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We hear over and over again from the school of premillenial dispensationalism that the Antichrist is a literal man who will come at the end of the age and wage war against God. Hal Lindsey can be credited (or accused) of making this theory very popular in the ’70’s and ’80’s with some very spurious biblical interpretations. But these interpretations simply go unnoticed by the casual observer as flawed because the rhetoric is so alarmist and points to a clear reason for the existence of human suffering. So without going into these arguments I want to look at one little word that does not get mentioned very often at all in the New Testament that if interpreted differently kind of messes up the entire theory that Lindsay, LaHaye and others who seem to go on TBN and CBN consistently bashing this into the heads of unsuspecting needy people. What I want to discuss is the theory that this is a man.In actuality the term Antichrist in Greek is “antichristos”. The way that we interpret the prefix “anti” often perhaps comes from the Latin which more of less means “in opposition to” (that’s just a guess since my Latin is very weak, so if someone else can clarify that would be helpful at least to me!). However, in Greek this prefix is clearly one that indicates “along side of, or against”. The meaning is actually one of something being in parallel where we often read “against” as something perpendicular in literal opposition to something else. The the spirit of the Antichrist is anything that looks like Christ, but is in fact not!

While the Hebrew scriptures are clearly anthropomorphic in order to describe God and the power of God as a literal person, the New Testament loses some of that imagery in favor of more spiritual imagery in association with those anthropomorphic interpretations. This is very true in the words of Jesus and is especially true the Gospel of John. So we cannot just assume based on 2 Thessalonians that the Antichrist is a man when John told us that this spirit is already among us. Making the spirit fit the supposed man is making two passages fit together in terms of an argument that does not even exist in the bible itself or is even implied anywhere.

This is why is is absolutely central for any claim of Christianity to frame any statement in terms of God’s radical event of forgiveness and the overcoming of death in the cross. Without that event as a lens to interpret all of the Gospels, we lose the significance of why Jesus lived among us in the first place!

This is also why I am not a fan of proselytizing. We cannot “get” people to respond to God’s love, but can only witness the significance of that love as a world altering event in the person of Jesus. This means helping those who could care less about what we have to say, and it means finding a means to love everyone including our enemies in the same way that Christ loved the Church. This means helping others to find that path of love rather than, as one person in another board told me, to hold them accountable to Scripture. Holding someone accountable to Scripture is more or less something that makes sense in Islam where the Qu’ran is the literal Word of God. But for Christians, Christ is the Word of God and the Scripture is a witness to that, a damn good one to be sure, but a witness nonetheless that does not deserve our allegiance. To place one’s interpretation of Scripture ahead of the cross is a subtle but very powerful form of idolatry that we see active everywhere today and is the central cause, I would argue, for any surge of atheism because it must limit the radical nature of God’s own activity in the world to a set of clear propositions held prior to what God’s activity can actually be!

Remember that unbelievers were not the ones who would support the crucifixion of Jesus. These were the believers whose faith was a firm understanding of the law and how they were applying it just as God told them to. Jesus reveals to them that their understanding was fundamentally flawed and reveals to us that the cross is our point of reference for what happens to those who place anything other than the radical love of God in the cross at the center of their faith. The truth is that practice of Christ’s love will result in persecution just as Christ said. But this will not just be a persecution at the hands of unbelievers for that much is very clear. It will also be persecution from those who think they have got it right and have boiled the Gospel down to a few clear propositions they have developed to simplify the message into palatable bits which limit the radical nature of God’s love.

Once our laws and traditions become on par with the event of the cross, we are commiting the most heinous act of idolatry by placing ourselves and our interpretations ahead of the free and radical nature of the love of God. This, I submit, is the true nature of the Antichrist. It is a very powerful and deceptive force luring millions of people today into believing that they are following the one true God, when in reality they are following regurgitations of men who are in self-made positions of authority to proclaim the truth they they have fabricated, and worship the witness of Scripture rather than the very Word of God to which scripture is a witness!

An article published by Beliefnet and no doubt countless others very soon if not already, reports that insurance companies that insure Protestant churches report numerous sex abuse cases every year.I am not sure why this would be "news" or even surprising. The Catholics have had all the press with this issue not only because it runs so deep but because it was revealed that they were fully aware of the sex abuse and pedophilia issues among priests for years, but decided to cover it up rather than expose it themselves and lance the boil that had been forming on the souls of countless parishioners over the years who would call their spiritual guide in life "father". To that end, there has still not been a constructive and consistent forum for people to talk through the issues with the church and it continues to get swept under the rug of ignorance. Rather than the issue being openly discussed in pastoral and theological terms, we continue to hear the issue in the hands of lawyers and lawsuits and litigation along with payoffs. It is as if a little cash from the Vatican coffers will heal the problem. Now we hear publicly that the Protestant churches have a similar or even the same issue in many of their congregations. About 7 years ago I went up for ordination trials in front of a very conservative presbytery in the Presbyterian Church (USA). After I was questioned with random doctrinal, pastoral, and governance issues repeatedly in an open forum of a standing behind a pulpit in front of pastors and delegates of all the churches in the region (I passed the trials by the way but decided the pulpit was not for me), a pastor then stood up in front of that same group but for a completely different purpose. He was a pastor in the midst of the Presbyterian judicial process due to his relationship with a member of the youth group in the church in which he was a pastor for many years. He also had a wife and kids during this relationship. As he stood before the Presbytery he said, "It is almost a shame that I stand before you now after we just heard one's passion for the ministry and intellect expressed." He then went on with profuse requisitions for forgiveness but seemingly without a direct apology. He was standing before the Presbytery to ask for reinstatement after his ordination had already been suspended by the Presbytery after the relationship he had with his parishioner had blown up against his family and against his church. The presbytery meeting included many members of his congregation. One of those members was visibly angry that this pastor would have the gall to come before them and ask to be reinstated just a year after he committed this misjudgment in relationship choice and made his petition to the presbytery to vote accordingly. The issue is that he was not contrite enough, and simply had not done a consistent and proficient enough job of making amends and seeking forgiveness. The presbytery voted almost unanimously not to reinstate him and that he needed to continue to seek forgiveness. This is clearly not a new issue, just approached differently in the bounds of church polity in this case at least. Now there can be no doubt that there are probably cases that are kept behind closed doors as with the Catholic church, but without the seemingly endless supply of cash from the Vatican, it becomes very difficult to pay hush money out to victims who come forward! But I submit that these are all symptomatic of a deeper theological problem in Christianity in general that is also intimately linked with the debates over homosexuality and its presence in the ministry. The problem is that Christians do not talk about sex - period! Christians only engage sex as a topic of what not to do rather than the nature of sex itself. Sure we celebrate babies all the time, but we do not celebrate the sexual union to produce them. If we cannot talk about sex on that most basic level, discussing it as a necessary and natural act between people who literally become one through that act never crosses our language and social taboo barriers. We simply do not have a sophisticated and deep enough understanding of sex as a natural human act as needed to propagate the species as food, and as needed an expression of erotic love as a hug and a peck on the cheek. So it remains hidden and taboo among parishioners as something "inappropriate" as if a good and deep discussion about sex would necessarily result in pornographic discussion. So it is as taboo in the churches as it is in our culture in general. The irony is that sexual behavior and desire is such a powerful message that the media uses to entice the desire of a viewer or listener to consume goods such as music, cars, food, alcohol, movies, perfume, softdrinks, and yes…video games. While this is more geared toward men, women must participate in the production of these messages in order to entice the men! If you are in a band doing cover songs at a bar, if you want to make money you need to play songs that women tend to like in order to keep the men around to buy them drinks - hence "ladies free" nights. You probably get the point even though we could all come up with 10 ways sexual behavior is a public means of enticing people for different consumerist purposes. So we act out our sexual inclinations on a regular basis, but when we try to discuss them, we are embarrassed or it is too shameful. It is such an odd paradox in our culture that it is baffling. So I will say it again: We consistently act out our sexual desires as our culture permits, but we are not permitted to discuss these desires for reasons of taboo and arbitrarily demarcated private boundaries. Any desire we have must have a vent of discussion to bring that desire under rational understanding and thus proper direction to a proper end or it will run out of control to improper ends. Freud called this the id and the superego that form a synthesis called the ego or self. Our innate desires (food and sex) come under the control of the rationality (the superego) and from this synthesis we get the ego or self. For the psychoanalyst the technique is to tap the unconscious mind of the ego (to reach the dialectic battle between id and superego) in order to bring these desires in a proper framework. And this is all done through articulation. While Freud continually comes under fire from counselors (my wife included) due to his over zealous attention on sex, there is some basic truth about how articulation leads to disclosing our desire and from that we gain a more rational and less intimidating view of ourselves. Not talking through these desires leaves them unchecked and so, improperly guided and directed. We know that there are a lot of gay pastors and priests who are simply not allowed to have the forum to discuss the desires that cause them pain daily because they cannot express them and so, these desires find poor direction and release where it is convenient and quiet. Heterosexual pastors like the one I discussed above have the same issue although they are allowed to be public with their relationships. Many more parishioners have the same set of problems due to the consistent strictures of our culture that do not allow us to articulate our sexual desires in concert with our theology and our relationship with God. This seems to be the very definition of dysfunction - when people have problems and keep them hidden until moments of stress tap them causing brief and sometimes permanent upheavals in relationships. Pastors and theologians need to do a much better job of not being afraid to discuss openly and honestly with adults and especially youth about desire and its role in our relationships. This is not in order to discuss the limits of sex - there is enough material that tell us what not to do. What we need are better open and honest discussions of our deep seated desires we probably have never discussed in order to bring them under the guidance and purview of the Kingdom of God as lived in the midst of our brothers and sisters in the church. Hinduism has a far more nuanced and spiritual view of sexual union as that which can bring one closer to moksha or release and thus closer to God. After all yoga means union! yet we use the same language in Christian sprirituality with regard to Christ through food in the Eucharist. So our desires of food are brought to use in spiritual terms regularly and we are reminded of gluttony and the poor regularly. Yet that other desire of sex remains hidden from view and remains unconditioned by our spiritual union with God. Bringing sexual desire under these conditions on a consistent basis is bound to have a profound effect on the health of marriage and this cycle of abuse we have given over to litigation rather than as a sacrifice to God. If we cannot name and express what makes us sexually aroused and even attracted to different people and different objects of desire, then the cycle of abuse will just continue and the Body of Christ will continue to bear the scars of our culture and its socially mandated limitations that continue to constrict the love of God that ought to exist in the very midst of our sexual union with another.

There is a nice summary of a study conducted on student behaviors that also addresses student faith commitment in higher education. The study shows that the education of a student might not be the most important factor in faith decline during college years, but the very transition itself into adulthood. The study shows that those who did not go to college are more likely to drop their religious ties altogether or stop attending worship services than students who go to college, earn an associate’s degree, or a bachelor’s degree. Thus, the education of a student is most likely not the most influential factor in religious behavior overall, but the age and the stage in life might be the most important factor.

However, other studies (e.g., Madsen & Vernon, 1983) argue that attending college does result in a liberalizing effect on student orthodoxy. While this might not affect the results of the study referenced above, this effect can result in a difference in religious affiliation and denominational connections when students leave college for whatever reason. So it will be interesting to see when this study comes out in Social Forces if we can derive any causal connections between the research to get a more nuanced view of students and their religious behaviors as connected to their doctrinal and denominational commitments before and after college.

It would follow that an engagement of parachurch organizations such as Campus Crusade and religious programming on campuses, along with the differences in these effects on religiously affiliated campuses would also be of interest. The may also help to tease out variables that were not covered in this study.

In an article entitled The 20th Century University Is Obsolete, Rev. John P. Minogue argues that the for profit sector of Higher Education has “cut its teeth” into the market driven model of the knowledge economy where the 20th century university has missed the target and so, has lost almost too much momentum to get back in the game. The two philosophical premises that Rev. Minogue uses are that of evolution and relevance. To state the underpinnings of these two assumptions that form the foundation of the argument, the evolution of the university as that which can adapt to the knowledge economy of the world and so achieve harmony with its environment is a function of how relevant it is in relation to the wider social and cultural capital of the world that it inhabits. That the university has not adapted to this market driven social and cultural capital well enough indicates that extinction is all but inevitable.

The social and cultural capital that the 20th Century university has not invested itself and so adapted to the knowledge economy of the world is precisely the model that the for-profit institutions have adopted and, it can be argued, were the reason for their very foundations of existence. These areas are professionalization by tapping into corporate and job market fluctuations and needs for the corporate economy to sustain itself, and the flexible model of staffing that allows such educational ventures to adapt to new corporate structures. Of course one major stumbling block has to do with tenure since with tenure an institutional hierarchy cannot jettison faculty and programs on a event driven basis rooted in the whims of the market. An additional stumbling block is that there are too many institutions struggling to compete for a consumer base that is simply not large enough. So with evolution in mind, if the predators do not have enough prey, they will slowly dwindle in size.

As some commentators on the article have written this perspective is overly focused on one aspect of the university and its relationship to social and cultural capital. By focusing on this one aspect, the university comes out looking exactly what David Harvey argued as a condition of postmodernity in his masterful volume The Condition of Postmodernity (1990). There he argues that the movement of capital has transformed from a monolithic entity able to control all of its production (Fordism) into companies diversifying their production and outsourcing expertise and employment in order to maintain flexibility with regard to market changes. Thus companies have become more nimble and efficient entities that can make use of cheaper labour and production that can adapt to consumer and market changes (flexible accumulation). In Rev. Minogue’s view, the university needs to be one more node in which companies can outsource knowledge production in order to sustain their own flow of capital and constrict over-accumulation and overhead costs.

Of course, the Marxist view suggests that while the flow of capital is the inevitable end of a culture driven by capitalism in which there must always be an oppressor and an oppressed, this structure is never a permanent fixture and will change primarily though the oppressed engaging in a political struggle or revolution. Universities are famous for these kinds of social revolutions and have indeed been the progenitor of these struggles for centuries. More recently, Princeton students revolted against the administration in the 19th century, French students protested in the 60’s along with just about everyone else it seems, Chinese and South Korean students also protested even more recently. These kinds of events are given rise by students who do not see the relevance of their education or who perceive a social responsibility of the university that is not happening in the face of injustice, and that tenured faculty who are given the freedom to engage knowledge in often unconventional or controversial ways shakes up the evolutionary model that Rev. Minogue assumes is true and permanently stable. For this understanding of things we must pay tribute to the late Richard Rorty who called for a disruptive kind of dialogue in order to deconstruct assumptions of reality and truth - both of which are loaded with assumptions based on rhetorical strategy and skill rather than on any notion of objective reality.

I am quite frankly surprised that Rev. Minogue does not give any nod to the social responsibility of the university as an agent of change that can transform the evolutionary structure that he circumscribes as an unchanging and finally determinative structure to which the university must adapt or die. It is as if the corporate and market driven state of the world is so monolithic and powerful that all of our knowledge production and social responsibility must be jettisoned or conform to fit the structure of the market. The alternative that he does not mention is the university as a structure of influence on the market in order to accomodate it to the knowledge that the university produces. True, the flow of capital and the market is a massive and powerful system that shapes much of our perceptions of reality and does determine aspects of it. But there is a question here that beckons a broader understanding of the place of the human being in that structure and thus questions the validity of arguing that humanity is finally determined and constituted by that structure so that the production of knowledge cannot participate in the reformation of that structure. Although Minogue does not state this, by not stating it reveals the philosophical problem with the argument he pursues.

Much like structural anthropologists (Levi-Strauss) or psychologists (Jean Piaget) evolutionary adaptation is not a one way process in which the organism simply adapts to the environment or dies. Rather, there is a balance that the organism achieves with its environment. While the environment conditions and eventually determines quite a lot of the features of that organism, the organism also participates in that structure to change it as well. This is the most clear and obvious as a particularly unique feature of the human organism where the use of our mental capacity has a profound transformative effect on our environment. While with most organisms accommodation to the environment is perhaps primary, with human beings the assimilation of the environment to our needs and desires is a constant struggle. Issues like global warming and resource consumption outpacing resource production are key areas where the human struggle to assimilate the environment needs to be balanced with accommodating to the environment if it is to sustain us for the long term.

So the primary problem with Rev. Minogue’s argument is that he misses this mark in the assumptions that support his thesis. The argument is myopic in terms of what he sees as the final and determinative structure of university life (the market) and the inevitable evolutionary extinction of the university due to its inability to quickly adapt to this structure. This places far too much emphasis on the need for the university to accommodate to this structure rather than have any participation in the reformation or transformation of that structure as an agent of social responsibility and social change.

But as another commentator argues, this line of thought is not new. It goes as far back to Petrarch and even to Aristotle’s view of his students. More akin to Minogue’s thinking are a series of articles starting in the 1930’s (check the Journal of Higher Education for a good starting point around 1933) that foretell the inevitable demise of the liberal arts institution in the face of the elective and secular system as introduced by Harvard and Hopkins at the end of the 19th century. As it goes, this did not happen and even if some liberal arts institutions folded or became secular, liberal arts education is still an important viable element in the landscape of the higher education market. The truth is that the university is a remarkably flexible organization that has always been able to adapt to environmental change, but in so far as that it also participates in the change of the environment. The latter part of this intricate relational dynamic is that the university has a social responsibility to the environment to initiate change in the flow of social and cultural capital in the knowledge economy. I know of no university, even a for profit one, that has this as a component of their mission. Universities know that they are producing those who will eventually lead these corporate structures and so, they have a very powerful influence in how the future of these structures will look. That the university produces not only knowledge, but also those who will produce knowledge is an element that Minogue does not take into account which renders his argument anemic at best, but mostly misleading to those who invest too much stock in social determinism by capitalism and the market.

The problem is that if the university ignores its impact as an agent of change, it will then become irrelevant and lost its share in the knowledge economy. This is why tenure must be maintained, but in a way that it can also be reformed to continue to promote the tenured professor as a participant in the knowledge economy as an agent of change for both the knowledge produced through sound research and the knowledge producers of the future through excellence in good teaching. It is the university and not legislators that has the most powerful and well-situated position to balance the market economy and change it from the inside out. To do that will continue to balance the economic forces of the world with the social responsibility that the university can continue to sustain as a lever to maintain true adaptation through equilibrium between the market and knowledge production.

I am amazed at the amount of discussion everywhere and even on my little spot on the web that has followed from the Sopranos finale! It kind of gave my little blog a blip on the grand radar of the bologosphere even if temporarily which is not what I thought would happen at all. On Sunday I watched the traffic go from about 76 to about 900 unique visitors in about 10 minutes all from about 5 total postings in which I included the link on the NJ.com website forums. People as far as Slovenia and Guam stumbled across it as well. That is a testimony to my very small fraction of the overall buzz that this phenomenon generated in about 12 hours. And the water coolers are still emptying out in offices as a result of people hanging around talking about it even this morning!

But I wanted to throw out one more thought on all of this as I have heard the exegesis of the Book of Chase go through its multiple interpretations and reconstructions by those both intelligent - as are the comments on this site - and those who are a little closer to Paulie Walnut’s superstitious complacency about life.

The truth is that if all of that happened with the demise of Tony and family it would be extremely trite. Tony was never portrayed as something sacred and whose most intimate moments were kept in a shroud of secrecy. We had access to everything. We saw how fragile, trapped, and ruthless he really was. We always saw the underbelly of his veneer and watched him lie, cheat and kill on a consistent basis. We saw how family loyalty was a double-edged sword.

The fact that the show ended in a diner was fantastic. More than anything that diner represents a unique part of New Jersey culture in more ways than one. Everyone goes to or has been to a diner. And only for special occasions do they take reservations, if that diner happens to have a larger dining room (that diner is not one I would think of for that either). That alone was humerous and pretentious on Carmela’s part! Tony Soprano was not a sacred object and if he was ingloriously and publicly killed in that spot with his family, we would have seen it, and it would still leave us unsatisfied because it would only raise a new set of questions and we would still not be happy.

This is why the cut to black was intended to be a jarring shock. It was a play on irony as if to say to the audience, “You have been given intimate access to the family and with that access, comes consequences.” The double-edged sword of loyalty.

But with that interpretation now out there as a clear logical possibility, it is also very clear that what we saw may not have been any ending at all, but a last minute decision not to end it at all. As one discussant here noted, there were three different endings that were filmed. It seems that we saw only part of one of them. So does this mean that HBO will hook people for a replay? Or will it be on the Season 6 DVD set? Either of those choices would be the most awful conclusion to a show that transformed cable television forever. But it would go along with how we saw everything boil down to greed and revenge - this time from the media.

It turns out the show was neither comedy nor tragedy since the ending has no form. It ended without any definable structure, without any sign of meaning, and an ambiguity buttressed by the echo of “Don’t stop…” So in the best postmodern sense, it turns out that we have been the authors of the narrative all along. We have been the ones who have ascribed meaning to what we watched. It is the audience who created the structure. And now we continue that process with only a void as our raw material to compose the continued unfolding of something that ended in emptiness.

Ok…now we can move on to more important things like Paris Hilton’s sentencing or Michael Vick’s puppies

Read the David Chase interview in the Star Ledger!

Living in New Jersey for nearly the entire unfolding of the Sopranos, I know that many households subscribed to HBO just to watch the show. That’s what, 9 or 1o years of households that subscribed to a network primarily to watch one show that nailed so much of their cultural backyard to near perfection even if encased in a very typical yet complex tale of the mob.

So I was expecting an ending of irony. One of a king whose kingdom had crumbled. The image of Job sitting on a pile of rubbish angry with God for being betrayed. AJ acting as the reincarnation of his father’s own turmoil and sending its fury inside the sacred place of the family. AJ as that symbol of the logical end of his father’s problems. The validation of the theory that there is no cure for it, only self-destruction. How poetic that would have been, how layered and complete. I was expecting AJ to burn down the house in a depressed fury raging against the machine taking his sister and mother’s life after the air seemed to be clear from the truce with the New York crew.

And then Tony all alone in an ironic spin on what seemed to be the theme of the entire 6th season “You know, there’s more … than this,” “Phil we can have it all”. Alone, depressed, and the inheritor of his family’s own self-destruction that the mob provided the perfect cover for all of these years until his very image, his son, brought it all down…

Instead it ended with an abrupt fade to black. No resolution to much of anything, more questions raised than answered. What a crime if this is just to create a buzz for some other marketing of the Sopranos brand in a film or series of films. What a failure if the show comes back. No matter how you cut it - or even if you call it an artistic choice to fade to black, it truly betrays all of those people who shelled out 12 bucks a month for all those years to spend some time with the family on Sunday nights.

Maybe this is Chase’s method to whack his audience. If so, it may have done the trick. What rubbish! That he did literally and figuratively. Bobby said, at the beginning of the last episodes, that you never hear the shot that kills you. Well, we never hear the shot that killed the audience. Tony lives on, we do not. That’s about the extent of the irony folks. Kind of tongue in cheek…

In an earlier posting, I mentioned the issue of Creation Science and the difficulty with the presupposition that we literally came from two original people. The hard-core side of this understanding of Genesis as literal both in terms of history and the scientific method means that the entire cosmos was created some 6000 years ago and that humanity was created on a literal seventh day in terms of the approximate 24 hour timespan. Now be it known that overall very few subscribe to this “hard-core” creationism.

Many more would support a more liberal view of creationism in an attempt to reconcile physical evidence that we have gleaned from nature itself. While still supporting the claim that Adam and Eve were the original humans, this would also claim that there was an Intelligent Design to it all. It was not in fact random actions between particles in which the evolutionary processes of life began, but an instantaneous instance of humanity through the will of God. This maintains the literal side of Genesis as both scientific and historic narrative, while upholding the evidence of science. So it goes, scientific knowledge is simply working from the wrong perspective with the right evidence and must conform both evidence and theory to what Genesis tells us.

Controversial Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson argues the biological side of the debate in his book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth as a biologist writing a letter to an imaginary Southern Baptist pastor (Wilson was raised in a Southern Baptist household). (Wilson through his stunning claims of sociobiology argues that our social nature is a product of evolutionary adaptation as a specie. This essentially boils religious and social processes in human groups and cultures down to biological principles. This is one of the few upheavals in the biology community that the two-time Pulitzer prize winner has caused).

In one quote Wilson states the following:

Life was self-assembled by random mutation and natural selection of the codifying molecules. As radical as such an explanation may seem, it is supported by an overwhelming body of interlocking evidence. It might yet prove wrong, but year by year that seems less probable. And it raises this theological question: Would God have been so deceptive as to salt the earth with so much misleading evidence? (See link above for source)

This pulls away the veil of what we deem to be evidence versus what is actually not and also points to the very problem in the science and theology dialogue in which the Creation Science and Intelligent Design theories get entangled. This is, as I have stated before, that mythic narrative becomes interpreted through the lens of scientific method and literal historical narrative which results in serious problems. The primary problem is this: If I am retelling a narrative as simple as going to the supermarket to buy milk, what would you do in all the powers of human rationality to prove to someone else who did not hear that story directly from me that it was true? If you were using history, you might try to find my receipt, go to the location where I made the purchase, find out the brand of the milk I purchased and learn something about its origin and the shipment that was made to the store for the day I made the purchase, you could also appeal to other narratives of those at the store on the same day all to corroborate the accuracy of what the person retelling the narrative has just told you.

If you were corroborating that story with scientific data you may look for biological and chemical data to confirm who was there, but it would be far more difficult to reconstruct the narrative with that data.

Now this is all presupposing that you could not go directly to the source to hear the narrative which would help the process, but corroborating the narrative with evidence would still be needed.

But this reveals the problem when we try to use a method that works in one area as a method to explore the validity of a claim in another area. This is the problem that Wilson creates and the problem that the theologian creates when each tries to boil down another discipline of knowledge and collapse its premises into their own area of expertise. The basic epistemological truth is that the scientists ought not distort theological argument by assimilating it into scientific discourse and the theologian ought not distort scientific method by assimilating it into theology. But this does not mean that both areas of knowledge and understanding of the world in which we live and all of the life therein ought not discuss similarity in the midst of difference in their respective understandings of it. There should rather be more room for both to let the other discipline stand on its own ground and then to engage it on its own terms as an other.

Perhaps the former problem of attempting to assimilate one way of knowing into one’s own is a product of our current university graduate system of education that favors and demands disciplinary depth and narrow focus rather than an integrative synthesis of the wider implications of that narrow and focused idea. Graduate study in which research is conditioned and therefore in which knowledge is propagated to future generations seeking the holy grail of academic stardom jettisons the idea of liberal education that does look at breadth and integration of ideas across disciplinary boundaries. Theologians are few and far between who can allow multiple areas of knowledge to stand firmly in their own area of expertise in which their claims are both rational and valid expressions of reality, and scientists in that same vein are also rare indeed. Barbour, Polkinghorne and Torrance are but the cream of the crop of a rather short list of those who can speak in both areas quite rationally while seeking integration and noting irreconcilable differences between the two.

However, Wilson does quite a lot to explain the irreconcilable differences in an attempt to move beyond them, but also stirs the pot in the process leaving one to wonder if the project was successful or will impact the environment in the way that he would like to see its intended effect occur. Rather than offer validation the to the narrative explanation of the cosmos, note that the evolutionary explanation will always have irreconcilable differences and then appeal to both sides of the argument to re-focus the energy on stewardship, the intellectual pot stirs up once more, theology is given no validation in its claims of the creation narrative, and the confusion of the disciplines continues rather than the intelligent integration of the two in the midst of their noted distribution in forming a more nuanced picture of reality.

The continued discussion must include the theologian taking seriously that perhaps the evidence that science has been amassing about evolutionary biological processes and even the claims that our social, psychological, and religious behavioral processes are integrated into that evolutionary perspective have credible and rational truth. Whether viewed as random processes or intentional acts from God in the form of random processes (an argument perhaps not pursued strongly enough by the theologian) it is hard to deny the validity of the Book of Nature as a source of God’s continual revelation to humankind as participants in those very processes of life and death. But the scientist ought not look at the evidence in science and not also understand that the religious dimension of human life cannot simply be relegated to mere biological and psychological processes when that dimension still holds such a powerful cultural and social force in how we shape human life together and how that relationship is integrated in the whole of creation. That inchoate yearning for something transcendent cannot physically prove the existence of God, but it also must raise a question that the scientist ought to ask about human nature that it may indeed be far more than the sum of its consitutent parts and therefore mitigates the explanatory power of science on its own to explain who we are and why we are here.

Therefore as humanity is inscribed into the fabric of the universe religion cannot ignore the wealth of knowledge science lends us in the explanation of humanity’s relationship to and within the universe’s complex structure. And as the inchoate yearning for that which transcends that physical structure of the universe appears to be an irreducible element of human nature, the scientist cannot ignore the claims of the theologian to paint a more complete picture of humanity.