Not so Kathy Fisher. [Schiffer, my bad!] She tries, finally, to be motherly. But the title of her blog post is Again, Dan Brown? New Novel ‘Origin’ Spurns Faith - a motherly reproach. We'll pass on that and go to some worthwhile matters:
Dan Brown's Crisis of Faith
Dan Brown's success is almost inconceivable: The 53-year-old author has more than 200 million books in print in 56 languages. Three of his thrillers have been made into movies, and the success of those blockbuster films makes it likely that Origin, the fifth in the Robert Langdon series, will also attract the attention of Hollywood.
Brown was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of a mathematics teacher and a church organist. It was that combination of interests which laid the foundation for his lifelong focus on the interplay between science and religion. He was raised in the Episcopalian Church but fell into atheism when he failed to find satisfactory answers to his nagging questions about the integration of science and faith. In a 2009 interview with James Kaplan, he said:*
I was raised Episcopalian, and I was very religious as a kid. Then, in eighth or ninth grade, I studied astronomy, cosmology, and the origins of the universe. I remember saying to a minister, 'I don't get it. I read a book that said there was an explosion known as the Big Bang, but here it says God created heaven and Earth and the animals in seven days. Which is right?' Unfortunately, the response I got was, 'Nice boys don't ask that question.' A light went off, and I said, 'The Bible doesn't make sense. Science makes much more sense to me.' And I just gravitated away from religion.
A little contrast.
I had no professional Churchmanship in my background. A mother left off a Salvation Army carreer (her beliefs now Catholic or close to, and I mighht have sth to do with it). She started med school and is passionate about nature.
My grandparents on her side were both Evolutionist, gramp buying me, when I was very young "Försvunna världar" (the Classics Illustrated "Lost Worlds") after a former stepfather, a Chemist and an Atheist had already introduced me to dinosaurs and millions of years.
I spent time pondering how a fish could change into an amphibian.
My granny bought me "Människans förfäder" from an English original I cannot identify (it's decades since I held the book, it is not sold any more, so I cannot look it up), but it starts with a lot of scientific method and ends in England's Iron Age, might tell someone else sth.
All this before my ma first introduced me to the New Testament and only after that to the Bible as a whole.
There was a time when I tried to conjugate the two, playing around with gap theory and day age or gaps in genealogies, possibilities which my mother hand mentioned without stating she believed them.
And at that time I also tried to find evolutionary answers to mind, to abiogenesis, to origin of language.
To me it was, and will always be, the supposed science which from a certain time on did not make sense. The Bible makes more sense to me.
Today's article on CMI is for a book mentioning the impossibility of an evolutionary theory of the mind:
Consciousness: a problem for naturalism
by Daniel Tate
https://creation.com/consciousness-problem-for-naturalism
It seems from the review that the reviewed authors, Brad Harrub and Bert Thompson, both Ph.D., came to same conclusion as I as a boy of 10 +.
The second groups of studies we might refer to as deficit studies. These studies involve demonstrating that when a particular region of the brain is damaged, a corresponding psychological deficit is consistently noted. Neither correlation nor deficit studies explain how the region of the brain is involved in the psychological process in question; they merely establish that it is involved in some way. For this reason, they are incapable of excluding the involvement of a non-physical soul in the same process. If I observe the gearbox of a car, I may note that whenever the car is moving, the gears rotate, and that whenever the car is stationary, they do not. That hardly proves that the gearbox alone provides a complete explanation of the motion of the car. Similarly, if I damage the gearbox of a car, it may well no longer be capable of driving. Again, however, that hardly demonstrates that the gearbox alone makes the car move.
In other words, as I have said myself, for that exact reason, there is no study which proves either that thought is produced by or even that any thought at all can be produced by brain activity in the physical and biochemical sense.
It is also not a thing which is inherently likely, I have even more often mentioned that even if you can do maths on an abacus, the abacus is not likely to understand maths at any level at all.
Matter doesn't have what it takes to understand.
Computer linguistics in action have more than once tipped me off that the computer software really doesn't understand what it transcribes from scans, what it gives subtitles to, what it translates.
Spell check is a nuisance, I was writing a Latin sentence with accusative plural of the masculine pronoun "eos" and I got the Spanish "eso" ... if it was not own clumsiness, perhaps induced by post-hypnotic suggestions or sth ... and if so, I have seen other abhominations of spell check.
In other words, I completely agree with Brad Harrub and Bert Thompson and with their reviewer Daniel Tate.
Here too:
There is an absolute qualitative gap between the production of, and response to, signs (whether innate or conditioned) found in some animals, and the complex inflections and grammatical structures found in human languages.
This is exactly what made me dump evolution as the real large picture forever, even if I had a later brief (ok, less than ten years) relapse into evolutionary human prehistory (after the then common thought that Neanderthals were killed off by Cro Magnon, I was actually prepared to write a pre-history fiction, a genre I liked and still like, with Neanderthals showing Abel like and Cro-Magnon showing Cain like traits**). But it never went as far as doubting God's primordial necessity for the existence of the human mind.
So, my own road is the opposite one to Dan Brown's. It will remain opposite to the one he has so far taken on this issue.
That said, I think Dan Brown is in some sense more honest than a reviewer of his, already quoted.
The Myth of Catholic Irrationality
For Dan Brown, the creation narrative in Scripture was a deal-breaker. If the earth wasn't created in a literal seven days, then the Bible could not be true. But was he right?
Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI affirmed that the Book of Genesis is not intended as science, that it teaches that God created the earth but does not offer a literal explanation for how he did it.
Saint John Paul II, in his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio, likens faith and reason to “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Rather than fearing scientific inquiry, the Pope embraced its potential to lead the soul toward God. He explained:
God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word, to know himself – so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
It's unfortunate that the youthful Dan Brown didn't receive a more substantial answer from his minister. If he had, perhaps he would have continued his pursuit of truth, eventually exploring the depths of Catholic teaching which can be found in the Catechism or in the works of great theologians like Aquinas.
Six literal days is not the issue. One can believe in a one moment creation, like St Augustine, but that poses the question whether that one moment in which also Adam and Eve were created was on a Sunday, like the Creation of Light (also in that one moment), or on a Friday, as the sequence of six literal days suggests.
Now, after suggesting one moment creation with a great deal of argumentation end of book V, beginning of book VI of De Genesi ad Literam libri XII, St Augustine actually goes on to say that believing six literal days may not be as subtle, but it is good enough.
Now, Kathy Schiffer mentioned Aquinas ... she gave an Amazon with a preview, but arguably this might not include what St Thomas has to say on the six days.
Look here instead:
Summa Theologiae > First Part
First Part (Prima Pars)
http://newadvent.com/summa/1.htm
Here is a part worth noting:
The Six Days (Matter)
CREATION: The work of creation (65***).
DISTINCTION: The ordering (66) of creation towards distinction. The work of distinction in itself: The first (67), second (68) and third (69) days.
ADORNMENT: The fourth (70), fifth (71), sixth (72) and seventh (73) days.
GENERAL: All seven days (74***) in common.
Kathy Schiffer recommends "John Paul II" and "Benedict XVI" in fairly gushing terms. I do not see them as having the same faith as St Thomas Aquinas, nor as St Augustine of Hippo, nor as anyone I can clearly and definitely without reservation consider as Catholic.
A Jesuit a few years ago presented his moder view of Biblical exegesis (compatible with JP-II and B-XVI), but noted that St Robert Bellarmine had a much more Fundamentalist one (perhaps it was in the context of the Galileo affair).
So, Dan Brown has a certain reason to consider Catholicism as Creationist, even if that does not amount to considering either as irrational.
I think that the quote from JP-II comes dangerously close to Baha'i. I think in Baha'i, "two wings" might be a metaphor for gender equality, but Baha'i has the same attitude to faith and reason.
St Thomas Aquinas considered Faith and its opposite Incredulity not as coordinated with Reason, but as qualities of it.
Even if JP-II had led an examplary life, saying things like this would make him uncanonisable.
Perhaps his quest would have led him to the Magis Center, founded by Jesuit Fr. Robert Spitzer, where science, reason and faith are integrated and explored, or to the Faith and Reason Institute, where issues challenging contemporary society are explored within the framework of the “two wings.”
I looked up the Magis Center. One essay title there is "A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysical Proof of God (with a response to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion)"
This very title admits that the Five Proofs for God as given by St Thomas are, at least by him and similar evolution supporters, not totally "contemporary". A brief glance tells me, he is omitting Prima Via, in which God is moving the Universe each day around Earth (if you look up parallel passage, much longer, in Summa Contra Gentes) and this causes movements all the way down to it, including day and night and heat and cold and winds of passage and Oceanic currents, which prove God, since the outer layers move the inner ones and there cannot be more and more faster and faster moving outer layers "all infinity" outwards, moving what is moved.
He is so content with Proof 2 (from causality) and 3 (from necessary and contingent existence). Like so many other contemporary Thomists, even if St Thomas himself said that Prima Via or Proof 1 was the most obvious.
So, Kathy Schiffer, you proved there are Modern Catholics in disagreement with Catholicism as previously believed. Not that Catholicism is in any way shape or form more open to Evolution than the Episcopalian Dan Brown saw.
Let's analyse the dialogue again, shall we?
Or, read it again, and analyse, rather?
- Dan Brown
- 'I don't get it. I read a book that said there was an explosion known as the Big Bang, but here it says God created heaven and Earth and the animals in seven days. Which is right?'
- Minister
- 'Nice boys don't ask that question.'
- Inner event
- "A light went off, and I said,"
- Dan Brown
- 'The Bible doesn't make sense. Science makes much more sense to me.'
What exactly did the Minister mean by saying 'Nice boys don't ask that question'? My hunch is, he was ironising over "nice boys" as being not curious enough to ask that question.
What inner light went off in Dan Brown? My hunch, not necessarily a disgust with the Minister's Creationism (he hadn't documented any), but with his insincerity. If the Minister had said instead "one of the books is wrong", Dan Brown would have had some reason to listen. The science teacher presumably had said "one of the books is wrong" - and come off as sincere. The Minister, no.
And that same insincerity is the exact same one as in the quote from JP-II.
That pretty much does give Dan Brown a good reason to paint his fictive Catholics as very Traddy Trads. It gives him a relief from the real very Modern Mod he had for Episcopalian minister, I should not wonder.
As to his painting of fictive Catholic Churchmen as very evil, often enough, that is a Traddy Episcopalian thing, the Anti-Catholic Propaganda of Bilious Bale or Foxe' Book of Martyrs being from the first century after Henry VIII, and therefore having some venerable veneer for Anglicans, and presumably also for ex-Anglicans.
I have actually meditated on founding a Silas Fanclub, after the Albino "Opus Dei Monk" Silas - but unfortunately some would miss the irony. That is one reason why I often refrain from irony, even if capable.
Another is, it can be taken in a bitter way, like I think Dan Brown took the irony of that Minister.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Gregory the Thaumaturge
17.XI.2017
* The link to the interview gives a url plus an empty white page. See:
https://parade.com/106060/jameskaplan/13-dan-brown-life-after-da-vinci-code/
At least, an empty white page is what I see.
** I probably never figured out which population group should represent the Biblical Seth.
*** First and last Q of section are 65 and 74, the ASCII numeric values for A and J. In Swedish AJ (pronounced like "I" or "eye") means "ouch". Perhaps a look at these QQ might give a Catholic non-Creationist promoting Aquinas OVER Creationism reason to exclaim "ouch" as well ...
No comments:
Post a Comment