Painting Fakes

I first heard of Francis Collins in Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , where his faith journey served as a contrast for Shermer's own journey from evangelical Christianity to atheism.   The Language of God is Collins' own telling of that story, along with his reflections on the relationship between science and faith. Collins is famous for his role as the director of the Human Genome Project, in which a host of geneticists pooled their efforts to develop a complete map of the human genome.  He is also a committed evangelical Christian, and this makes him something of a poster boy for the idea that Christianity and science can be compatible.  After all, if such a distinguished scientist is also a believer then faith must be smart. The Language of God opens with his own description of his conversion.  Brought up in a non-religious household, he more or less drifted into atheism as the default option for a budding scientist, before his switch to ...

The final fall story in Genesis is the story of the Tower of Babel, found in Genesis 11:1-9.  Here it is. 1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they...

For the past couple of weeks I've been obsessing about Richard and Linda Thompson , and in particular their beautiful song A Heart Needs a Home. Richard and Linda first met around 1969.  Richard was already famous as the guitarist and sometime songwriter with folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention, his guitar playing reportedly the reason for their initial recording contract.  Linda, then performing as Linda Peters, was a struggling singer,  recording advertising jingles and doing folk club gigs in the evenings. In 1971 Richard left Fairport, seeking more scope for his own songwriting.  In between earning his living as a session player he recorded his first album, Henry the Human Fly, with a band that included Linda as a backing vocalist.  By the end of 1972 the couple were married and officially performing as a duet.  Richard had found his muse and Linda her voice and a set of songs to sing.  Of course it was not an entirely equal par...

Sandwiched between the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden and the story of Noah and the flood is a very different kind of fall story - the story of Cain and Abel.  Here's the story as it appears in Genesis 4. Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. 3 In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the LORD. 4 And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, 5 but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. 6 Then the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? 7 If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” 8 Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Ab...

Long ago, but not very far away, I was asked to cast my eye over the advertising poster for a youth event organised by my employer, and sponsored by the Queensland Health Department's anti-drug campaign.  They wanted a proof-read.  The names, location, dates and times were fine, but along the bottom it had a tag. Alcohol, tobacco and other drugs free. I burst out laughing, and asked the organisers if they really wanted it to say that.  They laughed too, and rang their contact in Queensland Health.  Yes, they really did want it to say that.  They were baffled.  What was the problem?  This tag-line went on everything they put out.  We laughed some more, and the posters went out as they were. At the time, I wondered if perhaps I was just a little bit too pedantic.  Now, however, I blame my youthful exposure to British television comedy.  My parents were big fans of any funny person with a British accent.  Political correct...

Being something of a heretic myself, in a modest sort of way, I was interested to read Alister McGrath's Heresy.   McGrath is currently a theology professor at Kings College, London and has a glittering academic carreer, representing the educated face of moderate orthodox Christianity in the UK and beyond.  I've enjoyed a couple of his previous books - The Twilight of Atheism   provides a handy, accessible summary of the trajectory of atheist ideas in modern Western thought, while The Dawkins Delusion provides a pithy response to Richard Dawkins The God Delusion . Here he's moved on from atheism, which challenges the church from without, to heresy, which provides a challenge from within.  He is at pains to stress that heretics ancient and modern are not outsiders attacking the church, they are insiders trying to reform it, generally with the best of intentions.  So what is it that distinguishes heresy from orthodoxy?  There is a thread of thinking in 2...

So, the talks between Government and Opposition on reviving offshore processing have collapsed .  Even though both government and opposition want basically the same thing, each wants their own version of it and neither will compromise.  This is undoubtedly good news  for asylum seekers, at least in the short term, because Australia's current laws as interpreted by the High Court are more compassionate than either of our main parties would like them to be. Meanwhile, Tony Abbot has plumbed new depths of absurdity in this increasingly absurd debate, suggesting that a Coalition Government would return boats to Indonesia .   As usual, Abbot is a little short on practicality here.  First of all, there is the issue of detecting the boats.  The ocean is wide, the boats are small.  Often the first Australian authorities know of their existence is when they chug into the dock on Christmas Island. Secondly, there is the issue of the process of th...

Finkelstein and Silberman  suggest that the book of Genesis began life as a series of orally transmitted stories which were turned into literary form relatively late in the piece.  It is possible that the first eleven chapters, in particular, consist of orginally unconnected material, with the genealogies serving as a literary device to tie them together. If this is true, then it is possible to see that there is not one but four stories of the Fall in Genesis.  There is the one we usually associate with it, found in Genesis 2 and 3 .  Then there are the stories of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4), the Great Flood (Genesis 6-8) and the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11).  All four stories feature the same core elements - humans fail to live up to God's standard, God intervenes to punish them or prevent them from doing more harm, and there is a form of redemption at the end.  I'll talk about Cain and Abel and Babel later, but first the Flo...

Oxford mathematics professor and Christian apologist John C Lennox has recently acheived a high profile in Australia due to an appearance on the ABC's Q&A .  He has also debated noted atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer .  All of which means that sooner or later I was bound to check him out. God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? is Lennox's summary of his arguments against the "scientific atheism" of the likes of Dawkins and Shermer.  Its central question is whether the evidence of science has really killed off the idea of God.  His main antagonist in this debate seems to be Dawkins, and a number of chapters in this book are direct refutations of claims made by Dawkins - that the process of natural selection is sufficient to explain the origin of life, that an interventionist god violates the laws of nature, that David Hume's arguments are a conclusive philosophical refutation of the possibility of miracles. ...

Speaking of the Fall , my relaxing holiday reading this Saturnalia , has been AJ Mackinnon's lovely travel story The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow .  Mackinnon tells the story of his journey through the waterways of Europe, from Wales to the Black Sea, in a 10 ft sailing dinghy.  It's glorious fun, with the odd hair-raising incident to keep the adrenaline going.  Like to try crossing the English Channel in a dinghy?  Without any larger craft accompanying?  Like to be accosted by pirates in remote Bulgaria?  Like to be stuck in Serbia as NATO is about to begin bombing? Apart from the comedy and high farce, one of his most persistent themes is the kindness of strangers.  Just when he is about to despair, his boat is ready to fall to pieces, he is starving and out of cash in a Visa-less country, or some other disaster strikes, some complete stranger steps up with carpentry tools and expertise, good home cooked food, a towrope, a place of shelter,...

Prompted by reading an essay by Wendell Berry, I've been thinking about the second and third chapters of Genesis and what they have to say about our current environmental predicament. Many scholars think these two chapters represent the earliest Hebrew version of the creation account, with the opening chapter added at a later date.  They record the creation of humanity, and the fall of the first humans from their state of innocence. We are accustomed to think of ourselves as somewhat separate from nature, as shown in the diagram below. We understand that we are, to some extent, natural beings.  We know we need to eat and drink, that we get sick.  However, we see ourselves as fundamentally different from the rest of creation.  Hence, we see "nature" as something to be conserved, managed or exploited by us.  This is why we are able to talk so easily about balancing environmental and economic factors, for instance, as if the economy was something seper...

Happy New Year everyone.  I trust 2012 is a better year than 2011 or, if 2011 was the best year of your life so far, that at least the comedown is unspectacular. In between eating, sleeping and watching cricket I've been reading The Bible Unearthed, an earlier book by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, authors of David and Solomon .   This book operates on a broader canvas, providing an overview of the latest (at least up to their time of writing in 2001) archaeological evidence about the times in which the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, are set. Finkelstein and Silbermann are serious and distinguished historians and archaeologists, not eccentric amateurs like Tony Bushby or Stephan Huller .  They carefully cite and sift their sources, build their arguments from evidence and are careful to avoid overclaiming.  Nonetheless it is important to remember that archaeological evidence is intrinsically partial.  In a country which has been continu...