We consider the trivia of Emergence not because it is true or reasonable or helpful. I personally don't care to respond to its proponents, at least until they start showing some regard for church teachings and traditions.

And language. Not language in its semantic plasticity; language in its precision. Richard Mitchell's kind of language.

So if it is not true, not reasonable, not helpful, (or not civil) why bother at all? I think it is important to consider their thoughts because they are instructive. Like every movement, reaction, reform, idea or school of thought that preceded it, it will leave a mark. You can't be wise as a serpent and ignore the environment. You certainly cannot minister to people without knowing something of what is floating around in their heads.

I recently had reason to think about the relationship between Jesus and the teachers of Israel, and a lot of preachers have speculated about what Jesus taught the lawyers and separatists when he was 12. I have often wondered what he learned. Certainly their questions betrayed their presuppositions, their tendencies, their loyalties, their priorities, their prejudices....

I think that is probably the historical conversation I would most like to have witnessed. Surely that informed his ministry and shaped how he confronted ideas.

And how one contends in this world of ideas is important.

David Berlinski probably couldn't care less about emergence, but he does care about silly ideas and ideas in their ascendency, and he has written a book, The Devil's Delusion. I just got a copy yesterday afternoon and have read only the Preface and first chapter (No Gods Before Me).

But to introduce the book I will quote the last paragraphs of the preface and then one small slice from the first chapter to give a taste of his writing.

While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought. The yearnings of the human soul are not in vain. There is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience. There is recompense for suffering. A principle beyond selfishness is at work in the cosmos. All will be well.

I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.

Occupied by their own concerns, a great many men and women have a dull, hurt, angry sense of being oppressed by the sciences. They are frustrated by endless scientific boasting. They suspect that as an institution, the scientific community holds them in contempt. They feel no little distaste for those speaking in its name.

They are right to feel this way. I have written this book for them.

And from page nine:

After comparing more than two thousand DNA samples, an American molecular geneticist, Dean Hamer, concluded that a person's capacity to believe in God is linked to his brain chemicals. Of all things! Why not his urine? Perhaps it will not be amiss to observe that Dr. Hamer has made the same claim about homosexuality, and if he has refrained from arguing that a person's capacity to believe in molecular genetics is linked to a brain chemical, it is, no doubt, owing to a prudent sense that once that door is opened, God knows how and when anyone will ever slam it shut again.

____________________
The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions
David Berlinski
Crown Forum, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39626-6