long. I've never understood those astronomers (it's obviously not all of us!) who want to fight turf wars for robotic missions to the complete exclusion of manned space missions.

Is the Pope Catholic?

So, like, do I now belong to the "United Methodist Ecclesial Community"?

In all fairness, this isn't terribly new. It mostly restates the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's 2000 document, Dominus Iesus (although it seems to clear up some details, and it's more adamant in denying Protestants the honor of being called churches). And that, itself, wasn't terribly new in using this buzzphrase, "ecclesial community," which goes at least as far back as Vatican II's Lumen Gentium (well, there it's "ecclesiastical community"). It doesn't make the document's claims any more correct, from our point of view, but it does go back a ways.

I'm entertained to find that the criticism of this language goes back to the 2000 document. In fact, the "was this really necessary?" response amongst some Catholics goes back to that, too. The American Catholic article I linked to there could have been written yesterday. Interesting. Incidentally, I was hoping to be the first to use the phrase, "United Methodist Ecclesial Community," but it seems Mr. Switzer beat me to it!

So are Catholic priests and officials, in everyday conversation, really going to be saying things like, "the Methodist Ecclesial Community"? Surely not...right?

Hugo Grotius on Christian Tolerance

I'm reading Meletius, or, Letter on the points of agreement between Christians. This is a previously (before ~1988) unpublished work by the great, 17th-century Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius, best known today for formulating international law.

I was surprised to learn that Grotius was not just a jurist, but also a theologian and political philosopher. After the Dutch won their independence from Spain, the Protestants were free to practice their religion, but a new fight broke out between the Calvinist and Arminian schools of theology. The Calvinists had a majority and, in the end, outlawed the Arminian position. Grotius was a young government staffer at the time but already showing his promise, and he wrote a treatise on religious toleration and church-state relations, defending the Arminian "Remonstrants." Another time, he wrote the first major piece of Christian apologetics from a Protestant perspective.

Meletius is a kind of draft of the latter. It's short, about 30 pages, and he felt it was superseded by his later and more complete apologetics book (which is actually written in rhyming verse, in Dutch!). But it's still an interesting work in its own right. It includes some of the arguments on toleration, which are what interest me the most.

Surprisingly, most of Grotius' citations and arguments come from Classical Roman and Greek philosophers, rather than from scripture. Not that he's devoid of the latter (and he argues that philosophy and reason have to answer to revelation, rather than the other way around), but his background as a classicist really shows through. He likes to show how even the pagan philosophers crudely pointed the way to the Jewish and later Christian fullness of truth. This was true for some of the early church fathers, as well.

The bit on toleration is what interests me at the moment. He argues that Christians of different denominations agree most easily on questions of moral behavior, and they disagree mostly on doctrinal points. His position (if I've gotten this right) is that the dogmatic points can be taken down to a small number that we all need to agree on, and the rest laid to conscience. While it is the issues of moral behavior that we can be united in.

Hmm... Well, I don't think I've written that last part very clearly. It's probably basically true, as written, but Grotius' points are more detailed. OK, I'll post more on this later. I'm especially eager to read his treatise on church/state relations, and I'll blog about that, too.

Science and Religion

I just found the Veritas Forum, which has (among plenty of other things) two interesting-sounding articles on religion and science. The first is "The Theological Roots of Modern Science," by Fritz Schaefer, and the second is "Is it God's Universe," by Owen Gingerich.

I'm not familiar with Schaefer, but it says that he's a scientist. Gingerich is a pretty famous astronomer, and he's written popular books on cosmology, most recently, The Book Nobody Read, which is about the Copernican revolution.

These are audio or video files; I don't see that there is a transcript. But maybe these could be downloaded onto an iPod.

The Veritas Forum, where these are posted, is an organization of campus discussions and debates on religion and its application. I'll be checking back often. Schaefer himself has about a dozen talks posted there on Big Bang Cosmology and religion.

Weekly Standard on Limbo

Jonathan Last has a nice summary of the limbo activity (the theological concept, not the dance) coming out of the Catholic church. He points out a lot of the misinterpretations in the press, and he summarizes the history of the concept.

His closing remarks are something I especially appreciate:

In essence, the biggest problem with the whole theory of limbo was that it suggested that the sacraments God established created limits to His own power--which would mean that God is not, in fact, omnipotent. If one believes that all things are possible to God, then limbo is a problem.
[...]
What did the magisterium do that is so heartening? It admitted that it doesn't, and we can't, know everything. It acknowledged that this situation has no theological signposts to guide an approach to it.
[...]
In a way, it was a model, from on high, of a type of intellectual humility, a constant awareness that we are trying to talk about things we can't really talk about.

Yes, yes, YES! One of my biggest frustrations in theology, especially mediaeval theology, is the temptation to run on into wild speculations, extrapolating far beyond the data of the Bible. Do that often enough, and you wind up with all kinds of crazy doctrines there's little or no evidence for.

Now, limbo was never an official Catholic doctrine, but it's still good that in this document, they have countered the kind of speculation that led to its proposal in the first place.

My second agreement is on the tendency of theologians and churchmen to force God's actions into a concrete formula, from which He can never depart. They figure that we know completely how God acts in certain situations, and they treat Him as some kind of mindless automaton whose behavior in other situations is simple to predict, given the handful of rules He obeys. That is another wrongheaded attitude that is countered by this document.

There are still geocentrists out there?!?!

Yikes! Here is an honest-to-goodness geocentrist's blog. In this post, he's recounting an internet exchange between another geocentrist (Robert Sungenis) and physicist Stephen Barr. Good grief!

I came across this while looking up material for my scientific reasoning class. They'll present a debate over geocentrism in class, set as the trial of Galileo. Since Galileo's actual (second) trial wasn't specifically about geocentrism per se, I'll have them refocus it so that it is. And I'll let the prosecution team know that until Galileo's telescopic observations, the geocentrists probably had the preponderance of evidence on their side. They ought to make a halfway decent case, although the defense should be able to answer their objections with telescopic observations.

But...wow...that was 400 years ago! Science has moved on, people!

Mark Shea's descent

Some time back, I posted a link to Mark Shea's blog, where he had a post about the reasons for the traditional date of Christmas (i.e., why pick December 25th, if we don't know exactly when Christ was born?). Since then, I'd checked it out regularly and found nice articles there on religion and some other things.

But I've finally seen how he has descended into crankery on some political issues, especially on the Iraq War. Not content to disagree respectfully with people who are otherwise on his side, he indulges in sarcasm, snideness, name-calling, insults, and throws around words like "sin" and "evil" and "stupidity" in a discussion of politics. Plus his apparent view of President Bush as being bent on establishing a totalitarian dictatorship or a cult. Or both, maybe. A number of his regular commenters seem to share my objection, so it's not just me. This is, however, the internet, so I shouldn't be surprised to find somebody losing a grip on polite disagreement.

I bring this up because I could agree with Mark on other issues in politics or morality, and for some reason I still check his blog regularly. But now, I think I do it just to find things to get mad about, whether it's on politics or religion. It's a shame, really...

Common sense on the supposed "Jesus tomb"

Opinion Journal has sensible commentary on James Cameron's documentary on the supposed tomb of Jesus. The writer is a professor of New Testament at Asbury in Kentucky, and he explains the background with a professor's care.

Interestingly, he mentions that the fourth-century church historian, Eusebius, "saw the tomb and the standing inscribed slab in front of it." Interesting. I wouldn't guarantee that Eusebius saw the correct tomb (300 years later), of course, but he was certainly a lot closer in time to the events than we are today. So does Eusebius describe the location? How long were pilgrimages made to this tomb? Is it still known today? I know that the cave traditionally thought to have been Jesus' birthplace has remained publicly known. So if the traditionally-recognized tomb hasn't, why not?

UPDATE: Oh, right. I keep forgetting that the practice in those days was to erect a church on top of any such important historical site. So yes, the traditionally-recognized site of the tomb is now underneath (or within) the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, originally built in 330.

I went looking for pictures of the tomb itself. Hmmm...turns out that not only was the church destroyed several times, but the Egyptian caliph al Hakim cut the tomb itself down to the bedrock in 1009 to destroy it also. Nothing left of the original tomb, now, whosever it was.

"Chinese" Gordon identified another tomb as a possibilty--the "Garden Tomb." Not much in the way of historical links, but a pretty site to visit. And I'd bet that Gordon's site is more realistic than the ornately-carved ossuaries Cameron is touting.

Proof of Intelligent Design?

The existence of the Hebrew language.

I didn't take Greek, although I read just a little of the Greek textbook on my own, and it seemed a lot more complicated than Latin. Hebrew's vocabulary was a lot of work for me to memorize, but I did fairly well with it, and some of its quirks have still stayed with me, so maybe I did "get it."

I've read that among seminarians, who'd be expected to learn both Hebrew and Greek, you find that you're either a Greek person or a Hebrew person. Not an Old Testament/New Testament split, but the feel of the language. Greek has remarkably complicated verb structures, with all kinds of nuanced meanings and moods. It's a philosopher's language. Hebrew expresses things more directly, and instead of creating new compound words, it uses metaphors.

I don't know that I'm necessarily that way, myself, but I think I did get the feel of Hebrew.

Rome and Canterbury to unite?

Riiiiiight... And the Anglican laymen are going to wake up one morning and be told by their bishops that they're all "Anglican-Rite" Catholics now? And that they must all believe the Roman Catholic catechism? It doesn't work that way in Protestant churches.

Consider the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Now compare with the Roman Catholic catechism. See any conflicts between these two?

Predictably, the newspaper thinks the marriage of priests is the big deal to get over. That's trivial. Compare the Anglican

Articles VI (Of the sufficiency of the scriptures for salvation),

XI (Of the justification of man),

XIV (Of works of supererogation),

XIX (Of the church),

XXII (Of purgatory),

XXV (Of the sacraments),

XXVIII (Of the Lord's supper),

XXX (Of both kinds),

XXXI (Of the one oblation of Christ finished upon the cross), and

XXXII (Of the marriage of priests).

I wouldn't say such a unity is something to be desired, either. Better to work together as Christians, without trying to force a combined hierarchy on the laymen, and compromise on our beliefs.

Archbishop Cranmer has reluctantly been prodded into commenting on this. He agrees that it's better to tolerate each other as separate denominations: Let us just agree to differ, and let our mutually manifest tolerance be light in an increasingly intolerant world.

Amen.