John Stott remembered

My friend, mentor, and inspiration to ministry is now with the Lord. Uncle John (Stott) passed away. We met 27 years ago in London at All Souls and 6 years later, he would commission me missionary envoy to the US, beginning my ministerial career to this day. Uncle John wanted me to give my mind to the Lord's service and despite all my excuses, he hounded me until I made the decision to leave the world of legal practice for a ministry of the mind. He generously gave me his personal endorsement and opened many doors of opportunity everywhere I went. He remembered me to others whom he had influenced and tried to keep us all in contact with each other...but we were all 'too busy'. We kept in touch during my annual visits to London and his visits to New York City. I was privileged to introduce him at the American Bible Society to pastors in New York. We last spoke a few months ago when it was already apparent that he would soon be in paradise. Although I am glad that John is no longer in pain, I am saddened, deeply saddened beyond words.

Thoughts about Consciousness and the Wisdom Faiths of the Axial Age

Here are some thoughts about Hinduism and Buddhism. Both are concerned with satisfying karmic debt. The Hindu quest for the right guru and the Buddhist quest to be awakened for parinirvana, assume no relationship between creator and creation.

The Christian Gospel announces the stunning news that at a moment in geohistory, God became man to reconcile man to God. The historicity of the incarnation of Christ makes the Gospel uniquely relevant to the urgent issues of a scientific age. It is this reality that makes the Christian Gospel worthy of consideration for both Hindus and Buddhists.

My personal conviction is that the Christian faith embodies revelatory truths rooted in geohistorical events that culminated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. Such a belief is neither verifiable nor falsifiable by any discipline of human inquiry.

Christianity is a faith that seeks understanding and not a faith that results from understanding. Thus, the primary impulse to believe in the metaphysical must have been hard-wired in our minds. Indeed, contemporary neuropsychology suggests that the human brain is evolved for religious cognition. Our minds are optimized to interpret metaphysical signals that machines and our natural senses are unable to measure.  Thus, belief in God finds corroborative support in our interpreted experience of the divine. This universal desire to make sense of our experience as human beings, who long to understand more than we know, marks us as the religious animal.

One of the most important questions Christians may ask of its own tradition is, “Did God reveal himself outside the Judeo-Christian cone-of-experience?” How can we account for the fate of the 99+% of humans who ever lived, and who died without having heard the Gospel because they existed outside the geohistory of the biblical faith? Does being born in the wrong time or wrong place doom one to damnation? How does the limited cone of experience generated by any religion, say Christianity, with its focus on Palestine from c.1500 BC to AD 30, count as a universal revelation of God to creation?

Another area worth observing is the effort made by many Buddhist communities to engage the maturing disciplines of the neurosciences. Both Hinduism and Buddhism have long been concerned with the nature of human consciousness  and its collateral effects on personality, emotions and memory. The sense of a unified consciousness that we all experience (unless we suffer from schizophrenia, multiple-personalities or other forms of memorial dementia) as colonies of trillions of individual cells, let alone the mitochondrial cells within our somatic ones, cannot be readily explained scientifically. Indeed, in consciousness studies, neurotheology is as much a resource as the philosophy of mind and the neurosciences. The achievement of trance in Hindu rituals and altered states of consciousness in Buddhist meditation remain little understood by modern science and beyond the scrutiny of even powerful machines such as functional MRIs. There is much debate concerning the veracity of interpretations of what these machines measure. Do they measure the cause or the effects of such meditations and mind-controls? Are there Christian analogues practiced by medieval mystics, long forgotten when the Church adopted modern philosophy in its theological doctrines? Can an interdisciplinary approach yield a more holistic understanding of what these ancient religions seek to convey?

These and other such questions are well beyond the scope of this introduction. But I hope to convey the immense amount of interesting work that remains to be labored over by investigators and practitioners of these living faiths. The Christian world ought not to fall behind in understanding how we think and what transpires when our brains are traumatized by physical or psychological stimuli. As we learn to delay our demise and live longer, the essence of what it means to be human, to be alive and to prepare for death takes on new dimensions of urgency.

What we can begin to answer is how the Gospel of Jesus Christ can be relevant to a Hindu or a Buddhist seeking alternatives or simply curious about what other faiths of the Axial Age have produced. Although the basic quest of the Hindus and Buddhists reflects those of other faiths, only the Gospel of Jesus expressly claims a divine will to reconcile us to our maker.

I hope this introduction to the great wisdom beliefs of Hinduism and Buddhism has helped you begin to think through a set of worldviews shared by a quarter of the human race.

Perhaps … if the Buddha met the Christ,
there might not have been a need for Buddhism at all.

The Challenges of Neuroscience for the 21st century Evangelical Apologist

My dissertation - 

Do we sin because we are sinners or are we sinners because we sin?  Cognitive Nolition, Neuroscience and Kenotic Soteriology 

is an interdisciplinary proposal for a kenotic theological doctrine of moral cognition, one that accounts for the salvific status of amorals who suffer post-natal brain trauma resulting in declarative memory loss and false memory, infancy deaths as well as preconscious retrocausal urges such as found in victims of Tourette's syndrome.

Abstract: This dissertation adopts postfoundationalism’s methodological quest for convergence in the interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and the neurosciences with reference to sin and cognition. Evolutionary creationism serves as a template towards a kenotic doctrine of moral cognition that arises from reflections on creation, sin, and repentance. Paleoanthropology elucidates the evolutionary emergence of humans via the consequent biological adaptation for speech that enabled the cultural evolution of moral cognition and religious dispositions. Moral cognition consists of awareness, judgment, and performance. Sin refers to (i) an existential state of spiritual immaturity or impurity to which we are all born (which attracts no guilt and demands no cognitive repentance), and (ii) volitional acts of defiance seeking autonomy (which attracts guilt and demands repentance). Neuroscience raises questions about freedom of will and whether the doctrine of sin can account for the salvation of the amorals, who cannot volitionally sin and do not need to repent. As for freedom, our capacity for cognitive nolition by a neurological veto can reverse preconscious urges and preserve room for a doctrine of culpable volitional sin. The classical doctrines of creation and forensic atonement cannot account for the existential sin of the amorals. We conclude that a kenotic theological doctrine of moral cognition with a soterial atonement best accommodates the distinction between existential and volitional sins, necessary to account for the salvation of the neurologically impaired, as well as the construction of nolition as a neurological veto in the brain. Its significance includes a fresh articulation of soteriology with implications for jurisprudence, medicine, sociology, and the neurosciences. We are thus existential sinners by birth but volitional sinners by choice.

Here are the contents page of the original dissertation:

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: THE POSTFOUNDATIONAL QUEST FOR CONVERGENCE

1.1 Introduction: Interdisciplinarity in Science and Theology

1.2 Sin and Moral Cognition in Science and Theology 

1.3 Postfoundationalism  

1.3.1 Experience and Belief

1.3.2 Truth and Knowledge 

1.3.3 Individual and Community 

1.3.4 Explanation and Understanding

1.4 Postfoundational Rationality

1.5. A Postfoundational Theology? ………………………… 14

           

CHAPTER TWO: EVOLUTIONARY CREATIONISM

2.1 Introduction: Theology of Evolution and Evolution of Theology 

2.2 Creation and Nature

2.3 A Scientific Doctrine of Creation?

2.4 A Trinitarian Doctrine of Creation

2.5 Jurgen Moltmann’s Evolutionary Doctrine of Creation

2.5.1 God the Holy Spirit in creation

2.5.2 Theological basis for a doctrine of creation

2.5.3 The Creator

2.5.4 God’s Image In Creation 

2.5.5 Embodiment - The end of all God’s works 

2.5.6 Responses to Moltmann

2.6 Conclusion …………………….36

CHAPTER THREE: ANTHROPOLOGY

3.1 Introduction: The Embodied Mind

3.2 The Sciences of Human Origins 

3.2.1 Paleoanthropology 

3.2.1a Bipedalism

3.2.1b The Prefrontal Cortex 

3.2.1c Cognitive Fluidity

3.2.1d The Language of Speech 

3.2.2 Geology 

3.2.3 Molecular Biology

3.3 Philosophy of Human Origins

3.3.1 Embodied Evolutionary Epistemology

3.3.2 Speech

3.3.3 Moral Cognition and Religious Disposition 

3.4 The Theology of Human Origins 

3.4.1 Fallen Angels or Rising Beasts?

3.4.2 The Imago Dei (selem elohim) 

3.4.3 Was Adam the First Human?

3.5 Postfoundational Approach to Religious Experience 

3.6 Neurotheology or Theoscience? 

3.7 Conclusion ….................................87

CHAPTER FOUR: NEUROSCIENCE AND MORAL COGNITION

4.1 Introduction: Neurophysiological Challenges to Brain, Mind and Self

4.2 Neuroscience: The Science of Mind 

4.3 Moral Cognition

4.3.1 Moral Awareness

4.3.1a Consciousness 

4.3.1a.i The Neurobiology of Consciousness .

4.3.1a.ii The Philosophy of Consciousness 

4.3.1a.iii A Theology of Consciousness and the Soul

4.3.1b Imagination & Belief-Formation (Music & Speech) 

4.3.2 Moral Judgment 7

4.3.2a Emotions 

4.3.2a.i Musical Emotions and Religious Belief 

4.2.2a.ii How Emotions Enable Moral Belief 

4.3.2b Memory 

4.3.2b.i The Biology of Memory

4.3.2b.ii The Philosophy and Plasticity of Memory

4.3.2b.iii The Theological Basis of Memory 

4.3.3 Moral Performance9

4.3.3a Amoral Freedom 

4.3.3b Preconscious Freedom 

4.4 Conclusion ………...................... 141

CHAPTER FIVE: EXISTENTIAL SIN AND COGNITIVE NOLITION 

5.1 Introduction: Theological Solutions 

5.2 Sin 

5.2.1 How Sin Became Inheritable

5.2.2 How The State of Original Sin became the Guilt of Individual Sin

5.2.3 The Culpability of Sin 

5.2.4 The Hermeneutical Problem 

5.2.5 A Third Interpretation of Sin 

5.2.6 Existential and Volitional Sins 9

5.2.7 The First Volitional Sin

5.2.8 The Biblical Fall 

5.3 Cognitive Nolition 

5.3.1 Nolition and the Moral Mind 6

5.3.2 The Self-Discipline of Nolition

5.4 Conclusion ………………………184

CHAPTER  SIX: A KENOTIC THEOLOGY OF MORAL COGNITION

6.1 Introduction: A Kenotic Doctrine of Moral Cognition

6.1.1 Ontological, Volitional and Eschatological Kenosis 

6.1.2 Altruism and Agape in a Selfish Universe 

6.2 A Soterial Doctrine of Atonement

6.3 Kenosis & Repentance

6.3.1 Mental Disability and Cognitive Repentance

6.3.2 Epectasis 

6.4 Kenosis and Nolitional Veto 

6.5 Conclusion …….…….…….……199

I am currently editing it for public consumption and plan to be ready for submission to a publisher before August 2011.

Appreciate your prayers, y'all