Quantum Non-Linearity: “Church in England Spiritually Dead” According to Ham.

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

“Church in England Spiritually Dead” According to Ham.

Ken Ham: Flying in the Teeth of the Evidence

Ken Ham has obviously read James Knight’s latest Network Norwich & Norfolk’s article. Ken quotes a large chunk of it on his blog here. Ken is a little upset about James calling AiG a “cult”. Ken is also not very complimentary about state of the church in England, or even in America for that matter:

Oh, by the way, look at the state of the church in England: it is all but spiritually dead. I’ve ministered in England about 15 times now and have met with countless church leaders there. I’ve seen for myself that this once-Christianized nation is pagan. Most of the next generation doesn’t even believe in God. Yes, that is the outcome of this heretical teaching, which sadly not only pervades the church in England but is also infecting the church now in the USA. Sadly, academics like Peter Enns and those from Calvin College (and others as quoted in the Christianity Today article) are leading generations of church leaders to undermine the authority of the Word instead of standing uncompromisingly upon it as we must do!

As far as I’m aware the church in England is far from spiritually dead; what Ken means, of course, is that a church rates as all but spiritually dead, or at least compromised by heresy, if it doesn’t accept YEC teaching and ministry. Thus, as far as Ken is concerned that puts the great majority of the English church well beyond the pale of God's pleasure! No wonder he sees the English church as dead; so very little of it swallows AiG's flintstone travesty of palaeontology, hook line and sinker. And am I glad: The last thing we want in this country is an expensive outsized wooden toy boat dominating the shore of an undersized ornamental lake; it would be an affront to both atheist and Christian scientists in this country. It is this sort of doctrinaire sectarian perspective by Ken and AiG that ticks one of my cult check boxes.

As I’ve said before I have a reserved view toward evolution and I have a lot of respect for many of the anti-evolutionist correspondents on Uncommon Descent. I can even understand how your average Joe and Josephine Pugh, puzzled and confused by the times they are in, are looking for something that narrows the domain of cognizance thereby taking the strain off their creaking epistemic resources. For them a literal interpretation of early Genesis provides a myth that makes sense of reality and suits them just fine; at the very least it cuts down the vertiginous time dimension to anthropic proportions, if not the agoraphobic spatial dimensions of the cosmos.

I have to say that in spite of being potentially sympathetic I have a great deal of trouble trying to summon up respect for AiG and what it stands for with its “Our Word is God’s Word” ethos. But the rampart “dead cert” fundamentalism of AiG is not the only problem I have: Frankly, when it comes to technical subjects commentators like Beyond Our Ken Ham lack competence and aptitude. Give me William Dembski, or Hugh Ross any day – but not Ken Ham. Ken’s expensive Theme Park projects are just a little too kitschy and sentimental for me. Ken really needs to sort out his PR even in America before he brings his anti-science circus and far right Christian extremism over the pond.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: If not spiritually flatlinind, the church in England is certainly very sick. As a South African who has lived here for 10 years, I am saddened by the dearth of strong, active Christians in whole sectors of society, especially the workplace and have visited so many churches where a handful of people work very hard to keep things chugging along with no growth or gospel outreach. I frequently ponder the reason for this and wonder if it is because the people in this country have 'little need for God. Perhaps the recession is an opportunity for people to reevaluate their lives and put their faith in something other than worldly things.; 1:01 AM, September 04, 2011
Timothy V Reeves said...: With a comment like the above we need to factor in the following:

1. The state of society as whole is being confused with Christianity
2. Sectarian and proprietary religious interests (like YEC for example) if not satisfied in the eyes of religionists will, needless to say, register as a failure in Christian witness.
3. Quoting a source on the history of Christianity: "An extraordinarily large amount of Church history is one of internal conflict, of disagreement about the nature of the tradition".

Consequently I take the above comment with a large pinch of salt.; 11:25 AM, September 05, 2011

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

“Church in England Spiritually Dead” According to Ham.

2 comments:

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION