Time Immortal

My former professor, Denis O. Lamoureux, offers up his thoughts in a discussion of a recent paper by one George Murphy: Roads to Paradise and Perdition: Christ, Evolution, and Original Sin.

I basically agree with George, but I wish he had been more forceful. Gen 1-2 is an ancient origins account. Typical of these in the ancient world, origins is De Novo (quick and complete). The ancients saw a cow give birth to a cow, give birth to a cow, etc; and they logically extended this phenomenological experience to an original cow [termed "retrojection" It's what we do in geology]. Similarly, a human gives birth to a human, who gives birth to a human, etc, Ergo, who is Adam? Ancient science. He never existed.

Therefore, if Adam never existed, then he never sinned. And if he never sinned, then his sin was never passed down to us from him. End of story.

So what’s happening? The Holy Spirit is accommodating. NOT LYING, BUT ACCOMMODATING. Therefore, don’t go to Gen 1-3 to find out how the world was created, or how human history began — it’s not there.

What we must do is separate (not conflate as most through history and today have done) the Holy Spirit inspired Message of faith (inerrant & infallible) from the INCIDENTAL ancient origins science (the science-of-the-day). In the case of Gen 1-3, Adam is an ancient vessel that transports the spiritual Truths: humans are created in the Image of God, humans are sinful, and God judges us for our sins. Worrying about where Adam fits in the paleontological record makes about as much sense as trying to figure out where in the firmament NASA sends its spacecraft.

There’s more than just what I’ve excerpted, but I’ve always thought that this hermeneutical analysis of Denis’ has always been the important starting point for dialogues with those who take an anti-evolutionary, hyper-literalist interpretation of the Bible, especially concerning the Book of Genesis and Adam and Eve.

At any rate, read the whole thing, good Reader. And maybe check out some of the other articles in the ongoing dialogue as well.

Hmmn…that’s twice today I’ve found a reason to link to Denis’ new book on Amazon.com.

Perhaps the watchmaker is not as blind as Richard Dawkins would have us believe?

“The discovery answers an age-old question that has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random, operating like a ‘blind watchmaker’?” said Chakrabarti, an associate research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton. “Our new theory extends Darwin’s model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness.”

The first assumption here is that evolution is completely random: as far as I can tell, we don’t know that it is. Moreover, we don’t know if what appears, from our viewpoint, to be random is actually random, or is the wholly predictable response of the system to some outside influence we cannot perceive — the proverbial watchmaker, whether teleological in nature or not.

And supposing the existence of said watchmaker, teleological in nature or not as it might be, the second assumption made is that said watchmaker is “blind,” or substantially disconnected from the watch it is manufacturing. As far as I can tell, given the lack of information about the watchmaker which we are operating from anyhow, we certainly know nothing of its blindness, or lack thereof.

Which makes both assumptions statements of faith, after a fashion, and gets back to the previously discussed issue of what happens when the evidence begins to pile up against the atheist argument: “[if] the conclusion that God may have had something to do with it is too much to swallow, you propose a wild scenario without any empirical evidence.”

Note: I’m not actually disagreeing with this new study or its supposition that organisms can influence their own evolutionary course. Coming from the assumption that the Universe, and all life within it, reflects design, and in the understanding that this design has been effected through an ordained and sustained evolutionary process, it makes sense to me that the designer, in His good wisdom, gave organisms the ability to strike out along their own evolutionary paths.

Indeed, that dovetails rather nicely with certain other theological notions of the Christian faith.

No, I’m simply objecting to the creeping dysteleology that is evident in the base suppositions of the scientist quoted in the article. Because it’s not science that he’s talking about at that point.

The Deeps of Time nails one out of the park:

What happens when you discover that that the universe is improbably fine-tuned for life? If the conclusion that God may have had something to do with it is too much to swallow, you propose a wild scenario without any empirical evidence which says, essentially, that we happened because everything “happens.” That’s science. Scientists don’t often like to admit that they, too, operate with philosophical and religious pre-assumptions, but Discover lets the cat out of the bag and reports on the anti-theistic motivation behind the multiverse theory…

This is in response to this article at Discover magazine, which notes:

Consider just two possible changes. Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. There are many such examples of the universe’s life-friendly properties—so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.

“We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible,” Linde says.

Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multi­verse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non­religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem” — the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

“For me the reality of many universes is a logical possibility,” [Andrei Linde] says. “You might say, ‘Maybe this is some mysterious coincidence. Maybe God created the universe for our benefit.’ Well, I don’t know about God, but the universe itself might reproduce itself eternally in all its possible manifestations.”

What is of course immediately apparent is the rush to push God back out of the picture again, according to a false dichotomy that people on both sides of the religious/non-religious divide have built up. The assumption that faith in something beyond the merely empirical, especially faith expressed through a formal Religion, must be in conflict with science is a deeply-embedded prejudice for many people. But let us be clear: it is nothing more than a prejudice, and then a highly erroneous one.

To be fair, Linde could be correct: maybe there are an infinite number of universes, and ours is just the one that happened, by some fluke, to end up with all the necessary ducks in a row so that life could emerge in it.

But the article notes the key problem with the multiverse theory: there’s no way to prove it; it’s a faith claim, rather than a scientific conjecture. And its principle purpose is, as The Deeps of Time notes, anti-theistic in nature: it’s the only other suggestion, apart from the notion of some form of intelligent designer, that explains the exceedingly tight fine-tuning that is evident in the cosmos. And in a sense, it’s an extension of the tired argument that the likes of Richard Dawkins so often advance: that apparent design is just an illusion.

That argument will get you published, perhaps, but at some point it begins to wear thin. It might be useful when discussing e.g. how what we see with our eyes (the beauty of flowers and sunsets, the intricacy of the body and brain, etc.) seems to have an immense amount of thought put into its composition and operation. But when we’re talking about physical properties of the Universe, we’re not talking about things which we can perceive naturally (e.g. without the assistance of considerable amounts of technology and calculation). So even if we’ve evolved to think of a delicate flower as being something intricately designed, there’s no way we could have evolved to think of e.g. the fine structure constant as being similarly designed.

And yet, there is is, staring us in the face: the Universe we know is built upon a series of physical constants of exacting precision, and we would not exist had even one of these constants been even marginally more or less than it is.

Design is everywhere: we see it in the day-to-day operation of the world, in plants, animals, and our fellow human beings. And at the same time, design is there too in places we cannot see, in the very blueprints of creation itself.

Parsimony alone would suggest that at some point, what appears to be design should probably be considered to be design, especially when the very fabric of our existence seems to have been put in place with the emergence of life in mind. Suggesting otherwise — by, say, proposing a vast and unprovable myriad of barren alternate Universes — is as rational as suggesting that the world is merely 6,000 years old. Moreover, such a suggestion, though cloaked in the language and manner of science, is not a scientific suggestion at all. It is, as previously noted, a faith claim, and then a rather desperate one.

From The Deeps of Time:

Uncommon Descent calls our attention to this paper which indicates that radioactive decay rates are not constant, but seem to vary with distance from the sun. The assumption that radioactive decay rates are constant is key to the use of radioactive decay as a dating technique. The variations don’t affect the million-to-billion year age estimates obtained by decay rates by very much, but it does indicate a need to research the unknown cause of this variation and evaluate its implications for dating techniques.

This will no doubt be touted as proof, in some quarters, of the complete unreliability of radioactive dating, and as proof that the whole science of geology is invalid. That’s unfortunately the approximate level of dishonesty one has come to expect from young earth creationism these days, in which even slight variances in the data or data-collection methods get amplified into comprehensive rejections of the science itself, and the basis for yet more “proofs” that the Earth is a mere 6,000 years old.

Because as we all know: if geologists can’t quite be certain whether the Earth is 4.5 billion or only 4.49 billion years old, this clearly demonstrates that geologists are just plain wrong about the age of the Earth in general, and that the world must clearly be 4.499994 billion years younger than the most commonly accepted estimates suggest.

The problem with a book like Denis O. Lamoureux’s Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution is that it is proposing something which is at once radical and entirely normal. It proposes that evolution and science can be fully reconciled with Religion, and especially with the Bible. Not only that, it further proposes that science and religion actually work together, in a kind of harmony or companionship, to bring God’s revelation to humanity, though each in different ways. This is not a proposal which many Christians and non-Christians are willing to accept, in part because they are caught up in a false dichotomy that unnecessarily assumes that science — and in particular the theory of evolution — and religion are mortal enemies which must, by definition, contradict each other.

Dr. Lamoureux’s view is not simply a syncretic one, nor is he attempting to simply establish a synthesis between disparate concepts. His conjecture, rather, is that in looking at Scripture and then at science, we are looking at different forms of revelation of the same one God — science and religion, then, are not simply bridged by the idea of Evolutionary Creationism, but treated as a kind of unit whole, each effecting the revelation of the Lord by a different means.

Because this concept is above the grasp and reasoning of so many who are caught up in the unnecessary conflict that infests the origins “debate,” Evolutionary Creation can’t simply start by jumping in head-first into an explanation of its core philosophies and the justifications for them. Instead, Dr. Lamoureux must begin at the very beginning of reasoning itself, by discussing and establishing categories.

In a nutshell, categories are the foundations upon which we base how we look at the world, and how we think about the world. Evolutionary Creation uses the example of how our eyes are programmed to perceive the spectrum of colours in visible light to illustrate this point, noting that our brains are wired to perceive the issues which we face in a similar, ranging manner that is rarely ever “black and white.” Yet at the same time, Dr. Lamoureux notes that many view the origins “debate” in a very “black and white” way. Even referring to it as a “debate” suggests a conflict model that pits a secular and godless science against a Christian, Biblical view of creation. This very limited category set thus forces people to make a choice between science and religion, “faith” and “reason,”
God or the various things which humanity has discovered about the nature of the world and the processes which formed it.

This dichotomy, incidentally, is seen on both sides of the debate, and it’s almost impossible to ferret out who fired the first shots in the war. Atheists who promote the dichotomy present atheism as the bastion of reason and wisdom, and portray Christians as mental dullards and uninformed fundamentalists. Christians who promote the dichotomy denounce evolutionary theory as misguided or, worse, Satanic, and discard the substantial body of evidence in support of an old Earth as “circumstantial” whilst simultaneously clinging to threadbare evidence which purportedly justifies their own positions.

Even worse, both sides turn on like-minded folk who dare to step outside the conflict model. Atheists or skeptics who step outside the model and propose that empiricism and research are not a sufficient basis upon which to base a rejection of the existence of God, or who themselves admit to even weak agnosticism, are derided as being senile or simply in error. Christians who afford even a handful of scientific discoveries are denounced as liberals, heretics, cafeteria Christians, or proto-secularists.

At the same time, however, these two warring sides actually agree on at least one thing: whatever the exact nature of the origins of the world, human Morality and ethics are intimately connected with the view of origins one is informed by. This gives the origins “debate” special relevance, because our beliefs about who we are and where we come from directly influence and inform our believes about how we should relate to one another, and how we should order the societies in which we live. Christianity and secular humanism alike concede this point…and for as wrong as both sides may be about the topic of origins, both sides are at least correct in noting this important connection.

The key contributors to the false dichotomy (Greek: dicha - “in two”, temno - “to cut”) are, in Dr. Lamoureux’s opinion, two related factor. The first is what is that both sides tend to adopt “popular” understandings of terms like “evolution,” “creation,” and “theory.” This logical error is compounded by the second contributing factor: conflation. When a Christian hears the word “evolution,” she immediately associates the term with atheism, with a worldview that postulates a godless, chance-driven reality. When a secularist hears the word “creation,” he immediately associates the term with the (false) notion that the world was formed in six 24-hour days. And whether both sides realize it or not, this immediately prohibits any progress in the dialogue between them; both sides are trapped in their thinking.

So the question must be asked: is their thinking accurate?

Dr. Lamoureux begins his analysis by looking at the popular categories and conflations involved in how both sides view “evolution.” He begins by unpacking the term a bit, and by moving past the conflation: he proposes that the idea of evolution must be re-categorized thusly:

• Teleological: has a plan and a purpose (reflects an intelligent designer)

       ↑
Evolution
       ↓

• Dysteleological: has no plan or purpose (reflects random chance, not design)

The Greek term telos indicates the presence of an end or a goal; dysteleology is a term coined first in German which was intended to refer to the absence of said same. The two terms refer as much to the actual nature of the evolutionary process as they do to the views each of us has concerning it: we either view evolution as a process which was set in motion — and which may be reflective of some influence of — a designer or creator, or we view it as a the result of purposeless, random chance.

It should be noted that the teleological category actually can be broken down into a few different sub-categories, which roughly correspond to the range of religious opinions evident in the world today (theism, deism, paganism, etc.). This is an important point to keep in mind in light of what follows its articulation in the book.

The most powerful argument that Dr. Lamoureux makes in this section is based on a survey done about a decade ago that, taken to its logical conclusion, deals a death blow to the idea many Christians have that scientific researchers are predominantly atheistic and trying to impose a godless worldview upon millions of hapless schoolchildren.

In 1997, Karry Witham and Edward Larson issued a report called “Scientists Are Still Keeping the Faith,” in Nature (a prominent scientific journal). To a large sample group of scientists and other researchers, the following question was posed:

I believe in a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind, i.e. a God to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer. By ‘answer’ I mean more than the subjective, psychological effect of prayer.

40% of those polled expressed belief in God as defined above, 45% expressed that they did not believe in God so defined, and 15% expressed no definite belief.

Let us come back to the teleological sub-categories mentioned above, because something important must be noted about the respondents who answered in the negative to the given question. Deists, pantheists, and other pagans — despite not being atheists — would have been caught up in the negative-responding group, despite the fact that all accept teleology to one degree or another. Deists are, as I understand it, given to believing that God is not intimately involved in the day-to-day function and structure of creation…but still generally accept that He had something to do with it, and that He may have had an eye toward its design. Pagans believe in various divine forces, or pantheons of gods, who exert varying degrees of control over the course and shape of creation. Pantheists believe that creation is itself divine, and thus reflective of a will and a design.

And of course, 15% of the respondends expressed an agnostic view. Here again, categorization is important: agnosticism and dysteleology are not synonymous. As such, an interesting conclusion emerges from the results of this admittedly limited survey: a majority of scientists are probably teleologists, or at least are not dysteleologists.

Which is more than a bit of a shot in the arm to the notion that scientsts are part of some atheistic cabal or conspiracy seeking to undermine the good faith of the world’s youth.

This brings us to the end of the first part of my review of Chapter 1. It should be noted that the above all comes out within the first 7 pages of the book, which, overall, starts slowly and yet covers much ground as it goes. Thus far, Dr. Lamoureux’s presentation is written in an engaging and accessible manner, but readers will nevertheless likely be surprised at the steady stream of information coming at them as they progress up to, and past, even this early point in the book.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which looks at — and debunks — popular notions concerning creation.

Charles Tysoe writes in with a follow-up to my response to a few of his comments from a while back. I’m going to break up his message a bit and respond to it in a more inter-linear fashion, although the good Reader can rest assured that the entirety of what Charles‘ message will be included in this post. He covers a few different topics, however, which I would prefer to address as they arise.

[7] But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
[8] or the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
[9] Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the LORD has done this?
[10] In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of all mankind.

Thanks for responding.

I thought after I sent that email that I should have looked up “message-incident” again to make sure I had the phrase right; thanks for clarifying and that is indeed the one I did in fact search for.

Would I find it, for instance in the Poetics of Aristotle?

Is not Aristotle essentially a heathen philospher? Was it not Aristotelian methodology that plagued Catholic Middle Ages Scholarship and led in part to the controversy involving Galilei Galileo’s works?

I wish you and/or DOL would make clear the source and rationale for “message incident” since it seems of murky pedigree and since DOL hangs such great weights from this small wire. He claims to be an Evangelical, and is a member of ETS. Can he point to other present or past members of this association and specific examples of this principle in action? Otherwise we have just you and DOL (and perhaps Aristotle) as advocating this system. That’s a very small sample space.

Aristotle was indeed a pagan philosopher, but I don’t think he had as much to do with the Galileo affair as did Ptolemy, all things considered. Also, I feel I should caution both the Reader, in general, and Charles in particular, against the automatic dismissal of non-Christian philosophers. Even in the Bible, God imparts blessings and wisdom to His chosen people through pagans and non-believers. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament give us examples of this. It should also be noted that St. Paul often quotes from non-Jewish and non-Christian poetic or philosophical sources.

In the end, what matters is what is true (Philippians 4:8). Whether we arrive at this by a source from within Christendom or without, what ultimately matters is what is true. And if there is in Aristotelean philosophy something that is true, or which enables us to better understand some aspect of the truth of the Lord, then we ought to pursue that thing.

I mentioned, previously, that the “message-incident” principle draws heavily, I think, upon Aristotle. That was a comment made out of personal opinion rather than out of specific knowledge of the fact on my part; it may well be that there is absolutely no Aristotelean influence in the principle itself. I was remarking on what seemed to be a similarity to me between the Message-Incident Principle and the notion of accidentals that inform the Catholic understanding of Eucharist.

In the Eucharist, we have the host, which at a glance appears to be a thin wafer of unleavened bread. However, this is not the sum total of its nature, nor is this an accurate picture of its nature. A separation needs to take place in our understanding of it, for it is actually the Real Presence of Christ Jesus, and retains only the accidentals (shape, taste, etc.) of the bread which it formerly was. The Message-Incident Principle doesn’t exactly mirror this understanding, but the idea is similar: a separation has to take place in our understanding of the text of the Bible, in that we need to be able to look at the message of faith conveyed by the text separate from the incidental events or details given by the text.

Previously, I gave the example of Ephesians 5, and how when we interpret this passage it is necessary to separate the “incident”al aspects of the text — some of which can seem sexist at first — from the theological “message” that St. Paul is attempting to convey, by illustrating the relationship of Christ to the Church through the imagery of the relationship between husband and wife. The purpose of the passage is not to convey a somewhat sexist message, nor is the purpose of this passage to present an improper model of the relationship between husband and wife; it is to present a model of the way we relate to Christ, and Christ to the community of His faithful. But to understand as much, we need to separate, categorically, the teaching from the imagery used to present it.

I will cover this in greater detail when I get to that part of my review of Denis O. Lamoureux’s Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution. The first part of that review, which looks at Denis’ examination of analytical categories, should be going up later today, provided that I don’t get too bogged down in other tasks.

How would this method, if laid out in parallel, compare to the current evangelical standard, the “Grammatical-Historical” method?

Let’s see if we can establish a comparison here. As I understand it, the Grammatical-Historical Method is structured as follows:

“Interpreting grammatically

• The historical-critical method assumes that words and expressions have a relatively stable meaning during given periods of history. Therefore, we begin by taking what we can determine as the normal, everyday meaning of the words, phrases, and sentences to the extent possible. In other words, our interpretation must correspond to the words and grammar in the text in a reasonable way. Otherwise, the interpreter could assign meaning of his own without objective control. The Bible would become a horoscope of vague sayings we try to plug into our lives however we are able.
  • Most of the Bible can be easily interpreted by simply taking the language (either in the original or translation) in the usual way (Jn. 3:36; Acts 1:11). In other words, if the plain sense makes sense, seek no other sense.
  • A plain sense reading should not be confused with a literalistic interpretation. We should allow for figures of speech (Mk. 1:5; Lk. 22:19).
  • If a passage contains symbols or a special literary genre this should be indicated in the text, either by textual cues, or because symbolism is required in order to make sense of the text. Most symbols are explained by the Bible itself (Rev. 1:9-20)

Interpreting historically

• - Historical interpretation means that we take into account the historical background of the author and the recipients as possible. The Bible was written to common people, and is understandable to anyone. However, it was written thousands of years ago to a different culture. Therefore, as modern readers, we have to try to recover a general sense of the meaning of words, phrases and concepts in the ancient cultures.  These phrases are addressed in Scripture primarily to the Hebrew and Greco-Roman culture of the first century.
  • We are not interested at first in the question, “What does it mean to me?” but rather, “what did it mean to those whom it was originally written?”
    • - Rev. 2:12,13 - Pergamum was the center of the worship of Aesclepius.
    • - I Cor. 11:4-6 - Shorn hair was typical of Aphrodite priestess-prostitutes; shaven heads were typical of convicted adulteresses (vs. 5).
  • Use Bible dictionaries or other sources to discover customs, money, geography, etc. Then
    find a corresponding meaning in our culture.
    • - Good Samaritan (Lk. 10); 2 Denarii (Mk. 6:37); 50,000 Drachma (Acts 19:19)
    • - Pharisees’ teaching on the relationship between illness and sin (Mark 2; John 9:1) “

Conversely, the Message-Incident Principle is structured thusly:

Message

• Divine Theology
• Inerrant and Infallible

Incident

• Ancient Science
• Ancient Phenomenonological Perspective

“This approach contends that in order to reveal spiritual truths as effectively as possible to the ancient peoples, the Holy Spirit used their ancient phenomenological perspective of nature. That is, instead of confusing or distracting the biblical writers and their readers with modern scientific concepts, God descended to their level and employed the science-of-the-day. Similar to the central message in the Kenotic Hymn, the Creator humbled Himself through the use of ancient human ideas about nature in the revelatory process. Therefore, passages in the Bible referring to the physical world feature both a Message of Faith and an incidental ancient science. According to this interpretive principle, Biblical inerrancy and infallibility rest in the Divine Theology, and not in statements referring to nature. Wualifying ancient science as “incidental” does not imply that it is unimportant. The science in Scripture is vital for transporting spiritual truths. It acts as a vessel similar to a cup that delivers “living waters” (John 4:10). However, the word “incidental” carries meanings of “that which happens to be alongside” and “happening in connection with something more important.” In other words, the ancient science in Scripture is “alongside” the “more important” Message of Faith.” (Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolutionary Creation, pp. 110-111)

Now, how do these two things compare?

For starters, I want to comment on something tangential. It has always struck me as a point of some curiosity that evangelicals, who profess to be true “Biblical Christians,” tend also to not be Eucharistic Christians. Indeed, evangelicals tend to set themselves very much against Eucharistic Theology. Which is, I content, very odd for an element of Christianity which purports to interpret the Bible according to the maxim: “if the plain sense makes sense, seek no other sense.”

With all due respect to my evangelical bretheren, the plain sense of e.g. John 6, Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and 1 Corinthians 11 is that the bread we break in the meal at the altar is meant to be, and become, the literal and true Precious Body and Blood of Christ. He gives us His own flesh to eat, and His own blood to drink, in memory of Him and of His sacrifice for our sins…and we fail to discern Him in the bread and wine at our eternal peril. That is the plain meaning of the text, and yet evangelicals do not seem to interpret it thusly. This suggests to me that perhaps the default hermeneutic that evangelicals employ, the Grammatical-Historical Method, is somewhat subjective and arbitrary.

Thus, the problem with insisting on the use of literal-ish hermeneutics, and with insisting that Scripture be taken at its “plain meaning”, is that nobody really does that with any kind of consistency. Let me put that more plainly: no Christian ever takes Scripture at its plain meaning at every opportunity — indeed, many of us are often guilty of a certain hypocrisy when we insist upon just such an approach. More often than not, what we really mean when we insist on taking things at their plain meaning is: “let us use my interpretation of Scripture; let us take it at what I say its meaning is.” A similar fault exists with the evangelical concept of letting Scripture “self-interpret.” And for this reason, the grammatical aspect of the method actually exists in contradiction of the historical aspect.

There’s really no two ways about it: if our hermeneutic is to always take Scripture at its most obvious meaning, on a passage-by-passage basis, then we should all be Eucharistic Christians in light of John 6. That