Faith Plus: Christian discoveries for John Loftus.

John Loftus, in his on-line persona at least, seems determined to explore every nook and cranny of fuzzy thinking about Christianity.  Take his post this morning contrasting the top-ten discoveries of science for 2012, with the allegedly shoddy record of religion in making new discoveries during the same year:

Let's do a comparison between science and religion by looking at their top ten discoveries in 2012, okay? First consider the top tech and science breakthroughs of 2012 according to ExtremeTech. Click through all ten of them. Pretty impressive, right? Now let's consider the top ten religious discoveries in 2012:

Pretty unimpressive, eh?

Science continues to advance while religion continues to retreat. Every year science makes new discoveries while religion has stalled and stopped scientific progress so many times it would make our heads hurt to recount them all. And it's a lie to claim Christianity produced science, a reoccurring theme among deluded believers. A lie. (See this tagged below). Just read Richard Carrier's excellent chapter on this in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails.

Faith doesn't discover anything. It has no method. Religion is based on superstition, ANCIENT superstition. So what reason do people of faith have for denying the results of science like they do, especially when they accept it's results in a vast number of areas except those rare ones that conflict with their faith? I see no reason to place faith above science like this at all. And yet all believers do this, at least in some areas.

 

Now this is dumb by any measure. 

 

(A) First of all, science is an epistemology, a way of finding things out.  "Religion" is among other things a set of beliefs about the nature of things.  It is not a way of finding stuff out.  So why chastize it for not accomplishing goals it does not set?  This is like complaining that a golden drinking goblet doesn't make a very good push broom. 

 

What if we were to ask, "What are the top ten discoveries of Secular Humanism in 2012?" 

 

I just googled "Secular Humanism top 10 discoveries 2012."  The Google fairy smirked at me like I was trying to whistle with a stalk of celery covered in peanut butter, and coughed up the following:

 

"List of humanists, Wikipedia."

 

"Is Atheism + just Secular Humanism? -- Greta Christina's blog."

 

"Top Ten New Species -- 2012."

 

And so forth.  Clearly, Google didn't even know what to make of such a silly inquiry. 

 

From which we are to conclude that Secular Humanism is useless?  All right, if that's how John wants to argue.   

 

(B) Richard Carrier showed no such thing as Loftus reports.  He argued, in fact, that something that ought to be called genuine science arose in the ancient world.  He argued that it was in part inspired by ancient Greek theism! 

 

"Most intellectual polytheists believed in a Creator who had intelligently ordered the cosmos, that this order could be discovered by the human mind, and that such discovery honored God. Scientists like Galen and Ptolemy were thus motivated to pursue scientific inquiry by their religious piety . . . " (407)

 

Carrier didn't really even try to show that modern science was not inspired by Christianity, though the title of his chapter ("Christianity was not responsible for modern science") inplied that that was the case.  If anything, his argument makes the relationship between Christianity and the rebirth of modern science more, not less, credible.

Maybe John Loftus should start reading those books he cobbles together.  

Meanwhile, here's a new book from Dr. Allan Chapman, historian of science at Oxford University, that shows just how friendly the relationship between Christianity and science has been.  Chapman is a respected authority on the subject, several notches above Dr. Carrier in the pecking order of academia.  John might find this book a revelation. 

 

(C) I think John is one of those people who could rightly brag, "I've forgotten more about theology than you'll ever know."  Certainly he has forgotten what "faith" means, however many times I try to remind him. 

Genuine faith in the Christian sense is that act of mind and will by which we discover all that we ever can come to know.  Faith means trusting, and holding firmly to, what we have good reason to believe is true, in the face of trial.  In that sense, no science, no history, not even the most platitudinous reasoning, would be possible without faith. 

 

That doesn't mean faith is a methodology, and that is how science differs from religion.  Science might be described as "Faith +."  It is faith in the mind, the senses, and one's colleagues, PLUS a particular methodology for sorting certain kinds of claims and determining if they are true. Of course it is not the only such methodology, and of course religious believers use many valid methodologies to sort rival claims to truth, as much as secular humanists do. 

 

Faith by itself should probably not be described as an epistemology.  But all valid epistemologies involve both faith and reason, working together.

 

(D) What about John's claim that religion has led to no great discoveries in 2012? 

 

Christianity is not an epistemology, though it includes statements about the nature of the cosmos.  But people thinking from Christian assumptions have made a huge portion of the greatest discoveries about the world, including both ancient Greek and Medieval European scientists. 

 

The pace of discovery did not, as far as I could tell, flag in recent years, at least those that have come to my attention over the past year:

 

(1) My own doctoral thesis, offering a new, bold, and I think nuanced model of how ultimate beliefs relate to one another, was completed last fall.  The thesis also sets the intellectual history of China in a novel light.  I have hope that this work may come to be seen as a major new understanding of a vast field  of human thought and understanding. 

 

(2) Robert Woodberry continues to show, in his new works, that Protestant missions was largely responsible for the spread of democracy around the world.  Who knew that? 

 

(3) Ross Douthat's new Bad Religion is a brilliant description of American society, and what makes it run most effectively.  (Orthodox Christianity is his answer.)

 

(4) Melanie Kirkpatrick's Escape From North Korea seeks an answer to the question, "What should the world do about its most diabolical regime?"  One of the answers she finds is, the Gospel is already beginning to take some of the most effective measures to give hope to North Koreans, and perhaps even transform that pathetic nation from the inside. 

 

(5) Alvin Plantinga reaches exciting intellectual insights about science and Christianity in Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.  Loftus ought to read that book: he needs to think more clearly about science and religion, and that might help.   

 

(6) Richard Bauckham shows, in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, that the Gospels almost certainly derive from eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life.  This is a very exciting journey of intellectual discovery into the life of the most important person who has ever lived. 

 

(7) Ivan Satyavrata's Christian interpretation of Indian tradition was published in an accessible form in our Faith Seeking Understanding. 

 

(8) And, of course, Christians who happen to be scientists, philosophers, historians, or other intellectual explorers of various kinds, continued to contribute their bits to the general fund of knowledge over the course of the year.  The whole scientific enterprise, again, was started largely on theistic premises, and to a large extent (Oxford historian Allan Chapman has a book coming out this month at least tangentially on the subject, I think) under Christian motives. 

 

These are just a few of the discoveries made by Christian thinkers that have specifically come to my eye over the past year or so, and come to mind in a few minutes of thinking after reading John's blog. 

 

Really, John Loftus ought to broaden his intellectual horizons if he is going to continue writing about Christianity.