IC XC

I miss certain things. as the weather was warming up (before we got winter blasted) i started to miss Biola very much. this general nostalgia remained for a number of days until I attempted to actually remember some of the things i missed. try as i may, i couldn't conjure one image to mind of something at Biola that i actually missed. when i thought about my actual expereience at Biola i didn't miss it that much anymore.

The place that i could see in my mind's eye was the very same place that i saw when i was a highschool senior wanting to go to Biola, i.e. a paradise Biola that I had imagined. It was a place of perpetual spring time (not unlike southern California) where everyone was a realist, where everyone was as cool and smart as me (i know right?). I do miss many of the friendships that I made, but i'm not sad that Torrey is not apart of my life right now. Having that expierience at Biola gave me a glimps of the fundamental flaws of Christian Education (a topic for another blog), but i'm no pedigological uber minch.

rather than aggiate my pompous ass by listing the things i don't miss, here's some of the things that i do:
Reynolds Sessions
Biking to the Beach
Tours of L.A.
Telling noble young christian college students that morals are relative (tee hee)
Driving up and down PCH with my May 26th Friend, David

i miss a place of timelessness. I miss the place where I stood overlooking the ocean for 30 seconds, or 15 minutes i don't remember really. I miss the place where I was in love. In short, I miss a place that I've never been to. It's easy to say that I miss heaven, but i've never been there either and have relatively no associations that term, but i think that's what i miss. maybe one day i'll get there. I miss a place that i can make my home, that i never have to leave.

this last semester at Biola taught me something very important. That most Biolans (including very many Torrey Students) are idiots. Please be aware that this is not a "i'm so much smarter than them" speech because i'm not God's gift to anything, but there are some serious problems in the contemporary christian thought that are just moronic. there are three people that i have in mind that are on the forefront of an effort to end the "stupid christian" motif and who are failing miserably. i agree with them that the main pull for christian academia is going to come from math and science.

The world has moved towards paradigm in which empiricism reigns. we can trace this back to the Modern era; the conintental rationalists, the British empiricists, the crisis in authority, the church, God, science BAM it's the close of the year 2007 and Science has become the iconic road block to belief in Christ. Three professors at Biola recognize this and are attempting to shift the sway, and for this i respect them. But Dr. John Mark Reynolds, Dr. J.P. Moreland, and Dr. William Lane Craig, distinguished though they are, seem laughable to secualr scholars. Their Degree speciallites are in Plato, Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophy of Religion respectively. Reynolds and Craig have absolutely no scientific background and at all. Moreland has a B.S. in Chemistry. The major thrusts of his arguments is simply this, "intelligent design is science". I'm sorry Dr. Moreland "Magic Man done it" is not science. I believe that the universe has an intelligent (a large understatement) designer. But i'm not so foolish as to claim it's science. when i look out on something beautiful and think "gee, that looks hard to make" it's still not science.

More than once i've heard Christians claim that Contemporary academia is moving away from the evolutionary standpoint because it becomes increasingly untennable, but this is simply a lie. with the publication of Stephen J. Gould's Structure of Evolutionary Theory the theory of evolution will be sustained for at least the next 50 years. These same christians believe that Reynolds, Moreland, and Craig are on the cutting edge of paradigm shifting.

Not only has Reynolds contributed nothing to the scientific paradigm (asside from his book Three Views on Creation and Evoltion co-written with Moreland which is hardly a contribution and is rather a restatement of a religiously driven agenda) he can't. His training makes him a Plato scholar (and a damn good one mind you), he's just not a scientist. He feels that he is capable of contributing to a conversation about science, but can't do the math problems that support the theories he's against. He makes the claim that, "Christianity provides a necessary catalyst to the development of science" and the modern science has its roots in the Christian west. Ask an academission with a background in math or science if that claim is true and see if they don't start wheezing from laughter. Reynolds also claims that, "Progress in Religion is precisely what produces progress in science" One need only look at the last 150 years of scientific progress to see that that's not true either. Religious progress has hit some of it's all time lows in the last 150 years. Yes, there were many more converts, many more martyrs, and genuine revivals but one can hardly observe the causality that he claims exists. there have been times of great religious progress in the Medeivel ages, but very little scientific work being done, at least not by the christian west. To Reynolds, "Ultimately religion isn't only necessary to science, but is the only way to do science." i'm not sure how i feel about this. i'm inclined to agree but probably not in the same way.

One of Reynolds main points is to show that (as is popularly thought) there exists a hostility between religiocity and the scientific method. I can think of very few people, either christian or not, who would agree with his premise. But he seems to think that this is an operating assumption in the secularization thesis (i.e. that as religious knowledge increases, scientific knowledge decreases and vice versa) and that this "myth" needs to be done away with. but the assumption Reynolds has explicated is not why the ST has weight. there is not hostility between religiocity and the scientific method at all. there is however, a hostility between religiocity and the operating assumptions of science in general. Stephen Hawking admits that, "the basic assumption of science is scientific determinism" that the events in the universe happen one way and one way only and that they could not have happened any other way given the laws that govern the our universe. so if God exists he created the laws and has no power to undue them or tweek them in any way thus limiting his freedom and thus he ceases to be God. it's not that the scientific paradigm rejects God. Good scientists know that science can't speak to the existence of God and they don't claim that it does. To many scientists, the existence of God seems unreasonable or unlikely but this is not what Reynolds understands to be the problem. He is a platonist, where his Scientific authority comes in is ambiguous to me (if not non-existent). to my knowledge he has not done one day's course study in non-linear mathematics, astrophysics, advanced biology. Please note i'm not claiming to have this knowledge either, i'm only trying show that there seems to be a problem when philosophers try to talk to the scietific paradigm. philosophers find intuitive problems and reject them when the math, whose intutitions are so basic as 1+1 shows the philosopher's conculsions to be false. Reynolds is at least a mild rationalist and holds human reason to be a type of grandiose broad stroke to which the rest of the topics of academia should adhere. He says that that is not what he is doing but with statements like, "I would rather be reasonable than religious". It's hard to see the coherence.

One note on Moreland: i don't know that much about him accept he claims to be a philosopher of science advocating intelligent design. he also also has that undergrad chemistry degree. maybe he has more meaningful things to say than other intelligent design advocates but that "i-think-i-can" B.S. doesn't appear very intimidating on a C.V.

Similarly with Craig. The man has no training in math or science yet is cited as a "Philosopher of Science" in young-earth-agenda'd DVD sereies "A priveleged Planet". Craig's B.A. was in communications from Wheaton. and he has two Ph.D.'s. one from the University of Birmingham in England (philosophy) and on from the University of Munich in Germany (religion). similarly to Reynolds, i am not aware of any official course work done in the topics he attempts to speak to. Consider this quote, "If the universe never had a beginning [as is the assumption of the scientific paradigm], then that means that the number of past events is infinite. But mathematicians recognize that the idea of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions. For example, what is infinity minus infinity? Well, mathematically, you get self- contradictory answers. This shows that infinity is just an idea in your mind, not something that actually exists in reality." the mathematician he is citing is David Hilbert whose famous thought project called "Hilbert's Hotel". the object of this example was to show that, what has been called, an "actual infinite" (i.e. a physical example of something that is infinite) is absurd. Craig conveniently leaves out that Hilbert recanted that position after Benoît B. Mandelbrot demonstrated that the coastline of Great Britain is an actual infinite. The empirical evidence suggests a rule which, if extrapolated, shows that the measured length of Britain's coast increases without limit as the measurement scale decreases towards zero. Cantor also showed in his work on the non-denumerability of the continuum that infinities come in sizes. There are denermerable and non-denumerable sets of infinites. The cardinal number of any given set defines the "size" of its infinite. all this to say that infinity minues infinite does not lead to self contradictory answers. mathematicians have at very least been aware of this since Cantor died in 1918. Craig is either lying or is too uninformed on a topic that is not in his field to be speaking on the subject. maybe this is why he has almost never debated major figure in the field of science or math in his entire career. He constantly debates a bunch of nobody's from mediocre universities. He has also not returned to few serious univiersites that he has debated at because he (i) plays semantics games, (ii) asks more questions than are capable of being answered in the time frame and then claims that his oppoonents avoid his question. One question to you Dr. Craig (from my friend Jim), if infinite doesn't exist in "reality" then what is God? and actual finite?

Final Note: I don't genuinely dislike any of the above mention persons, only their tactics for defending the Christian Faith. Reynolds, Moreland, and Craig are all very interesting and intelligent fellows if i ever met any. I hope to worship with them one day in heaven when none of this matters any more.

such a conglomeration of feelings . . . both hungry and apathetic. i really don't want to study for my modern philosophy midterm. it's tomorrow and i'm not looking forward to it. it seems like the modern philosophers were just trying to be as good as the medeival philosophers and were failing. i understand that they were going through an epistemic crisis with the fall of the authority in the catholic church in the west, but come on. anyway, it's looking like i'm going to have a 50% chance of getting an A depending on which essay Dr. Ten Elshof decides to assign. i'll study some more tonight and tomorrow.

So as much as i respect Dr. John Mark Reynolds, i think his aim in torrey is slightly misguided. one the one hand he's an advocate for classical education, christ centered academia (insofar as we understand that christ truly is the source of knowledge) as well as genuine mentorship and intellectualism. on the other hand he's very pro "claiming the culture for christ". i have two qualms with this. firstly, the verbiage and secondly the meaning.

i think christians really need to get away from this war-language that we've gotten ourselves into. it bothers me how often we feel like we need to be violent against the powers that be. now i agree that we should not be conformed to "the world" (if we could nail down an actual definition of whatever that means) but if god truly workd across all time like i believe paul says he does then we don't really have anything to fear from the culture. let me qualify that by saying that there are aspects of the culture that we shouldn't be apart of but besides the ones that are blatant sins how can we pick and choose? using war language like "reclaim the culture" makes it sound like we had the culture in the first place. so many christians here at biola think we should go back the sexually deprived days of the fifties because they had it right (except we have no criteria by which to judge how right they had it except for contemporary opinions). ok so they were having less sex than our modern culture is. is that good? maybe. who knows. but obviously they weren't in tune with god as much as we want to think they were. look at how the minority was treated. the list goes on.

as for what the phrase "reclaiming" the culture means: it means he wants the political right in control of the government so that he can stop abortions. i don't agree with abortion either. i really don't think anyone should have one, but putting the evangelicals in control of the government won't solve anything. there are no political solutions to social injustice, poverty, right's for the unborn. those are just symptoms. even if the world was like reynolds wanted it, it would only serve as catalyst for an even more potent anti christian movement then the one that is already here. i really think we need to just role with the culture and stay away from the extremes. so our culture says you need to buy things in order to be happy . . . you don't . . . we all know its a lie so don't. or you need have lots of promiscuous sex . . . we're christians . . . we don't (at least we're not supposed to) do that any way. and the ones that do do those things aren't any less christians. they just sin like everyone else. can we show christendom a little tolerance please. isn't that the right buzz word?