Thinking About Software Engineering

I found a video by a Canadian professor regarding software engineering, debugging, code quality, automated unit testing, critical thinking and standards of proof.

The crux of the matter is that you cannot trust credentialed people simply because they are credentialed.  You must weigh their arguments yourself.

That and the best way to debug code is to read it.

Greg Wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It’s True

The Divine Dance to Dethrone God

I recently had "The Divine Dance" brought to my attention as a new means of meditating on Christianity.  After studying it, I feel the need to publicly critique the theology and philosophy of "The Divine Dance," by Fr. Richard Rohr.

The core message of Fr. Rohr is the idea of Flow.  According to Rohr, the Flow is God's love and life going out from himself into creation, yielding a "bottom up" approach to theology.  Bottom up theology starts at mankind and the relationships between them and derives from these the idea of the Flow coming from God and flowing between men and back to God again.  As Rohr says, "The all-important thing is that the Three are formed and identified by the outpouring and uninhibited flow itself. The flow forms and protects the Three, and the Three distribute the flow. It’s precisely this same dynamic for a healthy society, isn’t it?"

These kinds of philosophies have appeared in the past, and they all have the same root: humanism.  The humanistic themes in Rohr's work permeate throughout his ideas of the Trinity and the role of humanity in Christianity.  As he says "Some mystics who were on real journeys of prayer took this message to its consistent conclusion: creation is thus 'the fourth person of the Blessed Trinity'! Once more, the divine dance isn’t a closed circle—we’re all invited!"  This fourth person is supposed to be nature and mankind, as humans and clearly shows that Rohr is attempting to elevate humanity to godhood and make humanity as the fourth member of the Trinity.  This has been the pursuit of philosophers from the Renaissance onward, to attempt to elevate humanity to godhood and in doing so, dethrone the true God and enable us to determine the rules of morality for ourselves with no interference from God.

This humanistic approach to Christianity has been tried before, even back in the time of Paul in the form of the Greek paganists who sought to emphasize the material over the spiritual, and Rohr himself borrows from their theology stating, "The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them."  This inordinate focus on the material world and the attempt to elevate the material world to the level of divinity is a definitive sign of a thoroughly humanistic approach.  As theologian Francis Schaeffer has said in A Christian Manifesto, "Humanism means that the man is the measure of all things. Man is the measure of all things. If this other final reality of material or energy shaped by pure chance is the final reality, it gives no meaning to life. It gives no value system. It gives no basis for law, and therefore, in this case, man must be the measure of all things."  When man is the measure of all things, anything can be accepted as doctrine.

The natural outcome of this philosophy is complete relativism in which anything can be acceptable as morally good.  Actions such as abortion and homosexuality can be readily accepted as good and right, when the Bible clearly speaks against such things.  In Rohr's attempt to elevate the natural world to divinity, he successfully dethrones God and relegates Him to the position of sourcing the Flow.  When you hold this position, you are consigning yourself to be set adrift in a sea of directionless doctrine and meaningless morality and a perpetual search for truth which invariably ends in nihilistic despair.

The Bible is very clear on the nature of God and man.  Isaiah 45:5 states unequivocally "I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God."  God is very clear on this matter.  There is no room for humanity in the Trinity.  He goes on to say "Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker, those who are nothing but potsherds among the potsherds on the ground.  Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ Does your work say, ‘The potter has no hands’?"  Here God condemns those who seek to dethrone him, saying Woe to those who quarrel with their maker.  Even Jesus, who Rohr is constantly seeking to humanize, stated very clearly that "I am the way, the truth and the life.  No man comes to the Father but by me."  Even the human Jesus clearly excluded all other paths to God.  In Colossians the relationship between man and God is also enunciated without confusion, "For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him."  Meaning the all of nature was created for God, without any room for nature to become God.  Even Paul in Romans argues "But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? 'Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’' ²¹ Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?"  We are nothing before a holy and omnipotent God and to attempt to elevate lumps of clay to divinity is nothing less than humanistic heresy.

God is serious about His nature, and about humanity's role in the universe.  To attempt to elevate humanity to divinity is heretical and will ruin all who ascribe to this belief, both in this life and in the life to come.

Edit: I had the wrong Greek cult as my example.
The Gnostics were the spiritualists, not materialists.  The paganists are the ones who carved gods for themselves from stone in the form of natural creatures.