Painting Fakes

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. In

Still ploughing through my rapidly diminishing pile of periodicals.  Right now I'm reading Zadok Perspectives No 112, Spring 2011, and it includes a lovely lucid article by John Dickson , director of the Centre for Public Christianity and one of Australia's foremost Christian apologists, reprinted from the Sydney Morning Herald .  Dickson is talking about the very same thing as Michael Shermer , confirmation bias or as Dickson calls it, the "Backfire Effect".  We readily believe evidence which supports our pre-existing views, while contrary evidence not only fails to convince us, it often "backfires" and strengthens our erroneous opinions. His point is the same as Shermer's - that our beliefs are so rarely dictated by the evidence, and instead we read the evidence with beliefs in hand.  This effect applies equally to Christians and atheists, the those on the left and the right, to those who refuse to see the evidence that there is a real physiologic

To make sure I don't just get trapped in a single viewpoint, I've been reading John Ortberg's Faith and Doubt.   Ortberg is an American Presbyterian pastor and also coincidentally a former clinical psychologist.  His overall outlook seems to be basically orthodox, conservative Protestantism but he is not really in the "fundamentalist" camp in that he is not a believer in the literal seven day creation, nor in premillenialism.  He has written this book to deal with the question of doubt.  Why do Christians doubt, what should they do about it, and how does doubt relate to faith?  He deals with the issue in a chatty, anecdotal style, keeping it light and easy and leaping from story to story, topic to topic, with the agility of a grasshopper.  Although he doesn't say so, I suspect that the material in this book started out as a set of sermons, and it still sounds like something meant to be spoken, peppered with jokes that are often quite funny but also distracti

For a long time I've wondered why some people seem so certain of what they believe, while I find myself so often vacillating and asking questions.  While I was out riding my bike this morning it occurred to me that it's because they practice. It's very much like playing guitar (something else I'm not very good at).  A brilliant guitarist like Bruce Cockburn or Jeff Lang  makes it look and sound easy, but they can only do that because they have spent hours behind closed doors playing scales and arpeggios over and over again until they can do it without thinking.  They have usually started young, when their hands and brains are still supple.  They also look after their hands like precious treasures.  I've never forgotten the bushwalk I went on with a serious classical guitarist - he wore thick gloves the whole day because he couldn't afford to cut his hands.  Of course they need some talent and the right shaped fingers, but without all that hard work and care

I guess this is a kind of addendum to all those posts on biblical inerrancy .  It's also the 100th post on Painting Fakes which is more than any of the Australians managed in the first innings in Adelaide (cricket joke, for the Americans among you).  The more I do it, the more I love it. Among the incredibly wide variety of types of people in the world, there are two that I'd like to mention in this post.  The first are "black and white people".  They like things to be clear.  It's right or it's wrong, it's true or it's false.  The second are "shades of grey" people.  They rarely see the world in absolute terms.  Something may be true in a certain sense and false in another sense.  It depends what you mean by "true". This distinction is a matter of psychology, not belief.  For instance, both Ken Ham and Richard Dawkins are black and white people.  The content of their beliefs differs, but they have a similar approach to belief

I've been following (and participating in) a very interesting discussion at Simone's blog about whether people can accept the statement that the earth was created in six days. Personally I find a six day creation hard to accept scientifically and unnecessary theologically. But it made me think about how we can paint ourselves into a corner defending a position that never needed defending in the first place. The US in particular has a huge ongoing controvery about the six day creation, and this has led to the elaboration of "creation science" and its love-child, the Intelligent Design movement. I'm hardly competent to assess the science, but it's always seemed to me that the primary argument of creation scientists is a theological one. Years ago I heard Ken Ham speak, and his basic message was that if you don't believe in the literal truth of Genesis then the whole authority of Scripture collapses and you may as well give up on Christianity. Oddly e

For some strange reason I’ve been thinking this week about the movie Galaxy Quest, and its relationship to fundamentalism. For those who haven’t seen the movie, it’s a very funny send-up of Star Trek. The cast members of “Galaxy Quest”, a long-discontinued TV science fiction series, now eke out a soul-destroying career making appearances at fan conventions and answering inane questions about the show. After one such appearance the actor who played the Captain is approached by a group of people in Galaxy Quest uniforms saying they need his help to combat hostile aliens. Assuming it’s another request for an appearance, he accepts. It turns out that an alien civilisation has picked up transmissions of the show, and having no concept of fiction has assumed that they are “historical documents”. In order to win their own war against insect-like alien oppressors they adopt Galaxy Quest technology, building real spaceships on the pattern of the cheesy 1970’s SF sets, modelling their uniforms a