Dawkins and Coyne

This is the full uncut interview with the Catholic thinker Fr. George Coyne which was omitted from Richard Dawkins' television program, The Genius of Charles Darwin. It is really interesting indeed:

http://es.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=965C53D2B4BCCCF5

Here are some of the thoughts that Father Coyne leaves with us to think about:

“There is no official position of the Catholic church on the issue of evolution”

“Human beings are not just made of what science discovers human beings are made of”

“There is positive evidence for the supernatural but it goes beyond the scientific methodology”

“We are all subjects to our personal histories” (explaining why he is Catholic instead of Muslim)

“There are ingredients of God speaking to the Muslim tradition, to the Buddhist tradition, to the Hindu tradition… There are elements of God’s true revelation to those people in each of those traditions”

“What that exactly means [about the inspiration of Scripture] is far to difficult to get into”

“The book of Genesis, is fairly established by now, was written by many authors over vast periods of time, it has two creation stories…”

“I tend to get very upset by it, any literalist, fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture… because it reveals a fundamental ignorance of what Scripture is all about”

“The ID movement is a mistaken attempt to use science to establish the implications of science, that is, going beyond science to the philosophical and theological implications… Its fundamental fault is that it steps outside scientific methodology and would not acknowledge its doing it... It’s a religious movement”

“The so-called anthropic principle is not a principle and is not anthropic… We observe that the universe is made in this way and if we change anyone of a series of 20 constants… by a little amount we wouldn’t be here… To me it’s a scientific problem, it’s a scientific observation that does not yet have a scientific answer but to bring in God to explain it is to bring the great ‘God of the gaps’”

“I will accept, in the way that you have presented it, that the God in whom I believe is superfluous. That is: I do no need God. That the God in whom I believe is a God who gave himself superfluously, whether I needed him or not”

“God gave us brains so that we can explore the universe and find answers to the questions we have”

“I don’t believe in the soul; I don’t believe that at some time in the evolutionary process God put a soul… I’d like to think more of the spirit emerging in the whole evolutionary process”

“I believe that I survive death… I don’t believe my soul does; I do”

I wonder how many Christians would agree with these words... I suspect not to many...

Yet another debate

Yet another debate between Christopher Hitchens and a christian thinker:

http://www.wts.edu/flash/media_popup/media_player.php?id=462&paramType=video

Whoever has the patience (and the time) to listen to this (1 hour and 52 minutes) debate will find in the lips of this christian minister all the arguments that separate so many thinking people from Christianity. And even though I still consider myself a believer (in some way), it is very evident to me that arguments such as these don't really help to make the Christian faith more palatable (that is, if you consider yourself a coherent thinking person). The circularity in which this christian speaker constantly falls during the debate ("I believe in miracles because the Bible tells me so, and I believe the Bible because... the Bible tells me to") seems to assume Christianity to be a non-coherent system of thought. I remember a book by J.I. Packer in which he tried to argue that either you should put reason above the Bible or put the Bible above reason (somewhat similar to what this guy says towards the end of the debate). I really can't understand this way of 'thinking'... Can you?

Torres vs. dog (dog wins!)

This attempt to make an advert where Torres scores a goal to a dog is revealing:

http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj0rrJE7qxE

Perhaps football should've been a dog's game after all...

Albacete vs Hitchens

This is an excerpt of a debate between these two opposites:

http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq08XDbapVI&NR=1

Interestingly, the catholic opponent mentions half way through the excerpt an interesting argument which deserves consideration: talking about miracles, after Hitchens having said that a miracle wouldn't be enough for him to believe in a Christian God (it wouldn't be enough to prove the identity of the miracle-worker), and after agreeing with that affirmation (Jesus points to the imcompleteness of miracles by themselves in John's gospel), Albacete says the following:

"There is one fact upon which he [Jesus] risks everything, in which he was willing to risk the authenticity of who he was... 'the world will believe only to the degree that you love one another; if you break this law, the world is right in not believing any of my claims'"

Although I myself don't believe that Jesus really claimed anything like this about his own messiahship, this affirmation by Albacete makes things (I think) very easy for any opponent in a debate. I mean: if this affirmation is true, do the love between Christians shine as much as would be expected if the Christian message was true? I'll leave the question open...

Obama on faith

Here are some interesting thoughts on faith, extremism and literalism by the President-Elect Barack Obama (speech given earlier this year):

http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=odsDYodanxQ

Very interesting to hear those words from the US president...

God and suffering

"I believe in God. God created the world. Obviously pain had to be included in God's plan. Otherwise we'd never learn that our actions have consequences. Our cave-person ancestors, finding fire warm, would conclude that curling up to sleep in the middle of the flames would be even warmer. Cave bears would dine on roast ancestor, and we'd never get any bad news and pain because we wouldn't be here.

But God, Sir, in Your manner of teaching us about life's consequential nature, isn't death a bit ... um ... extreme, pedagogically speaking? I know the lesson we're studying is difficult. But dying is more homework than I was counting on. Also, it kind of messes up my vacation planning. Can we talk after class? Maybe if I did something for extra credit?"

P.J. O'Rourke, The Guardian, Tuesday October 7 2008

Capitalism and idolatry

This is a link to the last controversial comments of Rowan Williams regarding capitalism and the finantial crisis we live in:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/2172131/face-it-marx-was-partly-right-about-capitalism.thtml

Is he possibly right about it?

Crawley vs. Dawkins

Check this out!

http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=7mgaRKsIR_U

Clever questions and clever answers going to the heart of the matter. In a time where it's not hard to find many ridiculous interviews in the most unexpected contexts (I am thinking of Rick's interview to the US presidency candidates), is this not one of the best interviews you have seen done to Richard Dawkins?

A human book

"One must read the Bible in a human way, for the Bible is a book written by men for men: the language is human, and human the external means by which it was written and preserved; indeed, when all is said and done, the mind by which the Bible can be understood is human, as is every means of explaining it, as it is the whole purpose and use to which the Bible is applied. So you can certainly believe that the more humanly (in the best sense of the word human) you read the Bible, the nearer you come to the purpose of its Originator, who created men in his own image; and in all works and good deeds where he shows himself to us as God, he acts for us in a human way"

Herder

Perhaps that was the trick from the start: to take the Bible as human, only human, and not as human and divine (which eventually became only divine).

Surrendering to the Bible

'Scripture to which one surrenders... uncritically, leads... to indistinguishability between faith and superstition'

E. Kasemann

This is true, at least, in some cases: I open the Bible one day in a random page hoping to find an answer to an important question and happen to find a text that (apparently) answers it. Is this God answering my question or is it me trying to make sense of some words I have just read? And leaving that question aside for a moment, what kind of God will I end up believing in if it becomes a habit to open the Bible at random every time I need some answer to my questions?

Two questions worth thinking about...

Reasonable faith

'Reason conceives only of such an unknown within itself that it can conceive by means of itself'

Kierkegaard

I take this to mean that reason, by its own definition, can only ever be reasonable to itself; reason cannot 'transcend itself' to conceive of a superiority outside its own means. The unknown is reason's own inaccessible exteriority, the absurd, at which it must stop short. It seems that for Kierkegaard there is no reasonable basis for faith - faith is absurd. Faith is in this sense baseless, a chasm, a leap into the unknown. And this idea of faith as necessarily opposed to reason appears again and again in many Christian churches today.

Although I don't defend the view that reason can explain everything, I don't agree with this either. If God exists at all it is clear that he must be mysterious to a big extent (and probably beyond understanding). However the biblical faith seems to be based on some kind of evidence, be that the testimony of those witnesses who experienced the first things that happened when Jesus was alive, or the later experiences that the people who heard the gospel had. Paul's constant testimony to the people around him is based on the assumption that they can test whether what he is saying is true or not in their own lives, and his arguments often stand or fall depending on whether those tests hold. I think reason is involved in this process of testing and I think that still applies today.

Before the law

An excerpt from Franz Kafka's story The Trial, narrated by Orson Welles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZYugbqI3rQ

This is an inspiring story. What does it tell you?

All-power vs. all-good

This is a video where Greg Koukl appears to explain an everlasting problem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jRMWKz4hbw&feature=related

Now - this is the guy who has appeared in several videos over the internet supposedly refuting the atheists' arguments and showing that they are not reasonable (that they are fallacious).

Being this a very reasonable person who boasts in following logical arguments, I thought that perhaps he had at last found an answer to this problematic question. However, after hearing his answer I have two immediate reactions: first, I am surprised to find that he is not saying anything new at all but just repeating a Christian argument made long time ago; second, this argument doesn't really follow. His main premises are:

1. Although God could have chosen to create any kind of world (because he is all-powerful), God decided to create the best possible world, a world which allowed human beings to have freedom (because he is all-good).

2. In such a world, evil is necessary.

3. Therefore, although God is all-powerful and all-good, evil is necessary in the world.

I think my main problem with this argument is premise 2: why is evil necessary in a world with human freedom? I assume that the kind of evil that is being considered here is 'human evil', the kind of evil that human beings choose to do (and therefore a direct consequence of human freedom). But, what about the other kinds of evil, the evil from natural disasters, the evil that comes directly from blind nature? How can we justify this kind of evil? Is the freedom of human beings to blame for all kinds of evil that happen in the world?

And even if we took evil to mean just human evil: is it not possible for a loving mother to allow for the freedom of her children without allowing for them to kill themselves? Does a mother's love imply that she cannot be caring? Is there not love in advice?

Perhaps I am not seeing the extreme logic of this guy's argument: if this is so and you can see it, please illuminate me!

Solipsism and Big Brother

'But how can you control matter?' he burst out. 'You don't even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death----'

O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation--anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.'

[...]

'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny--helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'

'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'

'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.'

'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.'

'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.'

'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.'

1984, George Orwell

Our friends, the... crows?

This is a short and pretty wonderful talk at TED:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXQAgzfwuNQ&feature=user

Share your ideas about what you think crows could do for us...

Nice...

"Tell me", Wittgenstein asked a friend, "why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went round the Earth rather than the Earth was rotating". His friend replied: "Well obviously because it just looks as if the Sun is going round the Earth". To this Wittgenstein replied: "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?"

Is Lee Strobel pro-ID?

Judging from the fact that in most Christian bookshops in Spain we can find many of Lee Strobel's books, and judging form the fact that you'll struggle a lot to find only one Christian book that defends evolution (I never found any), it seems logical to assume that Strobel's books don't support evolution. Here you can find the evidence for this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_0WL1D5jOY&feature=related

Any opinions about this guy's argument?

Karl Barth and the Christian faith

"In history itself there is nothing, so far as the eye can see, that could provide a foundation for belief... In history itself everything could always also have been regarded as quite different. One should unequivocally hold that faith is based on revelation - on historical revelation to be sure, but on revelation; and one should get accustomed to thinking of revelation as a special category, as that unresolvable unity of happening, speaking and listening which is actually witnessed to in the Bible. Whoever wants to find revelation must find revelation and not something else, not something that revelation is as well. Otherwise he does not find revelation at all".

K. Barth

I think Barth comes closer to revealing his own position (among all these rather mysterious and cryptic paragraphs) in a casual remark:

"The more clearly the biblical witnesses of Jesus Christ speak, the more what they say gets lost in what we should today call the realm of pure legend".

In other words, the more clearly the Bible claims a revelation has occurred, the less reliable that passage is as history.

Barth's way of thinking here is rather weird: on the one hand he seems to share the historical judgement of liberal biblical scholars who thought that the events that reveal God's power in the Bible did not actually occur, but on the other he didn't follow them in disregarding these events and concentrating on something else. Rather he affirmed that the whole complex event of the Bible, which centred around those alleged revelations of God's power, was an indispensable part of a larger pattern of revelation.

This, to me, sounds like a lot of trickery focused on escaping the obvious conclusions to which your investigations are leading you. I can understand why people like Bultmann would get very angry when finding this dualistic view about the Bible. What I find harder to understand is why so many people today keep using these tricks in order to continue believing that which they suspect is not historically true anymore.

The truth of faith

"So what does it mean to claim that the truth affirmed by Christianity is not a description but an event, not a fact to be grasped but an incoming to be undergone? It means that the truth affirmed by Christianity is not primarily related to some external facts such as the age of certain Gospels or the particular facts contained in them. These are interesting and important issues that should be debated and reflected upon. However, the deep truth of Christianity is not found in the acceptance of some particular historical claim. Rather, it refers to a happening testified to within the Bible that cannot be reduced to words, confined in concepts, or divulged by definitions. The truth of Christianity is not something that can be reduced to intellectual affirmations or experiential moments that can be objectified and dissected by experts."

The fidelity of betrayal, Peter Rollins

So, what is it then? If the truth of Christianity (what makes it different from any other religion) doesn't depend on any historical happening such as, for example, the resurrection of Jesus, then: what does it depend on?

I have to recognize that I find this idea of letting Christianity be a religion based mainly (or most profoundly) on an unsearchable mystery a very tempting one. In this way (and this is not a criticism) Christianity can become anything I like: it can be the religion of my soul, pure subjectivity, not based on anything historical and completely and safely independent of the findings of any criticism that we can think of. In this way, it seems to me, Christianity becomes the perfect barthian religion, always separated from the realm of objective reality.

I have two problems with this. First, I am not sure that this way of understanding Christiniaty is fair to the way primitive Christians seemed to think of it - I remember that Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians that if it can be shown that Jesus was never raised from the dead (a historical and objective fact) then his faith is vain (a subjective consequence). Second, this attempt to separate the Christ of faith from the historical facts of Jesus' life reminds me of Bultmann's way to do that very same thing. And if this is a fair comment, then I think Bultmann's attempt showed us why that wasn't a very good idea.

Hello, my uglies!

This is a new album by Rachel Austin. You can find it and listen to some of the songs here:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=60023848

The whole thing is really good (and it's not because I know her), but I specially like the fourth song: 'They said'. Very true...

Persepolis

This is a very worth watching film. Here you can access the trailer:

http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/persepolis/

I recomend it. And after you watch it, share what you think!

Hierarchized oppositions

Where is she?

Activity/passivity,
Sun/Moon,
Culture/Nature,
Day/Night,

Father/Mother,
Head/heart,
Intelligible/sensitive,
Logos/Pathos,

Form, convex, step, advance, seed, progress.
Matter, concave, ground - which supports the step, receptacle.
Man
-------
Woman

Always the same metaphor: we follow it, it transports us, in all its forms, wherever a discourse is organized. The same thread, or double tress leads us, whether we are reading or speaking, through literature, philosophy, criticism, centuries of representation, of reflection.

Thought has always worked by opposition,

Speech/Writing,
High/Low

By dual, hierarchized oppositions, Superior/Inferior. Myths, legends, books, Philosophical systems.

H. Cixous, 'Sorties'

I've just read a message where someone was using Ephesians 5-6 to show God's loving order: 'submit to one another in God's love: wives to husbands, children to parents, slaves to masters'. Although the text we are reading is often used as God's direct word from heaven, it sounds to me very much like Cixous' list of hierarchized oppositions. I wonder what God thinks of texts like this...

Doubt as belief

“Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself” (Unamuno).

This is a hero of mine, above all for his honesty when dealing with subjects as serious and profound as this one. And he makes me think... perhaps an important part of believing in God is doubting God; perhaps part of being a believer is being an atheist. I certainly would like that, and I think (or want to think) that's what Bonhoeffer discovered in prison. Perhaps part of God's personality consists of hiding himself; and if it is, he is certainly very good at it.

(Kind of) Evolution conversation

This is a very informative conversation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjKMhtyI3L8&feature=related

On heresy and the tribal mind...

A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy[...]

The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The eclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the exclusive object of our study[...]

Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Lies, lies, lies...

'Love thy neighbour as thyself', say the petty bourgeois, and by this those well-raised children and now useful members of the state - who are very prone to any passing emotional influenza - mean partly that if someone asks one for a pair of snuffers, even though they are sitting quite far away, one is to say 'by all means', get up 'with the greatest pleasure' and hand the snuffers to the person, and partly that one must remember to pay the obligatory condolatory calls. But they have never felt what it means for the whole world to turn its back on them, since of course the whole shoal of socializing herring in which they live will never let such a circumstance arise, and should serious help ever be required, sound sense will tell them that the person in sore need of their help, yet not at all likely to have any opportunity to help them in return, is not their 'neighbour'.

S. Kierkegaard

I wonder: is 'heresy' not the word that Christianity invented to be able to turn its back on some people with a clear conscience? Are words like that not the only way that a christian can justify with a smile in their face that the people who has left the church are 'not of God', or 'not spiritual enough'?

I recently heard of someone in a church who said: 'those who left our church were just not good enough, they were not walking with God; but we are very happy now'. This shows the importance of a clear conscience to the Christianity of our day, even when that clear conscience might be based on lies, lies, lies...

There will be blood

I found this film quite remarkable. This is the web page:

http://www.therewillbeblood.com/

You have to watch this film and then comment your impressions here.

Eternal answers...

I remember one day in early spring, I was alone in the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened, and my thought went back to what for these three years it always was busy with - the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how did I ever come by the idea?

And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning... Why do I look further? a voice within me asked. He is there: he, without whom one cannot live. To acknowledge God and live are one and the same thing. God is what life is. Well, then I live, seek God, and there will be no life without him...

After this, things cleared up within me and about me better than ever, and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from suicide. Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But as insensibly and gradually as the force of life had been annulled within me, and I had reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was strange was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It was my ancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole purpose of my life was to be better. I gave up the life of the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on life, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending.

Tolstoy (abridged)

And Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so, ever since.

I was speaking to a friend last night and he mentioned his feeling of how unpleasant life often feels. His problem with life seemed a little bit similar to that of Tolstoy: in William James' words, "the superfluities and insincerities, the cupidities, complications, and cruelties of our polite civilization are profoundly unsatisfying". And they are.

There seems to be something that heals, something that has the potential to break the effective edge of sadness, in the very act of accepting an eternal answer to our deepest questions, even when this answer is as mysterious as God (or 'the eternal', or 'the MORE', or 'the Wholly Other') can be. I am not speaking here of answers in the doctrine-dogma-system way, but rather in the acceptance that there is, in fact, an eternal answer (although it may not be possible to put it into logical and reasoned words).

I find this a very interesting thought... Perhaps even satisfying...

Good evidence

"Only religious belief requires faith because only religious belief postulates the existence of entities which we have no good evidence to believe exist. It is a simple error to suppose that just because atheist beliefs are also 'unproven' or 'uncertain' that they too require faith. Faith does not plug the gap between reasons to believe and certain proof. Rather it is what supports beliefs that lack the ordinary support of evidence or argument. And that is why, as the traditional religious texts tell us, faith is not as easy as ordinary belief. Or, as atheists tell us, why faith is foolish".

Julian Baggini, Atheism: A very short introduction

I think there is some truth here. I think that both religious and atheist 'faiths' (if they can be called like that) are quite different in that they do not both argue for the existence of something but rather one of them argues against the existence of that which there is not enough 'good evidence' to believe in. As some atheists keep telling us, we are all (or most) atheists with respect to Zeus, and we all know what it means to be so. I certainly am an atheist with respect to divine cats with two heads that fly and answer my prayers - I have no 'good evidence' to believe in them.

However I wonder what kind of evidence would count as 'good evidence' for atheists to start believing in any God. I don't think that all the believers around the world do not have any evidence at all that could count as 'good evidence' to believe in the God they believe in; I don't think they are just blind people who happened to choose one God they heard about and that's why they believe.

I find it hard to make sense of discussions like this because sometimes people talk about 'good evidence' but they don't make clear what they mean by it. I recently heard a debate between a woman believer and Richard Dawkins in which he admitted the possibility of the existence of 'emotional truth' (as a kind of truth different to scientific truth), for which 'good evidence' would not need to be scientific but rather 'emotional'. In fact he himself is aware of parts of his life where that kind of truth applies. However, if this is so and both truths are based on 'good evidence' (although different kinds of evidence), is it not possible that religious faith is based on 'good (religious) evidence'?

Snowman photos

It is true... We created a monster...

The evolution of the flagellum

For all those who really want answers, this is an interesting video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdwTwNPyR9w

And ID again...

"It turns out God has fought back... "

You don't usually hear these days sentences like that coming from the lips of ID proponents. They have learnt that when they present God as their main scientific argument they are showing their real intentions (as well as how little they know about science). And so they usually are very careful to avoid saying things like that. This is why I think the last 10-20 seconds of this short interview are specially enlightening:

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=90952

It's God-talk... I knew it!

Evolution and ID debate

This is a VERY enlightening debate...

http://www.kkms.com/blogs/JeffandLee/11566451/

I think it shows quite a lot of what really is going on. Enjoy it!

The intelligence of ID

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=3015753963746035923&q=intelligent+design&total=2698&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=4

Thanks for the link, Pete!

Does God exist?

This is a well worth and really interesting debate about the existence of God.

http://www.ajula.edu/Content/ContentUnit.asp?CID=1766&u=7037&t=0

Enjoy!

Rich Mullins

This was a hero of mine. Still is... He tells in a simple song so much that I find difficult to express. Enjoy the song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDR_ksEln-4