May 1, 2013
Czeslaw Milosz
The epigram of Milosz’s The Captive Mind:
“When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.”
– An Old Jew of Galicia
via Czeslaw Milosz- Poets.org – Poetry, Poems, Bios & More.
December 18, 2010
“Begging the question” means assuming as true that which is being questioned. It’s a way to avoid potentially uncomfortable, or even crisis-producing, learning and reflection. Fundamentalisms– be they religious OR scientific OR political– beg questions. They assert as true, that which is being questioned.
In “What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs”, Ken Ham neatly begs the question of “What counts as ‘really happening?’” by assuming that any account of what “really happens” is a literal, materialistic account. This leads him to read Genesis backwards, projecting the modern fascination with literalism and materialism onto a text that doesn’t share the same assumptions about what counts as “real:”
According to the Bible: Dinosaurs first existed around 6,000 years ago. God made the dinosaurs, along with the other land animals, on Day 6 of the Creation Week (Genesis 1:20–25, 31). Adam and Eve were also made on Day 6—so dinosaurs lived at the same time as people, not separated by eons of time.
via What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs? – Answers in Genesis.
Dinosaurs: from the "Answers in Genesis" website
The mistake of this fundamentalism is, that in its haste to achieve (a false) certainty, it assumes as true that which is up for question: namely, Is what “really happens” in the world only that which can be accounted for literally?
December 10, 2010
Christian fundamentalisms like Answers in Genesis are at root atheistic because they reduce all discourse– all ways of speaking and knowing– to the scientific. Instead of approaching the world with God as the location of all coherence, they approach the world with the particular way that Western, post-Enlightenment humans understand the physical world– science– as the location of all coherence. God is then forced to fit into that schema: the Creation story in Genesis has to be “scientific,” in order to be true.
The first move out of this impoverished misapprehension is to recognize multiple ways of making meaning. The way the words of a poem “mean” something, for example, is different than the way the words of your owner’s manual for the microwave oven “mean” something– and the way the words of your marriage vow (“I do”) “mean” something, is even different still. It’s a mistake to read an instruction manual as poetry; it’s a mistake to read poetry as a promise; and it’s a mistake to read Genesis as science.
God is surely no worse off for that– and we’re better off, because we can then find a faith for the twenty-first century, that is intellectually honest.
December 3, 2010
There’s too much to learn about the disintegration of Western culture simply to ridicule the worldview behind the new Noah’s Ark Theme Park in Kentucky, and the “Answers in Genesis” group behind it. (I mean “disintegration” not in its general meaning of “disappearing into little bits” or “dissolving,” but in its more specific meaning of “not being whole; split; fractured.”) There’s too much to learn about the world we live in, simply to dismiss these people as crackpots: like you and me, they’re trying to make meaning in a world where meanings are elusive. That doesn’t mean we have to accept nonsense: it just means we can learn something about ourselves and our time, by shining the searching, sympathetic light of God-given reason on this fundamentalist worldview. The following is from Howard Friedman’s “Religion Clause,” which you can track back for more on this story:
Kentucky Gives Tax Incentives To New Noah’s Ark Theme Park
Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear announced yesterday that, subject to approval by the state Tourism Development Finance Authority, the state will grant tax incentives that could total more than $37 million to developers of a new theme park, Ark Encounter. The park’s centerpiece will be a 500 foot long replica of Noah’s Ark, and will also feature an ancient walled city, a petting zoo, live animal shows featuring giraffes and elephants and a replica of the biblical Tower of Babel. The day-to-day operation of the park will be handled by Answers in Genesis, the group that operates the successful Creation Museum in northern Kentucky.
Mike Zorvath, co-founder of Answers in Genesis ministry, says the mission of the new park is to dispel doubts that Noah could have fit two animals of every kind on his ark. The Lexington KY Leader-Herald reports that the Governor at a news conference yesterday rejected church-state concerns about the state subsidies, saying that the law does not allow the state to discriminate against a non-profit business on the basis of subject matter.
via Religion Clause.
Crucial issues regarding how we know what we know, are raised by “Answers in Genesis” and their ideological relatives. If you’re feeling adventurous, take a deep breath and read about what really happened to the dinosaurs. I will be trying to clear a path through this epistemological underbrush in the days ahead.
