Dinesh D'Souza's book What's So Great About Christianity? just arrived today, and I'm planning to evaluate it to see how good it is, since several important people are saying it's an important book. I plan on reviewing it in several Blog entries. Let's call this the first ever DC Book Club Selection. I got it delivered in just a few days, so if you want to buy it and read along, I recommend that you do so. Together let's see what he has to offer. [FYI: I really don't care if you disgaree with anything else he's written prior to this book, because his other views are basically irrelevant to his case here].
Here are my first impressions:
You can see for yourself in the table of contents that he covers a lot of ground, including whether Christianity will survive in the future, how it affects the western world, its relationship to science, its intelligent design hypothesis, its defense of the miraculous, the morality of the Inquisition vs the morality of atheists, and who has the best foundation for morality. He's obviously well-read too, which means I will probably learn a few things, which is always a goal of mine.
Lacking in his book is a discussion of Biblical criticism, any detailed argument on behalf of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, or for the inspiration of the Bible, and he only deals with the design argument for God's existence. Well, I suppose he can't cover everything. He's entitled to assume some of these things, I suppose, since it seems his book is attempting to answer the arguments of Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens, who themselves don't offer any detailed arguments in these other areas. Fair enough. Although, I should point out that even if he's correct about most everything else in his book, and I very much doubt it, unless it can be shown that we can trust the Bible as the inspired word of God, and unless we can be sure Jesus actually arose from the dead, his whole case falls to the ground.
Okay so far?
Now just a brief note about "A Note On the Interpretation of Scripture." (pp. xi-xii)
D'Souza distinguishes between a "crude literalism" reading of the Bible from a "cafeteria" style reading where we reject the parts we find objectionable and embrace the parts we like. Since the Bible operates on a multitude of levels, like metaphor and parable, we shouldn't approach it in a crudely literal way. And on this point he's absolutely correct. However, few people, if any, embrace such a crudely literal approach to the Bible. Even if Origen did castrate himself based upon a crudely literal reading of Matt. 19:12, who else reads it this way today? Maybe snake handlers do in some sense, but even they don't do so consistently since they live and breathe in the 21 century like the rest of us. Moreover, he seems blithely unaware that all Christians pick and choose the parts of the Bible they like from the parts they don't like, and they have been doing so from the beginning. The only difference between Christians on this is how much they do so, much like on a continuum, and the question left unanswered is why they do so in some areas but don't do so in other areas.
The other extreme, which he rejects, "says the Bible should be read through the lens of contemporary secular assumptions." Now here I see trouble ahead, for I don't think we can objectively read the Bible, or any historical document, without using our present assumptions. We are, after all, children of our times, and as children of are times we are not likely to be able to rise about them, as Voltaire pointed out. The question for us is which set of assumptions should we use to interpret the Bible, and I don't see why we should assume that Christianity is true, or that supernaturalism is the case, in order to read the Bible properly. If, for instance, we begin reading the Bible from Christian assumptions, then the question I want to have answered is where does the Christian gain those assumptions in the first place if they don't get them from the Bible? To me this whole approach is circular reasoning.
He claims to hold a middle ground between these extremes. He wants to read the Bible not literally, nor liberally, but rather contextually. He writes, "Only by examining the text in relation to the whole can we figure out how a particular line or passage is best understood." Then he suggests "whether you regard the Bible as inspired or not, read the text in context for what it is actually trying to say." He says this will be clearer as he proceeds.
This reveals more trouble ahead, I think. Even though his approach sounds on the surface to be true, and is partially true, I question where this will take us. His approach is partially true since we must read every passage in the Bible according to its context in order to understand it. Since the basic meaning resides in the sentence (not the word), then in order to understand any sentence we must also understand the context for that sentence in the paragraph, and onward up to the purpose of any book in the Bible itself. But there is more. For any book in the Bible there is a wider context. There is the cultural milieu of each book in the life of the initial readers which must be understood. But that wider context is difficult to understand and also debated today. And there is the whole problem of knowing what purposes the last editor/author of each of the books in the Bible were, since even conservative scholars admit the gospels, for instance, were compiled by editors (or redactors). This means we need to also adequately date these books, know where they were written from, and even who the final authors were. Furthermore, there were pseudonymous additions to the texts long after it left the hands of the final editor/author, along with copyists who made their changes, sometimes for theological reasons, along with the whole process of canonization which affirmed which books belong in the Bible.
On one level we might be able to understand a Biblical passage given only the texts themselves, but that’s a different thing entirely from trying to truly understand what the Biblical editor/authors meant in their day and time. Furthermore, just understanding what they wrote isn't enough, for we must go on to evaluate whether or not what they said was true. So not only do I fear D'Souza is skipping a few contextual steps, but even when I have understood what they wrote I can still question what they said. This is the subject of his book. We'll see how it goes.
October 22, 2007
DC Book Club: Reviewing Dinesh D'Souza's "What's So Great About Christianity."
October 20, 2007
The Least Religious of American Medical Professions is Psychiatry
In a recent study by Farr Curlin, et al, published in Psychiatric Services (2007) 58: 1193-1198; titled "The Relationship Between Psychiatry and Religion Among U.S. Physicians," there is an interesting finding. [You can download the PDF file].
According to the authors, "Psychiatrists were less likely to attend religious services frequently, believe in God or the afterlife, or cope by looking to God."
There is something anti-religious about the field of Psychiatry. While it's true that it had it's roots in the anti-religious zeal of Freud, there is still something anti-religious about it as a discipline. I think I can guess why.
Psychiatrists know something most of the rest of us don't know that well. Experiencing this a little from when I was a counselor in the churches I served, I think professional psychiatrists know better than the rest of us that what people believe and how they behave are both based upon many factors that are out of their control. What are some of these factors? Brain matter. Genetics. Gender. Race. Social learning. Social development. Cultural influences. Family influences. Peer influences. Drugs (or the lack of drugs). Diet. Strokes. Sicknesses. There are many others, including financial status, geographical location, age, and birth order.
Psychiatrists know that the whole idea of a person holding to, and acting upon, a completely rational set of beliefs, is just not possible. There are so many other factors that heavily influence us all. Therefore, they also know better than the rest of us that the whole idea of a God who is supposed to judge people based upon what they believe, who subsequently condemns people forever based on how they act, is not a good God at all. In fact, it's abhorrent. And if there isn't a good God, there might as well be none at all.
Christian, you should really consider the evidence coming from the field of Psychiatry. It could change your minds.
October 19, 2007
My Book is Sold Out On Amazon But More Are On the Way
An extensively revised edition of that book is being published soon, titled, "Why I Became an Atheist," by Prometheus Books.
Creedal Post-Mortem, Part One
"We Believe..." These are the first words of (arguably) the most important and universally acknowledged creedal statement in christianity - the Nicene Creed. They are also possibly the most dangerous and destructive words ever professed.
In AD 312, Constantine won control of the Roman Empire at the battle of Milvian Bridge. He attributed his victory to the intervention of Jesus Christ (a shrewd political move) and elevated christianity to favored status in the empire. His motto became "one God, one Lord, one faith, one church, one empire, one emperor."
The new emperor soon discovered, however, that "one faith, one church" thing wasn't representative of the state of christianity in the empire. Believers in the new religion were already fractured by theological disputes, especially over the understanding of the nature of Christ. Arius, a leader of the church in Alexandria, asserted that Christ was created by God before the beginning of time - divine, yes, but also created. Therefore, the divinity of Christ was similar to the divinity of God, but not of the same essence, because it was of the created order. Arius was opposed by another leader, Alexander, together with Athanasius, who argued that the divinity of Christ, as the Son of God, was of the same essence as the divinity of God, the Father. To believe otherwise, they said, was to open the possibility of polytheism, and to imply that knowledge of God in Christ was not final or ultimate knowledge of God. To counter this widening rift in the church, Constantine convened a council in Nicaea in AD 325. A creed reflecting the position of Alexander and Athanasius was written and signed by a majority of christian leaders (and politicians). Arius was declared a heretic and his teachings heretical. Nevertheless, the two parties continued to battle each other, so in AD 382, a second council met in Constantinople. It adopted a revised expanded form of the creed, now known as the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed became the foundational creed of christianity, and today is the only creed acknowledged by protestant/reformed, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic traditions. (thanks to creeds.net for the above summarized information).
This little history lesson is given to demonstrate a couple of crucial points. Every Sunday morning, literally millions of christians around the world - regardless of theological or denominational stripe - utter these words. However, how many of them know their origin or their meaning, and what they were attempting to create? As a former pastor (who served thousands in a quarter-century of service, I would say less than 10%). A second point is that - even its earliest days - christianity was not a unified or coherent theological system and did not understand its own god. A council of leaders was necessary (which actually was called to address a political purpose) was needed to develop an authoritative position that could be enforced within the faith community and from beyond (in this case, the empire and the sword). Someone needed to tell the poor christian lambs both what they believed, and what they were not to believe. The creed was formed as much to identify the heretics like Arius as it was to promote the doctrine of Christ as God.
The development of the creed is important to understand because it establishes the true source of belief and doctrine of christianity. Evangelical christians profess that Scripture is the only "infallible" source of faith and doctrine, but the canon of scripture was not even agreed upon at the time of creedal formation. Athanasius (yeh, the same guy who was involved in the controversy with Arius) developed a list of accepted scripture in 367; however, it was not consistent with what was finally agreed upon decades later (and ultimately contended for another thousand years). Creed came first, and creed ultimately created canon!
So, christians, do you know the creed? Do you believe it? Do you understand it?
It is ironic and amusing that the creed, which created canon and is the foundation of christian belief and doctrine, is also in contradiction to much of biblical literature. Nevertheless, christians continue to make the creedal profession and assert that the bible is the "infallible" foundation of faith and doctrine - an internal contradiction at the very foundation of the religion.
The words "We believe", stated at the beginning of the creed, represent the core problem of christian religion, and perhaps any religion. Those words establish, at the outset, that christian religion is not based on reason, logical argument, or scientific evidence, but on subjective experience or opinion that is formed by a number of different sources...not just one authoritative source (like scripture). If christians ascribe to the creed, then they willingly subjugate reason to subjective experience.
Belief is highly personal. It involves a willingness to suspend reason or rational review. Belief is formed in a number of ways, and we all practice it. I am not saying belief is "bad" - however, it must always be tested (eventually). In the test of belief, christianity has largely failed. The creed states "we believe", not "we conclude". There is not a conclusion drawn on the basis of offered evidence.
Belief, in the case of religion, is a weakness and possibly a terminal illness. It has led to atrocities in the name of its god or doctrine. It leads individuals towards delusional thought patterns and behavior. It both incites emotion and denounces it. Who, or what, can challenge a personal, subjective profession? The only real authority in christian religion is the "authority of the believer" (the protestant battle cry!). The authority of one's experience and opinion is ultimate - even the bible says so - "what we have seen, and heard, we declare to you." (1 John 1"3). How can it be tested? Christian religion spurns the test, calling it a challenge to faith, even calling it the activity of the devil.
Because belief is the heart of christian religion, the religion both flourishes and presents its greatest vulnerability. A continuous, pressing challenge on christians about their beliefs - beginning with the Nicene Creed - will eventually lead to collapse.
Let's Think About the Big Picture
Disbelief has rapidly been gaining ground especially since the beginning of the twentieth century and continues today at record pace. Atheists are the fastest growing minority in America. The non-religious comprise 1 billion members of the population, around 20 percent of the entire population. To realize how fast this has happened, consider this. The percentage of people that would fall into the skeptic, Agnostic, Deist, or non-religious category at the year 1900 would be around .2%. So within a hundred years that same group has gone from .2% to 20% or more and that is not including the deists!
I read this a while back in a book by the Christian apologist Os Guinness who specializes in the sociology of religion, he holds a Ph.D in Sociology from Oxford, for the percentage of present worldwide disbelief see the Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Considering all the effort put forth by religious adherents for people to believe in the religious, including things such as missionary work, literature, religious radio, Churches, Religious schools, Sunday school, religious tv etc. And considering on the other hand that on scale with the religious the skeptics ideas and exposure of them have been infinitesimal. So it is pretty remarkable if you think about it, that skepticism has grown as much as it has without having no where near an equal hearing or exposure as religious belief have had. It wasn't even much longer then one hundred years ago where even in America people where being put in jail for blasphemy charges! So if skepticism has grown this much this fast without near the exposure that religion has had, just think what would happen if culture got to the point where it did? We have this many people becoming skeptics without skeptics Sunday schools, without skeptic missionaries, without skeptic churches, without threats of going to hell if you change your mind, without all the social pressure to believe certain doctrines and the threat of being cut off socially if you don't, without skeptic praise and worship, without skeptic communities that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy giving you a sense of identity and making you feel like your part of some divine eternal plan, without skeptic TV that is on 24/7, without being indoctrinated to believe something without question from the time they where young with hell is the only alternative if they chose to believe otherwise, without skeptic wars that set up a skeptic pope, without killing religious people for disagreeing with them, burning books and libraries down who adhere to another creed and silencing the opposition not by argument but by force, without a skeptic empire that dominated western civilization for over a thousand years, without the punishment of death or imprisonment for blasphemy for talking against skeptics beliefs etc. I could go on but you get the picture, the war for truth and for the minds of men have not been fought fairly throughout history. Just think how different things may be if it was!
In any discussion on the subject of making society more conducive to secular enlightenment invariably both many skeptics and believers will indulge in the guilty by association fallacy. This fallacy tries to say something is wrong just on the basis that it is in someway associated with something wrong. For example Hitler drinks water and wears clothes and Hitler is bad, therefore drinking water and wearing clothes is bad. Even though this line of reasoning should obviously strike some one as absurd, I very often hear this line of reasoning from otherwise intelligent people when it comes to religious issues. So when people say things like.... "you should not try to change someone’s religious views because that is what religious people do" "Skeptics should not meet in buildings because religious people do that" "Skeptics should not be passionate about letting people Know why and what skeptics believe because that’s what religious people do" they are committing the guilty by association fallacy. Of course it is fine if people want to try and say why skeptics should not do such and such on other grounds, but when there soul objection is that skeptics should not do something if religious people do the same thing that is just patent nonsense. Religious people also breath, have friends, have careers, and have sex, but I do not see skeptics saying we should deny all that on the same grounds (:.
So lets do some brainstorming and try to think of the big picture. If our goal is to secularize society what are some barriers that would need to be overcome and how can we overcome them? For starters I think we need to persuade skeptics that doing things to make society more skeptical is beneficial for them and everyone else. Skeptics of course believe religion is false but many do not think it is more harmful then helpful. If religion is valuable then why do anything to mitigate it? Until this prevailing attitude is changed among the skeptical community it will be like trying to fight a war without half your countries members or resources. I actually plan on putting together a book on this very topic in the future. The book would be a compilation of the greatest thoughts from the greatest skeptics throughout history on the reasons they gave for religion being more harmful then helpful. I would also want to have all the greatest modern skeptics to write their thoughts on why they think religion is more harmful than helpful and how we would be better off without it such as Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, Loftus, and more. I would, to be fair, include some essays by both skeptics and believers who argued the counter-position. I think the skeptic community very much needs this though, because if they are not persuaded that religion is more harmful then helpful, then what incentive will they have to go out of there way to do something about it? Skeptics have enough numbers to change the worldview of billions if they really wanted to.
For example I have only been a skeptic for a couple of months and have helped deconvert my best friend, my brother, and my ex-girlfriend. Think what would happen if every skeptic just helped deconvert one person in their lifetime, the effect would be incalculable. With my best friend and ex-girlfriend I did this just by giving them skeptic books to read and persuading them to read them. With my brother I actually just talked to him and he became a skeptic. Many of the people that are close to you will read some type of skeptical material if you let them know how important it is to you. Religious people become skeptics all the time, how do you think there are near a billion skeptics in the world if they didn't? My main tactic with people is to first convert them to reason (by that I mean a rational method) and then expose them to counter-information. So how do we help expose religious people to counter-information? How do we even begin to secularize a culture where religion is privatized and a personal affair not a public one? A culture where it is politically incorrect to rationally scrutinize religion. A culture where people are constantly affirmed in there beliefs by there collective group but rarely challenged, and if so it is usually a superficial challenge. Here are some possible ideas that could get the boll rolling.
1. Create incentive among the skeptical community that religion is a harmful falsehood that is well worth fighting against for the sake of the greater good of humanity.
2. Organize the skeptic community as much as possible and help create as many skeptical institutions as possible (Yes I think the idea of skeptics meeting together is a good idea, call me crazy but it just may be beneficial for skeptics and the cause of skepticism. How much influence would religious people have without Church?
3. Seek to make religion more of a public affair then a private one. Bring it out into the light.
4. Publish more skeptical books at a popular level that are geared towards the people who need to read them the most.
5. Start a skeptic 24/7 television station (yes I am serious why not? We have the numbers and the money to do it; all we need is the will.)
6. Start a religion Channel that deals with things only related to religion and where the best arguments and top people of both sides are presented. In this way we could expose religious people to skeptics and skeptical thought they may never have been exposed to otherwise and plant seeds of doubt that may spur them to read and study farther. If the subject of history can have channel and do well, why not religion, why not a religion channel? This would be healthy for society in so many ways I am sure you can imagine.
7. Make sophisticated and entertaining documentaries that are good enough to show at the national cinematic level (Hey Michael Moore did it with 9/11, why could it not be done again dealing with religious issues? You could also make documentaries, where both top people and reasons pro and con where presented. In this way you could get more people to watch it and get more people exposed to new ideas.
8. Create a book series that critically challenges all the major religions. In the book series you could bring all the top skeptical scholars to write a comprehensive critique of the religion at hand, and make the book series geared for the believer to read. To reach as wide a demographic as possible, the book series would have beginner, intermediate, and advanced versions of each book. So for example you would have: a) The Case against Islam (Muslims comprise about 1.6 billion people of the world which is about 25% or one out of every four people on the planet! Some sociologist estimate that if Muslims keep growing at the same rate, that in 40 years from now half of all children born on the planet will be born to Muslim parents! There are also over 40 Muslim nations on the planet. b) The Case Against Christianity (Close to two billion people) c) The Case Against Eastern religions (This book would cover mainly Hinduism which comprises about 850 million people and Buddhism which comprises about 600 million or so.
9. Create a debate book series similar to the Christian counterpoint book series, except instead bring together top philosophical combatants on issues related to religion. In this way you could expose people to views they would otherwise never be exposed to or never read themselves (and if religious people think there views can withstand the force of sophisticated scrutiny then they should want this also). You could call the series the "decide for yourself" debate book series. You could also carry over this idea to a magazine, radio show, documentaries, internet website, and TV show.
I could go on, but I would like to hear more and more brainstorming form others on what could possibly be done to make society more conducive to the truth.
Maxwells Demon and The Soul
A commenter that goes by the screen name of B H has a blog with an entry from September 30 that I appreciated very much. The artcle is called "Maxwell's Demon and the Soul". I highly recommend everyone go take a look at it.
The Set of All Things Not Identical to Themselves
In this Article B H proposes a scientific test for the soul using the hypothesis that in the case that a supernatural being should exist in the natural world, then properties of the natural world should be disturbed and therefore detectable.
If the soul allows humans to have wills that are free (at least to some degree) from material causality, then our souls must act like Maxwell's demon in some sense. The soul must allow neural impulses to proceed unhindered in some instances but not others, but being separate from the physical world, there's no physical requirement for the soul to balance the energy consumed and the energy expended. The purpose of the soul is less specific than Maxwell's demon, but we might expect to see that energy is added to the system extra-physically when the brain makes moral decision and that the energy added may be proportional to the complexity of the dilemma or to the desire of the individual to do the immoral act.
I agree. Several times in the comments I have argued similarly that if the holy spirit can be said to guide us or influence us, I think it should be detectable in the brain because the whole of our experience as humans is gathered through our senses, interpreted, processed, understood and stored there. It makes sense to me that gathering a base line of brain activity in different modes storing them, searching for patterns, signatures to be used for comparisons could be useful in determining if any supernatural activity is 'skewing' the normal signatures. I think that the technology for this type of thing is beyond us now, but one goal for Health Care insurance is to verify that a Psychological Treatment is working, and one way to do it is with brain scans, so I think the technology is forthcoming.
I also have defended a variation of this argument against Shygetz at the beginning of the year when John proposed that Prayer should be able to change history. If God is everything that he is supposed to be, I think it should be feasible and it should be detectable through a kind of "skewed probability".
And I argue that another intersection between the natural and supernatural is prayer, and though many studies have been performed, the results do not support the efficacy of prayer.
Additionally another contributor wrote an atricle, of which I highly recommend, about the soul called "The Soul--A Rational Belief?". Exbeliever argues that the brain being what it is, it does not support the existence of a soul.
I challenge Christians to formulate testable hypotheses, publish them and encourage scientists to investigate them. It would go a long way to giving some of us something to believe in and would be the most powerful ministry ever devised by Humans.
REFERENCES
- The Set of All Things Not Identical to Themselves
- The Soul--A Rational Belief?
- Can Prayer Change The Past
- The Promise of Prayer
- Lee's Holy Spirit Series
October 18, 2007
The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument
The deductive cosmological argument from contingency has a long and illustrious history. It’s been exposited and defended by the likes of, e.g., G.W. Leibniz, Samuel Clarke, and recently (e.g.) Stephen T. Davis, Ronald Nash, Robert Koons, and Alexander Pruss. However, a number of contemporary theists seem to shy away from defending it, such as J.P. Moreland, Peter Van Inwagen, and William Lane Craig (although Craig seems to have warmed up to it slightly in recent years, given his more-positive-than-usual assessment of it in his essay in The Rationality of Theism). In this post, I will exposit the Leibnizian cosmological argument from contingency. Then, I will discuss some common objections to the argument that don't seem to work. Finally, I will discuss several decisive criticisms of the argument. In the appendix, I exposit and critique a recent defense of PSR.
I: Exposition
This version of the cosmological argument has been given a number of construals, depending on how its proponents spell out the notions of a contingent being and the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). One common way to spell out these notions is as follows:
A contingent being or state of affairs is a being or state of affairs that exists, but doesn’t have to – its nonexistence is logically (or metaphysically) possible. So, for example, rocks, trees, and you and I are contingent beings, and George W. Bush being the current U.S. President is a contingent state of affairs. By contrast, a necessary being or state of affairs is a being or state of affairs that exists or obtains of logical (or metaphysical) necessity – to use possible worlds talk, one that exists or obtains in all possible worlds. So, for example, if Anselm’s God exists, then it is a necessary being.
Finally, PSR states that (a) for every being that exists, there is a sufficient reason for why it exists, and (b) for every state of affairs, there is a sufficient reason for why it obtains. PSR has prima facie plausibility, and is often defended by offering one or more of the following three considerations. First, it seems to make sense of our intuitions when we reflect on sample cases. So, for example, suppose there is a ball on the lawn in your front yard. No one would say that there is no sufficient reason for why the ball exists, or why it’s there on the lawn. Obviously, the ball has an explanation for its origin (in a toy factory), its continued existence (in terms of, e.g., the properties of the particles that constitute the ball), and its being on the lawn now (your daughter left it there). The same sorts of explanations seem to generalize to any case we can think of. Therefore, we have some support for PSR based on reflection on cases. Second, some have argued that PSR is self-evident. Self-evident propositions are those that can be seen to be true merely by coming to understand what they assert. That is, once you understand what they mean, you can see that they’re true. So, for example, consider the proposition, “all triangles have three angles”. Once I understand the constituent concepts of this proposition, I can see that it’s true. Similarly for “nothing can be red all over and green all over at the same time.” And similarly, say some proponents of the contingency argument, for PSR. Third, even if one remains unpersuaded by the previous two considerations, one may think that it’s a presupposition of rational thought. Compare: Although it's notoriously difficult to justiify the existence of material objects, and the existence of a past, it nonetheless seems pathological to deny that material objects exist, or to deny that the universe has existed for more than ten minutes (as opposed to thinking that it was created ten minutes ago, with an appearance of age, and with false memories of a longer past). All sane people accept these propositions, and -- say some proponents of the argument from contingency -- the same is true of PSR. Thus, even if you think we can’t prove it, you must accept it to be a rational agent. Given these notions, we may now state the argument.
It’s undeniable that contingent beings exist. After all, we came into existence, and could go out of existence without much trouble. The same is true of rocks, trees, our planet, and in fact every object in the universe. In fact, the universe itself seems to be just one big contingent being. If so, then by PSR, it has a sufficient reason for its existence. Now since it’s a contingent being, it can’t account for it’s own existence in terms of its own nature, even if it has existed forever. For even if the contingent universe existed forever, the following contingent state of affairs would obtain:
(CF1) There being an eternally existent contingent universe.
But if so, then by PSR, there is a sufficient reason for why CF1 obtains, in which case we must look for a reason beyond our contingent universe.
Now whatever that “something” is, it can’t just be more contingent beings. For even our universe is explained in terms of an infinite series of contingent beings, the following contingent state of affairs would obtain:
(CF2) There being an infinite series of contingent beings.
But if so, then by PSR, there is a sufficient reason for why the infinite series of contingent beings exists or why CF2 obtains. In short, no matter how many contingent beings we throw into the explanatory “pot”, the existence of our contingent universe – or any contingent being whatever, for that matter – cannot be sufficiently accounted for purely in terms of contingent beings. But if not, then the sufficient reason for the existence of our contingent universe must be in terms of at least one necessary being. And, as Aquinas would say, “this we all call ‘God’.
II: Giving the Argument its Due: A Defense Against Common Objections
In this section, I continue the task of giving the contingency argument its due. To that end, I briefly discuss three criticisms of the deductive argument from contingency that don’t seem to work. Here I’m just summarizing William Rowe’s points from his Philosophy of Religion (Belmont, Ca: Wadsworth, 1978), pp. 16-30.
1. Dependence and the fallacy of composition:
1.1 The argument fallaciously assumes that because each member of the collection of beings within the universe is dependent, that therefore the whole collection of such beings is itself dependent. But this doesn’t follow.
1.2 Reply: It would be fallacious to assume this, but the defender of the cosmological argument need not assume it for the argument to work. Rather, since the existence of the collection of dependent beings is a positive fact, then it follows from PSR alone – i.e., without the need to rely on an inference from dependence of the parts to dependence of the whole -- that there must be a sufficient reason for why the collection exists.
2. Causation and the fallacy of composition:
2.1 The argument fallaciously assumes that because each member of the collection of dependent beings has a cause, that therefore the whole collection of dependent beings has a cause. But this doesn’t follow.
2.2 Reply: It would be fallacious to assume this, but the defender of the cosmological argument need not assume it for the argument to work. Rather, since the existence of the collection of dependent beings is a positive fact, then it follows from PSR alone – i.e., without the need to rely on an inference from the need for a cause of the parts to a need from a cause of the whole -- that there must be a sufficient reason for why the collection exists.
3. Nothing’s left to explain
3.1 The defender of the cosmological argument fails to see that once the existence of each member of a collection of dependent beings is explained, the existence of the whole collection is thereby explained.
3.2 Reply: It’s not true that explaining why each member of *any* collection of dependent beings exists entails an explanation for why the whole collection exists – why there are dependent beings at all. True, there are cases *of certain sorts* in which explaining the former entails explaining the latter. For example, if a necessary being were the direct cause of each dependent being in the universe, then it would be true that explaining why each dependent being exists would thereby entail an explanation for why the whole collection exists, and why there are dependent beings at all. However, there are cases in which it wouldn’t; just take the necessary being out the previous case, and imagine each dependent being as caused by one of the others. In such a case, explaining why each dependent being exists wouldn’t explain why there are dependent beings at all.
III: Why the Argument Ultimately Fails
This section completes my discussion of the deductive cosmological argument from contingency. In the previous section, I considered a set of objections to the argument that didn't seem to be persuasive. The moral of that discussion seemed to be that the argument stands or falls with the viability of PSR.
Here, I offer objections to PSR that seem to have some force. These criticisms aren’t original with me, but rather are standard objections (except perhaps the last one, although it's based on ideas of other authors). Furthermore, I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t other versions of the argument from contingency that may avoid these criticisms. However, they do seem to apply to the variants of the argument that one finds in standard “intermediate-level” apologetics books. The criticisms can be divided into two broad categories: (i) those that undercut the reasons offered for accepting PSR, and (ii) those that indicate that PSR is positively false or unreasonable.
1. Type-(i) Criticisms:
1.1 Contrary to what its proponents often assert, PSR does not seem to be supported by reflection on cases. Rather what such reflections support is the weaker principle that objects and events are explained in terms of antecedent causes and conditions. In actual practice, ordinary individuals and scientists explain the existence of objects and events in terms of antecedent causes and conditions, provisionally taking the latter things to be brute facts unless or until they, too, can be further explained. But the prinicple implicit in this sort of search for explanations isn't sufficient to generate the need for an explanation of the universe as a whole in terms of a necessary being.[i]
1.2 Contrary to what some of its proponents assert, PSR does not seem to be self-evident. For what makes a proposition self-evident is that grasping its meaning is sufficient for seeing that it’s true. Consider the two standard categories of self-evident propositions: analytic a priori propositions and synthetic a priori propositions. Both sorts of propositions are knowable independently of empirical investigation of the world. But they differ in that the former (analytic a priori propositions) are tautologous and uninformative, while the latter are not. So, for example, "All bachelors are unmarried" is an analytic a priori proposition, while "Nothing can be red all over and green all over at the same time" is arguably a synthetic a priori proposition.
Now consider PSR: (a) For every object, there is a sufficient reason for why it exists; (b) for every positive state of affairs, there is a sufficient reason for why it obtains. This isn't a tautology; so it's not analytic a priori. Furthermore, although it's a substantive claim, its truth or falsity is not evident merely by reflecting on its constituent conceps. Thus, it doesn't seem to be synthetic a priori, either. Perhaps there is another category of self-evident propositions, but if so, PSR seems not to belong to it. For what makes a proposition self-evident is that one can see that it's true merely be reflecting on its contituent concepts, and we have seen that PSR doesn't safisfy this condition.
1.3 Even if PSR were a presupposition of reason, it wouldn’t follow that it would then be true. But in any case, PSR does not seem to be a presupposition of reason. Rather, again, reason only seems to demand that the existence of each object or fact is explained in terms of antecedent causes and conditions, which are provisionally taken as brute facts unless or until they, in turn, can be explained. Reason does not seem to require anything beyond this.[ii]
2. Type-(ii) Criticisms:
2.1 PSR absurdly entails that everything obtains of necessity. The argument for this can be stated as follows. Consider the conjunction of all contingent facts (CCF). By PSR, there is a sufficient reason for CCF. Now the sufficient reason for CCF is itself either contingent or necessary. But it can’t be contingent, because then it would represent a contingent fact, in which case it would itself be a part of the CCF. But contingent facts don’t contain within themselves the sufficient reason for why they obtain – let alone the sufficient reason for why the CCF obtains. Thus, the sufficient reason for CCF must be necessary. But whatever is entailed by a necessary truth is itself necessary, in which case all truths would be necessary truths, and the referents they represent would obtain of necessity. But this is absurd. Therefore, PSR is false. [iii]
2.2 The following scenario is prima facie possible: there are just two kinds of beings that exist: contingent-and-dependent beings (e.g., rocks, trees, planets, galaxies, you and me) and contingent-yet-independent, “free-standing” beings, out of which all contingent-and-dependent beings are made (perhaps matter-energy is like this). If so, then even though there are possible worlds at which the contingent-yet-independent beings don’t exist, they are eternal and indestructible at all possible worlds in which they *do* exist (interestingly, some theists -- e.g., Richard Swinburne -- take God to be just such a being). On this account, then, there are contingent beings that come to be and pass away – viz., the contingent-and-dependent beings. But the beings out of which they’re made – i.e., the contingent-yet-independent beings -- do not; nor can they [iv]. This scenario seems possible. But if so, then since PSR entails that such a state of affairs is impossible, then so much the worse for PSR.
The basic point here is that PSR assumes that dependent beings must have their ultimate explanation in terms of *necessarily existent* independent beings (beings who exist in all possible worlds), when in fact *essentially* independent beings (beings that are independent at all possible worlds *in which they exist*) are all that are needed to do the requisite explanatory work. PSR entails that this isn't enough: if there are any essentially independent, indestructible, free-standing beings, then these must be *further* explained in terms of a *necessarily existent* being. But surely this is explanatory overkill, and since PSR entails that such further explanations are required, this implication undercuts any prima facie plausibility PSR may seem to have had.
These criticisms have varying degrees of force. However, it seems to me that criticism 2.2 is an undercutting defeater for PSR, and that criticism 2.1 is a rebutting defeater of PSR. But if these things are so, then the argument from contingency is defeated.
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APPENDIX: A Recent Defense of PSR
(Note: some things I say here are of a technical nature, and thus will probably only be of interest to those with some background in philosophy)
A number of philosophers have attempted to revive the Leibnizian cosmological argument in recent years by advancing a weaker version of PSR. According to their version of PSR, every contingent being has a *possible* explanation in terms of something else. That is, every contingent being is such that there is at least one possible world at which it has an explanation for why it exists. Call this version of PSR, 'Modal PSR'.
Now some authors -- in particular, Garrett DeWeese and Joshua Rasmussen[v] -- offer an argument for Modal PSR . Now I think their argument has a couple of problems, but here I just want to mention one that I think is decisive: The argument uses Modal PSR as a premise to derive the standard version of PSR we discussed above. But this premise is implausible at best, and outright false at worst. For unless they just beg the question and assume that there are no possible beings that lack a sufficient reason, then they must be claiming that, even if there *are* possible worlds at which a given contingent beings lacks a sufficient reason, there are *other* possible worlds at which it does. But this is implausible, For It seems to me that the only way to accept Modal PSR is to reject origin essentialism. Allow me to me unpack and explain this criticism below:
Suppose origin essentialism is true, and suppose we've got our hands on a universe, and we give it a Kripkean baptism: (pointing to the universe) "Let *that* be called 'Uni'. 'Uni' is now a Kripkean rigid designator -- it refers to *that* universe in all possible worlds in which it exists.
So now we have a way to hold Uni fixed, so we can start considering modal claims about *it*. Well, there are two relevant possibilities for us to consider here: (i) Uni has its origin in the causal power of a divine being,and (ii) Uni has no origin. If (i), then, by origin essentialism, this is an essential property of Uni, in which case there is no possible world in which Uni lacks such an origin.
If (ii), then Uni lacks an origin in the causal activity of a divine being, and so *this* fact about Uni is essential to it, in which case there is no possible world in which it has an origin in the causal activity of a divine being.
The moral, then, is that if we accept origin essentialism like good Kripkeans, then whether a universe has an explanation in terms of a divine being doesn't vary from world to world. But if so, then Modal PSR is of no help unless we know *beforehand* whether our universe has its origin in the causal activity of a divine being. But if we already knew *that*, then the contingency argument would be superfluous.
Of course, one could always reject origin essentialism, or restrict its scope in a way favorable to the argument, but then the audience for the argument shrinks considerably.
================================
Notes
i. This is a rough paraphrase of one of J.L. Mackie’s objections in The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983), pp. 84-87.
ii. See ibid.
iii. This objection is a rough paraphrase of one of Peter Van Inwagen’s objections in his textbook, Metaphysics, 2nd edition (Boulder: Westview Press, 2002), pp. 119-122.
iv .Another way to see how this could be: contingent-yet-independent beings have indestructibility as an essential property: they are indestructible and everlasting at all possible worlds in which they exist. However, there are possible worlds at which they don’t exist.
v. See their chapter of the recent apologetics book, In Defense of Natural Theology (InterVarsity Press, 2005).
Religion is Totalitarianism
Christopher Hitchens debates Alister McGrath
Let me start out saying that I am not a fan of Hitchens' politics. However, there is a reason why he does this for a living, while I am a mere amateur.
I would like to use this video to kick off the discussion of one of Hitchens' points. Religion is totalitarianism; it requires complete obedience to the figurehead, even to the point of outlawing certain thoughts. It utilizes a pervasive surveilance system to ensure obedience--God is always watching, always judging. It demands loyalty to the leader as the supreme in morality, over and above all other moral dictates. It has been previously argued, here and elsewhere, that religion is no worse than atheism from a moral stance, as many of the most despotic regimes of the modern world were atheist (Stalinist Soviet Union, Mao's China, Pol Pot's regime). I argue that all forms of totalitarianism are morally wrong, including religion.
Totalitarianism supercedes all moral constraints with a duty to the leader, whether that leader be god (who makes his wishes know via fallible humans or fallible revelation) or man. The Bible is full of atrocities (genocide, slavery, infaticide, etc.) performed out of loyalty to a totalitarian God, and also full of punishments for those who dare revolt against the regime. Loving Jesus himself brought about the ultimate totalitarian notion of eternal punishment for thoughtcrime--you must believe or you will burn in everlasting fire.
Stand with me in condemning totalitarianism in all its forms. Be it service to the Fuhrer or to a supposed god via his prophets and priests, it is evil and an affront to your human dignity.
An Important New Christian Apologetical Book is Now Available
October 17, 2007
Apologies Not Accepted!
I once had a friend named Mickey. He was a great guy, though underappreciated at the time. Like so many friends who grow up and part ways, we don’t see each other anymore. Oh, how the ages fly by—that is one lesson you learn from life. But I learned another, a more important lesson from my friend Mickey.
Mickey was one of a kind. He would come over and lounge around the house with the rest of us kids who occupied ourselves with less-than-constructive activities all summer long. We had great fun, but more than anything, Mickey got on our nerves because he broke half the things he touched. He was like “Chunk” from The Goonies.
He once stepped on our cat while walking upstairs. Another time, he crushed two Christmas lights that lit the walkway to our house. He broke two expensive lawn chairs by leaning back too far in them—and these are just a few things. Cassette tapes, tools, and dishes also came to be demolished with the calamitous touch of this oversized, Snickers-eating chum. Mickey was a Class-A klutz.
But Mickey was funny; just after every little mishap, he would say, breathing heavily and in a nerdy, fat boy’s voice, ”Oh, uh, sorry! I’ll pay for it!” He had a few other yucky tendencies too, like sweating profusely all over everything – and farting with the force of a category-1 hurricane – but this was all harmless fun in retrospect. It was actually hysterical. Mickey was a good guy. He still is, I hear.
But the other thing I learned from Mickey was that God must also be a pale-skinned, clumsy, fat kid with an eating disorder and a gland problem. No, just kidding. What I really learned from Mickey was that sometimes saying, “I’m sorry,” is not enough! When Mickey broke an expensive piece of stereo equipment we owned, mom and dad were furious. It took more than an apology to fix what was done—it took money from Mickey’s mom, which we got.
Now an apology is only good when it is followed by a resolution not to commit the same offense again. In Mickey’s case, he improved a little, but then again, he was still Mickey and always would be (what are you going to do, right?). As was the case with Mickey’s meaningless apologies, so it is with Christians and Christianity. We infidels get lots and lots of apologies for Christian shortcomings, but these apologies are totally un-redeemable.
My inbox is filled with emails from evangelical Christians making apologies for this, that, and the other. It’s always something as they apologize that I rejected Christianity without having a chance to know the “real Jesus,” that I was “soil with little root,” that I was ruined to Christianity by the radical Church of Christ from which I came, that I was not raised in or around family or friends of religion x, that I was driven away from the church by “cruel and divisive brethren,” that I was not taught well in preaching school, that I never had anyone take me to see a “real miracle,” that I was hurt inside from a personal tragedy, etc. The list is incredibly long.
Every step of the way, Christians are apologizing for something—for everyone else’s failures and for their own, but never for their deity’s failures. The apologies don’t mean a thing because no improvements can be made. Apologies for “bad Christians” are worthless because human nature is what it is. Humans will keep making the mistakes they make. There is nothing that can be done about that. And what about apologies from God? Well, of course, we get no apologies from that mystical being. God (if he existed) would owe the human race the biggest apology of all for bringing us into such an abhorrent existence. However, because the God of the Bible is like a big chemical company who refuses to be culpable for poisoning a small community’s water supply, you’ll get no apology from him. Allowing sick babies to stay on ventilators may move you and I to tears, but it doesn’t move God. So don’t expect an apology of any kind.
And what do we get in place of apologies from God? We get from Christians the ever popular “we’re all sinners” contention. That sickening gab never ceases to weary me. I’m tired of Christians apologizing for their failures, for the church’s failures (both today and in the past), for my supposed failures, for my parent’s supposed failures, for my preaching school’s supposed failures, and for the alleged failures of the whole human race. I want accountability, damnit, not meaningless apologies! Christians, your apologies are NOT accepted! And don’t tell me that you’re sorry I feel that way!
(JH)
The Firepower of Debunking Christianity.
I just want to thank the team members and commenters who make DC what it is. There is some real firepower at DC in our common goal. Here we are in alphabetical order:
Edward T. Babinski has edited a book, written chapters for others and is somewhat of an expert in the issues pertaining to creationism and evolution. He seems to have his hands everywhere, a sort of hub for people who leave the fold. He first encouraged me, and I'll always be thankful, I think. ;-)
Dr. Hector Avalos, a Biblical scholar of the New Atheism.
Jason Long has a Ph.D. in Pharmacology and wrote two books, Biblical Nonsense, and The Religious Condition.
Joe E. Holman was a seminary trained minister who is writing a book describing his deconversion and highlighting the many problems there are for the Christian faith. I just read a rough draft of his deconversion story in his book and it's the most comprehensive and complete one I've ever read. Plus he teaches creative writing and this is reflected in his book. He maintains a website and an online forum.
John W. Loftus, me, *ahem* I have the near equivalent of a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Religion, have taught apologetics at a Bible College, and I too wrote a book.
Lee Randolph, is my right hand man in many ways. He's a polymath and dabbles in Comparative Religions, ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean history and Mythology, Argument Analysis, Informal Logic, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Game Theory and Information Technology. He has a great deal to share, and he helps maintain this blog.
Marlene Winell has a Ph.D. in psychology and specializes in helping people go through the process of deconverting. She wrote a book and she conducts seminars for people who leave the Christian faith.
Valerie Tarico has a Ph.D. in psychology and also wrote a book. Her specialty lies in the area of the psychology of beliefs, how we get them, and why the evangelical faith is so hard to shake.
That’s a pretty well-rounded group.
I am very pleased they have come on board and I greatly value their contributions. Of course, I wish some would contribute more often, but whenever I have a question, or whenever there is a person whom they can deal with better than me, I hook them up.
There are others who comment here, both skeptic and Christian, and I thank them all. Christians who visit here help to sharpen us, and I thank them for this. Skeptics who visit here do the same, and add to our combined knowledge.
I personally think this is a great place to discuss the ideas that separate us. I look forward every day to see what people have said. My aim is to make this a friendly place to debate, and I think that goal is being achieved. I also want DC to be a place where people who struggle with their faith can come to ask questions and learn. There are many such people in the church who dare not express themselves. At DC they can. If the church was more open to their questions they wouldn't have to visit DC to express them, and you all know the answers that we offer.
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Past Contributors at DC Include:
How the Torture of Witches Revealed the Sexual Repression of Inquisitors
Austin Cline has a pretty disturbing set of images with a good discussion of the torture of witches. We've discussed it here before, but why did a loving God say, "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live?" Why? Why not instead say, "thou shalt not torture or kill people who have different ideas than you," and say it as often as needed?
Stargazer's Story
Stargazer wrote a story which demands a wider audience:
I’ve spent nearly 20 years of my adult life believing what you so often state about the Spirit, being led by the spirit of God, etc. I grew up in a conservative evangelical setting, where even C.S. Lewis was considered ‘iffy,’ (he smoke, drank, and enjoyed bawdy jokes, you know!), but he was allowed. In my late teen years, I expanded my reading to other writers, and found my way eventually to where I felt most at home, with the mystics of the church. My intro to this world was through Evelyn Underhill, Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton—from there I found my way to the Theresas, John of the Cross, Julian, Hildegard, many others and eventually committed myself to a lay contemplative group connected to a Cistercian monastery. Over those same years my church experience and theological outlooks, at least to my mind at the time, broadened and deepened. Like you, the experiential became more foundational than the intellectual, and everything I read in scripture or in the writings of Christian authors and teachers was seen through the lense of my experience. After all, I had opened myself to the spirit of love, the spirit of God, and had come to trust that I would be led into the truth, since that was my deepest desire.
I became the standard by which all things were measured—my perceptions and understanding of the truth were a very subjective measure, and when my perceptions came into conflict with those of my fellow contemplatives, it began to raise more questions. We were all committed to God, we all supposedly desired truth, how did we come up with so many opposing ideas?
I was with that group for about 15 years, and then went into formal spiritual formation training with the goal of becoming a spiritual director (I blush now to think I even allowed myself to think I should do this!). While the experience was very positive in the relational aspect, I found myself beginning to wonder how on earth we could end up in such different places, using the same basic source for our beliefs.
The problem was that, essentially, we become our own ‘popes.’ Even when I would say that my relationship with God was born out by the evidence of experience, it still resulted in belief system—there were things I believed about God and things that I did not. You mentioned offering another option other than liberal and conservative views of scripture and belief—but I think what it comes down to is that it is just another system. And it again results in the cherry-picking that has been mentioned in various posts on this blog. It offers no more of an evidential support for belief in God than any other system of belief. We believe that God is love, we believe that the spirit guides us, we have felt this love and the spirit in our innermost being. Problem is…when I came to the point where I had to honestly admit I no longer believed in a personal god, I would still have that experience—but it was connected to things I would read about the cosmos, or when I would lay outside under the trees and just look at the world around me. I get the same sense of awe, the deep, heart-thrilling, take-your-breath-away sense of being overwhelmed just be the sheer beauty of life and the amazing fact that I am alive in all of this. Part of this comes, I am sure, from no longer having to feel like I have to get it “right” about god. That is done. Now, I just live and learn
I’ve been reading a recent book, Leaving Church, by Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopalian priest who resigned from parish work and is now teaching. She talks about how, for the first several years of her life, she remembers having tremendous joy in the natural world, experiencing a deep oneness with that world, and then says when she finally went to church for the first time at the age of seven, she “got the impression that the people who were there that morning had figured out a way of talking about their feeling (equating that with her experience). They seemed to know where it came from , who was responsible for it, what it meant, and how to respond to it.” When I read that and what followed, I felt very sad. Though for her it remained a positive experience, because it made her hungry for God, it also led her to a way of thinking and being from which she found later she needed to extricate herself. She now is at a place where God is much bigger to her than the church will normally allow, and my guess is if she continues on the path she is on, she may well find herself letting go of all the definitions.
But that is where I now find myself—I’m back in the world again, knowing that I’m a part of life. I want to know and understand as much as I can. I want to know about novas and supernovas, I want to learn some languages, I want to get back to my music, I want a telescope for Christmas, I want to know more about fractals—you name it, I want to know it. I feel like I have been in a cocoon far too long—it was often comfortable, familiar, warm, but dark. And the real me is finally allowed to be. All those spiritual experiences—they were wonderful at the time, but they kept me from asking my deeper questions.
October 16, 2007
A Psychiatrist on C.S. Lewis' Apologetic as an Answer to Why Christianity Flouishes
Hi. I’m new here, but I follow this site and have a few thoughts about this topic that I haven’t seen brought up yet. I am an atheist-leaning agnostic, a former fundamentalist, and a psychiatrist, so I hope I can bring that perspective to this discussion.
What I suggest as part of the reason for the flourishing of Christianity is apologetics – but not the “conscious”, logical sort of apologetics debated on this site, but rather a more “implicit” sort, more emotional and rhetorical (in the sense of classical rhetoric), that otherwise uncritical prospective believers come across.
I recently wrote my deconversion story and, as part of that process, went back and looked at some of the apologetics that I used to find convincing. What an interesting exercise! It is fascinating to re-examine these things, now that I am a much more critical reader, and note the assertions and bad arguments I used to accept.
Most significant for me was CS Lewis (like many people), especially his Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. Here’s what I noticed:
It is quite noteworthy, I think, that Lewis does not begin with philosophical or evidential arguments about God or the Christian Bible. He instead argues from the basic human experience of guilt. He asks his readers to consider all of the times they have acted, or thought, selfishly, or done something they knew was wrong. This is a master rhetorical move, because it gets his readers into a state of affective arousal (we are social creatures, and all experience guilt), which makes them less critical. And then he pulls a bit of slight-of-hand, which it goes without saying I did not notice at the time.
(a) He defines “sin” extraordinarily broadly, encompassing anytime we have any bit of self interest in our actions (for example, if we take any pleasure in having done something good – i.e., the fact that *I* did something good – rather than pure egoless pleasure in the fact that *good was done*, that’s sin), as well as any “primitive” emotions, such as jealously (which implies selfishness) or irrational anger (“If you are angry with your brother…”). Since human beings cannot control what they feel, then obviously, by this definition, we are all sinners.
(b) He suggests that these experiences of shame and guilt are the truest and most accurate intuitions we have, so we should heed them. They imply what kind of creature we are. There is no irrational or misplaced guilt, for Lewis.
(c) He suggests that this is only the tip of the iceberg, that we are actually much, much worse than we realize. He does not even bother to argue this. He simply states, in Problem of Pain, that once we *feel* how bad we have acted, that something about us is really awful and unforgivable, then we will begin to see how pervasively wicked we really are.
Lewis then makes another Christian assertion, which is common (not unique to Lewis) but is almost never argued: that God cannot tolerate sin. Yet this seems curious and at least would seem to require an argument. Why not? Isn’t he God? Doesn’t he tolerate our “corruption” already, while we are alive? Why does he stop after 80 or so years? Lewis does make a somewhat oblique argument for it, when he suggests that “real” love, such as God has for us, “demands the perfection of the beloved.”
Love that does not wish its object to be perfect is disinterested, and therefore not real love, according to Lewis. Yet this, too, seems curious, and is inconsistent with human relationships: we wish those we care for to be the best they can be, yet accept their foibles nonetheless, indefinitely. We even laugh about them. Its what makes us interesting! But Lewis’ readers are not likely to notice this. Now that they are convinced how utterly corrupt they “really” are, being told they are loved fiercely by God (Lewis has a stirring passage describing this) is likely to engender even more guilt and a sense of undeservedness.
Taken together, if Lewis is effective (and his popularity suggests he is very effective) then it is likely because, it can be argued, he gets his readers into emotional arousal, taps into bad feelings they have about themselves, and then convinces them that they are much worse than they think and God will not tolerate even minor imperfections.
What out does a reader have at this point but accept the cure that Lewis offers?
I think some psychology can shed some light on this process. Most schools of thought within psychology, though they differ on the details, agree that self-esteem is a learned phenomenon. We are not born knowing how to feel okay about ourselves, and feeling that we have worth. But anything that is learned, can be learned well or it can be learned poorly. Self esteem can be spotty, uneven, even in healthy people, and can be lower during times of difficulty in our lives.
Moreover, modern psychology suggests that the emotional life of young children is much different than the emotional life of adults. Consider when you are angry, as an adult, at someone you love. You may be very, very angry, spittin’ angry in fact, but somewhere, deep down, you still know (and could say, if pressed), that this person is still the same person they were, the same person you love, and still has good qualities, despite your being so angry. This sense is what children probably lack. Their emotions have a global, totalizing quality. When they are mad, that anger is, for the moment, all they know and all they have ever known. It colors their whole experiential world.
The reason is that the ability to discriminate emotions from self is also a learned behavior. In older analytic terms, it is an ego function. It takes brain maturation and good parenting to learn that what you feel at the moment is not all of who you are; feelings are part of the self but not identical with it. Thus, the upshot is that, for a young child, there is no or little difference between *feeling bad* and *being bad.*
The point here is that we all carry within us a residual sense of “inner badness” that most of us eventually learn to master, but during periods of stress and emotional upheaval, can be reactivated. Christianity has a keen sense for human frailty, and well-honed methods for rooting out any sense of imperfection we already harbor.
Lewis taps into these feelings. This sense of inner badness and (potentially) low self-esteem is ubiquitous in our development and so Lewis, in activating these feelings, presents what is essentially an emotional argument that serves as both an amplification of bad feelings, low self worth, and a solution to them.
And if we feel overwhelmingly that we are bad, worthless, and unable to help or improve ourselves, well then what option to de have except to accept the “rescue” of a larger-than-life figure such as Jesus?
My proposed solution to this focuses much more on emotional health than on the more cognitive arguments that many atheists gravitate toward. We should be teaching our children – perhaps in schools? – how to deal with their emotions. How do you recognize when you are upset, or hurting? How do you seek support when you need it? How do you ask for and get what you need from others, effectively? How do you make, and keep, friends? How do you make yourself feel good about yourself? What do you do when you get mad, or sad, or lonely, or upset? How do you “regulate” emotions, as psychotherapists say? These are skills that many of us learn, imperfectly, as part of growing up, from watching others and trial-and-error, but they can also be taught explicitly. I think we can make people much more resistant to Christianity or any other form of ideological indoctrination, not only by making them more adept at critical thinking, but more adept at managing their emotional lives. We can impede Christianity by getting people to need it less.
So, my basic idea is this: critical thinking is extremely important. But it goes out the window when emotional needs are not being met. We need to teach people how to take care of themselves emotionally. Psychotherapists know how to do this. I’m not saying everyone needs therapy; these are skills that could be taught in a classroom.
I apologize for the length of this post, but this material is hard to summarize quickly.
I’m interested in hearing others thoughts!
Posted from Richard M
Solomon Asch Conformity Experiments
Watch YouTube Video
This article is intended to show how people will conform to peer pressure against their own convictions and in what conditions. It is relevant to the influence exerted in the church community among its members. There is significant pressure in the church to prevent the expression of doubt or critical questioning of the properties of the religion. People would rather conform than go against the group. Since people are evolutionarily tuned to be social animals, the perceived benefit of belonging to the group should outweigh the benefit of dissension. I am grateful to Matthew, one of our readers, for submitting this and his kind sentiment. Click on the Link above to show a short video documentary on them. Click on the Link below to read a short summary from Wikipedia.From Wikipedia
Solomon Asch "became famous in the 1950s, following experiments which showed that social pressure can make a person say something that is obviously incorrect.
The way he did this was through an experiment in which participants were shown a card with a line on it, followed by another card with 3 lines on it labeled a, b, and c. The participants were then asked to say which line matched the line on the first card. At first, the subject would feel very at ease in the experiment, as he and the other participants gave the obvious answer. Shortly after, the "participants" in front of the subject would start all giving the same wrong answer. Solomon Asch thought that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that an alarming number of participants gave the wrong answer. See Asch Conformity Experiments"
REFERENCES
Debunking Christianity
The Role of Persuasion and Cognitive Bias In Your Church
The Role of Persuasion in the Question of The Holy Spirit
Suspension of Disbelief
All Lee's Persuasion Articles
Wikipedia
Solomon Asch
Asch Conformity Experiments
YouTube
Asch Conformity Experiments Video from YouTube
My Book is Ranked 11th on Amazon
Did Josh McDowell Lie?
Are Believers More Likely to be Hypocrites Than Atheists?
October 15, 2007
The Canon Within the Canon
Which parts of the Biblical canon are to be emphasized while others are minimized? If Christians really believed the Bible they wouldn’t let women speak in their churches (I Cor, 14:34), for the man would be the domineering patriarchal head of the house in which a wife is to “obey” her husband just like Sarah obeyed Abraham (I Peter 3: 6), even to the point of lying to save his life by having sex with another man (Genesis 12: 10-16), and by letting him sleep with another woman so he could have a child (Genesis 16). And yet in order to blunt the force of these passages, today’s Christians focus on Paul’s principle that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.” (Galatians 3:28). Which is it? What Christians stress becomes “the canon within the canon,” and this is cherry-picking plain and simple.
This problem forces Christians to specify exactly where they get their morals from. If they can stress one part of the Bible to the neglect of another part, then how do they actually decide which parts to stress and which parts to neglect? I maintain Christians get their morals from the same place I do…from the advancement of a better understanding of who we are and what makes us happy as human beings in society. Christians do not get their morals exclusively from the Bible. Christians have just learned to interpret the Bible differently down through the ages in keeping with our common sense of morality, that’s all, as our moral values change with the times.
Christians will object, without good reason, that I cannot provide an ultimate moral standard for my values. However, I just don’t think we need an “ultimate” justification for our morals, and I don’t think any of us has such thing, either. Let me just offer one analogy here. Take for instance, the scientific method. Can anyone tell me exactly what it is, and can someone also provide a complete and full justification of it? As far as I know no one has done so. Some thinkers, like Paul Feyerabend, have even argued there is no scientific method. And yet we have a general idea of what it is. In a like manner it falls on deaf ears to ask me to provide some kind of fully complete or ultimate justification for my morals before I can behave morally, in the same sense as it does to ask a scientist to provide a complete and full justification for the scientific method before he does science.
October 14, 2007
Dr. Witmer on the Design Argument v. Problem of Evil
October 12, 2007
"When Our Vices Get the Better of Us"
This article weakens the claims regarding Gods Justice, Mercy, freewill and Human Accountability.
As humans, we have limited resources to control ourselves, researchers say; all acts of control draw from one source. So when using this resource in one domain, such as dieting, we’re more likely to run out of it in another domain, like studying hard.
www.world-science.net
Inzlicht and Gutsell asked participants to suppress their emotions while watching an upsetting movie. The idea was to deplete their resources for selfcontrol. The participants reported their ability to suppress their feelings on a scale from one to nine. Then, they completed a Stroop task, which involves naming the color of printed words (i.e. saying red when reading the word “green” written in red), yet another task that requires selfcontrol.
The researchers found that those who suppressed their emotions performed worse on the task, indicating that they had used up their selfcontrol resources while holding back their tears during the film.
An electroencephalogram (EEG), a recording of electrical activity in the brain, confirmed the results, they said. Normally, when a person deviates from their goals (in this case, wanting to read the word, not the color of the font), increased activity occurs in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, which alerts the person that they are offtrack. The researchers found weaker activity in this brain region during the Stroop task in those who had suppressed their feelings. In other words, after engaging in one act of selfcontrol this brain system seems to fail during the next act, they said.
If we are expected to make moral decisions and are going to be held eternally accountable for them, we have a poor mechanism to do it with. Our brains design is such that it is more likely in any given situation that we will make an error in judgment.
October 11, 2007
Five Big Rocks (part two)
To help Christians understand why I left the Christian faith, I am writing a series of articles about the obstacles that dissuaded me from belief. I call them the Five Big Rocks:
1. The Problem of Evil & Suffering
2. The Problem of Communication.
3. The Problem of Scriptural Errancy
4. The Problem of Theological Incoherence
5. The Problem of Religious Toxicity
I dealt with the first rock here. Danger! Falling rocks ahead!
2. The Problem of Communication.
Jim Benton (aka Prup) is the first one I know of to name this argument in this way. I won’t attempt to articulate it as Jim would, because I probably won’t do it justice (he’s got some great insights to share, though, and I look forward to reading his comments a little later).
One Christian article I read recently asks, "Have you telephoned God today?" Would that it were that easy! The article continues, "Every endeavor on earth requires proper and clear lines of communication, otherwise, there would be chaos." And chaos there is. If there is a God, why does he have such a hard time communicating with his creation?
If God exists and if communication originated with him (as Genesis and John's Gospel imply), then he should be able to communicate far better than any communicator who has ever lived. According to communication experts, a good communicator:
• Knows his audience
• Knows his purpose
• Knows his topic
• Anticipates objections
• Achieves credibility with his audience through good argumentation
• Takes different learning styles into account
• Presents information in several ways, using multiple communication techniques
• Communicates as little or as much as it takes to be properly understood
• Follows through on what he says
• Develops practical, useful ways to obtain feedback
If God exists, it is imperative that he communicate with us in a way that encompasses all of these things. He should convey his will in a manner that anyone, anywhere, anytime can recognize, understand, and respond to without significant barriers. You might suppose God would have little trouble delivering a message to the human race. Yet, if Christianity is to believed, God chose one of the worst channels of communication possible: a 2,000+ year old book, full of factual & historical errors, antiquated cultural nuances, confusing & conflicting teachings, and translation difficulties. This, as it turns out, was a sure-fire way to be MISunderstood--just look at the myriads of Christian denominations today who can't agree on such basic Biblical issues as salvation, election, worship, baptism, etc.
Neither is evangelism (the one-person-at-a-time model of spreading the Word) the most efficient way of communicating God's will. Millions will die without ever hearing the Gospel; many millions more will hear the Gospel but not understand it because of cultural and intellectual problems inherent in the message itself. Christians, how often have you virtually beaten your head against the wall, frustrated because people don’t "get" the Gospel? You really shouldn't blame yourself. After all, isn’t it God's responsibility to make sure that his point of view is both apprehended and comprehended? As one Christian recently commented, "But in the end, it's really not my job to convince people of God's existence. If he can't provide proof himself, he's not much of a God." Amen to that.
Here's what might work better: God could initiate a personal conversation with every man, woman, and child, tailored to their unique needs and situations. As a Christian, I always wondered why it was that God spoke so very long ago, but didn’t bother speaking today. And why did the miracles come to a halt? If the purpose of the signs, wonders, and healings of Jesus and the apostles was to confirm the word of God (Hebrew 2:4), then surely miracles would do the same today. Think of the wonderful PR for God! Think of the victory against skepticism! God could speak through his actions--cleaning up the evil and corruption flooding the world at large.
Speaking of the apostles, why was there no succession of apostolic authority? The early church started departing from the teachings and traditions of the apostles shortly after they died (leading to the horrible monster of a church-state that was the Roman Catholic Church).
Bottom line: if God wants us to follow him so badly--and if there is an eternity of either heaven or hell at stake--there are innumerable ways that God could make himself known to us. We could all have a vision (like Saul of Tarsus) or a dream (like Joseph of old). God could commandeer all telecommunications ("Stay tuned for a special message from the Intergalactic President of the Universe"). He could stop all traffic and machinery (like the visitor from outer space in The Day the Earth Stood Still) so that we'll stop and listen. The possibilities are almost limitless for an omnipotent God. Instead, we are left with copies of copies of copies of a very old collection of religious writings (the originals were long ago lost to antiquity), with so many variants that the science of textual criticism has developed to try to piece together the "authentic" text of the Bible.
In the end, perhaps George Benard Shaw was right: “The problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.”
Scripture Only Is a Myth
One of the sects of Christianity that is on the rise, especially within the Evangelical branch, claims that the sole religious authority comes from Scripture, and the traditions, doctrines, and interpretations of man have no authority. Martin Luther was perhaps the most famous person to preach sola scriptura, the idea that the Bible is the sole source of religious truth. However, I argue that it is impossible to hold to the idea of scripture only with logical consistency. The reason is simple; the determination of what the sacred writings make up the Bible is wholly extra-scriptural and based on church tradition, doctrine, and politics. In order to logically hold to scripture only, one of the writings in the Bible would have to have a list of all of the books of holy writings, including itself; otherwise, one must go outside of the scriptures themselves to determine the which writings should be in the Bible, which renders the claim of "scripture only" false. Since this list does not appear in the Bible, any claim of authority based on scripture alone is facially false as the identity of scripture itself is based merely on tradition, doctrine, and church politics, which are the works of humankind. In order to support scripture, Christians must appeal to doctrine, thereby abondoning their imagined authority of God-breathed scripture.
Two Chinks In The Armor
The reference to Pascal's Wager in a previous post has incited to me address the issue of why Christians believe, and what is the basis of that belief.
Pascal's Wager is as follows: "If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having, neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is ... you must wager."
From my position, I see an impasse in the struggle between theists and atheists...neither side will ever be able to prove their basic supposition, that there is or is not a "God." Arguing from the atheist's side of the table, I don't see how our side could ever prove conclusively that there is not a God...our science will never be able to plumb the depths of reality in our universe. Certainly at this point in our evolution, there is far more that we do not know...and do not even know how to identify or measure.
So, what is our challenge, and what is the basis of our activity to "debunk" christianity? If we cannot achieve the goal of debunking by disproving the existence of God (which, I posit, we cannot), then what are we saying or doing?
I want to propose that christianity has to be debunked at two vulnerable points: (1) the legitimacy of the bible as the "source" reference for all that christians believe, and (2) the creed statements that grow out of an attempt to summarize and dogmatize the essentials for salvation contained in the bible.
In my experience as a believer and pastor for over 30 years of adult life (I became a believer as an adult, not a child) - and having spent 25 years of that life as a theologian and pastor - I observed that most christians fall back on the caveat of personal experience when threatened with logical arguments against belief or doubt in God. The statement I heard most often was - "I may not understand God, or the bible, but - I once was lost, and now I am found, was blind and now I see." In other words, they had an experience...and that experience is their fall-back position when threatened with logic or doubt.
I mention that fall-back position of experience because as I have read and participated in the commentary on this site, I have noticed that the christians fall back to a common position - "if you knew God like I know him, yada yada." That kind of fall-back (a retreat, in my opinion, and a admission of failure to prevail in the debate) is probably inevitable, and so must be expected in any debunking activity.
AND EVENTUALLY - BECAUSE MY EXPERIENCE OF GOD PROBABLY RIVALS THE BEST OF EXPERIENCE OF OTHERS ON HERE - I WILL BEGIN TO ADDRESS THAT EXPERIENTIAL POSITION.
But right now, I want to insist that christians are vulnerable at two points:
- their faith in the inerrancy or infallibility of scripture (yes, two different positions that lead to the same conclusion...what the bible says is true and can be believed about the essentials of salvation), and
- their trust in the summation of the essentials, found in the creedal statements of the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed. These two documents were produced in the earliest years of christian formation, in response to perceived theological heresies and rebellion against centralized authority. They were intended to provide a common belief system that any and all groups, nations, and individuals could understand and agree with. My take on these creeds is that they are riddled with assumptions and contradict much of what the bible says about god and salvation...and so they represent - not an accurate summation of biblical essentials, but a made-up system of belief that most christians ascribe to whether they know it or not.
Remember, when challenged and debunked, most christians will fall-back to the well-worn "I may not understand, but I know what happened to me" position. There is a christian commentator on this site who admits that God does not answer prayer in the way he promises to in the bible, but that is OK with him because he has grown to believe (through his experience) that God only answers prayers that are prayed in a specific way for a specific thing. HIS EXPERIENCE has trumped biblical revelation and creed...and who can argue against that? We can only point it out.
What if We're Wrong?
What Dawkins said is the basis for my Outsider Test for Faith. If the point of such questions has to do with Pascal's Wager, well, that's ignorant and irrelevant when dealing with the number of religions making similar threats of judgment after death. Dan Barker turns the tables and asks the Christian what if you are wrong?