CELEBRATING IN-DEPENDENCE DAY

A SERMON FOR YEAR C, 5th Pentecost, Proper-8
Copyright © 2007 Nathan L. Bostian
Scriptures: Galatians 5:1,13-25; Luke 9:51-62

What was your favorite holiday as a kid? Which holiday did you enjoy the most, regardless of whether or not you got presents?

For me the answer is simple: The Fourth of July. Independence Day. Perhaps it is because in the town I grew up in, it was the one day of the year when it was legally sanctioned to BLOW THINGS UP.

As a kid, I had this ritual leading up to Independence Day. I would build models of tanks, and jeeps, and even balsa wood airplanes for weeks before the fourth of July. I would collect armies of little green army men. And the week before, I would prepare the battlefield by building fortresses, and digging trenches, in our front lawn.

Then the day would come. I had positioned my soldiers. I had attached bottle rockets to my balsa wood planes. The tanks and jeeps were filled with miniature explosives. I had a lighter in one hand, and fists full of fireworks in the other.

A Short Lexicon of Probabilistic Epistemology

This article is about epistemology: the study of how we know what we know. The main thesis here is that we do NOT come to know things by becoming absolutely certain of them, so that we do not need faith to believe them. I do not believe- due to the noetic effects of our own finitude and the corrosion of sin- that we can have absolute certainty. Such certainty only applies to God's own knowledge. Instead, we can only have degrees of certainty… Or, put better, degrees of probability that any explanation [A, B, or C] actually conforms to a given Reality [X].

To Matt on the Problem of Petitionary Prayer

My buddy Matt Tapie recently wrote a blog that deals with faith in God and the problem of petitionary prayer (i.e. Prayers that ask God to DO something to help us). The central problem is always this: Why does God help some and not others? A few major solutions have arisen to deal with this problem:

Are all "miracles" just coincidences, completely explainable by scientific cause and effect? In this case, God is like a scientist who made this huge science fair project we call "creation", and then sits back passively to watch it run. This, by the way, is called Deism, and it leads directly to Atheism, because if God is nowhere involved in Creation, then there is no need of using God as a causal or explanatory factor at all.

Or, is God bound by the processes of the Universe to evolve along with it, growing and changing as the Universe grows and changes, like a soul that grows with a body? In this case, God cannot do anything other than what is already happening, because what is happening- good and bad- is God's personal evolution. God is doing the best God can. This is called process Theism, or panentheism, and because it leads to a view in which God never intervenes in Cration to express His personality, it usually leads to pantheism. Pantheism is the view that "God" is really the impersonal life force of the universe, source of good and evil, and unknowable to any personal being (like us).

So, all of the major solutions seem to deny key features of the Biblical revelation of God we find epitomized in Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate. This God is personal, does "intervene" on some occasions, does do "miracles" (but infrequently), and does seem to be moved by petitionary prayers. But, why is God not moved by EVERY petitionary prayer (if, indeed, he loves everyone)? Here is what I wrote to Matt:

Does Atheism Cause Child Abuse?

[An essay on the logical implications of one's worldview on morality]

I recently had a discussion with a young atheist who could not believe in God because of all the pain and suffering in the world. In particular he pointed out child abuse and the death of innocents as a key stumbling block. I pointed out that without God, he had no basis to call such things "evil", since there is no evil in a materialist framework, only personal values and opinions. He had no clear answer to this, other than to say that he did value moral goodness, and he did believe that children are necessary even in an atheist worldview for the "continuation of the species". I simply retorted that he had no basis for such values from within his worldview, and he had to "back door" such values into his system from Christianity. Then we moved on with the discussion…