Where are philosophers glamorous and influential?

There are not many countries in the world where someone who has taught Epistemology at a leading university, would also be featured regularly in a glossy magazine, and be a political mover and shaker.

Today's Australian reprints an interesting article French Thinkers are Men of Action Too by Ben MacIntyre from The Times (London). It contrasts the role of intellectuals in public (and political) life in France and the U.K.  Here is an extract:

Almost everything about BHL [Bernard-Henri Levy] is, from a British point of view, annoying: the vanity and showmanship, the white Charvet shirt unbuttoned to reveal the tanned chest, the film-star wife, the elevated language and the mane of unacceptably glossy French hair.

Hard as it is to like this preening self-styled "militant philosopher", I find it impossible not to admire him. From Bosnia to Afghanistan to Libya, BHL has been a cultural fixture, expounding, criticising, agitating; sometimes wrong, frequently pretentious, but always there, the modern incarnation of the intellectuel engage, the committed thinker.

British intellectuals are simply not engaged in the politics of international affairs in the same way. We expect our thinkers to be scholars, quietly toiling away to explain afterwards what it all meant, but not to hold forth on matters of conscience or affairs of state.

Do you want to be a star?

After 37 "chapters" of Job and his friends philosophising and arguing about the theological significance and explanation of Job's suffering, the LORD speaks:


³¹"Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades
   or loose the cords of Orion?
³²Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season,
   or can you guide the Bear with its children?
³³Do you know the ordinances of the heavens?
   Can you establish their rule on the earth?

Although this is humbling to the modern reader it had probably even greater significance to readers in the Ancient near east where the distinctions between stars, deities, kings, and pharoahs was blurred. This then ties back to the "polemical" nature of the Genesis account of creation which again is stark contrast to Babylonian epics.

Another angry young man

Continuing my reading through Job this morning I got up to chapter 32 where the angry young man Elihu speaks his mind. My post last year suggested that perhaps he was so angry because he was scared that the answers were not as simple or as definite as he wished.
Coincidentally, later in the day I read an article Wayne Rooney faces two-game ban for a recent expletive filled outburst in front of the TV cameras. It was interesting to read what Harry Rednapp (manager of rival Tottenham Hotspurs) said about successful young footballers:

"Why is he so angry? I don't remember Bobby Charlton doing that when he scored or smashed one in from 30 yards, or Jimmy Greaves.

"Why do some of these young players have to be so angry with the world? They're getting hundreds of thousands of pounds to play. I respect him as a player, but he's a silly boy and he shouldn't have done it."

The epistemology of Job

¹² "But where shall wisdom be found?
   And where is the place of understanding?
¹³Man does not know its worth,
   and it is not found in the land of the living....
²³"God understands the way to it,
   and he knows its place.
²⁴For he looks to the ends of the earth
   and sees everything under the heavens.
²⁵When he gave to the wind its weight
   and apportioned the waters by measure,
²⁶when he made a decree for the rain
   and a way for the lightning of the thunder,
²⁷then he saw it and declared it;
   he established it, and searched it out.
²⁸And he said to man,'Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom,
   and to turn away from evil is understanding.'"


Job 28

The gracious divine Gift of freedom, rest, and joy

Two months ago I posted Freedom, rest, and joy on the Sabbath about Karl Barth's exposition of Genesis 2:2,3. This morning I read more of Barth's wonderful discussion of the theological significance of Genesis 2:3

So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

Barth discusses how this first Sabbath is the beginning of God's covenant of grace with man.

It cannot be emphasised too strongly that this invitation comes at a time when creation, and particularly man, had nothing behind it except its creation by God, so that there can be no question whatever of a relationship between this Sabbath observance and any work completed by himself. Before and apart from all work and conflict, irrespective of any merits of his own, he is invited to cease from his own works, to rest, and therefore to enter into the freedom, rest and joy of God Himself. In his case, therefore, the Sabbath as the sign of the given promise does not stand at the end but at the beginning, i.e., at the beginning of his working week. 

And the promise itself, whose sign is the Sabbath, cannot be tied to his own volition, achievement or merit. What precedes it when it first occurs is wholly the work of God and not of man. God has taken it upon Himself to do and accomplish what can now be for man as well as for Himself an occasion for freedom, rest and joy. As far as man is concerned, he has simply to recognise that God has really done all that is necessary, that He has invited him to participate in His rest, and that he may accept this invitation. In other words, he is left wholly and utterly with the grace of God. When this is addressed to him, there begins the history of man with God. Hence this really begins on Sunday and not on a weekday. It begins with the Gospel and not with the Law. It begins with the freedom of man and not his commitment; with a holiday and not an imposed task; with joy and not with toil and trouble. The latter will follow soon enough, but only in succession to the former. 

That God rested on the seventh day, and blessed and sanctified it, is the first divine action which man is privileged to witness; and that he himself may keep the Sabbath with God, completely free from work, is the first Word spoken to him, the first obligation laid on him. It is thus decided once and for all that the history of the covenant which begins here is to be the history of the divine covenant of grace. And with this decision creation is completed as the revelation of the will of God with regard to the existence and being of His creation. With it creation itself is also completed: "The heavens and the earth … and all the host of them." Creation took place in order that man's history might commence and take place as the history of the covenant of grace established between God and himself. According to the first biblical witness it took place because God's love for man willed to be incomparably strong in the fact that man and his whole world and therefore the object of God's love should become God's creation and therefore belong from the very outset to God. Creatureliness, and therefore creation, is the external basis of the covenant of grace in which the love of God for man moves towards its fulfilment. It is in this teleology that it is presented in the first creation narrative of the Bible.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 3.1: The Doctrine of Creation, pp. 218-9.

The Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard, Rembrandt (1637)

Science fiction in Christianity Today

There is a really strange article Christ of the Klingons in Christianity Today which sympathetically discusses some wild claims about the theological significance of string theory by a theoretical physicist Gerald Cleaver [who works in M-theory (a version of string theory)] and a philosopher Robin Collins. Here are a few statements I found rather strange:

"To me [M-Theory] offers a Christian God whose creative ability is much larger than we ever could imagine before," Cleaver says.

To Cleaver, M-Theory's multiverse, with its dizzying variety, unending moments of new creation, and perhaps infinite scope, makes perfect sense as the work of "a God of the infinities, who creates eternally."

I've always had problems perceiving the infinite God that we believe in [as] creating life in just one spot," Cleaver says. "Over the entire past and future of humankind, there'll probably be no more than a few hundred billion humans to interact with God on this earth. That is a finite number that does not make consistent theological sense to me."

"The beauty of it suggests that this is the true picture of reality," Cleaver says. "The beauty of a theory is extremely important."

[He quotes Paul Dirac, a famous theoretical physicist who said in 1963]

"It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit [an] experiment… . If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress."

I think theology is silent on the merits of specific scientific theories. I would say that Dirac's view borders on being unscientific. Arguably, this obsession with "beauty" is why he did not make any significant contributions for the last 30 years of his career.
It does not matter what we think about the beauty of a theory. What matters is whether it can explain experimental data and predict the outcomes of new experiments. String theory is yet to do that and some physicists are skeptical whether it will ever be falsifiable. So is it science? Theology is grounded in reality and so I see no need for it to engage with such speculations.

Our subconscious self-righteousness

This morning, I really enjoyed our reading group which is going through Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace. This post is just about one intriguing issue which came up. Volf begins the chapter, "Exclusion" with comments from Michael Ignatieff about patronising (and self-righteous) European attitudes to ethnic conflicts. [Incidentally, Ignatieff is currently leader of the Liberal Party in Canada].

A 1995 journal article by Ignatieff, The seductiveness of moral disgust  considers the motivations for and failures of Western military interventions, particularly that in Bosnia and Kosovo:

There was a strong element of narcissism buried inside the more obvious motivations leading the West to intervene. We intervened not only to save others but also to save ourselves, or rather an image of ourselves as defenders of universal decencies. We wanted to show that Europe "meant" something, stood for toleration within a peaceable and civilized civil society. This imaginary Europe, this narcissistic image of ourselves, we believed was incarnated in the myth of a multiethnic, multiconfessional Bosnia.

The essay is reprinted in a book, The Warriors Honour: Ethnic war and the modern conscience. The book also contains an essay, "Nationalism and the narcissism of minor difference". Apparently this is an illusion to the claim of Freud that a signature of Narcissism is the amplification of "minor difference".

So what? To me this is just another example of how humans all have an incredibly powerful subconscious force driving us towards self-righteousness. This is what drives the creation, maintenance, and promulgation of religion.

God has placed within us a strong desire to be right and to be in right relationship. But we pervert this desire by trying to establish our own righteousness by self-justification and comparison to others unrighteousness. But the only way we can be right with God and be justified is if we accept his gift of righteousness provided by Jesus. (Romans 3:21-26).

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector, Gustave Dore