If you haven’t heard yet, Bishop Olmsted of the Roman Church has excommunicated a Sister of Mercy who served on the ethics committee at a hospital for her role in the decision to end the pregnancy of a woman whose death was a certainty if the baby was carried to term.
Now this is a disaster on several levels. Here we have a religious insitution, the Roman Catholic Church, which seeks to serve as a voice of morality for the world. This mission is playing out in the following way: If you are a bishop or priest and have raped a child, then you will be reassigned after a slap on the wrist. You certainly should not be excommunicated, let alone be handed over to the legal authorities. However, if you recommend abortion to save the life of the mother, you’re out of here… anathema… don’t let the door hit you on the butt on your way out.
Never mind the fact that the intent was to save the life of the mother…
Who the hell are these people and why are they masquarading as the Body of Christ???
Divine Acton. How do we understand and talk about God acting in the world if everything is evolving?
So to continue what I began in part 1, part, 2 and part 3…The concept of divine action, or how we understand God acting in the world, is critical for a lot of different reasons. As we saw earlier in part 2, how we understand God acting directly impacts our concept of God as creator, and as we saw in part 3, how we understand God acting in the world impacts our understanding of how God acts specifically as creator of the human soul. (more…)
NOTE: This paper was written quite some time ago so please keep that in mind as you read this. I plan on revisiting this topic many times and hope to improve on my reflections.
I. Introduction
This paper will be a summarization of THE WISDOM OF LAOTSE (translated, edited and with an introduction and notes by Lin Yutang), and a comparison of the major elements of Tao with Christian themes generally and, specifically, with St. Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the divine simplicity of God. (more…)
As mentioned in my previous posts, Part 1 and Part 2, I will now take up issue 2, the Image of God, or to be more specific, “How does evolution affect our self understanding as being made in the image of God?”
There are several problems that evolution seems to create for the concept of humans as made in the image of God, but I think the big ones are,
1) If humans evolved from lower forms of life, then this means humans are not radically different from animals… does this mean we are but one kind of animal among many?
2) If humans appeared on the scene through the process of evolution, then what are we to make of Adam and Eve and, consequently, the doctrine of Original Sin? (more…)
I’ve just finished attending a study group at Grace Cathedral for Richard Rohr’s latest book, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See. I was struck by something he said within it… actually struck by many things, but the one thing I want to talk about today is on page 166-167 where he says,
The ego self is the unobserved self. If you do not find an objective standing point from which to look back at yourself, you will almost always be egocentric – identified with yourself instead of in relationship with yourself.
Most of us have been given no training or practice in this, because it was all negative self-criticism rather than calm self-observation (moral examination of conscience instead of examination of consciousness). Ego is not bad; it is just what takes over when you do not see truthfully and completely. That “lamp” does not illuminate well. (more…)
Fr. Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J. was a member of the Thomistic school, a tradition which contains a variety of interpretations of the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Fr. Lonergan is situated within the Thomistic tradition that is known as the Louvain tradition, which began at the University of Louvain’s Higher Institute of Philosophy which was founded in 1889 at the request of Pope Leo XIII. The thrust of this school was “…to engage in vital dialogue with post-Kantian philosophical currents then active, and to confront the traditional philosophy with the findings of modern science.” 1 The members of this school saw their task as being the epistemological justification of metaphysics and the preservation of the faith in the face of the Kantian critique of knowledge which had left the human mind unable to claim any knowledge of “reality as such” in the realm of speculation.
They both believe that evolution disproves the existence of God. This is interesting to me because it also reveals that they have something even deeper in common: they both subscribe to a very bad theology. The atheist will struggle to maintain a very weak and immature concept of God in order to “prove” this God doesn’t exist; while a fundamentalist will have a very literal and simplistic reading of scripture that undergirds a very weak and immature concept of God, albeit in the guise of an “all powerful” God that in the end becomes self-contradictory or absurd, yet is meant to sustain a rejection of evolution. That both the atheist and fundamentalist are both confused in the same way about what science actually does say, goes without saying… but maybe not.
Science actually says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God. The method of science intentionally excludes anything approaching theological language in its task of explaining phenomenon. The scientific method wasn’t developed in a vacuum. The people who struggled to articulate the scientific method included people who believed that God existed. They understood that God is not something that can be measured, is not something open to the empirical sense, and is not something that is observable. Therefore, when one uses a method of explaining phenomenon that entails observation, measurement, and reproduction of results for all to see and duplicate through empirical senses, then one isn’t going to be able to say a word about God within that method. To talk about God requires theology… not science.
I’ve discovered the musical group The Low Anthem, thanks to Letterman. They played a song on his show the other night from their second album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin. I’ve embedded the official video for it from YouTube below.
It’s an intriguing, as well as hauntingly beautiful, song. Theologians take note: I believe this captures the spirit of the Intelligentsia regarding the cultural aftershocks left by Darwin’s theory of evolution. I think evolution is well established and efforts to disprove it are in vain… mainly because these efforts are mostly non-scientific. If there were scientific arguments against evolution that would be one thing… but so-called challenges to evolution such as Intelligent Design are not scientific… they are religious objections that, very awkwardly, try and use science to bolster a conclusion already held: evolution is anti-God and therefore must be wrong.
Theologians, I say take note because I think the sadness of this video comes from the loss of God that evolution brings to most. I myself don’t think God is lost as a result, but I would agree that it takes a real bit of effort to get to this understanding. I also agree there are plenty of folks out there that are all too happy to conclude that atheism is the only response. I don’t fault them for their atheism, but I do fault them if they insist that we all be atheists… that’s just fundamentalism and intolerance of it’s own kind.
But we do, as theists, face a real loss of God for most people. I like this video and song because it states this fact poignantly. If theologians are to do their job aright, then this is where we start.
Allow me to indulge in a little thought exercise. I think it would be safe to say that most Christians believe that God is omniscient, which means that God knows everything that there is to know. Most Christians would include “the future” amongst those things that God knows. My first question is: What if the future doesn’t exist? Now before you get the wrong idea… I’m not saying there IS no future… I’m asking, rather, what makes us think the future is already determined? I suspect we (Christians) think the future is already determined because we believe that God is not bound by time and therefore God sees past, present and future in one eternal moment. But wait… believing that God is not bound by time does NOT NECESSARILY mean that God knows something that doesn’t even exist yet… unless the assumption is made that the future is already determined then … wait… THAT assumption stems from the conviction that God is eternal and knows the past, present and future as one eternal moment… but… ok… anyone see a circle yet?
My second question, then, is: If the future does not yet exist, isn’t determined, then isn’t it reasonable to say that God doesn’t know the future? I think it would make more sense to say that God knows what possible futures there may be… but not what the future is per se, because it doesn’t exist yet. So… any thoughts? Comments?
If you haven’t heard yet, Bishop Olmsted of the Roman Church has excommunicated a Sister of Mercy who served on the ethics committee at a hospital for her role in the decision to end the pregnancy of a woman whose death was a certainty if the baby was carried to term.
Divine Acton. How do we understand and talk about God acting in the world if everything is evolving?
