Found: Two Goalposts

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief.

Obviously I have taken a bit of a break from blogging, my last post having been made one and a half months ago. My dialog with Ernie has been the major emphasis for awhile, and while he was traveling and moving, it was pretty easy to take a break. But now that Ernie is back, looking for an argument, I guess it's time to devote some time to writing again.

In his post, Ernie sets forth what he hopes might be a reasonable characterization of my foundational objections to Christianity. Has he succeeded? He certainly captures some important elements of my thinking. I will try to state them succinctly myself and then perhaps highlight what I think are important differences between his "Woodman" version and my version.

Using the word "theory" in the sense of an explanatory framework, I assert that a theory built on naturalism can provide a better explanation of the world and specifically of the history of Judaism and Christianity than a theory built around Christian monotheism (or any other theism). Such a theory can explain features of the Bible and its development that are inconsistent with divine inspiration and divine authority. Such a theory can provide a more reliable foundation for morality than supposed divine authority. Such a theory provides a better explanation for the existence of both natural and moral evil. Such a theory can better explain the variety of religious beliefs and experiences found throughout the world, and the variety of beliefs held by those who self-identify as Christians. In short, I believe a naturalistic (non-theistic) theory has greater explanatory power than Christianity-as-theory does.

There is, of course, a great deal of elaboration that might accompany those claims, but for my purpose here I hope it will be sufficient. How does that compare to Ernie's Woodman? Really pretty well, I think. Regarding "[e]pistemic dependence on received Scripture as a reliable indicator of divine will", I would go beyond calling such a belief merely unjustified and irrelevent; other beliefs, including belief in the existence of a Creator God, I would call unjustified epistemically and irrelevent morally.

I hope readers will find this consistent with this list of assertions I made three months ago, when I had intended to start detailing my reasons for disbelief.

Ernie also advanced two propositions that he is willing to defend:

1. Belief in a transcendent moral purpose for the universe is as well-justified and essential for social inquiry as belief in the transcendent mathematical nature of the universe is for scientific inquiry.
2. Belief in the Biblical narrative regarding God's role in shaping religious faith is as central and well-justified as belief in the scientific narrative regarding evolution's role in shaping anatomically modern humans.

These are strong claims, as I am sure Ernie is aware. I look forward to seeing Ernie's elaboration and defense of them. While perhaps due to a misunderstanding of our mutual goal at the time, one of my frustrations in this "diablogue" has been the higher-than-helpful ratio of assertions to justifications and perhaps we have now arrived at the point where we can remedy that problem.

P.S. For those who might stumble by that question the evidence for evolution, the article I would recommend most highly is 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent by Dr. Douglas Theobold. This is not, however, specific to "evolution's role in shaping anatomically modern humans." As I am not actually sure of Ernie's particular position on the subject, I suppose it is possible that Ernie does not feel the standard he is suggesting for (II) is as high as I think it is, but considering the standard he presents for (I), I strongly suspect he intended the second standard to be high as well.

Chesterton's Orthodoxy

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief.

It has been just over a month since Ernie suggested I read three books. I have previously posted on C.S. Lewis' Pilgrim's Regress and Brian McLaren's A Generous Orthodoxy. The third book Ernie recommended was G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, which I finally got from the library two weeks ago. As it turns out, the book is freely available for download as well: you can find several different formats here.

Orthodoxy was written to answer a challenge from a Mr. G.S. Street, issued in response to Chesterton's earlier book Heretics in which Chesterton (apparently) criticized the philosophies or beliefs of some of his contemporaries. Street said, "I shall not begin to worry about my philosophy of life until Mr. Chesteron discloses his." Orthodoxy was intended to be this disclosure.

The book is not long, only 168 pages. Even so, I have only read two-thirds of the book and am unlikely to finish. While there may be some redeeming features in the last sixty pages, I am not hopeful. I cannot recall ever using the term sophistry to describe a work before, but I would be sorely tempted here. In fact, in the course of reviewing the early chapters of the book as I write this, I find in the first chapter that "Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused." If his other works were similar in character to this one, I would tend to side with his accusers.

The first chapter is the introduction. The meat of the book begins in Chapter 2, "The Maniac", and its very first paragraph made a poor impression. He relates an anecdote wherein a publisher made a comment in reference to somebody else "That man will get on; he believes in himself." Now when somebody is said to believe in himself, we normally mean that they have a certain amount of self-confidence. Chesterton responds that those who truly believe in themselves are found in lunatic asylums. But this is an extreme literal interpretation that I would expect from my eight-year-old son. Yes, it is possible to have too much self-confidence, but that hardly means that we should have none at all. According to Chesterton, the publisher eventually said, "Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?" By the second page, Chesterton has already introduced a false dichotomy: either you believe in yourself so completely as to be insane, or you cannot believe in yourself at all.

This practice of contrasting his views with their extreme opposite is far too common. Much of Chapters 2 and 3 are spent criticizing other philosophies propounded by his contemporaries. Perhaps some of them really did hold the extreme views that he attributes to them. If so, while he was right to reject those views, he cannot validly draw conclusions that exclude more moderate positions without addressing those positions, and this he does not do. (Of course, if his opponents did not in fact hold the views he attributes to them, his case is even worse.) For instance, on pp 28-29 (of the 1995 printing by Ignatious Press), Chesterton is attempting to demonstrate that materialism is more limiting than any religion. Now there is a sense in which this is true, insofar as religions (typically) involve a material world plus some sort of spiritual world. But Chesterton takes this too far when he says:

The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. Poor Mr. McCabe is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel...

Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it.

I would suggest that most materialists adopted that position based on insufficient evidence for anything non-material. Materialists' disbelief in imps and immortality does not prevent them from considering them; rather, their consideration of them does not extend far beyond the positive evidence for them. Since such evidence is lacking, so is their belief. This "limitation" thus stems from a superior epistemological method, as it excises belief in unsupported (and sometimes unsupportable) propositions, so long as they remain unsupported.

This sort of skepticism is anathema to Chesterton. On pp 36-37, he writes:

But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt - the Divine Reason...

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table...

I may be wrong, but I think he is quite wrong in this.

In Chapter 4, "The Ethics of Elfland", Chesterton contrasts the natural world with the world of fairy tales, a world that is somehow more pure or more real because its characters and rules are so stereotypical. In fairyland, the laws are laws of reason, laws of necessity. They cannot be broken: "If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father of Jack" And then he writes,

But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened -- dawn and death and so on -- as if they were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit... The men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling.

So laws in fairyland are unbreakable laws, while so-called natural laws are merely inductive "it has always been that way but it could be different" statements. Now, that may be a worthwhile distinction to make. But what I found ten pages later was most curious:

In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken. But the machinery of this cosmic prison [the natural world] was something that could not be broken; for we ourselves were only part of its machinery. We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them. The idea of the mystical condition quite disappeared; one can neither have the firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of breaking them.

So, in fairyland laws cannot be broken, but they can be, else they would not be laws. In the real world, the laws are not true laws because we could imagine breaking them, but they are not true laws because they cannot be broken.

Chapter 6, "The Paradox of Christianity", Chesterton continues to describe what finally led him to return to Christianity. He had observed that some skeptics of Christianity would accuse it of one thing, and others would accuse it of the opposite. Christianity, they said, was too pessimistic and too optimistic. Christianity advocates fighting too little (turn the other cheek) and fighting too much (causing wars and their attendant misery). Christianity drags women away from their families into the cloister, and Christianity forces marriage and family upon people. Christianity shows contempt for women, and only women go to church. And from this, Chesterton eventually concludes, Christianity must be correct because it brings together and balances such paradoxical ideas.

There is, however, another explanation. Christianity does none of those things because Christianity is a religion, a belief system or even a family of related belief systems. It is not itself an actor, an agent. Christians do those things. Some do one thing, some its opposite. Some do one thing at one time and its opposite another. Christianity as an institution is complex; it is possible for both one thing and its opposite to be true in different parts of the overall whole, or at different times. The same can be said of many complex institutions. Why should we therefore look to Christianity for truth and not these other institutions?

In addition to reading the book, I have done a small amount of reading about Chesterton himself, and one point that I found not at all surprising was that C.S. Lewis apparently held Chesterton in high regard, calling his book The Everlasting Man "the best popular apologetic I know". When I read in Chapter 4 that

In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

it reminded me immediately of C.S. Lewis. Unfortunately, it reminded me of that which I find least convincing in Lewis' writing, an "I'd like it if this were true, so it must be" sort of reasoning.

These are some examples of what I found lacking in Orthodoxy. Obviously there is more to the book than just this, but yet, in some ways there is not. That is, I did not find anything remotely compelling. I generally hate to leave books unfinished once I get started; I like closure. But after reading two-thirds of this book, there was still nothing that had been opened, nothing that led me to think, "that's a good point, I wonder where it leads." Perhaps I was just too dense to see it, or too biased, but I am afraid all I got from this book was a rather poor impression of G.K. Chesterton. Sorry, Ernie.

Dobson on Modern Education

We still get a monthly newsletter in the mail from Focus on the Family, usually written by James Dobson. June's edition, titled "Education Turned Perversion" arrived today. I still sometimes read them, and this one deserves comment for its inflamed rhetoric, dishonesty and irony.

The primary focus of the letter was to examine the ways that "homosexual activists and their allies on the far left" have been trying to advance their cause by influencing education. Dobson describes this as an effort "to gain control of children", "a brilliant plan, hatched in Satan's own lair." I am not sure if Godwin's Law applies to snail mail, but it took only until the third paragraph to mention Adolf Hitler.

Dobson discusses (if you could call a diatribe a discussion) three bills under consideration in California as examples of what is being done, SB 1437, AB 606 and AB 1056. You might want to read them quickly; they are not long. But before you do, make sure you read Dobson's newsletter first, so you will know what to look for.

SB 1437 amends existing law to forbid educational materials from "reflecting adversely" on people based on sexual orientation, in addition to other categories that are already protected. It also requires that social science classes include study of the role and contributions of various social groups (again now including sexual orientation), and it requires that educational materials reflect the diversity of our society. Each of these are to be done in "an age-appropriate manner". This is the closest that any of these three bills come to actually promoting homosexuality, and that only by recognizing the contributions to California of homosexuals among many other groups. It does not directly promote homosexuality or any other sexuality.

According to Dobson,

AB 606 would authorize the California Superintendent of Public Education to withhold two-thirds of a school district's budget from any district that does not, in its judgement, promote homosexuality, transsexuality and bisexuality in school policies.

His footnote for this claim references an article on WorldNetDaily, which includes the above statement, not quite word for word, but very close. Unfortunately, this is an inaccurate description of the bill. Discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation (again, among many other characteristics) is already illegal in California. However, such descrimination and harassment continues to be a problem. This bill requires school districts to develop and publish anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, update other documents, display information on training, curricula and other materials that address these issues, and so on. It does also specify the means by which the Superintendent can enforce the law. To claim that anything in this bill forces school districts to promote homosexuality, transsexuality or bisexuality is simply wrong.

The third bill Dobson references, AB 1056, would authorize up to $250,000 for pilot programs for "tolerance education" ($25,000 per school for up to ten schools). Each school would run its program for three years. Dobson takes pains to point out that this $250,000 would come from an almost bankrupted state treasury, and while that may be true, that figure represents only 0.0005% of California's annual education budget of the $48 billion estimated for 2006-20007. Again, the focus of the programs is on tolerance, not of various sexual lifestyles particularly, but of any of a large variety of criteria. It certainly does not promote homosexual lifestyles, but only promotes the kind and respectful treatment of students. It does not require students to respect homosexuality, as Dobson complains, but to respect (among many others) homosexuals, a distinction fully compatible with the old "hate the sin, love the sinner" idea, if you happen to view homosexuality that way.

After these misleading and outright incorrect descriptions of the bills, Dobson asks

Is there any doubt about the commitment of these people to the task of controlling children's minds? All the ranting and raving about "tolerance" is a ruse. The real purpose here is to promote sexual "lifestyles" among the young. Hence the fate of California's children, and by extension, the children of the nation, hangs in the balance.

Controlling children's minds? I think not. Teaching people to be kind to each other, even when people like Dobson are trying to fan the flames of intolerance? Yes. And who is ranting and raving?

Dobson includes a few more accusations to fan the flames a bit more. He claims that the bills will require textbooks "to depict same-sex couples in romantic and family settings." There is no such requirement. Dobson also "presumes" that because the law (SB 1437) would prohibits material that adversely reflects on gays and lesbians (on the basis of their sexual orientation!), it would also prohibit "references to sexually transmitted diseases among both heterosexuals and homosexuals." Why would he presume that? Not because the law would actually prohibit that, any more than it would prevent discussions of any other disease. No, he would presume that, I think, because it will further inflame the fear and anger he is trying to generate.

And that is where the irony comes in. Dobson quotes an associate of Ted Trimpa, a political strategist that works with Tim Gill, a Denver businessman involved in gay political issues. Dobson includes this quote:

"You have to create an environment of fear ... the only way to do that is to get aggressive and go out and actually beat them up..."

Uh, oh. Ellipsis alert. Time to go and track that quote down and see what was really said. I'll add context and then bold the elided parts:

McFarlane quotes his boss on another key aspect of their political strategy. "Tim says you have to turn down the volume [of opponents' antigay rhetoric]. They can't just say and do everything with license. They have to know beforehand that it is going to cost some votes and some serious money to play like that. It certainly doesn't stop it, but it turns it way down." And when they do spew antigay rhetoric, they often look extreme.

"You have to create an environment of fear and respect," added Trimpa. "The only way to do that is to get aggressive and go out and actually beat them up [politically]. Sitting there crying and whining about being victims isn't going to get us equality. What is going to get us equality is fighting for it."

Well, in this case, including the elided parts and context does not change the meaning entirely, as sometimes happens when people "quote mine", though I would suggest that the differences are sufficient to change the stress a bit unfairly. In the original context, you can see that McFarlane was speaking about their goals in influencing politicians, who they want to understand the possible repurcussions of opposing the legislation the Gill Foundation is advocating.

Now, I do not condone the intent to instill fear, nor do I really want to spend any more time talking about the context in which the statement was originally made. The reason that I brought this up is that Dobson through this very letter is himself seeking to (continue to) create an environment of fear among his supporters. His volatile words and imaginative interpretations serve exactly this purpose, at the expense of accuracy. This from the man who wrote "I always considered my responsibility to the children and their parents to be a sacred trust that demanded the highest degree of integrity." (Emphasis mine.) Dobson may want to review the definition of the word, because the dishonesty in this letter contradicts this claim.

I found it ironic too that Dobson would complain about a judge in Georgia ruling that a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was unconstitutional (oh, those unelected activist judges, you know), while also complaining about the elected activist legislators and governor in California. According to Dobson, the California legislature "is controlled entirely by gay activists and radical liberals" and "they can impose the most extreme social experiments without serious opposition from conservatives... they can do whatever they want to children..." (Ellipsis alert. Better go check up on me!) How true that is of California I do not know. But when something similar happened at the federal level with conservatives in power, I do not recall him complaining. Rather, I believe he was rather pleased.

By the way, one of the roles of the judiciary in this country is to protect minorities against the tyranny of the majority. Rejecting a measure that was approved by a majority is quite reasonable in this light. (That is not to say that the particular case he mentions was rightly decided; I have not looked into it, and my opinion would not count for much anyway.

One final bit of irony. Dobson mentions several times that children are vulnerable to believing everything adults tell them. In fact, he specifically says that God made them this way, and that there are "those who would subject them to carefully designed propaganda." With this, I partially agree. Not the God part, but the rest. And I might suggest that some of the carefully designed propaganda includes many Sunday Schools, AWANA, even Adventures in Odyssey.

Review: A Generous Orthodoxy

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief.

A couple weeks ago, Ernie suggested that I read three books. The first one I read was "The Pilgrim's Regress", by C.S. Lewis, which I reported on earlier. I am still waiting for G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" from our library, which somebody has checked out and which is now ten days overdue. But I did get "A Generous Orthodoxy" by Brian McLaren a week ago Friday and finally finished it last night.

After reading only a few pages, I could see why Ernie would recommend this book, and in fact I recommended it to my wife (a Christian). This is not because I was suddenly convinced that Christianity was true, but rather because I appreciated McLaren's approach to the topics he would be addressing. I have been considering what I would consider the most defensible sort of Christianity, and an important facet of that would be a recognition that our understanding of God (assuming for the moment that he exists) has been exceedingly poor in the past and is still very uncertain. A Christian of the sort I have in mind may hold and act on his beliefs as they currently exist while still holding them tentatively and acting in recognition of their potential inaccuracy, and while continuing to test and refine those beliefs.

McLaren appears to do that. In his introduction, for instance, he says:

If I seem to show too little respect for your opinions or thought, be assured I have equal doubts about my own, and I don't mind if you think I'm wrong. I'm sure I am wrong about many things, although I'm not sure exactly which things I'm wrong about. I'm even sure I'm wrong about what I think I'm right about in at least some cases. So wherever you think I'm wrong, you could be right. If, in the process of determining that I'm wrong, you are stimulated to think more deeply and broadly, I hope that I will have somehow served you anyway. See Chapter 0 for details.

And in Chapter 0, titled "For Mature Audiences Only",he writes:

Scandalously, the generous orthodoxy you will explore (if you proceed) goes too far, many will say, in the direction of identifying orthodoxy with a consistent practice of humility, charity, courage and diligence: humility that allows us to admit that our past and current formulations may have been limited or distorted. Charity toward those of other traditions who may understand some things better than our group -- even though we are more conscious of what we think we understand better. Courage to be faithful to the true path of our faith as we understand it even when it is unpopular, dangerous, and difficult to do so. Diligence to seek again and again the true path of our fatih whenever we feel we have lost our way, which seems to be pretty often. While I see this practice as a way of seeking and chrishing truth, some will interpret this approach as an abandomnent of truth, doctrine, theology, etc. You are free to be among them.

I appreciate the attitude that underlies these words.

The book is subtitled "Why I am a missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic + biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/calvinist + anabaptist/anglican + methodist + catholic + green + incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished Christian." The bulk of the book is devoted to describing these various branches of Christian thought, how McLaren finds something good in all of them, even when there are problems that have been associated with them as well. McLaren appears to be attempting (in his own life) to appreciate and integrate the good while leaving out the bad, surely a noble goal. In fact, in the chapter "Why I am Incarnational" McLaren advocates dialog with members of other religions wherein a Christian should be open to learning what good those other religions have to offer. It is in that context that he writes:

In other words, we must be open to the perpetual possibility that our received understandings of the gospel may be faulty, imbalanced, poorly nuanced, or downright warped and twisted... In this sense Christians in missional dialogue must continually expect to rediscover the gospel.

In fact, this is one of the great benefits of missional interreligious dialogue for the Christian community: it puts un in situations where we may discover misconceptions and distortions we never would have seen if we were only talking to ourselves in self-affirming, self-congratulating conversation.

There is something to be admired and emulated in this approach to our beliefs, and its applicability is certainly not limited to Christians.

Still, I have some criticisms that I hope I can offer in a generous way. While McLaren advocates willingness to refining beliefs, this is not without limit. Again, back in Chapter 0, McLaren writes:

Many hold a minimalist concept of orthodoxy, seeking "the least common denominator," which limits the list of requirements for orthodoxy to a few core essentials. The generous orthodoxy of this book never seeks to dispute those lists, but rather, it consistently, unequivocally, and unapologetically upholds and affirms the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds... It also affirms (this is so Protestant) that Scripture itself remains above creeds... [hyperlinks mine]

After (or actually before, as presented in the book) going to such lengths to describe how open he is to , this struck me. It was as if he said, "I'll go whereever the journey for truth takes me, as long as it does not cross these lines." This may not be what he meant. Strictly speaking, this was a statement about the orthodoxy described by this book, not about where he would allow himself to go at some future time. But throughout the book, except for the briefest hints (as I quoted above), there is no substantial acknowledgement that those creeds may also be mistaken or that scripture may be nothing more than a purely human endeavor.

Instead, while discussing the separate problems of conservative and liberal Christianity, McLaren says:

Meanwhile, liberals had another set of problems. Just as conservative biblical interpretations could "prove" almost anything, liberal free inquiry could question anything. Their questioning and research could arrive at conclusions that left the Christian faith severely -- some would say fatally -- wounded, depleted, and drained of content. When the Bible's trustworthiness was questioned, then the divinity, resurrection and existence of Jesus were questioned; even the existence of God was suspect. What was left to believe in? Had liberal Christianity self-destructed? Had Christianity become a wrapper with no contents, an excuse to gather and hear exhortations to be nice folks, good citizens, and safe drivers? What happens when the methodology of free inquiry that unleashed your movement now turns on your movement and threatens to suck the life out of it?

What happens? McLaren's unstated answer does not allow that perhaps Christianity is a wrapper with no (divine) contents. Must there then be a problem with free inquiry? McLaren does not answer the question, but it certainly appears that there are answers he is not prepared to accept. Is that surprising? Not really. But it does temper my appreciation of what he is trying to do.

It will not be surprising, in light of my comments so far, that I found McLaren's chapter "Why I am Biblical" lacking. He spends half the chapter trying to explain how the Bible can be inspired while also being the product of personality, community, culture and historical context. In this attempt, he uses several analogies, including an analogy with how God creates individuals through "a complex synergy of biology and community and history", thus explaining one mystery with another. He also rejects emphasis of the terms "authority, inerrancy, infallibility, revelation, objective, absolute, and literal" even while maintaining "that they are important within certain contexts" (emphasis his) but without saying anything about what those contexts are. I came away from that section without any good idea of what point he was trying to make.

He does advance this statement: "The purpose of Scripture is to equip God's people for good works." This is in contrast to its role (according to others) "as a weapon to threaten others, as a tool to intimidate others and prove them wrong, as a shortcut to being know-it-alls who believe the Bible gives us all the answers, as a defense of the status quo...".

The last part of the chapter McLaren devotes to a defense of the problems that the Bible causes for him. When he talks about this to people outside the church, he says:

I try to explain that the problem isn't the Bible, but our modern assumptions about the Bible and our modern interpretive approaches to it. I try to explain that there is a better way to understand and apply the Bible, a largely new and unexplored way that can be summarized like this: We need to reclaim the Bible as narrative.

We must begin with a recognition of how violent the world of the ancient Middle East was. The violence of the Jews entering Canaan in 1400 B.C. was not extraordinary; it was typical of their day. And so we ask: in that context was God commanding the people to do, not what was ideal or ethically desirable for all time, but what was necessary to survive in that world at that point.? Was there a viable alternative at the time for a group of wandering, homeless, liberated slaves seeking a homeland?

And later,

According to the Torah, while God is commanding the destruction of Canaan, God simultaneously commands that once it was subdued, the Jews should treat their neighbors and aliens with respect and kindness. God never commands them to build a divinely sanctioned empire that will conquer all their neighbors and destroy or assimilate them; after all, they had been the victims of empire themselves in Egypt. Instead God strictly limits the violence and leads the Jews to create a society that was a step above that of their neighbors ethically.

I believe this defense fails for a number of reasons. First, it only addresses one class of biblical atrocity, the manner in which the Promised Land was (supposedly) occupied. While important to this discussion, there are a number of other problems that this defense does not address, problems like slavery and treatment of women, or the killing of forty-two children who mocked Elisha (as just a few examples). Second, to say that God "strictly limits the violence" is misleading at best. While the violence and conquest did not extend across the entire world, the destruction within Canaan was extreme. Group after group are "utterly destroyed". Israelites are punished for failing to be complete in their destruction on some occasions. On other occasions, the Israelites are commanded to kill everyone except for the young virgin women, who can be, uh, kept. This is not limited violence, and it would take more than mere assertion to convince me that this level of violence was both typical and necessary. Third, while McLaren seems to try to deflect responsibility from God by claiming that God was simply working with people who were violent, and by asking whether God should have withheld is blessing to a people of such a nature, when that nature was entirely typical. But God did not merely associate with such violent people, he actually commanded the violence and sometimes inflicted it himself.

In addition to these failures, McLaren does not address or even acknowledge other substantial problems with the biblical text, some of those very problems that led liberal Christianity to ask those questions that he so quickly dismissed earlier. Now it was not his purpose in this book to explain or defend all of those problems, but there is a sense in which the Bible and the history of the Jewish nation and of the early church is a foundation for all that follows, and because McLaren fails to address my concerns about those topics, I am left with a rather mixed opinion of the book.

To a Christian, this book presents a valuable message about the importance of humility, of generosity, in one's interactions with other branches of Christianity and with other religions. In fact, that general message (if not most of the details) is useful in other contexts of our divisive culture. Judging from the reviews at Amazon, this message is not universally welcome, however. Not really too surprising, that.

Again, I'll ask Ernie to bring up anything about the book that he found to be particularly significant to our discussion, if I failed to mention it.

Seeking Middle Ground

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief.

In The Pursuit of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, Ernie responded to my invitation to clarify what I had previously written in A Scattered Review of The Pilgrim's Regress.

In answer to Ernie's question, yes, I still affirm that belief in truth is inherently good, and I agree that belief in truth is inherently possible, to the limited extent that we are able to discover it or describe it. I also agree that those who do not believe that truth exists are unlikely to discover it (assuming it does exist), and that belief of truth can reward those who find it, in the sense of providing an advantage over those who believe falsehood. What an individual does with his (incomplete) belief still may not actually be to his benefit or to anyone elses'.

As a bit of a sidebar, I might also add that belief in falsehood is, according to this view, worse than no belief at all. I do not have time to go into this too deeply here, but I was reminded of an aphorism found in Tom DeMarco's "The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management". (For those who do not know, Tom DeMacro is a sort of luminary in the software development world, a co-author of "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", which is something of a classic in the field.) In "The Deadline", which is a rather quick and humorous read about a project manager who is kidnapped and then given a unique opportunity to lead a number of software projects, Mr. Tompkins (the project manager) is struggling to figure out how to meet the impossible deadline he has been given. It is in this context that he discovers what he believes to be a fundamental human error:

It's not what you don't know that kills you, ... it's what you know that isn't so.

But back to pursuing truth...

At this point, I think Ernie misses my point, and perhaps Lewis' point (if in fact I have understood Lewis' point). The longing that Lewis describes is rather more specific that a general longing for truth. For instance, it is an "immortal longing". The conclusion that, because the longing cannot be satisfied in this life, its satisfaction must lie in the next (and that the next life must exist) is unjustified. Lewis has failed to admit in any real way that the longing may have no satisfaction. He also has not demonstrated that this longing is universal, and I rather suspect that it is not.

When I said:

This seems a very dangerous road, to take an intense longing and from that longing infer that a fulfillment of that longing simply must exist. "If nature makes nothing in vain, the One ... must exist." Perhaps nature does make some things in vain. And he also admits "how easily the longing accepts false objects" but claims that by following the desire faithfully the false objects will be rejected. I reject the idea that because he has some desire, the fulfillment of that desire must exist, and I am skeptical about how reliably he is able to identify what is false and what is true.

the important point was to deny the inevitability of Lewis' conclusion. Secondarily, I intended to call into question Lewis' methods of distinguishing truth from error. The example of Mr. Enlightenment was meant in part to support this, as Lewis' description of science, his caricature of it, is so distorted.

I think Ernie understood me to be making a more general claim about the possibility of distinguishing truth from error, thus suggesting nihilism. As I said above, I do believe it is possible to approach the truth, though often slowly. I do deny nihilism, at least as I understand it, though in the Wikipedia article on the subject, there are hints that Nietzsche (for instance) intended a rather different emphasis than what I normally associate with the term.

In defending Lewis, Ernie (unintentionally I think) supports a point that I have made before, which is that belief itself can have transformative power, regardless of whether or not truth underlies that belief. For he says, "The only thing that makes his journey possible is his belief that the journey is meaningful" (emphasis mine). That may very well be true. But Ernie proceeds as if he had said "The only thing that makes his journey possible is that the journey is meaningful", thus making its possibility evidence of its meaningfulness, and its meaningfulness evidence of the destination's existence.

In doing so, I think Ernie and Lewis, like many theists, go too far. They demand that either there is an ultimate meaning, or no meaning at all; Good with a capital G, or no good at all. This is a false dichotomy, a fallacy of the excluded middle. We can adopt purpose, we can create meaning, we can observe what leads to happiness and call it good. We may argue about the details, and I will not claim that any such purpose or meaning or measure of goodness is necessarily unique or necessary, but their existence provides a middle ground that lies between theism and nihilism.

Just today I came across a transcript of an interview with Steven Weinberg from the PBS show, "Faith and Reason". He addresses this very point. In reference to a statement he had made years ago in a book on cosmology about the pointlessness of the universe, he said:

I don't think this means [however] there's no point to life. Usually the remark is quoted just as it stands. But if anyone read the next paragraph, they would see that I went on to say that if there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that -- in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play.

Similarly, we may very well approach the truth without reaching it in this life, and this does not imply that there must be an afterlife so that we can reach it. Perception of beauty may be the result of complex neuro-chemical processes; perhaps it is an accidental artifact, but that makes it no less real, even if there is not a divine Beauty somewhere. I have also previously attempted to describe how it can be sensible to call something "good" without a reference to divine Goodness.

So, the statement "Belief in truth is inherently good" need not be a cruel mockery to an atheist. To a nihilist perhaps, but nihilism is not the sole alternative to theism. If you are looking for a positive -ism to associate with such a view (rather than the simple lack of belief implied by atheism), secular humanism is one example. This paragraph on ethics from A Secular Humanist Declaration summarizes this idea pretty well. I could also include my obligatory reference to Richard Carrier, whose "What an Atheist Ought to Stand For" also addresses this subject.

So why is truth knowable, Ernie asks. My short answer is that there is an objective reality that we can (imperfectly) perceive and which appears to operate according to reliable (at least statistically speaking) rules. While our limitations (and indeed those very rules, e.g., quantum mechanics and the finite speed of light) prevent us from knowing completely or perfectly, practically speaking there are some things that we know very well and many things that we do not. The pursuit of truth is necessary to better inform and enable our ethics, among other consideration.

I do very much appreciate Ernie's continued emphasis that Christianity-As-We-Know-It is merely the current state of a belief system that has been and will continue to evolve as its proponents seek the truth. I will have some more to say about this when I get to my intended posts describing my reasons for unbelief as well as my feedback on the second book which Ernie recommended, "Generous Orthodoxy", which I am part way through.

A Scattered Review of The Pilgrim's Regress

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief.

There are a couple of things I need to address in this dialog. First, I want to talk a little bit about "The Pilgrim's Regress", by C.S. Lewis, which Ernie recommended I read (along with two other books). Second (and in a later post) I want to attempt to describe the view from 30,000 feet of my reasons for rejecting Christianity. And then I will try to flesh out the details of those reasons.

So: "The Pilgrim's Regress". According to the book jacket, this was the first book written by Lewis following his conversion. It was originally published in 1933 and the copy I read contains an afterword written for the third edition, published in 1943. As one might guess from the title, the book is an allegory roughly in the style of Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress". It details the journey of John, originally from Puritania, as he attempts to find a way to The Island, which he has seen in a sort of vision. In the course of this journey he encounters a number of characters which represent different philosophical and theological positions. This journey reflects, in a general way, the progression of Lewis' beliefs "from 'popular realism' to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity" (taken from the Afterword).

I am certain that more meaning could be extracted from the book by someone more intimately familiar with the various philosophies, theologies and personalities represented in the book. In fact, without the explanatory headlines at the top of each page (like "Marx really a Dwarf; Spinoza a Jew; Kant a Puritan"), I would often have been hard pressed to recognize many of the allusions being made. Whether or not I understood enough to help me understand Ernie's beliefs, I am not sure.

Before I get to anything else in the book itself, I have to comment on Lewis' method, that is, the method by which he arrived at Christianity. (Again, this is taken from his afterword.) As I mentioned, the goal of the main character is to reach The Island, which he first glimpsed as a child. This represents "a particular recurrent experience which dominated my childhood and adolescence" and this experience was one of "intense longing". Then he says:

It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given - nay, cannot even be imagined as given - in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience. This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous of Arthur's castle - the chair in which only one could sit. And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist. I knew only too well how easily the longing accepts false objects and through what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us: but I also saw that the Desire itself contains the corrective of all these errors. The only fatal error was to pretend that you had passed from desire to fruition, when, in reality, you had found either nothing, or desire itself, or the satisfaction of some different desire. The dialectic of Desire, faithfully followed, would retrieve all mistakes, head you off from all false paths, and force you not to propound, but to live through, a sort of ontological proof.

This seems a very dangerous road, to take an intense longing and from that longing infer that a fulfillment of that longing simply must exist. "If nature makes nothing in vain, the One ... must exist." Perhaps nature does make some things in vain. And he also admits "how easily the longing accepts false objects" but claims that by following the desire faithfully the false objects will be rejected. I reject the idea that because he has some desire, the fulfillment of that desire must exist, and I am skeptical about how reliably he is able to identify what is false and what is true.

One of the first characters that John (the main character) meets is Mr. Enlightenment, a "big man with red hear and a red stubble on all his three chins". The headline describes this character as nineteenth-century rationalism, and Lewis evidently has a rather low opinion of him. Naturally, Mr. Enlightenment rejects the idea of "the Landlord", who represents God. But Lewis puts some interesting words into his mouth:

"Well, as to that... I see that you have a very crude notion of how science actually works... Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact."

Really? This is a gross mischaracterization of science. While science may not be able answer all of the questions that Lewis would like answered, the fact that he does not understand how it does answer what questions it can answer does little to inspire trust in his own approach. And later, while speaking with Reason about what science says about religion, she says "They pretend that their researches lead to that doctrine, but in fact they assume that doctrine first and interpret their researches by it." Even if that were true (and I take it as a skewed description of methodological naturalism), I think the same charge could be leveled against some religious thinkers, and Lewis' statement that "the One ... must exist" comes immediately to mind. That is, he starts by assuming what will be found.

It is my understanding that Lewis saw in various pagan mythologies precursors and foreshadowings of the story of Christ, which was a sort of archetypal fulfillment of those mythologies. The Hermit describes something like this (but not exactly like this) to John. While there are many similarities in the stories of Jesus to the stories in other religious/mythological traditions, one coud just as easily say (and most skeptics do) that this is merely a reflection of recurring themes that people find compelling in these stories. Some Christian apologists (but not Lewis) have claimed that these others were in fact demonically-inspired stories intended to cast doubt on the true story of Christ. Who assumes their doctrine first, again? No more the skeptics than the believers, at least.

I do not disagree with all that Lewis writes. He critiques a variety of beliefs and I think some of those critiques, like those of Freudian wish-fulfillment and of Fascist and Communist revolutionaries, are well-founded. John's conversation with Wisdom about the source of moral rules contains what is essentially a description of The Euthyphro Dilemma. While John encounters Wisdom relatively late in his travels, and while the character is given a name that is generally "positive", Lewis does not agree with all that he has Wisdom say, so I am not absolutely sure how Lewis himself felt about this issue, whether God is the author of morality or simply an advocate of it, but when the topic came up later as John was speaking with the Man (Jesus), the Man does not contradict Wisdom.

You heard from Wisdom how the rules were yours and not yours. Did you not mean to keep them? And if so, can it scare you to know that there is one who will make you able to keep them?

From Ernie's description of Psi and Omega, I would guess that he views moral rules as intrinsic to the fabric of reality and as inseparable from divinity. I am not sure if that is an accurate description of Ernie's beliefs, nor am I certain that I have correctly understood Lewis. Perhaps Ernie can clarify, it it seems important.

Since Ernie and I spent a fair amount of time talking about hell and Ernie has expressed his general agreement with Lewis' view of hell as explained in "The Great Divorce", I was curious to see how Lewis treated the problem of hell in this book. Hell is represented by the Black Hole. John first hears of the Black Hole from a Steward.

However, it all ended with pointing out that the Landlord was quite extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would certainly torture most of them to death the moment he had the slightest pretext.

Of course, the Stewards represent a sort of Christianity that Lewis believes is quite mistaken. After John crosses the chasm (becomes a Christian), he has a conversation with the Guide about the Black Hole. According to the Guide, there is a black hole and he offers up the free will defense.

"... The Landlord has taken the risk of working the country with free tenants instead of slaves in chain gangs: and as they are free there no way of making it impossible for them to go into forbidden places and eat forbiddden fruits. Up to a certain point he can doctor them even when they have done so, and break them of the habit... You must not try to fix the point after which a return is impossible, but you can see that there will be such a point somewhere."

"But surely the Landlord can do anything?"

"He cannot do what is contradictory... it is meaningless to talk of forcing a man to do freely what a man has freely made impossible for himself."

"I see. But at least these poor creatures are unhappy enough: there is no need to add a black hole."

"The Landload does not make the blackness. The blackness is there already wherever the taste of mountain-apple has created the vermiculate will. What do you mean by a hole? Something that ends. A black hole is blackness enclosed, limited. And in that sense the Landloard has made the black hole. He has put into the world a Worst Thing. But evil of itself would never reach a worst: for evil is fissiparous and could never in a thousand eternities find any way to arrest its own reproduction. If it could, it would be no longer evil... The walls of the black hole are the tourniquet on the wound through which the lost soul else would bleed to a death she never reached. It is the Landlord's last service to those who will let him do nothing better for them."

This does seem consistent with what Ernie has described. But I still do not buy it, as there remain a number of problems. Those I am saving for my own story. I did find it amusing that Lewis would attempt to turn the existence of hell into a demonstration of God's mercy.

I suppose that so long as one views this work as a description of Lewis' journey and as an explanation of some of his views, it did passibly well. (Lewis himself says it was needlessly obscure.) As Ernie expected, I do not find it convincing. I am not sure how much it illuminated my understand of Ernie's beliefs. Ernie, is there anything to which you would draw my attention, or wish to clarify?

CAWKI: What Is Wrong With Those People?

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief.

Finding the energy to blog has been rare lately, but Ernie has put up something today that deserves comment, What I Hate About Christianity (As We Know It).

Ernie lists these "gripes" about American Evangelicalism, aka "Christianity As We Know It" (CAWKI):

1. Non-consequential ethics: defining 'good' and 'right' by adherence to some abstract intellectual principle or social structure, rather than by how well we love our neighbor.
2. Non-empirical speculation: differentiating theologies on the basis of unobservable assertions about the afterlife and end times.
3. Pseudo-gnosticism: starting from the assumption that "our group" has the unique ability to properly interpret scripture, and thus (alone) surely discover transcendent truth.
4. Impotent evangelism: defining Christianity primarily in terms of nominal (in-name-only) or notional (in-intellectual-belief-only) membership in a club, pretty much as an end in itself.
5. Power politics: defining truth --in practice -- in terms of who's strongest, or at least most adept at wielding the levers of power.
6. Unquestioned authority: placing absolute, uncritical reliance on a particular person, structure, or interpretive method.
7. Exclusionary paradigms: an empirical method that justifies dismissing contradictory evidence using platitudes, rather than directly grappling with them (e.g. "all Buddhist religious experiences are of the devil").
8. Convenient agnosticism: the attitude that since we can never know inconvenient truths (e.g, the age of the earth) with absolute certainty, we are justified in not believing them
9. Worst-case comparisons: demonstrating our superiority by comparing the best of our tradition with the worst of someone else's, rather than vice versa.
10. Nostalgia: seeking to recreate an imagined golden age of the past -- including those very flaws which led to its downfall in the first place!

That is a pretty good list. I am not exactly sure what (4) is getting at, but then I am not likely to get too worked up about impotent evangelism at this point.

As with any list describing a set of people, the statements will not apply equally to all people. Please keep that in mind as I continue, because as I suggest some additions and modifications, I am not at all intending to paint all Christians with the same brush. Some of these apply only to a significant minority, where "significant" may be measured either by numbers or by influence. These are additional observations, not intended to replace or diminish Ernie's list. Some are fairly specific to contemporary American Christianity.

1. Insufficient skepticism: failing to appreciate the uncertainty associated with their beliefs, both core and peripheral.
2. Inappropriate skepticism: rejection of well-established (usually scientific) facts and theories (evolution, age of the earth)
3. Political entanglement: inappropriate injection of religious beliefs into governmental policy and legislation (e.g., Plan B, gay marriage)
4. Political complicity: facilitation of corruption and incompetence through uncritical support of public figures (e.g., Tom DeLay, Pat Robertson and yes, George Bush) that abuse that trust
5. Strawmen: incorrectly ascribing beliefs and motivations to non-Christians (no morality without God, disbelief is rebellion)

Now, Ernie pointed out that the problems in his list are human flaws, not problems with Christianity itself. In fact, as I look more closely, I see he already made the point I was about to make: that these problems are not specific to Christianity. They are "people problems". The problems in my list are likewise problems with people. None of them have anything to do with whether "Christianity As We Know It" is true or false. And if we could wave a magic wand and remove all trace of Christianity from the earth, these problems (or others very much like them) would remain.

Ernie asked three questions about his list:

• Do you agree that these are legitimate gripes, or do you think some of them are unfair/invalid?
• Would you agree than any proposed replacement for Christianity needs to do better in some or all of these dimensions?
• Where do you feel I did not go far enough? What additional gripes do you have that I may not have sufficiently addressed here?

As I said earlier, I generally agree with Ernie's list. I would not call any of them unfair or invalid. Regarding replacements for Christianity, I am not sure that Christianity needs replacing based on these problems, because as Ernie said, it is not Christianity that has or requires these characteristics in the first place. Maybe Christians need to be replaced. :-) Or maybe some or many Christians (like some or many non-Christians) need to replace some of their attitudes, views, epistemologies and everything else that is wrong with them.

Ernie says that "there is more to Christianity than this ... [and] it is precisely that 'more' which provides the basis for this critique." Yes and no. Certainly there is more to Christianity than a list of flaws that characterize some believers. But neither does Christianity hold an exclusive position in being able to criticize itself. That is, there are other foundations that can provide these same critiques of Christians, and also to provide the same or similar critiques of those that rest on those other foundations. In other words, I disagree that it is "precisely the 'more'" that provides the basis for the critique, at least not for any exclusionary sense of "precisely".

Ernie had previously suggested I read three books, which he kindly offered to buy for me. As it happens, all are available through inter-library loan and I finished "The Pilgrim's Regress" by C.S. Lewis this weekend. However, I may need to re-read parts of it before I can comment. Both of the other books he suggested were checked out, but were due within a week or so, so I should be able to read them soon.

(In)coherent Mumbling

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief.

At the end of my last post I left unanswered a set of questions that Ernie had posted. Tonight I intend to clarify some of what I said toward the end of Practical Truth as well as answer those questions.

First, I need to clarify this paragraph:

Ernie also asks "on what basis can we assert that science is really correlated with truth, as opposed to just a 'comfortable myth, held by a self-selected group, which seems to work much of the time'?" My answer is pragmatic: who cares? If a theory works (and that is the crucial qualification), it is useful and if another theory works better, it is more useful. I do think that science is correlated with truth in the realms it can address, simply because it works so well, but there is not a necessary causal relationship between "works" and "true", a point that came up yesterday in relation to the historical success of Christianity.

The question "who cares?" was a little too superficial, too flippant. Instead, the point that I failed to communicate is that we can never be sure that we have discovered the truth. We are fallible, both in observation and in rationality, and often we operate with incomplete information so that even if we observed and reasoned perfectly, we still could not be sure of everything. Rather than get all worked up over that limitation, we do the best we can, and for science the best we have done (so far) is to figure out what works, that is, what theories correlate with observations and which make verifiable (and verified) predictions.

That was science, though. What about other areas of inquiry? What about history? What about theology?

In history, it is still possible to make predictions, for instance about the nature of as yet undiscovered evidence. Beyond that, or rather, below that is the idea of coherency. We expect our historical assertions to be mutually compatible as well as compatible with that evidence we do possess. Coherency is more than logical compatibility though; to me it implies a kind of parsimony and abstraction. It "compresses" the relevant data into a more succinct form.

When there are conflicts among our assertions, we know that something is wrong, but not necessarily what. There may also be gaps, subjects for which no assertions are yet made. We can easily reduce the conflicts by allowing the gaps to grow; the challenge is to reduce the size of the gaps without increasing the conflicts, or better yet reducing the conflicts. This explanation is getting pretty close to what I described in Belief Optimization several months ago. One thing that I touched on at the end but must emphasize here is that so far as coherency goes, there may be multiple partially coherent (but not perfectly coherent) belief systems that assert different things. Which one is closest to the truth? How can we know? Coherency (or at least compatibility) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being confident in the truth of our assertions.

For one example, consider the question of the resurrection. Did Jesus rise from the dead? Can we know that? Without going into any significant detail, let me contrast two different positions. First, to a theist the possibility that Jesus was raised seems not at all unreasonable, so given some reports that he was raised and the lack of any contemporaneous contradictory reports, a belief in the resurrection is not incoherent. On the other hand, to one with no prior belief in the supernatural, the possibility that the accounts of his resurrection were fictional is likewise compatible with the lack of any contemporaneous contradictory reports, so this (dis)belief of the resurrection is likewise not incoherent. There is, of course, much more that could be said about this example. The point here is simply to illustrate that there may exist multiple sets of beliefs, each of which is internally coherent, but which are mutually incompatible.

So while coherency is important, it is insufficient to provide certainty. As I mentioned in Belief Optimization, evaluating the coherency of our beliefs in an accurate way is difficult enough, and by practical necessity we cannot independently assess all of the relevent evidence; we must rely on the work of many others. That, however, introduces beliefs about the trustworthiness of those others into the belief system.

Now, I do think that Christian belief systems are less coherent than some atheistic or even deistic alternatives. Possibly I am wrong -- anybody could be. I have previously spent a fair amount of time advancing the claim that eternal consequences for decisions made under such uncertain conditions is unjust. Rather than get into that again, let me raise several other considerations. First, could the uncertainty be reduced? Is there anything that God could do (if he exists) to reduce the uncertainty? Some Christians like to claim that those who do not believe would reject him no matter what he did, but that is presumptuous. It may very well be true of some people, but there are those of us who have taken a measured look at the available evidence and attempted at least to make a reasoned decision. We are willing to consider new evidence, but what we have so far is insufficient. Any explanation that Ernie offers for why eternal damnation would be considered just needs to explain as well why God is unwilling to make our situation clearer and more certain.

Second, while what I have said so far in this post may make it seem like there is very little hope for finding the truth, practically speaking we do reasonably well. For some harder problems, with enough eyes looking and enough time, we often arrive at answers that are "good enough". Sometimes we are wrong; sometimes people die for those mistakes, but we can then learn from those mistakes. Sometimes what we learn is wrong too, but slowly we make progress. Medicines are developed with unforeseen side effects, but eventually the pattern is recognized and medical practice changes. As sad as we may be over the mistakes we make, and as horrible as the consequences sometimes are, we can make progress. Compare this, however, with heaven and hell: we have no observational capabilities that can help us with that. We have no way of verifying the existence, let alone the character, of any kind of afterlife, and certainly no way of correlating any eventual disposition with actions or beliefs during this life. Yet we are told the consequences are beyond anything we can imagine (in duration if nothing else). And this same lack of verifiable progress plagues various aspects of theology.

Whether or not it happens to fall within the context of this dialog, my thought is to explain more fully the variety of reasons that I find Christian beliefs untenable, what preferable alternatives exist, and why they are preferable. I think we have had too many claims and too little explanation and support of those claims.

Practical Truth

This post is part of an ongoing dialog between my friend Ernie and me about the validity of Christian belief.

As I noted last night, Ernie had gotten two posts in and I only replied to the first. Tonight, I will tackle the second one, Of Truth and Trust.

As often seems to be the case, Ernie is worried that I committed an category error in my comparison between the Standard Model of physics and any "Standard Model" of Christianity. But I think it is Ernie that has misunderstood my point. In describing the Standard Model of physics, I was not referring to all of physics but to a specific theory, a theory that Ernie brought up and described as "wildly successful and universally believed". My contention is that there is no corresponding theory in Christianity. Yes, there are a variety of orthodoxies, but not a single universally believed orthodoxy, a point the Ernie acknowledges and indeed emphasizes. His mention of string theory and the dispute among physicists as to whether or not it is a valid scientific theory is irrelevant to the universal acceptance of the Standard Model.

(As I re-read the paragraph Ernie quoted, I can see why he might think I was conflating Christianity with orthodoxy, as I was not careful to distinguish throughout that I was intending to compare the physics Standard Model with any theory of Christian orthodoxy, rather than with everything that is labeled Christianity. I started well, but ended poorly.)

The main point of Ernie's post seems to be this:

I assert that the ultimate test of "justified belief" in physics -- and, I wager, everywhere else -- is not formal or empirical, but social. In the sciences, the strongest test we can devise is being published in a peer-reviewed journal; mere experiment by itself is hardly sufficient (remember cold fusion? :-).

I agree that there is a social element here, but I think Ernie has undervalued the experimental evidence. Granted, the initial cold fusion claims were based on experiments, but the eventual consensus of the scientific community was based not just on the experiments described by Pons and Fleischmann, but on numerous failed attempts to replicate those results in experiments performed by other scientists, as well as criticisms by the community of the execution of the original experiments.

Ernie does ask a good question when he asks, for the purposes of peer review, who counts as a peer? And what do we do when there is not universal agreement?

When peer review is done for scientific journals, the reviewers are generally supposed to be scientists with expertise in the subject of the paper under review. Chemists do not review physics papers, and in fact, solid state physicists do not review plasma physics papers. Still, this review is only one step in the process and papers must withstand the scrutiny of skeptical experts and further experiment.

Ernie asks us to consider what effect non-believers and heretics should have on our own beliefs. Should disbelief by non-experts give me reason to disbelieve? Ernie says no, and I fully agree. What about a (small) minority of experts that disagree with the (vast) majority? Should their disbelief mean I should also disbelieve? Again, I agree with Ernie that we should consider their case, but that justified belief can remain in the face of such disagreement. On the other hand, continued skepticism by a significant minority would likely cause me to withhold belief. In all of these cases, belief remains contingent. Even the vast majority can be wrong.

There will always remain, then, the possibility of being wrong, of believing something untrue, even in science. In other venues like history, there will often be substantially greater uncertainty because the available information is usually incomplete, biased, sometimes fraudulent or otherwise inaccurate and imprecise.

Ernie also asks "on what basis can we assert that science is really correlated with truth, as opposed to just a 'comfortable myth, held by a self-selected group, which seems to work much of the time'?" My answer is pragmatic: who cares? If a theory works (and that is the crucial qualification), it is useful and if another theory works better, it is more useful. I do think that science is correlated with truth in the realms it can address, simply because it works so well, but there is not a necessary causal relationship between "works" and "true", a point that came up yesterday in relation to the historical success of Christianity.

Am I being inconsistent then to disbelieve Christianity in the face of its historical success? I think not. It has been successful in the sense of surviving and even growing, but I believe it has had and continues to have significant failures in the sense of promoting the welfare of humankind. I think there are alternatives that work better.

Ernie finished with a few questions about what, who and how I trust. At this point, I'll have to postpone answering them until I have more time.

On the Evolution of Religion

At the end of my last post I briefly discussed why we should expect religions that have lasted and even flourished for thousands of years to improve the viability of the communities that embrace those religions. The reasons are analogous to the role of selection in biological/ecological systems. Today, I happened to come across this in a blog comment:

The doctrine of the fall of man was one of the greatest religious ideas to ever be put forth. It "explained" why man was no longer aware of God, able to communicate openly with God, and that everything absurd about God was really just man's "fallen mind". Looking at religion from an natural standpoint, it is retrospectively easy to see why the major religions survived as they did -- according to Dennett in his new book, a new religion is born every single day, as a seed of speculation. The effect of selection (like evolutionary biology) is that only the best ideas, the most viables seeds, have taken root. Those ideas which did the best job of explaining the history and present situation of the cultures they developed in lasted longest. Furthermore, those religious frameworks which developed around the most stable of economies, or had the most "societally-friendly" beliefs and practices, tend to spread and further themselves the fastest. I would quote a friend of mine here, concerning a particular anthropological phenomenon:

My favourite example of relative morals is the pre-Christian religion of Fiji. Under this religion, people had a moral obligation to cook and eat their enemies. This was not simple savagery - it was an aspect of their religion. By eating an enemy, you denied them entry to the afterlife. Hence, it was a moral duty - a sacrament.

The Old Religion was finally exterminated with the conversion of the King Cakobau in the mid-19th century, and I think that today most of us (including me) would feel that this was a good thing. The Old Religion was not a stable strategy for a civilisation, as evidenced by the fact that before the Christian missionaries arrived, Fiji was a melange of warring petty kingdoms with no structure or history that we would recognise. Hence, although they survived, they did not thrive. Today, although there is a huge number of different Christian, Moslem and Hindu sects represented in the population, they have a "civilised", progressive government and economy, thanks to the Judeo-Christian moral complex.

It is, as John pointed out, a question of "cart or horse first?" Do we assume the truth of the Bible, and work outwards from there, saying, "the reason Christianity has thrived is because it's true and God is good," or, "the reason is because it works, and other religions work too, but some not as well, at explaining various aspects of the world?" John proposed what he called the "outsider test" for Christians to follow: treat your own religion, just for a moment, as you treat others -- as untrue. Approach your deepest-held convictions with skepticism, ask what Ockham's razor does to the "explanations" you erstwhile simply took for granted. And see if you cannot easily reject Christianity for the same reasons you reject Islam and Hinduism and the other thousands of religions: because there is no good reason for you to believe it.

Daniel Morgan

Comment at Debunking Christianity

How apropos.