Your deep dive is majestic and very much appreciate it. This quote above all helped me,
This is my name for a science, taken from St. John of Damascus, that would cautiously pursue its knowledge for the sake of wisdom and love, rather than power, and being willing to abstain from the pursuit of knowledge that would be gotten at too high a cost…”
It is the power quotient buried deep in modern science that I had to stain. And my tongue and cheek historical analysis is meant to enliven the conversation so that we might see that the core of the modern problem is an individualistic love of power over nature, over “all the immaterial nonsense“
Peace to you indeed! Thank you for being here! Christos Voskrese!
I'll take the Genesis story over evolution as an origin story, a philosophical framework, even as a more full description of reality than what evolution offers, you don't need to convince me there, but those bones of Turkana boy have got to have a place in the story somewhere right? It's not like the scientific evidence for evolution doesn't exist, but the atheistic story told using that evidence is incomplete. Maybe the missing thing is something like (and I'm spit balling here) the denial of dependence on the powers above (gods, spirits, angels, etc) alongside the dependence on the stuff below (cells, bones, electrons, wavefunction collapses etc). The story of evolution tells us something like "we come from the dust" which is not totally a lie, it's just only half of the truth, because we also come from the breath of God.
Love this. The trick is how to enter "the rest of the story". Because it does indeed tell us something! Love it. You are so right. But if we take the scientists mindset into the exploration of the rest of the story, well, we get stuck telling a story about data. Which is, just as you say Zac, an incomplete telling. For the me the hard part is to reside in the unknown, the scientific unknown. But it's not really that hard if you have the teleological and Christic world view and hold it as the first principle... The "holding" is the hard part in our modern mechanistic world I think...
Zac - a great observation! It was a union of the material (mater or mother) with the pattern (pater or father) that created human.
This idea of union is so innate & natural that a young child picks up on it. The Enlightenment seems to have tried to discover “light” by studying “dark” - discarding one half of the union. The book Language of Creation has helped my modern, Protestant brain tremendously to see in a more ancient, more meaning filled way. When Moses went up the mountain, he received a pattern (the commandments AND the Tabernacle plans) - the theme of pattern repeats again & again.
A recent observation - after Christ’s death & resurrection, He appeared to the disciples. As the story goes, “He breathed on them” (John 20:22). As did the Father (Genesis 2:7) so did the Son!
This sort of reminds me of light people with roots in NY, IL, and UT trying to convince people in South America that they are really Hebrew, but they come doing a gnostic twist.
Also, you hit the nail on the head in regard to the fatherless. An orphaned 3 year old has asked my son, who is almost, but not quite yet, her father, if he is “dad”. None of us put this idea in her head, that’s how deep our need for a father is. She knows she has a father even though her’s has always been AWOL and she’s looking for him. I’m hoping the one who adopts her and becomes her father, will point her to her Father who art in Heaven and teaches her that Kansas songs about mere dust in the wind only make sense if you are Fatherless. I hear the sound of dry bones rattling……
It's very interesting as a Kenyan who has recently been struggling with this stuff, on one hand we have the race problem and I've been steeped in Sowell and others for a while, and while I agree with your general thesis I'm left ambivalent especially since the state of the church here especially the evangelical ones is terrible, they're reactionary and driven mostly by American right-wing and republican think tanks and local political interests than actual thought, philosophy -most of them are openly anti philosophy - and Leakey and his family, my opposition to their Scientism and positivism not withstanding have done amazing things for the nation, much better than our politicians, so I'm conflicted. That said, as a kikuyu I think what Africa needs most right now is a story, a myth, I'm a huge fan of the inklings, Barfield, Williams and Tolkien in particular and I think we need a mythos to unite us, to give us meaning, identity, telos and to reenchant our world. I see no conflict at all between England and kikuyu and Ethiopian myth and using the universal history framework of Jonathan Pageau, I believe it can be done so we can be done with all the anti colonial, post colonial, deconstructionist, anti racist, post modernist nonsense here. And most of all maybe solve the cultural problems, orient a people towards higher values like truth, beauty and justice not the cultural framework we work in right now in Africa of sheer materialistic gain and etcetera. Anyways, thanks for the good work, wouldn't have learnt all this without you guys and kingsnorth among others, we're listening and you're helping immensely.
Zac,
Your deep dive is majestic and very much appreciate it. This quote above all helped me,
This is my name for a science, taken from St. John of Damascus, that would cautiously pursue its knowledge for the sake of wisdom and love, rather than power, and being willing to abstain from the pursuit of knowledge that would be gotten at too high a cost…”
It is the power quotient buried deep in modern science that I had to stain. And my tongue and cheek historical analysis is meant to enliven the conversation so that we might see that the core of the modern problem is an individualistic love of power over nature, over “all the immaterial nonsense“
Peace to you indeed! Thank you for being here! Christos Voskrese!
I'll take the Genesis story over evolution as an origin story, a philosophical framework, even as a more full description of reality than what evolution offers, you don't need to convince me there, but those bones of Turkana boy have got to have a place in the story somewhere right? It's not like the scientific evidence for evolution doesn't exist, but the atheistic story told using that evidence is incomplete. Maybe the missing thing is something like (and I'm spit balling here) the denial of dependence on the powers above (gods, spirits, angels, etc) alongside the dependence on the stuff below (cells, bones, electrons, wavefunction collapses etc). The story of evolution tells us something like "we come from the dust" which is not totally a lie, it's just only half of the truth, because we also come from the breath of God.
Love this. The trick is how to enter "the rest of the story". Because it does indeed tell us something! Love it. You are so right. But if we take the scientists mindset into the exploration of the rest of the story, well, we get stuck telling a story about data. Which is, just as you say Zac, an incomplete telling. For the me the hard part is to reside in the unknown, the scientific unknown. But it's not really that hard if you have the teleological and Christic world view and hold it as the first principle... The "holding" is the hard part in our modern mechanistic world I think...
Zac - a great observation! It was a union of the material (mater or mother) with the pattern (pater or father) that created human.
This idea of union is so innate & natural that a young child picks up on it. The Enlightenment seems to have tried to discover “light” by studying “dark” - discarding one half of the union. The book Language of Creation has helped my modern, Protestant brain tremendously to see in a more ancient, more meaning filled way. When Moses went up the mountain, he received a pattern (the commandments AND the Tabernacle plans) - the theme of pattern repeats again & again.
A recent observation - after Christ’s death & resurrection, He appeared to the disciples. As the story goes, “He breathed on them” (John 20:22). As did the Father (Genesis 2:7) so did the Son!
This sort of reminds me of light people with roots in NY, IL, and UT trying to convince people in South America that they are really Hebrew, but they come doing a gnostic twist.
Also, you hit the nail on the head in regard to the fatherless. An orphaned 3 year old has asked my son, who is almost, but not quite yet, her father, if he is “dad”. None of us put this idea in her head, that’s how deep our need for a father is. She knows she has a father even though her’s has always been AWOL and she’s looking for him. I’m hoping the one who adopts her and becomes her father, will point her to her Father who art in Heaven and teaches her that Kansas songs about mere dust in the wind only make sense if you are Fatherless. I hear the sound of dry bones rattling……
Kansas! Dust in the wind... that brings back some memories sister!
It's very interesting as a Kenyan who has recently been struggling with this stuff, on one hand we have the race problem and I've been steeped in Sowell and others for a while, and while I agree with your general thesis I'm left ambivalent especially since the state of the church here especially the evangelical ones is terrible, they're reactionary and driven mostly by American right-wing and republican think tanks and local political interests than actual thought, philosophy -most of them are openly anti philosophy - and Leakey and his family, my opposition to their Scientism and positivism not withstanding have done amazing things for the nation, much better than our politicians, so I'm conflicted. That said, as a kikuyu I think what Africa needs most right now is a story, a myth, I'm a huge fan of the inklings, Barfield, Williams and Tolkien in particular and I think we need a mythos to unite us, to give us meaning, identity, telos and to reenchant our world. I see no conflict at all between England and kikuyu and Ethiopian myth and using the universal history framework of Jonathan Pageau, I believe it can be done so we can be done with all the anti colonial, post colonial, deconstructionist, anti racist, post modernist nonsense here. And most of all maybe solve the cultural problems, orient a people towards higher values like truth, beauty and justice not the cultural framework we work in right now in Africa of sheer materialistic gain and etcetera. Anyways, thanks for the good work, wouldn't have learnt all this without you guys and kingsnorth among others, we're listening and you're helping immensely.