Half Past Noon

“a mission that rejects violence as a way to ground peaceful community and instead witnesses to the Lord’s life of rejection and crucifixion by living it in publicly perceivable communities derisively called Christian.”

Great First Things article.

A new First Things post by Stephen Barr contends that Intelligent Design argument have “done positive harm” (“The End of Intelligent Design?, HT: Davey). It’s an interesting article with an interesting thesis. Yet, Barr’s post feels sloppy, for a couple of reasons.

First, he doesn’t really explain any of his significant accusations. It’s clear that he’d prefer to condemn ID on theological grounds; yet, since he has to address the science (at least in part), he seems to content himself with flat generalizations. I say “seems” because I admittedly know very little about science or ID—I complain because I’d like to know why he makes these statements and why I should trust him over, say, Ben Stein. For example:

It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists.

Pretty bold and interesting statements. And I’d honestly love to see why he makes these claims: I’m persuadable! Yet, this is all the evidence he provides. This sort of reasoning occurs at least two more times in the article, which leads me to suspect that Barr isn’t writing for ID sympathizers. Why else would he make these broad statements and assume that we see things the way he does? And that makes me ask another question: just who is this article for?

Second, Barr’s central complaint about ID is that it hurts Christians in the eyes of unbelievers. He ends his article by saying, “Religion has a significant number of friends (and potential friends) in the scientific world. The ID movement is not creating new ones.” But so what? Should Christian scientists be aiming to make friends? Is Barr complaining about poor behaviour by ID folks, or is he simply annoyed that ID folks make it harder to be respectably Christian? That’s a harsh question, I know, but I can’t help but ask it. Even if Barr is right and ID does more harm than good, I find it hard to stomach an argument based on embarrassment. Which, at the end of the day, is all I get from this article.

How did I go so long without reading First Things? It’s my favorite thing to read, period. Here’s a neat observation in the middle of an article on image and sacrament:

What is it that puts me off about photographers? Anyone who’s ever been in charge of taking pictures at a Thanksgiving dinner or a children’s birthday party knows how abstracting it is. If you have to take the pictures, you can’t be there in the usual sense: you have to be always looking for shots, turning people toward the camera, eyeing the turkey or birthday cake for posterity. But the more you believe in what you’re doing, the more you also believe your presence justifies everything.The photographers I’m talking about, the true believers, don’t seem absent from where they are, the way people do when their eyes pass over you as they talk on their cell phones. But as Nikon says on its website: “Choose a camera and you’ve taken the first step toward turning fleeting moments into precious memories.” What it says is accurate: the objective of most amateur photography is the conquest of time and distance. The photographs will eventually be the memories as the context drops away. Just go through your old photographs and see.

The great faculty of memory that St. Augustine celebrates in the Confessions has enhanced itself with literal accuracy and indentured itself to technology at the same time. Plato (and not just Plato) worried that even writing things down would supplant the living presence of the truth, but the photograph uncannily holds the present, only the present, this moment forever, while the world goes on.

A veiled Muslim woman once chased my wife through Istanbul trying to get back her stolen image. I understand the impulse. I find myself uncomfortably in the camp of Susan Sontag: “the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”