Strange Bedfellows
On The Loom, Carl Zimmer has been following Deepak Chopra's attempt to save Intelligent Design from the evangelical Christians. Deepak's misguided presentation is on The Huffington Post. PZ Myers retorted to Chopra here, as did many readers of Huffington. Deepak then replied to all of this with another string of confusion here.
Fundies and new agers make strange bedfellows, though we've certainly come to expect this. One finds parallels in the field of Jesus studies, where the fundies and Bultmannians agree, for opposite reasons, that searching for the historical Jesus is detrimental to faith. For fundamentalists, the historical Jesus is the Christ of faith; and Bultmannians say that Jesus is forever lost, and questing for him is not only impossible but represents a feeble attempt to justify oneself by works (!). I've never considered myself an especially aggressive proponent of the scientific method, just one who naturally accepts it, without letting it threaten any faith I have about transcendental mysteries.
posted by Loren Rosson III @ 8/25/2005
2 Comments:
As an amateur and latecomer to the historical Jesus field I look for the broad middle and therefore eschew Bultmann. I'm also troubled by the "fundies" on the opposite wing who have latched on to intelligent design as a sort of creationism-lite. Seems to me that these people (including several in my fairly mainstream Methodist parish) suffer from too little faith rather than too much. In what way are they different from the Apostle Thomas, who needed to see the nail holes before he would believe in the resurrection?
Ralph Hitchens
Well Ralph, you sound more Bultmannian than fundy. It wouldn't be too unreasonable to ask for those nail holes, would it?
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