Opus 2025-468: New terms: Academic Brain Dysfunction

In my thought journey, I keep coming across people who have certificates on their wall and letters behind their name who think they have the right to pontificate on major issues.  When I go to see my doctor, which I did recently, I choose the doctor not because he has certificates, but because he has impressed me that his mind and his understanding have grown beyond his degrees and his official status.  I go to see him because I feel he is unusual in the field of primary care medicine.  I will continue to work with him as long as he continues to keep thinking.

Other doctors I have been around take the company line, swallow it hole, and spew back the nonsense that they have been told.  They show no evidence of thinking it through themselves.  They show no evidence of reading or paying attention to what’s happening in our society.  This is true in just about every area of study.

I fight this most in the area of my biblical studies and my theology.  The current burr under my saddle in theological terms would have to do with the immutability of God.  Put in simple everyday language, that means that God does not change.  I agree with that statement because the Bible has statements like this,

(Mal 3:6 KJV)  For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.

To paraphrase a quote from Princess bride, I keep wanting to say, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”  The reason for that is that there are numerous places in the scripture where it talks about God changing his mind.  In the King James that is often built around the word “repent” .  One of the classic lines that proceeds Noah finding grace in the eyes of the Lord is this verse,

Genesis 6:6 (KJV) And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

Now, I don’t care what your theological persuasion is.  You may be a total atheist.  But when someone repents of something that means they change their mind.  It means they have a different idea than they had before.  It would seem that it is possible for God to have different thoughts.

Is God immutable?  Yes if you understand it in the proper way.  But that does not mean that He is a dead piece of stone.  Several places in scripture God mocks the idols of the pagans.  He talks about them having eyes, but they cannot see; feet, but they cannot walk; mouths but they cannot talk and so forth.  The implication is that He, the living God, can see, walk and talk.  Now when you see things they interact with your neurons and make your brain perceive something that wasn’t there before.  That is literally, change.  I understand that God is not physical so He does not have nurons, but if God is different from the idols because He can see, and He can feel and He can hear, every time He does one of those things He is changing.  So don’t give me this nonsense that God cannot “change”.

I started watching a video by someone who had impressed me once, but has been losing ground ever since and he got off on this idea that God cannot change.  He was taking it all the way to the wall.  His statements were without any kind of waiver or qualification.  He even quoted a famous theologian, one that I had heard of, one that I stopped listening to a long time ago when he declared war on non-Calvinists.  That theologian really got worked up and said that if there is one molecule anywhere in the entire universe, that is a maverick molecule, outside of the total control of God, then all our theology, all of our beliefs, everything about who we are as Christians is meaningless.  Excuse me.  My God is bigger than that.  What if God made that molecule a maverick?

The problem with being an academic is that you think your theories are above the facts.  How someone with many books to his credit, and I’m sure multiple degrees, could declare that everything is void if there is one spec out of place has an undue respect for his own insight.  I would encourage him to stay in his office and write out deep thoughts on sticky notes and post them on his window so that he doesn’t have to look out and see the real world.  I would even encourage for him to make videos and post them.  One of the great things about YouTube is, I don’t have to watch.

I’m sure this rant will continue in other places of the times.  Until then, keep your brain in gear and your Bible open.  It is amazing how well those two concepts work together.

homo unius libri