Christ the Tao

"How do you test the hypothesis of God?"

2012-03-11T10:01:00.001-07:00

A gentleman named Harry Marks asked me this morning:

"David Marshall, How would you test the hypothesis of God?"

Here is my brief answer.

You ask how I would test that "hypothesis," so let me give a personal reply.

When I was in my early 20s, growing up in a Christian home, then educated at a secular university, studying Marxism, I was full of doubts, and decided to do just that: test whether God was real. My method was to join the missions organization Youth With a Mission in Hong Kong, and see if "God would show up," to put it in Forrest Gump's terms.

I found that sometimes, he seemed to. What I found was that (a) sometimes, remarkable answers to prayer seem to be given, with real probative value; (b) God seemed to have arrived in Asia before me, in the sense that the ancient Chinese had known about Him; (c) I saw that the Christian faith was making things better, for individuals and societies, as Genesis 12 prophecies; (d) I found that the Gospel fulfilled deep truths in Asian cultures.

As with subatomic particles, though, in this case the observer influences the outcome. Who is this "I" that is observing? Who is seeking God? And does he really want to find God? What influence might the observed have on the observer?

This is another level of awareness, and testing, that may be more real than "the God hypothesis" version of the test implies.

Before I went to Asia, I spent a summer working as a counselor at a Bible Camp in the most beautiful place in the world, Berner's Bay, Alaska. I didn't do much actual counseling -- aside from one week with my own cabin of kids, most of the time I spent on ladders, counseling spruce branches with a chain saw. I walked on the beach, rode horses, climbed Angel Peak across the bay with other staff, and must have spent considerable time in meditation.

One evening, I stayed in the main building while everyone else was off somewhere, and reread C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. I read the chapter on "The Great Sin." Probably the sin I felt most guilty about was lust, at the time. But Lewis argued that sexual sins were trivial compared to the real monster: pride.

I came to realize that I was full of pride. I saw that I needed to repent of that sin, and that I would have to fight it, for the rest of my life.

And so it has proven.

One way God proves Himself to me, in the Bible, is by speaking truthfully about my own heart. I find that many non-Christians don't even recognize, what Lewis proved to me beyond doubt that night, and that the biblical writers clearly understood, that pride is the heart of all sin, and reflection of our deep need for a savior -- not just from obvious vices like alcoholism or prostitution or even war-lordism or pimping, that caused so much devastation in parts of Asia I would soon visit. No, the evil began inside me, and could not be disconnected from me.

God reveals himself to me in the Bible, in short, by telling the truth, on a deeper level than I find it anywhere else, and more salvifically. Having studied the religions of the world, and read many books by atheists, many rather brilliant, and thinkers like Lao Zi, Confucius, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Tolstoy, I do not find a parallel to the Sermon on the Mount, though I find much that supports the teachings of Jesus.

Everyone is different. Pascal, who helped develop probability theory, seemed to see some sort of probabilistic argument in the prophesies of the OT, but was most deeply convinced by a mystical experience of the Holy Spirit. I have met philosophers for whom philosophical arguments worked, scientists for whom scientific arguments worked, and lots of people who find the life of Jesus, and the evidence for the resurrection, convincing. I doubt I would much like God, or maybe trust him, without Jesus as His image.

I'm not pretending this is simple. If we want to test a chemical, we put it in solution. If we want to test a tortoise, we race him with a hare. If you want to test your girlfriend, or boyfriend, don't try chemicals: try life. Watch how he or she interacts with other people. Bring her home to mother. Watch him hang around your girlfriends.

So the smarter the object, the harder and more "existential" the test.

Can we test God? Jesus said "Don't put the Lord your God to the test!"

What I think he means is, we shouldn't presume that God is like a protein compound or our laborador puppy. The test, in this case, as with our lovers only more so, must involve our whole lives.

And each of those lives is different. So the test -- whether of Him, or of us -- will also vary accordingly.

Such, at least, is the best I can make out. Because my testing -- or His, apparently -- does not seem anywhere near complete.

Ode to Blind Faith (and John Loftus).

2012-03-09T22:01:00.013-08:00

Dedicated to all those who spread the Blind Faith Meme.

God called Abraham to near Tel Aviv
Without giving any cause to believe
That would satisfy scientists named Steve
But Isaac laughed, and Ms. A felt relieved.

Hang-gliding Moses ascended Sinai.
In the face of Reason -- off he did fly!
Jehovah seemed epistemologically shy.
Though Madame Ramses stayed home to cry.

Elijah pulled twelve rocks together.
His mind clean at the end of its tether.
"No proof! And now all this bad weather!
Worse -- the smell of barbecued leather!"

Our Lord refused to give any syn.
Not a single trigonometrical line.
Nor did he heal all the empirically blind.
But after Easter, fishing Galilee so fine.

-- David Marshall, 3/9/2012

Contra Hedrick: On Faith & Demographics

2012-03-07T22:47:00.008-08:00

Among critics of The Truth Behind the New Atheism, the best-known so far have been Victor Stenger, who dedicated a good part of a chapter in The New Atheism to rebutting my analysis of faith and reason, and Hector Avalos, who attacked me over my claim that the Gospel liberates slaves, beginning with this piece. (I responded here and here.) Several wild-eyed Internet critics have been even more persistent, but less worth responding to.

A more interesting Web critic has been Landon Hedrick, a doctoral student in philosophy. Landon has Christian roots, and has seemed less inclined to brush them off with contempt than some former Christians. While he began our dialogue with what struck me as a naive hero-worship of Richard Carrier, a bubble I did my best to burst, he has at times distanced himself from the more self-confident and glib pronouncements of the New Atheists, including (lately) those of Dr. Carrier.

In this blog, I'd like to respond to some of Landon's overlooked, but imaginative, criticism.  His arguments invoke three substantive questions about faith and demographics: first, does education kill faith? Or is the slight tendency of well-educated Americans to "lose their religion" an anomaly? Second, are scientists often Christians? And third, were most atheists in the world today "socialized into atheism" by Marxist propaganda?

Epistemology also makes a calling. On what basis we should believe stuff? Should an author (like me) make a claim in a popular rebuttal of the New Atheism, without backing it up with solid social survey data? Can a writer be allowed an occasional appeal to his own authority or experience?  In short, does The Truth Behind the New Atheism "wallow in ambiguity?" Or just take a dip in it occasionally, to take a break from the humorless anality of so much public discourse?

A tertiary issue might be expressed, "How big an error does it take to discredit an opponent?" The Truth Behind the New Atheism, like The God Delusion, is full of claims of all shapes and sizes in philosophy, theology, history, sociology, and science. To give him credit, Victor Stenger tries (however inattentively) to debunk the main claim of one whole chapter of my book. Hector Avalos narrows this scope considerably: he critiques a single argument that covers about two pages of TBNA, implying that if he successfully shreds that minor point, my reputation as a scholar will be shot to hell. Conceivably this might work, if my argument were as bad as he says. After all, a mere 300 Trojans damaged the whole Persian army by the cliff at Thermopylae.

Hedrick picks a yet smaller target.  Rather than claiming I am wrong about anything at all, he critiques the strength of my support for mere parenthetical rejoinders. He approaches my book less like a hawk looking for a rabbit to consume whole, than like a hummingbird flitting through a flower bed to extract a little nector to enjoy a lazy April morning. His goal is also more modest than that of Avalos: not to dismiss my work wholesale, but to place an asterick by my name. "Watch this guy, he might be trying to a fast one."

With all these issues in mind -- social, epistemological, and personal -- here is Landon's critique (in green italics), including his quotes from me (in blue italics), followed, after each substantive point, by my response and reflections.

1A. Religion and Statistics

Imagine that while reading Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion, you come across a rather bold claim: "As it happens, in Britain, the more educated a person is, the more likely he or she is to be an atheist." Of course, such a claim would need to be supported by some sort of controlled scientific survey. But imagine that Dawkins didn't even provide a citation; he made the claim without any benefit of actual evidence outside his own experience. Would it be a big deal? After all, Britain is his home.

We can be confident that had Dawkins made this mistake, somebody would have noticed and called him out on it. Perhaps that person would have been Christian apologist David Marshall, who has made an effort to debunk Dawkins on several points. (He even has a list of "160 errors" in The God Delusion.) But imagine further that, when confronted with this problem, Dawkins offered the following response:

"Years ago I saw a study conducted in Liverpool which informed me of this correlation, and ever since then I've personally noticed that this is the case throughout the rest of Britain. I don't know where you can find that study, but you can take my word for it. I'm a generally perceptive person, and I wouldn't be making this claim unless I had a wide exposure to British people."

Would you be satisfied? Would David Marshall be satisfied? As it turns out, I don't think Dawkins did make this mistake in his writings, so "his words" above are completely fictional. But it's interesting that David Marshall, in his book The Truth Behind the New Atheism, makes a parallel claim and leaves it unsupported. On page 41 he tells us that "in East Asia, there was a strong positive correlation between education and the Christian faith. The more books you read, the more likely you were to be a Christian." This claim was not followed by a note citing any valid scientific surveys; it appeared to come straight from Marshall's own observations. When I pointed this out to him, here is the reply he gave:

"I would have liked to cite the study of faith and education in Singapore that I mentioned. The numbers were quite dramatic. They also corresponded with what I've seen all around East Asia: the more educated a person is, the more likely to be a Christian. However, I read the paper in Taiwan, and cited it in a paper I wrote in seminary, and haven't seen it since. The reader is free to disbelieve me if he likes, or suspend judgement until hard stats turn up. But I've been involved with Asian Christianity for 24 years, both on the ground and academically; it would be wise to take my opinion on this seriously. (Alternatively, check into almost any Chinese church in America, and see how many people with Phds in science, mathematics, and engineering you can find.)"

Is it alright for Marshall to put this fact in his book if it's merely based on an old study from Singapore (that he no longer has access to) and his own experience with East Asia? Perhaps it would be more responsible of him if he altered his wording to offer the information not as a categorical fact, but as his belief based on his experience.

DM: Admittedly, I could have supported this minor point better in TBNA. It turns out I was more right on the point than I remembered, though. In Singapore, while only 6.4% of those with less than secondary education counted themselves as Christian in 2000, a full 39.3% of those with university education did. (Eng, Lai Ah, 2008: editor, Religious Diversity in Singapore Singapore: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Institute of Policy Studies : Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 47.)

So yes, I "put a fact in the book" that was inadequately supported. Unlike many of Dawkins' claims, however, it was a real fact, even expressed conservatively: the truth is, in Singapore, a university education seemed to correlate with a more than six times greater probability of being a Christian!

Why should my slight casualness on proving this point (or that the same is true in other East Asian countries) be considered a problem? As Landon mentioned, I listed 160 "errors, gross exagerrations, and highly dubious claims" in The God Delusion. Many of these derive from the fact that Dawkins simply didn't know what he was talking about. But I do know what I'm talking about, when it comes to Asian Christianity.

Dawkins should be given less benefit of the doubt, because he is writing out of his field most of the time The God Delusion. If an author also shows a good track record of getting facts right (and in all due modesty, I think I do), why not give him the occasional benefit of the doubt? Trusting those we find trustworthy is how we operate in every department of our lives, from taking notes in class, to believing what our spouse tells us about expenses on our 10-40 form, to checking sources on-line or in journals. Of course, Landon may distrust my claims because he disagrees with my overall philosophy, and perhaps give his own side (Richard Carrier) more latitude, without realizing he is doing so. Probably most of us do this, to some extent.

IB. Christian Scientists

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins offers some statistics (based on an actual study!) of the percentage of scientists that believe in God. Marshall appears to distrust Dawkins' cited statistics, writing that it's "a little hard to jibe with experience," since he sometimes meets devout Christians in church who also happen to be scientists (p. 39).

But consider what Marshall is suggesting to his readers here: that the statistics seem suspicious because he meets Christian scientists in church. Isn't this precisely where we would expect to find Christians (of all professions) on Sunday mornings? Clearly such an observation does nothing to deflate statistics from a properly-conducted survey. When I mentioned this to Marshall, he responded as follows:

"Your complaint about my response to the claim that relatively few scientists believe in God seems overly argumentative. My point wasn't that the data was wrong; only that based on my own experience, it seemed fishy. What I'm offering is a prima facia reason to look more carefully at the data. I didn't say only that scientists who are Christian are in church on Sunday. I said I often find the most committed Christians in many churches are scientists. But later I concede that the incidence of atheism among scientists is probably higher than the general public, and then offer some non-rational reasons why that might be so."

But it's hardly clear how meeting Christian scientists in church constitutes even a prima facie reason to be skeptical of the data. The claim made by Dawkins was not that all scientists are non-Christians; his claim was that a survey reported a particular correlation between being a scientist and being an atheist. Besides, do we need this sort of information in order to convince us that we should carefully evaluate the data?

DM: It is the glory of philosophers to be careful, so perhaps I shouldn't complain about Hedrick's criticism. Except that I didn't say I "sometimes" meet pious scientists in church, I said I "often" do. Also, I offered two other reasons to question Dawkins' presentation of the facts, which Landon neglects to mention, including a report from one of Dawkins' colleagues on the Oxford physics faculty on all the Christians there whom Dawkins appears to have overlooked.

Anyway, again, I see nothing horribly defective about my procedure here.

Often, in my experience, when claims by experts look fishy, closer inspection shows they are fishy. The phrase "Lies, damned lies, and government statistics" reflects the fact that this is a common experience. A scientist who worked with Stephen Jay Gould said that he had great skill in finding the anomylous piece in a dig that ultimately led to a different understanding of the finding. That skill, even if partially intuitive and wholly tentative, is I think to be cultivated, not summarily dismissed. Misgivings are no substitute for strong empirical argument, but are often worth attending to.

And of course if scientists really are unlikely to be Christians, one would expect fewer of them in church. And if study of science eroded faith, one would expect scientific Christians who remain to be less enthusiastic about their beliefs. That does not seem to be what I find. So I continue to hold the stats, and my own experience, in a state of suspended judgement. Experience, even without a "study" to back it up, is often a good reason to be extra cautious about alleged statistics, and what they might mean. I hope such common critical reactions are not lost, enthralled as we now seem by silly headlines like (from an old Time Magazine cover), "Why are men and women different? It isn't just upbringing. New studies show they were born that way."

IC. Are most atheists commies?

There is at least one more incidence of this sort of problem in the book. On page 30, Marshall writes that "most atheists in modern times have been Marxists." But again there is no citation supporting the claim, it is just a bare assertion. Elsewhere, I believe he has pointed to the Soviet Union and China as virtual oceans of atheists. But even so, how many of these people were really atheists (by whatever definition of the word Marshall is working with)? And how many were really Marxists? Presumably, it must mean something to be a Marxist (perhaps a belief in some set of doctrines laid out in the writings of Marx himself, or an avid reader of those writings, or even just somebody who claims to be a Marxist). Whatever Marshall means by these words, we cannot simply assume that everyone living in a communist country is or was a Marxist. And even if we could, this still doesn't tell us anything about the number of atheists among these people, or how these numbers compare to non-Marxist atheists in modern times. When confronted with this challenge, Marshall responded:

"You complain that I don't cite the claim that "most atheists in modern times have been Marxists." But later in the book, I describe the role atheism played in Marxist ideology in some detail. There are only some ten million atheists in the United States, but hundreds of millions in communist China, who learned disbelief from Marxist teachers. (How do I know? I've been studying communist history, and talking to Chinese young people about their beliefs, for decades. Take my word for it. Or check my sources.) And many atheists in Western Europe and America during the 20th Century were also Marxists.... And my estimate that most modern atheists have been Marxists, at least in the sense that they imbibed Marxist ideology from the same source that they learned atheism, is almost certainly true."

I responded by pointing out that he still had not provided a study or survey which proved his claim, and that merely living in a Communist country probably does not qualify one as a Marxist. I further wrote:

"If Marshall has some evidence that most people who have claimed to be atheists in modern times have also claimed to be Marxists, he should have cited it when he made his claim. Either we take his word for it, as he suggests (since he's been studying this stuff and talking to some Chinese youngsters for decades), or Marshall can just point us to a study/survey which proves his point. I can't check all of his sources all the way through to see if they may have happened to include such a statistic."

And Marshall offered a longer response:

"A 2007 survey by scholars at East China Normal University of about 4500 people showed that a projected 300 million adults in China have some sort of religious belief. (Reported by BBC, Washington Post, etc.) That would leave some 700 million adults without a religious belief. How many are atheists? Given that atheism is what students have learned in school for the past 60 years, it would seem fairly safe to assume -- quite a few. My own small-scale survey supports this conclusion. When I ask Chinese to pick among a thirteen options (including three forms of Buddhism, two forms of Taoism, two forms of Christianity, Islam, "don't know," "am not sure" "other," and "atheism"), so far about 30% have indicated "atheist," and about the same percent was unsure, maybe agnostic. I haven't surveyed enough people yet for these numbers alone to be a strong argument, but this fits my general impression, in 23 years of talking with mainland Chinese. (Perhaps since before you were born.) Furthermore, religion has been growing rapidly -- before 1979, the percent of those who saw themselves as atheist was almost certainly a majority of the Chinese people.

You'll be hard-pressed to find 300 million atheists in all of the never-communist world. Four percent of Americans call themselves atheists; that's 12 million. About 18% of EU citizens call themselves atheists, according to a Eurostat poll reported on Wikipedia; that's perhaps 70 million. A lot of them are in post-communist countries, or have been Marxists in Western European countries. (French and Italian communist parties often received a quarter or more of the votes; German and other W European communist parties have also done quite well at different periods, drawing of course from atheists in particular.) Marxism in the former Soviet Union created hundreds of millions of avowed atheists over its run.

Atheists probably exist in small numbers in Muslim countries. All reports seem to indicate that atheism is very rare in Africa. Atheists in Latin America are often Marxist, and appear to be few in number. (The World Almanac, according to religioustolerance.org, counts 2.7 million.) As for India, Adherents.com (not always a very reliable site) gives just 2% non-religious OR atheist. Some of those are, of course, communists, which has been fairly strong in India.

Put all that together, and it's clear that in the broad sense of "Marxist," my comment was almost certainly correct. Over the past century, a large majority of atheists in the world have learned their atheism as part of a general Marxist education, and have been "Marxist" at least in that limited sense."

The survey that Marshall refers to, however, apparently measured how many people were religious--not how many were theists. One need not claim to be religious to believe in God (just like one could be a religious atheist). The numbers do not measure what Marshall wants them to, so he is forced to guess that the majority of non-religious people are atheists.

The other point to note, again, is that it's not entirely clear what it means to be a Marxist in Marshall's intended context. The context in his book referred to the "Marxist-Leninist enterprise," but here in his response he generalizes to the broader context of individuals who have received "a general Marxist education" (whatever that might mean).Is it a virtue for one's book to wallow in such ambiguity?

DM: My point about China can also be backed up with new data, now. The extensive Baylor survey of Chinese beliefs, led by Menchen, Carson, Byron Johnson & Rodney Stark (2010: ‘Final Report: The Empirical Study of Religions in China'), showed that about 77% of respondents said they lacked religious belief. By some definitions these would be atheists. My own survey last fall, less demographically complete, showed that a majority of college students I queried (about 60%) were atheists in the sense that they said their belief about God was that he did not exist. This percentage, however, dropped off for graduates by about half, to some 30%.

This clearly suggests that a Marxist education was the cause of their disbelief. Indeed, at the school at which I conducted the main part of this survey, Christians were actively suppressed.

While these numbers cannot be simply extrapolated to the country as a whole, since most respondents were northern intellectuals, what the survey did show was a close correlation between Marxist education and atheism. Indeed, a large percentage of young repondents identified themselves as Marxists.

Given the results of all these surveys (if the experience of those, like myself and others, who have interacted with young Chinese for decades is not enough), it is evident there are hundreds of millions of atheists in China, who were taught atheism in school. One can find millions more in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, Mongolia, the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, Cuba, and among Marxists in India, Western Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

It is clear, then, that my point was again correct, even if not defined and footnoted to Landon's satisfaction.

I have some sympathy for Landon's demand that I should have supported points 1 and 3 more thoroughly, but only a little. I was personally confident, being familiar with religion in Singapore and China, that what I was saying was correct, and these verifications do not add much to that confidence. Given that certainty, I knew that should anyone question my claims fairly, they would find them to be accurate.

If this sounds subjective, that is the point.

It seems to me we often become helpless in the face of "scientific" claims, and too quickly discount the experience and common sense of practiced observers.  It may be better to gain a feeling for an author's credibility, than to always demand footnotes and exact figures.

If we do have the footnotes, it may give us a false sense of confidence. Perhaps the footnoted information will prove ephemeral, if we track it down and closely examine it. That may, in some cases, be why citations are given in the first place -- a kind of shell game, with the author hoping (or betting) that few of his readers will look up the studies he cites.

Citations only take the demand for evaluating a writer back another step, to another set of people who may also be wrong. Judgement, in the end, is what we must base our beliefs on: our own, and that of other people we trust.

I am not deriding careful citations.  There are probably ten times as many solid, scholarly citations per page in The Truth Behind the New Atheism than in The God Delusion.  World religions, especially East Asian religions, is my field. I was being loose, but not careless or uninformed. But in the end, an author's arguments are his own, and his credibility depends on what happens after critics start asking questions, and looking into the facts for themselves.

A popular book is not a dissertation. One must draw the line somewhere, if one wants a popular piece of writing to flow.

But it doesn't hurt to have thoughtful critics, like Landon Hedrick, around to nip at one's tail, and encourage stronger arguments.

I love (hate) sex!

2012-03-05T10:08:00.005-08:00

I mean scientifically, of course.

Real-life vampires are not
cool!

Not that there haven't been times when it was personal. When I was working as a free-lance missionary in Taiwan, for example, I often got lonely. It's a beautiful island, which is what the word "Formosa" apparently means, but nothing was more beautiful than the friendly smile of the pretty girls who lived there. However, my work in trying help young women who had been forced into prostitution, was the opposite of an aphrodesiac. Seeing how those sad young girls were put on the assembly line to have sex with strangers until they were used up, then cut loose to die early deaths, disgusted me with the whole enterprise of sex, and with a good portion of the human race.

My last blog included part of a dialogue with Anne Rice, author of famous books on vampires. Looking over reviews for one of Rice's non-vampire, non-Christian books, I got a bit of a feeling of having been duped. This older, well-read, and somewhat moralistic (when decrying the crimes of Christianity) lady, having made millions and received her fifteen years of fame, chose to write about: spanking. Torture. Sexual slavery. Border-line pedophilia.

And come to think of it, the "vampire cult" is essentially about sexual predation. In fact, it is a lot like the use Chinese men made of those girls in Snake Alley, Taiwan, as justified by traditional Taoist quackery:

“According to Pengzu the Long-Lived . . . If a man wishes to derive the greatest benefit . . . He also had better choose young maidens . . . My late master handed down these methods and himself used them to live for 3000 years. If combined with drugs, they will even lead to immortality.”

“The Queen Mother of the West attained the Tao by cultivating her yin energy. As soon as she had intercourse with a man he would immediately take sick, while her complexion would be ever more radiant . . . She always ate curds and plucked the 5-stringed lute in order to harmonize here heart and concentrate her mind . . . “

This latter quote reminds us that women can be sexual predators, too. (And some of these girls had been sold out by their mothers!) My own feeling is that both sexes abuse one another, and their same-sex rivals, about equally, though in different ways. (And that Sandra Fluke, the 30 year old Georgetown "coed" who wants the school, or perhaps the state, to pay for her sexual activity, abuses her fellow-citizens' wallets, not to mention intellects.)

I should also say, unlike Anne Rice, I don't see sexual abuse as all that interesting. I enjoy trying new cuisines: Indian samosas, Dai baked fish, Russian soups, the regional cuisines of China. But all these foods do just one thing: they deliver nutrients through the mouth to the stomach. So many of these sexual fantasies seem boring and stupid, like pouring soup into the ear instead of the mouth, just to be "exotic." As G. K. Chesterton recognized, "conventional" sex, in its full form, is as exciting as it gets, already. "Kinky" innovations "lack the realization of sex," as he put it.

Yesterday morning, Mark Driscoll preached about porn addiction. The flagship church for Mars Hill Fellowship is located just across the Ship Canal from Seattle Pacific University, and just a few miles from the University of Washington, so there are a lot of young people in the audience. Blunt as usual, his edgy sense of humor rather subdued, Driscoll challenged his young congregation, and the tens of thousands who watch his sermons on-line, to grow up and live productive and pure lives. He illustrated his points by interspersing the sermonizing with an interview with a former porn star, a pretty, but broken young woman.

Her life had been a series of abuses and broken dreams, which began when she was abused by a neighbor. She was like those girls I saw in Taiwan. She brought to mind my grandfather's comments about the fertile bottomland of the Kent Valley, that was filled with warehouses, and could no longer grow crops. Only the warehouse of her life was filled with dung piles and trash heaps. Christ had begun to tear that broken structure down, to make room for a cottage fit for living in, a garden and perhaps a home.

As a human, I can't help but take the beauty and the ugliness of sex personally. As a Christian, I think the Gospel gets things right, or rather Jesus gets things right, that are usually out of joint.

But what we Christians don't often do, is step back and look at sex, and what it means for the world, outside of our own, parochial, human concerns. Driscoll's interest in sex, when not personal (and very monogamous), is pastoral, and limited to homo googlus sapiens, the on-line generation of porn addicts.

Biologist Nick Lane looks at the bigger picture in Life Ascending. He notes that "some of the best minds in biology have wrestled with the problem of sex." (I bet!) Sex is a peculiar thing, he points out. It's kind of a waste, producing equal numbers of males and females, when only one can bare children. Wouldn't it be more efficient to produce assexually, through cloning? And it's hard to find a mate, with lots of head-butting and Romeo-and-Juliet type drama along the way. Plus when you get a particularly fortuitous gene mix, and a scientific genius appears, his kids are likely to play the guitar for some basement rock band, the potential diffused by the random sorting.

Still, our world would be a drab place without it:

Sex!

"It may be that, without sex, large complex forms of life are simply not possible at all: we would all disintigrate in a matter of generations, doomed to decay like the degenerate Y chromosome. Either way, sex makes the difference between a silent and introspective planet, full of dour self-replicating things (I'm reminded of the Ancient Mariner's 'thousand thousand slimy things'), and the explosion of pleasure and glory all around us. A world without sex is a world without the songs of men and women or birds or frogs, without the flamboyant colours of flowers, without gladiatorial contests, poetry, love or rapture. A world without much interest." (124)

Indeed, aside from things like lemons, lupine crowning the slopes of Mount Rainier, mallard drakes, penguins nursing eggs through the winter, Medieval allegory, we recall the holidays, Christmas presents, meals around a table, sports (which serves man in place of butting antlers), butterflies and hummingbirds that, as Lane puts it:

More sex!

"Must be tiny, for no larger bird could hover motionless over the deep throat of a flower . . . They have been seduced by the enchanted potions of plants into a life of bondage, moving relentlessly from flower to flower, distributing pollen, or collapsing in a coma and quite possibly dying."

But who can say the life of a hummingbird is a sad thing?

As humans, we inherit and imbibe all of that: still more, we can see the beauty and enter into the trajedy. Unlike the hummingbird, we can also choose to rest our passions. Yet the joining of unlikes to create something new, can also be transposed to describe our union with God, the "wedding feast of the Lamb."

Still more sex!

It is not a coincidence, or an anthropomorphism. We are not projecting our provincial mating mores on Ultimate Reality. All Nature echoes and prepares us for marriage, which by definition involves the joining of unlikes: from two up-quarks and one down-quark in a proton, to protons and electrons in a hydrogen atom, to two hydrogen and one oxygen atom in a molecule of water, to the complex assembly of atoms that makes proteins, proteins that make tissues, tissues that make organs, and organs that make bodies. Then bodies join in sex, creating the smallest "platoon," as Burke put it, that constitutes the elementary particle of clan, village, tribe, state, empire or civilization, and the ephemeral hope or pipe-dream of a "United Nations," or the "Federation" of biologically unrelated sentient beings that the Bible anticipates, long before Star Trek.

This is the Music of Life. It is complex, sometimes difficult, with discords, beat and a rhythm, and strange, exotic, heart-felt riffs.

"Women! Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em!"

And verse-vica.

But especially the latter.

Spring is in the air!

Interviews with a Vampire Novelist: Anne Rice drives stakes through the heart of Christianity

2012-03-02T08:53:00.008-08:00

Mrs. Rice does not
come across as this
spooky "in person."

Interview I: Are Evangelicals Anti-Semitic?

While I have not read her vampire books, which have sold tens of millions of copies, or her perhaps more scandalous "Christian" books, I should begin by saying that I like and respect Mrs. Rice. She is an intelligent, educated woman who asks a lot of interesting questions, and is humble enough to wear her heart on her sleave, even when mucking around with (to her) exotic Internet denizens, such as yours truly.

I also think Anne is wrong about many things, and is grossly unfair to Christians, especially those who are theologically or politically conservative.

In late 2011, I had the chance to "talk" with her for quite a while on-line, along with other people, when she started a discussion forum on Amazon.com to talk about the problems she sees with Christianity.

I came late to the game, after a month or so of discussion.

The conversation was long, and included other people. For the sake of clarity and time, I'll focus on comments between the two of us, cutting where helpful to make the conversation flow.

Some of the dialogue rambles. Rice is an emotional dialogue partner. Readers may find my failure to answer some of her questions frustrating, too. You may find my focus on the issue of Christian ant-Semitism, in this first dialogue, too narrow, given all the shots Anne takes at the Gospel. Anne also seems loath to come to grips with my arguments, or back up her own, in this first round. All this seems understandable: this is an informal conversation, and both of us (but no doubt especially Mrs. Rice) have other things to do. The dialogue improves in later rounds, if I am not mistaken.

Nevertheless, I think some readers may find these talks interesting, as a portrait (or at least a cartoon sketch) of a writer whose thoughts and feelings seem to be in flux. I hope those of you who are attracted to the Dark Side, for instance the Democratic Party, find this interesting.

Final warning: this first post is fairly long. Later posts will probably be a bit shorter. (For those of you who were hoping the final warning would be about vampires, sorry to disappoint.)

I. Comments from where I came in.

Anne Rice: I cannot accept a lot of Christian theology. And frankly I am hardly alone.

I think many churches today are trying to rescue Jesus from the theologies of the past. They want to preach a Jesus of love and get away from the theologies that involve the constant threat of Hellfire. But do these churches succeed?

I myself cannot accept Atonement theory, not at all. I find it very unconvincing, and I have never encountered a brand of atonement theory that did not argue for the literal interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. This is something I cannot force myself to believe.

But Jesus Christ remains of the utmost importance to me.

What do you think?

Can He be reclaimed by those of us who cannot accept the theologies of the past?

AR: Theo, I cannot help but wonder why you believe these things. You mentioned having studied the bible for decades with a pastor teacher. Why do you think that a Supreme Being would reveal so much in one book, or collection of writings, and that human beings would have to study this book so intensely in order to know this Supreme Being?

Doesn't really make much sense, does it? ---- The God who made DNA, and black holes in space, the Big Bang, evolution, all of that --- putting such a difficult series of revelations in one book to one human tribe in one very small part of the world, and then demanding that humans study it intensely. Doesn't make sense now, does it?

And of course we know it doesn't work ---- for every person claiming to understand it, we get a point of view, an approach, a theology, a religion, and then the arguing starts, Protestants damning Catholics, Catholics scorning Protestants and all the independents haggling over who is saved and how.

Doesn't all of this raise your suspicions? Aren't you even a little curious that such intellectual striving might not have much at all to do with a Supreme Being?

Myself, in twelve years of studying the bible and Christianity, I came to believe the religion is based on absurdities and contradictions, and a great deal of nonsense.

Christians think semantics can solve metaphysical problems. Just "say it" another way, or quote yet another passage. But that just doesn't work, really.

Christians have to "study it" to convince themselves that all of these absurd and contradictory things are true. They've convinced themselves of their withering superiority to the Jews, and of all sorts of things based on this or that phrase or sentence from Scripture while ignoring so many others.

I don't think we're hard enough on Christians. And I don't think Christians are hard enough on themselves . . .

All those poor pious Jews singing psalms and feeling so close to Godand so devoted to him --- only to be corrected and told by Christians in the First Century, guess what, you're really the enemy of God and if you don't buy into Christ you're going to burn forever? Come on.

You would think that your Supreme Being would at least have told the Jews they were all going to Hell, wouldn't you? Instead of that pontificating from Sinai, he might have just given them an even break.

And then there's the beauty of the Old Testament, the magnificent poetry of Isaiah, Jeremiah, David, the Psalms.

And none of it matters, says Paul. They were the enemies of God until Jesus came along. What a bunch of fools the Jews were, according to Christians. Come on.

Sorry, my friend, it simply doesn't add up.

What comes across in these threads is that Christians are into personal empowerment. This religion makes them feel so good, helps them not to drink, cheat on the wife, that sort of thing.

And I think it makes some feel quite learned. After all they have studied Scripture, indeed, for years. And that must make one quite proud, indeed, to know at least one subject thoroughly.

But there is little logic to this, and the claims for revelation aren't credible, and last but not least, the world did not end as Jesus and Paul claimed it would.

No, it just didn't, did it?

I think you need to demand some hard answers, yourselves, and we should perhaps be demanding some hard answers from you.

Enough of the coddling . . .

We're told we're to respect you, but I don't know if I can. After all, we do live in a vast and wonderful universe. And you're claiming that the Maker is saving you, but not us. That's a pretty obnoxious claim when you get right down to it, and I don't think you have much to back it up.

Sorry for being so blunt. But the truth matters. It really does. And I'm tired of soft peddling what I feel is the truth.

II. First Response and dialogue.

DM: "Doesn't really make much sense, does it? ---- The God who made DNA, and black holes in space, the Big Bang, evolution, all of that --- putting such a difficult series of revelations in one book to one human tribe in one very small part of the world, and then demanding that humans study it intensely. Doesn't make sense now, does it?"

The early scientists talked of God revealing himself through two books -- Scripture, and the Book of Nature. Since empirically, the Bible has in fact changed history in many ways -- not least through early science -- apparently this was not such an ineffective way to communicate, after all. But I have no problem with the idea that God also spoke to and through, say, Lao Zi.

"And of course we know it doesn't work ---- for every person claiming to understand it, we get a point of view, an approach, a theology, a religion, and then the arguing starts, Protestants damning Catholics, Catholics scorning Protestants and all the independents haggling over who is saved and how."

That's because people like to argue. Witness the Internet. Witness the Amazon comments forums. I've been damned to hell by atheists more than once, online. For one with a sense of irony, this can actually be pleasurable. It is also ironic, of course, that Christians talk so much about love, and still throw pots and pans at one another -- but such is human nature.

"Myself, in twelve years of studying the bible and Christianity, I came to believe the religion is based on absurdities and contradictions, and a great deal of nonsense."

And in 45 years of studying both, I have come to believe that Christianity is true, though there are a lot of difficulties and unanswered questions. And I don't think it helps to offer a child's understanding of Christianity up for refutation -- throw out the bathwater, not the baby.

Paul doesn't say none of the OT matters, at all. He clearly loved the Jewish traditions and found deeper meaning in the prophets than ever before. But if he was harsh on Jewish (and Christian, BTW) failure, so were those very prophets you mention. They agree with him!

Pascal was being a little unfair when he wrote of "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars . . ." (You can hardly accuse him of dismissing the OT, though!) Some of the philosophers an scholars were keen in knowing God experientially, too. You assume so many boundaries to Christian orthodoxy. I deny that they are as normative as you seem to think. I am just now finishing my dissertation on this very question, but wrote my first book on it -- True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture -- more than 15 years ago. I wish you'd check into Fulfillment Theology: it is intellectually exciting and also orthodox in a way that embraces truth wherever it is found, allowing us to appreciate, say, Confucius or Lao Zi, and God's work in the universe, more deeply. It also joins us intellectually with some of the wisest and most sympathetic thinkers in human history.

DM: I find many passages in the OT much harsher towards "the Jews" than anything in the NT.

When I was in seminary, I tried to reconcile James and Galatians. I came to the conclusion that Paul was talking about the ceremonial law, not the moral law.

I open Paul at random:

"Then what advantage has the Jew? . . . Much in every way. First of all, they were entrusted with the oracles of God."

That's a lot more positive about the OT than, say, Richard Dawkins, or even many modern Jews. If Paul reinterpretted Jewish tradition around Jesus, and found he could thus "save" most of it intellectually, that's far more than secular Jews do, maybe more than most religious Jews do, either, and infinitely more than the Gnostics.

As we learn more, our view of reality broadens, without losing the truth that appeared in the picture at first glance -- like rising in a rocket from earth. I can't claim to know anything special about eternity. Paul made it possible for billions of Gentiles to be intellectually-fulfilled "Jews," in essence. If Paul was anti-Jewish, his actually historical effect on human society -- among which was to make the Jewish scriptures the planet's best-seller -- may be the most startling paradox in history.

AR: That's a rather novel way of looking at it, David -- your statement:

"If Paul was anti-Jewish, his actually historical effect on human society must be the most startling paradox in history."

Hmmm. I don't see it that way

AR: I think the study of Paul yields the obvious, based on his own words. He suggests that the Jews are in fact the enemies of God, and can only be reconciled to God through jesus Christ.

I see no evidence in the O.T. that God or the Jews thought the Jews
were the enemies of God.

Atonement theory and its absurdities (eternal Hellfire, a wrathful God damning a world based on Adam and Eve et al) is rooted in Paul. There is no way to escape this. The O.T. does not support supercessionist Christianity. It does not support the cliches offered again and again by Christians as to why Christ had to come, and how the Jews had "failed." The "failure" just isn't there. Ultimately the reasons for Christ come off as rationalization because He was crucified.

DM: Let me put it this way. I once took a flight across China, from Shanghai to Kunming. Across the aisle was a Chinese man, who turned out to be a leading scientist. Inside his jacket, he carried a copy of the Union Version Bible. His uncle was a respected elder in the church, and he peppered me with questions about the Bible (before I even said I was a Christian, as I recall.)

If it weren't for Paul, is it likely that a Chinese scientist flying over central China would carry a copy of the Jewish Scriptures, in Chinese, in his jacket?

AR: I have to confess, I'm not getting your point. Which is what? That Christians don't benefit from education? That Christians wouldn't be helped by knowing something about the evolution of their basic ideas? That Christians wouldn't benefit from some perspective on the history of their religion? That they should just read the N.T.? Is that what you're suggesting?

If that is your point, I'm afraid I can't agree with you. I must come down on the side of education.

No matter how much one studies the N.T. it can be wondrously illuminating and inspiring to read Josephus and Philo, and Tacitus --- No matter how long and hard one studies the bible, it can be a a powerful thing to read learned commentary on the obscure Greek words, and possible mistranslations, to seek knowledge as to the history of interpretations, and their evolution.

I think education is a beautiful and wonderful thing.

It's a joy to read some body like N.T. Wright or Craig S. Keener because these biblical scholars are so finely educated, and have so much light to shed on the text of the N.T.

Why do you think some Christians put so little value on education in general?

You lost me there, David. I don't know what you're talking about . . .

DM: You're right, Anne, you did badly miss my point.

The point is, in my experience, education has made the NT seem more remarkable, not less, as you seem to assume it should.

Why do some Christians not value education? It may be that some perceive that a lot of college professors have a chip on their shoulders about Christianity. It may be that some correctly recognize an unwarranted intellectual snobbery on the part of some scholars and science, that is too easily assumed to bleed over from areas where they really are experts, into everything else. But I'm speculating, because I can't claim to know many people who don't value education.

The point here is that far from having it in for Jewish tradition, Paul is one of the reasons why Jewish tradition is now univerally known and partially followed by billions of people around the world.

AR: Did anyone here suggest Paul had it in for Jewish tradition? I don't quite "get" that.

Paul took aim at the Law as given by God on Sinai. He felt that circumcision was no longer necessary.

All this is pretty clear, isn't it?

Judaism still is a vigorous and healthy religion. It has withstood 2,000 years of Christian criticism and persecution.

DM: Anne: Sure, Paul denied that circumcision was no longer necessary -- and I don't mean any disrespect to orthodox Jewish friends to say I'm glad of it!

But what are you saying, then, about Paul and Jewish tradition? One of the characteristics of Fulfillment Theology, as I understand it, is that it is dialectic -- it sees both good and bad in the tradition, and reconstitutes them into a viable new form that remains in some sense faithful to the original. That's what I see Paul, and other NT writers, doing with their beloved Jewish tradition, with Christ as the interpretive key. In a sense, this is what everyone has to do with an old tradition, as new facts come to light -- and the Incarnation, death of Jesus, and Resurrection, were empirical facts that Paul's letters are reflecting on, and trying to figure out.

I seem to share with you a great respect for the Jewish people, and their amazing success in preserving their traditions and community over thousands of years of exile. I actually see that as the work of God, also the reconstitution of their nation, as I think many Jews do, too.

But Christians have NOT persecuted Jews for 2000 years. I know of none in the first 300 years, and very little until the 11th Century. As Rodney Stark points out (Rene Girard does much to explain this, too), persecution of Jews was generally a symptom of larger civilizational struggles in Europe. (This is very clear from Richard Fletcher's account in The Barbarian Conversion, too.) It was like two continental masses colliding, with little volcanoes erupting at points in the continental plate -- the masses being Islam and Christianity, the volcaoes being pogroms. This happened in both Europe and in the Muslim world, as similiar persecutions occur of minorities in China, Japan, India, and everywhere else where people are people.

Most often, the Church protected Jews against this persecution, though not always as vigorously as you might wish. The worst of it often came from non-Christians, including Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans, Muslims, communists, and of course worst of all, the Nazis. Even some East Asian cults have been anti-Semitic, strangely enough, even in Japan.

Lots of Christians were guilty as well. I share your repugnance for the crimes Christians have committed against Jews. But given the larger pattern, I don't think Christian theology is a necessary or sufficient explanation for that. I think people who use the NT to justify attacking Jews, are engaged in grossly dishonest rationalization.

AR: David, I don't think the picture you give here of Christian antisemitism can stand up under scrutiny.

DM: Where did I err? Sounds like you know a lot about the subject; I'm willing to be corrected.

One thing I've always been intrigued about: that most of the world's Jews lived in Europe, by 19th and 20th Centuries. They didn't start out there. Somewhere along the line, someone seems to have done a lot of voting with their feet. If "Christendom" (a dubious word) was as horrible as it is often portrayed, it seems pretty strange.

But I like the American system better, where religions compete freely. There has been some bigotry, but no pogroms, so far as I know.

AR: David, research into Jewish history is one of my passions. It was the story of the Jews in history that drew me back to God.

And I do know something of the subject. I'm not a professional historian. I'm familiar with the persecutions of Jews during the time of the Crusades and the time of the Black Death, and earlier expulsions of the Jews from England and France, and later from Spain. I have researched Jewish life in Renaissance Italy.

What I have not studied in detail is what happened right after Constantine's conversion. I'm in Europe right now, and my Jewish library is of course at home in California. I need to check references there.
I am also familiar with the kinds of remarks Luther and Calvin made about Jews, etc. which can be found online.

David, your statement here: "One thing I've always been intrigued about: that most of the world's Jews lived in Europe, by 19th and 20th Centuries. They didn't start out there. Somewhere along the line, someone seems to have done a lot of voting with their feet. If "Christendom" (a dubious word) was as horrible as it is often portrayed, it seems pretty strange."

This strikes me as a really bizarre statement. Where exactly did you expect these Jews to live?
In Muslim countries? You do know that when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 a.d. they drove the Jews out of their own city, don't you? You are familiar with what is called the Jewish Diaspora?

What do you think all these Jews should have done, exactly?

I'm not sure oppressed peoples in any culture can ever be seen as voting for anything with their feet.
Women are treated pretty badly in Saudi Arabia. They're not voting with their feet for anything when they remain where they were born and where their families live.

Perhaps you're putting a burden here on Jews that is quite unfair.

The peasants of Czarist Russia weren't voting for Czarist Russia with their feet by remaining where they were born and where their families lived.

DM: The issue here is the effect of Christian theology on treatment of Jews. No serious person denies that Jews have often been mistreated in "Christian" countries. My question is whether they have been treated worse in traditional Europe than elsewhere, so that there is an effect (Christian anti-semitism) which must have a theological rather than just sociological cause.

To answer that question, one has to begin with the fact that the Jewish people began in Israel. Babylonian, Egyptian and Roman anti-Semitism, culminating in the destruction of Israel, are part of the data.

Where else could the Jews have gone? Somewhere closer, of course. Somewhere warmer, maybe. Many commentators claim that Islamic civilization was richer and treated the Jews better than Europe did, during the Middle Ages. It is, therefore, significant that while many Jews did remain in the Middle East, most did not. What exactly does it signify? I'm not sure, that's why I'm asking. But it certainly undermines the likelihood that Christian theology was the "independent variable" that "caused" anti-Semitism.

People living in Israel could, one might think, also have gone east, into India. Some did, I think. Some Jews did make it as far as China, and eventually assimilated there, though I admit that would have been too long a journey for mass emigration.

But I think at some point in history, yes, Jews must have found relative welcome in Russia, or so many wouldn't have gone there. You know they didn't go there for the weather.

American history is also relevant to this issue. Jews have lived in America for almost 400 years, in a dominantly and often zealously Christian culture, at peace with their neighbors, thank God.

So as bad as Medieval anti-Semitism could be, even before opening the NT and finding a bunch of Jewish writings by Jews who loved their traditions, from a bird's eye perspective, it seems unlikely that Christianity was the cause of that anti-semitism.

This has nothing to do with "putting burdens on the Jews." I'm asking why most chose to move to quasi-Christian Europe.

Of course oppressed people often "vote with their feet." That's why America has so many Cubans, Vietnamese, Russians, Cambodians, Irish, Koreans, and, yes, Jews. Indeed, that's a large part of the history of the Jewish people.

AR: David, this may be so. But any time you have a large block of irrational people trying to get control of political power for their own religious objectives (deminionists led by Bachmann, Perry, or fanatical Catholics like Santorum) you have a dangerous situation.

Irrationality is dangerous. Secular humanism is based on reason, solid principles of reason, the idea that law is arrived at by reason, not revelation. America was brought into existence by rational men. And Irrationality always poses a threat.

America has always rejected this kind of hysteria and I am confident they will again.

David, there are so many inaccurate statements here, I don't know where to begin. I really don't have at my fingertips the numbers of Jews who lived in thriving communities throughout the Middle East until the creation of the State of Israel. I know that Iraq and Syria had some of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, and there have been ancient communities in India.

Nor do I have figures on how early Jews migrated to Russia, and throughout all the other countries of the world. I do know there were Jewish merchants working in Russia before the conversion of the country to "orthodox" or Eastern Christianity which became Russian orthodox Christianity.

I think you are way underestimating their numbers. Europe was one place that Jews lived. Jews have lived everywhere. Again, I simply don't have the facts and the figures. Wish I did.

I sense that you feel uneasy about the record of Christian persecution of Jews. You're trying to avoid the topic somehow, with simplistic suggestions that "it couldn't have been all that bad, etc." I suggest more reading.

Find out about the massacres and the persecutions. There are many excellent books on Jewish history.
I would say face up to it.

Millions cannot vote with their feet. Jews migrated to America along with all the other immigrants. What is your point? The presence of ancient Jewish communities throughout Europe, dating back to before Roman times, does not mean Christian persecution wasn't cruel and ghastly and completely immoral.

Why is it Christians don't want to take responsibility for the dark side of the religion? I simply don't get it.

DM: Again, what am I wrong about? Some 12 million Jews lived in Europe before Hitler came along; half were murdered. When Israel became a state, most Jews were expelled or left Islamic states in the ME; the total of immigrants to Israel from those sources were less than a million. No doubt others went to the US, etc. But clearly, the vast majority of the world's Jews lived in Europe and the Americans before WWII.

According to Josephus (says Wiki), by far the main Jewish populations at the time of Christ were in Palestine, Syria, Babylon, and Egypt.

Of course Christian persecution was "cruel and ghastly and completely immoral." I think I've admitted that, already, more than once. I am appalled by it, I admit and renounce it. But let's not blame everyone for the crimes of a few. Let's set historically accurate boundaries around the issue.

What I want is truth. You comment just now about how evangelicals are anti-semites is I think not true. What makes you think most evangelicals feel that way? What evidence can you point to? I have seen very little evidence, having grown up in the community, that evangelicals have it in for Jews. Let's be fair about the facts, first, then decide what they signify.

Millions can and do "vote with their feet," all the time. The partition of India, for instance, resulted in the displacement of some 10 million people, alone, who largely walked away from their homes. The founding of Israel led to maybe 2 million people moving, one way or the other, in a year or so. 2 million Nationalist Chinese went to Taiwan after the communists took over; others went elsewhere, often on foot. This is a common story throughout human history.

But I don't think we need to disagree on principle, here. Persecution of the weak and marginalized is always disgusting, whoever is responsible.

AR: "But let's not blame everyone for the crimes of a few. Let's set historically accurate boundaries around the issue. "

I don't see you doing that here. You seem to be trying to draw attention away from the persecution of the Jews by Christians over time.

Your speculation is interesting but beside the point. Christians have persecuted Jews for thousands of years and it was more than the actions of a few. The documentation is easy to find. There are innumerable studies of what happened right through the Holocaust.

Again this "voting with their feet" idea seems suspect. You seem to be saying, "well, it couldn't have been all that bad."

Again, that's beside the point.

I do think Christianity is in crisis today with regard to anti-semitism. It's having to learn to live without it, and this is going to be tough.

As we can see in this thread, casual denigration of the Jews, casual statements of superiority to them, casual judgments of them abound.

With regard to Evangelicals, I think their anti-semitism is so thoroughly documented that no one needs to argue you it here.

DM: "I don't see you doing that here. You seem to be trying to draw attention away from the persecution of the Jews by Christians over time."

Then you're not really reading fairly. I have admitted that persecution many times, here. What I deny is that it is caused by NT theology. I also have pointed to several larger patterns in the context of which it should be understood: (1) general scapegoating of minorities; (2) persecution in times of civilizational stress; and (3) anti-Semitism in many non-Christian civilizations.

The issue is not the fact of persecution, but its cause.

"I do think Christianity is in crisis today with regard to anti-semitism. It's having to learn to live without it, and this is going to be tough."

This is a strange comment. Maybe you mean something broader than usual, by the term "anti-Semitism." But you seem to think that Christianity needs to persecute Jews to get along? Is that really what you're saying? If so, what about all those time and periods when there were no Jews to persecute, but still lots of Christians? What are 150 million Asian Christians and 500 million African Christians going to do?

"As we can see in this thread, casual denigration of the Jews, casual statements of superiority to them, casual judgments of them abound."

I haven't read the whole thread; it's a long one. But there's a difference between: (a) denigrating Jews as a racial group, and (b) claiming that the beliefs one holds are superior to some other beliefs. (a) is what we call "racism," and is usually pretty obnoxious. (b) is naturally implied by any set of beliefs. If you think something is true, naturally you think what is true is superior to ideas that are less true -- that's why you believe it. This is true of ANY belief system, including atheist or pluralist positions, like that, say, of John Hick or Wilfred Cantwell Smith.

I haven't seen much of (a) among evangelicals. If anyone did that here, then I'll be on your side in disavowing their comments, and rebuking them.

"With regard to Evangelicals, I think their anti-semitism is so thoroughly documented that no one needs to argue you it here."

Heh. Well that makes it easy, doesn't it? No evidence is needed! Or can you cite this alleged "thorough documentation?"

Let me just say this, though: whoever "documented" this alleged "fact" was, I have to think, most likely a liar. Because as a generalization, having lived among evangelicals for half a century, that is certainly a lie.

Let me recommend you open a dialogue with the orthodox Jewish talk-show host, Michael Medved. A large portion of his audience seems to be evangelicals. He's a very smart fellow, spends his life talking across religious lines, and knows this issue extremely well. As a well-known writer, I imagine you would probably have access to him. He would, I am sure, give you a better perspective on how evangelicals feel about Jews.

I didn't ask for a "complete education on Christian anti-semitism in the West." I asked you to define and defend your claims in this forum.

You still haven't answered my most fundamental question: what do you mean by "anti-Semitism?" Do you mean (1) The opinion that one's own beliefs contain more of the truth than Judaism does? or (2) An active hatred of the Jewish people?

You seem to be committing the fallacy of equivocation: you are attempting to apply to (1) the stigma that belongs to (2). So I have to ask that you choose between the two, and stick with whichever meaning you choose.

You keep on implying that I'm ignorant of something important, but have yet to explain what that is. What important claim have I made that you (or Carroll) can show to be false?

"I have no idea what percentage of Evangelicals are "guilty" of anything, of course. And I think you know this."

Then you shouldn't make such sweeping accusations. I'm glad, though, that you admit you lack any serious empirical basis for blanketly claiming that "evangelicals are anti-Semitic." That's a pretty serious charge, and should be backed up by serious evidence, if made.

"I get the impressing you are stunningly and irresponsibly ignorant about the history of your belief system in this regard, and you want to protect your ignorance."

And I get the impression that your "impression" is based on nothing at all that I have said.

Rather than answer reasonable questions, define your terms, and defend your claims, you now relapse into patronizing ad hominem that ought, frankly, to be beneath you:

"There is a lot we can accomplish in these threads, but the full education of an ignorant person we cannot accomplish here, for obvious reasons."

I strike you as an "ignorant" person, do I? So what glaringly ignorant comment have I made, that forced this opinion on you? What are my supposed errors?

Come on, now, Anne, I think you're better than this. Please engage with facts, logic, and evidence, not this nebulous and thin form of ad hominem. I know you're not at home with your library, but surely you can do better to explain and defend your comments.

AR: there's little I can add to my earlier posts. I've addressed the issues again and again.

Again and again, I've discussed here the problems of Christian supercessionism and how I feel after years of study that the Old Testament does not support Christian supercessionism.

The Old Testament does not support the casual attitude of spiritual superiority to the Jews expressed here and in other places by so many Christians.

On the Christian persecution of Jews for the last 2,000 years, I have provided some summary info from Wikipedia and some bibliography.

Again, there's not a whole lot more that I can add, or feel moved to add. Again, the material is out there on both this subjects if you want to read it. I stand by my frequent observations here that some Christians are woefully ignorant about Judaism, Jesus as a Jew, and the history of the Christian religion as regards the Jews.

I don't feel moved to go into any further detail, and I've explained why.

What you really want here is an extended engagement with you, on your terms, though you've already indicated you are close minded on the subject and not likely to believe people who offer you other opinions or material to support different conclusions.

I'm not finding this fruitful or illuminating enough to continue it.

Again, I think you face some real problems here with your lack of knowledge and lack of curiosity in these matters.

I'm sorry I can't give you what you seem to want, but I am suspicious of what you seem to want.

By the way, David, I won't be sacking my Jewish library to offer you a crash course in all this when I do get home. I think I've offered enough general information and enough bibliography.

DM: Sorry, Nicholls' thesis is obviously incoherent:

"The Nazis chose the Jews as the target of their hate because two thousand years of Christian teaching had accustomed the world to do so."

Dr. Richard Weikart explains one of the problems with that claim in From Darwin to Hitler. Hitler didn't just target Jews. He also targeted Poles, the mentally retarded, and Gypsies, among others.

Did Christian theology also prepare the world to hate the mentally retarded? Hardly. In fact, Christian theology was distinguished for the care it lavished on the marginalized and weak, for two thousand years.

Weikart argues that Social Darwinism was the real driving force behind Nazi ideology, and furnishes numerous telling quotes to show that this is so. One could also cite Hitler himself, who in Mein Kampf describes how the communists inspired him to their hateful methods.

The "Christ-killer" slur has always been an obviously stupid rationalization for scapegoating that comes natural in times of civilizational stress. No honest person could read the NT and suppose it teaches followers of Jesus to persecute his own people.

AR: Thanks, David. I'm glad you considered the book. I've given you my best thoughts on the entire subject. Don't have any more to give. Thanks again for sharing your responses here.

DM: Anne: Here's what you HAVEN'T done:

* You haven't defined "anti-Semitism," despite my repeated requests that you do so, and the obvious importance of doing so.

*You haven't explained which of the two meanings I gave you prefer. It seems, from the following review, that Carroll also conflates these two meanings:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_2_128/ai_71578793/

* You haven't offered a scrap of evidence to defend your claim that American evangelicals in general are "anti-Semitic." You now admit, in fact, that you can't back that claim up in more than a very subjective way.

*You haven't acknowledged the fact that the "2000 years" you keep referring to is an over-generalization.

* You haven't dealt with the fact that real anti-Semitism has been common in non-Christian cultures, undermining the claim that it is "caused" by Christian theology.

* You haven't dealt with the fact that there are other causes for anti-Semitism that seem to explain it better than Christian theology.

* You haven't pointed to any serious errors I have committed, that justify describing me as "ignorant."

It is possible that Christian theology has in some indirect way been a contributing cause of anti-Semitism. Stranger things have happened. But I think you and Carroll both are engaging in a bit of anachronistic thinking. The Holocaust was a shock that alerted most sane people to a lot of things, including the injustice of racism and the long European history of anti-semitism. I have a lot of problems with Christian institutions: I think the Gospel was diluted by Roman power, European superstitions, and the competition with Islam, and perverted by human nature. But I think you're mistaking the bathwater for the baby.

Of course you don't need to engage with my arguments more seriously if you don't want to. But I don't think I'm the only one who thinks you could stand to back up your claims here a little better, or better yet, mellow out a few of them, at least a little.

AR: David, I have nothing to add to my earlier posts. If you will go back I think you will see I did provide info on many of your questions. Thank you for sharing.

Again, there is ample info out there to answer all your questions and address all the issues you raise.

DM: That's fine, Anne. I'm heading up to Vancouver this morning to give a series of lectures (a mostly historical approach to understanding world religions, actually), then off to Asia for a month for research, on Tuesday, so I probably wouldn't have much time to respond if you tried to seriously answer my challenges, anyway.

Looks like you've moved on to the subject of life after death, though. Interesting topic; about which, I confess, I truly do have almost everything to learn. (But hopefully not too soon. :-) )

World Religions in Snoqualmie Valley

2012-02-28T09:22:00.000-08:00

The "Wordless Stele," Mt. Tai.

This Saturday, I'll be giving an all-day seminar on "Understanding World Religions," at Snoqualmie Valley Alliance Church. If you live in the Northwest, you're welcome to come! The cost is $25, which includes lunch.

The church is fairly easy to find. Take the Preston exit from I 90, drive four miles to Fall City. Cross the bridge, following signs towards Snoqualmie Falls to the right. About a mile up, you'll see the church on the right hand side of 202, about half a block off the road. Take the next right, circle around a bit, and there you are.

I like this church, because it has a really global vision. Aside from helping provide water for people in Africa, they have also been aiding the tribes of Burma, which that wretched government has been making war on for 50 years, now.

I have given the roughly the same series in Vancouver for KOINOS a couple times, now, and the response has been good. We'll cover Christian theology of religions (a lot more interesting than you might suppose! -- rather thrilling, actually), "primitive religion," Indian and Chinese beliefs, Islam, and modern secular "religions" -- and how Christians should see each.

Hope to see some of you there.

Coyne vs. Plantinga, Bambi vs Godzilla

2012-02-26T13:38:00.008-08:00

Dr. Coyne marshals his forces
for the attack.

Jerry Coyne attacking Plantinga on philosophy / theology! What next, is Bambi going to have another go at Godzilla? Or will Flower the skunk step into the breach?

Before reading Coyne's comments this morning, I first reread an old piece called "Response to Behe's Critics, IIA and IIB," that I posted a few years ago on Amazon, which analyzed Coyne's review of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution. In those posts, I listed some two dozen dubious arguments Coyne advanced, many of which involved logical errors, or just plain misreading Dr. Behe. Number 20 seemed particularly portentious:

(20) Coyne: "Science long ago dispensed with the notion of a scala natura: a progressive ladder of life with humans at the top."

DM: "This is confused. If we talk about value and meaning, that is a philosophical, moral, or religious question, not a scientific one. Fortunately most scientists are well-rounded and human enough to recognize that in fact, some organisms are more significant than others. (At least after office hours.) If we're talking about complexity or intelligence, then even science can recognize a scale in nature. But Coyne seems to be artificially narrowing the subject to the criterion of adaptability, or how long a species has evolved."

Coyne: "So what scientific reason can there be for singling out just one species as the Designer's goal? How do we know that the goal was not butterflies or sunflowers?"

DM: "When scientists ask such stupid questions, I despair of common sense in the Academy. If science cannot tell us that people are more significant than sunflowers, that only goes to show the limits of science, not that Pascal and petunias are morally equivalent. A scientist with no theology ought at least to supplement his intellectual diet with a little philosophy."

Now, reading Coyne's "Sunday Sermon" this morning, it seems Coyne has "followed my advice," and added "a little philosophy" to his intellectual diet. But he eats too fast, and fails to properly digest what he reads. The results are not pretty:

"I don’t think many theologians have ever faced serious opposition to their ideas, at least on the debate platform."

I'll be happy to debate you on my ideas, Dr. Coyne, if you would like to remedy that alleged defficiency.

"Today, my brothers and sisters, I’d like to speak briefly on Plantinga’s evidence for God’s existence, at least as laid out in his chapter “Reason and Belief on God”, pp. 102-161 in The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader (James F. Sennett, ed., 1998, Eeerdmans Publishing Co.). That chapter itself is taken from a book edited by Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff: Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (1983, University of Notre Dame Press). "

An excellent essay. Only, it is emphatically NOT about "Plantinga's evidence for God's existence," as Plantinga explains right away:

"In this essay I want to discuss a connected constellation of questions . . . Must one have evidence to be rational or reasonable in believing in God?" (Faith & Rationality, 16)

In fact, Plantinga makes no effort at all in this essay to give "evidence" for God's existence, nor does he promise to. Coyne thus appears, from the very beginning, to have misconstrued the purpose of the essay he purports to be criticizing.

Coyne continues:

"As we know, there’s no good empirical evidence for God’s existence . . . "

Coyne is preaching to the other flowers on the forest floor, here. Considered philosophically, it is hard to know how anyone could possibly know that "there's no good empirical evidence for God's existence," still less be so smug about it. Has Dr. Coyne checked all the planets in every galaxy, for such evidence? Or even interviewed everyone on this planet? One should be more cautious about claiming universal negatives.

In fact, Coyne apparently has not even bothered to read the places where Plantinga really does offer evidence for Christianity.

This, at any rate, is a statement of dogmatism, not what Plantinga might call "the deliverances of empirical reasoning." Or perhaps Coyne takes the lack of evidence for Christianity as "properly basic?"

"After reviewing the history of theological evidentialism, beginning with Aquinas, Plantinga presents his own argument: that belief in God is a properly basic belief. A “properly basic belief” is one for which one doesn’t need evidence, for it is manifest to the senses immediately."

This, too, grossly mistates Plantinga's argument. Plantinga explicitly says that one can only define "properly basic" beliefs inductively, not with an a priori definition. Even the "foundationalist" definition of proper basicality that he give on page 75, then dismisses, does not assume that the properly basic object is "manifest to the senses immediately:"

"For any proposition A and person S, A is properly basic for S if and only if A is incorrigible for S or self-evident to S."

This Coyne misconstrues as Plantinga's own definition:

"Plantinga is fond of using philosophical logic to “clarify” ideas like this, and so this is how he defines his term:

For any proposition A and person S, A is properly basic for S if and only if A is incorrigible for S or self-evident to S. (p. 150)

But this is NOT Plantinga's definition of Proper Basicality. Plantinga explains this in the immediately prior sentence:

"The modern foundationalist's criterion for proper basicality, for example, is doubly universal:"

Plantinga then gives this definition, and explains, in the following pages, why he finds the whole foundational argument wobbly. To represent this as Plantinga's own definition, betrays a grotesque misreading of the text.

Coyne is also capable of purely philosophical misconstrual:

"Here are some examples of beliefs that Plantinga considers “properly basic,” i.e. beliefs for which one doesn’t need evidence. I’ll leave it to readers to judge whether evidence is unnecessary here:

I had breakfast this morning

I see a tree

That person is in pain

And, of course, there is a God"

Here, Coyne's misunderstanding is almost quaint. Coyne is intruding into an ancient discussion, with Descartes and Kant and numerous other philosophers, over what we know, and how we know it. (See comment section below, for more specific context, from philosopher Randal Rauser.) Plantinga recognizes, from his long acquaintance with careful reasoning on the subject, that it is harder to support facts we "all know" in the naive sense, our sense impressions, for instance, or our memories, or the intuitive leap that allows us to recognize that other people share our feelings, with strict, evidential reasoning, without begging the question. But Plantinga is assuming more careful thought on his reader's part. He does not seem to anticipate a reader like Coyne, who is evidently not familiar with that conversation, and takes sense and cognitive construals naively for granted in a way that careful philosophers dare not.

Coyne barges in like an Enfante Terrible, posing the questions of an amateur, indeed begging his reader to ignore careful thought, and go with their (uninformed) gut intuition. This is, of course, very much what non-biologists do, when they say, "But look at how complex the eye is! I'll leave it to the choir to judge whether or not it was designed -- but obviously it was!"

At one point, admittedly, Coyne does recognizes difficulties with naively accepting sensual data:

"But of course what is “evident’ to one person may not be so for others; for example, you may be deluded about whether you had breakfast, and the tree you see may be a hallucination. This is especially true for belief #4 above. How does Plantinga get around that? By asserting that the grounds for belief may differ from person to person and from community to community:

Accordingly, criteria for proper basicality must be reached from below rather than above; they should not be presented ex cathedra but argued to and tested by a relevant set of examples. But there is no reason to assume, in advance, that everyone will agree on the examples. The Christian will of course suppose that belief in God is entirely proper and rational; if he does not accept this belief on the basis of other propositions, he will conclude that it is basic for him and properly so. Followers of Bertrand Russell and Madelyn Murray O’Hare may disagree; but how is that relevant? Must my criteria, or those of the Christian community, conform to their examples? Surely not. The Christian community is responsible to its set of examples, not to theirs. (p. 151)

"I find this evasive, self-serving, and intellectually indefensible. What he is saying is that what counts as “grounds” (i.e., evidence) . . . "

By persisting in conflating "evidence" and "grounds for belief," Coyne gives evidence that he needs to begin by studying Philosophy 101, not by attacking Alvin Plantinga.

" . . . for God for some people won’t—and needn’t—count for others. That, of course, is a big difference between science and theology."

But it is not. I have grounds for thinking I see a bare, leafless aspen tree outside my office window, right now. Dr. Coyne may think he has no such grounds. He may in fact have no such grounds. He may in fact have no such tree.

So what follows about the grounding of my belief in the tree? Very little. Similarly, if I think faith in God is grounded for me, or if indeed it is grounded for me, or even if God has indeed revealed Himself to me, say by sending an angel to liberate me from prison, it hardly follows that Dr. Coyne will necessarily admit that, not, perhaps, sharing those grounds. Even if faith in God is grounded for Dr. Coyne, it is also possible he denies that grounding, perhaps for reasons Plantinga (and St. Paul) mention at various points.

"Of course this argument can be used to support all kinds of nonsensical beliefs. Plantinga brings up one: belief in The Great Pumpkin, of Peanuts fame . . . And what, exactly, is that relevant difference?

Thus, for example, the Reformed epistemologist may concur with Calvin in holding that god has implanted in us a natural tendency to see his hand in the world around us; the same cannot be said for the Great Pumpkin, there being no Great Pumpkin and no natural tendency to accept beliefs about the Great Pumpkin. (pp. 151-152).

"What a tangled thicket of logic we must make our way through here!"

Here one almost sympathizes with Dr. Coyne. He does, indeed, seem to find Plantinga a "tangled thicket."  Perhaps he is doing his best to follow an abstract logical argument, maybe for the first time since his undergraduate days, and is finding, to his surprise, that his best is not quite enough.

What follows are Coyne's attempts to hack through that thicket:

"First of all, not everyone has a natural tendency to see God’s hand in the world . . . "

Plantinga didn't say that exactly. He said some people may think (hinting that he is sympathetic) that God has implanted an awareness of Him in us.  It would not at all follow, in Plantinga's view, that given sin, everyone would retain that awareness in its full and least ambiguous form. (In our interview, indeed, Dr. Plantinga noted that he wished his own awareness were keener than it is.)

"and even if they do, how does Plantinga know that that tendency was implanted by God, rather than having been taught to credulous children by their parents or preachers?"

How does Coyne know that it wasn't implanted by God, perhaps at times by means of parents and preachers? (Though developmental psychologist Olivera Petrovich finds that it even seems to turn up among young Japanese children who are not so taught.)

"Is there really a “natural tendency” to accept beliefs in God without having been taught them?"

Probably.

"And which God?"

The Creator God. The God who demands justice. The St. Paul /Calvin /Plantinga model nicely accounts for polytheism, if that is the alternative Coyne is heading towards.

When I asked Dr. Plantinga if he felt the discovery of belief in God like the Christian God in primitive cultures could be taken as evidence for this view, he agreed that it can. And as I have argued here a couple times before, I think it can.

"And on what basis does he say “there is no Great Pumpkin”?

Presumably, he has no Sensus Cucurbitus Majorus, and does not think anyone else does, either.

"There is a natural tendency among Muslims to accept a God different in nature from the God of Christians: that is the Islamic “basic belief.”

I doubt it.  I think, from experience, that most or many Muslims believe in the Creator God in a similar way to Christians, even if they discount evidence that he has revealed himself uniquely in Jesus Christ. (And here, I think Plantinga would also talk about evidence.)

"And how does one adjudicate among competing existence claims—about Jesus versus Mohammed, for example? According to Plantinga, you can’t: each community has its own “basic beliefs” that can’t be argued against. It’s madness. It’s no way to find out what’s true."

Here, again, Dr. Coyne seems simply confused. Alvin Plantinga is not saying that evidence has nothing at all to say about Christian or Muslim beliefs. He is talking specifically about belief in God.

The title of the essay, indeed is "Reason and Belief in God." Philosophers tend in my experience to be careful with words and titles. Much of Coyne's confusion could be cleared up if he simply bothered to read more carefully.

I think that faith in Jesus as Christ can be much more direct than historical skeptics assume, and can in fact sideswipe a lot of the attacks by the Bart Ehrmans and John Crossans of this world. This will be the crux of my contribution to Faith Seeking Understanding.

But that is not because there is no evidence for Jesus, it is because the evidence is plain enough that ordinary readers can easily pick up on it. Even a deer, after all, recognizes a tiger, whether or not he can defend his perception to the American Zoological Association.

The point here, though, is that just because Plantinga claims some parts of the Christian faith may be properly basic to some people, it does not follow that they cannot be rationally questioned, or that other parts may not be properly basic, or to all people.

"What we have instead are such beliefs as:

God is speaking to me
God has created all this,
God disapproves of what I have done,
God forgives me, and
God is to be thanked and praised.
Coyne might, for instance, have noticed that all of these sentences begin with the word "God," not with the words "Jesus Christ."

"Remember, these are incorrigible beliefs: beliefs that it is impossible to hold without them being true! I find this unbelievable, for all the propositions adduced above presume that God exists, so you know who is speaking to you, you know who has created all this, and you know who is forgiving and loving and yet demands to be thanked and praised. How can you use those “basic beliefs” to support the notion that “God exists” if they all presume that God exists? How can you intuit, for example, that “God is to be thanked and praised” unless you have a basic belief that there’s a God in the first place?"

Here is where Dr. Coyne should have paid closer attention to Plantinga's earlier arguments.

My immediate sensory experience might be represented, in Plantinga's terms, as "I am being appeared to treely," or "I am being appeared to aspenly."

It involves an intuitive jump -- not an argument! -- from that appearance, to "An aspen tree is standing in the late February sunshine outside my window."

This would remain the same if I were to cut the tree down and take it en masse to a botanist. "I am being audibly appeared to botanist-calling-it-aspen-ly," might describe my immediate sense impressions. I intuit the botanist's mind, as I intuit the tree itself, by means (in these cases) of sense impressions and rational (but not provable) extrapolation.

Suppose God speaks to humanity through Nature.

How do we know this is not true? How does Coyne know this is not true? It seems to work, for billions of people. And many people for whom it does not seem to work, often seem quite hostile to the idea of God, as St. Paul predicts, like Dr. Coyne himself.

"And of course none of this justifies (nor does Plantinga attempt to justify) the” basic beliefs” in Plantinga’s own brand of Christianity, including his beliefs in the divinity of Jesus and the beneficence of God. Or are those not basic beliefs, but beliefs lifted from scripture?"

That is not the subject of this book. Again, Plantinga nowhere that I know of, claims that every Christian belief is "properly basic."

"To paraphrase Orwell, one has to be a theologian to believe things like this: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

Obviously untrue. Ordinary people do often believe in God as Plantinga describes, and justifiably so, Plantinga is beginning to convince me. Coyne does not seem to have made any arguments that even hint that he is wrong.

Also, again, Dr. Plantinga is a philosopher, not a "theologian."

But if we're looking for Orwell quotes, how about this one?

"For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforst were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake: The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all; it was a cesspool full of barbed wire . . . It appears that amputation of the soul isn't just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic."

Arrogance is, perhaps, the name of the particular form of septus that describes a person who has had success in one field, and then assumes, without warrant, that that success allows him to take on and defeat opponents in entirely unrelated fields, without studying that field first, or even reading his opponent's argument carefully.

And it is multiply clear that Jerry Coyne has not begun to read Alvin Plantinga accurately. He is like Bambi butting his antlers on the bottom of Godzilla's foot, not having even stepped back to survey the entire creature he wants to butt antlers with, before going on the attack.

Alvin Plantinga on the Social Character of Philosophy

2012-02-23T18:12:00.005-08:00

I interviewed Alvin Plantinga yesterday morning by phone for our new book, Faith Seeking Understanding. I was particularly glad that Dr. Plantinga agreed to participate, not only because he is probably the leading Christian philosopher of our time (the interview gave me the chance to read more of his work than I had, previously), but also because he has thought about St. Anselm and this great concept of "faith seeking understanding" in particular depth.

It proved a lively conversation, which I think will furnish a fitting climax to Faith Seeking Understanding.

I'll save specific quotes for the book. But one general theme interested me for the implications it holds for "how we know things."

I asked about the social character of philosophy. Dr. Plantinga answered, no, philosophy is not just a matter of holing up in your den with a pile of books, but is a social enterprise, a great conversation through the centuries. Descartes might seem to be an exception. But even he was educated by the Jesuits, and sent his ideas around to friends for criticism.

Think about the implications this has for those who worship science, who say science is the only real or worthy or truly useful way of ascertaining the facts.

Science is, of course, a highly useful enterprise. But it is a less direct, less basic, epistemology than pure logic or math, or the kind of logical philosophy in which Dr. Plantinga and those with whom he carries out the "Great Conversation" are engaged. If anything, logic is to biology or physics what they are to history or law: a more direct and certain way of knowing things. Yet it is still an eminently social enterprise, a mutually-correcting and stimulating conversation.

What does that mean for the common breed of logical positivists who run so deep and heavy in the herd of New Atheists?

We rely on other people for almost everything we know, from the name of the state we live in, to the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus. History, which we as Christians rely so much upon, is part of a natural continuum of epistemologies, that in essence is really no different from the sciences, and is connected to philosophy and even the trust we place in our own minds. This is what separates civilization from barbarism: not that we refuse to believe anything that hasn't been adequately proven by the "scientific method," but that we reasonably rely on one another (as well as the impulses that happen to come to us individually) to discover and sift the facts.

And there really is no way of getting away from that, and remaining part of human civilization. Even the Unabomber, after all, trusted the Post Office.

Footnote: a conversation at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, a couple weeks ago, with a young student from China:

"So, what are you studying?"

"Philosophy."

"What in particular?"

"I'm taking classes here in philosophy of quantum mechanics, and mathematics."

"Hmmn. Have you read Alvin Plantinga?"

"He's my teacher!"

"Really? I'm just reading his Warranted Christian Belief."

"It was reading that book that led me to Christ!"

Can Islam live with Christians?

2012-02-19T22:01:00.003-08:00

Dr. Timothy Winter

The Right Debate?

February 7th, a debate was held at Keble College in Oxford on the question, Can the West Live with Islam? The debate partners were Dr. Nigel Biggar and Dr. Timothy Winter, and frankly they bored me silly, and it seems some others in attendance. Partly this is because they were asking an unreal question, and partly because both failed to give the right answer even to that.

Winter, a British Muslim from Cambridge, began with a talk that essentially made two points: (1) Muslims are right to worry, because the West is doing a lot of worrisome things in regard to Islam, like wars in the Middle East and discrimination. (2) It is true that Islam also concerns the West, but for a bunch of mostly paranoid and mistaken reasons.

Keble College chapel; the debate venue was more
modern and less charming, off to the left, but this is
what caught my eye.

Nigel, a courtly Regius Professor of then responded with a fairly milquetoast "We share some concerns with our friends the Muslims, but we also have concerns about some of them" sort of response.

The debate went along in this unpromising and unreal manner, through a few questions, until a fellow from Nigeria (who came with us) finally asked,

"What about the Muslim terrorists who are trying to kill Christians off in Northern Nigeria?"

This introduced a stronger element of reality into the discussion, but did not, in my opinion, quite get at the heart of the issue. I raised my hand to expand on this challenge, but was not called upon.

Here is what (in retrospect) I would have liked to have asserted and asked:

"You're asking the wrong question! The real question is not whether the West can live with Islam. Of course it can. Any Christian in this room, can convert to Islam tonight, and live peacefully here in Britain, or in America, for the rest of his or her life. Nor are Western nations about to invade, threaten, sanction or in any way disturb any Arab or other Muslim country that acts in a civilized manner -- or, probably, those that don't. Heck, we have hardly sanctioned the lunatics in Iran who want to nuke Israel. Apparently we need their oil too much, and learned too little from what happened when we tried to appease Adolf Hitler.

"No, the real question is whether Muslims can live with Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and especially, Jews.

"Let me concentrate on Christians, with whom I am most familiar.

"Historical Christian populations that have lived in Iraq since long before the prophet Mohammed, that ruthless cutthroat, was born, are now fleeing Iraq and Egypt. The five million Christians in Pakistan are threatened, not infrequently murdered in sporadic attacks. Millions have already been murdered or enslaved in southern Sudan, though that state has finally obtained independence from the Muslim north. Muslims in northern Nigeria are trying to institute Sharia law on Christians, and engage in frequent pogroms, also burning down hundreds of churches. If revolution succeeds in Syria, it is reasonable to fear the large Christian population there will be attacked, as well.

"And what about converts to Christianity? All schools of Islam law lay it down that anyone who converts out of Islam must be killed. This penalty has often been carried out. An African Muslim convert to Christianity who is an expert in Islamic Law told me, as a Muslim, he would of course have agreed that converts should be killed. Yet Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance."

"How can we, as believers in God, believe that the God who created the nebulae and the human heart, has to hold those who trust Him, not by conscience, nor even by persuasion, but by violence and murder? This seems to feed directly into New Atheist talk about how the "faith meme" perpetuates itself by any means necessary. Isn't it God who gave us freedom? Or do Muslims, after all, worship so different a God?

"Are you so afraid that Islam is false, that you cannot allow your people to choose freely among religious options, but must use terror to keep your people in the fold? Or will you work to allow people in Muslim countries obtain the same freedom of conscience and speech you enjoy here in Oxford?"

Those are the questions I would have liked to address Dr. Winter, and would still like to ask other Muslims.

Republicans hate women! Democrats eat orphans!

2012-02-17T13:19:00.000-08:00

Some writers gain immortality by the wisdom they distill into a few golden words: Lao Zi, Ecclesiastes, Aristotle, the Sermon on the Mount, the lyrics of the great Tang poets, great passages in Hamlet and elsewhere in Shakespeare.

Others seem to seek 15 minutes of fame by expressed the essence of clap-trap and a finely distilled form.

I came across one such commentator this morning, a poster on Amazon named Michael Altaribba, expressing some political notions. Let's label those notions "A":

A. "It's a reflection of the Republican Party's fundamental (pun intended) misogyny . . . they see every woman as tainted, subservient, and inherently unclean. Women exist for the purpose of making children (preferably sons), keeping the house clean, and providing pleasure to their husbands. If they engage in sexual activity with someone other than their husbands, it is their fault, and they deserve to be punished, regardless of the circumstances. And, if they dare to actually enjoy that sexual activity, they are especially deserving of punishment.

"It's a revolting reflection of their Bronze Age social perspective. With any luck, the Republican candidate will lose by a landslide this November, and, perhaps finally, the Republican membership will reassess their ideology, and jettison the ideological poison (and those who produce it) from their midst."

Of course, it would be easy to formulate a caricature of Mr. Altaribba's preferred political party along similiar lines. Let's call those lines "B:"

B. "For Democrats, babies are conceived to be killed, so their parents can pleasure one another, without worry about contractions or diapers. If they survive the womb, they are taken as tools in the teachers' unions omnivorous greed for benefits. Later, when western society is forced by its creditors to deal with its economic (and concurrent moral) bankrupcy, the 'aborted generation' will be further saddled with paying back the $20 trillion in bribes the Democratic Party has paid its constituents for votes. All this is sanctioned or prophesied by the spiritual denigration of humanity argued for by philosopher Peter Singer, for whom a baby is no more than a pig or dog. Democrats obviously hate children. Since secularism derides the spiritual aspect of humanity -- treating us as more than barn animals -- Democrats will no doubt want to will eat children once its legal."

I won't, of course, argue that B is true. Its purpose is mainly to provide people on the Left who buy into A a mirror, by which they can see the absurdity of A. But if anything, I do think it more plausible to say Democrats hate children, than that Republicans hate women.

A. Do Republicans hate women (more than Democrats)?

To begin with, an excellent case could be made that Republican men like women more than Democrats do, or in a more flattering way. 54% of Democrats are now single, while 62% of Republicans are married. If Democratic men really loved women so much, why don't they marry one?

Oh, the slicker sorts reply, but it's so hard to choose! Bill Clinton, for instance, surely loves women -- and they love him back! While fooling around is certainly an activity that crosses the aisle, the culture of one-night stands and hookups seems most powerfully affirmed by a long series of Democratic politicians. For every Newt Gingrich on the Republican side, one seems to find two or three equally prominent Bill Clintons, JFKs, or Teddy Kennedys, or even a Barney Frank, with a male prostitution ring run out of his apartment.

Which might help explain the overwhelming Democratic support for abortion at all stages and under all circumstances. If you want free love, what makes more sense than to rid oneself of the ultimate romantic entanglement -- a new generation of Wawas?

But let's consider Michael's allegations, one by one:

"It's a reflection of the Republican Party's fundamental (pun intended) misogyny... "\

Get Michael's point? The trouble, the real reason Republicans allegedly hate women, is because so many Republicans are Christians, aka "fundamentalists." That's also the point behind his later "Bronze Age" shot -- the Bronze Age being when most of the Bible was written.

In an earlier series, "How Jesus Liberates Women," I laid out what I think is conclusive historical evidence that this common belief is badly mistaken. Far from demonstrating a hatred of women, the "Bronze Age" teachings of the Bible have done more to liberate woman around the world, by the billion, than any other force of nature or supernature. I still await a serious attempt by any skeptic to disprove these arguments.

As for evidence that Republicans are particularly mysogenistic, of course refuting that would take a different argument, even if many Republicans are Christian. But since Michael has given no real evidence for his assertion, I don't see any need to offer any extra proof to rebut it. But I do seem to remember a remarkable amount of vitriol swirling around the figure of Sarah Palin, an accomplished, reform-minded Alaska governer, over the past few years. It almost seems, as Clarence Thomas points out, that what really angers Democrats, is when "their groups" walk off the liberal reservation and come to conservative conclusions.

"They see every woman as tainted, subservient, and inherently unclean."

Michael seems to be suffering relaspses from bad experiences in a past life as a leper, apparently. This is almost too over-the-top to do anything but laugh.

"Women exist for the purpose of making children (preferably sons), keeping the house clean, and providing pleasure to their husbands."

Oh, that explains why more Republicans are married! We want our womenfolk to scrub the floors after our masculine, beer-swilling, Monday-night-football watching sons throw up on them! Curious, though, that married women are also far more likely to vote Republican than unmarried women. They must all be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

Here again, thinking of actual Republican women I know, and the men who love them, one finds this caricature tremendously amusing.

"If they engage in sexual activity with someone other than their husbands, it is their fault, and they deserve to be punished, regardless of the circumstances. And, if they dare to actually enjoy that sexual activity, they are especially deserving of punishment."

Here, I think, we see the nub of the matter for a lot of men on the Left. What is better, for the natural desire of a callow, self-seeking man with little thought for the future, than that women would accept the adolescent 60s ideology of "free love?" Free means, you get sex without paying anything in return -- no hand-holding at birth, no hospital bills, no cleaning diapers, no crying at inopportune times, no tuition, no work late at night like Tiny Tim's father for Scrouge. You can live free and easy, come and go when you like, like Charlie Sheen, or many other healthy, left-wing, Hollywood role models.

But if you say, "Love is for a lifetime. I will love and honor you, in richness and poverty, sickness and health, so long as we both shall live, even when you wrinkle up and I could, were I to ignore my vows, might still 'get' younger women -- such is reality between the sexes -- I choose to stay by your side, and provide for you and our children" -- that's exploiting women, somehow!

One wonders, sometimes, at the strange shapes people twist their minds into -- even if one cannot be sure of motives.

"It's a revolting reflection of their Bronze Age social perspective. With any luck, the Republican candidate will lose by a landslide this November, and, perhaps finally, the Republican membership will reassess their ideology, and jettison the ideological poison (and those who produce it) from their midst."

Ideological poison, indeed.

All such poison aside, if the Republican loses by a landslide this November, it appears we can be sure:

* Roe vs. Wade will continue as the Law of the Land, and with it an expansive Charlie Sheen lifestyle -- whether or not that makes for real and lasting happiness.

* No one will do anything about our present debt, which has passed 100% of GDP, sailed through $15 trillion dollars, until Obama is gone, and the next generation is forced to finally pay the piper. (Or our entire economy collaspses, as that of Greece has already done, as it may well soon do.)

* The great god government will continue to do a great many things to undermine marriage, fueled by the kind of contempt for marriage commitments suggested (if I am not mistaken) by Michael's comments.

Some philosophies become the pillars on which civilizations are founded. Others, become the wrecking balls that destroy them.

Most Democrats are not cannibals, of course, any more than most Republicans hate women.

But many Democrats (and some Republicans) have become champion of ideologies that, it seems to me, are spiritually and economically cannibalizing our civilization. And that, I think I can say without too much exagerration.

Is Christianity doomed in Britain?

2012-02-13T09:24:00.000-08:00

Tim Keller spoke at Town Hall in
Oxford all last week, to large
crowds.

"Christianity Under Attack!" The headline on the front page of the Daily Mail read Saturday morning, if not in VE Day font, almost in VJ day font.

"The right to practice the Christian faith in Britain is under attack after two controversial legal rulings against worshippers," the paper somewhat breathlessly, and it turned out a bit inaccurately, added. The article on the front page and on an inner page, along with a long, pugnatious but reasonable editorial by George Cary, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, dealt with these rulings.

The first concerned City Council meetings in the town of Devon. Since the reign of Elizabeth I, prayers had been part of these meetings. But now, due a suit brought by an atheist and former counsel member, they were to be discontinued.

The second ruling had to due with a Bed and Breakfast run by Peter and Hazelmary Bull, in the small resort town of Marazion in Cornwall, at the extreme southwest tip of England. The Bulls are a Christian couple of about seventy. A few years ago, a man in his thirties booked a room in their house, then showed up with his gay lover. The Bulls asked the couple to take separate rooms, since as Christians, they did not accept unmarried couples as guests in their home, either heterosexual, or homosexual. The man brought suit, and now, has won the suit, and some $6000 in damages. (A lot, one would think, for not being allowed to stay at a hotel -- if I were given equal damages from every hotel I was not allowed to stay at in China, I might be able to buy my own B & B!)

So is this a sign of the times? Has the England of King Alfred, John Wycliffe, John Wesley, and C. S. Lewis now become a de-Christianized, secularized haven of infidels?

One might think so, judging also by church attendance figures, which have been steadily declining for decades.

Yet that is not the overwhelming impression I get, over the now, seven or so months I have spent in the UK. Christianity does not appear to be on its last legs:

* Saturday I went looking for the Uffington White Horse, a 3000 year old figure of a horse made of chalk, longer than a football field, on a hill that now belongs to Oxfordshire. This figure was celebrated in G. K. Chesterton's rousing Ballad of the White Horse.

Unfortunately I did not find the horse. But I did find the town of Faringdon, which I hoped would be within walking distance. (The distance was not the problem -- finding a path was.)

Anyway, the old market town was charming enough, its winding roads flanked by 3-story shops crowding against one another, bringing one into the town square. Within a few blocks, I noticed four churches. There was also a Christian bookstore in the town square. You need some business to run a book store, these days, with on-line competition. I also noticed a "Jesus is the answer" type banner along the way.

* Christians in Oxford sponsored a series of evangelistic meetings, led by Tim Keller, the Manhattan pastor, this week. Total attendance for Keller's meetings (there were other meetings as well) was probably about 2500-3000, including repeat visitors over five days. Obviously most in attendance were Christians, but also obviously most Christians in Oxford did not come.

Keller's presentations were quite good, I thought, based on the stories of the Gospel of John, and followed by lively questions.

* I knew that the church was pretty healthy here in Oxford. There are dozens of churches in this small city, including two ancient churches -- St. Aldates and St. Ebbes -- within a block of each other, that are very large, and cooperate on outreaches like this one. One could, of course, ascribe the vigor of Oxford Christianity to its spiritual traditions -- colleges generally also have chapels -- or to the influx of more pious foreigners. (I have met Christians from more than 40 countries, here, which makes for interesting potlucks in the International Pastorate!)

Also, it may be that in England, Christianity is more popular among the educated classes, than in society as a whole. Indeed, one girl (a foreigner) who works in an office of 60 or 70, said she was the only Christian in the office.

OCMS, once an Anglican church, across Port Meadow, where
horses and cattle have grazed for millennia. The ruins of
Godwin nunnery lies to my back half a kilometer.
There are plenty of other churches in town,
though, still doing a booming business, and Godwin
seems sometimes to have served as a whorehouse during
the alleged "Age of Faith." Smaller numbers may,
perhaps, serve the cause of mission clarity.

* On an earlier visit, I road a bus up to Stratford on Avon, where William Shakespeare was born, and conducted business. His grave is at Trinity Church. This church holds a lively evangelical fellowship. They have a good little Christian bookstore in the back, which of course also sells souvenirs, but also books on miracles, for instance. The church looks pious for the great man whose bones it holds.

* I've been staying at Wycliffe Hall, which is, among other things, a training facility for young Anglican clergy. There seem to be plenty of enthusiastic young trainees, also at Aldate and Ebbes.

So how is Christianity doing in Britain? From passing visits, it doesn't look like it's about to fade away and disappear. Maybe nominal Christianity is on the ropes. Most identify with Christianity and don't want to lose the magnificent historical and cultural memory that the churches hold, and that are entwined about such quinscientental celebrations as Christmas. Serious Christians are fewer in number, as perhaps they usually have been, but it doesn't look at all like they're about to go away.

Richard Carrier, the One True Philosopher, takes on God, again

2012-02-10T02:34:00.000-08:00

Richard Carrier, apparently, has another new book out. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have mixed feelings about Dr. Carrier: those feelings might be described as one part respect, mixed with two parts "affectionate contempt," and three parts dumbfounded awe.

The latter arises in reaction to Carrier's bravado, the indefatigably transcendent self-image that seems to lie behind his attempts, in turn, to straighthen out the fields of philosophy, biblical studies, origins of life biology, American politics -- his genius seems legion, or perhaps we should say legend.

John Loftus gives a preview of Carrier's new book on his Debunking Christianity website. Let's listen in, then respond, in a provisional way, to some of the arguments Richard seems to be making:

Carrier gives four reasons as summarized by Confessions of a Doubting Thomas:

John Carrier is not a "doubting Thomas," of course: he is a highly committed atheist, who does not at all want to believe in God. Plenty of people in the 1st Century scoffed at Christian claims: Carrier might more accurately identify himself with one of the scoffers, not with Thomas.

God is Silent: that is, if God is as most Christians describe him, he should be able to make his message clear to everybody. And what's more he should be willing to make his message clear to everybody. The reality is, however, that most people are not aware of a clear message from God, and the message that seems to be heard by believers is not a consistent or even a non-contradictory one. Different believers get different messages and these conflict, and these lead (quite literally) to conflict. God appears to be unable to deliver a simple message to his people, let alone to everyone else. Thus, the Christian God is refuted by his silence."

If God is silent, why do billions of human beings today, believe they have heard from him? (Including me?)

I remember inviting an Egyptian Muslim over to our home for Christmas one year in Japan. She shared her reasons for believing in God. They had to do with perceptions of a designer that had come to her through nature, creatures in the Red Sea, pictures of which she showed me, for instance.

The Bible says Nature reveals God. It is legitimate to argue about cosmological arguments, or about design arguments. But even if these arguments fail, Nature itself is read as a language that seems to tell many or most people, "I am here, and I am not silent!"

This is why early scientists spoke of the "Book of Nature."

Suppose you are a prison guard in Hanoi. Suppose you hear some sound, and suspect that the prisoners are communicating with one another. But how? You listen late at night, and hear some scraping. Maybe it's just the rats! Maybe people are striking their cups against the wall at random, as they move in closed quarters. It doesn't sound like a language to you.

Suppose you then find that spontaneously, all around the prison, your American wards are putting up little decorations, and singing songs. You bring some of the prisoners into your office, and interrogate them. "It's Christmas today!" They tell you. But they refuse to say how they found out.

Maybe they have all calculated the days, and independently concluded that it is Christmas. Or maybe they have communicated -- maybe those scrapings, which sound random to you, are in fact a secret language.

If you know the language, you can be sure that you have received a real message. But if you do not know the language, you may suppose it is either a series of random noises, or perhaps a language, but like Jabberwocky, contains no coherent message.

Is that because the language is, in fact, garbled? Or because we are still learning to listen? Maybe it is in part garbled so that those who overhear it with hostility, will dismiss it.

Maybe you don't want it to be a language, because you're like Seargent Shultz, and really just want to get along, without any such complications in your life.

Even new prisoners, who are still learning the code, may be unsure if a given series of scrapings is, indeed, a message, or what it means.

"I hear NUUTHEENG!"

Carrier cannot, then, reasonably be sure that God does not speak to others, even if not yet to him, through Nature. Billions of people SEEM to perceive a fairly coherent message, even if some seem to find it garbled. The fact that so many still hear his Voice, suggests that some skeptics may be like Sergeant Schultz -- they don't hear, because they don't want to hear.

There are other languages, too, like the words of Jesus and the prophets, miracles, the conscience, our perceptions of beauty and justice, and our intuitive love of truth. One might be able to explain these things in terms of evolution -- I know many have tried -- but can one justify them, or give them the normative stature we know they deserve?

It is also a fact that peoples in hundreds or thousands of cultures around the world, contrary to skeptical assumptions, have come to a coherent concept of the Supreme God who transcends any one culture. This is a subject I have written a lot on, including in this previous blog.

So Carrier's first premise seems contradicted by a multiplicity of facts.

The fact that people hold some different beliefs about ultimate truth, follows from the fact that God is also hidden, as he must be, if we are to be free.  If it were impossible to believe anything but the truth about God, could we be free? Thus even in Star Trek, the "Prime Directive" is to allow otherworldly cultures to develop on their own, without outside interference.

God is Inert: that is, there is no evidence that there is a loving and supremely powerful God at work in the world. Innocent children suffer and die. Good people suffer and die. Innocent children of good Christian people suffer and die. God apparently does nothing to stop this. This is inconsistent with the claimed character of the Christian God, thus, God is refuted by his inactivity.

The Problem of Pain has been discussed by believers and unbelievers since ancient Greece, if not earlier. Ancient Jews and Christians were of course more familiar with pain than we are, in our anti-septic world. Most babies died. Epidemics swept whole populations out of existence. Warfare was more common.  Yet people came to the conclusion that God does care, and does act in the world. This is the strongest argument in the atheist arsenal, but it is curious that its force seems to be strongest just when we have found so many devices to get rid of pain.

Wrong Evidence: basically, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, and the biblical evidence is barely even mundane. The best evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus is four non-eyewitness accounts, which contradict each other on important issues, and a bunch of letters, ostensibly from someone who never met Jesus in the flesh and only had a vision of him. And all these were written a couple of decades after the alleged events, at the earliest. How is all that sufficient evidence for the greatest claim ever made?

Here we come into all sorts of disagreements, which one can only list, and not respond to at length on the spot:

* Is Carrier begging the question with his term "extraordinary claim?" Maybe for him, the idea that God would act in the world is "extraordinary." Maybe for me, the idea that God would NOT act is "extraordinary." Choosing between these options would take quite a bit of discussion; maybe we should return to this question at some point.

* I think the NT evidence IS extraordinary, for reasons I gave in Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could.

* There are, in fact, between three and five eyewitness accounts of the risen Jesus, in the New Testament, along with numerous close second-hand accounts.

* Carrier's description of what the Bible claims about Paul's meeting with Jesus is incorrect, as NT Wright demonstrates. That meeting cannot validly be described as "only had a vision of him." For one thing, visions do not ordinarily render a person blind, then accurately tell him about a stranger who will come and cure him some days hence. We might call this a "smart vision."

* What's wrong with writing about events a couple decades later? I do that all the time, as (I have found) do my seniors. If Dr. Carrier is fortunate enough to reach a similiar or later stage of maturity (may he enjoy good health), he may find himself referring to events he has himself witnessed a couple decades later, and still remembers quite clearly.

Wrong Universe: the Christian claim is that God made the universe and put us, the pinnacle of creation, into it. So why is 99.99999% of all creation hostile to us?

Is it? I can't live in space, but does that make space "hostile" to me? Be careful what writers smuggle in with their anthropomorphisms.

As far as we can tell, if you scaled the entire universe down to the equivalent size of a house, then the tiny zone which is capable of sustaining human life is as small as a single proton! Invisibly and insignificantly small. This is not what we would expect if the universe was intelligently designed for us, but is exactly what you would expect if we are merely an accidental by-product of a chaotic universe.

I know of no suggestion in the Bible that God created all the universe just for us. Maybe He likes lots of stars; if so, who can blame Him?

Aside from which, if we live in three-dimensional space, that space will either be bounded or not. If unbounded, it will either be full of things, or empty. If full of things, those things will either include sentient life, or not. Every possibility will be used by skeptics of this mind-set as an argument against God. Why did God create so much empty space? Why so many dead planets with atmospheres of sulfer-dioxide or carbon dioxide? Why, we know we're just one rational species out of ten trillion! Why should God care anything about us?

All such arguments are as vacuous as most of space itself. There simply seems to be no relationship between premises and conclusion. If nothing else, the astounding discoveries of modern astronomy underline the ancient phrase, "the Heavens declare the glory of God."

Oxford diary.

2012-02-06T09:09:00.000-08:00

* I'm staying at Wycliffe Hall, only about three or four blocks from my studies. College Park is even closer, so I did manage to get in one run so far, down to the Cherwell, around where the ducks mill before a small waterfall, then around again. But it was starting to snow -- yeah, that's my excuse -- so I didn't go more than one round.

* Each night it would get colder. One morning, the pond by the river was frozen, with a little skirting of ice where the water intruded into land a few inches. The next morning, chunks of ice were floating free. The next morning, the river was almost frozen over, as was the quarter-mile long, shallow pond or lake in Port Meadow. The ice was only about an inch and a half thick, but lots of people were walking on it with their kids on Saturday, and some grown men had out hockey sticks and were going at it. As I walked across the ice, though, it snappy, crackled, and popped -- not thick enough for me, yet.

* Then that night it snowed, turned to rain, clouds, then fog, and the ice was ruined.

* I've been reading Alvin Plantinga lately. I had planned to buy a book or two before leaving for the UK, but had to print off a few chapters, instead. Some brilliant stuff.

Last night chatted with a Chinese fellow (Mr. Chen) studying "math, physics, and philosophy." I asked him a bit about it -- the philosophy seemed a bit too mathematical for my taste -- then asked if he'd read Plantinga. "He's my teacher!" He replied. "Warranted Christian Belief is the book that led me to become a Christian!"

Who says arguments don't convince people?

Plantinga is, indeed, lucidity on skates: the air crackles, the ice beneath does not, his humor is fatal, killing you with the friendly absuridity to which your argument has just been reduced,

* Tim Keller is rumored to be speaking at Oxford Town Hall this week. May have to go.

* Wycliffe Hall is a nice place to stay: the room is warm enough, things generally work, people are helpful. I prefer Commonwealth House, though, because there are more internationals, and people are coming and going more -- you don't feel at all like you're butting in on a group of colleagues, as sometimes I do at Wycliffe.

* They're building a museum across the alley from Commonwealth, or trying to (it'll take ten million pounds!) called "Story Museum," or something like that. It'll be a museum to remember all the great stories created in Oxford: Alice in Wonderland, Middle Earth, Narnia, Pullman's Dark Materials, or whatever they're called. For the first time, I almost wish my dissertation were not nearing completion . . . A wonderful idea. And in a great location! (It'll also be across the street from Christ Church College, where Lewis Carroll was math teacher. And heck, while we're mentioning it, Lawrence of Arabia went to St. Aldates, behind Commonwealth -- that's almost a fairy tale. No comment on Mr. Of Arabia's romantic proclivities intended.)

* Meanwhile, back in the real world, the snow has turned to mush, and walking become difficult. It's supposed to freeze again the next few nights.

* My seminar seems to have been a success. Dr. Farr led it. During the seminar, he went around the room and asked each scholar whether he subscribed to exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism, the three usual choices. (Which I had just been explaining, also berating.) No one chose pluralism, which is good -- I'd been dumping on it most of all -- but maybe half chose exclusivism, despite my objections, and one or two volunteered that he agreed with me that the game was rigged wrongly.

Dr. Farr studied with John Hick, the pre-eminent pluralist. I asked him to say which he favored; his reply seemed surprisingly mumbled -- or is that nuanced -- but I gathered he saw something to Hick's position, anyway.

*

Me and Pascal, together again

2012-02-02T03:20:00.000-08:00

My close personal friend,
Blaise Pascal

John Loftus posted a blog yesterday accusing me (and Pascal!) of "empty rhetoric." I am, of course, flattered at the company, and hope the great scientist is not rolling over in his grave right now.
This is an "accusation" I feel compelled to respond to, if for no other reason, to drive the comparison between myself and Blaise Pascal home, for all those people in Junior High School who doubted I'd ever amount to much. :- )

Seriously, John's accusations come at a propitious time: I've just sent in my rebuttal of John's Outsider Test for Faith, as a chapter to an e-book on the subject of Faith and Reason, being put together by a nice fellow from Campus Crusade, and due to come out in two or three months, I believe. In that chapter, I intend to show not only that the OTF does not harm Christianity, but actually supports it, in four important ways.

Here's my preliminary answer to John's jabs in this post:

JL: "Christian apologists will write peer reviewed articles defending Pascal's Wager. Given Pascal's premises his argument basically works. In order to see how it works you have to grant that reason cannot decide between two options. The two options for Pascal were non-belief and a Catholicism where nonbelievers risk an eternal punishment in hell for their nonbelief. Given these two options it would be better to believe . . . "

"The reason I bring this additional deceptive strategy up is because Christian apologist David Marshall continues to spout off that there is one God who can be seen in every religion. I had asked him who answers prayers? His response: 'Who answers prayer? God, of course. That's "Bog" in Russian, "Dieu" in French, "Shang Di" in Chinese (also other names), and "Allah" in Arabic.' Now if you read the link I provided he did not attempt to answer the difficulties inherent in saying this. He responded with rhetoric, empty rhetoric, that is utterly lacking in substance."

Let's start with Pascal. Why is it that every skeptic on the planet seems to have read "Pascal's Wager," but none of them has read the rest of the book?

Loftus also mentions
William James. Not a
BAD fellow, mind you.

Pascal, 'empty rhetoric lacking in substance?' Who are you trying to fool? You might say that about Camus, or Marx, or Freud, but not about Pascal. Pascal has already explained why Christianity ought, intellectually, to be a live option for any serious reader of his book, by giving a variety of evidences that it is true. His Wager is frosting on the cake. (Or, I would prefer to think, whipped cream, Japanese style.)
And if you've really read my books, as you seem to indicate, you should know better that to imply that they are 'lacking in substance,' either. My arguments may be right or wrong, but they are certainly substantive.

And no I don't claim (still less "spout") that 'there is one God who can be seen in every religion.
You need to begin by getting the argument you're critiquing right. My claim is not about religions at all. It is that God is known by many names in many cultures . . . (this) is accepted by Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Chinese, Africans, Native Americans, common folks, and scholars alike, so I'm not sure why you make it sound as if I'm saying something new, here.

JL: "As an evangelical Marshall does not think God through Allah authorized Mohammad to be his prophet, for Marshall would say God's prophetic word through Mohammad contains obvious errors. God through Mohammad wants Muslims to kill Jews while the God of the Old Testament called Jews his chosen ones and granted them Palestine as an eternal possession. God through Mohammad said Jesus did not die on the cross while God in the New Testament said he died and that he arose from the dead."

Of course! People disagree about what God has done or said. Some Christians think God created the world instantly, 6000 years ago, others slowly, intervening in the biological process, others entirely through evolution. It hardly follows that they worship 'different Gods,' even if their understanding of him differs. (As does our understanding of other human beings -- I know you differently than William Lane Craig knows you, differently than your wife or accountant or customers for your business know you. But there's still just one you!)

JL: "He is not a pluralist like John Hick, you see. He wants to appear to be a rational level-headed believer and this means making these kinds of rhetorically empty statements. The reality is that Marshall is an evangelical standing in the tradition of evangelicalism. As a world traveler he instinctively knows evangelicalism is dead in the water, so he resorts to using empty rhetoric to appear reasonable, or at least, that's what it looks like to me."

Heh. Speaking of empty rhetoric . . .

As a world traveler I know that conservative Christianity has never thrived as widely as it does today. That will come up in my response to the OTF, too.

I just presented a seminar yesterday largely rebutting Hick, in a room full of serious Christian thinkers from Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, and Latin America. They represent often thriving churches, in some cases churches that are quite young. None of them agree with Hick, apart maybe, to some extent, the facilitator of the seminar, a philosopher who (as it happens) studied under Hick.

So much for dead in the water.

As to whether I "want to appear to be a rational, level-headed believer," honestly its not my first priority. Being rational is higher on the list than appearing one, and the list also includes such things as, "David Marshall wants to go sliding on frozen backwaters of the Thames if it gets colder as forecast over the next few days, then maybe take pictures of the spires in the snow from Christ Church meadow on Sunday."

What people on John's blog think of me, is (with all due respect) a somewhat lower priority.

"Marshall claims that God is Allah is Yahweh is ______ (fill in the deity of your choice) and that this represents the best of the deities believed by the world religions. But he lands squarely in the evangelical camp. What then becomes of his claim that God is Allah is Yahweh is ______ (fill in the deity of your choice)? Nothing of substance at all!" (Note: bold in original, transported into this blog from John's blog -- DM.)

I honestly don't know what to make of this. God is one. He has names in many languages, and had those names before the missionaries showed up. The locals often recognized that missionaries were talking about the same God they had known of, from time out of mind. This fact, that "God shows up" around the world, undermines the OTF something fierce, as I intend to show, in my upcoming chapter. But it certainly doesn't follow that all conceptions of God are exactly the same. Why this should trouble me especially as an evangelical, when I find Paul recognizing the same thing in Athens, I don't know. But perhaps, John, when you read the full explanation of why the OTF supports the Gospel of Jesus, you'll see the light and finally remember to give Shang Di the glory.

Postscript: Answer to 8 Questions on Avalos and Violence

2012-01-29T08:28:00.000-08:00

I have been taking the time to review Hector Avalos' book, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence in detail mainly because I find the subject important and interesting. Avalos is well-informed and clever, even if one is often tempted to add the words "by half." He is also an adversary, and in some ways a worthy one -- he offers arguments one can get one's teeth into, backed up by actual historical facts. At the same time, he also butchers some texts -- both in the Bible, and Medieval sources for the Crusades, in particular -- to a greater extent than should be permissible for a serious scholar.

I have not tried, in these posts, to defend "religion" in general, or always even "the Christian record." It might sound sanctimonious to say, "I have just been trying to get at the truth." I recognize my biases. But historical truth, wherever it lies, really is the goal -- and whatever insight into "what works" and "what is true" the mere facts of history can provide. As a Christian who rejects most of Avalos' assumptions, and has developed his own arguments on many of these subjects, of course I am as much a protagonist in this dispute as Avalos.

In this post, I conclude my review of Fighting Words by returning to the eight questions I wrote down, while reading the first few pages of the book, and seeing how Avalos has answered them, or failed to do so:

1. What does Avalos mean by "religion?"

This turns out to be the key question in evaluating Dr. Avalos' critique of the "Abrahamic religions." (I put the term in quotes, because I am skeptical about that way of classifying beliefs -- I think Christianity bares more in common with Taoism or Buddhism, than with Islam, in some ways.) Avalos assumes that religion is unverifiable. He offers only the briefest and most unsatisfying of arguments for this key assumption, and rests everything on it. Yet it flies in the face of almost all Christian thought.

Why does Avalos insist on the fact that "religion" cannot be supported by evidence? Because he is not ready to argue that most immoral violence is caused by religion, or even that there is more such violence with religion than there would be without it. He gives this impression, by his relentless and one-sided cataloguing of evils allegedly (and often actually) caused by religion. But he is smart enough to step back from the brink and make neither wreckless assertion, no doubt aware that he cannot back either one up.

So instead, Avalos merely asserts that religious violence is less moral than other kinds, because the "scarce resources" it promises do not (he assumes) really exist.

But he offers no real argument for that.

So all in all, Avalos' long, detailed argument sometimes seems rather unreal. Beginning with wrong or unsupported premises, it cannot reach its promised conclusions, and if it does, they may not be important.

2. What does Avalos mean by "violence?"

The unstated premise of Avalos' argument seems to be that "violence" is something bad. He does, in fact, disavow that premise -- he recognizes that sometimes violence is justifiable. Yet when he says no early Christian writer comes out plainly against violence under all circumstances, the impression he gives is that this is somehow a fault -- rather than that, as is more likely, early Christians were reasonable thinkers, and recognized (as Avalos seems to) that sometimes, a failure to do violence may itself be immoral.

So why does Avalos make violence the standard at all, if he is not a pacifist? This is a confusion that runs through the entire book.

3. Can Avalos show empirically that what he calls "religion" actually results in more violence than would occur without it?

Dr. Avalos never even brings up the question, let alone attempts to answer it. But I doubt one can successfully critique any one religion (let alone all of them) on the grounds of "violence," even if better defined and restricted to "unjustified violence," without seeing whether, over all, religion increases or decreases the amount of it.

You may think this is an easy question to answer. "Crusades!" I hear ten thousand New Atheists echo in chorus. "100 Years War! Witch Burnings! Luther and Hitler!"

We react that way partly because of the nature of history, and partly because we have been brainwashed.

History records what happened, not what did not happen. If a religious fanatic starts a war, we remember her war, and curse religion. If, instead, she prevents a war from occurring, we forget that.

Everyone knows that Christians burnt witches. Not many people know that pre-Christian Europeans also killed those found guilty of black magic, and that the early church banned such executions, and thus saved their lives. (Modern missionaries have also aided those accused of witchcraft -- I have met some who did that work myself.)

Skeptics talk a lot recently about the evil "pastors" in Nigeria who torture and kill children as witches. They have never heard of the tens of thousands who were saved from similiar persecution, when missionaries first arrived in Nigeria.

Christians have, I believe, prevented many wars. We are not told about those wars, because too many of our teachers are, like Dr. Avalos, do not tell us the whole truth, or even look for it.

Has faith caused more extra wars, more extra unjustified violence, or prevented it?

It would be very hard to answer this question. Avalos does not even raise it. He also never mentions violence that Christians prevented from happening, and that, I think, ruins his chance of making any serious argument against religion in this book.

4. Will Dr. Avalos even attempt to do this, or merely offer a series of post-hoc attempts to relate actual instances of violence, to their supposed religious roots?

He does some of the latter, though less than I feared.

5. Will Avalos discuss the many cases in which religions caused violence to stop, or justice to win over injustice?

On page 368, he actually finally mention this other side of the ledger:

"At first sight, one of the most persuasive arguments for the value of religion in bringing peace to the world is a long list of conflicts whose resolution (Walter) Wink attributes to non-violent religious activity. Examples include the Solidarity movement in Poland, Martin Luther King's struggles for civil rights in America, and Ghandi's ouster of the British in India . . . Indeed, we do not claim that religious beliefs cannot result in acts that benefit human beings."

Avalos argues, in response, that "It is not ethical or moral to bring good based on myth or premises that cannot be verified." The example he gives, is telling a child to clean her room so Santa will give her presents.

I never told my children that, because (a) I don't believe in Santa, and didn't want my children to believe in falsehoods, and (b) it was their responsibility to clean their rooms. There is nothing wrong with giving them added incentive, either in the form of carrots or sticks, along with teaching them responsibility.

But I believe in God. So why would it be immoral for me to say, "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand?" Or like the monk in the Roman coliseum, who stopped the gladiator games and was torn to pieces?

No belief can be verified absolutely, not even the existence of a reality external to our own minds. Nor can any other reason for making peace be fully verified. But I believe in God because I think he has verified his existence to me.

"Any act of love based on religion is immoral." (369)

This seems weird and fanatical to me. I don't know what else to say about it. Avalos sounds here more like one of the most ideology-ridden protagonists of the Wars of Religion, than a calm rational being. Jesus said "Give a cup of water in the name of the Lord!" Avalos dashes the cup to the ground and cries, "Blasphemy! There is no Lord!"

Avalos also argues that religion was responsible for much of the evil that reformers solved. Obviously that was not the case, when it comes to Solidarity and the overthrow of communism. Nor does it seem likely to be the case with slavery, as Avalos argues. People enslaved have their neighbors for economic reasons for millennia, though they justified enslaving them ideologically. Again, this just seems fanatical:

"Having generally endorsed slavery for some 1900 of the last 2000 years, Christianity can claim little credit for abolishing someething that it could have abolished almost two millennia years earlier. In fact, it is because the Bible was considered an authority that the aboltion of slavery was retarded in the first place." (370)

Notice how Avalos slips the goal posts as far as he think he can get away with in his direction, here. In fact, Christianity had no power to "abolish" anything during its first 300 years, at least. And in fact, William Wilberforce's pious crusade against slavery bore great fruit 200, not 100, years ago. And in fact, many great Christians fought against slavery all through those "two millennia years."

As for Avalos' bold claim in the final sentence, he has not supported it, and it seems highly unlikely. One fact reveals how unlikely the claim is: more people were enslaved in the post-Christian communist bloc in 60 years, than probably in all the centuries of the horrible Transatlantic Slave Trade.

6. How will he account for the violence of atheistic societies?

This is the subject of Part III, in my last post. The short answer? He is not as tendentius and dismissive as I expected, but his discussion is too narrowly focus on Stalin, and on the most direct forms of causation.

7. Does he assume that "violence" is the only or main ill to avoid?

He denies this, but also fails to suggest any real balance.

When Avalos does bring up other values, his discussion is often equally fanatical:

"Even violence is sometimes regarded with aesthetic delight by scholars. For example, Susan Niditch speaks of a 'bardic' tradition describing war as follows: 'The bardic tradition, so called because of the beautiful traditional-style narration in which much of the material is preserved, presents a view of war that glorifies warriorrs, their courage, daring, leadership, in skill. She includes as part of this 'bardic' tradition the story of the beheading of a man (David and Goliath) and other acts of murder and mayhem.

"In actuality, there is nothing that can be objectively defined as beautiful in scripture. Beauty is a value judgement . . . "

Yes, well so is peace. But that didn't stop you just now from dismissing heroic literature because you don't like what happened to Goliath after he lost the battle to a boy.

Obviously there is much of great beauty in the Bible. The fact that we are human beings whose hearts warms to beauty, even if we can't "prove" it by the scientific method, hardly makes that beauty less poignant, to those willing to see it.

Apparently Avalos now wants us to dismiss Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, because the beauty of their descriptions is subjective, while the violence they describe, and often seem to glory in (even Tolstoy) is bloody, like the history of human courage itself. Or does Avalos dislike David and Goliath merely because it is in the Bible? Either way, this wreaks of fanaticism, and a too-narrow and unbalanced conception of the good.

8. Could there be a relationship between the breakdown of a society's "sacred canopy," and the decay of a civilization?

Avalos does not attempt to balance his discussion by addressing this question, either. But his easy dismissal of the "courage, daring, leadership and skill" of warriors like King David, could not, I think, bode well for any civilization that embraced that contempt.

Hitler, Stalin, and secular violence: Avalos on Religion & Violence V

2012-01-25T11:52:00.000-08:00

An important part of any argument consists of anticipating and rebutting potential counter-punches.   Dr. Avalos therefore dedicates Part 3 of Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence, to answering the objection, "But haven't secularist ideologies been even more violent?"

Good question: we do, after all, live in the Age of Barbed Wire. At the beginning of the 20th Century, G. K. Chesterton warned that slavery was a "very human" expedient, and would therefore likely be tried again. It was, in a big way: tens of millions of Europeans and Asians were enslaved, and almost as many murdered, over the following decades by the great secular religions of Nazism and Marxism-Leninism, for thought-crime, race-crime, owning two cows when one was permissible, or praying to the God in heaven, instead of to demogods in the Kremlin.

In this post, I'll respond to Avalos' attempt to deal with all this post-Christian "secular" violence.

Framing: Why Stalin and Hitler?

Avalos does not claim that religion is the only cause of violence. He ascribes violence generally to competition over "scarce resources," of which religion merely creates more:

Our aim is not so much to deny that the violence is performed by secular institutions and individuals, but rather to show that secular philosophies are not as clear a motive for violence as is often supposed. Our discussion considers Nazism and Stalinism, two of the main supposed culprits of atheistic violence.

This way of framing the issue begs two questions. First, few Christian scholars claim that Nazism was "atheistic." There are exceptions: Dinesh D'Souza in What's So Great About Christianity seems to make this claim fleetingly, while Richard Weikart argues that Social Darwinism was the most important influence on Nazism. But few reasonable people describe Hitler as either an atheist or any kind of orthodox Christian.

Avalos' decision to focus on "Stalinism" is even more peculiar.

Stalin was hardly the only communist to commit violence. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were devout atheists, and their ideology emerged from a circle of "Left Hegelians" who were deeply inspired by the poet Percy Shelley's anti-God tract, Promethius Unbound. Marx and Engels unequivocally advocated violence. Their chief disciple in Russia, Vladimir Lenin, did a vast amount of killing to create the Soviet Union: a union that did not come together on a volunteer basis. Lenin and his immediate disciples, including Leo Trotsky, then committed still more violence, including by creating the Chekist secret police, in the eleven years before Joseph Stalin seized unambiguous control of the movement in 1928.

By that time, the Chinese Communist Party had already been founded. Its leader more or less until his death in 1976, Mao Zedong, was usually not under the control of Joseph Stalin. Yet he committed great violence, including against harmless Buddhist priests, Christian pastors and farmers. Mao and his comrades, all atheists, killed more innocent people than Joseph Stalin, and committed what many Chinese recognize as an equally tragic act of violence: the systematic destruction of four thousand years of some of the most brilliant art and places of worship in the world. In smaller communist countries, Enver Hofha, Fidel Castro, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pott committed systematic, massive, and horrendous acts of violence against their many often innocent victims, all in the name of an ideology that (Avalos is honest enough to admit, I am glad to see, see below) made atheism an intrinsic part of its ideology and propaganda.

Avalos is not the only secular humanist who seeks to conflate "Stalinism" with "communism:" Dawkins and others do this as well. But as Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out, from his experience in the Gulag, communists who were imprisoned by Stalin sometimes seemed to talk even more ruthlessly than the man who imprisoned them.

In Jesus and the Religions of Man, twelve years ago, I asked, "Where did Marx go wrong?" discussing and dismissing this already common tendency under the sub-head, "It was the Snakes' Fault!" As I pointed out then, not only independent communist leaders, but their followers, too, deserve blame:

But as French sociologist Jacques Ellul says, propaganda can only exploit what is in a person, not what is not.   Who gained a new apartment when a neighbor was denounced in a secret letter, or ate imported sweets when everyone else was standing in line for bread, because he was willing to shoot at shadows slipped westward into no-man's land? Not Stalin alone. The devil can't make us do what we don't want to do. Personal responsibility is at the heart of traditional morality common to the traditions of humanity. (48)

Adolf Hitler, Bible scholar?

Avalos has attempted to trace the evils of Nazism to Christianity elsewhere, and I have argued that those attempts fail. His goal in this chapter, again, seems to be to maximize the alleged Christian influence on Nazism, and minimize any influence atheism may have had:

The fact that Nazi ideologues saw themselves as religious refutes the idea that Nazism was necessarily, or actually, based on atheism. (308)

Avalos only provides anecdotal evidence that "Nazi ideologues" did regard themselves as "religious," whatever that infamously squishy word means.  Some of Hitler's chief lieutenants were stridently anti-Christian. Some early precursors to Hitler's plan of genocide were Social Darwinists, like Ernst Haeckel, Germany's chief promoter of Darwinism, who advocated killing the "unfit."  Richard Weikart notes:

Since many Darwinists and most early eugenicists were critical of the Christian virtues of compassion and pity for the weak and sick, they led the attack on Judeo-Christian prohibitions against killing innocent human life. (From Darwin to Hitler, 145)

Hitler was also deeply influenced by the atheist philosopher, Arthur Schoppenhaur, and probably Friedrich Nietzsche as well.

Instead of examning these influences, Avalos focuses on a marginal figure who may have influenced Nazism, but was more of a Gnostic than a Christian:

The work of Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels illustrates the extent to which the Bible was used to suport the notion of race and Aryan supremacy. (309)

Bringing up someone no one has ever heard of, and who was hardly a Christian, to link the Bible and the Nazis, is a thin reed on which to rest an argument. Avalos says he counts "at least 100 biblical references" in Liebenfels' major work, along with references to works on anthropology and paleontology. He admits Liebenfels' read of the Bible is "certainly tendentious and his philology is flawed," but no more so than that of Glock and Stark!

In fact, Liebenfel was a Gnostic, who twisted biblical stories deliberately in the service of an ideology that was fundamentally hostile to Christianity.

When Avalos brings up Alfred Rosenberg, who repudiated the Old Testament, comparing him to Ernest Renan in his effort to trace Christianity to its alleged "Nordic roots," one senses the desperation of Avalos' case.  Avalos further claims that Haeckel, a pantheist, "saw himself as simply reexpressing biblical concepts in scientific language." The "grounds" Avalos gives for this is that Haeckel approvingly cited "the ancient wisdom of the Golden Rule!" (As who does not?)  Such shell games would not fool an attentive labrador.

Avalos also twice describes Adolf Hitler as a biblical "exegete" -- not very skillful, but no worse than Luther or other "orthodox" believers. (318)

The desperation of Avalos' attempts to tie Christianity to Nazism thus grows more palpable by the minute. Comparing Luther, who staked his life on "Solo Scriptura," to Adolf Hitler as "exegetes" of the Bible? Hitler was, obviously, a hack, looking for reinforcement wherever he could find it, but seldom deigning to open the Bible, and then only for his own purposes. Avalos should understand the feeling.

The Nazi Holocaust represents the synthesis of attitudes found in both the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures. (319)

Given Avalos' complete failure to demonstrate that link, this conclusion falls on the ears as mere bluster, not supported by any real body of evidence the undeniably industrious Avalos has been able to find.

Joseph Stalin, Atheist

Avalos proves more reasonable and less dogmatic when it comes to communism that I expected, however. I think he still understates the role atheism played in communism, but he does not simply deny that role, as some skeptics seem to do.

Stalin never justified any actions with direct statements such as 'I do not believe in God, therefore I am committing violent act X' . . . Stalin did follow many anti-religious policies that can reasonably be attributed to his atheism. (326)

The latter comment came as a relief, after some of the "spin" Avalos engaged in earlier in the section.

Rather than showing Stalin's reign of terror as simply an atheistic plot, the new documents show that the (Russian Orthodox Church) continued its pre-Communist alliance, though tenuous and complex, with the elite powers. (331)

Avalos is here adopting a tedious posture: that in the late 1990s, some great new set of data has overthrow our previous, simplistic understanding of how the Soviet government dealt with religion. But every "new" fact he points to, was well known to students of the Soviet Union when I was studying its history and policies in college, in the 1980s. One could also much of this from the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in the 1970s, or from other sources, earlier.

This seems part and parcel with Avalos' general attitude, Gnostic in its own way, that really good scholars like himself are in a position to rethink every position, and overthrow common perceptions. Or perhaps Avalos was himself ignorant of the facts until the 1990s. Of course communist governments persecuted religion selectively, depending on the greater needs of the moment. Of course the Soviets openned churches during World War II, and tried to co-opt religious leaders. This is also described in Brother Andrew's God's Smuggler, an evangelical best-seller in the 1970s, and by Richard Wurmbrand.

That degree of pragmatism is a basic element in time-tested communist strategy, what are called "Common Front" organizations. The same strategy was manifest, for instance, when communists and nationalists in China joined against the common enemy of the invading Japanese in World War II.
Communists sometimes tolerated religion, and often bribed, brainwashed, or coerced religious leaders into carrying out their policies. One can call that an "alliance" in the same sense in which a camp commander in the Gulag "allies" himself with a prisoner who acts as a stool-pidgeon for preferential treatment.

Dr. Avalos also (again) conflates the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 as an instance of "collectivization" and forced terror, here also neglecting to mention that no violence was done by human beings in the story. I responded to this tendentious reading in my Amazon review of The Christian Delusion, and in our debate that followed, showing that few scholars accept Avalos' read of the passage.

The idea that atheism was responsible for the mass terror under Stalin is partly true. Atheism was certainly a part of the reason for antireligious violence throughout the Soviet era. The larger factor, however, seems to be political. (333)

I am glad Avalos admits this much.

The word "political," here, doesn't mean much, I think. Avalos recognizes that Stalin and his fellow Soviets disliked "religion," and that their hatred manifested itself in unjust violence. He fails, however, to deal with a deeper level of causality. Did atheism allow the communists to deny moral absolutes, and the authority of God, and adopt an "ends justifies the means" sort of morality? If it did, then not only communist violence against innocent believers, but against kulaks, dissidents, "thought criminals," and prisoners, also against, say, Chinese art, all reflect the influence of a particular atheistic worldview.

Which does not, of course, mean all atheists agree. But enough did, to make the 20th Century pretty hellish, in some quarters.

"Jesus Command Hate!" (Origins of Religious Violence IV)

2012-01-15T21:44:00.000-08:00

Let's skip Dr. Avalos' deconstruction of the Old Testament, and move to what for Christians is the heart of the matter: his attempt to argue that Jesus was at best ambiguous about violence, perhaps even more ruthless than the Yahweh-worshiping savages Avalos has raked over the coals (figurately, of course) in previous chapters.

A blow-by-blow rebuttal of key or particularly pernicious claims Avalos makes, will give readers a flavor of his argument, and why it is dead wrong.  In the final part of this post, a section called "Jesus Commands Hate!" (Avalos' own words), we will look at the big picture, which as we will see (and most readers may recognize long before that) Avalos grossly neglects or obfuscates.

Can we know Jesus?

Dr. Avalos begins with common skeptical doubts about the historical Jesus:

"The problem is compounded by the nature of our source materials . . . P52, which dates from the second century . . . contains only a few verses from John 18 . . . Thus, we cannot verify that any or all of the words found in those third and fourth-century manuscripts actually represent what Jesus said. In fact, passages such as Mark 16:9-20 and I John 5:7, which were regarded as original portions of the New Testament just a few centuries ago, are no longer held to be such." (176)

This scews a lot of big issues in an overly skeptical direction. P52 dates to the EARLY 2nd Century.  It is highly unusual to find extant ancient sources that close to the events they record. Even fuller NT manuscripts from the 3rd and 4th centuries are unusually early, compared to the norm. Also, Avalos neglects to mention that huge amounts of the NT can be found in quotations by Christians and non-Christians from fairly early in the 2nd Century: 170 Synoptic cites mid-century by Justin Martyr alone.

Plus, the foreign and late character of the end of Mark is obvious. The fact that it sticks out so plainly shows why it's unlikely that much else was interpolated by late scribes, as Avalos seems to suggest. The rest of Mark SOUNDS like Mark, as most of John sounds like John. That may sound simplistic or subjective, but one shouldn't ignore such obvious facts.

Is the New Testament "ambivalent" towards "violence?"

"This chapter will show how Christianity, beginning with the New Testament authors, has an ambivalent stance toward violence. Some passages indeed enjoin peaceful responses, but we shall show that even these responses can be interpreted as tactical, meaning that they are intended for utilitarian purposes." (177)

This thesis sentence seems to set the reader up for a lot of fudging.

Every text is "ambivalent," in many ways. That's a favorite scholarly canard, which can mean roughly, "You think you know this book you've been reading all your life? Hah! I will now justify my tax-payer funded education by showing that what you suppose to be its point, in your naive, literalistic reading, is only one of many I can tease out with the scalpels of scholarly exegesis!"

Same with the words "can be interpreted."  They flash a warning light at the cautious reader: "Beware! Humbug ahead!"

And indeed, the humbug begins right away:

"At the same time, we see non-Christians using violence to counter assaults by Christians on sacred space. One example is the story of the arrest of Stephen, who was later stoned to death. Note the role of sacred space and scripture in outlining the reason's for Stephen's execution: 'They set up false witnesses who said, "This man never stops saying things against this holy place and the law."'" (Acts 6:13)

How, in this story, did Christians "assault" sacred space?

Actually, they didn't. It's true the victim (Stephen) was found guilty of arguing with religious leaders. He was also vaguely accused of speaking with hostility, whatever that means, about the temple. (Perhaps his accusers were echoing the literalistic and suspicious spin the Pharisees had given Jesus' words, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up." As we will see, 1st Century Pharisees were not the last intellectuals to interpret Jesus in a woodenly cynical manner.)

Avalos jumps from that bad exegesis to the following conclusion:

"In sum, already in the NT we have instances of violence related to the acquisition or maintanance of sacred spaces . . . The New Testament already shows us a basic paradigm for violence . . . " (181)

Is this what Avalos means by "can be interpreted?"  "With a little ingenuity, I can force the text into any mold I like?"

There is not the slightest hint here that Jesus' first followers used violence against anyone, or condoned using violence. This is like accusing Martin Luther King of "being involved in a violent altercation on the road to Selma." Literally it's true, but it's grossly misleading.

Skipping Avalos' discussion of the Crusades, which I covered in my last post, on pages 187-8 he tries to give examples of "violence resulting from inscripturation." He plainly would like to find at least one such act of violence in the New Testament. This is what he comes up with:

"Clues to conflict resulting from inscripturation can be found within the NT itself. Note, for example, Acts 19:19: 'A number of those who practiced magic collected their books and burned them publicly; when the value of these books was calculated, it was found to come to fifty thousand silver coins.' The premise of such burning is that the so-called magic books did not contain God's word, and joining Christianity meant destroying rival scriptures."

Again, this is horribly shoddy, I am tempted to think wilfully dishonest, exegesis.

First of all, there is no violence here, as Avalos has defined it, so why is he even talking about the passage? Some people changed religions, and got rid of some books they didn't want any more. This wasn't Nuremburg: the books were their own property. There were no burn bans on, and they had a right to get rid of those books in a manner of their choosing.

Secondly, there is no suggestion that these books are "rival scriptures." Luke begins by telling us the converts practiced magic. A book of magic is not usually or necessarily a scripture. The Greek term used here, περίεργος, which one can almost translate "peripheral works," implies that the contents are petty or trivial, which hardly sounds like the works of Plato.

Third, there is no hint, anywhere in the NT that I am aware of, that Christians ever destroyed books, even their own, simply because they "did not contain God's Word." Paul was not averse to quoting pagan authors, which he had done only two chapters previously, without a hint that reading them was somehow wrong.

And fourth, Avalos scoffs at the word "magic." I explain, in Jesus and the Religions of Man, how Christian miracles and magic differ. It is evident the early Christians
recognize the difference, even if Dr. Avalos does not.

How do Christians treat outsiders?

"Indeed, the dissolution of ethnocentricism in New Testament Christianity is quite superficial: Christianity has actually substituted a different type of group privilege." (190)

This can be a valid complaint. Sometimes Christians do treat outsiders a lot like Jews once treated Gentiles. This is unfortunate, but hardly novel: we are by nature animals of the pack.

But at least in theory, there is a definite advance, here, which Avalos has missed. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, whose birthday it is tomorrow, the Gospel judges us on the content of our character and our relationship to God, not on the "color of our skin" -- or gender, nationality, or class. I see that as progress.

Who will be Saved?

Atheists often seem to think that the Christian doctrine that some will be saved, is morally indefensible, while their own doctrine, that we are all food for worms, is unassailable. And I can see their point, if the harsher images of hell in the NT are taken literally.

But it seems hypocritical to me, for atheists to criticize Christians for preferring our faith over religions we see as less true (though not devoid of truth), even while they dismiss all religions as more or less entirely batty. Avalos engages in this a bit, on page 198:

"Thus, William E. Phipps, who welcomes a more ecumenical attitude among Catholics toward Muslims and Jews, goes on to devalue New Age movements as follows: 'Much of what is called New Age spirituality, with its attention to self-deification, horoscopes, crystal gazing, seances and other irrational magic, is just a current phase of Old Age superstition that is global in scope.'

"This assumes, of course, that the Eucharist, salvation, and prayer to the Christian god do not constitute equally unverifiable 'superstitions.' In short, even this more 'inclusive' theology simply results in the maintenance of the scarce resource called 'salvation' as presumably New Age techniques would not be considered salvific."

Of course Dr. Avalos doesn't think these New Age techniques are "salvific," either. So what is he complaining about? His theology makes salvation not just a scarce resource, but a non-existent one.

Here again, too, we have the implicit assumption that faith in God is unverifiable. Probably Phipps does not agree. I certainly don't. So Avalos attempts to erase the distinction between Christianity and the New Age based on the "scarce resource" of his own non-inclusive "canon within a canon" interpretation of why religious people believe. But why should we accept that? His theology is certainly less inclusive that that of Mr. Phipps.

A final, Girardian aside, before the main point

"Contrary to Girard's theory, the belief in sacrifice can create new rationales for violence rather than result in the final overthrow of mimetic or scapegoating violence." (205)

Those who have read Rene Girard will find this a strange sentence. Girard knows quite well that belief in sacrifice creates "new rationales for violence:" this has been one of his chief themes, since Dr. Avalos was in grade school.

But I won't delay the reader by explaining the complexities of Girard's actual theory, since we have now arrived at Avalos' bizarre attack on Jesus.

"Jesus Commands Hate"

Those are the words of Avalos' subtitle, on 216. And he goes on:

"Arbitrary selectivity and interpolation is the main reason that the New Testament is so often viewed as preaching only or essentially love. However, the existence of violence in Christianity cannot be explained unless it is also recognized that Jesus also preached 'hate.'"

Let's begin with Avalos' background assumption, here. Is it really true that if, over the past two millennia, many Christians have committed violent acts, as obviously they have, that can only be explained by showing that Jesus preached hatred?

Or, while we're at it, if Buddhists have often committed violent acts (as they also have), then the Buddha must also have preached hatred?   And Confucius and Lao Zi must also have been hate-mongers? Because there is no other POSSIBLE explanation for murder or cruelty in a vast religious tradition, than that the founder of that tradition encouraged it?

I can think of one other explanation: people like to fight. We cut one another off in traffic. We point middle fingers. We covet. We commit adultery, and blame other people for our faults. We gang up on the weak, take our frustrations out on those lower down on the totem pole, form factions, cliques, Hatfields and McCoys, Crips and Bloods.

The gospels themselves teach us to expect this kind of behavior -- even from Christians! Jesus had to rebuke his own disciples, when they wanted to call down fire on an unrepetent village. "You do not know what spirit you belong to."

How about the claim that it is "arbitrary" to suggest that the New Testament emphasizes love?

This is, of course, absurd. The NIV concordance gives about 400 references to "love" in the New Testament, and 14 to "hate." The latter including "no one ever hated his own body," "hate wickedness," "blessed are you when men hate you on account of me," and "do good to those who hate you" -- such vile, pernicious stuff!

The "love" passages include some of the most magnificent passages in human literature.

I am tempted, at this point, to just dismiss Dr. Avalos as a fool, and have done with it. His method here is like finding an odd spelling by William Shakespeare (they are easy to find), and declaring,

"One might say Mr. Shakespeare was very good at English, the conventional view. One could just as well note that he made a lot of simple spelling mistakes. It would involve an arbitrary privileging of a 'canon within a canon' to choose the former description."

There is also the fact, even bigger than words, that Jesus saved lives, and did not take them. He fed the hungry. He healed the sick, spoke kindly to the poor, saved the wretched, and protected women.

And, of course, died for the sins of the world, praying, "Father, forgive them (the murderers, the "out-group"), for they don't know what they are doing."

But now Avalos swings his heavy gun around -- the one and sole use of "hate" by Jesus that might, conceivably, justify his claim:

"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple."

Avalos grasps this text like a dusty old prospector who has found a ruby of great value after a lifetime of tunneling through mines. He spends four long pages defending his allegedly straight-forward and honest interpretation:

"The text seems as clear an expresion of hate as any text found anywhere . . . "

He argues against disassembling scholars who don't think Jesus "really meant" what he said. Christians must hate their parents! What else is there to say?

"There is a great circularity at work in saying that Jesus cannot mean hate in Luke 14:26 because he preaches 'love' elsewhere. But we can reverse this rationale and argue that Jesus probably did not mean 'love' literally elsewhere because he clearly meant 'hate' in Luke 14:26." (218)

I find myself more irritated at the mind-numbing stupidity of this argument, as at the wilfull blindness it displays.

An honest person cannot, in fact, do as Avalos suggests, here. One cannot interpret hundreds of calls to love, by one single, and obviously rhetorical, call to "hate." That would break every scholarly norm of exegesis.

One can and should interpret the exception by the norm. One might, for instance, reasonably interpret the word "love" as it appears in Hitler's Mein Kampf -- "This probing into books and newspapers and studying the teachings of Social Democracy reawakened my love for my own people" -- by the man's whole wretched life.

For mature readers, words emphatically do NOT always take their most conventional meanings. There are such things as sarcasm, hyperbole, irony, satire, figures of speech, and caricature.

One of the most obvious things about Jesus, besides his genuine love, as obvious as Hitler's hate, was the fact that he often used attention-grabbing figures of speech. Kenneth Leong, a Zen Buddhist, wrote a book describing Jesus as a brilliant Zen Master, using language like koans, to arrest attention, and cause his hearers to think more deeply.

"Cut your right eye." "Drink my blood." "Get behind me, Satan!" "Vipers!" "Take up your cross." 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up!"

Why did Jesus use figurative and dramatic language? For those too dense to allow a genius to speak like a genius, Jesus explained one reason for that, too: "So that hearing, they will not understand . . . "

Is it really likely that Jesus was telling his hearers to "hate their own lives?" The parallelism points to the fact, which I think illiterate Palestinian peasants must have picked up on, anyway ("illiterate" not being a synonym for "dense"), that Jesus didn't really want his disciples hating their parents, anymore than he wanted them to commit suicide.  He meant "hate" roughly in the sense of "reject, when their will is in conflict with the will of God."

Perhaps Jesus wanted his disciples to remember this saying, and put it in paradoxical form so they would. Perhaps, like a koan, he wanted them to dwell on it, worry it, and tease the meaning out of its strangeness, in light of his example of a love that could not be manipulated.

If Avalos really thinks Jesus meant "hate," he is terribly obtuse. If he is only pretending to think that, as seems more likely, then he is disengenuous.

And that is the only such passage Avalos can find. Most cults can find more and stronger proof texts in the gospels for their heresies than that.

"In sum, Christianity, if it is meant to be a religion based on the New Testament, does not endorse a love open to all. Love was still primarily meant for other Christians. Christianity simply substituted creedal adherance for genealogical identity as basis for receiving love . . . No New Testament or early Christian writer can be found who believes in complete nonviolence, and all can be seen to believe in a sort of deferred violence." (228)

The assumption here seems to be that, to be moral, Scripture SHOULD endorse "complete nonviolence." Yet elsewhere, Avalos makes it clear that he is not a pacifist: he even seems to support blowing up Mecca, if push comes to shove.  So why is Avalos demanding a morality he himself does not believe in?

Anyway, the best responses to this last paragraph, and perhaps to Avalos' entire assault on the Christian tradition, can be found in the New Testament itself:

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" (Luke 23:34)

"Lord, do not hold this sin against them!" (Acts 7: 59)

Hector Avalos does violence to the Crusades.

2012-01-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

Urban II preaching
the Crusade.

One of the most impressive qualities of Dr. Avalos' Fighting Words is the number and breadth of sources he cites. One cannot accuse him of not doing his homework: at the end of some chapters, you so find more than a hundred citations, and he has obviously been reading in a bunch of languages, as well.

But this breadth of citation also means that most readers will not have read most of the sources. Avalos touches on a vast sweep of history here, from ancient Israel to the modern world. So if one gets the impression that Avalos is misrepresenting his sources, this will seriously undermine one's trust in the book as a whole.

Some of Avalos' sources I have read. I find some of his Scriptural citations dicy, and even more his representation of Scripture as a whole. But let's save that discussion for a later post, and focus here on how Dr. Avalos abuses the Crusades.

The Crusades are covered on pages 181-186, then again on 261.  Avalos' argument reaches its climactic conclusion in the following formula on 186 (Avalos is fond of such formulas):

"Belief that Jerusalem is sacred space

+ Belief that this sacred space belongs to Christians, not non-Christians

+ Promise of transcendent rewards

= Violence in order to regain Jerusalem."

The pages that precede this formula neatly support each of these points.  Avalos depicts Pope Urban II's original call for a Crusade as being based firmly on these four points.

Here is how Avalos begins his discussion of Urban's famous sermon. The following quotation is also useful because it names the sources on which Avalos (and the rest of us) rely for that sermon:

"Some of the clearest examples of the relationship between violence and sacred space may be found in the First Crusade and the propaganda meant to incite Christians to join it. The speech delivered by Urban II at Clermont has not been directly preserved, but we do have various accounts of it from supposed witnesses or recorders. These include the versions of Fulcher of Chartres (1101), Robert the Monk (1107), the anonymously written Gesta Francorum (deeds of the Franks), Balderic of Dol (1108-10), and Guibert of Nogent (ca 1109) . . . "

"According to Mayer's chronology, Fulcher of Chartres is closer to the actual event of the speech. Urban's motivation for this Crusade is clear in the following: 'Therefore, on this matter deserving prayer, not I, but the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds to publish this edict everywhere and to persuade people of whatever rank, knights and foot-soldiers, rich and poor, to aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy this vile race from our lands."

After this last line, Avalos says nothing more of "aiding Christians." The rest of his discussion focuses on seizing "sacred space" from the Turks, with no hint of any appeal to justice or compassion.  In Avalos' telling, the war is all about getting back Jerusalem, "consecrated because of the birth, preaching, and death of Jesus Christ."

After putting recovery of "sacred space" front and center in explaining the First Crusade, Avalos spends some time discussing the "promise of transcendant rewards," the heavenly pay-back the Pope and other leaders promised those who went on crusades.

But in all this, Avalos grossly misrepresents the historical records he cites.

Here is how Fulcher actually describes the beginning of Urban's appeal to carry out the first crusade:

"Hastening to the way, you must help your brothers living in the Orient, who need your aid for which they have already cried out many times.

"For, as most of you have been told, the Turks, a race of Persians, who have penetrated within the boundaries of Romania even to the Mediterranean to that point which they call the Arm of Saint George, in occupying more and more of the lands of the Christians, have overcome them, already victims of seven battles, and have killed and captured them, have overthrown churches, and have laid waste God's kingdom . . .

"Concerning this affair, I, with suppliant prayer -- not I, but the Lord -- exhort you . . . persuade all of whatever class . . . to strive to help expel that wicked race from our Christian lands before it is too late."

This puts Urban's speech in a different light!

The other accounts of Urban's speech, aside from the Gesta version which is short and mentions neither geopolitics, nor the crimes of the Turks, nor Jerusalem, agree in stressing the following points, usually in this order:

(1) The Turks had invaded and conquered "Christian lands." This was plain historical fact: indeed, Christendom had shrunk by about half over the past 400 years, due to jihadist expansion. (And much of the Middle East was, indeed, "occupied territory:" Christians were probably still a majority in many areas; a large, oppressed minority in others.) Turkish attacks on Byzantine presented a renewal of what must have seemed, and indeed was, an existential threat to Europe.

(2) It was the duty of Europeans to come to the aid of their fellow Christians, as the Byzantine emperor had requested.

(3) Pilgrims headed to the Holy Land were systematically being despoiled, robbed, tortured, raped, and killed, one source says by the thousands, by Muslim occupiers.

(4) According to Robert, Baldric, and Guibert, Urban emphasized the horror which the Turks visited on non-combatants:

"We have heard, most beloved brethren, and you have heard what we cannot recount without deep sorrow -- how, with great hurt and dire sufferings our Christian brothers, members in Christ, are scourged, oppressed, and injured in Jerusalem, in Antioch, and the other cities of the East . . . "

Robert describes various sadistic tortures inflicted by the Turks in vivid, bloody detail, which I will spare readers of this blog, adding:

"What shall I say of the abominable rape of the women? . . . The kingdom of the Greeks is now dismembered by them and deprived of territory so vast in extent that it cannot be traversed in a march of two months . . . "

(5) It is only AFTER detailing these horrors, that Urban begins to speak of the sanctity of Jerusalem, which in some accounts he does in some detail. (The one exception is Guibert's version, in which Urban begins with Jerusalem, then goes on to the atrocities of the Turks.)

(6) Urban does, indeed, also talk about spiritual rewards for the crusades, also (in at least one account) some end-times scenarios.

So the actual formula should be as follows:

Fact that Islam had conquered half of Christendom, including much of Europe, by this time.

+ Fact that the Turks had recently conquered much of the Middle East, including much of the remaining Byzantine Empire.

+ Fact that the Turks seemed an existential threat to surviving Christendom.

+  Fact that the conquest and occupation had been and remained both bloody and cruel.

+ Fact that unarmed pilgrims to the Holy Land were being abused by the occupiers.

+ Fact that most occupants of the area were still Christians and Jews.

+ Fact that these territories were of special importance to Christians.

+ Promises of earthly trial, and

+ Heavenly rewards and Apocalypse Now.

= Call to the Crusades.

Now why didn't Dr. Avalos say all this?

Obviously, because telling the full story would carry the advantage of being historical truth, but the disadvantage of ruining his story.

Is this what Avalos means by a "canon within a canon?" Has he made historical truth a "scarce resource" by forgetting these snippets of information -- "Oh, yes, the young man I described being beaten up by the old lady in the park did, actually, rob and beat her first . . . I didn't think those earlier details were germane to discussion of the violence her umbrella subsequently visited on him!"

Avalos "forgets" to tell us that much of the Middle East was, in fact, still occupied largely by Christians. He says nothing about 400 years of Muslim "crusading" that had conquered half of Christendom, including large segments of Europe. (Muslim raiders had even sacked Rome a few decades before.) He neglects to mention the stress Urban laid, according to some reports, on supporting an ally that had lost much of its lands already to Turkish invaders. He says nothing about the robbing of pilgrims. Nor does he mention the tortures and murders that apparently so weighed on Urban's mind.

Avalos gives the impression that Urban woke up one morning, turned over in bed, and said to himself:

"By Gum! We haven't murdered enough innocents lately! How about if we launch a Crusade to get back Jerusalem? Always wanted to go there and walk in Jesus' footsteps. I know: I'll promise a slice of heaven for every infidel our chaps kill! This will be a great warm-up exercise for the coming Armageddon!"

So the question arises: in the face of such gross misrepresentation of important historical facts, can we trust anything Avalos quotes from sources we haven't read?

I'm afraid the answer must be "No!" We cannot, apparently, trust any citations in this book without checking the originals for ourselves. Where the original is not available, we must suspend judgement. It is not, apparently, safe to cite Hector Avalos on the content of an historical text.

Avalos does, it is true, later slip the fact that:

"To be sure, many of the Crusades also involved political and economic motives, especially among the elite leaders."

But he does not mention moral motives, nor does he let his readers know that "sacred space" appears in most accounts of Urban only after a long discussion of actual invasions, threats, and attrocities that sound even today a lot like "just cause."

Avalos later also gives the false impression that the Crusaders killed everyone in Jerusalem. In fact, many appear to have been spared. He gullibly (or disengenuously) takes the report that the blood of the slaughtered went up to the bridles of horses at face value -- which is not physically possible -- and ascribes this great slaughter, not to the rules of war at the time (as Stark argues), but implying, for no valid historical reasons, that the Crusaders were following the model of Saul's slaughter of the Amalekites.

The Crusades were, no doubt, violent, and some of those who went on them might be war criminals, by our standards. (As, no doubt, Dresden or Nagasaki might seem evil to the inquisitors, let alone to a Medieval like St. Francis of Assissi.) Both Crusaders and their enemies conducted war in a pretty normal manner for the time, as Rodney Stark shows in God's Battalions. And Avalos grossly misrepresents the motives for which the Crusaders fought.

"Remember Pearl Harbor coral reefs!"
credit: Jon Loach

It may be that some Americans were especially angry at the Japanese for bombing so lovely a lagoon as Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. But it would be absurd to ascribe Dresden or Nagasaki purely to affrontery by crazed environmentalists over damage to the coral reefs of Oahu, and ignore little details like Japanese and German attacks on people. Avalos' attempt to explain the Crusades as a stupid tither over sacred places, is no more plausible.

Temperature Inversion!

2012-01-12T07:28:00.000-08:00

Snoqualmie Falls
during an autumn flood

I plan to post another violent attack on Hector Avalos' Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence later today. But let's take a break and delve briefly into one of our favorite branches of science: weird weather.

Last night I drove my son to his high school a few miles to the east to play trombone at a basketball game, and then home a few hours later, and noticed two peculiar phenomena.

First, the road around Snoqualmie Falls was wet, and "rain" (I thought at first) was pelting the roadway -- even though the stars were out. The wind didn't seem to be blowing that hard, nor is the river particularly high, but it seemed the wind was strong enough, and moving in just the right direction, to lift spray from the falls and pelt it onto the road.

Secondly, why was it so much warmer at John's school than at home? His school is -- checking Google Earth -- 425 feet above sea level. Our house is 110 feet above sea level. We drive UP along the falls to get to the school, and usually the temperature decreases. They usually get much more snow there.

This morning, driving John to school again, I noticed the same two phenomena were still in play. The air is still as a whisper in Fall City. There is no fog: the pumkin-colored moon shines through a layer of high overcast. Driving past the falls, where there seems to be some wind, the temperature climbed as high as 39 degrees. Coming back, I paid closer attention: 35 at the school, a couple miles on, then 38 at the falls, then down the hill, and sharply down in temperature: in two miles, 31, by Fall City, 27 degrees.

No cosmic points to make here, and no scientific explanation on offer. I just want to salute a bit of freakish weather, on a clear winter morning, when all the world seems at peace, but invisible forces battle in the heavenlies.

The only thing I can figure, is that warm upper-layer air strikes Snoqualmie Falls, because it's a bit more exposed, and a little higher. (Though the passes, at 3000 and 4000 feet, are both 16 degrees, so it must be a narrow band of warm air.) We're getting what the radio warns will be "air stagnation," though without fog, this morning -- perhaps the upper-layer wind blows that away.

Anyway, a freak of nature should be noted.v Normally the temperature would drop one or two degrees going up the hill: instead, within a few miles, it increased 11-12 degrees Fahrenheit, and the phenomena remained in place from last night to this morning. I've never before seen so much temperature inversion in so short a distance.

The confidence of Keith Parsons against miracles.

2012-01-10T21:54:00.000-08:00

The eminent atheist philosopher, Dr. Keith Parsons, recently defended Hume's critique of miracles.

I think Dr. Parsons is wrong on both his main assumptions: (1) the prior probability of the resurrection is, I think, pretty high, and (2) the evidence given in the NT for that event is remarkably strong. I don't see how these two points could be adequately explained in less than a book, though: I will not try to do it here.

I was, though, intrigued by these comments:

"How low can I reasonably put my priors for the occurrence of an event that I regard as physically impossible, like resurrecting a dead body? Well, pretty much as low as I like. If I want to put it at one in a million, I can put it at one in a million. Show that I can’t. Prove that this would be unreasonable. If you can’t (and you can’t), then that is the burden of proof you have to meet: one in a million."

Does this mean Dr. Parsons is that confident that his honesty and clarity of thought are superior to those of intelligent believers who have thoroughly examined the evidence for miracles, or who have experienced them themselves, critically examined those experiences, and come to the conclusion they were real? Or who have examined the evidence for God in general, and concluded that it is solid? He thinks there is a less than one in a million chance that they have observed accurately or thought more clearly, than that his own view of the universe could be wrong?

I wonder if one could justify such self-confidence on any objective grounds? Beginning, perhaps, with a theory of evolution that would bless one man with such vast cognitive superiority over his fellows, in a single generation?

I hope this doesn't sound too sarcastic; I am serious about the question.

Swinging for the Fences: Avalos on Violence and Religion II

2012-01-08T09:23:00.000-08:00

Return from the Crusade,
by Karl Lessing

Hector Avalos' Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence promises to cover four subjects: (a) "Past Explanations of Violence," a review of previous theories about religion and violence; (b) Avalos' own theory, with examples from "the Abrahamic Religions;" (c) "Secularism and Violence," which I expect will attempt to explain why secular movements (the commies) are often so violent; and finally (d) "Synthesis," which promises a practical ethics and even (shudder) some "foreign policy implications."

So many interesting topics! This should keep our critical faculties alert for another four posts or so.

Here, I plan to lightly review the first section of the book, then describe Avalos' own theory. We'll stop along the way to examine Avalos' "chronological snobbery," deconstruct a zany definition of violence that threatens to run wild and topple Avalos' theory, and look at contradictions in Avalos' critique of religion, when he accuses fellow secular scholars Glock and Stark of a sin of which he elsewhere suggests religion stands uniquely guilty.

Finally, I'll review the eight key questions mentioned in my first post, and see how Dr. Avalos is doing so far in answering them, and in making a successful case against the alleged violence of religion.

A. "Past Explanations of Violence"

I found this section fairly interesting and reasonably well-done. Avalos begins with proto-theories of violence in the Bible and in Greek philosophy, then brings us (quickly) to the present. The first important two modern theorists he deals with are two thinkers who have greatly influenced me: Rene Girard, and Rodney Stark.  Girard he proposes to rebut in more detail, later in the book. Avalos then describes several thinkers who progressively come closer and closer to his own position, which I will describe below, though he makes it clear none quite makes it there.

Skipping most of the early theories, which Avalos doesn't propose to defend anyway, let me comment on a few peculiar claims in this section, some of which seem to threaten the cogency of his argument.

* Avalos defines "the Enlightenment" as "the period wherein the elite of Western civilization established, as a formidable proposition, the idea that reason and experience are the best judges of truth." (45)

Avalos seems to have a bad case of what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery." When did human beings ever deny that "reason and experience" are the way to finding truth? Medieval scholars were great reasoners. So, in their own way, could be Tibetan monks. And what could anyone ever reason about, except for experience? Even paleolithic sketches on rocks in the South African and Australian deserts of out-of-body experiences by ancient shamans are all about "learning by experience."

The Bible is full of history, which is another word for "experience."  Avalos' description of the Enlightenment seems (here) trite and ahistorical.

* "It is not until the Enlightenment that some begin to discuss how certain religious frameworks can cause violence (e.g., Rousseau and polytheism)." (49)

This, too, is trite, and can also be chocked up to chronological snobbery.

The Bible is filled with discussions of how "certain religious frameworks cause violence." Try reading the prophets, the gospels, and the Book of Acts from this angle -- or even the Revelation of St. John. "And the dragon made war with the rest of her offspring" -- who does Avalos suppose the dragon's mortal forces are supposed to be, there?

* Avalos properly criticizes Shermer for following Tylor and overlooking high gods in primitive cultures. (54) I've made this point about Dawkins and Dennett, among others, myself.

* Avalos promises to prove in a later chapter that "some New Testament authors" advocate more intense violence does the Old Testament. Something to look forward to! (54)

* Dr. Avalos' own theory of religious violence begins with the notion that religions "create scarce resources" that are imaginary. He borrows from his future argument (see below) to critique Glock and Stark as follows:

"By selecting texts that support 'Christian ethics' rather than other texts that may say the opposite, Glock and Stark are creating new scarce resources (eg, a canon within a canon)." (79)

Here, again, Avalos may be cutting the legs off his own chair. Avalos is accusing two secular scholars (Stark was an agnostic when he wrote the text Avalos is critiquing) of what he claims is a typically religious vice: "creating scarce resources" that, presumably, will cause rival scholars to throw their laptops down in a fury, like Moses with his tablets, or hurl them over the lounge chairs at one another.

So religion is not, after all, the problem? Offering viewpoints that fail to take all the evidence for abstract historical theories into account, is the real threat to peace?

What scholar, then, can be without sin? Doesn't all scholarship involve selecting texts on which to focus, from particular angles? Who, then, can cast the first javelin?

And what will Avalos himself do? Will he "create scarce resources" by emphasizing the nasty parts of the Bible and thus "creating a canon within a canon"? Or does he plan to avoid all selection of Bible or Koran texts, and analyze every single verse? (Giving equal weight to the "nice" ones, and without privileging his own interpretation?)

That would be a sight.

Again, Avalos critiques a religious liberal for stressing a "particular definition of God" as the truest:

"Thus constituting the legitimization of another scarce resource ('the true understanding of God.')"

But what is Avalos offering in this book, if not just such another allegedly scarce resource -- "the true understanding of religion and violence?"

How does this act escape approbrium, merely because his imaginary scarce resource involves denying God, rather than affirming him?

One begins to get the feeling that Avalos is dealing from under the table.

This also reminds us how many and diverse are the causes of argument, and therefore of violence. If you laughed when I mentioned pitched battles in the faculty lounge, it's true that scholarly competition doesn't often go that far -- but then, neither does factionalism in most churches. Avalos' own words underlines the similarity between the two that his theory requires him to disavow.

* Regina Schwartz: "Imagining identity as an act of distinguishing and separating from others, of boundary making and line drawing, is the most frequent and fundamental act of violence we commit." (83)

This sounds like a caricature of academic doublespeak. Drawing a line between two people is an "act of violence?" What does Schwartz draw lines with in her faculty lounge, a flame thrower?

And why must an English teacher write such wretched prose?  Can we call that an act of violence against our beautiful language?

Schwartz is a woman, I am a man. There. Have I committed an act of violence? Or of cognition?

Beware, beware of academic cant, my children: it will creep in on you, and destroy your ability to think.

B. "A New Theory of Religious Violence, Exemplified in the Abrahamic Religions"

The crux of Avalos' theory is that religions create imaginary scarce resources, which cause rivalry and fighting. For example, why do Jews, Muslims and Christians fight over the "holy land?" Not because the land is especially rich in mineral resources or fertile fields, or even because it is geographically strategic. Religion has elevated, or demoted, an ordinary stretch of real estate into a prize which armies have come and gone to seize, often leaving smoking ruins and bodies in their wake.

Avalos identifies four such scarce resources: (1) holy texts; (2) sacred space, like Israel, the temple, the Vatican, etc. (3) "group privileging," such as a high priesthood or Brahmins, and (4) "salvation."

In regard to this latter, Avalos lets fall the following comment, the patronizing and un-self-critical character of which only a near-lethal dose of chronological snobbery can explain:

"As we shall show, Christianity is characterized by the belief that at least a priming act of violence, the torture and death of Christ, is necessary for salvation." (110)

Does Hector Avalos really propose to prove that Christianity emphasizes the cross of Jesus Christ?

After two thousand years, our secret is finally out! I guess "hiding the secret in plain sight," in the heart of every gospel, in half the great art of the Middle Ages, and on top of every single church in Christendom, didn't work, after all!

That bit of sarcasm does not, of course, undermine Avalos' theory, which seems internally consistent, on first read. We'll see how well he defends it in the coming chapters. Part of that defense must lie in answering the key questions I asked in my last blog. Let's see what Avalos accomplished on that score, through chapter 5.

C. Does Avalos answer my questions?

In part 1, I jotted down eight questions that occurred to me while reading the first few pages. How well has Avalos answered them, so far?

1. What does Avalos mean by "religion?" I pointed out, in my first blog, that Avalos' definition is self-serving and at odds with the facts.  For one thing, Christians do not, in fact, believe that God is "unverifiable," but claim He has demonstrated His reality in many ways. To overlook this obvious fact, when the New Testament talks relentlessly about probatively convincing "signs," is as big a blunder as to overlook the crosses on all the churches in Christendom.

On page 103, Dr. Avalos finally attempts to defend his definition. It looks like this is all we're going to get, so I'd better quote most of what he says:

"Believers often use the term 'supernatural' to signify something that is beyond nature. In actuality, the term is meaningless, as we cannot know what something beyond nature would be. If we define 'natural' as that which is detectable by one or more of the five senses and / or logic, then the supernatural must be unknown or unknowable. If we could detect it, it would be natural, not supernatural.   If it is not natural, then it is nothing more than a concept whose reality cannot be verified . . .

"Since religion is based on belief in the existence of supernatural beings, it follows that religion is working from unverifiable premises or conclusions when it speaks of the supernatural. That is to say, we cannot verify the existence of anything supernatural. Thus, religious beliefs cannot be subject to public scrutiny, even if they often claim to be based on empirical evidence."

That's it?

Avalos seems to want to win the whole enchilada by definition -- like St. Anselm, one swing, and the ball leaves the park. Only he has no idea where the ball is.

Doesn't it beg the question to define the supernatural as "something that is not detectable by one of the senses and / or logic?"

It is a Catholic dogma that natural reason can demonstrate the existence of God. Avalos simply waves Catholic philosophers aside here -- let's just ignore opposing claims, eh?  He also waves aside all reports of miracles. For some reason, which he does not give, he asks us to simply assume that God is incapable of causing effects in the natural world, which by hypothesis he created, and which Christian theology says he upholds.

On what grounds?

The only answer given, is the sound of crickets.

Does it really follow, that if God is supernatural, he cannot possibly have any way of revealing Himself to beings in the natural world that he made?

So at the heart of Avalos' thesis, we (still) find a profound and stunning emptiness. If Avalos has a coherent defense of his definition, he ought to have given it, by now.

2. What does Avalos mean by "violence?"

We now learn that things like "drawing lines" between people and making scholarly arguments may also be "violent" in Avalos' eyes, somehow -- though he commits these atrocities himself, throughout this very book. (We learned in the preface that the religious and non-religious do not even share the same "mode of life and thought" -- a claim that draws quite a line between people, right there.)

So perhaps all Dr. Avalos means by calling them "violent," is that religions have originated a lot of logical distinctions and scholarly articles?

3. Can Avalos show empirically that what he calls "religion" actually results in more violence than would occur without it?

Dr. Avalos offers little indication in the first 100 pages of the book that he will attempt any such proof -- though perhaps that's the point of the last section of the book. We'll see.

4. Will Dr. Avalos even attempt to do this, or merely offer a series of post-hoc attempts to relate actual instances of violence, to their supposed religious roots?

There are suggestions that he will indeed start with actual instances of violence, then rationalize them to their supposed theological roots.

5. Will Avalos discuss the many cases in which religions caused violence to stop, or justice to win over injustice?

He has not really addressed this issue yet.

6. How will he account for the violence of atheistic societies?

This, apparently, will be the main topic of Part III.

7. Does he assume that "violence" is the only or main ill to avoid?

If asked, I get the sense that he would probably say "no." But there is little attempt to balance the evil of violence with possible moral goods that might be hard tobtain in its absense, so far. (For instance: societies that emphasize conformity, like Japan, tend to have low rates of violence. But they may also lose something in creativity, sponteneity, and freedom, as well as be subject to occasional government coercion towards mass violence.)

8. Could there be a relationship between the breakdown of a society's "sacred canopy," and the decay of a civilization?

Nothing on the possible downside of alleged secular pacifism, yet.

Hector Avalos on Violence and Religion, Part I

2012-01-05T20:46:00.000-08:00

Hector Avalos is an atheist who teaches religious studies (of course!) at Iowa State University. He is not, let us be clear, a fan of religion in general, or of Christianity in particular. In previous blogs, I have jousted with him over his claim that Christianity was to blame for the Holocaust, over his critiques of my claims about slavery in The Truth Behind the New Atheism, and over biblical interpretation, among other issues.

The tone of these debates was not always very friendly.  No matter. This is an important subject, and Avalos is an intelligent man, with a great deal of learning. In reading and reviewing Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence, I will try to be fair, though I certainly come to the book with partial (but not complete) skepticism.

The theoretical apparatus and deliberation with which Avalos begins this book is impressive. As in his other writings, Avalos makes it clear that he thinks fellow scholars have missed the big picture simply by not reading widely enough, and that he is prepared to take up the slack. He has read widely, in many languages. Avalos makes the extent of his ambition clear in the introduction: both religious theories of violence, and academic theories, have failed, and Avalos proposes to supplant them with a new and better theory of how "religion" cruelly harms the world by vastly inflating the amount of unnecessary violence that occurs in it.

I am skeptical, not so much about ANY cheerful or gloomy accessments, but about the whole enterprise -- whether it even makes sense to reify what Avalos calls "religion" in the first place. I think Avalos' task is like trying to hold a downspout full of water in your hands -- in the end, your hands will be wet enough to say water flowed through them, but most of the water will have seaped into the ground and disappeared, long since.

And so, I predict, the facts will largely, but not entirely, elude Avalos' analysis.

In this post, I focus on the book's introduction. Here, Dr. Avalos he announces his intent to show that religion causes violence because it "creates new scarce resources." This is true not just of one religion, and not just of "fundamentalism," but of religion in general, liberalism as well as jihadist Islam, the New Testament maybe even more than the Old.

Several preliminary questions arose for me while reading the first few pages.

*What does Avalos mean by "religion?"

*What does he mean by "violence?"

* Can he show empirically that what he calls "religion" actually results in more violence than would occur without it? In other words, is there some control population to compare with the "religious," so that we even know there is a phenomena in need of explanation?

* Will Dr. Avalos even attempt to do this? Or will he, instead, merely offer a series of post-hoc attempts to relate actual instances of violence, to their supposed religious roots?

* Will Avalos discuss the many cases in which religions caused violence to stop, or justice to win over injustice? Or will we only look at one half of the equation, in this book?

* How will he account for the violence of atheistic societies? Will he attempt to "explain away" communist violence, and then represent, say, Sweden, as the normal non-religious society?

* Does he assume that "violence" is the only or main ill to avoid? Or will he try to balance "violence" against other ills, or goods to be won? (For instance, many aboriginal tribes seem to endure a high level of violence, but also seem more outgoing and sociable than more staid, hands-off neighboring groups.)

* Could there be a relationship between the breakdown of a society's "sacred canopy," and the decay of a civilization? Maybe societies need a certain level of violence to survive? Or will Avalos take the Swedish point of view for granted?

Fortunately, Dr. Avalos recognizes the need to define key terms, and answers the first question just a few pages into his introduction.  He defines religion as follows:

"A mode of life and thought that presupposes the existence of, and relationship with, unverifiable forces and / or beings."

Avalos quickly makes it clear that this definition will be crucial to the argument that follows. Here, if I am not mistaken, I see the foundations of that argument already shaking:

(a) Definitions of religion tend to fall into two categories: (a) those that make belief in supernatural beings essential, as this one does, and (b) psychological or sociological definitions, like Paul Tillich's "ultimate concern." (When people talk about communism as a religion, they usually assume such a broad definition.)

As a secular humanist, of course Avalos wants to define religion in such a way that he can slam "religion" without his own position taking collateral damage. This is why he has to define religion in relation to supernatural beings.

But socially, many secular ideologies seem to act like religions. We'll see if he can explain, say, communism away, without engaging in special pleading. ("But communism is really a secular religion, because Joseph Stalin went to a seminary!")

(b) Avalos supposes that belief in the supernatural involves a special "mode of life and thought." Yet surely on evolutionary grounds, human beings all partake in a mode of life and thought that is far more similar than different. If atheists really are so different from the rest of humanity, such radical bipolarity would seem an odd result for evolution to accomplish. This appears psychologically naive.

(c) The word "presuppose" assumes that religious people believe a priori, rather than in response to evidence.

Yet this is obviously untrue for many believers. Paul believed because he met Jesus on the road to Damascus -- he didn't "presuppose" the deity of Christ.  A legal scholar I know in England converted to Christianity from Islam after he heard the audible voice of God.  I maintain belief in Christianity over more than 30 years of researching and weighing the evidence.

(d) But the biggest "leap" Avalos takes in his definition, is to say that religion involves faith in "unverifiable" beings or forces. What is "unverifiable" supposed to mean? Avalos does not explain, yet this word presupposes immensely difficult issues of epistemology.

Didn't the sight and sound of Jesus speaking to him, and then his blindness as a result, verify the spiritual reality of Jesus to St. Paul?

Doesn't the word "sign" in the Bible point to the fact that the whole point of the gospels is to verify Christian theology, to show how Jesus verified his Messiah-hood, to show that God has verified his call to Israel and the world by raising Jesus from the dead?

As I have argued (see my anthology "Faith and Reason" at christthetao.com), historically, Christian thinkers have almost always argued that Christian theism is in fact verifiable -- that the facts support Christian truth.

Avalos seems here to simply defy or ignore almost all of Christian history and thought about the matter, and for that matter the rational arguments that followers of Mohammed and other teachers make.

And this looks like a key assumption for Avalos. He makes it clear already, that much of what he says in the rest of the book will depend on this definition of religion, in particular on the allegedly unverifiable character of religious claims.

Of course, Avalos probably believes, or claims to believe, that religious claims cannot be supported by good evidence. But you can't just assume something like that, basing a 300 page book on premises that most people deny, without even acknowledging the difficulty!

If Avalos chooses a stringent criteria for verification, one might argue that precious little in this world is "verifiable." Most of what we believe is based on much less than logical or mathematical certainty. And even math and logic depend on our minds, which skeptics often inform us are terribly prone to error.

Maybe Avalos will try to prove that religion can never be verifiable, later in the book -- though it is hard to see how one could fit an adequate a refutation of, say, Pascal, William Lane Craig or Gary Habermas, into a single chapter or book.  And he doesn't seem to have dedicated any chapters to defending this immense assumption. So while the house looks like it might rise several stories tall, with elegant pillars and fine wooden carvings and tasteful bonsai trees out front, the foundations appear to be resting on sand.

No doubt these issues will come up later in the book, and we will have to return to them. A few other points worthy of note from the introduction:

* "We define violence as the act of modifying and / or inflicting pain upon the human body in order to express or impose power differentials."

This also seems an odd definition, though maybe not as potentially devastating as Dr. Avalos' defintion of religion.

If a man shoots an intruder to protect his property, that is not "violence," because his goal is self-protection, and he is not thinking about power? (The imposition of power differentials being a means, not an end?) Or a rapist, if he sincerely wants sexual pleasure? Or even if the Greeks conquered Troy to get back a woman, that was not violence if their motives were pure?

I don't think it's a good idea to allow psychology to play such a large role in defining a physical act.

* Avalos discusses historical causation relatively well.

* "If any scholars come to believe, on the basis of their academic research, that religion or specific religious traditions are harmful to humanity, then it follows that it is their obligation to counteract those beliefs. Of course, this means a nonviolent and dialogic approach, given the current pluralistic politics." (26)

I want to agree, but I'm a little puzzled, here. Why must we assume one must only counteract harmful traditions non-violently? Does this mean a scholar must not serve in Afghanistan, say by violently opposing armies that seek to institutionalize abuse of women?

Why? "Given the current pluralistic politics?" And if conditions change, secular humanists should use violence? Under what conditions or principles?

* "The best way to deal with religious violence is to undermine religion itself." (28)

Perhaps, assuming that (a) religion is a thing that can be "undermined" in general; (b) religious violence is greater than violence without religion; (c) religion does not prevent worse things than violence (despair? boredom? communist jihad?)

* "One has to confront violence in each religion in a frank manner. I believe I do it evenhandedly. As a secular humanism, I do not favor one religion over another, as I hold all of them to be equally based on unverifiable grounds." (29)

Here we learn why Avalos must define religion as he does. Being innocent of a religion in the sense in which he has defined it, he is in a privileged position to act as Judge, Jury, and Executioner of that of which he himself suffers no taint.

* He then admits, however, that "all worldviews" are "hegemonic," including pluralism -- a point John Hick would do well to note.

* "Religious violence is always ethically reprehensible, while the same cannot be said of non-religious violence."

This seems a little unfair. So if, based on reflection and prayer, and appealing to deep theological beliefs, Dietrich Bonhoeffer decides to join the conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler, his fellow-conspirators may be innocent, because of their secular motives, but Bonhoeffer alone must stand guilty?

We are not far into the book, but already profound problems have appeared that seem to undermine Avalos' thesis. We will see what he builds on this foundation, and whether some of his later structures serve, among other things, to help buttress the shaky foundations below, and firm the loose sands on which everything looks to be built.

Atheism in China: Is it Doomed?

2012-01-04T21:16:00.000-08:00

The debate over religion in the West is dominated by Christians, on the one side, and atheists or secularists, on the other, with some input from New Agers. Atheist values are often conflated with those of secular humanism, the dominent atheist "religion" in the democratic world. Secularists also often glibly take a triumphalist posture: "Christianity is dying," they say, pointing to slight downward trends in church-going or faith in God in America, and a larger slides in Europe. (Seldom, however, recalling how often Christianity has ebbed and flowed in the West before.)

What is often forgotten is that most atheists over the past century have not been secular humanists, but Marxists and communists. This may even have been true in Western countries, in some of which (such as Italy and France) communist parties polled 20 or 30% of the electorate during the 1970s.

Today, about two thirds of the people in China deny holding any religious beliefs. This means that MOST "unbelievers" in the world probably live in China, including most atheists.

Over three weeks in October through December, I surveyed about 124 Mainland Chinese intellectuals. (Most in Mainland China, but including 19 near the University of Washington in Seattle.) I learned many interesting things. What I would like to share in this post is what I learned about the precarious position of atheism in modern China.

More than 70 respondents were college students at a major university in northern China. About a dozen other college students answered my survey in other cities. Most of the other respondents had graduated from college, in some cases with MA or Phd degrees. Some were themselves college teachers, including in an Institute of Marxist Studies.

I was curious to see what undergraduates and graduates would say, first about Marxism, then about atheism. Here are some results:

* 23 out of 81 undergraduates who answered the survey as a whole defined their faith as "Marxism." The most popular alternatives were (collectively) "unsure" (15), "other" (9), and "agnosticism" (6), for 30 total votes, various forms of Buddhism (8), Confucianism (8), Lao-Zhuang thought (5), Daoist religion (4), Christian (3), and Islam (1 -- a Uighur from the Northwest). So about 42% of those who defined their faith, chose Marxism.

* Asked what they thought about God, the most common answer was that He does not exist (47), followed by the Pantheistic belief that He is in all things (12), "Other" (12; in practice this often means something like "God is a belief in the heart," monolatry (4), monotheism (4), and polytheism (3). So of those who gave a clear answer, about 67% opted for atheism.

* Among older intellectuals who had already graduated from college, only 7 self-identified as Marxists. The Agnostic (6)/ Unsure (9) / Other (1) block in this case more than doubled the number of Marxists (16), followed by Confucianists (6), Buddhists (5), Christians (5), Lao-Zhuang thinkers (3), Daoist religion (2), and 1 Muslim. So only about 24% of graduates who identified with a belief system, chose Marxism.

*The drop-off was even stronger when it comes to atheism. 11 chose an atheist answer, 6 "don't know," 7 theism (including 3 non-Christians), 6 polytheism, 6 pantheism, and 2 monolatry. Again discounting the uncommitted, 31% opted for atheism.

So the percent of intellectuals who denied that God exists, seemed to be more than cut in half, after graduation.

This is admittedly a small poll, and skewed geographically and by other variables. For one thing, I found that Christian students at the university where I conducted this survey were being suppressed. We cannot automatically assume a larger survey of Chinese intellectuals would follow these figures too closely.

From prior experience surveying Chinese intellectuals, however, I believe this at least roughly reflects the general trend.

One of the Christian graduates, from Mao Zedong's home county, told me she had only become a Christian after graduation. This seems to be a fairly common pattern, evidently not just to Christianity, but to greater openness towards religious beliefs.

Should Christians in America panic because some of our young people lose their faith when they go to college? Does this spell doom for the Christian faith, as many skeptics fervently hope?

Should atheists in China likewise panic at the flight from atheism after graduation?

Here I return to my core conviction about the future: God alone knows what will happen next. Perhaps in both countries, a secularist college education will seem at first to "catch," but will ultimately prove ephemeral, as graduates move out into the "real world" and seek to make their ways in it.

From the Marshalls

2011-12-31T08:43:00.000-08:00

In China this fall, I often stayed at a new chain called "Like Home" hotels. I joked that one way they reminded me of home, was that I sometimes had to chase young men working there off the computer provided for guests, where they had been playing video games, to access the Internet. Now I'm back at my real home, chasing my own boys away from the computer, instead!

John is busy with the real world right now, though. He's begun sending out applications to universities. He woke Mayumi up in the middle of the night when I was still deep in jet-lag, to announce top scores on "subject tests" for SAT physics and advanced math -- he's interested in a scientific or engineering course of study, something to do with airplanes. I've also begun to take him out to practice for driving: so far nothing interesting to report, like the young man who took the gas for the brake, and put a hole in the post office across the street from our house, a few months ago.

James is also studying well, his first year in high school. He's good at reading and writing, but his favorite class is PE. Unlike John, who often waits until the deadline nears to bare down, James usually takes care of his homework as soon as he comes in the door.

We're also playing a lot of ping-pong on the table the boys got for Christmas: it's true winter in Seattle, with the dark and the rain outside, and now people are regretfully taking Christmas lights down. Why does Christmas only last one month?

Mayumi is still working at Bellevue Children's Academy. The school is a few blocks from the Microsoft campus --just over the civic frontier in Redmond. Mayumi and the boys enjoyed their trip back to Tokyo and Nagasaki again this summer, visiting hot springs with relatives, museums in Tokyo. Like Christmas, the annual visit to Japan involves a bit of a ritual: they would be sorry to miss anything on the list of things to do, people to visit.

For me, it's been a long, sometimes difficult, year of writing -- sowing, in the biblical metaphor, with the sometimes frustrating hope of doing some reaping before too long.

Mainly I've been writing my dissertation, which is now almost complete. I believe this work may change how people see the world. Studying the history of Christianity in Asia, the lives and thoughts of great missionaries, and how the Gospel touches the deepest parts of "alien" cultures, it has been a great adventure to knit these threads together into an explanation of how Christianity relates to other religions.

We've also almost completed my next book, Faith Seeking Understanding, expected to come out next September, published by William Carey library, and written in honor of Dr. Paul Brand and Dr. Ralph Winter. Since I'm the book's editor, but author of just one chapter, I can boast more shamelessly than usual about how wonderful I think it's going to be. Contributors include Philip Yancey, Oxford historian of science Allan Chapman, Miriam Adeney, Earl Palmer, Yuan Zhiming, and interviews with Rodney Stark and Don Richardson -- along with other wonderful writers.

The Truth Behind the New Atheism came out in Spanish this year, and I've been working on other exciting book projects.
Do have a wonderful New Year.

David Marshall

Twelfth Book of Christmas: "In God's Underground"

2011-12-27T17:51:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: liberation in the communist bloc.

Sometimes we may be too close to history to see it. For example, we often hear skeptics talk about the Inquisition, which killed a few thousand innocent people thousands of years ago, and completely forget about the tens of millions of victims of communist inquisitions. We hear the cries of the few who suffered a millennia ago, and they drown out far greater horrors practically next door.

We also fail to hear the thankful cries of millions from our own generation, as Chesterton wrote of the liberation of an earlier gang of freed captives:

"Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
"Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!"

The Gospel has, as this series shows, done civilization many services. One we often forget because it is too close: Christianity undermined Big Brother in his many guises, especially throughout that third of the world that was communist. Marxist brainwashing was relentless: attacks on "enemies of the state," and lying flattery of despots and thugs, assailed citizens in school, newspapers, on television, walls, over loudspeakers, through history and science texts, even on maps and history books. The Church gave people a break from the propaganda. In place of hate, believers praised God and shared one another's burdens. In place of the grey monotony of social-realist architecture and "art," the Church provided beautiful, uplifting music, incense and colorful processions, beautiful ancient architecture (when it wasn't blown up by the communists), comfort, cheer, and hope.

Christianity also aided in the overthrow of both Naziism and Communism.

This story is told in many books. I choose In God's Underground, by the Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand, as just one of many good selections. See below for other choices.

Mystic. Philosopher. Loving husband. Worried father. Proud member of the Jewish race. Creature with nerve ending that ache when you hit them and who hungers when you starve him. Social being who hallucinates apart from human voices, and hungers for sex and companionship as well as food. Martyr who stands up to tyrants and warns them to repent. Lutheran pastor with a weakness for jokes. Richard Wurmbrand may have been a 'voice of the martyrs,' but after reading this sensitive, deeply honest autobiography, what impresses me the most is the degree to which his voice is also the voice of humanity. I found it challenging to see how, as a well-read Christian in tough times who faces all the temptations I do, he integrated the various facets of his humanity with his faith.

In a literal sense, faith made Wurmbrand a free-thinker. Embracing a religion that fits the full complexity of life, miracles as well as madness, and sharing a broad and often painful experience with a knowledge of several spiritual traditions, he was free to think on many questions and come to unexpected conclusions both whimsical and sober. There are many modern names that could be added to the list of heroes of the faith of Hebrews 11. Wurmbrand tells some of their stories, including his own.

Other books: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Gulag Archpelago. Sergei Kourdakov, The Persecutor. Brother Andrew, God's Smuggler. George Weigel, The Final Revolution. Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ.

Eleventh Book of Christmas: "Timothy Richard of China"

2011-12-26T10:26:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: reform in East Asia.

William Soothill, "Timothy Richard of China, seer, statesman, missionary & the most disinterested adviser the Chinese ever had."

A book called Five Foreigners who Influenced China was published in Taiwan. Of the five men highlighted in the book, the longest chapter was dedicated to a Baptist missionary named Timothy Richard. In fact, Richard's chapter was more than twice as long as the next longest.

Richard was a remarkable person. He began his career preaching in the villages of Shandong Province. Having read Mateo Ricci and James Legge, he was unusually friendly towards other religions. In fact, the famous "Nevius Plan" for an independent, self-perpetuating local church, free of foreign control, was first developed by Richard on the model of local Chinese sects. (John Nevius visited his mission station, and borrowed his method, then developed and popularized it.)

When famine struck the province, Richard and other missionaries set about trying to help the hungry, mostly by giving them money to buy food. When a far worse famine struck Shanxi Province, he and David Hill attempted to apply the same methods to relieve mass starvation there. But he soon realized that the problem was transportation: food had to reach the province over mountain ranges, which were only traversed by mules, which couldn't carry much of a load. So he argued that China needed a system of railroads to carry heavier freight. (Superstitious Chinese opposed trains because they disrupted Feng Shui.) He also argued for a network of state universities.

One of the media through which Richard preached reform was a publication called Wan Guo Gong Bao, in Engish Review of the Times. Kang Youwei converted to the cause of reform through reading the writings of Richard and Allen in this magazine. Kang's attempt to reform China, with Richard's (in this case somewhat dubious) help, was ultimately thwarted by the Empress Dowager.

Some of Richard's indigenizing innovations may have been adopted in Korea (via the ‘Nevius Plan’), Wenzhou, and, indirectly, Henan (Goforth: 1943, 77), among the most successful outreaches to Confucian societies. His famine relief efforts and support for economic development and universities served as national models. His writings and advice deeply influenced the Hundred Days Reform, though his naive idea of ceding governing power to foreign tutelary advisors may have undermined its success.

Naiveté was also the charge against Richard's approach to non-Christian religions laid by his usually generous biographer, William Soothill. Harsher critics, like Hudson Taylor, suspected heresy. Richard's willingness to look for the best in every religion seemed to derive in roughly equal parts from personal kindliness and theological agreement with Legge and the Jesuits.

In 1878, the little band of Shanxi missionaries sponsored an essay contest on (in part) inquiring into the ‘decrees of Heaven.' This led to the conversion of Pastor Xu, who helped many of his countrymen recover from opium addiction.

A statue of Timothy Richard can be seen on the campus of Shanxi University, which was established (at his insistence) with indemnity money after the Boxer Rebellion, and which he initially led. A photo of Richard also hangs in the student cafeteria. This is a little ironic, since students who meet for Christian fellowship on campus are persecuted.

Tenth Book of Christmas: Jesus and the Religions of Man

2011-12-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the tenth day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: fulfillment of ancient hopes.

This book, my longest so far, is an attempt to show empirically that looking at world religions, Jesus really is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life." The longest section of this book argues that Jesus is "the Way" in the sense described in most of the other books in this series: his life has inspired change for the better in this world. So one thing Jesus and the Religions of Man does, is summarize the history given in these other books. It shows, in relation to other traditions, how the Gospel has inspired needed reform around the world.

But I'd like to focus on the question of "truth" here, and how Christianity relates to other religions.

Just yesterday a skeptic told me:

"Now, christianity happens to be the 'true' one, and also the one you were born into, of all of the thousands of faiths you yourself said are praticed by man. A little convenient don’t you think?"

The implication is, that if Christianity is true, all other religions must be simply or mainly "false."

But pick up a Bible, and you know that can't be right. Christians have included the holy Scriptures of another religion -- the Bible -- as the biggest part of their own holy book!

And you don't have to read very far in the New Testament to see that Christians do not mainly repudiate Jewish tradition -- though neither do they accept it in exactly the same form. The key word is "fulfillment." The life of Jesus is the central story in the history of Israel. He is the greatest prophet, the Son of David, the Lamb in the thicket, the Suffering Servant. All the Old Testament is rechanneled, refocused, and renewed in the life of the Son of God.

Paul Tillich claimed something similiar about how Christianity has related to other religions. The Gospel becomes:

"A crystalization for all positive religious elements after they have been subjected to the criteria involved in this centre."

The "centre," of course, being the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

This is the perspective from which I describe world religions (including secular religions, like communism) in Jesus and the Religions of Man.

Why do I include my own book in this list? Of course, because I think it adds something valuable to the list.

Looking back at it eleven years later, I see some serious deficiences in Jesus and the Religions of Man. A year before 9/11, there is no chapter just on Islam. Some may wonder why I write a chapter about Marxism, instead. (Aside from the fact that I knew more about it -- but even then, it seemed to have been consigned to the "dustheap of history.")

Reviewers, however, have often said very nice things about this book:

Frederica Matthewes-Green: "David Marshall takes cultural analysis several levels deeper, and in prose that is several levels higher, than we've come to expect. The result is not only enlightening but also a great deal of fun to read."

David Leshana: "Very well done . . . This book should be read by all who . . . are preparing for ministry in an increasingly multicultural world."

Leslie Keylock: "Carefully reasoned and beautifully written by a man who has read widely . . . One of the finest books on world religions I have read in a long time."

The book takes some patience to read. But I think most readers will find it substantative, and ultimately rewarding.

Other Books: On fulfillment, I have so many recommendations, it's hard to know where to start. See Richardson's books, described earlier in this series. C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton were great fulfillment thinkers: Chesterton's Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy crystallize his thinking here. (Lewis' thoughts on the subject are scattered all through his works, including in personal letters.) J. R. R. Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" is a profound essay with elements of fulfillment, and shows where Lewis' idea about religions came from.

But perhaps the ambitious might like to start at the beginning, with Matthew, St. Paul (Acts 15 & 17), Justin, Clement of Alexandria (Stromata), and Augustine (City of God). Then plunge into Roberto De Nobili, Mateo Ricci and his Chinese disciples, and Alexander De Rhodes (see post earlier this year). Read 19th Century Protestants, John Farquhar and James Legge. (Lots of reading in this latter -- he has two main fulfillment texts, though, which are shorter.) Read my True Son of Heaven: How Jesus fulfills the Chinese Culture, or else Lin Yutang's beautiful From Pagan to Christian. And DO NOT neglect Don Richardson's Eternity in Their Hearts.

That'll keep most readers occupied for a while.

Ninth Book of Christmas: "Chasing the Dragon"

2011-12-23T14:08:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the ninth day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: liberation for drug addicts and prostitutes.

Jackie Pullinger, Chasing the Dragon

Chasing the Dragon is well-written and fast-paced, and offers a little of everything: cops, robbers, farce, trajedy, an argument or two, and most of all, lives changed by the Gospel. Jackie has led a remarkable life, but wears her experience lightly, with a sense of humor. Having lived in Hong Kong, visited her church and known people who worked with her or become Christians through her ministry, the book was especially interesting to me.

Jackie is not alone in doing this sort of ministry. She is one of hundreds who have reached out to those addicted to drugs, or forced into the sex trade, in East Asia alone.

Since I took this picture, in
the late 1980s, Snake Alley
in Taiwan has become just a
tad less overtly seedy -- fewer
underage girls, it seems. OMF
missionaries continue to reach
out to them.

I once traveled around Asia to do research on forced prostitution and AIDs. There is a great need, as drugs and the sex trade ruin hundreds of thousands of lives. Many of the most successful Asian evangelists I have met were once drug addicts or criminals. This book might also be a good book to give to a non-Christian friend or to a Christian police officer who has become cynical and forgotten how God can change lives. The miracles Pullinger and Quicke recount are sometimes pretty amazing. But perhaps an even more important theme of the book is the perception, echoed by criminals as well as a pastor, that "You really care."

Readers should beware of a "one-size-fits-all" attempts to emulate the exact ways in which God's spirit works. (I knew a Christian in Taiwan who became frustrated, after reading Pullinger's books, because his own apparently quite successful ministry to drug addicts did not seem as spectacular in terms of miracles as the story in this book -- though he saw some pretty amazing things, too.) Jesus should be the pattern for all of us. But like he said, "The fields are ripe to the harvest. Pray the Lord of the Harvest to send out workers."

This book is also part of the larger story of how the Gospel has affected China.

Other books: Pastor Hsi tells the remarkable story of a Confucian scholar in late 19th Century northern China, who had been an opium addict, and then converted and helped other Chinese escape addiction. Most general histories of Christianity in China seem to emphasize the tremendous reform the Gospel brought and inspired in East Asia, but some of the best of these (for instance, by 顾卫民，林志平 and 远志明) have not, I think, been translated. Latournette and Broomhall's general histories, and Aikman's Jesus in Beijing, touch on some of this, as does my True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture. It's also interesting to read Matteo Ricci's journal from this perspective, or the biography of many later missionaries (Nevius, Ross, Taylor, Mackay, etc.)

Eighth Book of Christmas: "Mary Slessor of Calabar"

2011-12-22T16:21:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the eighth day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: resurrection for Africa.

Recently, a terrible phenomena has come to light in Nigeria. Christian pastors, or perhaps shamans playing the role of Christian pastors, have taken to accusing young children of being witches, or possessed by the devil. Many have been tortured, even killed, based on such accusations.

Skeptics readily assume Christianity is to blame for these truly diabolical actions. "Look what fundamentist Christianity brought to Africa!" I have heard several say recently.

It is awful when children are harmed by those who ought to safeguard them, especially in Jesus' name -- who warned of God's judgement against those who do such acts. But it is not true that the Gospel brought that mentality to West Africa, or anywhere else. In fact, in some areas, it had long been the custom that whenever a chief would die, or a prominent person fall ill, innocent people would be rounded up and murdered with him. Illness or misfortune were thought to be caused by witchcraft, so victims were again sought. Twins were assumed to be demons, and put out in the forest to die.

Mary Slessor was the best-known and one of boldest and most successful missionaries to fight on behalf of the innocent in West Africa. From a lower-class family in Scotland, this Mary was the true "Queen of Scots," if royalty is measured by courage. Mary would boldly rush into a melay between factions, unarmed, and force both sides to end battles. She would stand powerful chiefs down when they wanted to sacrifice human beings. She would rescue abandoned children and oppressed concubines. Her force of personality, and the Holy Spirit working through her, brought peace to a large part of southern Nigeria.

Mary Slessor of Calabar is one of a few biographies of the woman, and it's a good read: a nice antidote to Heart of Darkness.

But the human heart remains dark, and the fight must go on.

Other Books: Slessor was not, of course, the only missionary to help the African peoples in the wake of the slave trades and the wars they spawned, and native oppression. Tommy Titcombe's Tread Upon the Lion is an equally rousing adventure story, and describes Titcombe's struggle against village murder and human sacrifice in Nigeria.

Seventh Book of Christmas: "Peace Child" and "Lords of the Earth"

2011-12-20T17:32:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the seventh day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: life to the tribes.

"Peace Child" and "Lords of the Earth," Don Richardson

How do you preach a Gospel of peace to a people who idealize betrayal? Cannibals and headhunters, the Sawi of New Guinea little fit the old image of "noble savages." At the same time, Richardson describes them not merely as savages, noble or otherwise, but as individuals whom he invites us to know and recognize as fellow human beings. He gives a picture of them not only as headhunters, but also as naturalists, linguists, and myth-makers.

Richardson is an excellent story-teller. In this story, he is also one of the protagonists. He and his wife believed themselves called to bring the Gospel to the Sawi people. Richardson is an actor in this drama, potential recipient of the action of crocodiles, tropical disease, and natives, and also (he believes) an agent of God's grace. No second-hand outline of history, here we can read the spiritual story of one of the thousands of tongues and tribes and races of man, as it happens.

One of the central questions of our time is how universal truth relates to the heritage of each culture. No evangelical has done more to help Christians understand the Biblical answer than Don Richardson. Richardson introduces the concept of "redemptive analogies" in this book. This is the idea that God has prepared the cultures of the world for the Gospel by planting seeds of truth in them. (A concept developed by John and Paul, Clement, Augustine, G.K.Chesterton, and C.S.Lewis.) He tells the story of how the Gospel changed the Sawi culture from within. Peace Child is thus both a wonderful true story, and also introduces a paradigm-shifting mind-blowing concept of the first order. This is a great "missions" book, but I also recommend it to non-Christians who are trying to understand how the Christian revelation relates to other cultures. (And also those who just want to understand tribal cultures.)

What did change bring to the Sawi people? The hope that men might be able to trust one another. Less warfare. Less murder. Fishing hooks. Education. A connection to the outside world. The hope of living as equal citizens in an Indonesia that was going to swallow them, anyway. (Don talks about this in an interview in our upcoming book, Faith Seeking Understanding.)

Other books: Don Richardson discusses redemptive analogies in passing again in his even more thrilling story, Lords of the Earth. That book also tells how the work of gutsy missionaries like Stan Dale utterly transformed, and immeasurably improved, the lives of the fierce Yali people in the highlands of New Guinea. Then he extends his argument, and story, to the redemptive work God does from within cultures around the world, by means of the transformative message of Jesus, in Eternity in Their Hearts.

Another fascinating book that covers some of the same ground, only in South America, among the famously violent Yanomamo Indians, is Spirit of the Rainforest. Warning: it's even more graphic than Peace Child.

6th Book of Christmas: "The Book that Made Your World."

2011-12-19T15:28:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.
On the fifth day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: Renaissance in India.

"The Book that Made Your World," Vishal Mangalwadi

I have to confess something about this book: unlike all the others in this series, I'm not entirely sure I've read it. The reason I'm uncertain has not, I hope, to do with any premature senility. Rather, I've read seven or eight books by Vishal, one of which he sent me not long ago in pre-publication form. Since I didn't see the cover, and didn't look at the title every time I read the thing (and maybe helped edit it a little), I am not sure this is the book I read.

However, this is the recent, well-deserved "break-out" book for Vishal, and it probably the best place to begin exploring his detailed and powerful argument for the revolutionary charcter of the Bible.

Vishal was born in India, and in most of his books, argues primarily from that perspective. He is a particular fan of the great Baptist shoemaker William Carey, whom he and his wife Ruth have argued launched a sweeping revolution in Indian history. Vishal argues that ideas really matter, and that the ideas in the Bible are the ones that have ennobled the human race more than any other. Several of his books describe in detail the effect those ideas had on the great Indian renaissance that began in the late 18th and 19th Centuries.

We westerners have all heard of Mahandas Gandhi. Some of us know that Gandhi was influenced not only by the Bible directly, but also by Western thinkers, like Tolstoy, who were themselves deeply influenced by the words of Jesus. Mangalwadi reminds us, in effect, that a long history of reform had already taken place long before Gandhi even rose to prominence, and that the teachings of Jesus, and the example and reformist work of great missionaries, spurred that reform.

But this book is not, I believe, primarily about India, and Vishal is not just an Indian philosopher. Mangalwadi argues that the Bible is the source of reform in the Western world.

Sometimes Mangalwadi may overplay his cards. But it's a good hand: the historical facts of how the Gospel transformed India are remarkable enough. His arguments deserve to be taken seriously, and the truths he describes need to be taken into account by secular and Christian thinkers. These facts have the capacity to dramatically change how the world reads history.

Other books: I recommend all of Mangalwadi's books: Truth and Transformation, The Legacy of William Carey, Missionary Conspiracy, When the New Age Gets Old, World of the Gurus. His arguments are not the full story or the last word, but they tell an important part of history and deserve to be read. J. N. Farquhar's books, The Crown of Hinduism, and Modern Religious Movements in India, tell more of the story, in a tone that is somewhat more positive about Indian religions.

The Fifth Book of Christmas: Pain, the Gift No One Wants

2011-12-18T08:34:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the fifth day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: physical healing.

"The Gift of Pain," by Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey.

This books feels like several books combined, but the constituent elements are woven together into a coherent and fascinating whole.

The book begins with a forward by C. Everett Koop, who pays Dr. Brand the extravagent compliment of saying that when Koop thinks whose life he would like to live, were he to be someone else, the first name on his list is that of Paul Brand.

The first thread in the tapestry is Dr. Brand's autobiography. Brand was born in the "Hills of Death" in southern India, to missionary parents. These old-style missionaries were often headstrong, enormously courageous, and a bit eccentric, and Paul paints a loving portrait of parents who lived life in full. Apparently he derived his interest in Nature and Science from his father, who was always poking into ant hills and peering at plants, when he wasn't improving his corner of the world with new crops and healing sometimes hostile villagers. But tragically, his father died while Paul was being schooled in England. Having gotten his baptism of fire in surgery during the Blitz, Paul returned to India with his wife Margaret, an eye surgeon, where they worked for almost two decades in healing lepers and the blind of India. Paul then headed America's only center for the study and rehabilitation of Hansen's disease in Lousianna, where he broadened his study to the effects of pain loss from diabetes, which afflicts millions of people.

Pain then becomes a scientific adventure story. It tells how Paul and his staff in India discovered the means by which the lepresy virus ruins bodies, starting with the extremities, and therefore began to develop a lifestyle program for preverving quality of life for those afflicted.

One can also find elements of a love story, a spiritual biography, a bit of philosophy and some thoughts about ecology, in the book.

So why do I include it as one of the Twelve Books of Christmas? It represents the work of men and women called to heal, as followers of Jesus. Missionary doctors started thousands of hospitals on every inhabited continent, often reaching out to the poorest of the poor. (Though, as Brand points out in an interview in the upcoming Faith Seeking Understanding, some of these healing centers succomb to a "missions creep" similiar to what eventually afflicted Harvard.) Work with lepers was part of the Christian tradition already in the Middle Ages. And even in Greco-Roman times, Stark argues, care for the sick was one reason why the Church grew, both through higher survival rates, and because kindness attracted newcomers.

Billions of the sick have been treated, healed or had babies delivered, by those who follow in the steps of Jesus, the healer. Dr. Brand shows the connection between model (Jesus) and those who follow him, particularly clearly, because like Jesus, he "touched the untouchable," lepers who were stigmatized in India as they were in ancient Israel. And as with Jesus, he recognzed that human touch was important in the healing process, because we are more than our bodies: full healing is healing of the spirit.

Other good books: George MacKay, From Far Formosa, tells the "typical" story of a missionary in Taiwan, who did medicine (on thousands of patients!) in his "spare time." Perhaps the most prominent hospital in modern Taiwan is called the MacKay Memorial Hospital, in the center of Taipei: it's a landmark everyone knows. Many other missionaries, whether Hudson Taylor or Gladys Aylward in China, Mary Slessor in Nigeria, or the missionaries I've met in Asia today, include healing as a part of their ministry.

Hannam's book also shows how medical science also advanced in tandem with the healing arts.

Day Six.

The Fourth Book of Christmas: "Genesis of Science."

2011-12-17T08:25:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the fourth day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: modern science.

"The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution," by James Hannam.

You might read the subtitle of this book and fear or hope for a sharp polemical argument. The Genesis of Science is, in fact, an informed, pretty mellow, and easily read explanation of "how the Christian Middle Ages launched the Scientific Revolution." There is some stress on the word "Christian." But while Hannam does argue that Christianity played an important role in the birth of modern science, he recognizes that the story is complex, with many actors, and most actors playing ambivalent roles. Hannam brings this complexity to life well, while his rehabilitation of Medieval civilization lends the story continuity.

In some ways, Hannam's thesis might be defined by half a sentence in the second-to-last paragraph of the book:

"You could call any century from the twelfth to the twentieth a revolution in science . . . "

Actually, Hannam begins in earnest with the 11th Century, which he shows set the intellectual stage for what was to come. This was as soon as one could hope for: Europe had spend half a millennia fitfully recovering from a long series of invasions, and had never been the economic heart of Western civilization, anyway. Hannam mostly ends with Galileo and the first half of the 17th Century. But each century between these bookends gets a fair amount of attention, with many unknown characters, and stars, traipsing across the book's pages.

Among other things, I found Hannam's discussion of Humanism interesting. He argues that "humanism almost managed to destroy 300 years of progress in natural philosophy," by encouraging intellectuals to scoff at Medieval attainments. C. S. Lewis makes the same point about literature in his magisterial English Literature in the 16th Century: he shows that the humanists also scorned, and largely lost, the literary attainments of the Middle Ages. Many modern skeptics delude themselves into thinking the Enlightenment gave Western culture everything of value, even (I have heard them!) modern science. I appreciate those like Hannam and Lewis (Confucius is another) who help us remember and better appreciate our roots.

Another topic Hannam does not much touch on, but that came to mind when I interviewed Allan Chapman, historian of science at Oxford's Wadham College, where the Royal Society partly began, was the fact that Europe, while one civilization, was divided into many competing states. As it happens, so was ancient Greece, and the almost equally creative "Spring and Autumn / Warring States" period in Chinese history. (All of which, in addition, were theistic.) This E Pluribus Unum thing seems to work well, along with this "one civilization under God" idea

Other good sources: Please do listen to my interview of Allan Chapman at christthetao.com. He's quite a character, with a sweeping and enthusiastic knowledge of the subject. And as the interview takes place at his home, his clock collection chimes in, as well. Also interesting: Charles Thaxton and Nancy Pearson, The Soul of Science; Stephen Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith; and for different perspectives, David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations; and, for an opposing explanation that is depressing but formidably argued, Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Back to Book 1.

Forward to Book 5.

The Third Book of Christmas: "Atheist Delusions"

2011-12-16T08:13:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the third day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: revitalized Greco-Roman thought and morals.

David Hart is as urbane, pugnatious, witty, combatative, meandering, and dangerously informed as a writer as you want to enjoy on a long Sunday afternoon, with lazy dragonflies flitting past in the sunshine. In some ways this works best for an essay: one wants to come to a conclusion, and digest the ideas for a while before you take another bite.
3

This book is NOT a response (in a very recognizable form) to the New Atheists. It is a book about how Christianity shaped and shaped up western civilization, especially in the Greek and Roman world of late Antiquity, with a few words about Dawkins & Co added at the beginning and end after Hart got jabbed in the ribs by his editor.

One thing Hart attempts is to set a context for what Christianity accomplished in the ancient world:
:
"Pagan cult was never more tolerant than it is tolerance -- without any qualms of conscience -- of poverty, disease, starvation, and homelessness; of gladiatorial spectacle, crucifixion, the exposure of unwanted infants, or the public slaughter of war captives or criminals on festive occasions; of, indeed, almost every imaginable form of tyranny, injustice, depravity, or cruelty."

How long would it take to properly digest those two sentences -- or even to spit them out? One does slowly develop the feeling, though, that Hart knows what he's talking about, and that the picture he paints of the ancient world, and how the Gospel began (sometimes quickly, but often over long centuries) to transform it, may be the central story of human history. This is one literary, pugnatious, and dogmatic bookend to that story.

Related books:

The Durants' Christ and Caesar confirms many of the points Hart makes, though in fairly brief clips. Charles Williams' Descent of the Dove offers a very different kind of overview. Stark helps with concrete data from antiquity.

Book 1.

Book 2.

Forward to Book 4.

A Christmas List from John Loftus

2011-12-15T09:55:00.000-08:00

The atheist writer John Loftus has just posted a list of intellectual demands from God. These are six things he think God should do, or should have done, to prove His reality to John, and by implication perhaps to other skeptics.

When I saw John's list, I immediately thought of the door to our boy's bedroom.

My boys write something very like this list at Christmas, only they’re more modest. They tape six or seven “demands” to the door. Things like joysticks for a flight simulator, airsoft guns, books on subjects that interest them, even foods they like. Only not only do they ask for smaller presents, they give their parents an “opt-out” on less urgent requests. They might write something like "non-essential" next to one or more item. And they don’t really seem to think fulfilling their requests is absolutely obligatory.

As a matter of fact, I think God has given us at least two of the items on John's Christmas list. (My kids don't usually expect more than that!)

But more to the point, my kids recognize that gift's come at the gift-giver's discretion. They seem to understand that their parents love them, but that gift-giving decisions are also subject to constraints of which we might still have, in some ways, a better understanding than they do.

They also know to expect the unexpected. We are human, and limited in imagination, but what would Christmas be without happy surprises!

Personally, I think the intellectual presents God has actually given, are more interesting than the ones John is asking for. (Many of which I've touched on in various blogs over the past year, including "The Twelve Books of Christmas" series, which I interrupt to post this gut response to John . . . )

Reading over Philip Yancey's contribution to our new book yesterday, it also occurs to me that (as Dr. Brand explained) the very nature of a fixed reality forces constraints even on God.

Isn't that the way it would be, if God is God, which is something more than a parent? Wouldn't God's understanding of what we really need, in the way of "reasons to believe," be more than we kids can think up to tape on our bedroom door?

For example, there's this item:

“There would not be so much religious diversity around the globe if there is a God who wants us to believe in him. The probability that the Christian God exists is reduced in direct proportion by the amount of religious diversity that exists, and there is way too much of it to suppose that he does.”

I’ve answered this argument two or three times, in response to John's “Outsider Test.” I maintain, on the contrary, that the actual data of world religions tremendously confirms the Christian faith, often in fantastic and undreamed of ways. And unlike John (we all have our life journeys), I've in non-Christian cultures, and studying non-Christian religions, for many decades. World religions is my primary area of academic expertise.

John has read those posts. His “response” so far has been along the lines of, “That’s interesting, maybe I should respond some time.”

Until he does, maybe he should past another request on the bedroom door. Last Christmas he asked for a tricycle, and got a mountain bike, instead.

Which brings up that age-old, Willy Wonka question: "Can a child enjoy Christmas, with the wrong attitude?"

The Second Book of Christmas: "Jesus Through the Centuries"

2011-12-15T06:19:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the second day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: a new and transformative human model.

"Jesus Through the Centuries," Jaroslav Pelikan (For book 1, click here.)

This is not a devotional work, it is an insightful and valuable slice of intellectual history. Pelikan is a Christian, but distances himself from his subjects. The combination of sympathy and critical distance may help the reader begin his own conversation with the persons described. Of course, Pelikan bites off more than he can chew. How can there be room in one readable, coherent and reasonably short book for Augustine and Blake, Renan and Ricci, Constantine and Gandhi? But Pelikan pulls it off pretty well, summarizing the history with interesting anecdotes, and making reasonable comments. Not all of which I think are correct, though.

"It is not sameness but kaleidescope variety that is its most conspicuous feature." Pelikan includes a great deal of evidence for both. Early Christians attempted to translate Jesus as "logos" to relate to Greek thinking. Modern Christians in India and China undertook a similar task of describing Jesus as the fulfillment of the deepest truths in those great cultures. (Work I have studied for many years.)
I gave the book five stars on Amazon, because it is brilliant, fascinating and informative. Nevertheless, Pelikan's position sometimes seems to soak up a bit of the subjectivm he chronicles.

It is important to distinguish between images that are arbitrary, and those that depend on a reality that can be referred to. One could write a book called "The Moon through the Centuries." But that would be a different kind of book from "Martians through the Centuries," because in the first case, we just need to look up to correct our impressions. Pelikan does not take sufficient account of the fact that getting to know Jesus is more like looking at the moon than speculating about Martians. Kaleidescope is a mosaic of splintered reflections. But the image whom these reflections reflected, like the moon, is still before us, in the gospels. Pelikan tells us we are "dependant" on "oral tradition" that was "eventually deposited" in the gospels, but in fact they were written within the lifetimes of the first Christians. Rather than "tradition," they could have relied on memory.

Pelikan does not distinguish between birds that settle in the nest as they find it, and birds that steal twigs to built their own. He weakly justifies the fantastic subjectivism that goes into revisionist historical Jesus studies. Pelikan is a conscientious objector from the argument over what really happened. In a preface to a recent edition he admits, a bit coyly, that he doesn't buy the arguments of the "historical Jesus" crowd. Well and good: but this excellent book might be even better if the fascinating and fruitful subjectivism he chronicles were balanced with an occasional reminder that in the end, portraits are not about those who take the picture, but him whose portrait is taken.

Still, a deserved classic, and a wonderful way to begin looking at the influence Jesus has had from Antiquity on. I recommend this book not because it makes the full argument that the series as a whole will give, but because in it, one may catch a overall outline of Jesus in his variagated reflections in human culture, and grasp the general significance of Christmas for the world.

Other books in the series will focus on the influence Jesus has had on particular peoples, and that take a less subjective approach, so I'll leave more book recommendations for later.

Book 3.

The First Book of Christmas: "Rise of Christianity"

2011-12-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

Twelve Books that show how Christmas changed the world.

On the first day of Christmas, our True Love gave the world: a transformative social vision.

Day 1: Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity

How did Christianity spread in the Roman Empire? By force? By burning down libraries and blowing up pagan temples? By oppressing women?

Hardly. As Dr. Stark, one of the world's leading sociologists of religion, shows in this landmark study, the Gospel spread because Greeks and Romans found it attractive for good reasons. Christians aided the poor and sick, even at the risk of their own lives -- leading to higher survival rates, overall. Women were given a higher status in the early church than in society as a whole.

When I first read this book, I found myself agreeing with the points both those who liked the book and those who didn't like it made. (This was the first of Stark's volume's I'd read; I've since read many more.) The man clearly made many good ideas. His discussion of how the Gospel transformed the role of women is itself worth the price of the book, debunking errors about Christianity and women that are ubiquitous among American intellectuals. His insights about the courage believers showed during epidemics and martyrdom is also helpful. But, at the same time, the hubris of social science, a reliance on theories which are most persuasive within the framework in which most of Stark's direct research appeared to have been conducted, sometimes, I thought, caused him to overreach.

He argues, for example, that we do not "need" miracles or mass conversions to explain the growth of the church. Finding a growth rate over three centuries close to the 43% that Mormonism has maintained for the last century, he seemed to suppose he had discovered a scientific principle, which negates the need for "exceptional explanations."

Those who do not with to believe in miracles may find comfort in this explanation, and it is often cited by skeptics. For example, in The End of Christianity, Richard Carrier ham-handedly borrows the argument (without citing Stark, whom he has dismissed elsewhere as an historian), in a chapter pointedly called "Christianity's Success was not Incredible:"

"A full analysis of all the reliable evidence available indicates the rate of growth of Christianity as a whole, from its very beginning and throughout its entire history, was less than 4 percent a year, the same as that of any other aggressively evengalistic religion (such as the Mormon Church) . . . Its rate of development and success was entirely natural/ Since that rate was natural, we should expect its cause was natural, which alone closes the book on Christianity having any supernatural evidence or guidance."

This is, of course, an absurd argument, as Stark himself (in effect) admitted in an interview I conducted a year or so ago. The fact that Christianity grew no more quickly than Mormonism, under entirely different circumstances (persecution, higher overall death rate, no requirement that all young men serve in missions), does nothing at all to undermine reports that that growth included miracles.

When I first read the book, furthermore, I had just returned from a small town in China which, before the revolution, had about 20 Christians, but now had over a thousand. This is a 110% growth rate per decade. For most of that time, preaching was dangerous, and martyrs were seldom allowed to be treated as public heros as Stark described them. Yet this growth rate has been typical in many parts of China. In Anhui province, the church grew about a hundred times (not percent) in just two decades! In practice miracles, mass conversions, and the supernatural preparation of Chinese culture for the Gospel (as Paul and Augustine found in Greco-Roman culture) seem to be playing a tremendous role in these events. I have met people involved in mass conversions and miracles myself.

But as Stark shows, the message of Christmas spread mainly because early Christians did good works, and people found the Gospel attractive.

When I first took a social science course at the University of Washington where Stark teaches 30+ years ago, my immediate reaction was, "What this man is teaching, when translated into ordinary English, seems to reduce to either to common sense or to nonsense." Stark's ideas do not need translating, his style is lively and his thoughts clear. Better yet, his "discoveries" are much more of the first than the second. But most of them are not really surprising, on careful reading of the Bible. And a few may be mistaken.

As Stark told me, this and other books ultimately proved to be stepping stones on his own journey to Christian faith. "It all came to make sense."

Walking that journey with Dr. Stark will change how you see history. His works have immeasurably deepened my own appreciation of how the birth of Jesus has changed the world: how the Gospel improved the status of women, taught people to care for the sick and dying more deeply, and (in later books) invented science and liberated slaves.

Other books by Stark: For the Glory of God is indispensable, as is The Discovery of God. One True God, God's Battalions, and his book on Roman cities are all very worth reading. The gist of his sociological theories, which are very enlightening, can be found in these historical books, or read directly in Acts of Faith. Also look for Stark's article in Sociology of Religion, "Secularization, RIP." It will change how you see the Middle Ages.

Link to Second Day.

(Note: most reviews in this series will be partially adapted from those I posted on Amazon.com, with many corrections and additions, as in this case, and book suggestions at the end.)

What is a Miracle?

2011-12-12T14:47:00.000-08:00

Why believe in God?  Maybe the best reason is miracles. Debates about the truth of Christianity often revolve around the reality of the most famous miracle in human history, the resurrection of Jesus. In this era in which Christianity has spread rapidly beyond its old borders, Christians around the world also often explain their conversion by some event in which God seemed to step into their lives in an amazing way. Two chapters of my new book, Faith Seeking Understanding, tell such stories.

But this brings up a lot of questions. Wwhat is a miracle? Are miracles possible? Does science disprove them?  If Christians believe the resurrection, does that oblige us to admit Joseph Smith really received the Book of Mormon from the angel Moroni, or that Mohammed rode a white horse to heaven?  Do miracles provide good evidence for Christianity?

I think they do. But we can't tackle all these questions in one post, so let's start with the first, which is foundational to all the others.

The word "miracle" is given at least three different meanings:

(1) People often use the word to refer to "an amazing event." "We have all benefited from the miracle of science." "We'll be telling our grandkids about that miraculous fourth-quarter comback!" "I held her hand as the baby emerged, and witnessed the miracle of new life."

Language is a set of mostly arbitrary signs that we use to communicate. So there is nothing "wrong" about using the word miracle this, or any other, way.  If you like, you define "rose" as "a large mammal that lives in the swamps on Yoda's home planet." You can write a science-fiction novel using the word that way, and your readers will get used to the term quickly enough. But then if your neighbor tells you, "I'm putting in roses in my yard next spring," don't criticize him for harboring dangerous animals: his use of the word is more in agreement with convention, than your own.

So there is nothing "wrong" with using "miracle" to mean "an amazing event." But it is irrelevant to the debate between skeptics and theists, and its frequent use tends to confuse that issue.  An atheist can see miracles around him all day long, in this sense, without upsetting his atheism. So let us bracket this common meaning of the word "miracle."

(2) Miracle is also commonly taken to mean, "An event in the material world that violates the laws of Nature." In a post article at The Secular Outpost, the philosopher Brad Owen argued, "In order for an event to be a miracle, it must satisfy at least the following two conditions: 1. The event must involve the violation of a law of nature. 2. The event must be brought about by God."

The first part of this definition seems to have been popularized by 17th Century Scottish philosopher, David Hume:

"A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature."

Hume went on to explain:

"Sometimes an event may not, in itself, seem to be contrary to the laws of nature, and yet, if it were real, it might, by reason of some circumstances, be denominated a miracle; because, in fact, it is contrary to these laws. Thus if a person, claiming a divine authority, should command a sick person to be well, a healthful man to fall down dead, the clouds to pour rain, the winds to follow upon his command; these may justly be esteemed miracles . . . "

I responded to the word "violation" that both Owen and Hume use, as follows:

"One reason I object to the word 'violation,' is that it seems to imply a discontinuity between the 'laws' of nature and miracles. But there is actually a deeper continuity. Miracles are not like random street noise that interrupts a concert (magic). They are like the symbols that dramatically break up the horn soliquy with a sudden 'crash,' but were written into the music by the composer to climax the piece."

C. S. Lewis offers a similar explanation in his book, Miracles.
Brad responded by citing the Christian historian Gary Habermas, and softening his language, to say miracles must involve a "suspension" of natural law.

That helps, but I also see two larger problems with this assumption.
First, what are miracles like, in the Bible, or as people experience them today?

Some do seem to involve suspension of natural law. For example, the first "sign" John reports, is when Jesus changes water into wine at a wedding feast in the lakeside village of Cana. This is a chemically impossible reaction: alcohol contains carbon, for instance, while water does not. Nor does Jesus appear to have acted on the water to stimulate any kind of reaction.

On the other hand, a few chapters later, mere words at a well in Samaria, and then in a village nearby, convince some Samaritans that Jesus is "the Savior of the world."  No laws of physics or chemistry are obviously "suspended" in the process. But the people are convinced, and the reasons are good.

The same is often true of "miracles," today. I have never seen the laws of physics suspended or violated. But several times, I have seen what looked like "miraculous" answers to prayer.

Once when I was working as a missionary in Taiwan, I ran out of money. I went to a park in Taipei and prayed, "God, why don't I just go home! I don't even have enough money to buy a hamburger!  The hymn says, 'Great is thy faithfulness,' but I just don't see that faithfulness!"

On my way out of the park, I stopped to talk with a Chinese girl reading an English newspaper. (The paper was an excuse. "At least she answers!" I told God.)  As I was getting up to leave, the girl asked me my name.  "Ma De Wei," I said. "Ma Dewei? You're Ma Dewei! Really?"

I soon learned why she was so surprised. Years before, I had found a wallet some miles away, and taken it to the Taiwan University Lost and Found. I put my Chinese name in the wallet, and wrote, "God loves you."  In a city of four million, this girl turned out to be the owner of that wallet.

She took me to McDonalds for lunch.  Eating a cheeseburger, I remembered the jibe about money for hamburgers.

My other needs were met in almost equally surprising ways.

None, however, involved the suspension of any natural laws. But they did give me reason to think God had not forgotten me.

An opposite phenomena from the one Hume mentioned is often cited by modern skeptics: when a natural explanation (either "folk" or "scientific") is later found for events that at first seem supernatural. Maybe Jesus was a "psychic," in other words exploited some little-known physical powers to read the Samaritan woman's mind. Maybe his disciples did good research on her. Either way, the "sign," while compelling to those who converted, need not involve God (skeptics may reply), nor need it clearly violate known laws of science.

Some miracles in the gospels are like that: Peter's catch of the fish with the gold coin in its mouth, the disciples' big catches of fish under Jesus' instruction, occasions when Jesus seemed to know things without being told.  Some of his healing might be explained away as psychosomatic.

Even the toughest miracles might, in theory, be explained in terms of quantum physics. The philosopher Michael Martin, for example, suggests that even the resurrection might theoretically be explained by a random quantum fluctuation.  So might Jesus walking on water, or multiplying the loaves and fishes, or healing anyone of anything.

So there are two problems with the definition Brad Owen and David Hume (among others, both skeptics and Christians) use.

First, the Bible uses another term, "sign," which seems to put the stress on the probative value of the event in persuading those who experience it to trust God, and act on that trust. Some "signs" seem to involve what we would ordinarily call "violations of natural law," others do not.

Second, given quantum physics and modern technology, it is increasingly difficult to absolutely differentiate between what physical laws do or do not allow. One might also explain Jesus' healings, for instance, as those of a medical doctor from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, Dr. McCoy in Palestine.

Of course there are all kinds of problems with these counter-claims. The odds such an enormous quantum flux, for example, are greater than the number of fundamental particles in a universe the size ours would be, if every particle in it became a universe of its own. But it has become more difficult, now, to draw a clear line between the "improbable" and what is genuinely impossible in the course of nature.

It seems, then, that we need a definition of "miracle" that includes both how the Bible actually uses the word, the root meaning of the word, and in terms of probilities rather than mere possibilities.

So here's the definition I prefer:

(3) "A miracle is an event in the natural world that points probatively to God's work, and gives us compelling reasons to trust Him."

The most common Greek word is σημειoν, or sign, the root for semiotics. A miracle does not need to violate a law of nature, but should give good reasons for faith.

In Jesus and the Religions of Man, chapter 10 and 11, I give an in-depth description of what a miracle in this sense involves, and compare miracles to magic. Briefly, miracles in the biblical sense tend to share five characteristics (one of which Brad Owen has already mentioned):

(1) "Miracles ask to be verified; magic insults the intelligence." This is related to their root meaning of "signs," and to their purpose in guiding us to God.

(2) "Miracles tend to be practical; magic is often showy."

(3) "Miracles enhance human dignity; magic makes us more or less than human."

(4) "Miracles point to God; magic points elsewhere."

(5) "Miracles come in response to requests; magic to demands." One consequence of this quality is that it is often difficult to test miracles scientifically, but may be possible to check them historically. God, being our Lord, not our servant, will act when and where, and in whatever way, He chooses. Therefore miracles are not "repeatable," but they can be rationally deduced.

These five qualities not only help define Christian miracles, they also help differentiate true miracles from faked or even demonic supernatural acts. That's what I'm doing in Jesus and the Religions of Man.

Alaskans on Mars!

2011-12-10T12:21:00.000-08:00

Comet West apparently
broke into four fragments
in 1976.

My aim in this blog is to "map the universe, one blog at a time." But so far, my blogs have been a tad parochial -- about events on that one planet that most of my readers seem to inhabit. (And yes, there are readers, and their numbers appear to be increasing.)

So let me take a first, tentative, if nascently imperial, step beyond our world.

How about turning Mars into a summer home for Alaskans?

Here is how we would do it. First, develop one of the larger spacecraft considered for "Project Orion," which use nuclear bombs as propulsion.

Second, capture several dozen large comets with a lot of ice, and force them to crash on the surface of Mars. (The mass of Earth's oceans is about 5 million times the mass of Halley's comet, which is a small comet. We would need at least 1/500th as much water to make a viable ocean on Mars, whose surface area is one third that of Earth -- a thousand feet deep might be a good start.)

Third, if needed, add a smaller, more salt-rich comet or two. Shake well to mix.

Fourth, wait for the energy of the crash to melt the ice -- this might take some careful calibration, we'll put our best Chinese and Indian engineers on the job. Before the oceans evaporate into space, they should provide an atmosphere for a few thousand years, which we can tweak, once we have enough practice with our own. (Perhaps tax credits for Humvees on the Red Planet?)

Fifth, stock the new oceans with halibut, king crab and the better species of salmon.

Then open Mars up as a winter resort for Alaskans who can't book a flight to Hawaii, or in case we have to sell Hawaii to China to pay off our debt.

The sun does not shine very brightly on Mars, admittedly. But Alaskans are used to that. And it's sunny every day. We could, perhaps, also import a few seals, polar bears, and other animals that enjoy that sort of weather, once we've got the planetary thermostat down. There's a fair amount of CO2 in the Martian atmosphere already, so that should warm things up.

If Sarah Palin buys a summer home on Mars, she can reign as governor, if not goddess of the sea (a position that may not tax her powers of patience for too long.) Then, as Earth increasingly resembles its greenhouse-gas befogged sunward neighbor, the saying will come true, "Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus."

Fish the Red Planet!

And if we mess up our own planet badly enough, we'll have some off-world relatives to get things going, again. (Since chat lines will take at least 16 minutes for communication at the speed of light, this may also bring back some of the old romance of letter-writing. Imagine what it will do for stories of tragic lost love, as well.)