AGAIN, I CAN'T FIND the book which I was thinking of so I transcribed this short piece from a Youtube interview of Luke Timothy Johnson in which he gives an example of how idolatry in one definition of it is a habit with all of us.
It's also important to distinguish sin from idolatry because for a long time I tended to equate them. And the Bible has all kinds of stuff to say about idolatry. You know, "making false gods," taking something contingent and treating it as if it were necessary, making something the center of your universe and revolving around that. But I've come in my (old) age, I've come to understand that idolatry is the way we're constructed. We really can't not be idolatrous because we're instinctually impoverished. We don't molt, we don't migrate, you know, we're cursed with freedom. And so since we're not centered naturally we have to center on something. Problem is, idolatry is, "I want to be the world's best scholar, that's what I want to be" that's my goal, that's what I'm centering on. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. But my eight-year-old child calls from the other room daddy come play with me, I'm lonely. Idolatry is natural, sin is choosing the idolatry when a gift is available. My daughter's plea for company is a gift to me. She wanted to be with me. My making my scholarly paper more important is a refusal to discern that.
I would say that's not that unrelated to the habit of those those impressive idol makers who would certainly deny that's what they do when they "instinctually" (I'd say "habitually") reach for the idols of scientism such as "DNA," "natural selection," "random-chance," "probability" and a very naive and superficial resort to the billions of years they hold that those had the chance to produce this or that phenomenon, not taking into account that, for example, they would all have needed the age of the early Earth capable of sustaining any life and not the age of the universe to give them their actual time-span in which to work their creation mythology and not the theoretical age of the universe. I remember the time I pointed out to one of them online that "natural selection" couldn't have had the chance to do what they claimed it did before there was reproducing, mutating life so they didn't have the "13 billion years" that they cited as the time span it would have had to do what they claimed it did. The construction of idols even among those self-defined materialist skeptics is always an act that eschews the actual complexities involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment