I like what you said about God as/is love. I think more people would be drawn to a Christian worldview if they could believe it was the truest expression of love available to them.

Maybe making academic understandings of life a first priority, isn’t the best thing. Most of the really, really smart people I’ve known or know of seem to have a general mistrust of and contempt for, humanity. You strike me as an exception to the rule but I assume that to be because somebody taught you about love before they taught you about reason.

If you choose to decline that request that is fine but I think it’s a bit disingenuous to avoid answering direct questions by alleging a drop in the civility of the conversation.

“I’m having trouble imagining what the world would look like if God required the ‘consent of the governed’ in order to run the show.” (emphasis mine). You sound like a diehard predeterminist here. I’ve always got the impression from previous discussions with you that you were the exact opposite.

Nevertheless, I think the quality of our dialogue has started to take a bad turn, so I’ll bow out because I don’t want it to diminish the rest of our conversation - what I consider an improvement from our past conversations.

It still has been a pleasure. Thanks.

No yeah Gil, I certainly agree about the intellectual honesty. last semester I had ample evidence in my Philosophy professor who refused to account for many of the significant epistemological challenges to his materialist propaganda.

I think you’ve said it well. The apparent fear of the scientific method is palpable in many corners of the church.

I think what I would like to see is a far more integrated approach to these questions. Instead of isolating science and philosophy and theology and sociology - these disciplines need to be intertwined in our pursuit and discovery lest we be held to the same shame as our contention that the earth is/was flat.

to illustrate let me give you an example of what i think accomplishes the opposite of the above paragraph.
I recently had a discussion with several believers about the content we have been covering in my Neuroscience course. We were all taking turns commenting on the marvels of the intricacies of the brain while complaining about the impending doom we sensed with the difficulty of the appraoching mid term exam. At length, I asked my fellow class mates how they thought the material we covered in class affected thier perspective on faith.
“You know it really shows how complex we were created - it’s really quite wonderful.” When I pressed them to explore the issue of things like the mind body problem - I was met mostly with blank stares and awkward shuffling. It was pretty clear that the reasoning had sort of found its end goal in that reassuring statement.
Now i will grant that there may be some virtue in being able to live with simple faith such as this - but it felt unmistably clear that when pushed to make deeper connections between science and faith there did not seem to be many bridges across that cavern in thier minds. And i am not here to say that this conversation is typical of most and certainly not all believers but it did seem to resonate with similar feelings that have surfaced before with respect to the how believers view science (And i am not just talking about those cheesy lines in Nacho Libre either).
That’s what i mean about integration. I guess I think that for believers the jump between what are seen as secular disicplines and faith ought to be more natural and honest.

I’m having trouble imagining what the world would look like if God required the ‘consent of the governed’ in order to run the show. That kind of world, I’m afraid, requires more imagination than I can muster.

Your take on democracy as emerging out of ‘love for humanity’ is interesting but I think a bit revisionist. While there may have been some who entertained such lofty ideals, there were many more who saw it as the best possible way of maintaining a minimal level of security and protecting property rights.

So while the democratic arrangement might lead to peace and order (at least in theory), you’d be hard pressed to say that it could produce anything like genuine love.

I certainly believe that it is possible for you to help me change my mind. So, whatever influence my biological make-up has on what I “think, believe and do” it isn’t the only influence in my life.

“I don’t know what the ’sentient action of matter’ means. Can you use smaller words?” I honestly don’t know how. But I’m hoping to come across material that can challenge my assumptions here and/or help me articulate them better.

On the matter of God fixing things - I never meant to imply that he was to do it without our consent. No, what I mean is, whatever salvation you have and will receive from God by your consent, I think God could have accomplished it without inflicting pain on himself.

And since our democratic society has handed over (out of love for humanity) our freedom to physically hurt others, freeing the protectors of our laws to stop us, I see no reason why God couldn’t help the protectors of our laws (and the criminals that truly want to be rehabilitated). To me, this sounds like a world where more love is possible.

I guess that is what I would resonate with the most (Gil’s last comments). It’s not that those desires for God to fix things or to intervene in some way are bad or “crazy.” In fact, if we were honest, we all want that. Humanity does not seem to be able to make a really good world on our own and to have a higher power fix things does not seem unreasonable at some level. But the distortion of a loving relationship that this would cause between Creator and creation would disqualify everything else (maybe not everything!) I believe about God and His world. Thanks Gil for writing these thoughts better than I can think them.

You might think that your ideas are true but they can easily be explained in terms of neural activity in your brain and the relentless efforts of your biological material to replicate itself. To expect change in either direction of a debate would be pointless. Sort of like a biologically necessary relativism.

I don’t know what the ’sentient action of matter’ means. Can you use smaller words?

Re: your question of why God couldn’t just fix the problem. God is love. To love someone is to take the risk that your love won’t be returned. To love truly is to give freedom and just stepping in and ‘fixing’ all of our efforts to resist God would be an action against that commitment to love.

I share your sense that God should fix the mess. But think about the level of intervention that would require. It would require God overriding people’s choices at innumerable points in time, whenever there was a threat that things might not go according to plan. This might be a more agreeable kind of world but I don’t think it would be one where love is possible.

I agree with what I hear motivating you in your comment. I agree that Christians have been far too dismissive of other disciplines of study and I think that this reflects very poorly on us. To be perfectly honest, I think it betrays a fear of being wrong and I think that if we actually believe that God is the source of all truth then we should engage expectantly with all who are seeking to explain reality more clearly. Our failure to do that is a testimony to our weakness.

I am convinced, however, that intellectual honesty has to be a sword that cuts both ways. I’ve referred earlier to a certain kind of reductionism that I sense within a lot of naturalistic explanations about reality. The reductionism is quite simple: to explain causal links between events is not to explain their meaning or significance. To be able to understand how the machine works is not the same thing as saying whether or not it has any significance.

So I am sometimes frustrated by the refusal of ardent naturalists to admit that their worldview is underwritten by a bottom-line assumption that ‘what is is all there is’. This seems to be another example of intellectual dishonesty, a refusal to admit that there are unproved assumptions at work that are simply accepted as true (in faith).

This naturalistic assumption is profoundly not a scientific conclusion. It is question about the limits of science (or rational knowledge) and it is obvious that this is not the kind of question that could be answered using rational enquiry or the scientific method (I was very glad to hear you say that you are encountering instructors in science who are willing to admit gaps in their knowledge).

Certainly we live in a time where there are a lot of rival explanations out there regarding the meaning (or lack of meaning) of what we see all around us. I agree with you wholeheartedly that the church needs to produce Christians who have willingness to engage with these questions.