Trust and Obey

There's a very nice hymn with this title. For the sake of completeness, I give it here:

Trust and Obey

When we walk with the Lord
In the light of His Word,
What a glory He sheds on our way!
While we do His good will
He abides with us still,
And with all who will trust and obey.

[Chorus]
Trust and obey -
For there's no other way
To be happy in Jesus
But to trust and obey.

Not a shadow can rise,
Not a cloud in the skies,
But His smile quickly drives it away;
Not a doubt nor a fear,
Not a sigh nor a tear,
Can abide while we trust and obey.

Not a burden we bear,
Not a sorrow we share,
But our toil He doth richly repay;
Not a grief nor a loss,
Not a frown nor a cross,
But is blest if we trust and obey.

But we never can prove
The delights of His love
Until all on the altar we lay,
For the favor He shows
And the joy He bestows
Are for them who will trust and obey.

Then in fellowship sweet
We will sit at His feet,
Or we'll walk by His side in the way;
What He says we will do,
Where He sends we will go -
Never fear, only trust and obey.

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Now, I've always taken "trust and obey" to be two things that simply go together and naturally follow one after the other, like "live and learn". I think this is what the hymn has in mind. But recently I've been thinking about a different view of "trust and obey" - not contrary to the first view, but in addition to it. Trusting and obeying can sometimes feel like opposites. For instance, imagine that you're a scientist and a Christian. As a scientist, it's your job to push the boundaries of human knowledge. You can't know ahead of time where this quest will take you, and sometimes it can be a bit scary. Especially in our age of aggressively a-theistic science, one might fear that this quest could end up leading one away from God. But then you remember that God is the Creator of all things, even the things you are studying, and that no amount of boundary-pushing or questing will lead you beyond the boundaries of God's jurisdiction. You can trust that. You can rest in God's faithfulness, in His trustworthiness. You can push the boundaries with abandon and the worst that you'll do is show how much bigger God is than you had previously thought!

But on the flip side, you want to be faithful yourself; you want to obey, to bring "every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ." You don't want to pursue an idea into heresy. As long as you're pursuing the Truth, you're pursuing Jesus, but often it's hard to know in advance what it is about a new idea that is True and what is not. So you have to make a decision: Either you forfeit the pursuit, playing it safe, taking the conservative route; Or you plunge ahead, taking the risk. In the first case, your understanding of God's majesty and greatness suffers by virtue of not being expanded, but at least you know you're safe. In the second case, you stand to gain in admiration and praise for God, but you also stand to wander into heresy - you're not safe. It's like putting your money in a bank account vs. the stock market. But losing at this game is worse than running into a bear market. But again, you ought to be able to trust that Jesus is faithful to keep you on the straight and narrow, to keep you obedient ("trust and obey" come back together at this point, like "live and learn").

This may be enough to encourage you to step out (we say "in faith" but we could equally well say "in trust") into the unknown, but it doesn't always mean that you take the step without any kind of trepidation. In the meantime, you pray that Jesus will correct you if you start wandering from the path. It is therefore with some trepidation, but also with hope in the promises of Christ, that I submit the following bit of thinking...

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Jesus performed miracles and signs. These days we think that miracles are specifically contra-natural events that can only be explained by appeal to the supernatural. The (Greek) word used in the Gospels is "dynamis", from which we get the English words "dynamic", "dynamite". "Dynamics" is the branch of physics that deals with forces, and we might well say that "force" is a synonymn for "power" or "ability", which is really what the Greek word meant. "Dynamite" is something that has great explosive "power", or an "ability" to blast holes in mountains. But we don't think that dynamite acts by anything but entirely natural means, and likewise we consider dynamics to follow from certain Laws of Nature. I don't know what 1st century Greek speakers would have thought about the word "dynamis", but I wonder if they thought of it differently than we do today under the translation of "miracle" - if they thought of it in a way that involved the natural, perhaps as a natural means by which a supernatural Being might act in the world. Although I don't know whether this is the case, let's assume that it is, for the sake of argument.

Some of Jesus' miracles involved healing people. One of these miracles that has puzzled a lot of people, including me, is the healing of the blind man by making clay made with spittle and applying it to the blind man's eyes. The question has always been "What's up with the clay and especially the spittle? Why didn't Jesus just say 'Be healed!'?" I was struck recently when I discovered (recently) that there was a story of the Roman emperor Vespasian healing a blind man in a similar manner. A little further digging and I learned that there was a widespread belief in the ancient world that human saliva had some pretty impressive healing powers. (It seems that the idea went like this: Human saliva is poisonous to snakes, and by extension to other loathsome creatures, including demons. Spitting at someone with a disease might therefore act both to help cure the person by killing the disease with saliva, and to keep the disease from spreading to yourself. It was generally best to apply the saliva to the affected part of the body.) All of a sudden this miracle makes sense - Jesus was using the methods corresponding to the medical beliefs of the time to perform this healing of the blind man. But at the same time, this makes the miracle seem somehow less miraculous - at least, if we say that a miracle is contra-natural rather than para-natural (I know, I know, I'm mixing Latin and Greek roots...).

I'll have to think more about this, and study more, but I wonder if a similar thing could be said for Jesus' other (healing) miracles - namely, that He made use of the understanding of the day to display His power ("dynamis"/"miracle") and to prove His authority (by "signs"/"semeioi", which is also frequently translated as "miracles").

This leads me to think two things. First, it kind of makes sense that Jesus would condescend to the imperfect understanding of the day. After all, His parables are all about things that were common and every-day in that part of the world and at that time. And let's consider what we might have thought if Jesus had come performing His miracles in 2007AD rather than 30AD, and if He had healed a person sick with the flu by, say, mixing flour with water and rubbing the solution on the person's forehead. First of all, we'd think He was crazy or a quack, and furthermore if the person was actually healed we'd say that Jesus got lucky in that He happened to apply the flour water just when the person was about to recovery on their own (or because of the medication they were on). Even if flour-water applied to the forehead were a cure for the flu and we just haven't figured it out yet, our current understanding of how the body works and how the flu works just does not allow for this possibility to enter our minds. Perhaps this is rather post-modern of me, but it makes sense that if Jesus wanted to communicate something to us, He would use our language.

Now, what does this line of thinking imply? For one, I think it implies that the sometimes tricky issue of thinking about medicine vs. faith is not so tricky anymore. You might think that taking medicine to help you recover from a cold is like turning your back on God because you are putting your faith (your trust) in medicine instead of Him. But if a miracle is something that God does by means of nature (rather than in opposition to nature), then it makes sense that you will take your medicine and trust God - taking your medicine is no kind of disobedience.

One might object that since doctors then and now have used their understanding of the natural world to heal people, then if we say Jesus did the same thing, how can we claim that Jesus' miracles in any way validated His claim to be the Son of God? After all, we don't want to say that every doctor is the Son or Daughter of God (in the way that we mean it when we talk about Jesus). I don't think this is a big problem, really - after all, the point would be that Jesus was demonstrating His power; and He did that in many other ways, performing "signs and wonders" of various sorts, most importantly dying and being resurrected on the 3rd day. You can't dismiss these things simply because Jesus spoke the language of the day and used the understanding of the day to communicate His message, His Gospel.

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Well, I suppose this is enough for now. It's way past my bedtime...

fyi

The confirmation for the Chomsky-Kant connection comes from Chomsky's book Cartesian Linguistics.

Language as an organ, hence part of biology

I have just confirmed a sneaking suspicion that I've been developing in the last week: When Chomsky talks about language as an "organ", or when he talks about linguistics as a branch of "biology", he is making implicit reference to 18th century biology, reflected in Kant's view of biology and organisms. When Chomsky says that language is "generative", he means it in the same way that Kant means it when he says that organisms are self-generating. This puts things in a bit different perspective. What does Kant mean when he says organisms are "generative"? Among other things, he means that they construct themselves, in a way. The organism is built up from its parts, but the parts are goal-directed by the organism to build the organism. (See my last entry for a brief discussion of this with regard to a completely different topic.) In what way is language "generative", on Chomsky's view? Language constructs itself. Linguistic structures are built up of certain parts (say, X-bar structure, for those of you who know what that means), but they those parts are goal-directed by the larger linguistic structure to build the larger linguistic structure. Moreover, the parts (X-bar structure) are themselves (small) linguistic structures; this parallels Kant's claim that organisms build their own parts.

Now this raises a potentially very interesting cunundrum. Chomsky spends a lot of time saying that linguistic competence is innate. In order for it to be innate, it had to get there by means of evolution. But Chomsky and Fodor, among others, spend lots of time saying that language is not adaptive, and it can be called non-adaptive specifically because it is organic (in the sense above, namely, self-generating). So it had to be by means of a freak mutation or else as a freak side-effect of some other mutations that were adaptive. But insofar as the analogy between language and organisms is appropriate, the very possibility of the evolution of organisms from nothing becomes nill. You see, it's important that language is said to be innate and non-adaptive. These are things that make it possible for language to be organic - if language wasn't innate and non-adaptive, it wouldn't be organic. But if organisms are organic (a tautology), then they must share these properties of innateness and non-adaptivity. Or, to use more a more concise and understandable phraseology, organisms must be contingent. If Chomsky is right about language.

So, on the one hand, this leads Chomsky to a contradiction, whether he's right or wrong about language. On the other hand, if he's right about language, it raises some thorny issues for evolutionary theory.

...I think. I've made rather strong claims in this entry, stronger than I usually make when I see the possibilities for a lot of holes in my argument. I'll have to sit on these ideas for a while and see whether I can find such holes and then whether I can patch them up. In the meantime... It does make for some interesting thinking...

Two Kinds of Biology

I'm leading a discussion of a paper on Monday that I find rather difficult, so I'm going to write down some thoughts about it here. It's called "Organisms as natural purposes: the contemporary evolutionary perspective", by D. M. Walsh in the 37th volume of Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. This paper actually meshes well with some other reading I've been doing, including Dawkins' book (which I've already commented on a few times) and a book by Kirchner and Gerhardt called The Plausibility of Life. The argument goes like this: Kant described a paradox of sorts when he said that mechanical law is the only natural explanation; but organisms are natural purposes and thus inexplicable by mechanical law. I trust that the first half of the paradox is familiar territory. The second half takes a bit of explaining, and I find that I have trouble understanding it - perhaps because it is inherently more difficult to graph, or perhaps because it is largely ignored or even denied in modern science (that's not my claim, it's Walsh's, although I think I agree with him). Think of it like this: Mechanical laws are like lines of code in a computer program. Each line tells the computer to carry out a certain operation (say, add some number n + 1). By the time the program is done running, the output is the number 213. Now this computer is built in such a way that if a number other than 213 +/- 5 is ever output by any program, the program will crash, the computer will freeze, and you will never get the data off of its hard drive. If the number is 213 +/- 5, the computer will duplicate itself (never mind how). During duplication, the program may inadvertently get changed - say, one of its n + 1 lines gets deleted. If the program outputs a number more than 3 away from 213, the computer has a 95% chance of responding by adding or subtracting an n + 1 line, as appropriate, to bring the output closer to 213. Over time, the computer population will be very stable, because the computers are able to "fix" themselves, even though the program in each computer might be slightly different (one might output 213, another 212, another 214, etc.; one might reach 212 by adding 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + ..., whereas one might arrive at it by 1 + 1 + 1 + ... + 1 - 1 + 1, etc.). This variation can then be "naturally selected" if, say, computational efficiency is the desired trait; or if showy complexity is the desired trait. Sound like evolution? But there's a problem... The program not only is modified by the computer (by adding or subtracting n + 1 lines), but simply will not run without the computer! In order for the program to do anything - even for the program to exist - the computer must first be there to write and save and interpret and execute the program. This is what it means for a computer to be a natural purpose.

Now, let's turn to biological evolution. You have organisms which are like computers; you have genes which are like programs. All the other relations between computers and programs correspond to relations between organisms and genes. But the notion of a natural purpose is not much in vogue in the sciences. The general conviction is that nature is reductionistic, that the whole can be described in terms of the parts and that the parts are self-evident. This is Dawkins' view of evolution by natural selection. But there is apparently a rising tide of organisms-as-natural-purposes, coming from the developmental biology world. This is the position that Kirchner and Gerhardt take. Put in rather different terms, the generally accepted picture of evolution fits in the "mechanical laws" category; and the "natural purposes" category might be thought of as occupied by Intelligent Design. Hmmm... We come to this dichotomy again. Of course, I think that most people dealing with organisms as natural purposes are not thinking in terms of ID - rather, they are trying to put the natural purposiveness of organisms into a broader naturalistic picture. I'm not convinced that this is possible, but in the meantime there's some interesting stuff coming out of that group.

But what about Intelligent Design? In other entries I have come out rather negative toward ID. But I wonder... Would a modified form of ID be on stronger ground if it related itself directly to these kinds of issues?

Well, I'm not finished re-reading this paper, and my comments here take me about as far as I can go right now. I find it useful to write out my thoughts - it helps me to organize them in my own mind. And I think this entry is no exception to that rule. Phew! :-)

Dawkins on Morality

I've just finished reading the chapter in Dawkins' book that discusses where morality comes from, whether one needs to believe in God in order to be moral, and whether people who believe in God really are more moral than people who don't. It seems to me that he misses the point. I mean, sure, those are interesting questions to discuss, but the question lurking in the background which he does not address and which subsequently damages his argument is: what is morality, anyway? His claim is that morality is a by-product of evolution, for reasons that he spells out but I won't repeat here. He also claims that we evolved a sense of morality without the interference of God, whom he claims (probably) doesn't exist. Ok. In the same breath he attaches a huge amount of value to morality, to being good to others. That's fine, but this underscores the fact that he's not actually answering the question. If his story is right, then the reason he attaches value to morality must be because we evolved in such a way that we place value on morality. But if that's true, then where does God fit into the picture? He might say this is exactly his point. But I think that the Christian argument goes more like this. Suppose: I'm moral because I evolved that way; I would still be moral even without God; religious people might actually be less moral than atheists, because they are moral out of fear of retribution or hope of reward, whereas atheists are moral out of the goodness of their hearts. But this implies a value judgment that being moral is good; but where does that value judgment come from? From evolution. So if we had evolved to value rape, we would call Christians immoral if they didn't go around raping. But if morality is a by-product of evolution and we know that now, and we have the power to alter the course of our evolution, then if a group of people wanted to value rape, they could call it the next phase of their evolution. After all, more rapes would result in more pregnancies which would result in more replication of the rapists DNA, and DNA replication is the whole point of evolution (more or less Dawkins' own words). So what's wrong with it (if there isn't a God)? It is simply begging the question to respond that it's wrong because it's evil, or because moral philosophers have set down a principle that one should not hurt another human being. But this seems to be Dawkins' answer to the Christians who claim that without God there can be no morality. He's addressing a completely different question from what the Christians are asking, but doesn't realize it. (The question he's addressing is whether Christians are more moral than atheists.)