The Strange New World in the Church: A Review essay of \u27With the Grain of the Universe\u27 by Stanley Hauerwas

Hauerwas\u27s refusal to translate the argument displayed in With the Grain of the Universe (his recent Gifford Lectures) into language that anyone can understand is itself part of the argument. Consequently, readers will not understand what Hauerwas is up to until they have attained fluency in the peculiar language that has epitomized three decades of Hauerwas\u27s scholarship. Such fluency is not easily gained. Nevertheless, in this review essay, I situate Hauerwas\u27s baffling language against the backdrop of his corpus to show at least this much: With the Grain of the Universe transforms natural theology into witness. In the end, my essay may demonstrate what many have feared, that Hauerwas is, in fact, a Christian apologist — though of a very ancient sort

The Theological Origins of Engineering

Knowledge of our roots can sometimes help us figure out how we ought to proceed. Many claim that engineering began in ancient antiquity with the Egyptian pyramids, Archimedes\u27 inventions, or the Roman aqueducts. Others give contemporary engineering a more recent history, tracing its origins to the Industrial Revolution or the Enlightenment. Yet what is often overlooked is the fact that contemporary engineering owes part of its identity to medieval monasticism. The advantage of remembering this history is the bearing it has on the questions What is engineering for? and How ought engineering be practiced? Michael Davis makes the claim that, in Western thought, engineering has always played second fiddle to science because we in the West have been bewitched by the myth that engineering is nothing but applied science. But engineering is not merely applied science. Engineering has its own distinctive identity

Rethinking Fideism through the Lens of Wittgenstein’s Engineering Outlook

In an otherwise superbly edited compilation of student notes from Wittgenstein’s 1939 Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cora Diamond makes a false step that reveals to us our own tendencies to misread Wittgenstein. The student notes she collated attributed the following remark to a student named Watson: “The point is that these [data] tables do not by themselves determine that one builds the bridge in this way: only the tables together with certain scientific theory determine that.” But Diamond thinks this a mistake, presuming instead to change the manuscript and put these words into the mouth of Wittgenstein. But to make such a change shows a lamentable, even if commonplace, ignorance of engineering. Diamond apparently shares this ignorance with Watson, and presumably with most of us as well, especially those of us who are educated in math and science, because this education makes us think we understand engineering by extension. But we do not. I intend to show why Wittgenstein the former engineer could never have made the remark Diamond wants to attribute to him. The reasons drastically undermine the myth of Wittgensteinian fideism and have bearing on the manner of our conversations about religious pluralism

Teaching Engineering Ethics by Conceptual Design: The Somatic Marker Hypothesis

In 1998, a lead researcher at a Midwestern university submitted as his own a document that had 64 instances of strings of 10 or more words that were identical to a consultant\u27s masters thesis and replicated a data chart, all of whose 16 entries were identical to three and four significant figures. He was fired because his actions were wrong. Curiously, he was completely unable to see that his actions were wrong. This phenomenon is discussed in light of recent advances in neuroscience and used to argue for a change in the standard way engineering ethics is taught. I argue that engineering ethics is better taught in the form of a design course in order to maximize somatic learning

The \u27P\u27-Word: Conversion in a Postmodern Environment

Allow me to write frankly about the “P”-word. There is great concern about the proliferation of the “P”-word. In the past decade, over 1,500 articles and 2,000 books have come into print bearing the P -word in their titles. Nearly 1,000 of these books are still in print. Everywhere we turn we find that we have been inundated with the “P”-word. And so we have come to fear for our culture. The P -word? “Postmodernism.” Granted, postmodernism is a slippery concept; there are many versions, many postmodernisms. But should Christians fear postmodernism? To be sure, the modern era proved to be no particular friend of the faith. For whatever faults existed in medieval churches, at least they were well-attended. But since the seventeenth century, church attendance in the West has plummeted. In a good week, five percent of Western Europe attends church, while church attendance in the United States barely makes it into double digits. So the ending of modernity may not be a bad thing. Yet what guarantee have we that the gospel will fare any better in these supposedly postmodern times

The Descriptive Problem of Evil

Language is like the cane in the hand of the blind person. The better one becomes at getting around with the cane, the more he or she is apt to forget the cane but through the cane perceive the objects scraped and tapped by the other end. A defective cane may distort the world perceived by the blind person. So too, defective use of language threatens to muddy our understanding of the things we talk about. When discussing something as difficult as natural evils, a frequently undetected defect in our language use is “overly attenuated description.” In this piece, I sketch three conditions under which attenuated description multiplies confusion in general conversation. I then describe ways in which the lexical shortcuts taken in discussion about “natural evils” can be corrected. However, it remains to be seen whether conversants are willing to pay the cost involved. For in order to talk most clearly about “natural evil,” and thus understand the problem most deeply, those doing the talking must employ descriptions that require correlative practical actions in order to be intelligible. I give an example of how the juxtaposition of two components, rich descriptions and appropriate action, makes possible the trained eye to perceive a pattern that, while falling short of an explanation per se, serves as a satisfactory response to natural evils. I conclude my essay by proposing a protocol for advancing the conversation about natural evils

Dynamical Similarity and the Problem of Evil

Discussions of evil commonly fault God for not “doing something.” Defenders of God respond that God had good reasons for not “doing something.” Detractors observe that if a human being can snatch the toddler from the path of the oncoming bus, why does not God snatch the bus from the path of the oncoming toddler? The underlying assumption in such discussions is that God’s “doing something” is similar to humans’ “doing something.” If human beings bear the image of their Creator as the Abrahamic faiths maintain, it is natural to suppose that divine action is similar to human action. But what sort of similarity is in play? That more than one kind of similarity can be brought to bear is often overlooked. The everyday garden variety of similarity may be illustrated by imagining two congruent triangles: A glance will show that that the triangles are similar because their corresponding angles are the same. And though the sides are of different lengths, they are correspondingly proportional: if the bottom side of the smaller triangle is half that of the larger, then its other two sides will also be half the length of their counterparts. Here the simple scale is 1:2. The units of measurement are unimportant. Whether one measures in inches or centimeters, the same ratio always holds. In other words, “4 in. to 8 in.” constitutes a ratio of 1:2 as does “10.1 cm. to 20.2 cm.” Because the units of dimension drop out when the scale is calculated, this kind of similarity has been called “dimensionless similarity.” When atheistic philosophers of religion complain that God failed to “do something” about instances of gratuitous evil, they imagine the kind of divine agency being debated is a scaled-up version of human action: God’s action (should God exist) is similar to human action only bigger, stronger, faster. The employment of dimensionless similarity is a bewitching conceptual mismove that perpetuates both theological and philosophical confusion. At least as early as Augustine, Christians noted that there can be no proportion between God and creatures.3 Of course, atheist philosophers of religion cannot be held to Christian dogmas. But the underlying confusion is also philosophical. The Christian notion of God cannot be arrived at by a strategy that presumes dimensionless similarity (i.e., numerical proportion) and then adjusts the scale to account for an “infinite” term. Fortunately, the kind of modeling that relies upon dimensionless similarity is not the only kind of modeling human beings can employ. Unfortunately, however, the notion that may assist in the problem of evil is .not one that can simply be snipped out of one context and pasted into theodical discussion. It is a technical term, one on the same level of complexity as “partial differential equation” or “myocardial infarction.” As such it must be seen against the backdrop of its use-in-practice to get the point

Some Things Are Worth Dying For

In April of 1992, Kristen French, a 15 year-old girl was kidnapped and held as a sex slave in suburban Ontario. For two days she was raped and threatened with death. Surprisingly, on the third day she grew defiant, refusing to perform a particular sexual act even after she was shown pre-recorded videotape of her predecessor, Leslie, being strangled by her captors with an electrical cord. (Leslie\u27s corpse was sawn into 10 pieces before disposal.) A record of Kristen\u27s suffering was preserved on video tape too. Of interest is Kristen\u27s dying claim: Some things are worth dying for. Kristen\u27s story strikes me as a pointed example of the sort of suffering some have offered as the basis for an evidential argument from evil. For example, William Rowe captures the heart of the argument in proposition P: No good we know of justifies an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being in permitting E1 and E2. Yet I think Kristen\u27s tragedy is more troubling than that of E1, the case of the fawn languishing for days horribly and alone in the forest before succumbing to third degree forest fire burns, because I do not know what it means to say that animals are conscious of their pain. Kristen\u27s case seems also more pointed than E2, the case of the rape, beating and death of a 5-year-old, since 5-year-olds lack conceptual skills to fully cognize the evils of rape much less the sense that death is impending. Given that her story epitomizes gratuitous evil, there is something unnerving about Kristen\u27s assertion that some things are worth dying for. Taken at face value, Kristen claims to know of a good causally connected to some evil, namely, death-by-rapist, that makes the evil of some value, worth it in her words. Granted, she may have had a privative rather than a substantive good in mind (viz., the cessation of rape). Still, her story is reminiscent of others who insisted that some things are worth dying for. ... It will certainly be objected that at least some of the details of martyr stories are apocryphal. That charge doesn\u27t damage the point that I wish to make. For, whether it was spoken by the victims themselves or their redactors, a truth claim is still on the table: Some things are worth dying for

All Suffer the Affliction of the One: Metaphysical Holism and the Presence of the Spirit

When Copernicus and Galileo proposed that the earth circled the sun and not the 217 other way around, Christian believers faced the difficult prospect of surrendering a long-held belief that had seemingly undeniable support from the biblical text. After all, Joshua reported that the sun, not the earth, stood still; what could this mean if not that the sun orbited the earth? Today, centuries later, believers unanimously hold a heliocentric view of the solar system and are somewhat embarrassed by the ignorance of our pre-Enlightenment brothers and sisters. Ironically, however, such embarrassment masks the possibility that we ourselves may one day be found guilty of having held notions yet to be realized as backwards. We face just such a possibility with our conception of the Holy Spirit\u27s presence. It is my suspicion that, contrary to some of our most trenchant modern sensibilities, we are mistaken when we construe the presence of the Spirit in largely individualistic terms. Yet in this case, it is not the biblical text that is misleading. In contrast, a close inspection of the biblical record and of its earliest interpreters reveals that the earliest Christians naturally understood the presence of God\u27s Spirit primarily in corporate rather than individualistic terms. The holism that marks first- and second-century conceptions of community life tends to strike our modern ears as a form of primitive hocus-pocus. However, very recent discussions of emergence and supervenience in philosophical circles may provide us moderns with the conceptual resources necessary for better owning the biblical record. In this paper, I argue that biblical notions of the Spirit\u27s indwelling and filling ought to be primarily understood as descriptive of the Spirit\u27s relation to the believing community and perhaps only secondarily in relation to believing individuals. I begin by examining the biblical texts and the witness of the second-century apologists. I then proceed to summarize philosophical discussions regarding emergence and supervenience. I end with a suggestion that we can recover the biblical sense more fully by appropriating the language of emergence and supervenience: (1) the Body of Christ emerges from the system of individuals living under a particular form of life; and that (2) descriptions of the Holy Spirit\u27s presence supervenes upon descriptions of this particular form of communal living

Some Practices of Theological Reasoning, or, How to Work Well with Words

This Companion introduces readers to the practice of Christian theology, covering what theologians do, why they do it, and what steps readers can take in order to become theological practitioners themselves. The volume aims to capture the variety of practices involved in doing theology, highlighting the virtues that guide them and the responsibilities that shape them. It also shows that the description of these practices, virtues and responsibilities is itself theological: what Christian theologians do is shaped by the wider practices and beliefs of Christianity. Written by a team of leading theologians, the Companion provides a unique resource for students and scholars of theology alike