Good and evil

Our daughter has been getting into flipping light switches the last week or so. She can carry her chair to a switch, stand on it, and flip the switches. And she loves it!

A couple of weeks ago, we had an enormous fan installed in our ceiling, and for various reasons we don't want Evadel to turn it on. So now there's a switch plate with three switches, and she is not allowed to flip any of those switches. We had to take her around the house last night and show her all the switches she could flip, and then we reminded her of the one set of switches she can't flip.

It was a sad reminder of the futility of prohibitions dating all the way back to the first prohibition. It felt very formulaic: "You are free to flip any of the switches in the house, but you must not flip the switch of the knowledge of good and evil . . ."

Concurrent prognostication

For a while, I've had a distaste for the media's micromeddling in the state of the economy. They do influence the economy by trying to buoy confidence, but that prevents cause and effect from providing true consequence for policies and activities. (The same goes for the so-called bailouts.)

I finally figured out what troubles me about this. It's the practice of "concurrent prognostication." Journalists, pop economists, and politicians are all trying to foretell the future so they can manipulate something today so that the future will fit their vision so they can be heroes. Okay, maybe that last part is a little too dramatic. But they are afraid to let the world/economy/history/culture breathe. They put everything into understanding in the present what normally takes years or decades to discover. And when they intervene based on that hasty knowledge, I think it compounds the negative effects they were trying to avoid.

I'm not sure what the best fix is. In such an integrated world, it is probably smart to take steps to prevent collapses. Unfortunately, it seems we waited til we stepped just over the edge to start considering ideas to keep us away from the precipice.

Love and (versus) justice

The two most talked about traits of God these days are love and justice. Or love versus justice. This most often crops up in the bipolar discussion of whether God will save everyone in the end or whether he will punish some endlessly. So religious pundits call out their reasons for one or the other understanding of God.

I follow the Hebrew understanding that they are part of an integrated whole. But does one spring from the other? If so, I can certainly see justice springing out of love—a desire for the right treatment of those around me because I love them. But in no way do I see love springing out of justice. It just wouldn't happen. So to those who claim that at the most fundamental level God is just—more so than loving—I would encourage them to consider whether the kind of love that God displays toward his creation could ever originate from their conception of his justice.

In the end, God may punish certain communities endlessly. My proposal that God is love first does not negate the fact that he could bring retribution. But we need to (lovingly) quash logical fallacies before they twist our thinking further.

Objective truth

I had lunch today with my World Religions professor from last summer. She has an amazing mind, and I imagine we will be hearing a lot from her in years to come. We were talking a bit about truth, and it made me think of how I was trained to do evangelism.

The very best kind of truth that anyone can have is "objective" truth, no? That's the stuff we whip out when we want to shout down an atheist. However, if we chase the origin of that phrase, it seems that the observer of the objective truth must be the subject. In that apologetics paradigm, I'm uncomfortable allowing those subjects to be free, active subjects, because I've become disenchanted with how their worldview impacts the world. Even if God is the prototypical subject and we assert that objective truth is his, we still have to take a subjective position in order to define that truth.

The problem with that truth model is that it pushes every un-self-reflective subject into the position of object. So if I'm an old guard apologist, I see the object that needs to be converted, I grab the truth object off the shelf, and I try to get the two objects to play well with one another. It dehumanizes the human object, and it perverts what truth is.

This is where Dr. Ireland's thinking is valuable. She—confessedly borrowing and assimilating from many others—says that truth is a relational endeavor between subjects in which both subjects are transformed from their previous stases. I leave out some other key details in anticipation of her book being published. The point is, if we humbly see ourselves as subjects interacting with other subjects, the felt threat of evangelism is diminished. I'm not advocating some new "subjective truth" fad (which is actually very well in vogue). There is a time for everything. A time to be a subject, and a time to be an object. It's simply that our brothers (and usually not sisters, interestingly) who crow about objective truth need to stop objectifying truth and allow it to be the living, relational being we observe in the Bible—Jesus of Nazareth. When we allow him as subjective truth into our interactions, we can't help being transformed.

Sexual ethics and evolution

I'll begin by clarifying some of my comments on the Spirit's role in evolution two posts prior. First, this little line of enquiry is entirely experimental. It's a "suppose if" about the fact of evolution, although I am becoming more and more convinced of its veracity. Second, I hold strongly to creative, covenantal monotheism (the deity being YHWH, the God of Israel), and I don't think evolution diminishes this god's power, authority, or prestige in any way. In fact, the creative Spirit is given more room to work, and the only thing stopping him is creatures who are evolutionarily defiant. That is, they choose not to keep the standard of fully evolved humanity and instead revert to animalism.

Now, regarding sexuality, we see in the animal kingdom many different expressions. There's one fish, which in the right circumstance, can reproduce asexually, that is, with no sex act but the necessary sex cells are provided solely by the female. Other species, such as cattle, elk, elephants, gorillas, etc., have a dominant male who spreads his genetics to the females in order to ensure the survival of the species. I've heard that some eagles and cranes may mate for life. We see almost this full diversity of reproductive behavior in humans (which I'm using for Homo sapiens partially realized, not necessarily "fully human"). In fact, Bloodhound Gang has memorably expressed an "unevolved" sexuality with the line, "You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel."

So what if we "just do what comes naturally"? I think we fulfill a valid heritage from our ancestry. The Biology of Sin has been immensely helpful to my thinking in this regard. Accomplished neuroscientist Matt Stanford takes the concept of sinful behavior and chases down what is happening in the human body when the sin becomes compulsive. I cringe every time I think this, but perhaps those who follow their instincts are simply not as evolved as people who do not. (Caveat: More highly evolved people in this schema would also be humble. Also, we all lack evolution in some ways. Those who know me know that I can't control my tongue, making me a foolish communicator. But by God's Spirit, I am evolving.) So the compulsion that most guys feel to look at a woman a second time is probably a survival mechanism. It's his body's deep way of attempting to preserve what it assumes is some awesome DNA.

This leads to the question of the "fittest" that get to survive. There is a myth out there that people who limit their behavior for religious reasons are pansies. Actually, these people have more self-control, and they're following a blueprint for the most successful possible human existence. While animal behavior turns to infighting to prove dominance . . . Let's start over here. That sounds too much like a human office. Less evolved forms of life fight amongst themselves to prove dominance, get the best mate, secure the best domicile, etc. For gorillas, the proving of dominance is perfectly natural. It is the thing they do for their species to survive. But humans have ingenuity. This leads to medicine, which leads to someone like me with crappy DNA that causes diabetes to survive long enough to procreate and saddle their sweet little girl with a higher chance of developing diabetes. We can find ways to procreate and survive that don't involve beating our chests and shouting. Although, adolescent males don't often figure that out till much later.

So what is the profile of the "fittest" according to the New Testament? Be humble and gentle. Love. Serve. Give up your life for others. And Jesus alludes to exactly that: "The one who seeks to preserve their biological life will lose it. But the one who holds to biological life loosely will be rewarded with more satisfying life now and excellent life in the age to come." What is the effect of this behavior in human community? Peace. Flourishing. But beware the moment a gorilla in a man suit comes in trying to take control or prove something. Fear invades. People start getting defensive. Everyone begins to look down in their hands at that precious little thing called survival, and they clutch it tighter. And survival dies a little. That community just experienced evolutionary regression.

Now what about the fittest human sexuality? (Not necessarily what Ali G is describing when he calls a woman "fit.") I'm only going to attempt to describe this from a male perspective, because it's what I live every day. It's a trusting, committed relationship in which offspring can be borne who will learn the parents' fit behavioral traits and hopefully get nice genes along the way. The male will still look at women other than his wife and feel a procreative urge. But he tells himself thankfully that the Creator has supplied a fit partner with whom the family has an excellent chance of survival. And then he realizes that if he were to tend toward more basic mammalianism that he could possibly lose everything that he in his fitness has striven for.

So is sanctification evolution? I kind of like that idea. Regardless, our lives are all cradled in the hand of God. But as humans begin to willingly behave as God requests, we look more and more like the ideal human, Jesus. We don't necessarily need to become X-Men in order to have taken an evolutionary step. I believe Homo sapiens is the most biologically evolved species, even if we may not be the strongest or the fastest mammals. What makes us different is the complexity of behavior and communication that can enhance our survivability. So I think it is behavior that is the penultimate horizon of evolution. The only evolving that remains after that is for God's kingdom to become fully present at the resurrection.

Insanity and biblical wisdom/poetry authorship

I've recently begun to internalize the scholarly consensus about the authorship of books such as Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. The basic idea is that later composers (or even the culture at large) would attribute their work to an author to lend credence to their work and to honor them as the paragon of their tradition. For instance, David was seen as the greatest of YHWH's worshippers. Solomon was seen as the wisest at the head of a wisdom tradition. Doubtless, David wrote some psalms, and Solomon wrote many proverbs. But it's problematic to insist that every header in the Psalms that says "Of David" means that he sat down and composed it. (Never mind the fact that the preposition may not mean David wrote it, but it may mean that the psalm was composed "for David" or in his honor.)

Where does insanity come in? You've probably heard Albert Einstein's famous definition: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Problem is, the first place scholars can locate something like this sentence is in a Narcotics Anonymous handout from 1981. (See this site.) Why bring Einstein into this? He was a very, very smart man. He lends credence to my saying the aphorism. And nobody really wants to refer to NA in conversation.

This current example illustrates very well how biblical literature could have been attributed to famous people from the past. It just seems like the right thing to do.

The Spirit's role in evolution

I've been mulling the evolution/large early human community thing (cover article "The Search for the Historical Adam" in Christianity Today a few weeks ago). It was my observation of how some parents treat their children and how I treat Evadel sometimes that lead to my latest thought.

Presupposing an evolutionary model, in the beginning, or some time after the beginning, God breathed his spirit/breath into some primates and made the first human community. When they disobeyed, they died, or perhaps God's breath simply left them, and they went back to whatever advanced primatic state they were in. Let's look forward to another time when God's breath came powerfully upon people. Acts describes people loving and caring for one another in evolutionarily impossible ways, seemingly. Or at least their social behavior was counterintuitive, but it was the sociological evolution that God was directing.

Regarding parenting, it's interesting that nonhuman species show different parenting characteristics. Some parents eat their young. Others abandon the kids to fend for themselves. Still others hang with their brood for years to give them the best opportunity for survival. When we think of human parenting, "good" parents equip their children with the best tools they can to support survival and thriving. (I really wanted to say "thrival.") However, we see alcoholic—or abusive, or otherwise dysfunctional—parents teaching terrible behavior patterns to their children. These children have their own children, and they often exhibit the exact same parenting tendencies.

Theologically, we could say that abusive parenting is sinful. Or we could say that God's breath does not animate such parenting, even if this Spirit is present, sometimes protecting young psyches, sometimes restraining awful behavior. (And sadly, children still die at the hands of their parents today.) But think about some of the accounts in the First Testament. Parents would place their babies in the red-hot arms of flaming Molech idols. That's terrible parenting. That's worse than anything we see in the animal kingdom. Other animals, as far as I know, do not use technology to invent ways of torturing and disposing of their young.

This leads me to wonder if awful parenting, for instance, shows evolutionary regression. Other examples would include leaders committing genocide (physical in despotic regimes or emotional in workplaces), spouses speaking harshly to one another, and taking something illicitly to enrich oneself. (Strangely, this model of evolutionary regression is also called sin.) Humans have the choice to let the Breath of God animate them, or they can seize the fruit and declare that they can handle the differentiation between good and evil.

I've heard antievolutionists say, "Well, if evolution were true, why haven't we evolved into something else?" I wonder if it's because we've squeezed the Spirit of God out of the lungs of our communities.