The issue of recoveries from comas and vegetative states raise some important theological questions regarding the ethics and doctrines regarding life, death and existence in between.
In the past, death was registered when the cardio-vascular system fails. Today, it is brain-death that is more important, since we are now able to mimic the heart’s function as a PUMP, with mechanical devices. While it is possible to keep the brain artificially alive, there is no way to mimic its function as the MIND.
It also raises the question of how badly those of us who say be believe in an AFTERLIFE really wants to let go of this one … I don’t buy the lame excuse often given that God wants us to hang around here to do some good deed and that is why we survived. In the age of modern medicine, most of us survive because we fight tooth and nail not to let nature take its course and very often, at the expense of our competitors for medical aids who cannot match our economic resources. …
Rationality is humanity’s most important survival strategy. It operates between different modes of knowledge and across different reasoning strategies. This makes interdisciplinary and cross-contextual conversation possible.
Why should Christian theology bother to engage across disciplines and contexts?
The Great Commission extends the Gospel across geohistorical borders of ancient Israel., i.e., across space and time (both backwards into the past and forwards into the future). The Christian mandate to engage interdisciplinarily is supported both theologically because Christianity makes universal claims, and epistemologically because human thought operates with shared resources of rationality, i.e., our quest for understanding overlaps in every field of inquiry. For example to build an aeroplane, we draw from multiple resources of knowledge from engineering to materials science to meteorology to ergonomics and even to psychology. Each of these disciplines draw from the sciences and mathematics. So whatever your religious belief or disbelief, all humans use their brains’ minds to think and thrive. The Christian mind is part of humanity, so Christian theology is impoverished and even dangerous if understood in isolation. As human knowledge increases and our understanding of our bodies in the world we live in rapidly outpaces both agnostic and religious resources to catch up, both spiritual insights and the lack of them can devolve into self-fulfilling prophecies of communities that demonize the others, poisoning the human capacity for compassion. …
Today, I pay tribute to my teacher and friend, the late Professor Lamin Sanneh. He was a professor of history and World Christianity at Yale. Born into a Muslim family in Gambia, he earned his PhD in Islamic history at the University of London’s famed School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
His 1989 book, “Translating the Message”, was a seminal work that challenged the history of mission and gave many of us first hand accounts of a major thinker who grew up a Muslim and converted to Christianity but retained a deep love for Muslims, a respect for Islamic cultures and an awareness of the complex relationship between the two Abrahamic faiths. …
WHY INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY IS CRUCIAL FOR THEOLOGY?
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CLAIM: People of faith who believe in God need history, philosophy & science to keep theology honest.
STATE OF AFFAIRS: Covid 19 has finally done what I was hoping decades of research and study would do — expose the deep problem of Spiritual Integrity. In one fell swoop, the SARS CoV-2 virus exploded the myth that we spiritual leaders know what we are talking about when we proclaim more than we know. It is proper for skeptics to ask why a hitherto unknown piece of protein wrapped in a skin of protective covering can so threaten the world that every house of worship has to close down and every doctrine to do with rituals (long held sacrosanct and which for Christianity, people have been executed for), were suddenly revised…overnight! …
Human Origins, Genetics and the Illusion of Otherness
The interdisciplinary investigations in science and theology draw our attention to the illusion of otherness. Behind the geohistorical veil just 5500 years ago, we find a planet of 20 million humans with no known writing. This places our current preoccupation with textual authority in perspective. Before 12,000 years ago there is no evidence of buildings dedicated to worship among the 4 million people on earth. Around 30,000 years ago, there were at least three species of humans co-existing. At least 65,000 years ago we created the earliest known artwork. 100,000 years ago the most primitive mathematical art can be found. And 300,000 years ago, the first of 20 human species emerged. …
We shall explore the anthropology, geology and biology of human evolution.
Paleoanthropology
Two scientific explanations for human origins exist — the punctuated and the gradualist models.
Ian Tattersall, a punctuationist, thinks symbolic behavior emerged from one chance mutation that suddenly and dramatically transformed the human mind.[1]Modern humans arrived from somewhere into Europe (Cro-Magnons) around 40 thousand year ago (tya) and replaced the prior Europeans (Neanderthals). In Becoming Humans, Tattersall points out that in humans, “the potential arose in the mind to undertake science, create art, and discover the need and ability for religious belief, even though there were no specific selection pressures for such abstract abilities at any point during our past.”[2] The regular burial practice by the Cro-Magnons compared with the occasional burial practice of the Neanderthals marked the true development of religious cognition. Burial of the dead with grave goods is accepted as evidence to indicate belief in an afterlife. Our capacity for speech that creates complex art, music and religion is found nowhere else in the animal kingdom. …
Six Questions about DIVINE REVELATION
- What did God reveal?
The short answer is everything that is knowable. From as far back as historians can delve, the human mind has been learning new things. God’s revelation is not static and certainly continues. Religious dominance from the earliest times of shamanism around 50,000 years ago evolved to become institutionalized religions by about 5000 years ago in places such as Egypt. Many shamanistic religions exist among the Australian aboriginals and in much of Africa, Asia and South America as well as remote parts of Europe and North America. Political leaders encouraged the belief that they enjoy direct and unique access to the gods. …
Abstract
John Duns Scotus’ (1266 -1308) contribution to the embryonic development of pre-modern science and its promise for a contemporary theology of science forms the thesis of this paper. The keys to the modern search for reliable knowledge are predictability and verifiability even though early western science was concerned with demonstrations and proofs, the standard trade tools of medieval philosophical theology.
The significance of Scotus’ epistemology and natural theology lies in the potential for interdisciplinary dialogue between science and Christian theology. …
Perceptual Knowledge and Taciticity
The study of epistemology usually seeks to either justify ‘how’ knowledge is acquired or ‘what’ constitutes knowledge. We shall consider Pollock and Cruz’s epistemology of direct realism and its capacity to account for the inexplicable phenomena in scientific discoveries where seemingly accidental and perhaps incomprehensible procedures lead to discoveries which later finds attachment to explanatory theories by way of intuitive and insightful cognitive exercises.
We shall consider the model of direct realism and specifically inference from perception with its denial of a stage known as ‘beliefs about perceptions’ as a description of how scientific knowledge grows.
We ask whether direct realism and inference from perception adequately explain the growth of knowledge and whether the Polanyian concept of tacit knowledge offers an explanation for unexpected scientific discoveries. …
The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge:
A review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn; Galileo, Courtier by Mario Biagioli; and The Mangle of Practice by Andrew Pickering
Introduction
This review examines the shaping of knowledge through three works of scientific history. It seeks to show the open-ended situation of science studies to rethink what makes science, knowledge. We shall explore the implications of Kuhn’s paradigmatic view, Biagioli’s cultural study of Galileo and Pickering’s mangle-theory of scientific practice, to understand the constitution of a scientific fact.
The scientific fact is almost universally accepted as the best expression of human knowledge. But what is knowledge if not justified, true belief? At least, this was thought to be a watertight case until in 1963, Edmund Gettier demonstrated that it is possible to achieve justified belief which is coincidentally or mistakenly true.[1] Knowledge cannot now be defined as merely justified true belief. The contingencies involved in incidental true beliefs undermine the belief that truth is a universal notion. This remains a problematic conceptual uncertainty in epistemology. However, this philosophical conundrum has not bothered most scientists at all, and knowledge continues to be associated with the scientific fact. The shaping of scientific knowledge not only includes the fact but also the shapers such a history, culture and material agency. …
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