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12 Years Later
8 years ago
Saturday, July 5, 2008
McLean Wedding
Today was the big day for Andy and Sarah! It was also a big day for me marking my first wedding taking pictures with Joanna! It was so much fun! It was quite hectic...my camera did not stop snapping shots for 2 minutes straight all day long! Everything moves so fast...and everything must be captured! The bridal party was super patient as I'm sure we seemed like the paparazzi! Putting myself in their shoes, I think I have decided I DON'T want a photographer at my wedding! They are quite annoying! :)
Here are some shots:
Yes, leave it to me to find the kid...:) This guy got so excited when I bent down and said, "Can I take your picture??"
Here are some shots:
Yes, leave it to me to find the kid...:) This guy got so excited when I bent down and said, "Can I take your picture??"
Second Shooter....Here I Come!
A friend of mine introduced me to a local photographer named Joanna Liston (www.joannalistonphotography.com) and mentioned to her that I liked photography. She asked me to join her for a couple of gigs this summer as her second shooter. Of course I was thrilled to have the experience and glean from a pro! I have really enjoyed working with her! She is very talented and has a great heart for the Lord.
Our first outing was a Bridal. I have never even been to one much less taken pictures! It was VERY hot but so nice to be outside playing around with what is quickly becoming one of my favorite hobbies! Now that the wedding is over, I can now post some of the results!
Our first outing was a Bridal. I have never even been to one much less taken pictures! It was VERY hot but so nice to be outside playing around with what is quickly becoming one of my favorite hobbies! Now that the wedding is over, I can now post some of the results!
Friday, July 4, 2008
Instinct or Conscience?
On my day off work for July 4th, I packed up my books and walked up to a local coffee shop downtown Wake Forest. I opened my complete book of C.S. Lewis' Signature Classics to "The Abolition of Man" and indulged in some "intellectual candy" as the guys in my History of Ideas class used to say.
The Abolition of Man is quite depressing and poignant. It describes current philosophical
trends that result in the "de-humanizing" of mankind. I was struck by how "ahead of his times" Lewis' works are! While he certainly refutes relativism, his points also apply to the New Atheists who suggest there is an absolute standard of morality derived from biology. This new philosophical trend seems to be a more "sophisticated" form of atheism but is really the same thing in all new packaging.
Even though the New Atheist will admit to an objective right or wrong, they will not admit to an objective reality. They attempt to start with the normative ethic and skip the first step: the meta-ethic. They seek to remove "ought" from "is." Consequently, they have no justifiability.
By reducing everything to nature, the New Atheists have managed to reduce conscience to instinct. C.S. Lewis offers the following explanation for why they do this:
From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature "in order that" we may "conquer" them. We are always conquering Nature, because "Nature" is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers "from" Nature is also the surrendering of things "to" Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final steop of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. This is one of the many instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity. It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all. It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return.
New Atheism, while managing to reduce conscience to instinct, also manages to reduce man not as an being equal with nature, but as a slave of it. Lewis argues that our attempt to control nature "because we can" actually makes us a slave to it. Human beings do have the innate desire to make something better or improved. I argue that this is part of the Image of God in man. We live in a world ordered by the Creator over the creation. Because we are in His image, we are creators as well. Those who believe science will make humanity better are operating on their natural inclination to create or better something. However, they are doing so only after they have stepped out of the realm of the meta-ethic. As Lewis observes:
In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, no stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. . . . Each new power won "by" man is a power "over" man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.
This statement reminded me of Huxley's A Brave New World in the way the older generation attempted to create a perfect race with no problems (crimes, emotional pain, etc) but consequently enslaved them. It seems then, our god-given creativity must be used within the holistic created order which He put in place. Even though the New Atheists admit to "normative ethic" and objective morality, their system continues to de-humanize mankind. The new packaging might be "new and improved" but the final product is the same.
The Abolition of Man is quite depressing and poignant. It describes current philosophical
trends that result in the "de-humanizing" of mankind. I was struck by how "ahead of his times" Lewis' works are! While he certainly refutes relativism, his points also apply to the New Atheists who suggest there is an absolute standard of morality derived from biology. This new philosophical trend seems to be a more "sophisticated" form of atheism but is really the same thing in all new packaging.
Even though the New Atheist will admit to an objective right or wrong, they will not admit to an objective reality. They attempt to start with the normative ethic and skip the first step: the meta-ethic. They seek to remove "ought" from "is." Consequently, they have no justifiability.
By reducing everything to nature, the New Atheists have managed to reduce conscience to instinct. C.S. Lewis offers the following explanation for why they do this:
From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature "in order that" we may "conquer" them. We are always conquering Nature, because "Nature" is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers "from" Nature is also the surrendering of things "to" Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final steop of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. This is one of the many instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity. It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all. It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return.
New Atheism, while managing to reduce conscience to instinct, also manages to reduce man not as an being equal with nature, but as a slave of it. Lewis argues that our attempt to control nature "because we can" actually makes us a slave to it. Human beings do have the innate desire to make something better or improved. I argue that this is part of the Image of God in man. We live in a world ordered by the Creator over the creation. Because we are in His image, we are creators as well. Those who believe science will make humanity better are operating on their natural inclination to create or better something. However, they are doing so only after they have stepped out of the realm of the meta-ethic. As Lewis observes:
In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, no stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. . . . Each new power won "by" man is a power "over" man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.This statement reminded me of Huxley's A Brave New World in the way the older generation attempted to create a perfect race with no problems (crimes, emotional pain, etc) but consequently enslaved them. It seems then, our god-given creativity must be used within the holistic created order which He put in place. Even though the New Atheists admit to "normative ethic" and objective morality, their system continues to de-humanize mankind. The new packaging might be "new and improved" but the final product is the same.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Siding with Science
Richard Lewontin, population biologist at Harvard, brilliantly articulates the following in the New York Review of Books:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific comunity for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. Iti s not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the pehenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are foced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Morever, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.
After reading through a survey of the Great Books, it is really amazing to step back and see trends and movements in the history of thought. One of the most striking is in the realm of epistemology. The ancient greeks (especially Plato) believed the best way to know something is through reason and not the senses. They recognized that senses are deceptive and cannot be trusted. Many say the great epistemological shift came with Francis Bacon, or the Enlightenment in general. With this shift came the view that one can can only know something certainly through the senses. This is the view we are familiar with today. In our world, if one can't experience something with their five senses, it is not real and is either dismissed as speculation, placed in the realm of "belief" (which is defined as anti-reason) or considered a matter of opinion.
According to Lewontin, though science is proven time and again to not be entirely justifiable through the senses, people today still hold onto it with "religious devotion." Perhaps they are not holding to their own method of knowledge. How ironic.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
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