Who Are These People?
It turns out, crocoduck is a very popular search item.
I mentioned it as I LIVE BLOGGED! the debate of the millennium. Kirk Cameron showed a picture of a crocoduck that disproved evolution and therefore scientifically proved that you have a creator and therefore scientifically proved the existence of God and therefore scientifically proved that you're a sinner therefore scientifically proving that you need Jesus. He would probably say that at some point he was joking. Though where I would locate the end of that joke is probably different from where Kirk would.
Remember, I grew up Catholic so had a whole different type of cuckoo to believe. Bread literally turned into flesh, wine literally turned into blood. (Even though all of my literal senses suggested they were still bread and wine.) The Baby Jesus couldn't have cried or caused his parents any of the grief that babies seem to cause. Stuff like that. Stuff that Evangelicals scoff at and poo poo as silly. Stuff that only a superstitious papist could believe- not like the scientifically provable idea of irreducible complexity that proves a design that therefore proves a creator that is God, or the perfectly tenable proposition that humans and dinosaurs played with each other. I'm a late comer to the culture that assumes scientists are atheists or that evolution is evil.
So- is Kirk Cameron... I'm sorry, now I mean KIRK CAMERON... is KIRK CAMERON really putting all of these things in a big pile and saying this is the way the world is? So that if you deny Christ, you're denying a fact? It's like trying to deny gravity? it's not like not understanding gravity- or being ignorant of why things fall, it's like trying to say things don't fall. Is that what this is about? Oh sure those crazy Romanists on one side with their voodoo don't make sense, and those mystics with their flighty ecstasy on the other are just nuts- but here we have a Christianity that's all facts and order.
I don't think we realize what's at stake with that. I mean, I know that what advocates of Intelligent Design, Creationism really, that's what these supposed critiques of evolutionary theory are all about, want to do is give religious and moral propositions some sort of factual certainty, but that's a really bad idea (the attempt is a bad idea- the project itself is impossible).
Just to be clear, Intelligent Design isn't science. Once you look at something you don't yet understand or can't figure out and say, "That's 'cos of God," you're not "doing" science. You can say it, you're just not saying it as a scientist- or if you're already not a scientist, you're not making a scientific proposition. But it's not theology either, well, it's not Christian theology. Maybe it's some sort if anthro-theistic positivism. It's hard to categorize because it doesn't make sense, even if we really, really, really want it to.
It seems it is little more than a desire to make faith not faith, to confuse what one can say is a fact with what we believe, to make God something like "the car is in the driveway or the car is not in the driveway," something that requires no devotion or relation, only observation and assent. That hardly sounds like the transcendent God only identifiable as I Am and known through various experiences, after which one says God is a shepherd, God is a provider, God is a healer, by which one means, "God has shepherded me," "God has provided for me," "God has healed me..." It certainly doesn't sound like knowing God through Jesus.
"What canst thou say?" (a Quaker thing) doesn't mean, "Are you on the same page as us?" It certainly doesn't mean "You know Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs and someday we're all going to fly naked through the sky, don't you?" It means what can you say?
Don't say what you can't say. And certainly don't, with your fingers crossed, try to build silly rhetorical structures that let you to pretend what is impossible for you to say is inevitable.
So maybe a crocoduck is the perfect symbol for this.
If I Die Tomorrow, Send the Qweenbeen Flowers
Submission- Sex Pistols
Clap Your Hands!- Clap Your Hands say Yeah
I Can't Win- The Strokes
Outlaw Blues- Bob Dylan
Misery- Green Day
Pictures of You- The Cure
Let's Go To Bed- The Cure
Give It Up Turn It Loose- James Brown
Nature Boy- David Bowie
Everything is Broken- Bob Dylan
Lover Man- Sarah Vaughan
Auf Achse- Franz Ferdinand
The 59th Street Bridge- Simon and Garfunkle
5 comments:
Why is it impossible for religious and moral propositions to have "some sort of factual certainty"?
Well... sometimes I get the menstrual cramps real hard. (I think it's the drugs that make that seem funny or relevant to me).
In the post I said "give them some sort of factual certainty"- here for clarity I will say "any factual certainty."
I say it's impossible as a logical point about the limits of language and what facts are. I'm not saying religious or moral propositions can't have any type of certainty, just not factual certainty.
I figure that I should qualify three things: give, factual, and certainty. All of this sounds pretentious. But I suppose I should be glad that anyone reads my interjournal let alone wants me to explain what I've said, so...
Specifically, I would say that the ID movement and a lot of philosophers of religion try to do something that is not possible. But more generally, factual certainty is not something that is given. I mean, facts aren't the type of things to be given certainty- they are facts because they don't require that. I realize someone could say there are different types of facts- with varying degrees of certainty. I think that's being confused about what facts are- or makes the word meaningless. But worse if we try to apply it to moral or religious things, things of faith- then we make faith meaningless too. Or we try to make it mean something it couldn't mean.
Facts is facts- for sciencey type stuff.
But life's not all facts and science.
I would say there's soteriological certainty, but that is/requires a subjective relation and commitment to God- not an acceptance or reptition of an objective fact.
Secondly,did somebody call me ugly and then think better of it in the deleted comment?
Not that I might not be ugly, but they realized it could hurt my feelings and they didn't want to do that so deleted the comment?
I appreciate that.
I find the banana argument even more amusing. You can find it, and some absolutely hysterical responses to it, on YouTube - I've put links to my favorites on my blog at http://blue.butler.edu/~jfmcgrat/blog as well.
I had a student share the banana argument with me before one class. I asked him what happened if you turnned the banana around or tried to apply this to pineapples.
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