A Couple Quick Thoughts

Wow, it has been a while since I last wrote anything! Here are a couple of thoughts that have come up today...

1) In Luke 12:54-56, Jesus says "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, 'A shower is coming.' And so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, 'There will be scorching heat,' and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" This seems to me to speak to the issue of science vs. faith. Jesus is clearly acknowledging that the natural world obeys the laws of nature - that there is order in it and that we can predict certain effects from certain causes, such as rain from a west wind, and heat from a south wind (in Judean geography, at any rate). But He rails against what seems like "scientific naturalism": the notion that a scientific understanding of the world is all there is, calling the crowds hypocrites for being able to "do science" while missing the crux of history - Jesus' incarnation, ministry, and approaching death and resurrection. I think it's just a little earlier in Luke that Jesus says "the Kingdom of God has come near to you", or something to that extent. One more quote to go with this thought: in George MacDonald's book Phantastes, one character says of her husband, "I must believe my senses, as he cannot believe beyond his." I don't remember the details of the context, but I distinctly rememer thinking of it in terms of "scientific naturalism" vs. the evidence for Christianity. I thought it fit well with this thought about "interpreting the appearances of earth and sky but failing to recognize the times".

2) In 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul writes "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." It occured to me that there might be a connection between what Paul is writing regarding theology, and theories of biology - particularly relating to evolution. In some previous entries (either on this blog or my Xanga, I don't remember right now), I talked about the concept of an organ, or an organism. The idea (from Kant and his contemporaries) was that and organism was something like a self-contained thing. You couldn't make it simply from it's parts, but it generated itself. In this regard it is much like Chomsky's view of language as an organ. Organicity is something that evolution by natural selection does not do well at explaining, and even evolutionary theorists are quick to point this out (although without any diminution of their expectation that some other theory of naturalistic evolution will do the trick, if we can only figure out what it is). (Personally, I have a hard time seeing any feasible way around organicity.) Now when Paul says that anyone in Christ is a new creation, it makes me think of this issue of organisms. An organism must be created out-right (so far as I can see - although the jury is definitely still out). If I may stretch exegesis just a bit and apply the biological concept of an organism to Paul's teaching here, we could say that our spirituality is organic; and more than that, it is organically fallen. In order to be saved, our old organ must die, and a new organ - a redeemed organ - must be created in its place. We cannot "evolve" from spiritual fallenness to spiritual redemption on our own - that would be to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Instead, God must re-create us as an entirely new organism - a new creation. It is all of God by grace, not by works. All this begs the question, however, is this stretching exegesis too much? It may be intriguing (I think it is), but it is accurate? I wonder what the theories of biology were in Paul's time and in his location... Did the Romans, the Hellenists, the Jews believe that creatures evolved? Did they have some view of organicity? Is Paul himself drawing any parallels between the scientific thought of the day and the theological out-workings of God's salvation? I suppose Aristotle might be a good place to look for the first two questions. For the last question, I'm not sure how one would go about answering it...

That's all for now. Time to go to sleep!