Hey All,

I started reading this article yesterday and thought it had some really interesting thoughts on God and Evolution. Especially interesting is this quote:

it is vital to avoid, in the case of precultural evolution, the presumption that “God” competes with the evolutionary process as a (very big) bit player in the temporal unfolding of “natural selection.” Once we are released from that false presumption, “God” is no longer—and idolatrously—construed as problematically interventionist (or feebly failing in such) along the same temporal plane as the process itself. Rather, God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all; God is the atemporal undergirder and sustainer of the whole process of apparent contingency or “randomness,” yet—we can say in the spirit of Augustine—simultaneously closer to its inner workings than it is to itself.

As such, God is both “within” the process and “without” it. To put this in richly trinitarian terms: God, the Holy Spirit, is the perpetual invitation and lure of the creation to return to its source in the Father, yet never without the full—and suffering—implications of incarnate Sonship. Once we see the possibility of understanding the contingency of precultural evolution in this way, we need not—as so much science and religion “dialogue” has done in recent years—declare the evolutionary process as necessarily “deistically” distanced in some sense from God. Rather, I propose in contrast that God is “kenotically” infused (not by divine loss or withdrawal, but by effusive pouring out) into every causal joint of the creative process, yet precisely without overt derangement of apparent “randomness.”

Thought this could start some discussion…so discuss!

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/10/20/catholic-anglican-church-recruit.html

Z

http://flyingfarther.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/toward-a-theology-of-pipesmoking/

Recently in one of my courses, my professor gave us this short peice to read. I found it very powerful and extremely helpful in understanding what is at stake in asking The Question about the meaning of life. Read it. Envision the setting. Enjoy it. Comment on it, Dammit! Oh, and if you get lost in all the different animals mentioned, know that most of the animals mentioned are pretty much all different kinds of ducks.

http://www.riverwalking.com/essay2.html

 ”Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spirituous liquors: they will also, as I have myself seen, smoke tobacco with pleasure. Brehm asserts that the natives of north-eastern Africa catch the wild baboons by exposing vessels with strong beer, by which they are made drunk. He has seen some of these animals, which he kept in confinement, in this state; and he gives a laughable account of their behaviour and strange grimaces. On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons. An American monkey, an Ateles, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men.” Charles Darwin, On The Descent of Man, Penguin Classics, pp. 23-24

Oh to be a monkey…or, wait….

In light of our recent discussion surrounding souls, I would be interested in hearing feedback regarding PETA’s new campaign to “save the sea kittens“. What do you think about PETA’s attempt at creating more sympathy towards fish species by way of renaming them? Is it silly? Helpful?

I have recently been listening to Josh Ritter’s Thin Blue Flame (you can listen to it above, I linked it from his site) and can’t help but be struck by its beautiful and haunting exploration of God, the afterlife, and how our perceptions of the afterlife shape our ethics and our politics. Thin Blue Flame is a vision, ala John’s Revelation, that draws the reader/listener in with its compelling and disturbing imagery meant to shake us into a realization of our negative human tendency towards escapist conceptions of the afterlife that in turn negatively affect our ethics. If we, of course as the chosen ones, are escaping to a heavenly dwelling where we, along with God, will simply exist as energy ”mixing with nitrogen in lonely holes where neither Seraphim or raindrops go” then who cares if we spend our earthly time ”bringing justice to the enemies and not the other way around”….enemies defined of course by their lack of adherence to our particular God ordained “laws”, those things that we “loose on earth”. But as the song says, “If what’s loosed on earth will be loosed up on high
It’s a Hell of a Heaven we must go to when we die”. Who can dispute this when God’s laws explained on earth are often used to justify war against the “enemies” of God.

Throughout the song, there is a counter-appeal (over against the dualism of body-soul) to a heaven that is far more earthly; a heaven that is shaped “like the hips of a girl”; a heaven that is like a city where “the weddings in pollen and the wine bottomless And all wrongs forgotten and all vengeance made right The suffering verbs put to sleep in the night The future descending like a bright chandelier” (See Rev. 21:2)

What is left of our goodness as created beings if all we can do is wish to escape the home which God has given us? What if redemption is the culmination of creation and not escape. What if heaven is “the world just beginning and the guests in good cheer”?

But, the alternative is to believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and thus Thin Blue Flame mourns: “Oh it’s hell to believe there ain’t a hell of a chance”

Throughout the song, there is also the constant refrain: “Only a full house is gonna make it through”. In other words, only a world that is full of created matter — body, earth, wilderness, diversity, — only a world where “heaven is so big there aint no need to look up”, only THAT world is anything worth hoping for in the afterlife. A different, redeemed world to be sure, but a world that can be called a “full house”, not just the emptiness of “a cold dark room”.

What do you think?

Throughout this series and some other reading, it has become evident to me the tension in modern Christian discourse over how we are to, on the one hand, appreciate the neccessity and privelage to be responsible for the health of the natural world, and on the other hand, to recognize the way in which the very term “nature” is loaded such that to speak of caring for the health of the natural world is really to some extent to speak without making any clear referece as to what we are really speaking about.

What I mean to say here is that in some sense, there is great uncertainty as to what actually consititues “nature” and whether or not what some people understand as “nature” is worth fighting to protect or fighting to “overcome”. For example, some ecologists or environmental activists seem at times to want to posit a conception of “nature” that is overly romantic and that does not deal adequately with the fact that, as humans, to some extent, we must do damage to nature if we are to construct a world for ourselves to live in. This may sound offensive to some ears, but I think it is fairly easy to see that this is the case.

When we build cities, we damage “nature” — nature here understood as wildlife, grasslands, lakes, and the list goes on. Now, surely there are less “nature-damaging” ways to build cities; this is not what is at issue. What is at issue is that no matter how we avoid or reduce the damage done, to some extent, we must “damage” or “uproot” the previous environment in which nature would otherwise have taken over. The idea of a comprehensive symbiosis is just simply far fetched. On the other hand, it is also completely wrongheaded, in my humble opinion, to take the view of some Christian conceptions of eschatology that say that God’s ultimate plan for the “creation” will be one of destruction, while the disembodied souls of human beings are raptured up to a blissful, heavenly dwelling.

What do you think? As human beings in an inter-dependant relationship with “nature” or “creation”, what is our role? How can we adequately speak of caring for the earth while also adequately dealing with the clear tension of the impossibility of total symbiosis? Furthermore, how can we be empowered to speak well about such issues when terms like “nature” or “creation” contain such ambiguities? Thoughts?