Stages of Faith... one last quote!

Perhaps the most important thing that can be said in concluding this book is that our study of faith development, so far, underscores the fact that we human beings seem to have a generic vocation - a universal calling - to be related to the Ground of Being in a relationship of trust and loyalty. That vocation calls us into a covenantal relationship with the transcendent and with the neighbour - when the neighbour is understood radically to be all being. Faith development studies confirm the judgment that human beings are genetically potentiated - that is to say, are gifted at birth - with readiness to develop in faith.

Modus Operandi (part 1)

Perhaps the most fascinating and engaging aspect of looking at science from a religious point of view is the realisation that we are really gaining insight into the way God works. The Romans quote from the bottom of the page throws that door wide open.

Over the past eighteen months or so I've been interested to see a picture developing. It feels like digging away at a seam of rock. There is new richness to be discovered with each layer, and the direction is unpredicatable. Writing about it, reading more, and talking with friends, have all helped shape the ideas as they emerge. Yet it feels like there's so much more to discover

One thing I've realised is that there is a reassuring consistency between the God revealed in the Bible, the God of the Universe and the God of my experience. These three are one.

My experience of God is not one of dramatic, overt intervention, nor are there voices that speak to me in the night. I can't point to a miracle and with certainty say 'That was God' and I've never received a vision. God's hand has always been unseen but at the same time, looking back, quite visible. Whilst I have had moments in my life where God's work seems so obvious, most of the time it is in the background. God is a Potter.

More from Stages of Faith

Another quote...

Since I began systematically to work on a theory of faith development it has been clear to me that my normative images... have been strongly influenced by H. Richard Niebuhr...

In developing the concept of radical monotheistic faith, Niebuhr understood himself to be bringing to expression the dominant thrust of biblical faith. He understood it as the central element in the covenant relationship between a liberated Israel and the God of the Exodus. He understood that the Torah was given and elaborated in order to give form to a righteous community, a community fit to be priests to other nations. He saw Jesus as steeped in the Jewish vision of a covenant relationship with God and in the Jewish hope of a coming reign of God that will redeem, restore and fulfill God's creation in a kingdom of right-relatedness between God and humanity, between peoples and between people and nature. Niebuhr saw Jesus as the pioneering embodiment of radical monotheistic faith, the "pioneer and perfecter" of the faith to which we are called. He saw the resurrection of Jesus, in power and glory, as God's ratification of the truth for all people, of the proclaimed coming Kingdom of God.

That sounds good to me, looks like I'll be reading some Niebuhr next!

Considering irreducible complexity...

‘Irreducible Complexity’ is a phrase coined by Michael Behe in Darwin’s Black Box to describe how some parts of living organisms are too complicated to be put together by Darwinian mechanisms.

Whilst the idea is one I have some sympathy with – there may indeed be biological machinery out there that wasn’t put together by natural selection – the problem is that we just don’t have the data to be able to confidently say one way or the other.

The other problem is that seemingly irreducible systems can, with the steady march of science, suddenly become reducible. Here’s a recent example.

Mitochondria are the boiler room of our cells, providing all the energy. They actually look like discreet cells in themselves, and for good reason. Numerous lines of evidence suggest that they started out as bacteria that became incorporated within the more complicated ‘eukaryotic’ cells. It’s the ultimate in symbiotic relationships where the 2 become 1.

One of the many puzzles that this theory presents is how did the bacterium come to be able to transport across its membrane proteins that previously it would have been keeping out. A group of researchers have identified how this seems to have happened. Having identified strikingly similar proteins in bacteria that are used in the mitochondrial transport machinery they observed:

(i) that protein components found in bacteria are related in sequence to the components of mitochondrial protein transport machines, but (ii) that these bacterial proteins are not found as part of protein transport machines and (iii) that some apparently “primitive” organisms found today have protein transport machines that function with only one or few component parts.

In other words a stepwise process for the co-opting of proteins from one function to another seems to be emerging.

Stages of Faith

I like this, from James W. Fowler's book:

I have found it useful to make a distinction between two kinds of reasoning.

The first I call the logic of rational certainty. This mode of knowing aims at objectivity understood as a knowing free from all particular or subjective investigation. Its truths need to be impersonal, propositional, demonstrable and replicable. The logic of rational certainty, however, is a misleading ideal when we speak about forms of knowing in which the constitution of the knowing self is part of what is at stake. The model of disinterestedness represented by scientific enquiry does not fit with the kind of knowing involved in moral reasoning or in faith's compositions. This is not to say that there is not a form of disinterestedness or 'objectivity' in moral and faith knowing. It is to say that this latter mode of knowing proceeds in a manner in which the knowing self is continually being confirmed or modified in the knowing. For the latter, more comprehensive form of knowing I have chosen the term logic of conviction.

In widening our understanding of knowing so as to include the logic of conviction, we must not capitulate to critics who see this as representing an anti-rational or irrational understanding of faith. Rather we need to see "reasoning in faith" as a balanced interaction between the more limited and specialized and the more comprehensive and holistic logics we have described.

Okay, I know, its wordy - but true all the same!

Brains can shrink too!

Homo floresiensis skeletons were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. They date to within the last 100,000 years but the consensus (though contraversial) is that they are not modern humans. One of the interesting features of this example of Homo is that its brain size is smaller than its predecessors, showing how selection pressures don't always push one way - even though the general drift towards an increase in capacity remains true.

The image above compares one of the specimen skulls with a modern human example.

I thank You God

I thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(I who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
double unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

E.E. Cummings