Answering Nicholas Kristof's Questions on Faith

I've always liked Nicholas Kristof, though not reading the New York Times, I seldom see his essays.  I find something sincere and earnest about his work.  Traveling around the world on assignments, he seems to view people with real compassion.  I probably disagree with his politics, but he is one liberal whom I really respect -- what one would hope for from someone who calls himself a "liberal."  (Though I don't know if Kristof uses that word.)  

This morning someone posted a series of questions which Kristof posed to the New York City pastor Tim Keller.  (I won't give the poster's name, since this was on a closed forum.)  He asked us to try to answer Kristof's questions without looking at Keller's replies.   While I wasn't planning to write a blog piece this morning, the questions proved interesting, and on important issues that I've pondered a lot.  Here's what I came up with.  

John Loftus does math. (Hoooowwwww?)

I returned to North America two days ago and found the copy of John Loftus' How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist that I had ordered, in a box from Amazon in my office. I bought it because Loftus attacks me in it, and of course I wanted to see what he would say this time.   But that's late in the book, and I haven't gotten to that chapter, yet.

How does John Loftus (or anyone) know anything?

Explaining epistemology, how we know what we know, to New Atheists, feels a bit like rolling up a stone in Hades, only to have it slide back down, throughout eternity.  Asking them to stop blindly worshipping "science," and start thinking about our sources of knowledge rationally, is like asking a cat to be kind to mouse-flavored straw men.  (Sorry for the mixed metaphor: I have a cold, so make no guarantees even worse will not follow.) 

Crowd-Sourcing Vacuity: (non) Ten (non) Commandments for the (non) 21st Century

The authors of a new book entitled Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart, Lex Bayor and John Figdor, have it seems awarded $1000 prizes to the winners of their "Crowd-Sourcing the Ten Commandments for the 21st Century" contest.  More than 5,000 entries poured in.  The authors, or their colleagues, corralled all kinds of humanist bigwigs (Adam Savage, David Silverman, executive directors, presidents and founders galore) to judge the entries.  

And here (drum roll, please) are the ten.  Or six.  Or, well, if you want to be technical, the three, repeated a few times: 

1) Be open minded and be willing to alter your beliefs with new evidence. 
 
2) Strive to understand what is most likely to be true, not to believe what you wish to be true.
 
3) Be open minded and be willing to alter your beliefs with new evidence. 
 
4) Every person has the right to control over their body.
 
5) God is not necessary to be a good person or to live a full and meaningful life.
 
6) Be mindful of the consequences of all your actions and recognize that you must take responsibility for them.
 
7) Treat others as you would want them to treat you and can reasonably expect them to want to be treated. 
Think about their perspective. 

8) We have the responsibility to consider others including future generations 
 
9) Be open minded and be willing to alter your beliefs with new evidence. 
 
10) Leave the world a better place than you found it.

First of all, it's striking that even with a Stanford professor on board, nobody here seems able to count to ten.  Or perhaps none of those thousands of contributors could think of anything new to say.  The first "non-Commandment," as John Loftus calls them (let's color it red), is repeated three times, in exactly the same words (1, 3, and 9), and then once more, in slightly different words (2).  (What are the odds that three people would phrase Non-Commandment 1 (3, 9) exactly the same?  Instead of, say, "Be open-minded (with a hyphen) and therefore alter your beliefs when new facts present themselves?"  Or "Change your mind when warranted?")

Numbers 4 and 5 are truth claims, not moral imprecations (leave them black).  8 and 10 are repeats, and corollaries of (7).  6 is purely psychological.

So when up-to-date atheists get together and try to think up some really good improvements for the Ten Commandments, what do they come up with?  The Golden Rule (echoing Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus, who said it was half the Law), plus "Plan for future generations" (implied by the Golden Rule) and "Think things through, and change your mind when the evidence warrants."

I love that last one, and hope to see New Atheists begin following it, some time soon.  (Even if its "more like a guideline, really.")  Up to this point, our atheist neighbors have often seemed among the most pig-headed creatures on the planet.  

If they were less pig-headed, for instance, they might recognize that evidence has always been a part of what Christians mean by "faith."  (Since we have explained this to them in such detail and with such repetition, now.) 

For instance, when Jesus explained the Golden Rule, he said all the commandments come down not to ten, nor even to three, but to just two: "Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  And love your neighbor as yourself."  Loving with your mind, of course, means thinking, following our Creator who has made us in His rational image by exploring reality rationally.  In any case, aside from some cherry-picking of Thomas in the Gospel of John, and a few verses in Hebrews 11, which we explained in True Reason, both the Bible and Christian history have been pretty insistent that yes, the Christian call to faith is a call towards the evidence, not away from it.  

And yet the enormous wealth of evidence we have cited to prove this fact, does not seem to have budged the opinions of radical atheists an inch.  Even those who know better STILL attack Christianity for its supposed insistence on Blind Faith.  

So our Secular Humanist friends have crowd-sourced the Ten Commandments, asking many of their top leaders to vet the results.  And what do they come up with?  The ancient Golden Rule and one of its more obvious corollaries.  Plus, "Oh, BTW, that thing on top of your neck is called a head, it comes with a brain inside.  Try the on-switch."  

The implication, drummed into the reader by repeating this point four times, is that no one else ever thought of doing that, before.  "Gee, thanks!  I was wondering what that thing was for!"  

Aside from failing to find 10 Secular Humanist non-commandments, some secular humanists have also recently taken to denying that Jesus lived 20+ centuries ago, undermining even the date Lex Bayor and John Figdor assign to their non-innovations. 

So apparently Secular Humanism doesn't claim to have much to offer the world anymore, apart from what we already know, in our hearts if not in our hands, one may say.  But maybe that's an improvement from the Humanist Manifestos of yore, not to mention Soviet Constitutions and such, which could at times be worse than unoriginal.  

The Tao, as C. S. Lewis said, is indeed eternal.  

(Afterward: Arizona Atheists points out that I made a mistake, in copying this list from "Debunking Christianity."  [I did also go to the original site, but overlooked this discrepancy.]   In the present version -- see below -- non of the "commandments" are repeated.  However, the two "new commandments" are every bit as morally vacuous, and in one case untrue as well.  So my overall impression of mush is, if anything, heightened with the addition of these two new "un-commandments."  See the first two posts below.)

Peter Boghossian captains Titanic to bottom of Atlantic.

The skeptical world is presently agog over philosopher Peter Boghossian's new book, Manual for Creating Atheists.  And well they should be: the book is a monstrous, enormous, monumental, dare one say titanic work of hubris.  Some of the rivets of his argument are missing, it hit an iceberg even before sailing out of port, and there is a thirty-foot gash in its hull below the water line.  But it is a magnificent vessel, and skeptics from Richard Dawkins to John Loftus are clambering aboard with a considerable weight of philosophical luggage. 

I posted my review earlier.  John Loftus has just posted his.  Let us read through the latter with our customary critical engagement:

Peter Boghossian: Socrates or Sophist?

Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Pitchstone Publishing, 2013)

Let me begin this review (also on Amazon) with one of those enlightening conversations Portland State University philosophy professor Peter Boghossian is fond of. A Christian Scholar (CS; Boghossian is also fond of initials) who has studied Christian thought on the concept of "faith," watches a lecture by an atheist philosophy professor (PB) on the same topic. He sends him a polite e-mail, describing his relevant credentials (recently, author of "Faith Seeking Understanding," with leading Christian scholars contributing, blurbs from Yale, Penn State, etc), and suggesting a debate.

The following exchange ensues:

"Good morning!

"Yesterday I noticed on the website for John Loftus, that you had endorsed his new book on the "Outsider Test for Faith." I haven't seen the book yet, but I'm pretty sure he responds to my critique of the OTF in True Reason, somewhere in that book.

"I think I've also seen you make comments about "faith," with which I strongly disagree.

"Since we're both in the Northwest -- my home is east of Seattle -- I was wondering if you would consider a civil public debate on the topic of faith?" (Names titles of books, well-known scholars who have endorsed it, academic background.)
.
"Thanks much, (CS).

PB: "Answer this question: What would it take for you to lose your faith?"

CS is taken aback by the social minimalism -- no greetings, no explanation, no hint of civility. But he gulps, and responds guardedly yet still politely, aware of the need to define terms and ask questions before getting into details:

"Do we agree on what the word 'faith' means? Do you know what my 'faith' is, yet?"

"If the reasons I believe in God, and in Jesus Christ (or, say, that Io has active volcanoes), proved mistaken, and none better were forthcoming, then I think I would have little intellectual right to hold those beliefs any longer. But it is the very nature and grounds of faith, that I propose to debate."

PB: "This does not answer the question. Please answer the question or this will be our last communication. What reasons would have to be mistaken? Give me an example of a reason and how you know it would be mistaken. What would this look like?"

Now irritated at the undisguised rudeness, and the demand that arguments developed over hundreds of pages be reduced to a quick sound bite, CS checks PB's CV, finds a name there that may explain the fondness for questions, but not the discourtesy, and replies:

"Sorry, Peter, Socrates is a friend of mine. You're no Socrates.

"I'm duly warned off. I'll look forward to reading, then debunking, your book."

PB: "You're a fraud. Don't contact me again."

According to Peter Boghossian's A Manual For Creating Atheists, a dialogue should pass through four stages: (1) Wonder; (2) Hypothesis; (3) Q & A; (4) Accept or Revise Hypothesis.

In this case, the Q and A came first, but itself prompted wonder on the part of CS, and then a series of hypotheses. Why was PB so prickly? Is this his normal style of conversation? Is he unfamiliar with the social niceties, or does he habitually scorn them? Is PB, as they say in the professional literature, a jerk? Or just having a bad day?

And what did PB mean by diagnosing CS (PB is fond of medical lingo, too) as a "fraud?" Did he mean CS had not, in fact, written the books he claimed, and was not knowledgeable about what Christians mean by faith? If so, on what grounds did the "street epistemologist" deduce this? Mental telepathy, perhaps? Or did he mean that, without knowing what CS believed, or why he believed it, those beliefs must be wrong, and he must actually be aware of the fact that he is peddling falsehoods?

In any case, not considering himself a fraud, as promised, CS purchased the book, which was by this time among the top 500 in America.

Manuel for Creating Atheists proved more interesting than that short conversation might have led CS to believe. Perhaps PB had been having a bad day. The book proved punchy, passionate, original, and respectful of the ancients (never mentioning, however, that Plato or Epictetus were infected by the epistemic pathology of theistic faith.) PB even offers a biting critique of multiculturalism and what he calls "academic leftism" that almost inspired CS to break out in a one-man football season, Seahawks-are-on-Monday-night-football-tonight wave.

This is, indeed, a manual for a new generation of skeptics. It has been field-tested by the philosopher himself in, it seems, every conceivable setting: in classrooms, with parents who complain about his attacks on religion in classrooms, on the phone, in prisons, by email (the first line of his response to CS's query turns out to be a set challenge that is part of a field-tested stratagem). PB even looks for empty seats on Southwest Airlines (center aisle!) next to people reading religious texts, to enlighten them. (Wonder again: is this man simply a pest? Worse than CS, even?)

PB's mission strategy devolves around asking a set of Socratic questions designed to relentlessly deconstruct what he takes to be the false epistemology of faith.

But what is faith? Here is the question, again, which elicited CS's original desire for a dialogue.

For it turns out that PB's book, and apparently his whole career as an atheist evangelist, are based on a remarkably bold, but quite hollow, bluff. This bluff involves defining "faith" as "pretending to know things you don't know."

And that is precisely what PB is doing.

Anyone who has read much in the Christian tradition -- and PB evidently has not, his bibliography is replete with first and second string New Atheists, he seems to assume Tertullian did say "I believe because it is absurd" and meant exactly that, and that Pascal wrote a "Wager" and said nothing more to support Christian faith intellectually -- will of course reject this definition with a groan and a sigh. But PB calls for an army of "street epistemologists," not new Socrates who will seek out the most famous thinkers in modern Athens and sincerely try to find out what they know. He is after low-hanging fruit, injured caribou at the back of the herd. People who do know the tradition, and its reasons, who contact him rather than the other way around, may be dismissed peremptorily and magisterially. And so PB sends his disciples into the highways and biways, to pester people into the Kingdom of Reason, (wonder again: will this make Southwest stock go up or down?), to teach what has already long been the defining delusion of the Gnu Age, what CS calls the "Blind Faith Meme." (Don't read Justin, Augustine, Aquinas, Ricci, Locke, Sherburne, McGrew, read Plantinga and Craig alone but take care not to buy their books and thus support their causes -- yes, PB can be that petty.)

Confronted with the Christian tradition, unlike Socrates, PB simply has not yet bothered to really listen. (Shouldn't that come before "Wonder?") This is evident in small things, such as PB's repeated mention of the Young Earth Creationist belief that the world is only 4,000 years old. That would be 6,000 years old: of course it's a silly notion, but get the numbers right, just so we know you're paying attention! PB cites few serious Christians, but works in Ray Comfort, Benny Hinn, Ted Haggard, and Deepak Chopra. So where does he get his information about religion? There are some interesting studies cited, and respectable skeptics like Pascal Boyer and Phil Zuckerman, but he also seems to rely heavily on such party-trick fanatics as Hector Avalos, Greta Christina, John Loftus, and Victor Stenger. He also recommends a "refutation" of theistic arguments by John Allen Paulos that CS found to be as embarrassing, groan-worthy a cavalcade of caricatures, tattered straw men, and ignorance, as one might fear between the covers of a single volume. (Even worse than The God Delusion.)

Which suggests that when it comes to Christianity, this bit of false humility would mark needed progress for PB:

"I only know that I know nothing."

In conclusion, let CS briefly explain what faith really means for Christians, since skeptics have been so badly mislead on this subject. (As Tom Gilson points out in another review here, several of us CSs have a book coming out later this year called True Reason, where this is demonstrated in some detail.)

Faith should be defined as "holding firmly and acting on what you have good reason to believe is true, in the face of existential difficulties."

Note that on this definition, which fits both New Testament usage and most Christian usage for 2000 years, and which is also affirmed (in CS' experience, which is wider than PB's) by most experienced Christians (not talking about lame caribou, here), faith is not a distinct epistemology, but along with reason, it's twin, one basis for all possible epistemologies.

There are, in short, four "levels of rational faith," and all sane people participate (critically, one hopes) at least in the first three: (1) one's own mind; (2) one's senses; (3) other people (PB is very confused on this head, not recognizing that most appeals to science as well as any old text like Acts of the Apostles or the Koran are in essence at least appeals to the authority of people, which can be warranted or not -- see Cold Case Christianity for an interesting discussion); (4) God or other super-human beings. All of these can and should be tested rationally, and perhaps in some cases rejected. (One may know that one is not thinking straight after too many beers.) All can at least potentially also be reasonably cited as sources of true knowledge.

But PB does not understand this, which makes this book an often interesting, sometimes rather crazed and epic, Hunting of the Snark. In short, until he begins to ask questions with the goal of truly understanding and not caricaturing so as to put notches on his belt and destroy that mythical monster, "Faith," PB will not be Socrates. He will remain a clever, but irritable, and often irritating, and intellectually irrelevant, sophist.

Et tu, Soren Kierkegaard?

Informed Christians know that the New Atheism sect is defined by blind faith in the silly notion that Christianity recommends blind faith.  The evidence against this notion is overwhelming, as Christians like Alister McGrath and the co-authors of True Reason, including myself, have pointed out again and again.  (I also targetted the idea in The Truth Behind the New Atheism.)  The evidence for the "Blind Faith Meme," by contrast, runs the gamet of sketchiness from anecdotal to outright mistaken.  As for the latter, I have personally rebutted popular misconstruals of Jesus' words to "Doubting Thomas," Justin Martyr, Origen, and of Pascal's Wager, among other targets.  Pascal is even misrepresented by those who should know better, like A. C. Grayling.  (One hardly even wants Richard Dawkins to read Pensees.  "A man has to know his limits," as Clint Eastwood put it.)

One almost finds oneself feeling a little sorry for the New Atheists as the dominoes continue to fall.  Even so theologically marginal a thinker as Tertullian, and so rhetorical a writer as Martin Luther, are shown by people who know their thought more fully to not really promote fideism much at all. 

But surely Soren Kierkegaard is an impregnable fortress of fideism!  Surely Kierkegaard, if anyone, recommended that we believe without reasons! 

Or maybe not. 

Atheists praise The Truth Behind New Atheism!

The Amazon site for my book, The Truth Behind the New Atheism, has been dominated by atheists almost from Day One.  While a number of very thoughtful (and positive, though that's not the only thing that makes them thoughtful!) reviews have been posted there by intelligent and well-read Christians, hoards of crusading "skeptics" have voted those excellent reviews down.  In the Amazon system, that means people won't see them. (See especially the reviews by William Muehlenberg, Clifford Martin, Sol Lobbes, Rick Thiessen, and Benjamin Devan.  Bruce Bain, a dedicated Amazon contributor, gets in some good points in his quirky way, too.  Please vote up the ones you like, even if it's a bit late, now!)

About a third of the reviews are negative.  These are all by people who are ideologically opposed to Christianity, and (in a few cases) have a personal grudge against the author.  (Two or three of the one-star reviews are actually by the same person, a lawyer from San Diego who uses various "sock puppets" to attack me -- a dozen or so of his reviews have already been removed by Amazon.)  I'm glad to say, no one who wasn't ideologically opposed, has yet claimed the book is a bad read.  There was a Young Earth creationist from Northern Ireland who gave the book three stars, but he removed his review.  Other than my mistaken notion that the universe is old, he seemed pretty cool with the book, anyway. 

But here I'd like to focus on those few reviewers on either side who "cross the picket line," so to speak, and review Truth Behind the New Atheism against their ideological interests. 

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:

Loftus: Damned if you don't, too! (faith, again)

One gets whiplash, trying to follow anti-Christian arguments some days. 

A Gnu Unicorn misses the point. (On faith.)

An atheist named Mike, who calls himself A-Unicornist, has taken some time recently to blog through our e- (and soon paper) book, True Reason, even though he calls it "terrible."  So let me take time to decontruct his critique of my second chapter, even though I didn't find that critique so hot, either.  After all, if atheists who define themselves as people who don't collect stamps or don't believe in unicorns, still expend hundreds of man-hours justifying themselves for not doing what they implicitly claim needs no justification, the least I can do is spend an hour or so rebutting a very bad argument by a gentleman who really does exist. 

At least I think he does.  Of course, I take Mike's existence on faith, in the Christian sense (the sense I am going to explain yet again, below), as I take most things that are real on faith. 

Faith is the subject of True Reason.  The main questions it attempts to answer are, what do Christians mean by the word "faith?"  Is Christian faith reasonable?  Is it even meant to be reasonable? 

U2, Loftus?

John Loftus is to arguments against Christianity what Ronald McDonald is to hamburgers.  The quality may not be very high, but given mass-production techniques, the quantity is unprecedented.  Maybe that's what his cowboy hat is all about -- like Colonel Sander's beard, or Ronald McDonald's clown costume.  Billions and billions served! 

"Thousands and thousands
served."

This morning he's come up with a new one: the "You Too, Fallacy."  The tomato is oozing off of the bun, and the hamburger patty is off-center, and the katsup machine misfired -- in short, the argument is a bit of a mess. I'm not even sure whether John is saying I commit the fallacy, or that I criticize someone else for committing it -- so feel free to read it for yourself.  Loftus also objects when someone points out that his own faith of Secular Humanism fails his "Outsider Test for Faith," far more callamitously than Christianity does.  But this morning, the matters Loftus has on his mind are the "Problem of Pain," and the use of so-called "faith-based reasoning."  (Here's where I embrace the U2 fallacy with open arms -- atheists do and must think by means of faith, and without faith, cannot reason.  All reasoning is based on faith, in the Christian sense, as Descartes and the latest Matrix film show with equal clarity.  Unless you trust your mind, you cannot reason. Unless you trust your senses and other people, for good reasons, of course, as the Bible demands, you cannot use reasoning to learn much of anything.)

St. Anselm: Climbing by Faith

Note: I'll be posting exerts from our new book, Faith Seeking Understanding, off and on over the following weeks.  I hope you enjoy these passages, find them tantalizing, go and buy a copy here for yourself, then buy another one for your best friend for Christmas!  This first passage is from my introduction. 

“Faith seeking understanding” was the motto of St. Anselm, remembered today as a kindly reformer, philosopher, and gadfly, an 11^th Century Archbishop of Canterbury who was exiled by two English kings.  But long before such career advances and recessions, Anselm was a climber of mountains.  What Anselm meant by “faith seeking understanding,” and how this Medieval relic of an idea can transform the world today, was foreshadowed in his experiences growing up in the Alps of what is now northern Italy.

The city of Aosta, Anselm’s hometown, rests in a narrow valley surrounded by ten thousand foot peaks on three sides.  Anselm believed (it seems more literally than most young hikers) that heaven was to be found above the tree line.  One night in a dream, he was told to climb a mountain to the court of God.  On the way up, he passed women who were reaping the king’s grain in a slip-shod and lazy manner.  Received by God and his steward at court (everyone else was out working the harvest), the steward presented him with the “whitest of bread” to eat. 

Sometime after this dream, Anselm’s mother died, and his religious zeal waned.  He fell out with his father, renounced his patrimony, and set off across the Alps westward with a servant.  On a fine day, climbing to the pass below Mount Cenis (now, fittingly, part of Gran Paradiso National Park) must indeed have seemed like entering the courts of heaven: serrated peaks rise on all sides, ibex graze the slopes, grass and wildflowers wave in the breeze, and a large alpine lake reflects valleys and clouds beyond. 

But the main pass (which Constantine and Charlemagne had also ascended) was almost 7000 feet above sea level, and Anselm tired.  The travelers ran out of food: Anselm gnawed snow to assuage his hunger.  His servant gave the donkey’s saddlebag a final, desperate search, and was surprised to uncover bread “of exceptional whiteness,” like the bread in Anselm’s dream.  Refreshed, the travelers resumed their journey. 

Anselm later wrote of God as “the highest of all beings.”  His famous ontological argument, still debated by philosophers, can be read as a kind of prayer in dialogue with and in search of God, “he than whom there is no greater,” as if he were still looking for firm footing, ascending some alpine valley.  Nor did he forget the lazy farmers in his dream. He worked in the fields of God with diligence and compassion.  People who were afraid to approach the pope, “hurried” to meet Anselm, including Muslim vassals of Count Roger of Sicily.  He gently admonished kindness to children in the monasteries he supervised, was offended by abuse of animals, and played an early role in the anti-slavery movement.  Doubtless it is due to Anselm’s kindness that his story comes down to us: the historian Eadmer, who tells it, was one of many devoted students. 

Christians believe not just in abstract dogmas, but in truth “made flesh, and dwelt among us.”  From Anselm’s life we similarly begin to see what “Faith Seeking Understanding” might mean, not just as a sticker a Medieval schoolman might have pasted to the rear bumper of his ox cart, but as a lived solution to the urgent intellectual challenges of our own time. 

Two great errors confuse the modern world about faith.   Many see faith as a leap off an intellectual precipice.  Faith, Richard Dawkins famously informed us (he was not the first), means believing “not only in the absence of evidence, but in the teeth of evidence.”  Others seem to see faith as the ultimate karmic bailout: live as seedy and frivolous a life as you please, then Jesus comes with a big red checkbook and buys you out of prison.      

But faith for a mountain climber is neither blind nor lazy.  Calf muscles and eyes engage in the climb, as you step over stones and roots, and skirt puddles.  Or perhaps you trip, lose your way, even wind up like Otzi the Ice Man, found after 5300 years, encased in an Alpine glacier near another Italian border.  For Anselm, faith meant applying a mind rich in curiosity, imagination, and insight, along with alert senses and reasonable trust in other people, to explore the rugged landscape of an often demanding and complex Medieval world. 

The two men to whom this book is dedicated also set remarkable examples of lives fully engaged in ascending the peak of God’s truth, and describing what they saw from different slopes of that summit. 

My new book is Now Out!

Our new book, Faith Seeking Understanding, is now available from William Carey Library!

I think almost everyone interested in apologetics, missions, or the life of the mind, will enjoy this book. It includes conversations with Alvin Plantinga, Rodney Stark, and Don Richardson, as well as original and often personal essays about the search for truth by Philip Yancey, Oxford historian of science Allan Chapman, quantum physicist Don Page (a little weird!), anthropologist Miriam Adeney, Chinese philosopher and reformer Yuan Zhiming, philosopher Randal Rauser, and others. (Including myself, the editor, of course.)

Here are two welcome and telling endorsements:

Philip Jenkins, Penn State historian:

"David Marshall has gathered a really distinguished array of contributors, who have all thought deeply about faith in its global context, and the different essays work wonderfully well together. The book makes a splendid memorial to two truly great individuals, Paul Brand and Ralph Winter."

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Yale philosopher:

"What makes the collection especially fascinating and valuable is the individuality and particularity of the stories -- a concrete testimony to the fact that the Christian intellectual life takes many forms."

This latter underlines one of the purposes of Faith Seeking Understanding, to encourage Christians to "love God and think boldly," to paraphrase Luther. 

I'll also be hitting the road from next month (book launch this Saturday evening at West Side Pres, then next Saturday at Issaquah Christian, in the Seattle area), and welcome invitations to speak anywhere on the planet, very much including Antarctica.

Don't ask me to wear the suit, though. 

Creation Ex Nihilo? Moses vs. Lawrence Krauss

COBE on faith.

In a small land on the eastern fringe of the Roman Empire, an unknown late 1st Century Jew wrote about the origin of the universe:

By faith we understand that the universe was created at God's command, so that what we now see was made out of what cannot be seen.

Much has changed about how we understand the cosmos, since then.  We now know that the ancient Greeks were right in surmising that Earth is roughly spherical, and about 24,000 miles in circumference.  We also know it is one of eight (not five, not nine) planets that circle the sun.  We know the sun itself is one of perhaps 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and that the larget quantity of mass in our galaxy is made up of things "not seen," but that can be deduced.  We know that the Milky Way is one of perhaps 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe alone, and that much more may be permanently out of our sight, because light travels at a fixed velocity, and it even if more galaxies are out there, the light from them can't have gotten here yet.  We know that the universe is some 13.7 billion years old. 

And we also now "know," that indeed, the universe was made of things that cannot be seen -- a singularity, or something like a singularity, first, then a universe expanding for some 300,000 years in an invisible plasmic state before photons were released, some of which (now stretched out into the microwave region of the spectrum) still cross our television screens as static when we flip to the wrong channel.    

How do we "know" these things?  Has the epistemological basis of our "knowledge" much changed, since the ancient author of Hebrews penned these words? 

I think the change is less than one might suppose.  We still know these things -- by faith, "the conviction of unseen realities," as our anonymous author put it. 

First, of course, we believe the scientists who tell us these things.  How did they find them out?  By reading measurements from a radiometer, then telescopes on board Soviet and American satellites.  But they didn't build those instruments themselves, so they needed to trust other people, in large part, for their results.  In fact  Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, made a key discovery by accident, studying the stars, when they noticed their antenna was heating up more than it should have.  They then consulted Princeton cosmologists including Robert Dicke, who explained the data they had discovered as being caused by background radiation from the Big Bang. 

All that involved a lot of faith in other professionals.  It also depended on the researchers' faith in their own eyes and sense of touch, and in their own rationality and memory, which is of course is fallible as well. 

In other words, all three mundane levels of faith, by which we navigate the world around us, were involved in reaffirming the truth, long since announced in the Bible, and believed by faith all these years, that the universe began in a definite point of origination. 

Recently, physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote a popular and controversial book (which I have not read yet), arguing in effect that the universe created itself.  Theologians and other believers in God have lost their last excuse: stuff comes from nothing, end of story.  This kicked off quite a bit of commentary, including from Richard Dawkins, with his usual magniloquence:

Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.

Don Page, an eminent physicist who is contributing to our new book, posted a review on Amazon taking eloquent issue with such appraisals of Krauss' book. 

And, in the New York Times of all places, from philosopher David Albert (no wonder these guys don't like philosophers!), these wonderful lines:

But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place.

Both men are right, no doubt.  But notice, not 100 years ago, but 2000 years ago, the author of Hebrews didn't quite say God made all things out of nothing, but:

By faith we understand that the universe was created at God's command, so that what we now see was made out of what cannot be seen.


A fact that Krauss, in his usual, shoot-from-the-hip way, is echoing, too.  Whatever God's role in creation -- still, as ever, controversial -- reasoned faith has now again confirmed what reasoned faith taught that ancient Roman Jew: that all we now see, what made out of what cannot be seen. 

And we still add, now as then:

Somehow. 

Theology in Hades: Explaining Faith to Loftus and Pearse.

Do you know the story of Sisyphus?  He was a real fink of a king, who killed and tricked and seduced mortals, then also tricked the God of Death and locked him in hell.  (So he couldn't come out, and collect the newly dead.  Men would thus fight in wars, and no one would die.)  The gods punished this duplicitous tyrant by making him roll a stone up a hill in Hades.  Every time the stone almost reached the lip of the hill, it rolled back down again, and Sisyphus would have to start again from square one. 

That is what it can feel like, explaining what Christians mean by "faith," to some atheists. 

Real Faith: E-book announcement

An e-book called Real Reason, of which I wrote a good portion, is now available:
http://www.amazon.com/True-Rea...

The thirteen Christian authors of this book rebut what I like to call the "Blind Faith Meme."

William Lane Craig is the best-known contributor. 

Other philosophers, theologians, and historians, and a few younger Christian thinkers, also write chapters. 

Despite the claim that the Christian view of faith is muddled, we did not seem to find agreeing with one another on this subject difficult, writing a coherent defense of Faith and Reason, in 13 different hands. (Well, actually, 26, since none of us were writing in long-hand, I think!)

Aside from writing two chapters, and an appendix (which will probably be added later), I also helped edit two other chapters. My chapters are entitled: "The Marriage of Faith and Reason" and "John Loftus and the Outsider-Insider Test for Faith.")

What most struck me was the continuity of our arguments. (Those that I have read, so far.) 

This book should be an effective, one-stop answer to perhaps the most common misconception about the Christian faith on the market today -- that Christianity promotes "faith in the absence of reason" or "in the teeth of the evidence." 

Having interacted with "New Atheists" now for several years on a daily basis, and with others who held the same false notions of faith long before that, I think one can hardly exagerrate how central the question is today.  Watch popular movies like the Matrix series, or read any great popular science book, and the relevance of faith becomes clear.  In a sense, this question lies at the tipping point between "modernism" and "post-modernism."  I think a clear, biblical view of faith can help us understand life better, and avoid many of the grossest and most common intellectual errors of "this age of the world." 

It's also quite reasonably priced! 

So please: read, enjoy, and pass the word along. 

Ode to Blind Faith (and John Loftus).

Dedicated to all those who spread the Blind Faith Meme.

God told Abe to camp by Tel Aviv,
While giving no cause to believe
That would satisfy scientists named Steve
Isaac laughed, and Sarah felt empirically relieved. 

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

Elijah lugged 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 three days later, fished Galilee without any line. 

-- David Marshall, 3/9/2012

Alvin Plantinga on the Social Character of Philosophy

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!"

Faith or Insanity? Choose one, please.

Faith gets me to the top
of Mt. Tai.   

Nothing confuses modern skeptics more than the word "faith."  That Weapon of Mass Distraction Richard Dawkins once "explained" that the word means believing "not only in the absense of evidence, but even in the teeth of the evidence."  Almost every skeptic I have talked to about the matter seems to take some such silly definition for granted. 

In our respective rebuttals, Alister McGrath and I went to some lengths to explain that that is not really what Christians mean by "faith."  Dawkins read McGrath's book, but the evidence McGrath offered seemed to go in one ear and out the other.  He continues to hold, "in the teeth of the evidence," like a rottweiler with her favorite chew toy, to his original misunderstanding of what Christians mean by faith. 

In his book, The New Atheism, astronomer Victor Stenger cited ten passages from my chapter on faith in The Truth Behind the New Atheism, and managed to misread almost everything he quoted.   

Recently another skeptic challenged my on-line article, "Faith and Reason," which shows that great Christian thinkers (Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Locke, etc) have almost always seen faith as essentially reasonable.  Among other things, he criticized the fact that I cited so many other thinkers, rather than offering my own arguments.  He read this as evidence I can't think for myself, but blindly follow the errors of famous Christians of the past. 

In a follow-up post I plan to delve into some of the errors various skeptics make about faith.  

But first, I'd like to offer a more positive, old explanation of faith, how it relates to reason, that I published long before that article, and several years before the New Atheists blew into town.  These are my "own thoughts" (if that matters) on faith, reason, and the fine art of sanity, from Jesus and the Religions of Man, published in 2000. (23-25.)   

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Four Levels of Faith

One of the most awesome sights I have seen on screen was an IMAX movie simply called Everest.  Avalanches seemed to sweep us from our seats as we watched.  Crevasses opened at our feet.  My four-year old son said, "I'm afraid" and "I want to go home."  But for months afterwards, he lobbied to see the film again.

The movie told the story of the ascent of Mt. Everest in 1996 by Ed Viesturs, two teammates, and their hard-working Sherpa guides, who carried the IMAX camera gear to the summit.  It showed the rigorous, and photogenic, training the team undertook climbing sea stacks and bicycling along the edge of red sandstone cliffs.  It followed the team to base camp, and recorded their tension as they helplessly monitored cell phones when another party was trapped in a storm high on the mountain, and nine climbers, some of them friends, tragically succombed to the elements.  Finally, it showed their awesome ascent of the great mountain, beginning in morning darkness lit by torches.  Even to watch the climbers ascend to the roof of the world one felt something of the "dread, distress and paradox" with which Kierkegaard insisted we must understand faith.

A mountain climb involves a marriage between faith and reason.  Trust is a serious thing on a mountain, not lightly given.  On rock faces, or glacial icefalls, each step must be tested and planned in advance.  Yet without trust, in one's eyes, muscles, partners, equipment, the pilot of the craft that ferries you to the base camp, and the people who have been there and made the maps, no one could approach the roof of the world on foot.  In religion, as in mountain climbing, faith is the most necessary and the most foolish thing.  When divorced from the rules of logic and evidence that rule all other fields of human endevour, we have seen, in the camps of Stalin, Pol Pott, and Jim Jones, that nothing is more dangerous.  Every step is a step of faith, but every step of blind faith may be the last.  When a leap is required, the ground that it will cover should be tested with every faculty at our disposal, with utter concentration and will to know what is there.

"I think, therefore I am," wrote the philosopher Descartes.  Nothing can be thought until the validity of thought in general is taken on faith.  By "taken on faith," I do not mean, "taken without reason," but "taken with reason, and with something else."  Any argument in favor of arguments begins with that which is its goal.  You cannot build the second story of a house until the first floor is framed.  Faith (not blind faith) is always the lower floor on which reasoning must rest.

Most of us would feel insulted if asked to prove the trustworthiness of our minds.  But it was precisely this problem that drove the philosopher David Hume and, later, the logical positivists, to a radical skepticism that in effect closed the door on intellectual endevour.  Hume argued that nothing could be proven from experience -- the fact that A followed B yesterday does not prove that it will again today.  In this regard western existentialists came close to reinventing radical Zen skepticism.  It was out of fear of the implied threat Hume's theories posed to science that Kant wrote a book whose title says it all: Critique of Pure Reason.  Mind by itself is deadly to mind.  As Chesterton poined out, not only is it possible to reason oneself into the asylum, those already there are often, on their own terms, persuasive reasoners.  "There is a thought that stops thought.  That is the only thought that ought to be stopped . . . Descartes said, 'I think, therefore I am.'  The philosophical evolutionist reverses and negates the epigram.  He says, 'I am not, therefore I cannot think.'" The first step of faith is to close our minds to the possibility that our minds are wholly delusional. 

The second step of faith is trust in our senses.  I hear the computer hum as I write.  I see snow blowing in from the hills to the north of campus, which, unfortunately, is not sticking.  The small of my back faintly reminds me that my posture is bad, and I had better change positions.  The linings in my nose, the hairs on the back of my hands, relate data to my brain: I had better open the window before the heater comes on and change the air. 

Liang Kai: "In the
chopping of wood,
and the carrying of
water, there lies the
wonderful Dao."

"How do you know this is not all an illusion?" Ask mystics, the world's most determined logicians.  "Can you prove that which you see, hear, smell, touch and taste exists outside your own mind?"  India has developed lifestyles that cultivate detachment from the material.  By lying on beds of nails or sitting in one spot for years without speaking, the sadhu shows he is drawing close to a world of which the senses know nothing.  In East Asia, on the other hand, Zen used the same logic to come to an opposite conclusion: "In the chopping of wood, there lies the wonderful Tao."  If the world is an illusion, why not simply live a normal life, work at a productive job, and play along?  Just remember, it is all a game.

On a practical level, most people who have not studied Zen koans or the Bhagavad Gita may see the debate as a quaint eccentricity of Eastern mystics and Western philosophers with too much time on their hands.  "No, I can't prove the reality of the world around me," they might admit.  "Maybe I am stuck, like Arnold Schwartzeneggar, in a 'Total Recall' universe that some corporation has implanted in my brain, or like Jim Carey, in a scripted TV series overseen by some god-like producer.  But why do I even think such lunacy?  I have work to do!"  With virtual reality and designer heavens beckoning like a cloud on the technological horizon, and scientists like Richard Dawkins arguing that thought itself is no more than a mechanical byproduct of evolution, however, this question of what we know and how we know it has gained new urgency.  I have on occasion found myself toying with the thought, "How do I know that I am really here?"  And then common sense, perhaps inspired by the voice of Descartes reaching across the centuries, provides half an answer, "Well, I think I am."  Laughing at solipsism, we choose to live by faith in this second sense, and in doing so, touch the world of phenomenal reality.

The third level of faith is confidence in other people. 

It has been suggested that the landing on the moon was staged in a Hollywood studio.  How can we know otherwise, except by faith? 

Faith in our teachers is increasingly open to verification as we grow older.  As a child, I relied on "what people say" for almost every fact I called my own, from where I was born to who my parents were, the existence of leptons (not to say Leprachauns), Labrador, and my own liver.  In high school biology I dissected a turtle and found a purplish object that resembled diagrams of the liver.  After graduation, I flew to Europe over a land of twisted bedrock and hidden lakes that lay where Lapland appeared on my map. I saw the world (a small part of it) for myself, and thus confirmed, and sometimes refuted, what my teachers had told me. 

For a mountain climber, the question of whether faith in other people is reasonable, is far from academic.  Were densely concentrated contour lines that suggested a cliff drawn in the right place?  Did the Nepali colonel who piloted the big Russian helicopter over glaciers and serrated peaks check the mechanics of the craft that morning with adequate care, or had he been drinking the night before? 

Is riding a bus, like,
 totally insane?

Only madmen live without faith, but only fools live by blind faith, faith that cares nothing for external verification.  We cross-examine witnesses, sip before we swallow, cut cards and check phone bills.  Yet even by taking a bus, we entrust our lives to armies of strangers: engineers, factory workers, the driver, the drivers of oncoming vehicles.  As Chesterton said of natural law, we don't count on the mental stability of our neighbors, we bet on it.  The bet doesn't always pay off: ten minutes after I crossed a bridge in North Seattle on a bus, a passenger shot to death the driver of a bus coming the other way, plummetting the bus forty feet to the ground from the same bridge.  I continue to get on buses and cross bridges, not because I have a death wish, nor because I have scientifically proven that my fellow passengers are trustworthy, but because I am sane enough to take a reasonable chance.  (A sanity based, in my case, on an ultimate trust in God.)  Anyone determined to believe only what he had seen for himself would walk to work, walk up the stairs (carefully checking for loose joists), and look for tacts on his seat as he sat down -- or stay home all day and worry about burglars.  Such a complete reliance on reason and the lower levels of faith is the mark not of a scientific genius, but of a mental breakdown.

As Chesterton put it, we say the insane have "lost their minds," but in reality, it is not reason they have lost.  They often have excellent reasons for mistrusting people, often as a result of a stormy childhood.  It is faith they have misplaced. 

Together these three levels of faith constitute the foundations of life: faith in our reason, trust in our senses, and confidence in other people.  They are the grounds on which we stand, the light by which we see the world, and the legs which allow us to walk down the street and live our lives in a dangerous world.

The fourth level of faith, religious faith, is not then a separate form of consciousness or an eccentricity of peculiar people.  Nor should it involve suspension of critical thinking.  It is part of a natural human continuum which we accept every day.  And, like lower forms of faith, religious faith can and must be tested by reason.