Alan Hardy’s Blog

I stumbled across this article today - a really interesting read on the limits of Islam to foster scientific endeavour.

The following quote is enough of a teaser.

Social scientist Rodney Stark states that Islam does not have “a conception of God appropriate to underwrite the rise of science … Allah is not presented as a lawful creator but is conceived of as an extremely active God who intrudes in the world as he deems it appropriate. This prompted the formation of a major theological bloc within Islam that condemns all efforts to formulate natural laws in that they deny Allah’s freedom to act.”

Read on: http://www.globalpolitician.com/articledes.asp?ID=3768&cid=2&sid=2

This is Session One from Money and Life, a seminar held at St Peters Anglican Church in September 2007.

As far as money is concerned, some things in life are beyond our control. We don’t choose the country in which we are born, which is a key factor affecting our scope of opportunity. We don’t choose whether we will be born in to wealth or whether we will be groomed by parents or mentors at some formative stage of life to manage our finances well; whether our broader social environment will endow us with vision or horizons which inspires us to amass wealth. Or whether by virtue of our vocation, our natural giftings, we have the capacity to earn well. We don’t choose whether we, by some other stroke of providence, have been in the right place at the right time to take advantage of some opportunity. As in the parable of the talents, where one was given five talents, another two, and another one, we have been endowed unequally.

However we are equal in a crucial way: not in how much we have or will have, but in the way in which we take what we have and use it responsibly and wisely.

What do you think about money? The question could rather be caged as what do we think about money? It is common enough to talk about the idea of a person’s worldview; their overall framework of beliefs about the ways things are, the way things should be. The thinkers who discuss these things extend this by talking about worldviews as bundles of belief that are shared among people in a culture, who live in the same period of time. If this is true then we might talk about my ideas on money, but we can also talk our ideas on money.

Read on: Money and Life

There is a slide taking place toward a non-thinking populace. The most amazing thing is that this slide is persisting despite the huge resources that have been committed to education in recent years.

The trend toward mass education accelerated markedly in the second half of the twentieth century. The 1960’s in particular has been described by Paul Johnson as “the most explosive in the entire history of educational expansion”.[i] In Britain the Robbins Report of 1963 resulted in the doubling of university places within a decade. During the period 1950 to 1970 the number of teachers in the USA rose from 1 million to 2.3 million and spending per person rose by over 100 per cent. Between 1960 and 1975 the number of tertiary students in the US rose from 3.6 million to 9.4 million, the total annual cost rising to $45 billion.[ii] This pattern was reflected throughout the West, including Australia where an explosion of tertiary funding took place during the Whitlam years of the mid-1970’s. In 1996 the level of annual funding required for teacher’s salaries and on-costs in NSW alone was estimated at $3.2 billion.[iii]

The result of this injection of resources is not a civilisation of advanced thinkers but nations of people who are, in George Steiner’s words, “semi-literate”. Os Guiness writes that:

The ability to read is widespread, but the inability to read any but the shallowest texts is equally widespread … recent estimates put the literacy of more than half the population of the US at the level of 12 year olds.[iv]

Closer to home, reports keep reaching us about the levels of literacy in NSW schools and the show the situation to be little different. We have a populace that can read and write but applies these skills to little more than reading magazines and junk novels and writing shopping lists.

In contrast, during a period in which access to formal education was limited, one report indicates that:

Many common people in the 18th and 19th centuries had a knowledge of Shakespeare and the Bible that people today would view as the preserve of the literary scholar or theologian. … The prevailing taste for books of every kind [was such] that almost every man [was] a reader.[v]

This data is difficult to confirm. However it is consistent with the well-founded observation that a transition in emphasis from reason to feeling has taken place over the past 200 years. The result is that even the huge efforts to create an educated population have not stemmed the slide to a non-thinking culture. This is not as much a failure of educational process as it is the result of a shift in the overall attitude of people toward the mind. People do not see the point in thinking.

This is sobering but not less sobering than the tragedy that the church has followed suit in this process. When Kant’s idea that revelation could not bring forth truth was infiltrating the thinking of Western minds, the church was already well into its retreat from the realm of reason and toward a base of experience and practice. In the past two centuries the church has placed little emphasis on the mind and, because of this, it has not been equipped to meet the intellectual challenge of modern humanism. Our humiliation has not taken place because of the supremacy of secular truth but because Christians have failed to equip themselves. Scientific discoveries have not superceded the Bible. The church has been seduced, subtly but surely by changes in philosophy. The end-point we have reached, as Harry Blamires put it, is that “there is no longer a Christian mind”.[vi]

[i] Johnson, P. A History of the Modern World. Weidenfeld. 1991. P 641

[ii] Johnson, P. ibid. Pp 641-2.

[iii] The cost of the 1996 NSW Teacher’s Federation claim for a 12.5 per cent pay increase was estimated by the NSW Minister for Education, John Acquilina, in March 1996 to be $400 million. The figure of $3.2 billion here was derived by multiplying the $400 million out to 100 per cent.

[iv] Guiness, O. Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think And What To Do About It. Baker. 1994. P 72.

[v] Guiness, O. ibid.

[vi] Blamires, H. The Christian Mind. SPCK. 1963. P.3

People are creatures of culture. When a group’s actions make them distinctive from others we can refer to them as having a separate culture. Among Christians we could identify a number of religious cultures, and these can be seen in the way we go about things differently.

One of the weapons we have stumbled across as believers is how the Scriptures can be used to justify what we do, particularly in comparison to others. We enter a place where God becomes a tribal God, favouring us because of our doctrine, our way of doing things and how we’re not like ‘those people out there’.

Let me give you an example. We spent 15 years in a Christian movement (oh no, you’ll guess it) and found that this attitude was alive and well. There are a number of distinctive aspects of this movement which are described by its members with Biblical terminology. Terms like worship, headship, the presence of God, singing in the Spirit, baptism in the Spirit, speaking in tongues, prophecy, faith and, not to mention (cringe), teaching were all drawn from Scripture and applied either wrongly or with insufficient evidence that the practice so-labeled was in fact what the Bible is talking about.

The effect was that these elements of the culture were given divine sanction, and it was all too present in the thinking of people in the movement that those who did not have or do these things were a notch or two below the bar.

These people aren’t alone. We all need to examine ourselves for this attitude, which could be described as self-justification. Jesus told the Pharisees, “You are those who justify yourselves” (Luke 16:15). We should be looking to nothing other than the justification that Christ gives and to have our confidence among men stand on this alone. We all want to be authentic but let’s remember that the root of the word is author – our assurance is in the author of life.

Postscript: We had similar experiences in another movement which are detailed here: Moving On: The New Teaching on Family.

Man by the fall fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.
- Francis Bacon, 1620

This quote indicates two aspects of the fall of man as a fall from our innocence and from our dominion over nature. I would like to explore how the remedy for each points us to grace.

Our fall from innocence is repaired through faith in Christ and His righteousness becomes our own. This is the Gospel we are familiar with.

God’s standard of righteousness is expressed in the Law. Rather than just being a written code, according to Romans 7:14 “the Law is spiritual”. The Law is a small window view into God’s holiness, an account in our language of His moral qualities and conduct. It is intrinsic to God Himself. This makes it easier to understand why “the Law is our tutor to lead us to Christ” (Gal 3:24) and how Christ came to fulfill the Law (Matt 5:17). The giving of the Law was to lead us to something greater, to a living Word with power to save.

When the man and the woman ate from the fruit of the tree in the Garden it is arguable that they tried to seize control of this Word illegitimately. As God said, “the man has become like one of Us (Gen 3:22). This outcome was circumvented by a dreadful curse, angels and a flaming sword guarding the way to the tree of life and, later, the confusion of languages.

The written Law alone is thus impotent as a source of salvation and men seeking autonomy have a futile quest. Obtaining its fulfillment requires a settling of allegiance, the fundamental challenge to man.

In that men are made in the image of God it is not surprising that the ability to contemplate law is a part of our nature. It is the quality that made it possible for God to communicate his requirements to the people of the Old Covenant. It is also what the serpent appealed to in the Garden when He deceived the woman. When the man and the woman accepted the serpent’s advice they were set on a path in which they would be lured to consider all things given by God in a framework of independence from the giver.

As far as the Law is concerned, a key effect of the fall is that men reject who the Law points to, adopting it as a specification of works to be done for justification. Man seeks to be self-sufficient, detaching the law from Christ and rejecting God’s essential role in salvation.

When we consider the second aspect of the fall, relating to our dominion, we find that man deals with the laws of nature, the subject matter of the sciences, in the same way. Men dislocate these laws from God. C S Lewis highlighted how we are accustomed to speaking about the laws of nature as though they cause events to happen. However law possesses no determinism of its own, as all it can do is to describe what is happening. What we fail to see is that the cause of events is not law but the activity of God and that the laws of nature are describing the regularity of that activity.

In modern times, understanding the laws of nature is seen as essential to achieving control of our world. In the same way that man seeks to use divine law to take control of his salvation, he seeks to utilise the laws of nature to take control of his environment.

We could say that the laws of nature define how we can interact with nature, but this is not going far enough. Rather, if we are observing God at work, then any proper study or application of these laws must be treated as an act of service, as an act of partnership with proper reverence.

It is allegiance which is required by the Lawgiver and the same curse, angels, flaming sword and confusion of languages bar the way to independent man achieving dominion over nature. There is something built in to the reality of things that forbids us to truly flourish holding only law in our hands, something alive at its source that frustrates it.

Francis Schaeffer provides the quote at the top of this post to indicate a confidence in the seventeenth century that the arts and sciences would help us to recover our dominion over nature. If it was devoted men that held this conviction then perhaps God crowned their efforts, as he promised to the psalmist:

“It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect.” Ps 18:32

It is a matter of grace, after all.

“And what do you have that you did not receive? But if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” 1 Cor 4:7

One of the precepts on which modern economics is built is the idea of self-interest. This 18th century notion suggested that men should be able to freely pursue personal advantage and that this would create an environment that was better for all.

This arose at a time when beliefs about service to others was still a strong steering influence, directing the fruits of this liberation of self-interest in responsible ways.

The ideals of service I refer to were those developed in the Reformation. It was then that the understanding emerged that God distributes gifts to men according to His wisdom and that he intends that these gifts be used for the benefit of others. God is the author of society, the arts and sciences, and of economies, however tainted these may be in a world affected by sin.
If we know that God is our father then we are free to look out for the interests of others because we are confident that God is looking after us.

How is the idea of service regarded today? Our Christian heritage is fading - few would argue with that. In the face of this the past few decades have seen a re-awakening in commerce to the idea of service. However, in what might seem peculiar to our forebears, business adopts this orientation as a means for profit. They say with one voice “the customer is number one” and “look after number one”.

Men are variously endowed with advantage. Whether this advantage is based on the opportunities provided by our environment or by our personal talents the Bible deals us a great leveller - it has all been given by God. How much scope do we have, really, to be so puffed up?