Nicolas Steno: bishop and scientist
Today marks the 374th birthday of Nicolas Steno, a pioneer in geology and anatomy in the 17th century. Steno (Neils Stensen in the original Danish) was born in 1638 in Copenhagen, and after completing his university education in Denmark he spent the rest of his life travelling throughout Europe and collaborating with prominent physicians and scientists.
While the common approach of scientists at the time was to appeal to the ideas of Aristotle and Pliny, Steno was determined to examine evidence for himself and draw his own conclusions. He was guided in this by his religious convictions about God as Creator of the natural order.
Stressing the importance of investigation and observation, he wrote:
“One sins against the majesty of God by being unwilling to look into nature’s own works and contenting oneself with reading others; in this way one forms and creates for oneself various fanciful notions and thus not only does one not enjoy the pleasure of looking into God’s wonders but also wastes time that should be spent on necessities and to the benefit of one’s neighbor and states many things which are unworthy of God.”
Steno made important advances in anatomy and physiology, most notably in muscle research. He determined that the heart was a muscle (it was thought by many at the time to be a generator of heat), and also demonstrated geometrically that muscles under contraction do not increase in volume (they just change their shape).
But his biggest contribution to science is in the fields of geology and paleontology. After studying the similarities between living sharks and fosillised shark teeth, he decided that the fossils were actually the remains of once-living sharks, now buried in rock. He was not the first to make this connection, but he did go on to define the fundamentals of stratigraphy, the branch of geology that studies rock layers (stratification).
Considering the question of how a shark tooth (or anything else) could become encased in rock, he decided that it must at one time have been surrounded by liquid while the layer below it was already rock. Known in stratigraphy as the law of superposition, this ultimately means that every layer of sedimentary rock must be younger than the layer below it, and this observation is the basis for all fossil dating today. Steno’s theory that the fossil record could be chronologically ordered by the rock layer in which each fossil is was found is fundamental to modern evolutionary theory.
As a follow-up, he also studied crystals and determined Steno’s Law of constancy of interfacial angles, which basically says that the angles between corresponding crystal faces are the same for the same mineral. Steno’s geological work was published in De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus, or Preliminary discourse to a dissertation on a solid body naturally contained within a solid in 1669.
In 1675 he was ordained into the priesthood, and in 1677 was made a bishop apostolic in the north of Germany. After 9 years of devoted minstry to the poor, he died in 1686.
Happy birthday, Nicolas – you are yet another great example of Christian faith informing ground-breaking scientific advances.
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God and the “God particle”
The Telegraph has an interesting short piece from Alistair McGrath today. He looks at the parallels between the faith in the Higgs boson and faith in God, both based on explanatory power rather than direct experiemental observation. He concludes:
“Some tell us that science is about what can be proved. The wise tell us it is really about offering the best explanations of what we see, realising that these explanations often cannot be proved, and may sometimes lie beyond proof. Science often proposes the existence of invisible (and often undetectable) entities – such as dark matter – to explain what can be seen. The reason why the Higgs boson is taken so seriously in science is not because its existence has been proved, but because it makes so much sense of observations that its existence seems assured. In other words, its power to explain is seen as an indicator of its truth.
“There’s an obvious and important parallel with the way religious believers think about God. While some demand proof that God exists, most see this as unrealistic. Believers argue that the existence of God gives the best framework for making sense of the world…
“There’s more to God than making sense of things. But for religious believers, it’s a great start.“
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Read the rest of the article here:
Higgs boson: the particle of faith
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On the relative efficacy of cathedral demolition strategies
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I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca – or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame.
- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
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Cathedrals are too high for bulldozers. In the Soviet Union under Stalin and the German Democratic Republic under Ulbricht they used explosives instead.
– Richard Schröder, Professor of Philosophy in Berlin
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Where God meets physics
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Eminent thinker and commentator Revd Dr John Polkinghorne, Fellow of the Royal Society, will be giving a public talk – titled A Destiny Beyond Death – tomorrow lunchtime at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. It is part of a series organised by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. Here he gives an overview of his understanding of the relationship between what are generally considered to be two opposing schools of thought.
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Science and religion are two of the most powerful influences in contemporary society. Some see them as competing alternatives but, as someone who is both a former Cambridge science professor and an Anglican priest, I want to take them with equal seriousness. I am proud that Cambridge was the first university in the UK to endow a post in theology and science: the Starbridge Lectureship is held by Dr Fraser Watts.
The possibility of fruitful interaction between science and religion arises from the fact that both are concerned with the search for truthful understanding, to be attained through motivated beliefs. Of course, this is a philosophically contested claim, but my scientific experience encourages me to adopt the stance of ‘critical realism’ in relation for the insights of both science and religion. The term ‘realism’ signifies the belief that we can gain actual insight into the nature of reality, while the description ‘critical’ signals that this knowledge is never complete or absolutely certain, though sufficiently well supported by evidence to make commitment to it a rational act.
Science and religion look at different domains of encounter with reality. Sciences deals with an objective dimension, in which things can be manipulated and events repeated, thereby affording it access to the great weapon of experimental verifiability. Yet we all know that there are many levels of encounter with reality – both personal and, I would say, the transpersonal encounter with divine reality – in which neither manipulation nor repetition are possible without doing violence to the reality encountered. We never hear a Beethoven quartet the same way twice, even if we replay the same recording. In this personal realm, testing has to give way to something like trusting.
The difference in domains means that science and religion ask different questions of reality: in the former case how things happen; in the latter whether there is meaning, purpose and value in what is happening – issues that science tends to rule out of its discourse. Science and religion, therefore, complement each other, rather than being rivals on the same turf. For full understanding, we need both sets of insights. To take a homely example, the kettle is boiling because gas heats the water (process) and because I want to make a cup of tea (purpose). Some people have argued that these differences are so completely separate that they have nothing to say to each other, but I believe that this view is mistaken. Their questions are different but the answers given must be mutually compatible. Returning to the homely example, putting the kettle in the refrigerator would cast doubt on my intention to make a cup of tea.
The common quest for truth makes science and religion friends and not foes, with gifts to offer each other. Science can tell religion what the nature and history of the universe is actually like, a gift to be received with gratitude as theology seeks to understand the cosmos as a divine creation. It makes me sad to see some religious people refusing to take seriously the truth that science has to offer. The gift that religion has to offer to science is not to answer its questions – for we have every reason to expect that scientific questions will receive scientific answers – but to take science’s insights and set them within a broader and deeper context of intelligibility.
The metaquestions that arise from the experience of doing science take us beyond science’s ability to answer. One example must suffice: ‘Why is science possible at all in the deep way that it has proved to be?’ Of course, evolutionary process must have shaped human brains so that we can understand the everyday world in which our ancestors had to survive. But why are we also able to understand the cloudy and fitful world of quantum physics, which appears so far removed from the everyday world? Why is it that mathematics – the most abstract of disciplines – which furnishes the key to unlock the deep secrets of the physical world?
It is an actual technique of discovery in fundamental phyics to seek theories which are expressed in terms of what mathematicians can recognise and agree to be beautiful equations. This strategy is no act of aesthetic indulgence, for time and again it has proved to be the case that it is just such theories that provide the long-term fruitfulness of explanation which persuades us that they describe the way the physical world is. The universe has proved to be astonishingly rationally transparent and rationally beautiful. Is this just a random piece of luck or is it a fact of great significance? Science exploits this fact, but is unable to explain it,
I have been describing a world which in its deep intelligibility could fittingly be described as shot through with signs of mind. I believe that it is wholly reasonable to believe that it is the divine Mind of the Creator that lies behind the wonderful order of the cosmos. I like to say that I am ‘two-eyed’, viewing the world through the view of science and religion, a binocular vision that enables me to see further and deeper than I would with just a single eye. I need to take science and religion with an equal seriousness.
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Photo: Sunbeams spectacle - Copyright Gordon Richardson
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Desecrating the Temple: The challenge to literalists
I really think that those who endorse a “plain reading”, strictly literalist interpretation of the Bible are missing out on some of the most awesome stuff that God has given us the Scripture. Let me give a bit of background to explain what I mean:
I was recently asked to preach on Mark 13, in which Jesus describes the end times (and also some more imminent times). It’s a complex chapter and I’m not going to try and unpack all of it here, but I was particularly struck by his description of the Temple desecration. Jesus starts by saying that the Temple will be destroyed, torn apart block by block, and also says that the fulfillment of this prophecy will give the listeners confidence in what he tells them about the end times. The destruction of the Temple will happen soon, in the lifetimes of his listeners, and then they will know that what he says about his second coming is also true.
So why do I say that this is a challenge to a literalist reading of Scripture? Well, let’s look at what Jesus says. He warns the listeners to flee from the destruction, and he does it using these words:
“When you see ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ standing where it does not belong—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.” (Mark 13:14, NIV)
The bit that I want to focus on is is expression, “the abomination that causes desolation”. The abomination that he’s talking about is a perversion of a holy thing: in the simplest sense, it’s the referring to an incident shortly after the Romans broke the seige of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and the Roman general Titus placed an idol on the site of the Temple. So that seems easy enough to understand with a plain reading of the text.
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But there is more to it: Jesus follows up that expression by saying, “let the reader understand”, which seems a very odd remark. Why does he say “reader” instead of “listener”? Note that this is not an editorial insertion from the writer of Mark, this is a quote from Jesus speaking to his disciples. Jesus’ reference to “reader” is his way of pointing out the historical parallels with his prophecy: his expression “the abomination that causes desolation” is in fact a direct reference to the book of Daniel, which his disciples – being dilligent readers of the Hebrew scriptures – would understand. Daniel wrote in about 536 BC, and one of his prophecies foretold the invasion of Israel by Antiochus IV Epiphanies, who sacked Jerusalem in 168 BC and sacrificed a pig to Zeus on the altar of the temple. Nearly 400 years before this event, Daniel prophesied about it thus:
“His armed forces will rise up to desecrate the temple fortress and will abolish the daily sacrifice. Then they will set up the abomination that causes desolation.” (Dan 11:31, NIV)
Now, this is the textual allusion that Jesus is making to “the reader”, but he is also talking about the end times and his return as described in the Revelation. In the apocalyptic setting of Mark 13, where Jesus is also warning against false prophets and false claimants to the second coming, the “the abomination that causes desolation” can further be taken as a description of the ultimate exemplar of its type, the Antichrist. In Revelation the Antichrist is a perverted version of the Christ, the ultimate false prophet, the abomination that causes desolation for all who follow him.
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There are many more layers to this passage, but I hope that is sufficient to illustrate my point. There are at least three levels to what Jesus is saying here, and his remark “let the reader understand” indicates that he was intending his prophecy to be understood on multiple levels. This is a powerful and important passage, it’s not simply a foretelling of the Roman destruction of the Temple. But if we restrict ourselves to a rigidly literalist reading of the text, we cannot possibly unravel the full extent of what Jesus is telling us here.
Of course I’m not advocating any silly post-modernist “every viewpoint is equally valid” rubbish. But it’s vital to realise that the Biblical texts were written on multiple levels, and usually have multiple layers of meaning.
A literalist reading risks losing much of the richness that God has given us in his Word.
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Revisiting the Law
Recently, I’ve been reading through the Old Testament. I haven’t read the latter books of the Pentateuch for a while, so it was an interesting experience. The Pentateuch makes up the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and also comprises the Jewish Torah. This collection is also referred to as the Books of the Law, which is what Jesus is talking about when he mentions “the Law and the Prophets” (e.g. Matt. 5:17, Matt. 7:12).
Genesis and the first half of Exodus are largely composed of narrative, but from that point on there are indeed large chunks of detailed instruction from God which dominate the books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. And when you hear people talking vaguely about “all those crazy rules and stuff in the Bible”, it’s generally the last three books of the Pentateuch that they have in mind. So as I worked my way through these books, I was expecting to find an endless list of obscure and arbitrary prohibitions.
In contrast, I was delighted at just how sensible all the laws are. But there are a few important things to bear in mind as you read them.
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The Laws of Moses were given to a people who had been slaves in a foreign land for 400 years, and were now being moulded into a new nation. The Law is not there to restrict the Israelites’ freedom, it is God’s gift to them to help them live in harmony and build a successful society. Also, as God’s chosen people, they need special instruction on how to worship God. So most of the laws are focussed on teaching the nation how to interact with each other and with God.
But even with that proviso, there are a few laws which seem a little odd. There are two more things that we need to understand about the function of the Law:
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Firstly, as God’s people, chosen to be set apart for Him, it was important that the Israelites did not become corrupted with the religious practices of other nations.
The principal concern in this regard was keeping them separate from the influences of Canaanite religion, which was rife in the country to which God was leading them. Canaanite religious practices centred around worship of Baal, the god of thunder and fertility, and the bringer of rain; and Asherah (also called Athirat), who was the mother – and also consort – of Baal. (Another of the regulars in the Canaanite pantheon was Anat, the virgin goddess of war and strife, who was both wife and sister of Baal). A large part of Canaanite religious practice involved trying to increase fertility by bringing together objects associated with Asherah and those which represented Baal, so that their “sympathetic magic” would simulate Baal having sex with Asherah and thus increase the harvest.
Kinky, I know. But the point of this whole deviant diversion is that the laws which seem most arbitrary to us are ones like “Don’t wear clothes made of wool and linen” (Deut. 22:11), or “Don’t boil a young goat in its mother’s milk” (Ex. 34:26). The modern response to those passages is, respectively, “Why not?”, or “Why on earth would anyone do that in the first place?”. In each case, the principle behind those sort of injunctions is all about avoiding the idolatrous Canaanite religious practices centred on Baal and Asherah.
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Secondly, the laws are not like a modern penal code; they are not meant to be exhaustive. Instead, they function paradigmatically, by giving examples of the kind of behaviour that God wants from His people.
This is why the Israelites are instructed, for instance, to “Build a parapet around the roof of your house” (Deut. 22:8). The custom among the Near Eastern civilisations was for guests to sleep on the roof of the house (which was flat), and the instruction here is to make sure that they may do so safely without worrying about falling off if they roll over in their sleep. It is a paradigmatic example of the kind of concern for others that God wants us to show. Instructions about leaving gleanings in the field (Lev. 19:9-10) are an example of offering welfare and charity to the poor and destitute, but they also illustrate a principle of charity that is equally relevant even if we are not farmers.
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For a more thorough treatment of reading the Law in context, I strongly recommend Chapter 9 of How To Read the Bible For All Its Worth, by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart.
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Doing a little mythbusting…
Hard to believe that in such an intellectually advanced age there are still some who cling tenaciously to the notion that “Jesus was not a real historical figure”, but apparently the light of education has still not penetrated all the deep corners.
Should be unfortunate enough to find yourself accosted by denialists, you may find this essay series by James Hannam useful. Hannam writes in his introduction:
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“The thesis that Jesus never existed has hovered around the fringes of research into the New Testament for at least a century but it has never been accepted as a mainstream theory. This is for good reason. It is simply a bad hypothesis based on arguments from silence, special pleading, and an awful lot of wishful thinking. It is ironic that certain atheists will buy into this idea and leave all their pretensions of critical thinking behind…
In this four-part series, it is not my intention to study the minutiae of the various arguments. Instead, I will focus on three central contentions often advanced in discussions about Jesus. These are 1) the lack of secular references, 2) the alleged similarities to paganism, and 3) the silence of St. Paul.”
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Hannam deals with each of these contentions in a highly readable and well-researched series of essays. Read the rest of Is Jesus Christ a Myth? here:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
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Hannam holds degrees in physics and history from Oxford and London universities, and his doctorate in the history of science from Cambridge University, and recently published God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, the first history of medieval science written for the layperson. (You can also read more from him at Quodlibeta).
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Occupy the Headlines
Occupy Wall Street is an odd movement with a very mixed bag of messages. I’m tempted to say that at least it’s generating some much-needed publicity for real social issues, but at the same time I’m worried that the messengers are a little too entangled with their own message. Because despite what the banners read, if you make at least $48 000 a year (before tax), you are actually “the 1%”. (To check exactly where you sit on the scale, have a look at the GlobalRichList website). It doesn’t really help when you have Kanye West wandering through and “encouraging” the protesters while wearing enough bling to pay off Rwanda’s national debt, either.
Whether the movement is actually going to have any impact is debatable, but there are a few real social injustice issues which I think are worth highlighting.
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Billions of people around the world live in desperate poverty. This doesn’t mean that they are envious of your new iPhone 4S because they’re still stuck with the iPhone 4, it means that their kids die of malnutrition and diarrhoea, both of which are preventable for a few cents. Overwhelmingly, they are in that condition due to factors completely out of their control – war, famine, lack of access to social infrastructure – and not due to lack of ambition or application on their part.
The other issue is the willful disregard for the connection between an opulent lifestyle in some quarters and degradation of human life in others. Yes, I’m perfectly aware that economics is not zero sum and that wealth can be created without taking it away from others. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the fact that dreadful living conditions in large parts of the world are a direct result of lavish lifestyles in others.
Poverty and famine are mostly driven by greed. On a large enough scale, there’s always been plenty of food to go around: what causes famine is not a local crop failure but rather a political failure. When there is stable government, there is no famine because food is redistributed from areas with surplus. Hunger in Africa is used as a weapon in civil wars: you can donate all the food aid that you like, but until you stop funding war (through arms deals, through the diamond trade, through oil and mineral contracts) the food is just going to rot in the warehouse of the local warlord. You’ll note that all the aforementioned sources of war funding are hugely lucrative for Western corporations. European and North American farm subsidies systematically crush the competitiveness of third-world food imports. (Here’s a fun stat: the G8 spends about a billion dollars a year on agricultural aid to poor countries, and about a billion dollars a day on agricultural subsidies at home. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Albert of Monaco probably get more aid money from the EU than Africa does).
Environmental degradation is a related issue. The climate impact from the contrails of corporate jets will not be suffered by someone sitting in an air-conditioned office (not to mention the cars, the factories, the toxic chemicals from making the aforementioned iPhones). And this is not a new phenomenon, either, or one that is linked solely to current concerns around anthropogenic climate change. Centuries ago, warlords in India were granted estates on the slopes of the Himalayas, and in order to increase the value of their holdings they controlled and diverted the floodwaters which run down from Nepal. Which is why the whole of Bangladesh still gets washed into the ocean every few years.
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The point is, these are serious issues that have catastrophic consequences for large parts of the world. So on the one hand, it seems worrying that these issues are being entangled with a bunch of relatively rich people who are protesting while tweeting about it on their smartphones. On the other hand, these issues have already been ignored for decades: the wealthy nations have looked at poverty, famine and suffering in the third world and said:
“We don’t care.”
Is it true that any publicity is good publicity?
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Happy Birthday, KJV
This year marks the 400th anniversary of a momentous event in the English-speaking world: the first publication of the Authorised Version of The Bible, commonly known as the King James Version.
The translation project was instigated by King James I as a way of reconciling some of the theological disagreements between high-church Anglicans and Puritans. The transition from Latin Vulgate texts to early English bibles had not been a smooth one, and in 1604 James called for a completely new translation, “as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek.” Published in 1611 after 7 years of diligent work by 47 different scholars, the Authorised Version was not just the most influential version of the Bible, it was one of the most influential works in the history of the English language.
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I should probably put in a brief caveat here: strictly as a translation of Scripture, the KJV isn’t my personal favourite. The task of converting the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic texts into a serviceable English equivalent is a continual challenge for each generation of translators, and the KJV tends more towards formal over functional equivalence than several more modern translations. Opinions will differ on this point, and that’s ok.
But as a work of literature, the KJV sits on the loftiest peaks in the English language. Seriously, this is the book that gave us all these expressions:
How are the mighty fallen (2 Samuel 1:19)- A still small voice (1 Kings 19:12)
- Eat, drink, be merry (Luke 12:19)
- By the skin of my teeth (Job 19:20)
- The root of the matter (Job 19:28)
- Be horribly afraid (Jeremiah 2:12)
- A fly in the ointment (Ecclesiastes 10.1)
- A drop in the bucket (Isaiah 40:15)
- A house divided against itself cannot stand (Matthew 12:25)
- Like a lamb to the slaughter (Jeremiah 11:19, Isaiah 53:7)
- A law unto themselves (Romans 2:14)
- A man after his own heart (1 Samuel 13:14, Acts 13:22)
- A thorn in the flesh (2 Corinthians 12:7)
- Pride goeth before a fall (Proverbs 16:18)
- Put words in his mouth (Exodus 4:15)
- A broken heart (Psalm 34:18)
- Baptism of fire (Matthew 3:11)
- Feet of clay (Daniel 2:31-33)
- Let there be light (Genesis 1:3)
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Great orators such as Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln were powerfully influenced by the KJV for both idiom and cadence. The majestic structure of Martin Luther King Jr’s 1963 “I have a dream…” speech at the Lincoln Memorial draws heavily from passages in the King James Version. The sentence:
“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
…comes directly from Isaiah 40:4-5 in the KJV.
Likewise, the beautiful imagery of:
“No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
…is drawn from Amos 5:24, “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”
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In his 2001 book, In The Beginning, Alistair McGrath documents the creation and impact of the KJV Bible. He writes:
“The King James Bible was a landmark in the history of the English language, and an inspiration to poets, dramatists, artists, and politicians. The influence of this work has been incalculable. For many years, it was the only English translation of the Bible available. Many families could afford only one book—a Bible, in whose pages parents recorded the births of their children, and found solace at their deaths. Countless youngsters learned to read by mouthing the words they found in the only book their family possessed—the King James Bible. Many learned biblical passages by heart, and found that their written and spoken English was shaped by the language and imagery of this Bible. Without the King James Bible, there would have been no Paradise Lost, no Pilgrim’s Progress, no Handel’s Messiah, no Negro spirituals, and no Gettysburg Address. These, and innumerable other works, were inspired by the language of this Bible. Without this Bible, the culture of the English-speaking world would have been immeasurably impoverished. The King James Bible played no small part in shaping English literary nationalism, by asserting the supremacy of the English language as a means of conveying religious truths.”
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“Paradoxically, the king’s translators achieved literary distinction precisely because they were not deliberately pursuing it. Aiming at truth, they achieved what later generations recognized as beauty and elegance. Where later translations deliberately and self-consciously sought after literary merit, the king’s translators achieved it unintentionally, by focusing on what, to them, was a greater goal. Paradoxically, elegance was achieved by accident, rather than design.”
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There’s probably no Dawkins…
…now stop worrying and enjoy Oct 25th at the Sheldonian Theatre.
So read the signs on buses in the Oxford area at the moment, lamenting the sudden failure of courage from New Atheism’s leading apologist.
It seems that while Richard Dawkins is happy to have the occasional televised cup of tea with an English archbishop who is too polite to respond to his bombast, he is not quite so bold when it comes to debating religion with any serious Christian apologists. After lengthy prevarication, Dawkins has retreated securely into his shell and refused to debate William Lane Craig at the Sheldonian.
As the proposed debate was in his hometown, I don’t think travel costs were the issue. It’s really hard to see this as anything other than cowardice on Dawkins’ part.
Read more on the story here in The Guardian.
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