I sat there about 3 feet away from this guy, this morning, using my 32gb iPod Touch to find the passage that the preacher was on. Now, I’ve been preaching at my students lately about my iPod Touch, and how it represents my own selfishness, my me-first consumerism, my “buy-in” to the world’s view of things. I’ve been comparing it to the BMW that Tony Campolo talked about way back when, when he said he didn’t figure Jesus would have a BMW in his driveway as long as there were poor people in Haiti (or, for that matter, in the seats in my church). For me, I drive a ‘93 Civic, so I felt pretty good about myself until I thought about that 32gb iPod Touch that I’d recently bought. When I bought it, I stood in the Costco for a good 15 minutes, trying to come up with a reasonable justification why I needed not just an iPod Touch, but the 32gb version. The thing cost me about $500.

The preacher this morning was preaching from the end of Galatians. He got to this passage this morning, which I finally dug up on my iPod Touch:

> May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation.
> ~ Galatians 6:14-15

I sat there, feeling rather uncomfortable. What does it mean to be crucified to the world? What does it mean to be a new creation? Is there anything about me that doesn’t shout “I love the world!”, but rather says “I love God”? Does my willingness to rush out and drop $500 on an electronic gadget that I really don’t need at all, while a guy sleeps outside the bank 2 blocks from my house, nearly freezing to death, say “I’m a new creation”?

I think if the “world has been crucified to me”, my attitude about the things of the world, the “stuff”, the “lust of the flesh”, the “pride of life”, ought to be different than the attitudes of those who are “of the world”. Why is it that, so often, and perhaps most obviously around Christmas time, we let ourselves become enthralled with things?

Seneca’s main point is that it’s pointless to complain about how short life is. Life, he says, is plenty long enough; the main problem is that we waste most of it. It’s a valid point, from my way of thinking at least. Seneca’s suggestion, of course, is that we’d do a lot better with things if we just spent all our time studying philosophy. As much as I like philosophy, I don’t think that’s the example Jesus would have us follow, however.

What particularly struck me, though, was a comment buried way down in the middle of Chapter 7. Seneca says:

It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and – what will perhaps make you wonder more – it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.

Frankly, the quote comes off a bit like meaningless pseudo-intellectualism to me. What do you mean it takes the whole of life to learn how to die? Surely lots of people actually do die without having figured it all out. But how about the first part? How do we learn how to live?

On one level, the Christian life is pretty simple. We are to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We’re to love our neighbour as ourselves. Everything else hangs on that. You can read it, you can understand the principle, in around a minute or so. On another level, though, it’s a life-long process. Tozer, in chapter one of The Pursuit of God, cries out to God to help him to desire God more; it seems the more we do know God, the more realize we need him even more still.

I am glad that, although some people may try to convince us otherwise, the good life isn’t achieved by a Stoic renouncing of all of the pleasures of life and dedication to pondering high thoughts. The good life, for the Christian, is lived in relationships: first with God, then with those around us.

So, I recently went to take a look at what he’s been up to lately.

In my browsing, I stumbled across this podcast, in which Dawkins “takes on” Alistair McGrath, an Oxford theologian who has published a couple of books taking cracks at Dawkins’ work.

McGrath, unfortunately, fails to impress. He’s clearly got a fairly thorough understanding of his position, but his ability to communicate to the lay-person leaves something to be desired. Big flowery sentences, but it’s easy to miss his point (and it, sometimes, makes it too easy for him to speak without having a point). To some extent, I’m used to hearing Christian apologists and (more frequently) intelligent design advocates who fail to impress me, so I wasn’t all that surprised.

What surprised me most of all, though, was how unimpressive Dawkins was. He has a very clear way of speaking, a perfectly understandable and cultured accent, and clearly is highly intelligent. But, in espousing his atheist/strongly agnostic position, he seems a bit out of his depth. In particular, he seems a bit muddled in his epistemology (theory of knowledge).

Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone with a science background, his language is full of objectivism (the idea that an objective truth exists). He claims, over and over throughout the interview, to only be interested in “the truth”. Clearly, for Dawkins, an objective truth must exist. To go further, he seems to be very strongly positivist (an objective truth exists, and we can figure out what it is). For Dawkins, the scientific method is the way to discover objective truth, and during the podcast he holds up the laws of physics as good examples of truth, whereas religion is ridiculed and dismissed.

At one point during the discussion, while explaining that he doesn’t care how many good things religion has contributed to the world, he simply exclaims,

“Is it true?”

Good question.

Interestingly, the moderator in the discussion asked a revealing question from an entirely different epistemology. She asked something along the lines of this:

“Would you agree that Islam might be true for someone else, in the same way that Christianity is true for you?”

This type of epistemology is called subjectivism, which claims that no objective truth exists (or that no knowledge exists external to the individual who is doing the knowing).

Subjectivism is a pretty tough viewpoint to adhere to, because there are certain types of knowledge that sure seem to be external to the individual, such as the laws of physics. Your idea of the laws of physics might differ from mine, but in that case, we’d probably assume that one of us had it slightly wrong.

Dawkins leaves little room for subjectivism, it seems, even in terms of moral and ethical truths. In the discussion, he refers to a widespread consensus about what is right and wrong, appealing to our morals about child labour and slavery. This is surprising, since it’s generally Christians or members of other religions who claim that there is an objective moral or ethical truth. Dawkins, however, is forced to say that “something other than religion” is giving us this moral consensus, but he isn’t in any way equipped to know what that is.

So, how does an objectivist, positivist scientist start figuring out what moral and ethical truths are out there? Unfortunately, the scientific method doesn’t give us the tools to find that truth. Where Dawkins seems to fall apart is in his determination to stick with a firmly-entrenched scientism and naturalism that undermines any other means of knowing.

I decided that this might prove useful to others, since we don’t always decide to start reading the Bible on January 1st. So, I created a site, yourBibleReading.com, that allows you to set up your own Bible reading plan.

Some of the highlights:

• Flexible start date / end date
• Consecutive, straight-through styles
• Parallel styles that mix the OT and NT
• Several other styles
• PDF print-outs
• Online progress tracking

• and (much? well, at least a little) more…

  It’s free to use, so go ahead and try it out.

  

  ]]> http://www.daverosborough.com/2008/07/04/yourbiblereadingcom/feed/