Atheists to gather in Washington to pretend they're rational

One way to convince yourself that you are rational is to simply repeat words like "reason" and "rational" over and over again as a sort of mantra. The other way is to actually be rational by engaging in rational thought processes, such as observing the proper definitions of words, understanding what you are actually saying when you make statements, and observing the simple rules of logical validity.

The first way makes you a poser. The second way means you are the real deal.

As they did in 2012, the nation's atheists are getting together in public to repeat the appropriate catchphrases and to strike the appropriate rational poses so they can all pretend that they are logical. It's called the "Reason Rally," being held on the mall in Washington, DC on June 4. 

In 2012, I openly wondered if something called a "Reason Rally" would involve taking part in logical exercises like formulating valid syllogisms, identifying fallacies, and engaging in contests to see who can reduce syllogisms of the second, third, and fourth figure into first figure syllogisms, like we do in my logic classes. But, alas, all it really amounted to was a bunch of intellectually arrogant people with little to be arrogant about chanting slogans on the lawn.

This year, I was hoping to be available to travel to DC to stand on the lawn and lead them all in a chant of William of Sherwood's medieval mnemonic verse that includes all 19 valid syllogism forms to see if it would do any good.

In reality, these are people most of whom just simply have to scratch their heads when you ask them why secularism is somehow more inherently rational that religious belief. This idea is the unarticulated assumption behind all modern atheist thought. They will employ it in their argumentation, but if you ask them to justify it, they will descend into incoherence (if they haven't already).

For a fun exercise, recite to them various arguments from St. Thomas' Summa Theologica and ask them to identify which argument forms they exemplify.

These are also people who have made science into a religion and worship at the feet of the scientific method, which they seem to think is the only avenue to truth, a belief which itself cannot be proved on scientific grounds. In other words, their central belief is itself entirely irrational.

One of the themes at this year's rally is "LGBTQ Equality." It will be interesting to hear how reason and science support the whole concept of "gender identity," which basically consists of the belief that your gender is determined by your feelings and not your chromosomal makeup, like they teach in, well, science.

What IS the Christian Worldview?: An Introductory Book List

An excerpt from my post on "What is the Christian Worldview?" at Exordium, the blog of the Classsical Latin School Association:

There is something deeper than just our surface beliefs that partly dictates what those beliefs will be. I think this is more reflective of what we mean by a worldview.

If you really want to get a grasp on what a Christian worldview is, you’re going to have to devote yourself to reading a little philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on the history of ideas. I will say, however, that there are some great writers and great resources out there to get you started on this endeavor. What follows are the books I have recommended to my youngest son, who is now a philosophy major at the University of Kentucky. I think he would tell you that they have benefited him a great deal. For the most part they are books that simplify a lot of the main issues involved in the question of why we think what we think. But, also for the most part, they avoid oversimplification.

Read more here.

Is Jerry Coyne's new book the worst atheist book ever written?

Jerry's new book.

I have not yet had a chance to review atheist scientist Jerry Coyne's new book, Faith vs. Fact, but after this review by Catholic philosopher Ed Feser, I may not have to:

Faith versus Fact is some kind of achievement. Biologist Jerry Coyne has managed to write what might be the worst book yet published in the New Atheist genre. True, the competition for that particular distinction is fierce. But among other volumes in this metastasizing literature, each has at least some small redeeming feature. For example, though Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing is bad as philosophy, it is middling as pop science. Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great was at least written by someone who could write like Christopher Hitchens. Though devoid of interest, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is brief. Even PZ Myers’s book The Happy Atheist has at least one advantage over Coyne’s book: It came out first.

You gotta love it. Read the rest here.

Dr. John Lennox explains why science & faith are not in conflict

Dr. John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, explains why science and faith are not in conflict:

God no more conflicts with science as an explanation for the universe than Henry Ford conflicts with the laws of the internal combustion engine as an explanation for the motorcar. The existence of mechanisms and laws is not an argument for the absence of an agent who set those laws and mechanisms in place. On the contrary, their very sophistication, down to the fine tuning of the universe, is evidence for the Creator’s genius.

His article is the feature article in Knowing and Doing, a publication of the C. S. Lewis Institute. Read the rest here.

Is Christianity just another Myth? A discussion with an athiest

UPDATED 10:55, See below.

Following is the discussion today between me and atheist writer John Loftus at Debunking Christianity in the comments section of a post in which he says, "Anyone who looks into the historical evidence for Yahweh, Satan, hell, virgin births, incarnations and resurrections will see these beliefs come from the ancient mythological past. The best way to kill such barbaric and utterly ignorant beliefs is to look at their mythological origins, and no appeal to the genetic fallacy can help the honest believer here." I will update this post with any additional discussion.

Martin Cothran • 2 days ago
I realize this post is meant to just refer the reader on to books that delve into this more deeply, but (not having immediate access to the sources referred to here) I'm wondering what basic form the argument "linking it [any miraculous religious belief?] to the mythological past would take. Could you give a simple example of this?

John W. Loftus Mod  Martin Cothran • 7 hours ago
Hi Martin, I offered an example in Jaco Gericke's chapter. Here are a few more. Before looking into the coherence of the incarnation, let's see how many virgin births of gods there were in the same era. Before looking at how hell is compatible with a good God, let's first look into the history of hell to find it was accepted by others in the mythological past. Before looking at the coherence of a being who rebelled against God named Satan, let's see his history among the other cultures of that same era.

Martin Cothran • 6 hours ago
So is your argument that a miracle claim can be disproven merely by pointing out that other miracle claims have been made?

John W. Loftus • 5 hours ago
Not disproven. But why were so many other famous people believed to be virgin born semi-gods or divine?

Martin Cothran  • 5 hours ago
I'm trying to think of what the logical structure of this argument would be, and particularly what major premise one would have to employ in order to make it work. Here's a stab at it:

No claim of the truth of an historical event can be considered true if there are other, similar claims made asserting other, similar historical events. 

A miracle is a historical claim to a historical event similar to other claims about similar historical events. 

Therefore, a miracle claim cannot be considered true.

If the major premise I have provided is not the one you would employ, I would be curious to know what it should be.

John W. Loftus • 5 hours ago
No disproof is intended. If I were to structure a probabalistic argumemt though, it would go like this: if so many essential features of a religion look like they are culturally generated then the religion itself is probably culturally generated. Or, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck it probabally is a duck.

Martin Cothran  • 2 hours ago
Okay. I get that. So it's sort of an intuitive point, a rhetorical, rather than a logical, one? But does the point have any rhetorical force with the people for whose ears it is intended? In fact aren't you using the term "probabalistic" in a very analogous sense? You don't, for example, have statistical evidence of what percentage of miracle claims are true, since that is the very point in question. Does this argument have any force outside the body of unbelievers who already have a prejudice against the possibility of the miraculous? Why should those who have the opposite prejudice find this point intuitively appealing?

And why is this point any more intuitively obvious than the point made by thinkers such as C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G. K. Chesterton, who maintained that, to quote Chesterton, "If the Christian God really made the human race, would not the human race tend to rumours and perversions of the Christian God? If the center of our life is a certain fact, would not people far from the center have a muddled version of that fact?"

In fact, Chesterton makes an observation that seems to me to get to the heart of the problem with this line of argumentation: that what this position "really amounts to is this: that because a certain thing has impressed millions of different people as likely or necessary therefore it cannot be true."

John W. Loftus • 2 hours ago
No one is saying it cannot be true, so CS Lewis is wide of the mark. No one is saying this will convince everyone either. For it is possible that all Christian theology was borrowed or stolen from ancient superstitious cultures and still true. One cannot precisely calculate the odds. It's just extremely strange to many of us that Christian theology looked indistinguishable from ancient pagan cultures in its inception.

Martin Cothran • 15 minutes ago
And it would seem strange to some others of us that the beliefs of many pagans WOULDN'T look similar to Christian theology if Christian theology really reflected the nature of reality--a reality that man has had access to since the beginning of thought. That was my main point, but I don't think you contest that.

One other relevant belief of the thinkers I mentioned was that the main problem with paganism was not that it was wrong, but that it was incomplete. This is why the main stream of Christian theological and philosophical thought did not reject paganism wholesale, but accepted and incorporated many of its beliefs and modes of thought. That went for the meaning it saw expressed in their mythologies (which appealed to human imagination) as well as the truth expressed by their philosophers (which appealed to the intellect)--two streams of thought (the imaginative and the rational) that Christianity fused together.

In fact, this was the whole reason C. S. Lewis became a believer: His belief that the mythologies were meaningful but false, and history true but without meaning, was reconciled by Tolkien's thesis that Christianity was a myth that had entered actual history. This line of thought is explained in Chesterton's "Everlasting Man."

UPDATE: 3:16 p.m.

Phasespace

And it would seem strange to some others of us that the beliefs of many pagans WOULDN'T look similar to Christian theology if Christian theology really reflected the nature of reality--a reality that man has had access to since the beginning of thought.

Perhaps, but what if the nature being expressed isn't what you think it is? For example, what if any similarities that there are between Christian and pagan beliefs aren't due to an underlying truth about the reality of the universe, but rather a truth about how humans see and perceive the wo rld around us. Under such circumstances, the similarities between Christian and pagan beliefs don't necessarily reflect a truth about the existence of any sort of supernaturalism or the true nature of the universe, it merely reflects a truth about human psychology.

Without good evidence suggesting that the supernatural is real, how do you presume to know that the supernatural assertions of the religious are not merely a product of human psychology? And how do you arrive at the conclusion that paganism is just incomplete?

UPDATE: 3:45 p.m

Martin Cothran • a few seconds ago
I have no particular comment on your "what if" hypothetical scenario in your second paragraph. Yes, if Christianity and paganism (where they overlap) don't accurately reflect the nature of reality, then they don't reflect the nature of reality. But then, that is sort of tautological, isn't it?

As for your third paragraph, if there were no good evidence that the supernatural is real, then, again, they may, in fact, be the product of human psychology. Your conditional statement is likely true. But one would have to affirm your antecedent--that, in fact, there is no good evidence for it. If ~P, then Q, ~P, therefore Q. But I have no good reason to accept ~P, and accept what seems to me good evidence for P (that the supernatural is real).

As to your last question, all I was referring to is that Christianity accepted many of the Greek and Roman beliefs. There is a great amount of overlap between the meaning expressed in many of the myths and truths expressed by many of the philosophers on the one hand, and the theology later developed by the early Christian fathers and the medieval theologians and philosophers. Christianity took that and ran with it. For example, the Greeks and Romans figured out the four cardinal virtues,(prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice), which are completed with the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity); and Plato and Aristotle figured out the basic metaphysical structure of the world, which was built on and transformed by St. Thomas Aquinas. That sort of thing.

UPDATE: 10:55 p.m

Doubting Thomas • 7 hours ago
Reality is reflected in religion. The reality is that humans made them up. All of them. As for C.S. Lewis, why wouldn't paganism be true and Christianity just one more false religion that points toward the truth?

Martin Cothran  • 6 hours ago
Those are very bold definitive statements. I would be interested in seeing an argument for them. As to your question, again, I don't make strict dichotomy between paganism (either in its mythological or rational form) and Christianity. There is actually a lot of overlap. I could certainly conceive of a state of affairs where what you suggest might be true. The only problem is that I have no reason or evidence that convinces me that it is.

Phasespace  • 6 hours ago

As for your third paragraph, if there were no good evidence that the supernatural is real, then, again, they may, in fact, be the product of human psychology. Your conditional statement is likely true. But one would have to affirm your antecedent--that, in fact, there is no good evidence for it. If ~P, then Q, ~P, therefore Q. But I have no good reason to accept ~P, and accept what seems to me good evidence for P (that the supernatural is real).

I think this is the meat of the issue. I don't think it falls under the rubric of deductive logic, it falls under logical inference and probability. I have no good reason to accept the assertions of supernaturalism if psychology sufficiently explains human behavior with respect to religion (which I think it does), and the evidence in favor supernaturalism is at best sketchy, open to multiple interpretations, and adds additional complications that don't seem to be necessary, when psychology does so sufficiently and efficiently. The law of parsimony wins the day in my book.

Note: This doesn't disprove supernatural belief, but it does leave me wondering about its applicability to many of the issues that it concerns itself with.

Martin Cothran  • an hour ago
Again, my main point here was not to prove Christianity, but to point out that the whole mythological argument is not very convincing. But as to your point about the evidence for supernaturalism being "at best sketchy," are you saying you do not believe in entities or forces beyond the physical? And what makes materialism or the disbelief in the supernatural the default position?

Things for which you don't need scientific evidence in order to believe

I was reading the first volume of Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth today, and he quotes the second century Church father Theophilus of Antioch, in his book Ad Autolycum ("To Autolycus") , "But if you say, 'Show me your God,' I would reply, 'Show me yourself, and I will show you my God.'"

 

Benedict was highlighting Theophilus' argument that just as there were physical eyes, there are eyes of the soul, and just as physical eyes can be blinded, so can the eyes of the soul, making it difficult or impossible to see God. But it also made me think of the challenge I hear from the scientoids about what they argue is the lack of hard and fast evidence for God. "Show me your God," is the general point, and you are expected to produce scientific evidence for the belief in God.

The next time you are asked to do this by your atheist friend, ask him "Show me your self," or "Show me your mind," or "Show me your consciousness."  Atheists use these terms all the time and no one is expected to give scientific evidence for the things they signify--largely because there isn't any. 

The point being that there are things for which you don't need scientific evidence to believe.

A response to David Quine on why the Greeks and Romans got God wrong (and it's not what he thinks)

I have been in a debate in the comments section of another post with Christian curriculum developer David Quine about whether the Christian worldview is in fundamental conflict with the classical (or "Graeco-Roman") worldview. This is part of a larger disagreement over whether classical education is appropriate for Christian educators. 

David argues that the "Graeco-Roman worldview" is in opposition to the Christian worldview and because classical education reads and studies Greek and Roman authors as a part of its program, classical education is not a legitimate part of Christian education. 

As I do occasionally here at Vital Remnants, I am bringing this debate on a previous post back out to the main blog.

He also claims that this is the Reformation position, which it most definitely is not, since the Reformers were unanimous in their use of Greek and Roman authors in their works and in the systems of education they themselves took and often taught to their students (and in Luther's case, recommended) . But I am dealing with this in another set of posts.

In his most recent comments in an earlier post, the reason Quine gives for believing that the classical and Christian worldviews are in conflict is that the Greeks and Romans held to certain erroneous beliefs about 1) God, 2) origins, and 3) truth.

It seems to me there are several problems with this argument. We can see these by just considering the Greek's erroneous view of God, although it is the same problem with the issue of their beliefs about origins (I will talk about truth in another post).

Were the flawed classical beliefs about God due to a bad worldview?
First, his assumption is that the worldview of a culture is flawed if the beliefs of that culture about God are flawed (David may not think this is sufficient, but he seems to think it is necessary). But how do we know this? How could you ever know that it was specifically the Greek's worldview that was the origin of their flawed theology? The only way you could say this is if you believed that it was possible for people to whom God did not reveal themselves to have a correct view of God.

I would be surprised (in fact, shocked) if David believed this, since what it would require is the belief that you could come to a knowledge of God through reason. And I know David does not believe that.

If, in order to have a correct view of God, you have to have it revealed to you, then how could the Greeks have had a correct view of God, since it was not revealed to them? In other words, the obvious reason they had a flawed view of God was that they had no divine revelation. And if that's the case, how can Quine attribute their incorrect theology to their worldview?

We can no more blame the classical world's flawed theology on a bad worldview than we can praise the Hebrew's correct theology on a good one. If you believe that the only factor in the correctness of a culture's view of God is its worldview, then we would have to conclude not only that the Greek worldview was bad, but that the Sumerian worldview was good (since Abraham was from Ur of the Chaldees).

The Greeks could have had a perfect worldview and never attained a correct view of God because the only way you can have a correct view of God is for God to tell it to you. But, in accordance with His inscrutable will, God didn't do that.

David says that the Christian view of truth is based on divine revelation, and the Greek's view of truth was based on human reason. To say that reason is somehow in conflict with the Christian worldview is, needless to say, completely inaccurate, but I'll get to that in a later post. But the relevant question here is, without divine revelation, what else did the Greeks and Romans have but reason?

In his post on truth he says that sometimes the Greeks sought knowledge from a god through oracles such as that at Delphi, but more often through their own reason.

That means that either the Greeks sought their truth through divine revelation from the only gods they knew, which on Quine's view would constitute a good worldview practice (even though the gods they were seeking it from happened to be the wrong ones), or they sought it through human reason, which, having no real divine revelation, was the only thing they could do (In the absence of divine revelation, what were they supposed to use?).

Therefore, either the Greeks used a good worldview practice or they did the only thing they could do. I'm trying to determine why I should think badly of the Greeks for this. And, since I am only using Quine's assumptions here, I'm wondering how he can either.

Why the Greeks believed what they believed about God
The Greeks were all over the map on their beliefs about God, a phenomenon that would be hard to account for if there were some underlying worldview dictating their religious beliefs. The Greeks were searching and using the only tools they had at their disposal: reason and imagination. That is why there seem to have been two general categories of such beliefs among them, one based on imagination, and the other on reason.

Chesterton talks about the first of these in his book The Everlasting Man. He points out that classical pagan polytheism was the result of the practice of trying to make sense of the world solely on the basis of the human imagination:

Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had worshipped. The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone.

... Mythology, then, sought god through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty.

The second kind of classical religious thought was that of the philosophers. Here, rather than imagination being used as the sole avenue to knowledge of God, it was reason. As Chesterton points out, one of the problems with the Greeks was that the thought traditions based on imagination were disconnected with the thought traditions based on reason. There was a conflict between their priests and their philosophers and it was only the larger, deeper thought system of Christianity that could bridge the divide.

It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.

For now I'll just point out that the religious mistakes made by the Greeks and the Romans were not the result of something bad they possessed (a mistaken worldview), but of something good they didn't possess (divine revelation).

I'll address some other issues that I think Quine gets wrong, including the issue of the relation of revelation and reason.

Newsweek writer's "jaw-dropping ignorance" of the Bible

Every Christmas I write a post about how every Christmas the old weekly news magazines write an article that poses as a intellectually responsible treatment of the Bible but is actually a low-grade amateur attempt at historical research and literary analysis. So here we are again.

With mind-numbing regularity, Time, Newsweek, and their ilk publish an article about the traditional Christian belief about how the virgin Birth of Christ and other traditional Biblical beliefs are outmoded by "modern" Biblical scholarship. And the way they do it is to quote scholars on one extreme end of the scholarly spectrum who, far from being modern, are still stuck in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Karl Heinrich Graf (1815-1869). Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918). Check it out.

Liberal theologians are a bit like those Japanese soldiers hiding out in the jungle on isolated Pacific Islands who finally wandered into villages where they were informed that World War II had been over for 30 years.

Methods that were abandoned long ago in other literary disciplines are bandied about in contemporary liberal biblical circles as the brand spankin' newest thing. They survive only by virtue of a naive materialist rationalism fashionable in Germany 100 years ago which has been largely abandoned by everyone except a few American seminary professors who have yet to be informed that that we are living in the 21st century now and whose chief occupation seems to be taking calls from equally ignorant mainstream journalists looking for their annual Easter or Christmas cover story.

Who was it that said that America is where old German heresies come to die?

Justin Taylor at Sojourners makes the appropriate observations:

It is a tradition in American journalism as predictable as Easter and Christmas itself: a cover story purporting to reveal the true story behind the Bible we thought we knew.
...Even with a generous 8,487 words, Eichenwald reveals he is out of his depth for this subject matter. Though he doggedly advances his predetermined thesis from a mishmash of angles, experts quickly showed online that Eichenwald has not really done his historical homework or read his Bible carefully.

Read the rest here.

Five books that refute atheism

There have been a lot of good books defending Christian theism or refuting atheism, but for my money the following five books (one of philosophy, one of history, one on science, a biography, and a novel) do the best job of demonstrating that modern atheism is an untenable position that cannot intellectually withstand the force of the theistic position:

The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, by Edward Feser (philosophy). The great modern defense of Aristotelian-Thomism (The only thing that can really be called "Christian philosophy," despite many attempts to define it otherwise) by one of the great modern Aristotelian-Thomists takes a philosophical wrecking ball to the New Atheism. Feser defends the classical Christian worldview in an enjoyable polemic style (enjoyable, that is, if your not on the wrong end of it) and makes mincemeat of the silly and shallow argumentation of the New Atheists. He shows that arguments such as "But if God is the first cause, who caused him?" betray a total misunderstanding of the cosmological argument, an argument that really cannot be refuted if it is actually understood.

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, by David Bentley Hart (History). Hart argues that the moral revolution which we still enjoy the benefits of today was only made possible by the coming of Christianity. Of course, today's secularists, ignorant of the origin of the beliefs that underpin the modern view of such things as human rights, see no problem with holding a secular worldview and, say, being charitable. Hart points out that, for example, the opposition to slavery arose outside the chain of historical causation and was not only introduced by Christianity, but was impossible without it.

The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, by David Berlinski (Science). Berlinski received his Ph.D in philosophy from Princeton and was a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology from Columbia University. He is not only a formidable thinker, but one of the greatest prose stylists now writing. There are many people today who think that science somehow undermines religious belief. Berlinski points out that this position betrays a hopeless ignorance of both religion and science. His historical account of the debate over the Big Bang theory shows scientists such as Einstein desperately trying to justify belief in an eternal universe and having to reluctantly face the reality of a universe that has a beginning--a position that theology has held for millenia.

St. Augustine: A Life, by Garry Wills (Biography). Wills, a somewhat heretical Catholic, does a magnificent job showing us the life and thought of the man commonly acknowledged to be the greatest thinker of the first thousand years of the Church. Augustine received the best education of his time, made his way through the various systems of thought in the ancient world, and rose up through the academic ranks to eventually become the Professor of Rhetoric at Milan, the highest academic chair in the Roman Empire. Then, one day on the porch of his mother's villa, after having spend several years confronting the claims of Christianity, he opened up his mother's Bible, and was converted. He was known to have dictated several books to several secretaries at once, and wrote some of the most intellectually formidable defenses of Christianity ever penned, including his great masterpiece, the City of God.

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy (Narrative Fiction). Tolstoy may have been the greatest novelist of all time and Anna Karenina was his greatest novel. What many people don't understand about this story is that it is just as much about Levin, a young agnostic nobleman with all the secular prejudices becoming common at the time, as about Anna, the seductress whose affair with a dashing young army officer is her moral and psychological undoing. Through his courtship with the adorable and earthy Kitty, the barricades of his heart are broken through and he begins to see his life in the moral context of the economy of God. In one scene, his future brother-in-law reminds him before his Orthodox wedding that he is obliged to perform the sacrament of Confession, something his agnosticism has prevented him from doing for many years. The priest who, during the mass, Levin thought had just been going through the liturgical motions, surprises him in the confessional with his piercing questions and his understanding of Levin's spiritual conditions. It rocks Levin's world. By the end of the book, Levin realizes, partly through the Christian love of his wife, that his opposition to Christianity is intellectually groundless, and is the result, not of any sound rational objections, but only of his own intransigent attitude.

These are my picks. I would interested in what books have influenced others.

Not Even Wrong: How the belief that there is life on other planets is like believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster

P.Z. Myers has blogged on this post and, as usual, botched the job. My response is here.

There many scientists who believe that there is life elsewhere in the universe, and they seem to think that this belief is a scientific belief. But if you think about the criterion many scientists employ to determine what is and isn't science, you begin to wonder.

We are told by many New Atheist scientists in particular (who like to mark their territory, but, fortunately in a way slightly different than, say, cats) that a belief can only be scientific if it is falsifiable. This is their demarcation criterion of choice and they use it to ruthlessly guard the borders of science. This is one of the reasons, they say, we must reject Intelligent Design. This idea comes generally from Karl Popper, a philosopher, who said that a theory cannot be considered scientific merely because it admits of possible verification, but only if it admits of possible falsification.

It is this general idea that is behind Richard Dawkin's "Flying Spaghetti Monster." The Flying Spaghetti Monster, says Dawkins, exists just outside the range of the most powerful telescopes and the more powerful the telescopes, the further away the monster gets so that we are never able to actually detect him. There is therefore, no way in which belief in him may be disproven.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is Dawkin's send-up of the belief in a theistic God, belief in Whom has the same status as his imaginary monster: there is no evidence that can possibly count against his existence. God can never be disproven.

Okay, now take the belief that life exists somewhere else in the universe. This is a common belief among atheist scientists. In fact, Dawkin's himself conjectured that life on earth may have come from other planets. But how can that belief possibly be falsified?

There is a possibility that, if true, it can be proven true simply by finding it somewhere in our outside our own solar system. But if it is false, how could we ever know that it was false? If it was false and the universe were infinite, as many scientists believe, then would could never know it to be false even theoretically. And if it was false but the universe was finite, there is no practical way we could ever know it to be false even though it is theoretically possible--although there is some question whether it is even theoretically possible for humans to investigate a universe as massive as we know ours to be.

Even in this latter case of a finite universe theism would be less problematic since a theist could simply say "Well, we will find out after we die." And since everyone will certainly die, at least he has that to go on.

So there you have it. Belief in extra-terrestrial life. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Theoretically indistinguishable. And taking this into consideration, how is believing in God any more or less scientific that believing there is life on other planets?

Let's see what the Peanut Gallery has to say about this one.

The Thousand Faces of Christ: On the latest revisionist Jesus

Several years ago I was reading a book of quotations and came across a quote from Jesus, the attribution read, "Jesus, (if you can believe Luke)." Just for fun, I looked up a quote by Socrates. In that case the attribution simply read, "Socrates." It didn't say "Socrates (if you can believe Plato)."

The problem, of course, is that the historical standard employed by critics of the Bible is completely different from the standard they employ with any other book. When it comes to the gospel accounts, we all of a sudden want to abandon the criteria by which we judge the historicity of every other text in favor of a standard we don't apply to anything else.

In other words, the problem is not that the Biblical documents don't meet up to the regular documentary criteria (they do that just fine). The problem is that we want to judge them by a higher standard than anything else.

We see this just about every Easter, when Time Magazine or Newsweek (when there was one) features a cover article on "the historical Jesus" or "the real Jesus" or "Who was Jesus?" or "Who was the real historical Jesus" or countless other iterations of the same theme.

And what better way to determine whether Jesus existed than to go out and interview people who don't believe he did? Or those who think he did, but have their own pet theory about who he was--and whose theories pretty much contradict each other?

But scholars who think he did and think he was pretty much like the historical documents say he was sit by their university office phones like the old Maytag repairman: They never get a call.

Now there is a book out which does pretty much the same thing, this one by Islamic scholar Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Russ Douthat also takes note of the fact that Aslan's theory (and approach) is not exactly unprecedented:

The fact that Aslan’s take on Jesus is not original doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong. But it has the same problem that bedevils most of his competitors in the “real Jesus” industry. In the quest to make Jesus more comprehensible, it makes Christianity’s origins more mysterious. 

Part of the lure of the New Testament is the complexity of its central character — the mix of gentleness and zeal, strident moralism and extraordinary compassion, the down-to-earth and the supernatural. 

Most “real Jesus” efforts, though, assume that these complexities are accretions, to be whittled away to reach the historical core. Thus instead of a Jesus who contains multitudes, we get Jesus the nationalist or Jesus the apocalyptic prophet or Jesus the sage or Jesus the philosopher and so on down the list. 

There’s enough gospel material to make any of these portraits credible. But they also tend to be rather, well, boring, and to raise the question of how a pedestrian figure — one zealot among many, one mystic in a Mediterranean full of them — inspired a global faith.

It's so much easier to tame Christianity than deal with what it actually says.

But there is a better response to the constant stream of multitudinous and inconsistent Christs we are always being told existed instead of the one presented by the actual evidence (the New Testament) and it comes from G. K. Chesterton:

Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.

Which sort of goes back to something Hillaire Belloc once said: "Truth is one and error multiple."

A. C. Grayling: Another atheist with taxonomic issues

A. C. Grayling's new entry into the atheist sweepstakes is called The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, a title which I find rather amusing. Why do the people who call themselves "humanists" see themselves as somehow inherently opposed religion, since humanism has always been an important aspect of religious thought and indeed real humanism is impossible outside some kind of theistic world view?

Humanism is related to theism as species to genus. Are horses inherently opposed to the idea of mammals? Are daisies out there outraged at the concept of organisms? Is there a rebellious pigeon somewhere who repudiates the idea of being a bird?

I guess it's just one more instance of the branches calling the tree into doubt.

Is science dead because it has not kept up with ancient developments in philosophy?

Writing for Britain's Guardian, philosopher and scientist Raymond Tallis argues that it would be a shame if people took too seriously the proposal of people like physicist Stephen Hawking to give up on philosophy.

Hawking famously declared philosophy "dead" because it had "not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics." It would be more true to say that science is dead because it has not kept upon with ancient developments in philosophy. Nevertheless, more than a few modern secular scientists are sympathetic with Hawking's dismissive attitude toward philosophy.

Tallis makes the case that it isn't philosophy that has a problem, but physics itself:

Fundamental physics is in a metaphysical mess and needs help. The attempt to reconcile its two big theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, has stalled for nearly 40 years. Endeavours to unite them, such as string theory, are mathematically ingenious but incomprehensible even to many who work with them. This is well known. A better-kept secret is that at the heart of quantum mechanics is a disturbing paradox – the so-called measurement problem, arising ultimately out of the Uncertainty Principle – which apparently demonstrates that the very measurements that have established and confirmed quantum theory should be impossible. Oxford philosopher of physics David Wallace has argued that this threatens to make quantum mechanics incoherent which can be remedied only by vastly multiplying worlds.

That physicists like Hawking, who have to posit the existence of multiple universes in order to maintain the coherence of his physical theories, should criticize philosophy for "keeping up" with it is amusing to say the least. There are a few of us who are also a little out of touch with recent developments in astral travel and holotropic breathing. That we should find that that requires us to reassess own own beliefs is not exactly self-evident.

Tallis also points to the inability of current physical theories to give a materialist account of consciousness or time. And then there is the materialist demand that we accept their preposterous claim that something came from nothing despite the fact that they can provide literally no explanation of how this presumably happened.

As a theist, I find it rather amusing to be asked to abandon my belief in metaphysical realities on the grounds that it makes no rational sense by someone whose own theories seem to become more outlandish and unprovable by the week.

In fact, the only thing the fairly new theory of multiple universes has done is to make longer the list of preposterous beliefs we would have to stomach in order to accept materialism. Not only are such beliefs no more irrational than a belief in, say, God, but they have even less relevance to our lives as human beings:

Perhaps even more important, we should reflect on how a scientific image of the world that relies on up to 10 dimensions of space and rests on ideas, such as fundamental particles, that have neither identity nor location, connects with our everyday experience. This should open up larger questions, such as the extent to which mathematical portraits capture the reality of our world – and what we mean by "reality". The dismissive "Just shut up and calculate!" to those who are dissatisfied with the incomprehensibility of the physicists' picture of the universe is simply inadequate. "It is time" physicist Neil Turok has said, "to connect our science to our humanity, and in doing so to raise the sights of both". This sounds like a job for a philosophy not yet dead.

Tallis is not too bad at playing the philosophical equivalent of the boy who pointed out that the Emperor has no clothes.

Habemus Vacuitatem: Do we really want Pope 2.0?

Atheist fundamentalist P. Z. Myers titled his blog post yesterday, "Who cares if the Pope retires?" to which the answer seems to be: "Almost everybody"--at least if the sheer volume of news coverage of the event is any indication of interest.

I was actually taken aback by the amount of media coverage of yesterday's announcement that the Pope was stepping down from his position as the head of the Catholic Church. I thought fewer people cared than actually did.

The more relevant question is, "Why do so many people care?" The media is buzzing with interest in why  Benedict XVI chose to abdicate as well as with speculation on who will replace him.

Some of the things you hear, mostly from liberals outside the Church, is the wish that there will be a more "modern" Pope. You know, someone more up-to-date. Someone who understands modern sensibilities. Someone who won't talk so much about issues like contraception and abortion and same-sex marriage--issues about which even many Catholics differ.

I mean, couldn't they at least put a spoiler on the popemobile?

And not only that, but what about appointing someone to the position from a developing country? What about a Black pope? What about a Latino Pope?

The funny thing about these two pieces of advice on what kind of pope should be selected--often coming from the same person--is how completely inconsistent they are. If you want a more up-to-date pope, one who will take more liberal positions on issues like contraception and abortion and same-sex marriage, the last place you want to look is the Third World.

Liberals have this dreamy idea that the average person living in a rural village in Southeast Swazililand is some kind of liberal progressive. Just look at what passes for "multiculturalism" over at your local college. As Dinesh D'Souza pointed out a few years ago, when the liberal ideologues running our universities want to teach about what people in, say, Guatemala think, they assign their students to read I, Rigoberto Menchu, as if Marxism were somehow indigenous to Latin America. If multiculturalists ever realized what most of the native literature of the countries they're always talking about actually espoused (racism, sexism, and "homophobia"), they would be scandalized.

These are people who really think that a primitive tribesman fresh out of the jungle is a perfect candidate for a subscription to The New York Times Book Review.

If I were one of the progressive liberals now giving the Church bad advice, I would absolutely, positively NOT want a pope from a developing country. I would want anything but a pope from a developing country. No. What I want is a lily-White European male.

Oh. Wait a minute. That's what we have now. Never mind.

Furthermore, the idea that we need a more modern pope--Pope 2.0--is about the stupidest idea I've heard yet this year (although I realize that, given the creativity of liberals, I am fairly certain it will be superceded).

There is an interesting sense in which the Catholic Church becomes more, not less relevant by striving intentionally not to be. While everyone else is expending vast amounts of cultural energy trying to keep up with the times, an institution that strives instead to be 2,000 years behind the times tends to stand out from the crowd.

One of the things about constantly modernizing yourself today is that you will most assuredly be antiquated tomorrow. In a conversation with an old friend a few years back (the one who introduced me to my wife), I mentioned that my wife still wears dresses that are 20 years old. She (the old friend) said, "That's because she wears classic clothes." If she bought the things that were trendy today, she'd have to throw them out tomorrow.

The scientific materialism that is so fashionable today among the scientifically up-to-date (and philosophically naive) is one of the flies of the historical summer: It is here today and it will be gone tomorrow. And after it's gone, the Catholic Church will still be around--dealing with some other historically transient intellectual fad. And because of its historic sensibility, the Church will have the advantage of having fought some similar idea before--in all likelihood, several times.

That's the thing about intellectual and cultural fads: they're usually just a rehash of some previous idea that was in vogue 200 years ago--and 200 years before that--and 200 years before that.

In fact, historic Christianity is constantly having to open some creaky old door, climb a ladder, and blow the dust off of some faded and ancient volume in order to find the proper refutation of the latest idea--an idea usually voiced by someone who has no clue that it has already been refuted about fifteen times.

Think of the most anachronistic thing you can and remember that, at some point in the past, it was all the rage. The eternal things are the only things that never get old.

If there were a history written of all the attempts to be culturally relevant, it would actually end up being a chronicle of perpetual obsolescence. But when you are an institution that is almost completely impervious to the intellectual trends of the time, you tend not to have to worry about about constantly falling out of fashion.

Did the Virgin Birth happen?

Okay, so I am having this discussion in the comments section of a previous post about the Virgin Birth of Christ with "Singring," one of our resident skeptics (we keep a few here as pets). Now when you utter the expression "Virgin Birth" to a skeptic, they react like a vampire who has been shown a cross: they half cover their face with their red cape, cringe, foam at the mouth, and scowl, saying, "I vill refute zis vile beleef!"

Singring, who worships at the altar of empirical science, is very practiced at this routine.

In any case, this being the Advent season and all, I thought the discussion relevant enough to bring out on the main page for discussion. I thought we could address each particular topic, one at a time. I might even split up the posts to dedicate one to each topic to make it a little more manageable.

The discussion started when Singring said, "So are you saying that you, as a Christian, believe in the virgin birth? You believe that a woman who never had sex was impregnated miraculously by God?"

To which I answered: "Precisely," this belief having been a fundamental part of the Christian Creed since, oh, I don't know, about the 4th century. But this belief, it turns out, is at odds with the secular creed, which proclaims ".. and was NOT incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, since we believe, on the basis of a metaphysical principle which we deny having, that miracles cannot happen ..."

And at this point of course, Singring went into his vampire routine.

Now he has come forth with is first set of actual arguments, which, to give him credit, he usually does after the first shock of hearing somebody actually say that they believe something that people, not sharing his metaphysical presuppositions, have, in fact, believed for thousands of years (and which hundreds of millions, if not billions, still do today).

If you want to see all his arguments, you can go to the comments section of the post. But we'll take them all up eventually. But for the time being lets address his first one. Here it is:

The documents we have containing this testimony (empirical evidence) clearly indicate that the authors lived dozens of years after the death of Jesus and did not even speak his language. They were Greeks and certainly were not direct eye-witnesses to the events. It is highly doubtful they even had contact with any actual eye-witnesses.

It would be interesting to apply this to all historical documents to see what we get. In fact, one wonders how many historical events we currently take for granted that we will now have to call into question, since many (if not most) are based on writings written by people who lived not only dozens of years after the events they relate, but hundreds--and didn't witness the events they relate and didn't even have contact with any witnesses--not to mention not speaking the language they speak.

As it happens, the New Testament documents have less of a problem in these areas than just about any other ancient documents. The number of manuscripts, their historical proximity to the events--and the access to witnesses is better than just about any document of ancient history.

If we can't accept the reliability of the New Testament documents, then we're going to have to dump most of what we know about the ancient world.

Go Singring.

Cothran's Fork: Why there can be no scientific objection to miracles

The following article ran on Vital Remnants on July 7, 2009. Given all the talk I have noticed on atheist blogs of late about miracles, I thought I would re-run it again (with some changes):

In yesterday's post on Jerry Coyne and the New Atheist argument that science and religion are incompatible, I pointed out that there can only be two objections to religious miracle claims: either a philosophical objection or a historical objection, and given this, that there can be no scientific objection to the miraculous. I made the argument in response to the claim of some scientists that we know, based on our scientific knowledge, that miracles can't happen.

My argument is based on taking the scientists who make this claim about miracles (Jerry Coyne, Sean Carroll, etc.) at their word. They say that science only involves methodological naturalism. This just means that scientists assume for the purpose of their scientific studies that no miracle will happen that might interfere with their observations in the laboratory or in the field--or in their offices where they perform their mathematical calculations.

This is in contrast to metaphysical naturalism, which is a philosophical doctrine that declares, by philosophical fiat, that miracles can't happen.

If the only naturalism inherent in science is methodological, then science, by definition, can have nothing to say about historical miracle claims. That doesn't mean a scientist cannot have an objection to miracles, only that, if he does, his objection to them is as a philosopher or as a historian, and his arguments must observe the principles and procedures of those disciplines.

I am officially dubbing this argument "Cothran's Fork," in honor of its author (me). It goes thusly:

If the scientific arguments against miracle claims are based on a priori considerations, they are therefore philosophical, and not scientific arguments; and if the arguments against miracle claims are based on a posteriori evidential considerations, then they are historical, and therefore, again, not scientific arguments.

The arguments against miracle claims are either a priori or a posteriori.

Therefore miracle claims are either philosophical or historical, but not scientific.

The logicians out there will recognize Cothran's Fork as a complex constructive dilemma. It is similar in structure and operation to "Hume's Fork" with the additional advantage that, unlike Hume's Fork, Cothran's Fork is not self-defeating.

Now this should be no problem if the scientists who have claimed that science is only methodologically naturalist really mean it--and understand its implications. But scientists like Jerry Coyne and Sean Carroll will assert in one moment that science is methodologically naturalist and then, in the very next, drop the assumption and make arguments that rely on the very opposite belief.

You can offer a lot of arguments as to why science should be considered methodologically, but not metaphysically naturalist--because it studies nature itself and therefore has nothing to say about what may be beyond nature (but powerful enough to interfere with it); that science uses methods that cannot be extrapolated to philosophical issues such as whether the laws of nature are inviolable, etc.--but the fact is that this is not the issue in dispute.

For many of the new scientific critics of religion, the fact that science is methodologically, but not metaphysically naturalist is a given. The problem is that immediately after stating the limitation on their discipline, they argue as if the limitation did not exist.

When Carroll, for example, discusses the miraculous, he first goes to great lengths to assure his readers that he is methodologically naturalist: Science and religion are not compatible. But, before explaining what that means, we should first say what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean, first, that there is any necessary or logical or a priori incompatibility between science and religion. We shouldn’t declare them to be incompatible purely on the basis of what they are, which some people are tempted to do. So far, so good.

Then he takes note of the various miraculous events claimed by various religions, and tries to convince his readers (who apparently, like himself, don't get out much) that people do, in fact, believe these things:

...[I]t makes sense to look at the actual practices and beliefs of people who define themselves as religious. And when we do, we find religion making all sorts of claims about the natural world, including those mentioned above — Jesus died and was resurrected, etc. Seriously, there are billions of people who actually believe things like this; I’m not making it up. 

We'll take your word for it, Doc.

But just several paragraphs later, Carroll, who has just professed methodological naturalism, turn off that part of his brain and turns on the metaphysically naturalist lobe and argues just the opposite:

Religions have always made claims about the natural world, from how it was created to the importance of supernatural interventions in it. And these claims are often very important to the religions who make them ... 

But the progress of science over the last few centuries has increasingly shown these claims to be straightforwardly incorrect. We know more about the natural world now than we did two millennia ago, and we know enough to say that people don’t come back from the dead. [Emphasis added] 

Seriously, there are thousands of scientific materialists who actually believe things like this; I’m not making it up.

Such assertions have attracted the approving nod of the equally reckless Coyne, who praises them as "on the money." What scientific progress has been made over the last few centuries that has shown these claims to be incorrect? Did people believe, before the onset of the 17th century, that nature did not display regular behavior? If so, then why were people amazed and attracted by miracle claims? Those who claimed miracles not only assumed a belief in the regularity of nature, they banked on it (for good and ill).

You would think scientists with Coyne and Carroll's stature would understand the nature of the scientific reasoning itself, which involves, in part, induction, the strength of which is always probable rather than certain. It relies on a set of limited observations of a set of phenomena on the basis of which an extrapolation is made about the rest of the phenomena. But because it cannot observe all the phenomena, its conclusion must always be tenuous.

More often, however, science engages in abduction

Of course, this description of the logical strength of scientific reasoning is not explicitly contested by scientists. If you catch them in their Dr. Jeckyl phase (in which the methodological lobe is operative), they will nod their heads vigorously to this description of their discipline and say things like "Absolutely," and "Amen." But once Mr. Hyde takes over (in which the metaphysical lobe becomes dominant), they will act as if they had never heard it before, and spout a river of assertions that completely ignore the limitations they had just assented to in their other persona.

How, precisely, do we "know enough to say that people don’t come back from the dead"? The only way we could know this is to completely jettison our cautionary understanding of purely scientific reasoning and act as if we had had direct observation of every death and its aftermath that has ever been experience in the world. The Christian claim that Jesus was resurrected is false if it can be shown that every person who has died has, in fact, stayed dead, including Jesus. But the claim that every person who has died has, in fact, stayed dead is itself rendered false if Jesus rose from the dead.

How do we determine which tack to take? Certainly not by science, which labors under the disadvantageous fact that there were no scientists there to say one way or another. The only way anyone can make any claim about the Resurrection is to assume, philosophically, that it didn't happen, or to look at the historical evidence for the claim and make a judgment yeah or nay.

But the reader of the rhetoric of scientific rationalists like Coyne and Carroll will notice that they never offer any philosophical or historical arguments for their assertions. They simply invoke the word "science" in the hope that their readers, now mesmerized by scientific words, will immediately abandon all rational thought and give their passive assent.

Seriously, hundreds of people fall for things like this; I’m not making it up.

Does the Higgs Boson particle make God irrelevant?

In a July 9 article, atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss announced that, with the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle, humans "may have just taken a giant step toward replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable knowledge." It's a funny thing about scientific materialists: Whenever they announce the demise of philosophy, you discover very quickly that they are engaging in it in the very act of pronouncing it dead. Krauss is no different.

 Krauss, says Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science John Lennox:

Krauss has not taken that giant step himself, since his statement, far from being a statement of science, is another metaphysical speculation - a mixture of hubris and an inadequate concept of God.

Krauss has continuing trouble even figuring out the difference between science and metaphysics, as is evident from his recent book A Universe from Nothing, in which he confuses the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and the question "How did something come from nothing." In fact, as it transpires, he's completely confused about what the term "nothing" even means.

Apparently this confusion extends to a few other things. Says Lennox:

What does Krauss mean by "more relevant than God?" Relevant to what? Clearly the Higgs particle is more relevant than God to the question of how the universe works. But not to the question why there is a universe in which particle physics can be done. The internal combustion engine is arguably more relevant than Henry Ford to the question of how a car works, but not for why it exists in the first place. Confusing mechanism and/or law on the one hand and agency on the other, as Krauss does here, is a category mistake easily made by ignoring metaphysics. 

Read the rest here.

Are religiously informed public policy proposals legitimate?

Christian philosopher Francis Beckwith analyzes the claim that the claim "of courts and legal theorists who argue that religiously informed policy proposals have no place in a liberal democracy because the religious worldviews from which they herald are at their core unreasonable, for they are dependent on irrational beliefs."

The judicial opinions, most of which affirmed or implied the irrationality of religious belief, did not surprise me, since the jurists who wrote them are often unacquainted with the sort of literature on the rationality of religious belief that has been the staple of Anglo-American philosophy for nearly five decades. 

What did surprise me were the legal theorists. Their ignorance was embarrassing ...

... The legal theorists I read all claim to be experts in law and religion, and their works appear in law reviews published by prestigious universities. And yet, I could not find in them a hint that they had even a superficial acquaintance with the vast literature on religion and rationality produced by religious (and some non-religious) thinkers (mostly philosophers) over the past fifty years. 

... It should not surprise us, then, that when political conflicts between church and state arise that academic and media elites treat the church’s point of view as if it were an irrational outlier to contemporary culture. As I have come to reluctantly realize, they simply do not know any better, since their education insulated them from views contrary to the unquestioned secular hegemony that was ubiquitous in their intellectual formation.

Read the rest here.

Easter and its fashionable detractors: A response to Andrew Sullivan

Well, it's that time of year again. Time to fill Easter baskets with chocolate and candy, break out the eggs and food coloring, and ... respond to the cover stories on news magazines questioning the credibility of Christianity. It has become a customary part of the season.

Every year at precisely this time, Time or Newsweek or U. S. News & World Report (or all three of them) trot out a story discussing whether, in fact, Jesus rose from the dead, or whether he existed at all, or just what, in fact, Christianity really is, anyway.

Can you even imagine any of these periodicals doing an exposé on Judaism on Rosh Hashanah? Or on Islam during Ramadan?

Every year we are treated to the same, lame kind of piece which questions the veracity of Christianity's claims and, partly by giving a one-sided picture of the debate, fails to deal with the real historical arguments.

This frequently takes the form of a report on the most recent doings of the "Jesus Seminar," a group of "Bible scholars" who engage in the highly erudite procedure of taking a vote on whether various Biblical passages are historically authentic by dropping different colored balls into a box. If there are more black balls than pink or red, then the passage is rejected.

If such a procedure commonly used by fraternities to accept or reject new members were to be attempted in any other academic setting, the event would be laughed off as a ludicrous example of the trivialization of scholarship, but since it confirms a popular secularist prejudice, it is treated as a legitimate form of scholarship by journalists, who studiously write it all down in their little notepads and report it as if this is what responsible people in the academic world really do.

Clearly the standards one is required to meet in order to criticize Christianity are appallingly low.

Andrew Sullivan's piece this week in Newsweek, called "Christianity in Crisis," is not a full-scale assault on the Faith; it does not quite hit journalistic bottom like many of these kinds of pieces. But it isn't for lack of trying.

He begins with an admiring account of Thomas Jefferson's treatment of Christianity, which consisted in literally excising the miracles passages, leaving, says Sullivan, "the purest, simplest, apolitical Christianity, purged of the agendas of those who had sought to use Jesus to advance their own power decades and centuries after Jesus' death." These unfortunate supernatural claims, Sullivan continues, "fused with politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions, pogroms, reformations, and counterreformations."

Perhaps the reader can be excused for wondering what the exact connection is between the Virgin Birth, and, say, the Thirty Years War; or how Jesus opening the eyes of the blind contributed to, for example, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre; or what precisely the Resurrection has to do with, oh, I don't know, the Pogrom of Lisbon?

And what is the argument for saying it was specifically the beliefs in supernatural events, rather than Christianity's ethical beliefs, that spawned any of these violent events?

He doesn't say.

Sullivan is too insignificant a character to usefully be called a heretic; in fact, he is nothing more than a garden-variety theological liberal. But like every heretic throughout history, he tries to found his own version of the faith on one or two things that happen to appeal to him, while dismissing the rest as apocryphal or irrelevant. Instead of letting his own beliefs be conformed to Christianity, he has conformed Christianity to his own beliefs. Religion, in such cases, is not an exercise in transformation, but an adventure in autobiography.

Like every other heretic, he talks of the "essence" of Christianity, and this "essence" is always some reductionist version of the faith founded on a favored doctrine. "[T]he liberal theologian," wrote Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machan in 1923, "seeks to rescue certain of the general principles of religion, of which these particularities [the supernatural beliefs of Christianity] are thought to be mere temporary symbols, and these general principles he regards as constituting 'the essence of Christianity.'"

Machan was the great conservative champion in the so-called "Liberal-Fundamentalism controversy" of the 1920s and 30s, which pitted him against the great liberal theologian of the time, Henry Emerson Fosdick. He was one of the two great enemies of the theological liberalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries (although its influence, as Sullivan's piece demonstrates, has never entirely abated). The other was John Henry Cardinal Newman, a Catholic convert from Anglicanism. "Liberalism in religion," said Newman:

is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another ... Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy.

The two men cleverly and capably tagged the Sullivans of their time, and they have been under observation by the orthodox ever since.

Sullivan says that he himself accepts Jesus' divinity and resurrection, but he makes it pretty clear that, to him, these things really don't matter. Like Jefferson, Sullivan believes it is only Jesus' ethical teachings that really matter. But not every ethical doctrine: just the ones that happen to strike his fancy.

Sullivan wants to go "back to Jesus." Only the Jesus he wants to go back to looks surprisingly ..., well, like Andrew Sullivan. Like most modern theological liberals, he reduces the whole teaching of Christianity to the Gospel accounts. Why? Because they seem (at least at first blush) to comport with his preconceptions:

The issues that Christianity obsesses over today simply do not appear in either Jefferson’s or the original New Testament. Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and forgiveness for adultery. The family? He disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him. Sex? He was a celibate who, along with his followers, anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant.

Of course, the Old Testament and the Apostle Paul have plenty to say about these things, but they don't count in the religiously reductionist view propagated by Sullivan. If it was the Apostle Paul or the writer of Leviticus whose teachings were closer to 20th century secular morality, it would be the Gospels being thrown in the scrap heap.


In fact, as Machan pointed out, St. Paul is the first obstacle the liberal seeks to remove:

Many attempts have indeed been made to separate the religion of Paul sharply from that of the primitive Jerusalem Church; many attempts have been made to show that Paul introduced an entirely new principle into the Christian movement or even was the founder of a new religion. But all such attempts have resulted in failure.

To try to separate Paul--or any of the apostles--from Jesus would be something like trying to separate Socrates from Plato.


It's not that some of Sullivan's criticisms are without plausibility; the problem is that he keeps getting in his own way, and refuses to apply them impartially. While he repudiates the social activism unique to religious conservatives, the social activism acceptable to religious and secular liberals are somehow still obligatory:

This doesn’t imply, as some claim, to the privatization of faith, or its relegation to a subordinate sphere. There are times when great injustices—slavery, imperialism, totalitarianism, segregation—require spiritual mobilization and public witness.

Abortion and the family are not relevant because they are not discussed in the Gospels, but slavery and segregation are? Of course, the Gospels say nothing about these things either, so all of this turns out to be a not particularly sophisticated case of special pleading.

Sullivan's version of Christianity is certainly simple: all oversimplifications are. It could also be called pure, if by purity we meant unsullied by fact and history. But it certainly is not apolitical.

The Religion of Sullivan hasn't found the real Jesus, and separated him from the corrupt church. What it has found are "those elements in the teaching of Jesus--isolated and misinterpreted--which happen to agree with the modern program." That's Machan again, writing about Sullivan 89 years before Sullivan proclaimed his new religion.

The liberalism of Sullivan and his ilk sees Christ as a good example to be imitated rather than as a divine person to be worshipped. In this view, wrote Machan, "Liberalism regarded [Christ] as an Example and a Guide; Christianity as a Savior."

But the essential thing can be put almost in a word--liberalism regards Jesus as the fairest flower of humanity; Christianity regards him as a supernatural person.

Even in Sullivan's abridged Bible--a product of his own set of theological scissors--there is no purely ethical religion to be found. The chief subject of the Gospels is not the acts of Christ, but Christ Himself. The supernatural aspect of the Gospels is far from a sideshow, as Sullivan would us to think. It is, in fact, the main event.

Sullivan gives lip service to the supernatural aspect aspect of Christianity in one brief sentence, and it comes as a concession, not a confession.

Sullivan argues that Christianity is "in crisis." Christianity is always in crisis. As long as there is a church trying to do what it is supposed to be doing and Andrew Sullivans criticizing it for doing it, it will be in crisis. Crisis is what happens when the supernatural impinges on the natural--and does it through fallen men.

An update from the Church of Atheism

More evidence for my thesis that atheism is a Christian heresy, this time from Stanley Fish in the New York Times, discussing an interview of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker by Chris Hayes on MSNBC :

Pushed by Hayes, who had observed that when we accept the conclusions of scientific investigation we necessarily do so on trust (how many of us have done or could replicate the experiments?) and are thus not so different from religious believers, Dawkins and Pinker asserted that the trust we place in scientific researchers, as opposed to religious pronouncements, has been earned by their record of achievement and by the public rigor of their procedures. In short, our trust is justified, theirs is blind. 

It was at this point that Dawkins said something amazing, although neither he nor anyone else picked up on it. He said: in the arena of science you can invoke Professor So-and-So’s study published in 2008, “you can actually cite chapter and verse.” 

With this proverbial phrase, Dawkins unwittingly (I assume) attached himself to the centuries-old practice of citing biblical verses in support of a position on any number of matters, including, but not limited to, diet, animal husbandry, agricultural policy, family governance, political governance, commercial activities and the conduct of war. Intellectual responsibility for such matters has passed in the modern era from the Bible to academic departments bearing the names of my enumerated topics. We still cite chapter and verse — we still operate on trust — but the scripture has changed (at least in this country) and is now identified with the most up-to-date research conducted by credentialed and secular investigators.

Read the rest here.