hughbiquitous

Dave Ennis posted the wittiest blog comment I’ve seen in a long time. Start with Kevin’s comment to John’s post on Margin.

I posted on Thomas Huxley yesterday, including this quote:

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

What struck me there is that he says this enabled him to enjoy “peace of mind” even though it required him to resolve “at all risks” to pursue it. This suggests he suffered from FUD–fear, uncertainty, and doubt–until he insisted that what he believed in must be trustworthy.

If I were required to believe something that was utterly unbelievable, and at the same time, attempts to investigate the truth of the thing were forbidden, well, I’d lack peace of mind too.

Belief or Blasphemy?

It makes me wonder: do people really trust what they believe?

When Christians are willing to countenance blind faith rather than informed trust, it is blasphemy and a betrayal of the gospel. We ought to trust the resurrection of Christ if and only if it really happened. If the corpse of Christ never quickened, then Jesus is a fraud and worthy of contempt, not worship.

At the same time, if you are willing to trust the resurrection of Christ whether or not it really happened, then you are, to put it mildly, insulting God. The matter under discussion is, as John Piper put it, “the blazing center of the glory of God:” his victory over sin and death, won by the son of God at the cost of his own life for the salvation of worthless sinners. To say it doesn’t matter whether it really happened or not is to make a mockery of it by saying it wasn’t really necessary; that your redemption, if it really was necessary, could have been bought more cheaply; and that God squandered, not sacrificed, his son. In other words, “Dear God: you got suckered!”

If we are willing to let “just believe” suffice, and we consider the truth of the matter as either irrelevant or intimidating, then wouldn’t it follow that Jesus didn’t really need to die for our sins? Wouldn’t it have been sufficient for God to have said, “well, I could ‘go through the motions’ of atoning for the sins of the world, but why bother? Hey, y’all–Just believe!” Or for that matter, when Adam and Eve sinned, couldn’t God have said, “I didn’t see that! Do-over! That one didn’t count!”

Truth Matters

If testing (you might say trusting) your beliefs threatens you, then you need to answer this question: how do you decide what to believe in? Is there any criterion more important than truth? What could possibly make a false belief more trustworthy than a valid one?

It comes down to this: if the substance of an idea does not correspond to reality, then the idea is not worth trusting. If it lines up with reality, then it’s worth trusting. Investigating the truth of the matter will only correct or confirm it.

Maybe you’re like Huxley and you’re keenly aware that it’s risky business to pursue the peace of mind that comes with the truth. The challenge is to be like Huxley and resolve, in the face of those risks, to prefer hard truths over easy fictions and to live like what you believe is actually so.

But don’t take up the challenge merely for the peace of mind that attends a firm foundation, though. Do it because truth matters. If truth doesn’t matter, then that firm foundation your peace of mind is resting on is not so firm after all, and if you listen carefully, you might hear these words: “You got suckered.”

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

Thomas H. Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley is an interesting character… Wikipedia has this to say:

[Thomas Huxley was] known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his defence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. …Huxley did not accept many of Darwin’s ideas (e.g. gradualism), and was more interested in advocating a materialist professional science than in defending natural selection. …he believed that Darwin at least gave a hypothesis which was good enough as a working basis, even though he believed evidence was still lacking, and became one of Darwin’s main supporters…

And this is fascinating:

…he coined the term “agnosticism” to describe his stance on religious belief… Another significant advocacy of Huxley’s that is not seen today was his promotion for teaching the Bible in schools. This may seem out of step with his evolutionary theories but he believed that the Bible had significant literary and moral teachings that were quite relevant to English ethics.

He seems, at least from reading Wikipedia, to have been a fair-minded guy, ready to go wherever the evidence led him. I wonder what Huxley would think of the intelligent design debate: would he value what is right over who is right?

Would he, like the editors of today’s scientific journals, refuse to even countenance the publication of a scholarly article on intelligent design? (Hearsay: I’ve heard stories of people being fired for letting ID articles slip through…)

In closing, consider these further quotes from Huxley (emphasis mine):

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the Origin of Species with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them. Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

Sounds like my kind of guy!

See if you agree how vehemently you disagree with this lineup of The 50 Most Influential Christians in America.

HT: Melinda Penner

Update: At the bottom of the page, there’s a link to meet the staff of The Church Report. It is interesting to note how much of the staff appears on their own Top 50 list. Very interesting. File this one under narcissistic self-congratulation, methinks…

It is always generally best to make modest claims. Case in point: Researchers have developed an aerodynamic model that explains bee flight. Naturalists are giddy over the fact that this puts to rest a claim that intelligent design proponents have made about the inability of science to explain everything, with the classic example being “how do bees fly?”

Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years to promote the idea of a supreme being by discounting science because it can’t explain everything in nature.

“People in the ID community have said that we don’t even know how bees fly,” [CalTech researcher Douglas] Altshuler said. “We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.”

Now, I don’t know who’s arguing against naturalism this way, but they are doing themselves a disservice if they hang their entire argument on one example.

On the other hand, this does nothing to prove that science can explain everything, either. They have simply neutralized one popular (but weak) rhetorical tactic of those who have an irrational contempt for science.

Both sides would do well to make more modest claims about what they “know” and whether something is “proved.” In science, philosophy, or any area of life, we ought to be about finding the right answers, not the right kind of answers—even if it means we were wrongmistaken. After all… who wants to be wrongmistaken?

Scientists Finally Figure Out How Bees Fly - Yahoo! News

Update: refined semantics about “being wrong” vs. “being mistaken.”