The US Food and Drug Administration is allowing a dog breeder to use CRISPR to fix a harmful mutation. We are told that the FDA is trying not to stifle innovation.
By a dog breeder.
Why aren’t we reacting to this? An article in the Atlantic suggests it might have something to do with the innocuous acronym for the tool used to fiddle with genetics.
Why does a revolutionary gene-editing technology sound like a candy bar?
Close your eyes and imagine it is 1938. The German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann have just discovered nuclear fission.
Now give the process of Uncontrolled Nuclear Fission an innocuous acronym like UNUFI, something that sounds a bit like a stuffed animal. And imagine those chemists also discover ways to make it happen within reasonable reach of private parties at manageable costs. Who can then use the process in a barn somewhere out in the woods.
Several years ago, a leader in a local church introduced me to Open Theism. The theology appears grounded in the idea that the future is open and subject to chance and choice. God knows all there is to know about what is settled reality but can only know the future in terms of possibilities. And most of the writing I’ve encountered appears to rely on God as experiencing time. This has been explained to me as a succession of moments. Or, there is a moment (or a time) when God does not know something, and a moment (or a time) in which God does.
This has been bothering me like a bit of gravel stuck inside of a sandal. It seems to grind against the physical phenomenon of time dilation, which is an implication of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (STR). STR describes what happens when velocities differ between objects in the absence of acceleration. STR is based on two things:
The special principle of relativity: The laws of physics are the same for all observers, regardless of their velocity.
The speed of light in a vacuum (c) is constant: That is, everyone will always measure the speed of light as being the same (i.e. c = 299,798,458 m/s), regardless of their own velocity. [1]
These postulates establish relationships between time, distance, velocity, and the speed of light that can be described mathematically. As regarding time this might boil down to the following. Since the speed of light is constant, as velocity increases, time slows. And if our velocities are different relative to each other, our experience of time is also different.
Clock face of Big Ben.
If I board a space ship and travel for a few years at some measurable fraction of the speed of light, when I return you will have biologically aged more rapidly than I. My “present” will be no longer aligned with yours. This time dilation can be tested in particle accelerators and with moving clocks.
And as it happens, GPS satellites factor in corrections for time dilation resulting from both velocity and gravity. Accounting for the latter requires applying Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and adds a level of complexity to this discussion I am simply going to avoid. The point is that the passage of time seems inseparable from the fabric of the material world. A clock does not merely measure time. Time itself is in some way part of the operation of the clock.
In an attempt to wrap my head around the matter and give it a fair hearing I am currently reading God in an open universe: science, metaphysics, and open theism. [2] The book has a section that discusses STR in detail. It includes a fairly dense philosophical defense of Open Theism in the context of presentism vs. eternalism, as well as tensed and tenseless ideas about time.
But all of this really seems to be beside the point as it applies to God. I am probably missing something but what I’ve read so far in the book does not seem to engage the core problem and what philosophy extrapolates from Relativity Theory might be irrelevant to this issue. Time dilation is a physical phenomenon. Which means time is an inherent feature of the material universe.
I could do with some clarification. If what is meant is that God voluntarily limits the scope of interaction with the material world there might be some common ground here. But I do not see any possible way for God to inherently experience time as a succession of moments. What would also prevent thinking of God in terms of constraints such as distance, velocity, and the speed of light? This risks anthropomorphisms like Zeus and Odin.
The bar seems quite high. A while back Stephen Hawking participated in an episode of the television show Curiosity, titled Did God Create the Universe? His answer to the question focused on the singularity of the Big Bang:
“…here too, time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause. Because there was no time for a cause to have existed. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator. Because there is no time for a creator to have existed.“[3]
Hawking seems to think he has disproven God’s existence. There may be some unstated philosophical assumptions buried in the denial of causality, but let’s set that aside. What Hawking does is provide another view of how time is welded into the material order. And I think that what has actually happened is Hawking unwittingly illustrated the difficulties baked into defending any notion of anchoring God “in” time.
If my impressions of all this changes I will post an update. Perhaps there are other ways to think about this. I am neither a philosopher nor a theologian. And my understanding of physics is a bit thin. In an attempt to correct this last problem I am slowly gnawing away at a college primer on relativity theory.[4] As I said when I started, I’m in over my head. And I’m having trouble understanding how a problematic approach to cosmology can be a good context for a theology.
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[1] Adam Auton, An Introduction to Special Relativity (undated). Retrieved from Warp: http://adamauton.com/warp/lesson0.html. See also links at this site for further reading and a downloadable PowerPoint titled Special Relativity for Dummies.
[2] William Hasker, Thomas Jay Oord, and Dean Zimmerman, editors. God in an open universe: science, metaphysics, and open theism. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2011.
I found this book after an online back and forth with one of the editors.
[4] Edwin F Taylor and John Archibald Wheeler. Spacetime Physics. San Francisco: W.H Freemand and Company, 1963.
There is a second edition published in 1992. The book is listed on the Warp site above, and was also recommended in a forum as an accessible and less “mathy” introduction to modern relativity theory. I plan to acquire the more recent edition at some point. It’s a bit on the spendy side, probably as a result of being a college textbook.
On the one hand, employees have a responsibility to exercise some sort of reasonable care and compartmentalize political activities from an employer’s business activity. But once reasonable care has been exercised regarding that boundary we should be free to speak our minds. And not be abused by other Christians.
If we are trolling fellow believers because of their political opinions our allegiance is no longer to the risen Christ.
During our years in a former church my wife and I heard repeated admonitions from the leadership to greet visitors. Then a couple years ago we found ourselves visiting churches looking for a new church community. Now we were the newcomers. In some of the communities I noticed obvious personal connections between congregants that were not readily visible in others.
The common thread appeared to be that the communities with this “connectedness” had a single service and were smaller congregations [1]. I can’t claim to be able to tease these observations apart. The impact of multiple services could simply be a matter of a meeting location that doesn’t work particularly well, such as with crowd bottlenecks in congested building entrances. But group size, on the other hand, seems to have some inherent dynamics beyond the physical constraints of a meeting place.
I’ve spent most of my working career inside of large organizations and something fundamentally different is going on among people in small social groups vs large ones. In large groups the organizational structure, whatever that happens to be, seems to consistently take on a life of its own and define the function of the group, rather than any shared sense of mission or purpose.
There is a good chance this is a byproduct our cognitive makeup. In the early 1990s British anthropologist Robin Dunbar observed a correlation between the average size of primate social groups and neocortex size [2]. Dunbar extrapolated from that to calculate the number of stable social relationships that humans could comfortably have as somewhere between 150 and 200. He also made the following observation about human use of language, that it,
“…has two unusual properties that make it possible to form groups that are substantially larger than the 150-200 predicted by neocortex size: it allows us (1) to categorise individuals into types and (2) to instruct other individuals as to how they should behave towards specific types of individuals within society.”[3]
In short, it allows us to organize, which suggests a fundamental insight about why organizational structures dominate how people interact when group size grows. Below the limit interaction is about social connection. Above the limit interaction is driven by categorization and instruction.
Since Dunbar first published there appears to be have been a fair bit of debate as to where this boundary actually is, as well as contrary voices pointing out that personal networks in the modern world can be far larger [4]. I am not qualified to wander into the weeds here. All I am suggesting is that the boundary is real and has practical effects on the way social groups and organizing institutions work. And a good bit of political and economic theory seems to be blissfully unaware of it [5].
Why this matters to churches is that in the midst of theology and spiritual experience we seem to forget the limitations that characterize our physical existence. These just might include aspects of how our brains are wired. We are called into allegiance to the Body of Christ as part and parcel of our allegiance to the risen Lord. But it is possible that we can unnecessarily complicate the outworking of that when the structures we create don’t account for our material boundaries.
This problem seems to me to reach back into the ancient world. Group size was necessarily small when Christianity was a disfavored and sometimes persecuted minority. Faith can certainly come through preaching but in a hostile environment it would spread primarily via personal contact along social networks, such as families, work, and in the marketplace. Communities would be small and in periods of calm they could aggregate at the level of individual churches. But with numerical growth comes categorization and direction. And in learning how to do this the church absorbed the centralized authority practices of the surrounding culture.
And then Constantine’s official recognition of Christianity removed the limits to group size. At large scales centralized authority became a dominant feature of how the Church presented itself. It became an earthly kingdom that looked a whole lot like emperor, monarch, and baron. It is debatable how much this mirrored the kingdom Jesus describe to Pilate as “not of this world.”
We have the conceit in the modern world to believe we have put all this aside. But we also tend to uncritically absorb the authority and organizational structures from our own culture. And as our churches grow those structures come to dominate how they present to the world. Some of them have come to look a whole lot like corporations.
Ripon Cathedral
I am not trying to suggest that churches can’t ever be large, or that everything is inherently sweetness and light in small congregations. There are probably constructive ways that groups can grow in size and still foster stable community. There is nothing in Dunbar’s research to suggest that this is not possible.
But is is likely to require conscious thinking about limits as a church grows. Otherwise community is likely to be snuffed out by organization.
Size matters.
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[1] By smaller I mean relative to what we were accustomed. We participated in the same community for nearly three decades. At the beginning attendance was a bit north of 300. At one point attendance peaked at roughly 1000. Relative to some mega-churches even this might be considered small.
[5] This is probably why some of our grand ideas do not scale well. Consider, for instance, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” That probably only can work when the “eachs” all know each other. Or have reliable knowledge of reputation, and can readily identify freeloaders, liars and the power-hungry. The moment organization is applied to scale up the idea it becomes all about the apparatus required to collect from those with ability and distribute to those with need. A weak apparatus will collapse under the weight of the freeloaders. A strong apparatus will be dominated by the likes of Stalin and Mao.
Or such was likely the first thought of an old desert tribesman on seeing the line of petitioners winding through the encampment. The line ended at the tent of his son-in-law.
The younger man had done well for himself. When they parted he was an exile. He returned now as the leader of a people. And the older man had heard stories about how this came to be. But the younger man had little sense of his surroundings and the limits they imposed. He grew up as the adopted grandson of a king, and accustomed to having slaves hanging about out of sight, anticipating and delivering needs and desires. The upbringing also steeped him in stories that somehow elevated a mortal human king above the forces of earth and sky. He consequently seemed to have a rather blurry sense of personal limits.
photo by Kok Leng Yeo, Wikimedia Commons
The older man was Jethro, priest of Midian. He was grounded in a way that his son-in-law was not. On the one hand his position as a holy man brought prestige. On the other there was the poverty of his situation. When they first met Jethro lacked adult sons and his flocks were not large enough to support hirelings to tend them. They were also too small to attract the interest of suitable matches for his daughters. Jethro cultivated his prestige and was very careful how he used it. His status protected his daughters from physical harm when they tended his flocks. But it did not prevent intimidation when they brought the stock to water. Water in the desert was life, which meant it was often wielded as a cudgel by the strong. So Jethro lived in a balancing act between his position as priest and the limits of his actual power as the leader of his family.
But then a headstrong young fugitive waded into the midst of his daughters’ tormentors and beat them black and blue. Jethro was quick to recognize the potential. The fugitive became a relative and grandsons were added to Jethro’s little family.
There was some understandable consternation a few years later when the son-in-law proclaimed an encounter with the I AM. The encounter was followed shortly by a return to Egypt. Jethro knew whispers of the I AM from his service to the gods. But the vision of Moses dictated a confrontation with Pharaoh and survival seemed unlikely. Fortunately Moses left his family behind in the relative safety provided by the Midianite tribes. The children were the future.
And against all hope Moses returned. Jethro found himself learning something new of the I AM. But he also could see that the favor of the I AM did not apparently not bestow the good sense that comes with successfully navigating treacherous limits. So, Jethro stepped into the problem to bring a bit of that good sense. Again he was carefully trading on his status, this time as the family patriarch.
Why do you sit alone, and all the people stand around you from morning to evening?
Jethro could see that this was not going to end well.
The thing that you do is not good. You will surely wear away, both you, and this people that is with you; for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to perform it yourself alone.
Moses did not yet grasp the significance of divisions between what he must do, what the I AM must do, and what others must do. Jethro brought his experience to bear on the divisions.
You represent the people before God, and bring the causes to God. You shall teach them the statutes and the laws, and shall show them the way in which they must walk, and the work that they must do. Moreover you shall provide out of all the people able men which fear God: men of truth, hating unjust gain; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens. Let them judge the people at all times. It shall be that every great matter they shall bring to you, but every small matter they shall judge themselves. So shall it be easier for you, and they shall share the load with you.
Fortunately, Moses listened. Not every visionary leader does.
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Quotations are from Exodus 18 in the public domain World English Bible.
I recently finished Church Refugees, authored by sociologists Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope. It is a book about the exit from American churches of the talented and committed. The book challenges preconceptions about the dynamics of this exodus. Packard and Hope discovered something during their research that was rather different from what they expected to find, that “…the story of the dechurched was a story of modern religious organizations and institutions stifling people’s ability to engage with each other and their communities.”[1] The dechurched encountered during the study aren’t done with God. But as the book relates, they are “done with church.”
The discussions I have found about this book since publication appear to focus on what the “dones” expressed about why the left[2]. Commenters in online venues also had things to say about the theology of those doing the leaving – this was an aspect of the conflicted and frustrated space I was in when I heard about the book.
On reflection since it does seem clear that there are theological issues in play. I don’t think that it is possible to compartmentalize our faith by separating loyalty to the risen Christ from loyalty to the community of his people. Attempting to do so simply ignores what Paul has to say about the body of Christ and the bride of Christ. But having said that, “dones” leaving churches might actually communicate very little about the theology of those doing the leaving. It might instead say rather a lot about the actual expression of a professed theology in the place that is being left.
Beneath the surface of dissatisfaction with “church” are ways in which the insides of Christian organizations look unfortunately a lot like the insides of any other. Which is why I think Packard’s comments are such a big deal. What especially caught my attention was a comment on organization in Chapter 4.
“Existing research suggests that in any bureaucracy, power tends to become centralized, innovation is gradually diminished, and routines become cemented as the organization grows or simply continues to exist over time. The nature of the modern bureaucracy is to erase individual desire. In order to resist those forces, organizational leaders must be intentional and strategic. It’s not enough to simply wish for things to be participative and innovative. How many pastors have lamented the slow pace of change in their own congregations? Even founding pastors often find that after only a few short months or years of doing church, they’ve largely lost the ability to move the congregation in a new direction. This is true of all modern organizations, not just churches. It’s the nature of bureaucracies, not a function of poor leadership, bad vision, a sign of the withdrawal of God’s grace, or unfaithful followers. It’s simply a part of living in the modern world.”[3]
Most of the comment online about this book seems to drive right past issues of organization.
The last time I thought about the matter it coalesced into a rather fuzzy idea of how adoption of a specific organizational form might yield toxic byproducts. Which I think is still the case but I’ve since begun to wonder if something far more fundamental might be in play. I have had the opportunity to watch group dynamics from the insides of large organizations over the years. My sense is that there is something hard-wired about us that affects how large numbers of people behave when they are together[4].
We can’t do without organization except at very small scales — any numerical growth beyond what will fit in the front room of an apartment necessitates it. And more growth necessitates more organization. It seems to me that, absent some critical thinking while our groups grow, the features of whatever organizational structure we adopt are going to come to define the way the groups work. Which is likely to trump any theology we claim about the body of Christ.
If this is the case it will be true of any organizational form.
At some point nearly everybody rails about “the system.” The problem is that, get enough of us together in one place and there will always be a system. So rather than critiquing the “dones” who left, we ought to be thinking about how those of us who stay reflect the body of Christ when we meet. And if we don’t reflect the body of Christ, we ought to be thinking about what it is about our particular group that gets in the way.
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[1] Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope. Church Refugees: Sociologists reveal why people are DONE with church but not their faith. Group Publishing, Inc. 2015. Kindle edition, locations 86-87. See also: https://dechurched.net/church-refugees/
[2] For some examples see the the following:
Review: Church Refugees, at Candour, the blog of Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Reconciliation is what Christianity is supposed to be about. Just over a year ago I posted about shredding the toxic lists we keep of the wrongs others have done.
Here’s another view of it. I just listened to a podcast by Claire Perini and Mark Buchanan at Regent College in Vancouver, BC. They unpack what reconciliation looks like at a personal level between individuals and within national movements. Mark describes reconciliation as “…a father running down the road with his arms wide open…” and shares some personal stories of the “open embrace.”
The audio is about 45 minutes long and definitely worth the time. What really caught my attention was Mark’s statement near the end:
Stuff seems to leak out in our behavior online that says things about us we did not intend. And Christians need to take a good hard look at their motivations if cutting ties is wrapped up in severing a real relationship. This latest manifestation of the political climate is not something we should be participating in.
There are valid reasons for severing social media connections, such as avoiding the spillover from someone else’s toxic behavior. But if politics are at the bottom of this, your primary loyalties may be at issue. Christian faith at its core is allegiance to risen Jesus. It seems to me that this extends to how we treat his people — including those whose politics we find detestable.
Jesus gave the world the right to judge the authenticity of our claim to faith by our behavior toward one another.
Which might include how we behave in our political activities on social media.
Here’s an eye-opening article from The Atlantic on the weaponization of social media:
Most of us did not associate Twitter with terrorism until the Islamic State stormed into Mosul. We have given similarly scant thought to what might happen if the wondrous tools of the 21st century are ever paired with the scale and intensity of the conflicts that defined the 20th. Source: How Twitter Is Changing Modern Warfare – The Atlantic
The article lays out how bad actors exploit social media for propaganda purposes at large scales, serving up deliberate falsehoods to manipulate divisive national conflicts.
At least some of the trolls we encounter may not all be maladjusted losers living in their parents’ basements.
We are often more concerned with the appearance of our personal behavior than the actual substance. So we hold grudges and carry on our personal warfare with each other out of sight. Or so we think. Not so fast, suggests this article from The Atlantic. It discusses the effect of parental conflict on children:
The article described how smoldering, unresolved conflicts between parents do damage to their children, and quoted psychology Professor E Mark Cummings as saying that “‘…people underestimate the sensitivity of kids to their environments…'”
It might even be a step back from underestimation to a lack of awareness, which may be a broader feature of our conflicts with each other. We seem to have little or no idea of the damage we do to those around us.
“Biohackers have already signalled their intention to use CRISPR, which poses a big problem for the authorities.” 
Why does a revolutionary gene-editing technology sound like a candy bar? 
Sat Sapienti 
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