Author Archives: markdowe1

Arts, Christianity, Culture

The Old Testament Book of Numbers

NUMBERS

OVER the next few weeks narratives from Scripture will be based on the Old Testament Book of Numbers. The Book overlaps with Leviticus and Deuteronomy with Moses and the Israelites the key people to be found in the text.  

For today, Numbers has significance in that God is supreme over all nations who defends his people. There is also the lesson that hardship is not a reason to question God but an opportunity to trust him.

REBELS WITHOUT A PAUSE

It might better have been called The Book of Warnings. On several occasions the fractious Israelites oppose Moses and complain. Even his brother and sister oppose him.

Each time the rebels are punished by a divinely-appointed event, reinforcing Moses’ authority and leadership. People are reminded that God is holy and just; it is a common theme that runs through Numbers. His holiness is demonstrated in the detailed instructions for religious rituals, stressing the need for God’s people to be pure and to deal with him carefully.

His justice and care for the Israelites is seen in the way in which he defends their cause against the Moabites in the strange tale of Balaam. The pagan priest’s curses are turned into divinely inspired blessings.

As we see from Numbers, the Israelites had expected to go straight from Egypt into Canaan, a journey taking a few weeks at the most. The Book tells the sad story of their refusal to trust God after the spies sent into Canaan brought back a report of “giants in the land”. As a result, they were sentenced to 40 years solitary confinement in the Sinai Desert until all who had left Egypt had died.

All, that is, except for Joshua and Caleb, the two scouts who produced a minority report saying that Canaan was accessible with God’s help. They eventually took the Israelites across the Jordon as the story continues in Deuteronomy and Joshua.

Numbers makes for sober reading. Any generation can embark on new projects with the same buoyant enthusiasm reflected in the first census which prepared the Israelites for conquest. But the temptation to begin to rely on human wisdom, to forget God’s absolute holiness and to neglect the spiritual disciplines, returns every time. Numbers is a clear warning not to make the same mistakes as the Israelites.

The censuses make sense

– A narrative on Numbers 1-4, 7, 26

NO ONE ever read the phone book for pleasure, and therefore the temptation to skip the lists in Numbers is strong. Yet, they serve a purpose and have a positive message for today.

The censuses were taken as a record of the Israelites’ military strength (1:3; 26:2). So they offer a picture of a united federation of 12 tribes preparing for combined operations.

Entry into Canaan was going to be costly; they would have to fight even though they saw the land as God’s gift. Unity and co-operation were essential for success.

They also give us a snapshot of the relative strengths of Israel’s tribes. Judah, for example, with 74,600 men over 20 years is more than twice the size of Manasseh with its 32,200. Later in Israel’s history we see intertribal conflict, and Judah (with the smaller Benjamin) eventually separating from the other ten.

The list of offerings for the Tent of Meeting (chapter 7) reads like an accountant’s stock list. But how exciting it is! Little Manasseh gives exactly the same to God’s “church” as mighty Judah!

The tribes are seen as equal before God. Judah cannot be closer or more valuable to God because it is bigger, and Manasseh can’t be of less value to God because it’s smaller. This is an exact parallel to Paul’s teaching about the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12:14-27.

This well-known and beautiful blessing can be found in Numbers 6:24-26:

“The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn his face towards you and give you peace.”

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Arts, History, Philosophy

Philosophy: On Reason and Experience

AGE OF REASON AND ENLIGHTENMENT

“Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” – George Washington (1732–1799)

IN the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason – characterised by thinkers such as Descartes, Hobbes and Locke during the seventeenth century – brought about a seismic shift in emphasis in philosophical thought. Massive advances were made in the natural sciences and this in turn led to a questioning of old certainties and a rush of new and often competing ideas concerning everything from how knowledge and truth can be acquired and tested to the first seedlings of notions of democracy, representation and civil liberties. The floodgates opened, characterised best by Kant’s imperative in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” The human mind was emerging from the darkness of infancy and maturing like that of an enquiring child, while Kant urged people to “dare to know”. Reason and experience became the watchwords in this new philosophy, which was more concerned with how things actually are rather than how they could or possibly should be.

However, not all enlightenment was positive. There were darker consequences of this new awakening, as evidenced by the reign of terror following the French Revolution and by the work of possibly the most morose thinker of all time, Arthur Schopenhauer, who once wrote in an essay that everyone should swallow a live toad for breakfast to guarantee they wouldn’t have to experience anything else quite as dispiriting again for the rest of the day. It would also be a mistake to think that the status quo embraced the new enlightenment with open arms. The preface quote for this article is taken from George Washington’s farewell address to the American people and illustrates that although there was an explosion in free-thinking in some quarters, the old guard – the protectors of religious-based morality – were deeply suspicious and frightened of these new ideas about how to live in and view the world.

Reading the great thinkers of reason and experience shouldn’t be difficult. Most of what they had to say seems pretty self-evident today, obvious even, yet somehow their arguments can be difficult to follow. This is largely due to the intellectual zeal with which they approached their investigations and their fervent search for one over-arching, all-encompassing system of thought. It didn’t help either that this spirit of competitiveness led to petty rivalries. The German philosopher Schopenhauer had a hatred of Hegel bordering on the pathological. This drove him to take up a position at the University of Berlin, where Hegel had a seat, just to try and prove his ideas were more popular with the students (but he failed spectacularly). Nonetheless, readers should appreciate that the philosophers of the ages of reason and enlightenment represent a pivotal point in the history of philosophy.

“Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond… Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

HEGEL

Hegel was a major figure in German idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality was revolutionary at the time and a major factor in the development of some radical threads of left-wing political thought.

Hegel was born on 27 August 1770, in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied philosophy and classics at Tubingen, and after graduation became a tutor and explored theology. Hegel taught at Heidelberg and Berlin, where he wrote and explored philosophical and theological concepts.

His major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit (or mind), was published in 1807 and his ideas developed in other deeply complex works until his death, from cholera, in 1831.

Almost everything that Hegel was to develop over the rest of his life is prefigured in the Phenomenology, but the work is far from systematic and generally accepted as difficult to read. The Phenomenology attempts to present human history, with all its revolutions, wars and scientific discoveries, as an idealistic self-development of an objective Spirit or Mind.

His mark on history has been profound, in that his influence has spread throughout both left- and right- wing political thought. In fact, the interpreters of Hegel split into “left” and “right” camps. Marx drew inspiration from Hegel by developing the idea that history and reality should be viewed dialectically and that the process of change – the struggle – should be seen as a transition from the fragmentary towards the complete. This is a skewed development of what Hegel tried to suggest in phenomenology. However, in practical terms it is likely that Hegel may have approved of Marx’s revolutionary interpretation, as he was witness at close hand to revolutionary Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century. It is even said that he celebrated Bastille Day every year.

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Psychology, Research, Science

Are male and female brains wired differently? 

GENDER BRAINS

Intro: It is often pointed where we differ, but when it comes to our brains, research shows that there are far more similarities than differences

WE are told that men and women are so different, it’s as if they came from separate planets. Martian men are stereotypically target-focused, assertive, and good at navigating; women born on Venus are more empathetic, caring, and expert multitaskers. We are all fascinated by what makes the other sex tick, but back on Earth, when it comes to brains, much of what’s been written about the sex divide is more science fiction than scientific fact.

Websites and news outlets have seeped scientific-sounding theories into common wisdom, such as the idea that women listen with both sides of their brain, whereas men use only one side; or that men and women navigate using “entirely different” brain regions. Some even claim that there is a “male brain” and a “female brain”.

These ideas often have their roots in scientific research, but much of it is based on early experiments in our brains which were either found later to be insignificant, or their results were misinterpreted or misreported.

Scientists are suckers for wanting to tell a story that will be the talk of the town – and the media are willing accomplices. Less headline-grabbing experiments that show little or no difference can get stuffed in the drawer, never to see the light of day.

So, what does the science really say? From the eighth week in the womb, little boys’ and girls’ brains do start to develop slightly differently. Throughout our lives, the sex hormones testosterone, oestrogen, and progesterone mould our individual physical and emotional development. Hormone level differences tweak the dial on characteristics such as aggression, pain threshold, stress response, and parent-child bonding, but each person is so unique that there is often more variation within each sex than there is between them.

Male and female brains don’t differ significantly in size, either. Men’s brains are slightly larger as a consequence of their larger bodies, and thanks to detailed scanning we know that some brain parts differ in proportion between the sexes, but the differences are too small to claim that there is such a thing as a “male brain” or a “female brain”.

Most areas of mental functioning, behaviour and personality are the same in both sexes. What differences there are, such as in aggression levels, are usually driven by the differences in sex hormones such as testosterone after puberty.

Nature or nurture?

Recent research points to the historic sex divide actually being down to society, not science. When the magnifying glass of science reveals the workings of the brain, the accepted male and female stereotypes mostly vanish.

Some scientists now think that what differences there are between male and female brains – such as, say, in map reading – are the result not of biology, but of thousands of years of brain-training. The good news, however, is the brain is brilliant at learning new things – you can adapt and learn many new skills within a lifetime.

So it is logical that, if given the opportunity, men and women can learn skills stereotypical of the other sex very easily. For example, children who are given Lego to play with are likely to mature and have brains which have larger spatial cortexes, regardless of whether they are male or female.

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