What We're Reading

After asking everyone's advice for read-alouds, we've been working our way through Charlotte's Web. I recall watching the movie when I wasn't much older than Noogs, and I've always had a fondness for the book. Noogs seems to enjoy it, and often requests another chapter. I suppose I ought to tell her to wait until tomorrow, but I like hearing the story as well, so I often oblige. It should be a great vocabulary builder -- Charlotte often has to explain her word choices to Wilbur the pig.

We'd started on Stuart Little, which is a work of delightful style and charm, but it didn't seem to hold Noogs' interest so much, so we left off and will try again when she's a bit older.

Mama said there'd be nights like this...

Last night was just one of those nights where I couldn't get to sleep at all. Darwin had called about 1:30 am to say hi from California, and after that I was up. I laid in bed, I stared at the ceiling, I rolled around trying to get comfortable. Noogs, who was laying at the end of the bed, and I kicked each other.

Eventually I got up and ate the rest of the ice cream and read Chesterton. While pleasant in itself, this didn't put me to sleep because shortly thereafter I had to get up and take antacid for heartburn (welcome to being seven months pregnant!) So, being up, I surfed the internet, checked my email, and played poker on the computer -- and won, too.

At last, around 5 am, I started feeling tired. I climbed into bed, snuggled under my warm covers, got my pillow plumped just so, and stretched out my leg toward where Noogs was snoozing -- and promptly withdrew my foot, as the bed was soaked.

"Honey, you wet the bed!" I said to her.
"I am sorry," she replied, and padded toward the bathroom to change out of her wet jammies.

So Noogs was cleaned and put in her own bed. When I stepped into the laundry room to get the cleaner to spray on the spot, I realized that I hadn't closed the washer when I'd loaded laundry in this afternoon, so the clothes had been sitting in a washer full of water ever since. Closed the washer, stripped the bed (she managed to get everything but the pillows -- feather comforter, blanket, both sheets, and the mattress pad), sprayed the bed and laid a towel down, and remade it. All the while I was recalling what my dad used to say when things weren't going so well. "It could be worse," he'd say. "At least I'm not sitting in cow pies up to my neck." So true!

So at 5:30 this morning I finally laid down and fell asleep. Half an hour later Noogs comes to stand beside my bed and asks, "Mommy, can I sleep with you?"

The Vigil

Of your kindness, please remember Darwin and his family in your prayers this evening, as tonight is the vigil for his father before the funeral. They'll be praying three decades of the rosary -- the Crucifixion, the Transfiguration, and the Resurrection -- and I'll be praying them here at home as well. If you should have some extra prayer time tonight, join us in offering these decades for the repose of the soul of Jon Hodge.

The Bomb Shelter and the Ostrich

About a month ago (it's been a busy month...) a frequent commenter asked my opinion of an article called "Bomb-Shelter Theology" by Fr. Brian Harrison that appeared in Living Tradition in 1994. I read it almost immediately, but I wanted to write a substantive response to the article and time has been lacking. Anyway, here it goes...

Let me go ahead and open by quoting the first few paragraphs of Fr. Harrison's article:

Those who anxiously whittle down and attenuate the traditional Catholic faith to the point where it includes no affirmations whatever about physical, material realities (such as conception, virginity, crucified corpses, the earth, sun, stars, etc.), on the grounds that such matters fall within the competence of "science," do a very good job of what they set out to do: their theological bomb-shelter is indeed impregnable against any possible bomb which might be launched by physicists, geologists, historians, etc. No such missile could ever damage that kind of "faith," any more than a cloud can be damaged by firing a shot-gun at it: there is nothing solid there with which the shot might possibly collide. Nevertheless, if the Catholic Church ever came to adopt, or even officially permit, this scientifically-ever-so-respectable theology, her rational credibility would suffer death by the "asphyxiation" of self-contradiction. Let us see why this is the case.

The Roman Catholic Church's basic stance toward religious truth is not that of a plodding investigator. Rather, it is that of a faithful witness. Unlike scientists who search for truth in nature, or Protestants who search for it in the Bible, the original Church dating back to Christ Himself claims to have possessed the truth already for two thousand years, handing it on faithfully and continuously from generation to generation.... This is why her theologians can never simply imitate the methodology of other disciplines, in which the mark of intellectual integrity is open-mindedness, and a modest willingness to acknowledge and correct past mistakes....

For the credibility of an investigator and that of a witness have to be judged according to very different criteria. An investigator only need avoid self-contradiction in what he says at any given time. Provided he does that, he may - and indeed, should - contradict what he said only yesterday, if he happens to have found new evidence overnight that his previous view was mistaken. But a witness in a court of law is subject to more exacting requirements. Unlike the investigator, he is asking us to believe certain things on the strength of his word, not on the basis of publicly available data which the rest of us can inspect and evaluate for ourselves. He is asking us to trust him as a reliable source of information which is otherwise inaccessible to the rest of us. This means that in order for him to be credible in the claims he makes, he must avoid not only contradicting himself while under cross-examination today; he must also avoid contradicting today what he said yesterday -or the day before. Once he gives his clear, emphatic, sworn testimony to something, he must forever stick by it, and be able to defend it, on pain of destroying his whole credibility. Now, things like creeds and dogmas and solemn papal or conciliar definitions are the emphatic "sworn testimony" of the Catholic Church in bearing witness to the truth of God as it is revealed in Jesus Christ and in the natural moral law. So are those doctrines which, even though not defined in such specific documents, have been taught by a solid consensus of Popes and Catholic Bishops round the world as being "definitively to be held."

Now, I suspect that all of us would agree that a theologian who suggested that the Church back off from the truth of the virgin birth or the resurrection because physical science could disprove such assertions would be a deeply misguided thinker. The Church clearly teaches and has always taught that these events happened and happened 'literally' not in some metaphorical or symbolic sense. Throughout Christian history people who have denied the virgin birth or the resurrection have been invariably labeled as teaching heresy.

As such, if someone went back in history and discovered that Christ's body was not in fact resurrected, but was actually eaten by wolves, it would not be because the Church was being 'too literal', it would be because the Church was flat wrong. Similarly, if someone could somehow go back in a time machine and prove that Christ was not conceived by the power of the holy spirit, but rather by the intervention of a Roman soldier (as I believe some blasphemous writer or other suggested) this would not be a matter of the Church speaking metaphorically when it spoke of the virgin birth, it would be a matter of Christianity being false, pure and simple.

Now, I confess, I have never encountered a writer who insisted that giving science due respect in its own domain meant that the Church could not assert itself clearly on physical matters such as the resurrection or the virgin birth. Indeed, if you think about it, science itself cannot speak to such questions -- unless one imagines the existence of tools such as time machines (which current science believes to be impossible). Science deals with questions of general rules of physical behavior. Thus, science can state that it is not usual for a woman to conceive a son without receiving sperm from a man. However, one must remember that science is not in the business of stating eternal truths. Science cannot say "no woman could ever conceive a child except through one of her eggs coming in contact with sperm from a male of the same species." Rather, science says "so far as we have ever observed, all children are conceived through the process of a woman's egg coming in contact with a sperm -- and we don't know of any other way that conception could take place." Miracles, and other events that are the first observed of their kind, cannot be predicted or disallowed by science, because by definition they fall outside the experience set by which science works. Indeed, when the Church calls in a doctor or scientist to help confirm a miracle, what the scientist does is not say "this was a miracle" but "I can find no physical explanation for thisoccurrencee." Thus, I think it's important to note that any theologians who do subscribe to the "bomb shelter theology" described by Fr. Harrison suffer not only from a deficiency in their theological understanding, but also a grave deficiency in their understanding of the methodology of science.

In the second section of the article, where Fr. Harrison gets down to business and asks how we are to deal with the initial chapters of Genesis.

If the Roman Catholic Church must forever persevere (under pain of a fatal self-contradiction) in affirming the dogmatic principle that there exists a category of "dual-citizenship" truths which are both revealed and physical/historical, one of the specific questions that arise when we apply this principle to the field of Scripture studies is whether the truth of the creation accounts (Genesis 1-3) falls into this category, or not. Few people professing to be Catholics will want to say that this opening section of the Bible is simply "false" or "untrue." The big question is, What sort of truth does the Holy Spirit want to communicate to us here?

Good question. However, I have some concerns about how Fr. Harrison drills down into this topic. Fr. Harrison references an article in Pastoral and Homilitic Review by Fr. Stanley Jaki which he says boils down to the following syllogism:

Major - All Scripture (including Genesis 1-3) is inspired by God, and is therefore without error in all that the writers intended to assert.

Minor - Science has demonstrated that Genesis 1-3, understood as a factual, historical account of how the world and man began, would be in error.

Concl. - Therefore the author(s) of Genesis 1-3 did not intend to assert in these chapters a factual, historical account of how the world and man began.

However, Fr. Harrison does not like this line of thinking:

Such is the facile solution offered by a "bomb-shelter" hermeneusis of Genesis. One just reduces the asserted content of the creation accounts to a few simple transcendental propositions (for instance, "God made everything good"; "God made man in his own image"; "God made everything there is with the greatest ease") so that their "true" meaning is safely secluded or cordoned off from any conceivable damage that could be occasioned by the bomb-blasts of empirical science....

Consider this little parable. In a certain far-off land the dominant religion includes the dogma that on the dark side of the moon there are large craters full of salt water. Comes the twentieth century and space-travel. Rocket-ships finally get to photograph all angles of the moon, including the dark side. The believers are cast into deep anguish and a crisis of faith by the terrible news that, while the new photographs indeed show plenty of craters, all of them are bone-dry! At first there is a reaction of rejection. The hierarchy assures the faithful that the photographs are all faked, as part of a Satanic plot. As time goes on, however, this becomes hard to sustain, since some astronauts of hitherto unquestioned orthodoxy themselves take part in a space-flight to the moon and see for themselves the faith-shattering emptiness of those great craters, reporting this sad news to their brethren on return. Many of the faithful leave the Church in disillusionment; but for others, faith does not remain shattered for very long. The more learned theologians soon come up with a "bomb-shelter" solution which satisfies well-educated, sophisticated believers. It can be set out in another syllogism.

Major - It is revealed truth that there are salt-water craters on the dark side of the moon.
Minor - Science has demonstrated that no water of any sort is observed in the craters on the dark side of the moon.
Concl. - Therefore there is invisible salt-water in the craters on the dark side of the moon.

This eminently reasonable solution comes to be accepted by the bulk of the faithful, because after all, it is logical (the conclusion follows ineluctably from the premises); it is orthodox (the traditional dogma is faithfully preserved); and by accepting the minor premise, this revised faith is perfectly in line with the latest developments in science. Armed (and comforted) by this modern development in doctrine, the guardians of the new orthodoxy can afford to shake their heads condescendingly at the tiny minority of fundamentalists, who, in their naive literalism, regard the new theology as nonsense and continue to insist on the hypothesis of hoax and fraud in all the photographs and testimonies regarding the craters. These theological illiterates, locked into their narrow, fortress mentality which leaves no room for growth or flexibility, keep on stubbornly maintaining that if the traditional interpretation of moon-water turns out to be indefensible, the whole religion will be indefensible. The only perplexing thing for the more enlightened believers is that the great bulk of their contemporaries seem to agree with the fundamentalists on this last point. The new theology, designed especially to make faith more credible for modern scientific man, seems to hold little attraction for him. The churches keep on emptying, as a greater consensus grows outside the Church that there is, quite simply, no water of any sort on the dark side of the moon.

Fr. Harrison believes that this "moonie" example is in fact a pretty good example of where Genesis biblical scholarship has taken itself in recent decades:

A century and a half after the existence of a "non-historical" literary genre for Genesis 1-3 was suddenly "deduced" from the studies (not in Hebrew literature, mind you, but in geology and biology) of scholars such as Lyell and Darwin, our exegetes are still looking for it.... And since our deduction about the existence of a "non-factual" literary genre in Genesis 1-3 was not based on methods even remotely connected with literary criticism, it is also unsurprising that we have not found what we are looking for, even after more than a century of searching.... Since all appropriate literary methods have so far failed to identify the creation accounts as belonging to any known "non-historical" genre (such as poetry, drama, apocalypse, fiction, midrash, allegory, parable, etc.), and since the field of literature (unlike that of nature) now contains very little unexplored territory, then it might be time to recognize honestly that this genre which just "has to" be there is one which is permanently undiscoverable by any method at all which human ingenuity can devise! In terms of the parable, our "water" has failed not only the visibility test, but also the tangibility test.

Now, I've quoted a lot of Fr. Harrison's article. I hope you will forgive me the length, but I thought his approach was sufficiently novel (I haven't read anyone taking this approach to the creationism debate before) that it was worth being very clear (for those not up to reading all fifteen pages of the original article) on what Fr. Harrison is saying.

I have three basic issues with Fr. Harrison's position:

First, I think he takes an overly simplistic approach to what elements of scriptureconstitutee the Church's "sworn testimony" about the world. Clearly, the resurrection is something that the Church does and always has asserted to be a historical event. There is no getting around it without falling into heresy. However, though certainly not an expert in patristics, I've read a decent number of sermons and commentaries by the Early Fathers and medieval Doctors of the Church, and nowhere did I get the impression that the Church'scredibilityy relied upon the scientific and historical accuracy of Genesis in the way that Fr. Harrison's "moonie" religion apparently relies on the existence of salt water on the moon.

Without making a particular study of the matter, two of the Church's greatest saints andtheologianss (Augustine and Aquinas) both spring to mind as suggesting that the plain "testimony" of the Genesis narrative might not be "accurate" in the most literal sense. Augustine rejected the literal accuracy of the six days of creation, pointing out that God's eternal and all powerful nature would suggest that the work of creation was performed in an instant. He held that the six days represented not the literal working and resting cycles of God's activity, but rather the temporal perception of the angels witnessing God'sinstantaneouss act of creation. Aquinas questioned whether "and thus death came into the world" could be literally accurate, because according to the Aristotelian philosophy creatures do not change in kind, and a change from being mortal to immortal would be a change in kind. (Aquinas argued that the "death" that came into the world was "death" in the spiritual sense often used in scripture, rather than "death" in the biological sense. Thus, Aquinas actually addresses the question that some ask about Genesis and biological evolution: how could there have been evolution before the Fall if death only came into the world after Adam's sin?)

One can hardly accuse Augustine or Aquinas of being a bomb shelter theologian, and between the two of them, they challenge both the six day structure and the literal coming of death into the world -- both major elements of the creation narrative if taken historically. In the "moonie" parable, Fr. Harrison presents it as a given that the existence of lunar salt water was a dogmatic article of faith for the "moonies". While the parable's narrative is fully under Fr. Harrison's control, I think it would be inaccurate to say that the Church has historically preached the historical accuracy of the seven days of creation as dogmatic. For all of Fr. Harrison's scorn, most (indeed all that I can remember) ancient and medieval texts that discuss the creation narrative do focus on the "few simple transcendental propositions" that he considers such a cop-out. When being chatechized, new Christians were told "God created the world out of nothing" and "Man was created in God's image" not "water was created 48 hours before fish".

This leads to my second major problem with Fr. Harrison's analysis: His "invisible" literary style doesn't seem to me to be terribly illusive but rather the product of an overly modern approach to literature. Genesis 1-3 are, I would say, myth. Fr. Harrison rejects this idea because he seems to have in his head a definition of myth something along the lines of "a false and silly belief that people used to have when they didn't know any better". Certainly, that is what all too many modern people mean by "myth". However, I would say that those people are quite wrong in their assessment.

Although he's talking about a slightly different genre, I would recommend Tolkein's "On Fairy Stories" as a good discussion of true mythology, but I will attempt to cover some of the same ground with fewer words.

When I say "myth" I do not mean a "just so" story like such as Kipling wrong. Nor do I mean a superstition or false belief. True mythology is un-authored, going back so far in a culture that it is well known and available in many versions, not the product of any one author. It deals with serious questions about the world and human nature in a form that is not necessarily literally, historically true, because it deals with questions too old and basic for anyone to know the truth of in a historical fashion. In his recent First Things essay, Cardinal Schonborn pointed out the philosophical dangers of accepting the idea that to know a thing's material/historical origin is to know its essence and meaning. (For example, the idea that if human beings evolved from lower life forms, that this tells us something deeper about human nature and humanity's place in the divine plan, or lack thereof.) Mythology contains an implicit understanding of this distinction, in that it accepts that it may not accurately describe a thing's historical or material origins while attempting to explain its essence.

So, for example, the Greek myth of Pandora's box was not (I would argue) thought to be literally or historically true by the ancient Greeks. Giving the question due thought, one would not imagine that war, pestilence, greed, hate, envy, etc. were physical creatures trapped in a box, that a specific woman named Pandora released upon the world. Rather, the myth of Pandora's Box attempted to address the origin of evil in the world (and man's culpability in that origin) at a level more essential than the historical.

The earliest chapters of Genesis, I would argue, are also mythology, but mythology which is wholly true and successful in its attempt to address the nature of things, while pagan mythologies expressed only partial truths, as recognized by man's inherent grasp of God and natural law. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is by contrasting the biblical story of the flood with the Sumerian flood myth found in the epic of Gilgamesh. Both stories contain certain basic elements (a flood sent to purge the world of humanity and a single family which survives by building an ark), however in reading the Sumerian version one sees immediately how the pagan version reflects a false understanding of the nature of man and the relationship between man and the divine. In seeing that which is false in the pagan myth, one realizes how the biblical myth correctly reflects God's revealed truth, in the way that the myth of mere human origin does not.

My third point of disagreement with Fr. Harrison is in some ways the most urgent, and the reason that I have written such a long commentary on his piece. In his "moonie" parable, Fr. Harrison suggests that there are two honest approaches to dealing with the discoveries of science in relation to Genesis: either insist that science is a fraud and that it is wrong to assert that the world is ancient or that humanity (in the biological sense) evolved from lower life forms, or reject the bible as false and Christianity as a fraud. The "bombshelterr" route that his intellectuals and theologians in the parable dream up (with the "invisible water") he sees as inherently dishonest and dangerous.

This is all very well for Fr. Harrison, who apparently is satisfied in his own mind that the findings of modern astronomy, geology and paleontology are indeed a fraud. However, he binds up a heavy and dangerous burden for others to carry. Either they must assert that much of modern science is a fraud (Fr. Harrison even holds out hope that the bible is right that the earth is stationary at the center of the universe while the sun and all the stars orbit it once each day, though he does not fully commit himself to that view) or one mustabandonn Christianity as false.

This is the biggest reason I find myself drawn back into the evolution debate again and again. It's not so much that I have a fanatical devotion to evolution or to the aspects of modern astronomy and geology that suggest and ancient universe (though I do consider these explanations provided by science to be the best theories to explain the evidence we have at this time) but rather that many who have an antipathy towards these areas of science (as Fr. Harrison clearly does) feel it necessary to build up the threat to Christianity and make the argument: Either evolution is false or Christianity is false. Now you believe that Christianity is true, so surely you must reject evolution, right?

Given that the Church has said repeatedly that there is no inherent contradiction between the findings of modern science and our beliefs, it seems wrong to me (indeed, wicked) to risk destroying the faith of others by insisting that one must reject either evolution or the Church. I do not say that given the choice Fr. Harrison proposes I would reject Christianity -- because I do not accept that this is a legitimate set of alternatives to propose. But I do consider the choice set up to be dangerous and unhelpful.

National De-Lurking Week!

Taking a cue from the ever-resourceful Julie D. (who takes a cue from Paper Napkin), I want to extend an invitation to all lurkers to stand up and shout, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" or whatever it is that you lurkers do.

Tell us what you really think of DarwinCatholic! (And Mrs. Darwin as well!) Been reading us long? Just found us? Think we're sublime or stupid? Get your fifteen minutes of comment box fame right here!

I think that about says it all.

Further Adventures in Reading

Noogs (one of these days I'll have to respect the dignity of an almost-four-year-old and just use her real name) is making merry progress through 100 Easy Lessons, with lesson 7 taking place this morning. She's just learned the "t" sound and took great delight in writing a pageful of "t"s -- t is an easy letter for small hands to master. We have one more review lesson and then the curriculum introduces words, not just combinations of sounds. I can't wait for lesson 13, which is the first lesson to present a small story for the child to read. (The story is merely the sentence "See me eat" accompanied by a picture, but I think that Noogs will be thrilled.)

One concept she's having a little trouble assimilating is the rhyming section of the lessons. You start with a sound, say "m", and then rhyme it with various endings, such as "eat". She can do it with me, but when it's her turn to rhyme she only wants to say the ending. Since there's so much review included in each lesson, I haven't been pushing it. I'm sure she'll pick it up eventually.

Since we seem to be progressing well (so far!) with basic reading instruction, I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations for beginning math books. Noogs can count to twenty and do some very basic addition and subtraction with blocks or little toys. She recognizes all her numbers as well.

(Amber -- did you start with 100 Easy Lessons? How did that go?)

No Catholics Need Apply

I was going to blog about The Wall Street Journal's Saturday front-page article about professor Joshua Hochschild, who lost his job at a Protestant college for converting to Catholicsm, but Scott Carson has beaten me to the punch:

In today's Wall Street Journal there's a front-page story about Joshua Hochschild, an assistant professor of philosophy at Wheaton College whose contract has not been renewed because of his recent converson to Roman Catholicism. The story emphasizes the growing trend towards "mission purity" at some religious campuses: for many years plenty of Protestant and Catholic schools looked for academic excellence as their primary criterion for new hires and tenure decisions, but there have been lots of recent cases in which adherence to some doctrinal or credal affiliation has played a major role both in hiring and in tenure decisions. The case of Baylor's recent president, Robert Sloan, has come in for much discussion over at the Reform Club, where resident Baylor almunus Hunter Baker has had much to say on the topic that is both interesting and important.

Hochschild was hired by Wheaton when he was an Episcopalian, but he was already tempted by Roman Catholicism. Even when he was hired, he discussed the meaning of "Biblical inerrancy" with the president of Wheaton, Duane Liftin. Liftin has a rather impoverished notion of what Roman Catholicism entails, but his understanding of it is not all that different from what is widely beleived among certain Evangelical circles, so it's difficult to fault him for his decision to consider Hochschild a person who could not, in principle, sign the Wheaton statement of faith, and it was on the basis of this that he terminated Hochschild's contract. Academically, apparently, Hochschild was a keeper: the chairman of the philosophy department is quoted as having a favorable opinion of him, and the suggestion appears to be that he was on-track for a positive tenure decision.

Hochschild had been a professor of medieval philosphy; the end of the article notes that Wheaton has not hired another medieval philosophy professor because most of them are Catholic. Ha! Hochschild is now teaching at Mount St. Mary's in Emmitsburg, MD, about which I've heard generally good things.

(Note: Amy Welborn has a link to the article, I believe, and quotes it extensively in her post.)

On a sillier note: Noogs and Babs were convinced that Daddy was in the paper, because the cover photo of Hochschild bears a very superficial resemblance to Darwin -- dark hair, glasses, and a blue shirt that looks like one Darwin owns. The girls were pleased and agitated by turns.

10,000 Visitors!

I see that sometime yesterday we hit 10,000 visitors to DarwinCatholic. Whoo-hoo! Many thanks to all our readers for, well, reading us. Keep up the good work!!!!! (The extra exclamation points are courtesy of Noogs, who wanted to push a key.)

Fideist and Materialist?

As a controversy of sorts has played out on the pages of First Things between Cardinal Schonborn and Catholic physicist Stephen M. Barr over the topic of intelligent design, a number of people have found themselves fearing that Barr is a Fideist, someone who believes that one can only know about the existence of God by mean of a leap of faith, and that evidence for this cannot be found within the created world.

This has caused Mark Shea, among others, to fear that perhaps the thinking of Catholics such as Barr is not in line with the statement of Vatican I that God may be known from His creation by means of human reason.

Now, to a great extent I inherited my interest in the alleged "science vs. religion" clash from my father, a life-long science educator and devout Catholic. Having just flown out to the ancestral roost to help get ready for the funeral, I was looking through my dad's shelf of books on the topic (the family library runs to some four to five thousand volumes) and one caught my eye: Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by Stephen M. Barr.

The book jacket says, among other things: A considerable amount of public debate and media print has been devoted to the "war between science and religion." In his....book, ....Barr demonstrates that what is really at war with religion is not science itself, but a philosophy called scientific materialism. [This book] argues that the great discoveries of modern physics are more compatible with the central teachings of Christianity and Judaism about God, the cosmos, and the human soul than with the atheistic viewpoint of scientific materialism.

Clearly, I'm going to have to read this book, and this also makes me all the more eager to see Barr's article on Intelligent Design which is due out in the next issue of First Things.

I have several other books in the queue to finish first, so it may be a while before I'm able to write a review, but a couple things strike me right off from the bits that I've been able to skim this morning:

1) Barr is doing something rather different from what 'scientific' Intelligent Design of the Behe or Dembski variety attempts to do with biology. Barr is not claiming that specific theories in modern physics "prove" there is a God, but rather that they describe the sort of world that human reason suggests God would have created. Further, he points out that in many ways the philosophy of materialism is required to provide more complicated glosses upon current physics to justify its conclusions than Christians are to justify theirs.

2) Barr seems to be quite clear on the distinction between scientific theories themselves and the philosophical beliefs that one must layer onto them in order to make cohesive sense of the world. Thus, he seems quite clear that there is one body of current scientific knowledge with Christians and materialists then interpret in different ways to support their differing beliefs about the nature of the world.

3) People often complain that Catholic's who argue against the Intelligent Design movement spend all their energy arguing against other Christians and little energy arguing against the forces of materialism. Here Barr is spending an entire book on arguing against exactly those forces.

As I said, I'm very curious to see exactly what Barr has to say about Intelligent Design generally in the next issue of First Things. I don't know that we would fully agree on the issue, but I'm very much encouraged by his general philosophical stance.

Who cares if it's science?

Mark Shea advises readers to have a look at Cardinal Schonborn's article in this month's First Things dealing with the question of discerning the creation through 'natural philosophy'. It's an interesting article, and I'll write more on it shortly.

However, the main thing that seems to bother Shea about the intelligent design debate is: "Fine and dandy. It is not science. And that is cause for a judge to banish it from the classroom why?"

Well, the most immediate response that occurs to me is: Because it made the strategic mistake of pretending to be science in order to get into the classroom.

Remember, the Dover trial wasn't a grand showdown of elemental principles. It was a specific question of whether a school board had violated the Supreme Court's current understanding of the separation of church and state (which, of course, is a pretty idiotic understanding) in mandating the use of a science textbook called Of Pandas And People, which (from the selections I've read, I haven't read the whole thing) appears to contain a pretty broad brush version of the scientific form of 'Intelligent Design' exemplified by the Discovery Institute.

So the reason why intelligent design (as presented in Of Pandas And People) was banished for not being science is, at the most basic level, that it made the mistake of being presented as science, and rather badly done science at that.

The problem probably has a great deal to do with the historic roots of the scientific Intelligent Design movement (as distinguished from the philosophical points that Schonborn seeks to make). It's fairly clear that the Discover Institute and scientific intelligent design were developed in the late 80s and early 90s in order to provide a replacement for "scientific creationism" which had been ruled as too religious to be taught in public schools. ID used significantly more sophisticated scientific methods (most of them wrapped in the terminology of statistics and information science) than scientific creationism, and it remained studiously silent on the nature of the designer that is posited.

However, like scientific creationism, the strongest support for ID first came from the ranks of bible Christians -- a group not known for its philosophical chops. (Dang it if getting too far into philosophy didn't tend to lead bible Christians to become Catholics or Orthodox...) So instead of recognizing that polemicists who attempt to use the evolutionary narrative or Earth's history to "disprove" the existence of God are making very, very basic philosophical mistakes, the ID movement set out to prove that evolution was scientifically mistaken, and that God's "thumb print" could found "proved" scientifically.

If we want to try to provide public school students with arguments that will make them less likely to be seduced by the arguments of "scientific" materialists like Richard Dawkins, our goal should be to attack the philosophical roots of the problem, not evolutionary science. Additionally, if we want to play in the public school sand box, we need to play by their rules. Unless the last 50 years worth of "establishment clause" jurisprudence is overturned (and I don't see that happening real soon) any text that follows a straight through-line to "and that's how we know that God exists" is not going to make it. Nor need an introduction to philosophy book necessarily be so one sided in its assertions. If we are right in our understanding of the universe and of human nature, the arguments for God will naturally win out of the arguments against. We don't need to write the conclusion, many of the students will discover it just fine by themselves.

Indeed, if there's a target out there that we should replace, it's not the science curriculum, but rather the "Critical Thinking" texts that have become popular in many sectors -- including a number of public schools. The texts that I've seen definitely have a number of things to recommend them. They provide good lessons in addressing texts critically and the construction of logical syllogisms. However, many of them are written by skeptics or "brights" and have a bias towards materialistic philosophy. As such, they also ignore most of the great philosophers throughout history, starting with Plato and Aristotle.

What I would love to see if a good book on "Thinking About the World" which tackles basics like "How do we know about the world?", "What kinds of thought do we employ in making everyday decisions?" and "What do we mean by 'good'?" It could also deal with issues like efficient versus final causality, realism vs. nominalism, essence versus accidents, etc. All of these are tools which would allow students to put assertions such as "we know that human evolved from single-celled organisms and therefore there is no God" in their place, without explicitly teaching religious conclusions to major questions. And getting students to think about these kinds of philosophical issues will not only open a whole new world of understanding to them in later life, but set them on the road that has led countless souls to God.

Egg as art

A co-worker of Darwin's raises chickens and sends us some farm-fresh eggs every now and then. This morning, as Darwin fried up an egg for himself, I contemplated these minature works of art. They came in all shades except white -- camel, umber, light cocoa, robin's egg blue, pale blue, and even a rosy beige speckled with pink. One was a mix of blue and brown that defies description but was gorgeous. I have a weakness for swathes of color and can spend hours perusing paint chips, so the carton of many-hued eggs was music to my eyes. It almost makes me want to repaint the kitchen using the eggs as my color bases.

Of course, Darwin, I don't really want to repaint the kitchen, especially since I painted it a cheerful shade of green (Lowes, Eddie Bauer Colors, Lakeside Cottage collection, Apple Green) just this year. But the eggs inspire me! The pinks, the blues, the browns -- all this season's hottest colors, according to the Wall Street Journal's fashion editor earlier this year.

Why don't we see these kind of colors on eggs at the store? There it's either straight white or straight brown, with nary a variation. I bet egg consumption would rise if the eggs sold at the supermarket looked as irresistable as the farm eggs in my fridge. Marketers, you heard it here first.

Time Warp

Here's what the stars, as interpreted by the good seers at The Onion, have in store for me:

Sagittarius November 22 - December 21

Due to conditions beyond fate's control, Sagittarius will be required to repeat February 1992.

I have no idea what I was doing in February 1992, but as I'd recently turned 13, I'm sure it was lame and involved a lack of fashion sense. Agh.

100 Easy Lessons -- Lesson 4

Noogs continues to show interest in doing her "schoolwork", so we've progressed to Lesson 4 of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, as well as chapter 3 of Stuart Little. I'm enjoying the lessons, because it's giving a structure to our morning -- something we've lacked before. And I've gone ahead and bought the book, so that we don't have to keep renewing the library's copy. (Plus, I know that at some point, someone is going to write in it or spill something on it.)

Yesterday, Noog unexpectedly balked at putting sounds together. She'd enjoyed making "m" and "s" sounds, and learning "a". However, when it came time to read "a" and "m" together ("am", of course), she was indignant and insisted on making each sound separately. I didn't push it, because each new lesson is followed by a review lesson. This morning, we did the review and it didn't seem to bother her anymore. She doesn't put the sounds together smoothly, and I don't think it has really dawned on her that she's reading the word "am", but that's okay.

The end of each lesson involves writing sounds. She enjoys making "m", but has trouble with the "s". I found I have to tear a page out of the lined school paper notebook I bought for her and just give her one page a day, because otherwise she'll write on every page of her notebook. You can't limit the artistic muse, I guess.

Here are my thoughts on 100 Easy Lessons, so far:
I'm enjoying the brevity of the lessons, and the clarity of the instructions in the book. I read the introduction pretty thoroughly to get a feel for what I was about to do, and everything seems to be laid out fairly neatly. I was worried at first about the orthography, but then I recalled my time studying Old English -- at first the vowels were marked as to long and short sounds, and the easier reading selections were all printed that way. As your vocabulary grew and the selections became more difficult, the vowels were printed as originally written, and you used context and your knowledge of the vocabulary to properly translate the word. Makes sense.

The authors of the book want the children to learn to write "a" as you see it here -- with a crook up top and a litte ball below. Noogs doesn't like this, and knows that "a" can be written either like that or in the more simple fashion with a circle and a line next to it. That's how we've been practicing it in our writing exercises. Outside of calligraphy, who learns to write "a" in font-style? Seeing as the authors use their own orthography for other letters, I don't see why they couldn't have used the simpler "a", unless it's just that that's not how it's printed in most books.

We tried reading a bit of "Green Eggs and Ham" with its famous opening salvo: "I am Sam. Sam I am." She could sound it out, but didn't quite connect the sounds with words. Well, give it time...

A Grief Observed

My father, Jonathon Hodge, died quietly yesterday morning, January 4th. It is, in fact, the same day on which my younger brother, Jonathon Hodge, died eighteen years before.

I'd held off on saying anything because several of my father's old friends read the blog occasionally, and I wanted to make sure that people heard through the appropriate channels first.

Thank you all for your prayers throughout this period. As Catholics we believe that it is a good and noble thing to pray for the dead, and so I would ask that you continue to include my father in your prayers, especially when attending mass.

COSMOS-LITURGY-SEX

I came accross an interesting blog the other day titled COSMOS-LITURGY-SEX. Although I ran into them via the comments of some of the contributors contra evolution and pro Intelligent Design, I suspect that there's a great deal of philosophical aggreement between CTS and DarwinCatholic.

I hope to get some thoughts up in reaction to some of their recent posts over the coming days.

Militant Islam's Futile Rage

Scott Carson of An Examined Life links to a Crisis article by fellow Ohio University professor David Curp about Jihad and the Islamic world's resentment towards the West. Curp's thesis is that the resentment of the Islamic world towards the West is not so much a result of their "oppression" by Westerners from the Crusades through the colonial period, but rather a sense of futility and frustration that the world is now upside down. For centuries the Dar al-Islam could, almost at will, conquer more territory from the Christian world, and realistically looked forward to the prospect of a Muslim empire stretching the length and breadth of the known world.

Until Turkey's decisive defeat by Western forces in the 1600s, and the West's explosion of political and economic growth resulting from the colonization of the Americas, Islam could realistically imagine a future in which all infidels would be brought Allah's banner. However, as the Islamic world quickly moved from being a major threat to a near forgotten curiosity in the 18th and 19th centuries, the forces of Islam were left with a sense of frustration and futility. If Allah rewards virtue with military victory, how could the Dar al-Islam be so completely left behind by the Western world?

The more westernized segments of Islam have responded to this new world order by further personalizing the Islamic faith, more or less dropping the idea of the Lesser Jihad (the struggle to militarily subdue the infidel) to emphasize the Greater Jihad (the struggle against one's own sinful inclinations). In this direction (to the extent that Islam does contain elements of real revealed truth) lies stability and sanity. With the possibility of traditional, successful military Jihad all but gone, the choice for Islam is between this personalized version of Islam, and the conspiracy-minded rantings and resentments of groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad.

Educational Delights

The elder of our monkeys did the second lesson of How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons this morning over breakfast (at her insistence) and howled for more (almost literally). We told her that if she was good she could do another lesson tonight. There was much sssss-ing and mmmmmm-ing around the Darwin household this morning.

The only catch is, she doesn't really like writing the letters herself. She'd much rather instruct us in writing them for her. Still, she gamely filled a page with some M and S of her own construction, with regular variations in design just to keep things interesting.

We're thinking we'll launch into another chapter book that we already have, so Stewart Little or Charlotte's Web is probably next up on that front. I'm thinking probably Stewart Little.

Father Fox Talks Sex

That should increase our search engine hits...

Fr. Fox of Bonfire of the Vanities had a pair of really good posts last week about sex (as in gender) and sex (as in intercourse).

The first post deals with the question of "what's the big deal about sex?" As well as explaining why the Church considers sex something worth having moral rules about, he also points out the inherent inconsistency of those who insist both that sex is "just a little thing" that no one should bother making rules about and yet having your sexual desires denied is somehow an incredible injustice that "cuts to the very center of my being".

The second post deals with something I think could use more attention than it gets, that at the completely materialistic, biological level, humans are designed to have heterosexual intercourse. Indeed, that's why our species (and any species not capable of asexual reproduction) exists. Pull out a basic biology or anthropology textbook and look up the definition of evolutionary success and you will find something along the lines of "the number of second generation descendants an organism produces". Clearly this had a lot to do with heterosexual intercourse, and very little to do with homosexual intercourse.

The second post also provides an interesting case study in that a commenter turns up who attempts to make the case that forbidding gay marriage is like saying people with brown eyes can get married but people with blue eyes can't.

If you have a moment, you may want to scroll farther up to see some of Fr. Fox's other recent posts, including a link to some of the worst angel art that man can find. (Actually, I'm pretty sure I've seen worse, but this is moderately bad.)

Weird Habits Meme

I've been tagged by Rick for the weird habits meme -- list five weird habits, then inflict the meme on others. You all know the drill.

1. Not exactly weird, but just a bad habit -- I, like Rick, bite my nails. That's why I never wear any rings but my wedding ring -- no sense in drawing any unneccessary attention to my hands.

2. Here's weird for you. When I was young, my family lived in a trailer on nine acres of Virginia countryside, and we had a shared well with the neighbors. Consequently, the water pressure was low. To this day I never flush the toilet before taking a shower, scarred by childhood memories of no water pressure and no hot water.

3. I never brush my hair. Brushing makes it frizz and float. Instead, after a shower I run my fingers through it and then put a bit of Frizz-ease and gel in, then let it dry. This comes from having Naturally Curly hair -- my sisters can sympathize.

4. I eat my cereal without milk, generally -- I picked that one up from Darwin.

5. I make the sign of the cross after the Penitential Rite during Mass. Many other people do it as well, but I've never known why, and it's always slightly bothered me that if I were pressed as to why that sign of the cross is there, I couldn't answer. Anyone who knows, please tell me!

If a meme has worked its way down to me, that means that all the other bloggers have already been tagged. I'll just invite anyone who wants to list their weird habits to do so in the comment box, with a special invitation to commenter Barbfromcincy -- not because I think she has any weird habits, but because it's always a pleasure to hear from her!

Hello, 2006!

Thanks to everyone who's offered words of encouragement lately. Even though we've been slow to respond (this is the first day I've read my own blog in almost a week!), we are paying attention and grateful for all your prayers.

Coming up soon, look for my response to Rick Lugari's latest meme (I am NOT aging, Rick!); our continuing thoughts on homeschooling as well as some of our latest reading ventures in that direction; updates on Darwin's father (not much to tell, really -- he's still hanging on, God love him); and New Horizons in Organization for the New Year. Plus, it's time to start getting things ready for the homebirth and young Smaskig's advent in about two months. (What, oh what to do with the placenta? Bury it, freeze it. toss it, barbeque it?)

So the long and short of it is that blogging will be getting back to a regular schedule, and we appreciate your patience with our sporadic posts over the past month.