I read the interview with Ian McEwan in Spectrum (32) (Sydney Morning Herald 23Feb08) this morning, and got to thinking.
The sub-head: "The big issues of our age - belief in God, terrorism and, yes, global warming - now challenge this literary giant."
I thought first about his pals: Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens; the militant atheist, as the caption writer styles him. I was struck by his view of the upbeat positiveness of science. Of Dawkins, I suppose, being as he's a scientist.
Now, with their evolutionary beliefs forming the main stay of their atheism, I wondered at the wheel spinning traction that theistic evolution has with its apologetic: that's it: "wheel spinning". Not good if 'traction' is what one is after! TE confronts no one, compels no gospel response, and tells atheists that their religious take on the world is right! Crazy talk.
Oddly, the evolutionary-to-athesim counter apologetic is not influenced by the looking both ways of theistic evolution, or the head in the sand of 'its not about evolution' of SADists. Well if people's beliefs about the world are not the connection point for evangelism, I don't know what is.
What I found hard to grasp in a way was the moral tone of McEwan; moral epistemology is always a great point of contact with atheistic moralists, where morality is a mere aesthetic, as far as I can tell. There is no teleology in materialism, so no true, only a fake, morality of convenience.
I'm also amused by the materialist's unsurprising fake high ground. "Faith" is criticised, and well it might be, as it truly is a belief against evidence, or critical thinking, in many people's minds. But the fake high ground is exposed when it is realised that 'science' or reliance on it or on the bunch of uncritical humanisms that abound today is a faith position as much as any other man-made religion has. And a religion it is (read The Myth of Religious Neutrality by Roy A. Clouser). So easily can one populate a criticism of humanism, or materialism, by the very words that materialists use of 'religion' as they see it that I'm surprised to see little of such criticism by 'public' Christians. Perhaps, like the Lord Archbishop of Sydney, they are too busy compromising with materialism to be able to confront it.
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Yes, Eric, I read the same article today. What I find fascinating is that the Sydney Anglican Diocese believes that it's a relevant creature for today's world yet I cannot note one single point of change it has impressed upon the unbelieving world. Sure, it has made some contribution, for better or worse, within the Anglican ranks itself, but nothing which has challenged the worldview of the surrounding atheist culture.
Yes, the "evangelical" ghetto!
This is a disturbing account of how faulty theology on origins leads to faulty morality — Explaining the Anglican abortion submission:
Baron Habgood of Caverton, the retired Archbishop of York and Primate of England, a prolific writer on public and ethical issues, was instrumental in articulating for a new era this ‘gradualist’ position on abortion.
He wrote in his highly influential book, Being a Person, 1998, p. 250- 251, that ‘the idea of a complete spiritual entity being created by God for each individual in a moment in time makes no more sense than the idea of a sudden transition from pre-humans to humans in the emergence of the human race. Things happen gradually, and time is a dimension of our very being… the lack of personal attributes does not imply that such an embryo is of no significance. It is significant to its parents and to God, but not so significant that its potential to become a person should override all other considerations’.
I.e. this infamous liberal uses the alleged evolutionary history of man to justify a pro-abortion stance. Of course, this is reminiscent of the old ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny fraud of Haeckel.
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