The Internet Monk Archives

What Makes Us Human?

Given the discussion last week about Adam, Noah, and the early hominids, I’d like to rerun this previous post from the book: Minds, Brains, Souls, and Gods: A Conversation of Faith, Psychology and Neuroscience by Malcolm Jeeves. It covered Chapters 9-12 in the book, the chapters being: Chapter 9: What Makes Us Human? The Development of Evolutionary Psychology, Chapter 10: Are Humans Different? What About Morality in Animals, Chapter 11: What is the Difference Between Altruism, Altruistic Love, and Agape?, and Chapter 12: Does Language Uniquely Define Us as Humans?

I’ve lumped chapters 9-12 together because, in them, Jeeves is exploring the question; what makes us unique from other animals? I think that is a worthwhile question to discuss.

Jeeves begins by noting that the question has a long history of being raised. He quotes from a review of Frans de Waal’s book “Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals” (and notes he is a leader in the field):

From the beginning philosophers have agonized over the question of what makes us humans. Is the difference in kind or merely a difference in degree between ourselves and other animals?”

I think that puts the question in its basic essence: difference in kind or merely in degree? Blaise Pascal wrote in 1659:

It is dangerous to show a man too clearly how much he resembles the beast, without at the same time showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous to allow him too clear a vision of his greatness without his baseness. It is even more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both.

The discussion among Imonk commenters last time pretty well concluded that the difference between humans and other animals isn’t the presence of some immaterial soul magically implanted by God. In fact the demonstration from the Bible itself (as exegeted by professor of Old Testament at Asbury seminary, Lawson Stone) shows we are “souls” that is “living beings” as are at least the higher, more sentient animals.

The main issue in this chapter, for Malcolm’s student, is the evolutionary basis of evolutionary psychology. If you believe that God’s mechanism of bringing humans into existence was a special, instantaneous, creation event, then you are going to view evolutionary psychology as presuppositional atheistic materialism. If you believe that evolution was God’s mechanism for creation then “out of the dust of the ground” becomes the metaphor for God forming us through a process of development from non-living matter to living simple organisms to living complex organisms to living complex organisms that recognize and relate to him.

So what characteristics of the mind are uniquely human? Jeeves cites research on “mind reading” or the ability of an animal to understand the mind of another animal. Jeeves cites the work of Michael Tomasello who published a study in 2010 where he gave a comprehensive battery of cognitive tests to three groups: a large number of chimpanzees, a group of orangutans and a large group of two and half year old children. The test battery apparently consisted of a whole lot of different nonverbal tasks designed to assess cognitive skills, involving physical and social problems. Tomasello and his colleagues found that, as reported in the past, the children and the apes show similar skills when dealing with the physical world, but already by age 2 1/2 the children had more sophisticated cognitive skills than either of the ape species studied when it came to dealing with the social world. “Distinct species-unique skills” of what the researchers called social cognition had emerged in the children by age two and a half.

The next chapter deals with the question of morality in animals. Jeeves first discusses recent research that show the existence of “cultures” in animals. He notes a study by Frans de Waal that showed tool use in a subset of chimpanzees that seemed to be passed on by culture and tradition, and another study from McMaster University in 2010 that showed similar social learning in mongooses, animals not normally regarded as close to us from an evolutionary point of view.

Jeeves then quotes Francisco Ayala, leading American evolutionary biologist, who believes the clue to understanding how humans differ from non-human primates is to be found in the difference between what Ayala and fellow evolutionary biologists call adaptations and exaptations. Ayala (“The Difference of Being Human: Morality”, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences 107, May 11, 2010: 9015-22) says:

Evolutionary biologists define exaptations as features of organisms that evolved because they served some function but are later co-opted to serve an additional or different function, which was not originally the target of natural selection. The new function may replace the older function or co-exist together with it. Feathers seem to have evolved first for conserving temperature, but were later co-opted in birds for flying… The issue at hand is whether moral behavior was directly promoted by natural selection or rather it is simply a consequence of our exalted intelligence, which was the target of natural selection (because it made possible the construction of better tools). Art, literature, religion, and many human cultural activities might also be seen as exaptations that came about as consequences of the evolution of high intelligence…

The capacity for ethics is an outcome of gradual evolution, but it is an attribute that only exists when the underlying attributes (i.e. the intellectual capacities) reach an advance degree. The necessary conditions for ethical behavior only come about after the crossing of an evolutionary threshold. The approach is gradual, but the conditions only appear when the degree of intelligence is reached such that the formation of abstract concepts and the anticipation of the future are possible, even though we may not be able to determine when the threshold was crossed.

What Ayala is saying is what I was trying to get across with my analogy of water flow going from subcritical to supercritical. Not everything in nature is a gradual continuum or spectrum. Sometimes there are “nick points” when a certain threshold is reached and a jump is made to a wholly different level from what existed before. After all, whoever went to Africa to study a group of nonhuman primates and found they had hospitals, libraries, technology parks, art galleries, churches, symphony orchestras and so on and so on? It seems to me that it has become too easy to gloss over these enormous and fundamental differences, but the question is why, with such similar brains, are we so comprehensively different?

In Chapter 11, Jeeves discusses altruistic behavior in humans and animals. Evolutionary theory attempts to answer the question of self-sacrificial behavior by arguing that genes favoring altruism can spread in future generations if their costs to the altruist’s personal reproductive success is outweighed by the benefits in reproductive success of altruists’ relative carrying copies of the same genes – what is called “kin selection”. Second, it proposes that genes favoring altruism could spread if the altruism is sufficiently reciprocated, what is called “reciprocal altruism”. One of the most graphic examples of the first is honey-pot worker ants, who do nothing but hang from the ceiling of their ant colony, acting as receptacles or storage jars for honey, which some workers fill them with and which the colony draws on when needed. At an individual level, that is self-sacrifice. Examples of reciprocal altruism appear to be much rarer. The classic example is vampire bats, who are in real danger of starving if they do not get their blood meal on a particular evening. If this happens they are fed back in their colony by an unrelated nest mate, to whom they are likely to repay the favor on another night.

These two examples necessitate a warning: we must not assume that because two behaviors are similar, the mechanisms underlying them are necessary similar or identical. Jeeves notes that leading evolutionary psychologist Frans de Waal has written helpfully about how to understand altruistic behaviors, as well as other kinds of behaviors, that traditionally have been regarded as showing evidence of some sort of moral sense in an individual or group. In his book, Good Natured, de Waal warns against unthinking reductionism. He cautions:

Even if animals other than ourselves act in ways tantamount to moral behavior, their behavior does not necessarily rest on deliberations of the kind we engage in. It is hard to believe that animals weigh their own interests against the rights of others, that they develop a vision of the greater good of society, or that they feel lifelong guilt about something they should not have done.” And he goes on, “To communicate intentions and feelings is one thing; to clarify what is right, and why, and what is wrong, and why, is quite something else. Animals are no moral philosophers.” Of the moral sense he later writes, “The fact that the human moral sense goes so far back in evolutionary history that other species show signs of it plants morality firmly near the center of our much-maligned nature.”

De Waal gives a good summary of the issue, I think, and it points again to the “nick point” nature of the evolutionary transition from non-human to human.

The waggle dance – the direction the bee moves in relation to the hive indicates direction; if it moves vertically the direction to the source is directly towards the Sun. The duration of the waggle part of the dance signifies the distance.

In the next Chapter 12: Does Language Uniquely Define Us As Humans, Jeeves take a similar tact in the discussion. He notes the abundant research that shows all types of rudimentary language use in animals from the bee waggle dance to the learning of sign language in the great apes. But then he quotes from a 2006 report of a working group of the Academy of Medical Sciences in Britain, “The Use of Nonhuman Primates in research.”

The outstanding intelligence of humans appears to result from a combination and enhancement of properties found in non-human primates, such as theory of the mind, imitation, and language, rather than from unique properties.

So what about love, and in particular, agape love? Jeeves notes: Altruism is what we might call having regard for the actions or motivations of others. Altruistic love normally adds an additional feature, a deep affirmative affect, to altruism. And agape is altruistic love extended to all humanity. But in addition to that, it has a very special use in the hands of the New Testament writers. There agape is the Greek word used to describe a form of unlimited altruistic love seen supremely in the self-giving love of Christ on the cross (and in rough equivalents in Judaism, Buddhism and other great religious traditions). Jeeves concludes:

My own view is that from a Christian perspective there are no grounds for believing that we are all created identical in terms of things like personality. Indeed, the apostle Paul makes it clear that we are in fact all very different and we have many different gifts. I was reminded recently when reading some of the things that the apostle Paul had to say to Christians at Corinth about the way that some of them were boasting about themselves and their behavior. Paul said that by the standards of the world, the Corinthians may have had something of which to boast, but that Christians do not accept the standards of the world. Christians acknowledge that in themselves they are nothing. They owe everything to the grace of God and there is no place for boasting about one’s achievements. As Christians we acknowledge that we are all different, and it is the grace of God that enable us, in the context of the individual differences, to show agape love as much as we are able.

Another Look: Waiting to Live?

waiting. Photo by Wallace Lan at Flickr. Creative Commons License

Another Look: Waiting to Live? (2017)

Note from CM: I went back and re-read this post from 2017 and found I could relate today. It seems like, in the midst of this pandemic, we are waiting and itching to live again. But life keeps finding a way to break through — my little grandson running around in his Spiderman costume, video-bombing our family Zoom meeting, two death visits in one night that introduced me to people and families who have fully savored life and love, learning that baseball is being played in Taiwan and rejoicing that my sister-in-law, who loves the game as much or more than I, will be getting a chance to go to a game soon, re-living the pleasure and pure awe of watching Michael Jordan play in the new ESPN documentary on the Bulls, feeling the joy in my wife as her garden got tilled and she has begun planting and tending to it again.

Life is relentless. It does not wait for us.

• • •

Most of my life, I’ve been waiting to live.

The pattern has been like this: seasons of thinking about what it means to live and waiting to live and hoping to live, interrupted by moments of living.

I’ve spent most of my days thinking about life, pondering what will enable me to live. Hoping for that break that will allow me to live. Counting on that change that will lead me to circumstances in which I can live. Afraid that if I commit myself to living now, I will miss out on the real living that might have been.

Then, every once in awhile, life breaks through.

I hear my granddaughter giggle uncontrollably. I watch her dance around in a circle with an abandon that must be the very definition of joy, and I know my place in the world: I am like Abraham, the father who laughs, and the promise is in the seed. I live in my family.

I sit in a living room with an octogenarian, while her demented husband lies drooling on the pillow in his hospital bed next to her. Though we have known each other less than an hour, she entrusts some of her deepest feelings and fears to me. I live in her tears and whispered confidences.

A line in a sermon I am preaching catches me off guard and deeply moves me. I pause. I catch my breath. I hear myself speak more softly and personally, and the people in front of me are my friends. We connect. In the word on my lips, the Word that did not originate from me but which came like an unexpected breeze, I live.

Driving down the road, I sing along with a favorite tune. It surprises me when my voice breaks and my eyes tear up. There’s some kind of life in that music, life that swells in my chest, life that carries me away. I live in the song.

The greenest groomed grass, immaculately raked soil marked with white chalk, the shape of a precious diamond, the smell of oiled leather, and smack of honed wood on cowhide. A leisurely day in the sunshine. Narrative and tradition emanating from a radio speaker. I live in the baseball game.

A simple joke with a clever twist told by a friend catches me off guard and I find myself laughing from my belly. There’s life in the laughter.

A Sunday nap, the sound of rain blessing the surface of the land, recognizing the instant that taking the picture will capture the moment perfectly — and getting it, the anticipation before the thrill, the cool breeze in my face, the easy, effective partnership I have with my colleagues, the sense of relief and awe I feel when I’ve just had a near miss — life, the moments of life, the stuff of life.

And this is my vocation — to simply live. Having found life and having actually experienced living, I find I am much less anxious to search for it, to think I must change my circumstances, do something different, pursue some new interest, gain some new insight, achieve some new status. As Merton says,

Suppose one has found completeness in his true vocation. Now everything is in unity, in order, at peace. Now work no longer interferes with prayer or prayer with work. Now contemplation now longer needs to be a special “state” that removes one from the ordinary things going on around him, for God penetrates all.

I would never claim that this describes me, or that I am anywhere near “completeness in [my] true vocation.” Heavens no! But I would testify to a bit more contentment, a bit less anxiety; a bit more acceptance, a bit less restlessness.

A bit less thinking about how to live, and a bit more living.

What on earth have I been waiting for?

View from the (not so) front line

Vessel in a Drift of Diamond Light in the Sky of the Mind. Morris Graves

In a recent discussion, there was this nice note from regular commenter and friend Ted.

Mike, I’ve been wondering how the crisis has affected you and your work as hospice chaplain. Will there be a blog post about it?

A lot of your work must be in hospitals and nursing homes, which are now off-limits to you. Are you able to connect with patients and family members by phone or electronically? Do you meet with people for a walk?

The tragedy is that there must be an increased need for your service, at a time when your hands are tied. So far in this state, more than one-half of the covid-19 deaths have been in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. I think the figures are similar nation-wide.

It’s OK to feel frustrated. And it sounds like you need a chaplain, too. We’re praying for you.

• Ted

I’ve thought several times of giving a report of what it’s like to be me and to be a hospice chaplain in this pandemic. I’ll start with the work first. That’s easier.

In short, my work has not changed much. Most of my patients live at home with their families, and the majority of those families have not been victims of the virus. Our team simply takes extra precautions — the usual stuff: we are more attentive to handwashing, we wear masks on every visit, etc. In fact, for a time things have been slower. The chaplains and social workers have not been making as many visits, but have relied more on phone contacts.

With regard to our hospital and nursing home patients, not much has changed there either. Chaplains in our hospitals have not been allowed in the Covid units yet, but that mostly affects the hospital chaplains, not we who work in hospice. We’ve had no inpatient Covid patients on our hospice service. The nursing homes have a variety of rules about visits, but I have not been prevented from seeing any of my patients in those settings. This then involves a bit more work calling families and keeping them updated, because they do not have access.

I’ve had little fear for myself. I’ve not been conscious of being in many vulnerable situations in my work. I am careful and the public places where I work have clear policies and procedures in place. Homes, of course, are not always controlled environments, but our families are respectful of our safety. The one situation that is a crap shoot is the death visit. These can draw large family gatherings and they can take place in confined spaces. If I end up getting the virus, it may well be because of one of these visits, no matter how careful I try to be.

But like I’ve said, I have not felt afraid of contracting Covid-19. I know that I am technically in an at-risk group, being over 60 years old. But I am generally healthy and know that I have access to excellent care. I wish everyone could say that.

The pandemic and its stay-at-home orders have affected me much more personally.

We all have besetting sins, and a primary one for me is the sin of acedia. The Online Medical Dictionary (2000) defines acedia as “a mental syndrome, the chief features of which are listlessness, carelessness, apathy, and melancholia.” In her book, Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life, Kathleen Norris quotes the ascetic Evagrius, who describes a monk with acedia like this:

…when he reads…yawns plenty and easily falls into sleep. He rubs his eyes and stretches his arms. His eyes wander from the book. He stares at the wall and then goes back to his reading for a little. He then wastes his time hanging on to the end of words, counts the pages, ascertains how the book is made, finds fault with the writing and the design. Finally he just shuts it and uses it as a pillow. Then he falls into a sleep not too deep, because hunger wakes his soul up and he begins to concern himself with that. (p. 5)

Bingo.

Norris goes on to say that “It is a risky business to train oneself…to embrace a daily routine that mirrors eternity in its changelessness.” This is why acedia was and is such a besetting sin for contemplatives and those with certain monastic vocations. I have found it to be a problem in the structureless environment that Covid-19 sheltering-in-place has forced upon us. It has been a lifelong challenge for me to create structure and routine for myself. And now I find myself in a daily life that is wholly amorphous, unable to provide shape and form to my nebulous spirit.

The energy it took to write that last paragraph was enormous.

I think I’ll go get something to eat.

Who Inspires You?

Recently on Facebook quite a few friends have been posting a series of musical Albums that have either influenced their taste in music or have been significant to them. I declined to participate, although someday I may post a listing of my favourite ten Bruce Cockburn albums. There are after all 36 to chose from!

Since I was first tagged three weeks ago, I have been thinking what was meaningful to me, and I have decided to participate in a different way. In this time of a world wide pandemic, life seems way to fragile. So instead of posting Albums that have influenced me, I am going to be creating posts about people who have influenced, inspired, or have been otherwise significant in my life. Rather than do one a day, I will be doing one a week. A couple may make there way on to Internet Monk, but generally I will be sticking to Facebook. I did however want to post the first one here, to maybe get us talking about who is significant in our lives, and to maybe encourage some of you to think of doing something similar yourselves.

So without much further ado, let me introduce you to Mitch Sylvia.

Mitch has not yet released an Album. His vocal talents, or lack thereof, means that we should not expect one imminently. He has not been chased by paparazzi, starred in a movie, written a book, or even created a blog. He is not a socially media influencer, rather, he has yet to post on Twitter or Instagram.

So why does Mitch top my list of people who have inspired or influenced me?

Well, in short, Mitch has been my Pastor, and friend, for the past 34 years.

Back in 1986, I was attending University and was going through a particularly dry time spiritually. I ended up in a Bible study small group that Mitch was leading. He was a young student himself. After I described my struggle to Mitch, he offered to meet with me weekly, for as long as I needed to help me through my difficult time. Ever since then, whenever I have had issues, people, or circumstances that I was struggling with, Mitch would always be there to lend an ear. No judgement, sometimes sage advice, but always present. We have not lived in the same city since 1993, but he has always been available by phone, whenever I needed someone to call.

Mitch did become a Pastor. I could not think of anyone more suited for the role. Because he lived some distance away, I have only attended the churches that he pastored on rare occasions. But when I did, you could see how meaningful Mitch was to those in the church. In his first church I saw him investing himself in the lives of the youth, right from the age of junior high, and seeing them grow up into adults and joyfully participate in their weddings. In his next church I saw how he reached out to seniors, and welcomed them to his church where they had been pushed aside in the churches they had come from. It didn’t matter if someone was nine or ninety, Mitch was there to care for them in a way that few do.

Mitch is not a theologian. That is not to say that theology isn’t important to him, but theology has always taken a back seat to ministering to people, and that desire to minister to people has taken him across a wide swath of denominations over his life, always seeking to serve others, and not getting hung up on denominational distinctives, whether that was in an independent charismatic, Presbyterian, or Baptist churches.

I mentioned paparazzi a few paragraphs back. I had the privilege of being a reference for Mitch when he was last looking for a new church to Pastor. I can’t remember all my comments, but I remember saying this. “Mitch is a man of God… You are never going to have to worry about Mitch being involved in some sort of scandal, it is not in his character… If I ever had the opportunity to live in the same city as Mitch, I would want him to be my Pastor.”

His wife once said to me, “If anything ever happened to Mitch, I don’t think I could ever get married again, because I don’t think that I could ever find another Mitch.”

I couldn’t agree more.

So let me ask you. Who inspires you? While I have used the example of being inspired by a Pastor, many of the other people on my list are not Pastors. In my list I am only choosing to list people who I have made a personal connection with, but I won’t limit you in the same way. Would you be interested to make a list like this yourself?

“Every person you meet is a gift… If you notice the message.” – J Andy Szakony

As usual your thoughts and comments are welcome. I also want to add that these are difficult times. If you are going through a struggle or particular difficulty, any comment expressing that will not be considered off topic and will not be moderated. I know Mitch would not want it any other way.

Sunday with Michael Spencer: Complex Me

Sunday with Michael Spencer
Complex Me (from “Icebergs, Onions and Why You’re Not As Simple As You Think” – 2008)

I’m an iceberg, an onion, a mystery. I’m complex and rarely insightful into myself. Thousands of experiences co-exist in me at the same time. I’m a library of presuppositions and passively accepted versions of the truth. When I write a post, preach a sermon, respond in a conversation or give advice to a student, I am anything but simple. I’m complex and only partially aware of that complexity.

This doesn’t mean I can’t understand the simple statements of the Bible or believe and act on them with integrity. It does mean that I need to stop talking about myself as if I am a blank slate, and begin accepting myself as a human being.

I am a person on a journey. That journey has been rich and diverse. It began before I was born. It’s gone on when I was aware and unaware of all that was happening to me. I’ve been shaped by God through a variety of influences, and in one way, there is a sacredness to how God has chosen to shape my life. At any moment that I present myself to God, I am accepted as the “iceberg” of known and unknown influences that make me ME.

I don’t need to fear my complexity. I don’t need to ignore it or misrepresent it. There’s no point in speaking as if my understanding of truth is unaffected by all that preceded this moment and what is going on at this moment.

The Holy Spirit works with us as the human beings that we are. “Search my thoughts O God” is an invitation for God to work with me and all that makes me a person at this moment.

Is this an endorsement of some postmodern skepticism toward propositions? Is it another emerging denial of truth?

No. It’s simply an observation that I don’t “just” read the Bible and do what it says without bringing along all my personal influences and multiple layers of my personal history and experience.

There’s a reason certain ideas appeal to me, others are uninteresting to me and some never will make sense to me.

There are reasons I’ve come to the “obvious” conclusions that I have.

There are reasons I perceive some truth and can’t see other truth.

There are reasons my understanding of being a Christian falls easily towards some things and is repelled and conflicted by others.

I am complex. I have a history. I have influences. I’m not a robot. I am a person.

Knowing God’s truth is always a miracle of the Holy Spirit. I’m beginning to appreciate that more and more as I come to understand all that’s made me the person I am today.

“uncomforted as I have ever been”

Day 227: Rain. Photo by Snugg LePup at Flickr. Creative Commons License

Marilyn Hacker’s lament about a dreary April in upstate New York mirrors the experience of many in this stay-at-home world we inhabit these days. It’s going to be a rainy weekend here in Indiana if the weather forecast proves accurate, so this may just be the perfect poem for today.

• • •

April Interval IV
By Marilyn Hacker

There was no spring in Saratoga Springs.
I’ve spent a month under relentless rain,
uncomforted as I have ever been
though not in jail, love, anguish, debt, or pain.
No deft phrases or well-proportioned lines
relieve the repetitions of routine.
Sodden, the leaflings spoil. Only the pines
are green. My solace has been buying things:
a white duck jacket, insulated boots,
three patchwork quilts dead countrywomen pieced.
It snowed last week, then thawed. A few released
yellow and purple crocuses uplifted
between shade trees on lawns. The wet wind shifted
and rain battered them back against the roots.

Your Idealistic Faux Rage Is Unbecoming

Your Idealistic Faux Rage Is Unbecoming

There is a “we’re all in this together” rah rah spirit in this time of pandemic that can at times be an encouraging reminder and at other times a grating cliché.

As some of our commenters have said in recent days, we may all be in this pandemic together, but we are not all being impacted by it equally. Some of us who are more privileged and protected economically and medically bear a greater share of responsibility to do what we can to help those who are more vulnerable and who lack access to the resources we have. To whom much is given much is required.

So, by all means, let’s keep cheering ourselves up and reminding ourselves that “we’re all in this together” — and then let those of us who can go the extra mile as often as we can to intentionally include our neighbors in need in that, serving in ways that truly help them and protect their dignity.

But there’s another “we’re all in this together” theme being played by some idealists for whom everything these days is all about inequality. They, it seems, will not be satisfied that we who are more privileged can truly be “in this together” with others less fortunate until we throw ourselves on the ground, repent in dust and ashes, and vow to spend the rest of our days lamenting and performing acts of painful self-mortification.

Molly Roberts is, apparently, one of these folks. In a fit of idealistic faux rage, she finds the silliest of targets to pick on in her recent article at the Washington Post, “We’re telling ourselves fairy tales while stuck inside.”

The novel coronavirus has spawned a surprising aesthetic showing off humans’ capacity to make a heaven of hell.

You’d think self-quarantine would look morose and miserable, all rainy days filled with darkness and made-for-TV movies, a plodding life punctuated by sad sandwiches stuffed with packaged meat or sodium-soaked beans straight out of a can. Either we’re jobless or the work day blurs together lazily with the personal one. We’re always on, but we’re never burning especially bright.

You’d think.

But log on to Instagram, or Twitter, certainly Tumblr — the only way we see other people now, really, is the Internet. Yes, there are the stray still-in-bed selfies and confessions of ambient anxiety. But behold the sun-drenched countertops crowned with loaves of freshly baked bread with blistered crusts. The home-cooked meals, some of them even themed. There’s knitting and quilting and needlepoint, too, and there’s spring greenery along with flowers that run the ROYGBIV gambit.

These cheerily cozy glimpses are essentially a toned-down version of something called cottagecore….

…Most of us still aren’t in cottages, of course, but in a studio apartment or a two-level house out in suburbia. But we manufacture our own cottagecore, each in bespoke variations, depending on how much time, energy, flour and flowers we have to spare. And why not? We’re simulating a return to a simpler version of the world and a purer version of ourselves. Deprivation becomes an affectation; our loss becomes our gain.

We’re telling ourselves this fairytale: Once upon a time, everything was beautiful, and not only can once upon a time turn into today, but also the transformation is up to us. We can’t control the virus, we can’t control the government, we can’t even control whether our faraway family members and friends stay safe and inside. But we can control our own individual existences by making them that much less complicated than an outside world we’re not even allowed to live in anymore. Or at least we can trick ourselves into believing we’re in control.

Roberts goes on to complain that “‘giving up’ some comforts is only fun to those who are comfortable to start with,” and “You’re probably not spending the evening hours putting the final touches on embroidered pillow-covering when you’re worried about feeding your family, and you can’t curl up by the fire with a dusty old book when you don’t have a house, let alone a fireplace. You definitely can’t do it if you’re on a ventilator.”

She assumes that everyone staying at home who has tried to keep their sanity by engaging in projects and crafts and making their home environment more bearable and beautiful is guilty of shutting out the hard realities of those suffering in these hard times. She accuses those who share their “fairytale” pleasures with others on social media of being engaged in narcissistic escapism, of promoting pretend perfection that shields us from the fact that many people aren’t able to enjoy anything right now.

She would rather everyone feel “queasy” about their privileged status — around the clock, I guess. Furthermore, she assumes that, because people have been asked to stay home, that the enjoyable things they share on social media represent the whole of their lives, and that they have abandoned those who are suffering, taking no responsibility to help their neighbors.

Some people always have been more fortunate than others. Yet now the tension is harder than ever to ignore and harder than ever really to resolve. The usual answer to being a beneficiary of inequality and injustice is to get out and do something, but staying in and doing nothing is the new gospel. Or maybe that’s only an excuse for all of us looking to soothe ourselves in an unsettled era — to retreat to the cottage, and to shut the door.

Complete poppycock.

I wish I could bring her to Indiana. This article, for example, tells of creative ways teachers are reaching out to encourage and lift the spirits of their students, how people are devoting themselves to making masks, how stores and restaurants are banding together to provide food for those in need, how the Girl Scouts donated cookies to blood donors, how neighborhood residents are greeting each other from their balconies with songs and waves to keep up the morale of those shut-in. In short, how people with more are trying to help people with less. How they’re trying to include everyone in “we’re all in this together.”

My former church, where Pastor Dan ministers now, has partnered with local restaurants to provide meals for hospital workers, especially those in Covid units who can’t access food services when working. A friend of mine who owns a brewery (severely affected by this crisis, by the way) devoted his time and resources to making hand sanitizer for first responders. A high school student in our area started up a free food delivery service to help those most vulnerable to the virus.

You can find dozens and dozens of articles from all over America chronicling services that the privileged are performing to help the vulnerable and hurting during this pandemic. As always, humanity is a mixed bag and there is plenty of bad behavior one could cite in this lockdown. But in general, I have been heartened to see people becoming more concerned, more caring, and more creative in finding ways to include and help the hurting and less fortunate in this “together” we’re all in.

And yet, an idealist scold like Ms. Roberts lumps all the “privileged” together and berates them for trying to also make their lives a bit more bearable and entertaining while they shelter in place? Perhaps she is too busy feeling bad about her own privilege and finding fault with the rest of us to see the humanity and love of neighbor that is actually happening through acts of generosity and kindness all around her.

And if some of those people want to use the time they are being forced to spend at home planting flowers, baking bread, setting nice meals before their families, making quilts, and sharing pictures and videos with the friends they can’t invite over to see for themselves, well, I’m more than okay with that.

Was Adam an Ardipithecus?

Was Adam an Ardipithecus?

I’ve mentioned several times in posts about Glenn R. Morton. Morton was an ardent Young Earth Creationist, so ardent he switched professions from work as a geophysicist working for a seismic company and processing seismic data, and went into seismic interpretation where he would have to deal with more geologic data; so he could better defend YEC when he wrote articles for the Institute of Creation Research (ICR). The story of how he left YEC can be found here. In brief, he was simply overwhelmed by the actual data.

Glenn frequently writes and comments on the BioLogos Forum under the handle “gbob”. His profile for the BioLogos Forum can be seen here. Several of his articles speculate on the location of Eden and the location of Noah’s Flood. They include “Eden and the Flood: A Historical Reading of Genesis 2-3 and 6-9”, “The Location of the Flood”, and “Did Noah’s Flood Kill All Humans except his family?”.

Although no longer a Young Earth Creationist, and fully convinced of the timeline in the geologic record, Glenn is uncomfortable with assigning the early Genesis chapters as myth or allegory. He says:

“No, I am not a young-earth creationist, I am a geophysicist who fully accepts the age of the earth and that we arose at least in part though evolution. My problem with changing what seems to be written as history (Gen 2-11) into mythology or allegory is that we cease trying to solve the problems. I also have an ethical problem with changing what the Bible clearly says. My friend Klax says the whole thing is mythology. At least he is logically consistent which is to be preferred to the position where one gets to pick uncomfortable parts of the Bible and say they are allegory/mythology, but then proclaim other parts as historically true (the resurrection). So, here is why I dislike altering the Bible to make it what we want it to be. In my mind, either make it true or make it mythological–all of it, but don’t inconsistently pick and choose due to the need of the moment.”

So in the articles mentioned above, Glenn tries to concord what is written in the Bible with the geologic record. About 5.5 million years ago, tectonic activity closed off the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea diminished to a highly saline lake, much like the Dead Sea is now. This is known as the Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC), also referred to as the Messinian Event. A succinct PBS video summarizing the MSC can be viewed here. At that time, there was no Persian Gulf and rivers such as the Tigris and Euphrates drained into the Mediterranean basin as the Arabian plateau was tilted in that direction. The remnants of those canyons draining into the Mediterranean basin, including the 2500 meter deep Nile canyon, have been mapped seismically and confirmed by drilling. Glenn speculates that Eden would have been located in the Mediterranean basin. He writes:

“So, where was Eden? Genesis 2:10-14 says:

“A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates (Gen. 2:10-14 [NIV]).

The first river, Pishon, I believe, came off of Cyprus… The second river flows through Cush. Cush is Ethiopia and thus this can be only one river, the Nile. The third and fourth rivers are the Tigris and Euphrates… They fit together if we look at the world as it would have appeared to a very, very ancient Adam… most of the land of Israel didn’t exist. The Persian Gulf didn’t exist. But the Zagros and Taurus mountains of Iran and Turkey did and water flowing off of them had to go somewhere. The nearest low area was the Mediterranean desert. There are canyons cut into bedrock along the Levant coast testifying that rivers did come that direction.”

This is a pretty ingenious fitting of the Bible description to a known geologic event, but what is even more ingenious is that the Strait of Gibraltar reopened catastrophically about 5.3 million years ago in an event known as the Zanclean flood or Zanclean deluge, and the Atlantic Ocean poured through the strait at a rate about 1,000 times that of the present day Amazon River, refilling the Mediterranean more or less to its present level during a period estimated to have been between several months and two years. This, of course, would have been Noah’s Flood.

In his article “Did Noah’s Flood Kill All Humans except his family?”, Glenn notes the following reasons why he believes the Zanclean deluge was Noah’s flood:

It is the only flood in earth history that matches the Biblical description exactly.
Only at this time did the rivers of Eden flow into the same place.
It was just at the time when the earliest hominids appeared on earth. If all the humans are confined to that basin, then when the flood happened, they all died.
One couldn’t easily walk out of this area so an ark was necessary.
It covered high mountains. This is the only local flood ever proposed that could cover 15,000 foot high mountains.
Modeling of fluid flow shows that, depending upon how large the breach in the Gibraltar dam was, it would fill in between 8 months and 2 years.
An object floating on the waters could have easily landed in southern Turkey, which the Bible calls the mountains of Ararat. The Bible does use the plural for mountains, not the singular, so the Bible doesn’t say Mount Ararat.
Finally, I know of no other flooding event in geologic history that can satisfy the above check list.

Pretty impressive feat of matching actual scientific data to the Biblical account. This is concordism at its finest. As impressed as I am with Glenn’s attempt, I’ve got a couple of problems –

One is the stark dichotomy Glenn insists on between concordism and myth. I do not think this is a Boolean choice between strict modern journalistic reporting and stuff just made up. Just because a literary form is utilized does not mean true spiritual truth can’t be transmitted, and that transmission still be inspired by God.

I take the position that John Walton takes in books like “The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate”. Walton’s focus is not on concordism, that is, trying to show compatibility between the biblical accounts and scientific findings but rather on understanding the text of Scripture itself. Walton gives primary attention to the meaning and significance of these OT texts and what they communicate in their Ancient Near Eastern context.

Another excellent book that shows the stark dichotomy between concordism and myth is not the only valid interpretive grid is “Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science”, by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight. McKnight shows that it is manifestly obvious that the text of Genesis came to be in the ancient near East (ANE). It sounds like that world as read from similar contemporaneous texts, uses categories and terms and ideas from that world. It has the “pre-scientific” assumptions of that world. So if you don’t respect that text as designed for an ANE audience, you don’t really respect that text.

The second problem is that given the timeline Glenn is trying to use for the geologic events, the anthropologic timeline just doesn’t work. Adam and Noah would have to have been early hominids like Ardipithecus ramidus or Ardipithecus kadabba. That’s this guy:

Did Ardipithecus ramidus or Ardipithecus kadabba use tools? No they did not; the first known tools are 2 million years after Ardipithecus ramidus lived. So how did Noah the Ardipithecus build the ark? I just cannot imagine how that could be. Sorry Glenn– swing and a miss. Good try, though.

But Glenn’s timeline raises another question not so easily answered. Did Ardipithecus have human consciousness? To what extent did this creature have knowledge of God? Could it choose between right and wrong in any moral or ethical sense? And if Ardipithecus is too “immature” then when did human consciousness arise? With Australopithecus? Homo habilis? Homo habilis is the oldest species given the designation Homo, by Leakey et al. (1964).

How about Homo erectus? Homo erectus is the first known species to develop control of fire, by about 1.5 Ma. How about Homo heidelbergensis (in Africa also known as Homo rhodesiensis). They had long been thought to be a likely candidate for the last common ancestor of the Neanderthal and modern human lineages.

How about Neanderthals? It is possible that Neanderthals believed in spirits and the afterlife. Scientists speculate that Neanderthals possibly buried food and prized items with their dead for their trip to the afterlife as the Egyptians and many ancient cultures did. Would Neanderthals have shared in Adam’s guilt? When did the guilty conscience evolve, or asking the question another way, when did God hold “persons” responsible for their “sins”? I don’t know, obviously it is all speculation. At least as far back as Neanderthals, but Ardipithecus seems too far back to me. The Bible’s answer is the first man – Adam. Romans 5:12, “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” It would seem the Bible means modern humans i.e. Homo sapiens, but then again, no Biblical writer had any concept of pre-human hominids.

What do you think of Glenn’s theory?

Getting the Gospel Right: Interacting with a Post at Scot McKnight’s Blog

Photo by Kuster and Wildhaber Photography at Flickr. Creative Commons License

Getting the Gospel Right
Interacting with Scot McKnight’s Post

So, today, I encourage you to go to Scot McKnight’s blog, find Matthew Bates’s post and read it carefully: “Good News? Are T4G/TGC Leaders Starting To Change Their Gospel?”. Then, let’s use this and my comments below as the basis of discussion today.

Here are a few of Bates’s points (these are direct quotes):

• What John MacArthur, John Piper, R.C. Sproul, Albert Mohler, and others associated with T4G (“Together for the Gospel”) and TGC (“The Gospel Coalition”) have been asserting to be the heart of the gospel is not even part of the gospel in Scripture.

• The true biblical gospel climaxes with the proclamation that Jesus has become the Christ, Lord of all, the king (Acts 2:36; 3:20-23; 10:36). On the path to kingship, the Son was sent by the Father in fulfillment of OT promises, took on human flesh in the line of David, died a substitutionary atoning death for our sins on the cross, was buried, raised, witnessed, enthroned at the right hand, and then the Spirit was sent (Rom 1:2-4; 1 Cor 15:3-5; 2 Tim 2:8). All of which is the good news that God’s kingdom, heralded by Jesus, has now arrived (Mark 1:14-15; Luke 4:43). Because the enthroned king now rules, the gospel can be summarized: Jesus is the Christ (Acts 5:42; 8:5; 9:22; 17:3). Subsequently, the Spirit applies the benefits of the gospel to those who respond with pistis, that is, allegiance (bodily loyalty inclusive of trust). The gospel proper is what the king has done for us apart from whether you or I have responded—a point both Piper (The Future of Justification, p. 86-88) and Gilbert misunderstand. (See Bates, Gospel Allegiance, p. 104-7, for discussion).

• Scripture never says our justification by faith is part of the gospel. Righteousness is revealed to be among the gospel’s benefits (Rom 1:17). Meanwhile “faith” (pistis) is how we respond to the gospel of Jesus’s kingship, so its saving benefits are actualized. Getting this right has huge practical payoffs for disciple-making and ecumenism.

• T4G / TGC leaders have been misidentifying the true center and framework of the gospel for years. They have put something that the Bible does not even say is part of the gospel at its center instead. It remains to be seen whether MacArthur, Piper, Mohler, Gilbert, and others who have placed justification by faith at the center of the gospel, largely at the expense of Jesus’s kingship, will admit their mistakes. Regardless, if Gilbert’s sermon is an indicator, then a shift is already beginning. Thankfully the gospel of Jesus’s victorious kingship is being fronted by T4G in a way that it wasn’t in the past.

• • •

Trying to understand the true nature of the good news Jesus brings has been a primary part of our effort here at Internet Monk from the beginning. Along the way, we have come to appreciate the “new perspective” of people like N.T. Wright and Scot McKnight, among others. For too long, in my view, western theology has focused on soteriology at the expense of christology, eschatology, and ecclesiology. The gospel as delineated by Bates here at McKnight’s blog is much more full-bodied, much less schismatic, and much less focused on the inner workings of doctrinal mechanics.

It is Jesus-centered and Jesus-shaped. Indeed, the gospel per se is all about Jesus — it is the announcement that he has taken his throne and inaugurated God’s rule. (christology)

It focuses on God’s ultimate end game — not merely personal salvation but the establishment of God’s rule and the apokatástasis, the restoration of all creation in Christ. (eschatology)

It links the creation of the new people of God with the original vocation of humankind given at creation — which I desribe as tikkun olam, “repair of the world,” in anticipation of the apokatástasis. (ecclesiology)

It puts the reconciliation of individuals into this context, not only offering forgiveness of sins, but also participation in the project of restoring shalom to all the world. Having peace with God, we become peacemakers. Faith works through love. Salvation that is a gift and not of ourselves leads to people made new, buried with Christ in baptism and raised to walk in newness of life and good works. (soteriology)

Damaris: From Conquest to Balance

From Conquest to Balance
By Damaris Zehner

The power people have developed as a result of the Industrial Revolution has changed our relationship to nature. We’ve freed ourselves from the limitations that nature imposes, or so it seems. We can be warm when it’s cold, dry when it’s wet, and well fed even in times of drought. We can fly above the atmosphere and descend beneath the ocean, level mountains and make islands. We can eradicate ecosystems and impose our own crops in their place. Vaccinations, medicines, and surgeries make death seem optional, something we can sue the medical profession for, rather than a natural process. Writers even talk about techno-humans as a new evolutionary step away from natural limitations and toward total global hegemony.

The Industrial Revolution wasn’t the only breaking point in our relationship with nature, of course. Human cultures over time moved from bands to tribes to towns to city states, all of which was made possible through our increasing ability to conquer nature. But the Industrial Revolution ushered in a change not just in degree but in kind. Think of the Mongols, raiding and herding on the steppes until suddenly Genghis Khan emerged and drove them to conquer much of the known world; the Industrial Revolution was our Genghis Khan, leading us to power we never thought possible. Now human beings are imperialists flattening everything in our path, and nature looks like the blasted villages of Turkestan and the rubble of Kiev.

But the days of human empire are drawing to a close. Fossil fuels are harder to extract, easily available phosphorus for industry and agriculture is running out, and climate uncertainty will require us to focus on repairing, maintaining, and retrenching rather than the kind of explosive innovation that we’ve gotten used to over the last two centuries. This change in our circumstances will force a change in our thinking, from conquest to balance.

This may be hard. Citizens of modern industrial states tend to measure success in terms of total conquest. For example, when glyphosate was first introduced as an herbicide, it seemed to kill everything. Fields were smooth and uniform. Very rapidly, though, weeds adapted and reinvaded crops. This is seen as a failure on the part of the chemical industry and the farmers; to them the only marker of success, of a chemical or a technique, is one hundred percent annihilation of the threat. Researchers are currently working on creating – and marketing – a new solution that will address those pesky ragweeds and thistles that refuse to bend to our will.

Medicines are judged the same way, and in the early days of penicillin and vaccinations, they seemed likely to fulfill that promise. Medicines have been hugely effective, as evidenced by the more than doubling of the world’s population in my lifetime. But, as anyone who reads medical news knows, we’ve created problems in the process of solving them, and total conquest of disease is slipping further out of reach. The most striking example of this is the rise in auto-immune diseases. You’ve seen the research, I’m sure, about asthma being more common in children exposed to fewer diseases. Now scientists are looking into the relationship between parasites and auto-immune diseases. They’ve infected participants in an experiment with worms and have noticed, at least on a small scale, an improvement in auto-immune diseases such as multiple sclerosis or lupus. The speculation is that the immune system evolved to live in balance with the threats that attack it, whether germs or parasites; when that balance is disturbed by total eradication of the threats, the person suffers.

People raised with plentiful food, who never had measles or mumps and who were only sick for a few days with most infectious diseases, are very uncomfortable with less than total conquest of nature. I remember the persistent questions during my Peace Corps training about what to do in the case of most medical emergencies. Volunteers asked, What if we’re in a car accident far away from any hospital? What if we get bitten by a snake? What if both malaria and typhoid hit at the same time? The nurse who was doing the training, remarkable more for her realism than her tact, kept giving the same answer: “Then you die.” The volunteers in training couldn’t or wouldn’t hear it. What do you mean, we die? What are we supposed to do? Tell us the procedure that will enable us to conquer any threat that faces us. But she wouldn’t. She just kept pointing out that here in the unindustrialized world, death was always hovering nearby.

Human beings aren’t unique in wanting to survive, as individuals and as a species. Every living thing wants to survive and conquer its competition, to outbreed and expand. But plants and animals other than humans have not invented the means to do so as thoroughly as we have. We have annihilated many species and are in the process of annihilating more, sometimes deliberately because they threaten us, like wolves, more commonly because we want what they have and they can no longer live in the environments we’ve taken control of. For a time, to many people, this ongoing annihilation was seen as success; we were remaking the world into a place perfect for humans, where we would no longer have to compete with nature.

We are beginning to learn how desperately wrong we’ve been. Human beings can destroy a lot, but we are not more powerful than nature. Ultimately nature will achieve the balance that it is always aiming for – with us or without us. The hurricanes, wildfires, and rising seas are mechanisms of balance, although they seem in the short term the opposite of it.

So is this new disease. Evidently humans have been partly responsible for covid-19’s creation and spread, through the imbalance of population and resources that has arisen from post-industrial conditions. Corona virus will be one means, and not the last, nature will use to try to limit our power on earth.

My point is not to depress you with feelings of inchoate guilt or scare you with impending doom. Nor do I want to convince you that, if we’d all just live earthy lives in balance with nature, we’d be happy and healthy; that simply isn’t true. My point is that we, the descendants of the Industrial Revolution, need a change of mindset.

We need to accept our limitations. Before the Industrial Revolution, and in places where it never took complete hold, people and nature lived more like neighboring tribes, sometimes allied and sometimes at odds. Humans took some lands and people from nature’s grasp, then nature evened the score, taking our lands and people through drought, flood, storm, earthquake, or disease. We need to acknowledge that the same laws of balance that applied to us then apply to us now and that we are not above nature or separate from it. Not because, if we do, then we’ll “succeed” or “conquer” and never get sick or injured; of course we will. We should accept the limits nature imposes on us because it’s right to do so. Because life is hard, and it’s meant to be.

In removing difficulties, we’ve just created more difficulties. We can and should continue to work to make people happy and comfortable, but we will not have complete success. And there is a great danger in aiming for complete success: if we set annihilation of difficulties as the only measure of success, then we will justify ever more unethical actions against nature and people – such as eugenics, DDT, and totalitarian governments, all of which were and are offered as steps toward Utopia.

The more we struggle for complete hegemony of the earth, the more the spiral of pollution, climate change, displaced people, and environmental collapse will continue towards its disastrous conclusion. Let us instead measure success not by conquering nature but by living in balance with it. This may mean, on the practical level, fewer people, fewer inequities in wealth and power, and more encouragement by means of natural selection to eat moderately and use resources with care. It may mean, on the moral level, that simplicity, sharing, and cooperation are accepted as more adaptive than hoarding and war. It will certainly mean remembering that blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

• • •

Damaris blogs at Integrity of Life