Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends by Kevin J. Vanhoozer (ed.)
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Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Holy Imprecations
According to David Lewis, “Some worshippers of the perpetrator are obviously evil. They relish contemplating the torment of the damned. Some of them even think that delight in the eternal sufferings of worldly sinners will be a component of the bliss of the save,” Philosophers Without Gods, 239.
In the endnotes (295n12) he quotes a colorful passage from Tertullian to illustrate his point.
Several comments are in order:
i) Like so many atheologians, Lewis carries on a moral tirade against the Christian faith without bothering to explain how he, as an atheist, is in a position to moralize.
Now, perhaps he could marshal sort of argument for secular ethics. But he doesn’t. He simply takes for granted the moral authority of his value-judgments.
ii) We also find some imprecations and taunt-songs in Scripture. What are we to make of these?
One needs to make some allowance for hyperbole and picturesque figures of speech. It’s funny how many unbelievers quote the Bible in the same vein as Elmer Gantry.
iii) Let’s remember that the Scriptural imprecations and taunt-songs are directed at powerful enemies of the faith. Men who persecute the people of God. Men who hound the poor to death and corrupt the system of justice through bribery.
iv) Lewis seems to think the saints will glory will spend eternity gloating over the fate of the damned. There’s nothing in Scripture to justify that assumption.
What we have, instead, are the righteous taking moral satisfaction in the final judgment. The scales of justice are finally righted. Evildoers who defrauded widows and orphans or massacred the faithful will get their comeuppance at last.
How is that obviously evil? On the contrary, what would be obviously evil is someone so morally blind that he is offended by retributive justice.
We should rejoice when the wicked receive their just deserts. It’s a good thing when the innocent are vindicated and the guilty are punished.
This doesn’t mean the saints spend eternity munching on ambrosia while they literally look down on the damned, from their Olympian heights, as the damned writhe in agony. Some unbelievers have clearly seen too many reruns of Clash of the Titans.
It’s not as if, after a judge has sentenced the accused, the family of the victim stays in the courtroom, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. No, once the sentence is pronounced and the court is adjourned, they go back home and get on with their lives.
Justice is a liberating force. It doesn’t keep you trapped in the past, but—to the contrary—frees you to move forward.
In the endnotes (295n12) he quotes a colorful passage from Tertullian to illustrate his point.
Several comments are in order:
i) Like so many atheologians, Lewis carries on a moral tirade against the Christian faith without bothering to explain how he, as an atheist, is in a position to moralize.
Now, perhaps he could marshal sort of argument for secular ethics. But he doesn’t. He simply takes for granted the moral authority of his value-judgments.
ii) We also find some imprecations and taunt-songs in Scripture. What are we to make of these?
One needs to make some allowance for hyperbole and picturesque figures of speech. It’s funny how many unbelievers quote the Bible in the same vein as Elmer Gantry.
iii) Let’s remember that the Scriptural imprecations and taunt-songs are directed at powerful enemies of the faith. Men who persecute the people of God. Men who hound the poor to death and corrupt the system of justice through bribery.
iv) Lewis seems to think the saints will glory will spend eternity gloating over the fate of the damned. There’s nothing in Scripture to justify that assumption.
What we have, instead, are the righteous taking moral satisfaction in the final judgment. The scales of justice are finally righted. Evildoers who defrauded widows and orphans or massacred the faithful will get their comeuppance at last.
How is that obviously evil? On the contrary, what would be obviously evil is someone so morally blind that he is offended by retributive justice.
We should rejoice when the wicked receive their just deserts. It’s a good thing when the innocent are vindicated and the guilty are punished.
This doesn’t mean the saints spend eternity munching on ambrosia while they literally look down on the damned, from their Olympian heights, as the damned writhe in agony. Some unbelievers have clearly seen too many reruns of Clash of the Titans.
It’s not as if, after a judge has sentenced the accused, the family of the victim stays in the courtroom, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. No, once the sentence is pronounced and the court is adjourned, they go back home and get on with their lives.
Justice is a liberating force. It doesn’t keep you trapped in the past, but—to the contrary—frees you to move forward.
Divine Evil
(Posted on behalf of Steve Hays)
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Of the various contributors to Philosophers Without Gods, David Lewis is undoubtedly the most high-powered thinker of the bunch. However, the actual essay is a work of composite authorship since he died before writing out the essay in full. Perhaps this accounts for all the slack reasoning.
There’s nothing terribly original about his argument, and I’ve dealt with this sort of thing before. But since unbelievers may quote from this book in the future, I might as well take one more whack at the dead horse on the backstretch.
Also, when a philosopher of his stature offers his own formulation of what many unbelievers regard as the decisive objection to the Christian faith, there’s some value in evaluating his performance. If this is the best that the best can do with the best weapon in their arsenal, what’s left?
Basically, he contends that the doctrine of hell is a special case of the argument from evil. Of course, he’s hardly the first atheologian to approach the issue from this angle, but let’s study his own formulation.
If so, this raises the question of his target audience. For Protestants, Scripture rather than tradition is the rule of faith.
For Catholics, Dante is not an ecumenical council. And Tertullian was a Montanist.
I doubt the Eastern Orthodox are overly concerned with what a Latin Father or Florentine poet believed. In addition, there is a universalist strand (which I reject) in Eastern Orthodox tradition.
i) He seems to define eternal punishment in terms of pain. But he makes no attempt to show that pain is the singular or primary component of eternal punishment. Does he think he’s getting this from Scripture? If so, where’s the exegesis?
And if he’s getting this from tradition (e.g. Dante, Tertullian), why should I care?
ii) Where does Scripture tell us that the damned suffer in “unimaginable” ways? Maybe they do and maybe they don’t, but if you’re going to attack the doctrine of hell, you need to attack what is taught in our rule of faith, and not embellish that teaching with fanciful additions and hyperbolic descriptions.
iii) To say that damnation intensifies the sufferings we undergo in our earthly lives does not imply that such sufferings are “unimaginable.” To the contrary, such an argument appeals to our to imagination as we project what we suffer in this life into a heightened form in the afterlife—in the case of the damned.
Dante and Tertullian, as well as Milton and Hieronymus Bosch had, if anything, an overly active imagination when it comes to fleshing out the details of everlasting punishment.
iv) It may well be that hell embodies an extension and intensification of what the reprobate already suffer in this life. But we need to distinguish between the actual teaching of Scripture and mere speculation.
If hell is a place devoid of special grace or common grace, that it’s easy to conclude that whatever is bad in this life is even worse in the life to come—for the hell-bound. And I think that’s a reasonable inference from Scripture. But one can extrapolate from this principle in more than one direction.
a) Hell is not merely a worse version of what the reprobate suffer in this life, for many of the reprobate do not suffer in this life. They make others suffer while they luxuriate. In this life, they get off scot-free.
One aspect of Biblical teaching is that hell will mark a reversal of fortunes. The ungodly who prospered in this life suffer in the next, while the godly who suffered in this life prosper in the next. So it’s quite inaccurate to say that hell is merely a linear extension and intensification of what the reprobate suffer in this life.
b) Once again, if we’re going to use this life as our frame of reference, then there are many different ways in which men make themselves miserable, or make the lives of those around them miserable.
Most human misery does not resemble a horror film. Most human misery is far more mundane and banal. Most human misery resembles a film like The Last Picture Show rather than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Loveless lovers in search of love. Loveless lovers who fall in love with other loveless lovers. Men and women bored out of their minds by trite, repetitive lives.
So, if you are going to view hell as the perfection of everything that makes the reprobate miserable in this life, then, for the most part, hell would be a pretty tame place to spend eternity. What would make it insufferable is not the blood and gore, but the interminable triviality of a godless existence ad infinitum ad nauseum.
If Lewis is going to speculate, then I’m free to speculate as well, and my conjecture is that hell is a place with a wide variety of punitive lifestyles. There are many ways to be miserable, and a lot of misery consists in a mind-numbingly dull existence. Tedium rather than torture. Life without hope is unbearable.
Indeed, that’s the underlying reason why some people resort to a life of violence or drug abuse. Anything to temporarily break the crushing monotony of their godless little lives.
ii) Is infinite agony a meaningful concept? Doesn’t physical pain have a physical threshold?
Or does he include psychological torment? But is infinite unhappiness a meaningful concept? You can speak of an infinite quantity, but what does it mean to speak of an infinite quality? What palpable sense can we extract from infinite intensity?
A tyrant will have a secret police force that tortures revolutionaries and terrorizes the populace to keep the populace in a state of fearful submission to the tyrant.
God does not torture or terrorize anyone (or contract that out to a subordinate) in order to keep people in fearful submission to himself. The only men and women who submit to God are those who have been favored by his gracious loving-kindness. They serve him out of joy—by hearts liberated from the bondage of sin.
By contrast, hell is a penal colony for rebels. Their insubordination is everlasting. And if there’s any torture in hell, it’s a case of one hellion tormenting another.
How is that "infinitely worse than what the worst of tyrants did"? To the contrary, this is a situation in which one evildoer repays evil for evil by returning the favor to another evildoer. How is that unjust? How is that not the essence of justice? Each evildoer receives his just deserts at the hands of his fellow evildoers. Not a pretty sight, to be sure, but richly deserved and eminently fair.
ii) A tyrant is someone who allows the wicked to prosper while he persecutes the righteous. God is doing the very opposite in damning the wicked.
ii) Where does Scripture ever say that eternal punishment vastly surpasses the modes of torment about which we know? Indeed, isn’t his claim self-refuting?
If everlasting punishment vastly surpasses the modes of torment about which we know, then how would he be in a position to know that? How does he know so much about the unknowable? For someone who tells us that hell is “unimaginably” cruel,” he seems to have some very definite ideas about the nature of the punishment—otherwise, how would he know enough to attack the doctrine of eternal punishment?
i) He equates suffering or agony with punishment. But how does that follow?
I go to the doctor because I feel unwell. The cure may be painful. Is the doctor “tormenting” me? Is painful medication or surgery a form of punishment?
Suppose I accidentally injure my best friend. He’s in agony. Was I punishing my best friend? There’s nothing intrinsically punitive about pain.
ii) What makes a crime criminal is not that a criminal pained the victim, but that he wronged the victim. The amount of suffering is not what makes an action unjust. And it’s not what makes on action more unjust than another.
Suppose a Nazi gasses a Jew, or shoots him in the head. Is the evil quantified by the amount of pain endured? If you could make the Nazi feel the same amount of pain as a bullet in the brain, would that be a just punishment? Does Lewis believe that if only there had been an ouchless, painless way of implementing the Final Solution, the Nazis would be innocent of their crimes?
iii) How does he measure pain and suffering, anyway? And what point does the offender endure "the exact agony he caused"? Does Lewis have an agonometer? Is pain and suffering quantifiable in discrete units? How many units of pain and suffering does he think a child rapist should have endure to recompense the exact amount of pain and suffering he inflicted on the victim? What’s the minimum?
ii) Lewis has done nothing to show that Alice will suffer the "most exquisite agony."
Indeed, if Lewis really thinks that hell is populated by people as honest, caring, and charitable as Alice, then why does he also think that hell is such a horrific place to spend eternity? If the damned are such a nice bunch of people, then hell would be pretty idyllic.
I’m deeply disillusioned that a humanist would have so little faith in his fellow man. If what Lewis supposes is true, then the most loving thing that God could do is to allow so many wonderful unbelievers to spend forever and a day in one another’s philanthropic company. We should all book reservations before the vacancies fill up and the boxed chocolates run out.
Where did Lewis every come across the nasty rumor that hell is a place you want to avoid—much less a torture chamber? With all those humanitarians running around in hell, handing out bouquets and valentines, who would they recruit to torture anyone? Didn’t anybody ever tell him that hell is just one big rose garden, with fawns and butterflies and bunny rabbits?
i) Lewis is superimposing his own viewpoint onto God, as if God shares his viewpoint regarding ignorance of the hellbound.
ii) But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the hellbound didn’t know the consequences of their actions. So what?
Suppose that child rape is a capital offense. Suppose a child rapist doesn’t know that child rape is a capital offense. Suppose, if he’d known the penalty, he would have refrained from sodomizing little boys and girls.
How is that exculpatory? It’s a way of saying that he would do it all over again if only he could do so with impunity.
Does that somehow make the crime any less heinous? Does that somehow mitigate his guilt?
It’s a commonplace of human experience, in the here and now, that many people make themselves miserable by making destructive, lifestyle choices. They don’t like to be miserable. But they like the lifestyle that leaves them unhappy.
One more thing. Lewis has a myopic focus on the “torments” of hell. But his analysis is very lopsided.
What makes hell hellish? There are two things, not just one. Of course, one of them is where you end up. But the other is where you don’t end up. For one of the main things that makes hell hellish is that hell isn’t heaven. This is a neglected truth, yet it’s quite fundamental. To miss out on heaven is, itself, a hellish deprivation.
The penalty of damnation is, in part, the loss of heaven. The absence of heaven and not merely the possession of everything that heaven is not. Damnation is as much a matter of what you lose as what you incur.
To take a mundane example, suppose a man fumbles the chance to marry the love of his life. He procrastinates a little to long in popping the question. She gets tried of waiting, and accepts the proposal of his rival.
If he marries a battle-ax, then that is twice as bad. But even if he never gets married, or marries a good, dutiful woman, he will always regret his lost opportunity. If only he had screwed up the courage to seize the moment. But now it’s gone forever.
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[1] D. Lewis, “Divine Evil,” L Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007, 231.
[2] Ibid. 232.
[3] Ibid. 232.
[4] Ibid. 232.
[5] Ibid. 232.
[6] Ibid. 232.
[7] Ibid. 232.
[8] Ibid. 232.
[9] Ibid. 232.
[10] Ibid. 232.
[11] Ibid. 232.
[12] Ibid. 232-33.
[13] Ibid. 233.
[14] Ibid. 233.
[15] Ibid. 233.
[16] Ibid. 233.
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Of the various contributors to Philosophers Without Gods, David Lewis is undoubtedly the most high-powered thinker of the bunch. However, the actual essay is a work of composite authorship since he died before writing out the essay in full. Perhaps this accounts for all the slack reasoning.
There’s nothing terribly original about his argument, and I’ve dealt with this sort of thing before. But since unbelievers may quote from this book in the future, I might as well take one more whack at the dead horse on the backstretch.
Also, when a philosopher of his stature offers his own formulation of what many unbelievers regard as the decisive objection to the Christian faith, there’s some value in evaluating his performance. If this is the best that the best can do with the best weapon in their arsenal, what’s left?
Basically, he contends that the doctrine of hell is a special case of the argument from evil. Of course, he’s hardly the first atheologian to approach the issue from this angle, but let’s study his own formulation.
Standard versions of the argument from evil concern the evils God fails to prevent: the pain and suffering of human beings and non-human animals, and the sins people commit…What interests me here, however, is a simpler argument, one that has been strangely neglected. The standard versions, I said, focus on evil that God fails to prevent. But we might start instead from the evils God himself perpetrates. There are plenty of these, and, in duration and intensity, they dwarf the kinds of suffering and sin to which the standard versions allude.[1]I don’t see that this version of the argument has been at all neglected, but, to continue:
For God, if we are to believe an orthodox story, has prescribed eternal torment as a punishment for insubordination.[2]It’s unclear from his essay what his source is for the “orthodox story.” In the endnotes he refers to Scripture, Dante, and Tertullian. Does he therefore include both Scripture and tradition as the source of the “orthodox story”?
If so, this raises the question of his target audience. For Protestants, Scripture rather than tradition is the rule of faith.
For Catholics, Dante is not an ecumenical council. And Tertullian was a Montanist.
I doubt the Eastern Orthodox are overly concerned with what a Latin Father or Florentine poet believed. In addition, there is a universalist strand (which I reject) in Eastern Orthodox tradition.
The orthodox story is explicit about the temporal scale of the punishment: it is to go on forever.[3]This is a correct statement of the Scriptural doctrine. And that is binding on Protestants like myself. But Eastern Orthodoxy is tolerant of universalism.
Many of those who tell the orthodox story are also concerned to emphasize the quality of the punishment. The agonies to be endured by the damned intensify, in unimaginable ways, the sufferings we undergo in our earthly lives.[4]Several issues here:
i) He seems to define eternal punishment in terms of pain. But he makes no attempt to show that pain is the singular or primary component of eternal punishment. Does he think he’s getting this from Scripture? If so, where’s the exegesis?
And if he’s getting this from tradition (e.g. Dante, Tertullian), why should I care?
ii) Where does Scripture tell us that the damned suffer in “unimaginable” ways? Maybe they do and maybe they don’t, but if you’re going to attack the doctrine of hell, you need to attack what is taught in our rule of faith, and not embellish that teaching with fanciful additions and hyperbolic descriptions.
iii) To say that damnation intensifies the sufferings we undergo in our earthly lives does not imply that such sufferings are “unimaginable.” To the contrary, such an argument appeals to our to imagination as we project what we suffer in this life into a heightened form in the afterlife—in the case of the damned.
Dante and Tertullian, as well as Milton and Hieronymus Bosch had, if anything, an overly active imagination when it comes to fleshing out the details of everlasting punishment.
iv) It may well be that hell embodies an extension and intensification of what the reprobate already suffer in this life. But we need to distinguish between the actual teaching of Scripture and mere speculation.
If hell is a place devoid of special grace or common grace, that it’s easy to conclude that whatever is bad in this life is even worse in the life to come—for the hell-bound. And I think that’s a reasonable inference from Scripture. But one can extrapolate from this principle in more than one direction.
a) Hell is not merely a worse version of what the reprobate suffer in this life, for many of the reprobate do not suffer in this life. They make others suffer while they luxuriate. In this life, they get off scot-free.
One aspect of Biblical teaching is that hell will mark a reversal of fortunes. The ungodly who prospered in this life suffer in the next, while the godly who suffered in this life prosper in the next. So it’s quite inaccurate to say that hell is merely a linear extension and intensification of what the reprobate suffer in this life.
b) Once again, if we’re going to use this life as our frame of reference, then there are many different ways in which men make themselves miserable, or make the lives of those around them miserable.
Most human misery does not resemble a horror film. Most human misery is far more mundane and banal. Most human misery resembles a film like The Last Picture Show rather than the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Loveless lovers in search of love. Loveless lovers who fall in love with other loveless lovers. Men and women bored out of their minds by trite, repetitive lives.
So, if you are going to view hell as the perfection of everything that makes the reprobate miserable in this life, then, for the most part, hell would be a pretty tame place to spend eternity. What would make it insufferable is not the blood and gore, but the interminable triviality of a godless existence ad infinitum ad nauseum.
If Lewis is going to speculate, then I’m free to speculate as well, and my conjecture is that hell is a place with a wide variety of punitive lifestyles. There are many ways to be miserable, and a lot of misery consists in a mind-numbingly dull existence. Tedium rather than torture. Life without hope is unbearable.
Indeed, that’s the underlying reason why some people resort to a life of violence or drug abuse. Anything to temporarily break the crushing monotony of their godless little lives.
So, along both dimensions, time and intensity, the torment is infinitely worse than all the suffering and sin that will have occurred during the history of life in the universe.[5]i) Maybe yes and maybe no. That’s an armchair version of hell.
ii) Is infinite agony a meaningful concept? Doesn’t physical pain have a physical threshold?
Or does he include psychological torment? But is infinite unhappiness a meaningful concept? You can speak of an infinite quantity, but what does it mean to speak of an infinite quality? What palpable sense can we extract from infinite intensity?
What God does is thus infinitely worse than what the worst of tyrants did.[6]i) Lewis makes no attempt to defend this statement. And it builds on other indefensible premises. What tyrants do is to make their subjects miserable rather than let their subjects make themselves, or one another, miserable.
A tyrant will have a secret police force that tortures revolutionaries and terrorizes the populace to keep the populace in a state of fearful submission to the tyrant.
God does not torture or terrorize anyone (or contract that out to a subordinate) in order to keep people in fearful submission to himself. The only men and women who submit to God are those who have been favored by his gracious loving-kindness. They serve him out of joy—by hearts liberated from the bondage of sin.
By contrast, hell is a penal colony for rebels. Their insubordination is everlasting. And if there’s any torture in hell, it’s a case of one hellion tormenting another.
How is that "infinitely worse than what the worst of tyrants did"? To the contrary, this is a situation in which one evildoer repays evil for evil by returning the favor to another evildoer. How is that unjust? How is that not the essence of justice? Each evildoer receives his just deserts at the hands of his fellow evildoers. Not a pretty sight, to be sure, but richly deserved and eminently fair.
ii) A tyrant is someone who allows the wicked to prosper while he persecutes the righteous. God is doing the very opposite in damning the wicked.
God is supposed to torture the damned forever, and to do so by vastly surpassing modes of torment about which we know.[7]i) He keeps telling us that God tortures the damned. He never gets beyond the bare assertion. What is his justification for this claim—which undergirds his entire argument?
ii) Where does Scripture ever say that eternal punishment vastly surpasses the modes of torment about which we know? Indeed, isn’t his claim self-refuting?
If everlasting punishment vastly surpasses the modes of torment about which we know, then how would he be in a position to know that? How does he know so much about the unknowable? For someone who tells us that hell is “unimaginably” cruel,” he seems to have some very definite ideas about the nature of the punishment—otherwise, how would he know enough to attack the doctrine of eternal punishment?
For the punishment of the damned is infinitely disproportionate to their crimes. Even the worst of this-worldly offenders is only capable of inflicting a finite amount of suffering. However many times that offender endures the exact agony he caused, there will still be an infinite number of repetitions to come.[8]This is a very revealing analysis.
i) He equates suffering or agony with punishment. But how does that follow?
I go to the doctor because I feel unwell. The cure may be painful. Is the doctor “tormenting” me? Is painful medication or surgery a form of punishment?
Suppose I accidentally injure my best friend. He’s in agony. Was I punishing my best friend? There’s nothing intrinsically punitive about pain.
ii) What makes a crime criminal is not that a criminal pained the victim, but that he wronged the victim. The amount of suffering is not what makes an action unjust. And it’s not what makes on action more unjust than another.
Suppose a Nazi gasses a Jew, or shoots him in the head. Is the evil quantified by the amount of pain endured? If you could make the Nazi feel the same amount of pain as a bullet in the brain, would that be a just punishment? Does Lewis believe that if only there had been an ouchless, painless way of implementing the Final Solution, the Nazis would be innocent of their crimes?
iii) How does he measure pain and suffering, anyway? And what point does the offender endure "the exact agony he caused"? Does Lewis have an agonometer? Is pain and suffering quantifiable in discrete units? How many units of pain and suffering does he think a child rapist should have endure to recompense the exact amount of pain and suffering he inflicted on the victim? What’s the minimum?
Moreover, in each of these repetitions, the torment will be intensified and extended across all possible modes.[9]It will? How does he know that? What’s his source of information?
This is to assume, of course, that the damned have committed some crime. If the orthodox story supposes only that they fail to believe in God, then the injustice is even more palpable.[10]This assumes, without benefit of argument, that atheism (or agnosticism or idolatry) is blameless.
Alice the agnostic may live a life full of charity and good works, notable for its honesty, fairness, and loving care of those around her. If lack of faith suffices for damnation, then the divine reward will be an eternity of the most exquisite agony.[11]i) Alice is a virtuous agnostic due to common grace, and not due to her innate goodness or personal merit. Left to her own devices, she would be unfair, uncaring, uncharitable, dishonest, and full of bad works.
ii) Lewis has done nothing to show that Alice will suffer the "most exquisite agony."
Indeed, if Lewis really thinks that hell is populated by people as honest, caring, and charitable as Alice, then why does he also think that hell is such a horrific place to spend eternity? If the damned are such a nice bunch of people, then hell would be pretty idyllic.
I’m deeply disillusioned that a humanist would have so little faith in his fellow man. If what Lewis supposes is true, then the most loving thing that God could do is to allow so many wonderful unbelievers to spend forever and a day in one another’s philanthropic company. We should all book reservations before the vacancies fill up and the boxed chocolates run out.
Where did Lewis every come across the nasty rumor that hell is a place you want to avoid—much less a torture chamber? With all those humanitarians running around in hell, handing out bouquets and valentines, who would they recruit to torture anyone? Didn’t anybody ever tell him that hell is just one big rose garden, with fawns and butterflies and bunny rabbits?
So I think the usual philosophical discussions of the problem of evil are a sideshow. We seem to strain at the gnat and swallow the camel. Why is this? Many will say that what I have called the “orthodox story” is a cartoon theism. Real, grownup theists believe something much more sophisticated…I reply that this overlooks two important points. First, the neglected argument does apply against mainstream version of theism preached all around us. There is a strong case for claiming that the overwhelming majority of Christians and Muslims, both in North America and the rest of the world, are committed to the “orthodoxy story.” There are many passages in the New Testament (and in the Koran) that tell, or presuppose, that story, if they are read at face value.[12]Since I’m not a Muslim, I don’t care what the Koran has to say on the subject.
Second, the reply fails to appreciate how difficult it is to avoid the “orthodox story” while simultaneously retaining the distinctive doctrines of Christianity. To evade the neglected argument, you must contend that prominent passages of scripture should not be read literally. Perhaps there are alternative ways of reading the idea of God’s punishment or understanding torment. But we need to hear not just that there are such ways but what they are.[13]That depends on what he means. You don’t have to assume that the damned are Billy goats, or the devil is a red dragon with a chain around his neck, or that Jesus has a sword sticking out of his mouth, or that Jesus rides a warhorse into battle, to believe in the biblical doctrine of hell. One can make intelligent allowance for idioms, stock imagery, and literary genres. That’s a matter of retuning our ears to hear Scripture as it would have been heard by the original audience.
But if damnation is torment, or if it is a state for which eternal torment is an apt metaphor, then trouble recurs. For if we suppose that the alleged choice is ill informed and irrevocable, then God does evil. He places people in a situation in which they must make a judgment that binds them for eternity, and he knows that some will be so inadequately informed that they will opt for an eternity of torment (or for a state for which torment is an apt metaphor).[14]A couple of problems:
i) Lewis is superimposing his own viewpoint onto God, as if God shares his viewpoint regarding ignorance of the hellbound.
ii) But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the hellbound didn’t know the consequences of their actions. So what?
Suppose that child rape is a capital offense. Suppose a child rapist doesn’t know that child rape is a capital offense. Suppose, if he’d known the penalty, he would have refrained from sodomizing little boys and girls.
How is that exculpatory? It’s a way of saying that he would do it all over again if only he could do so with impunity.
Does that somehow make the crime any less heinous? Does that somehow mitigate his guilt?
It is hard to distinguish between God and the parent who equips the nursery with sharp objects galore and plenty of matches, fuses, and dynamite.[15]This assumes the hellbound are in a state of diminished responsibility, like children before the age of discretion.
Things would be different if those who are damned are stubborn, persisting in their choice even when fully informed. What would these people be like? They must prefer a state of torment (literal or metaphorical) to the alternative of salvation.[16]Do people choose to be miserable? Maybe not directly. Remember, though, that Lewis regards damnation as a carryover from life on earth.
It’s a commonplace of human experience, in the here and now, that many people make themselves miserable by making destructive, lifestyle choices. They don’t like to be miserable. But they like the lifestyle that leaves them unhappy.
One more thing. Lewis has a myopic focus on the “torments” of hell. But his analysis is very lopsided.
What makes hell hellish? There are two things, not just one. Of course, one of them is where you end up. But the other is where you don’t end up. For one of the main things that makes hell hellish is that hell isn’t heaven. This is a neglected truth, yet it’s quite fundamental. To miss out on heaven is, itself, a hellish deprivation.
The penalty of damnation is, in part, the loss of heaven. The absence of heaven and not merely the possession of everything that heaven is not. Damnation is as much a matter of what you lose as what you incur.
To take a mundane example, suppose a man fumbles the chance to marry the love of his life. He procrastinates a little to long in popping the question. She gets tried of waiting, and accepts the proposal of his rival.
If he marries a battle-ax, then that is twice as bad. But even if he never gets married, or marries a good, dutiful woman, he will always regret his lost opportunity. If only he had screwed up the courage to seize the moment. But now it’s gone forever.
------------------
[1] D. Lewis, “Divine Evil,” L Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007, 231.
[2] Ibid. 232.
[3] Ibid. 232.
[4] Ibid. 232.
[5] Ibid. 232.
[6] Ibid. 232.
[7] Ibid. 232.
[8] Ibid. 232.
[9] Ibid. 232.
[10] Ibid. 232.
[11] Ibid. 232.
[12] Ibid. 232-33.
[13] Ibid. 233.
[14] Ibid. 233.
[15] Ibid. 233.
[16] Ibid. 233.
Abusing Atheists
(Posted on behalf of Steve Hays)
---------
Earlier this month, Jeff Lowder posted an open letter to theists about abusing atheists.[1]
This is what he said:
1.I don’t think that Christians should send “hate mail” to Dawkins. On the other hand, Dawkins writes in a deliberately offensive and provocative style, so he richly deserves whatever hate mail he gets.
2.I don’t know why Reppert is jumping to the conclusion that a Christian sent this “hate mail” to Sinnott-Armstrong. Maybe it was a Christian. But Sinnott-Armstrong doesn’t say that. And neither does Lowder.
It could also have been sent by a Muslim or Mormon or Hasidic Jew, among others. The fact that Reppert instantly assumes that it must have been sent by a Christian reflects a prejudicial stereotyping on his own part. One wonders if even Reppert bothered to read the book before he clambered onto the bandwagon.
3.Unfortunately, neither Sinnott-Armstrong nor Jeff Lowder defines what they mean by “abusing atheists.”
Maybe Jeff’s question is an invitation to Evangelical Christians define such abuse. Here are some examples of what I would consider an improper response:
i) It is wrong to knowingly speak falsehoods about an atheist.
ii) It is wrong to disrespect a respectable argument.
4.On the other hand, there are atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins who willfully misrepresent the Christian faith through their studied ignorance of Christian theology and Biblical scholarship.
Likewise, I’ve found that Darwinians such as Ridley, Futuyma, and Kitcher presume to critique creationism without making any good-faith effort to acquaint themselves with the standard creationist literature.
They also pass over in silence the secular critics of the standard evolutionary paradigm, thus leaving the reader with a very inaccurate or lopsided impression of the state of the evidence.
That flagrant misbehavior deserves to be denigrated. It’s especially egregious when an atheist is posing as a rationalist, lecturing the rest of us on the rational superiority of atheism, at the very same time he resorts to patent sophistries and pig-ignorant aspersions.
5.As to the specifics of the email sent to Sinnott-Armstrong, I do not condone the email. It’s derogatory to no good purpose. There is no attempt to present a counterargument to his stated position. So it’s a gratuitous putdown.
6.So that is roughly how I’d distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate Christian rhetoric. But I still don’t know how they define “abuse.” For example, what does Jeff think about the stream of invective which his coeditor, Robert Price, directed at William Lane Craig in TET? Does he condone it or condemn it?
By definition, an atheist has a more favorable view of atheism than a Christian. So there’s no value-free standard to invoke. In the same volume that Jeff referenced, we encounter this complaint:
Indeed, the very volume in question operates on the principle that the best defense is a good offense. It goes on the offensive by attacking Christian ethics in a very in-your-face manner.
A number of the contributors clearly view Christians with suspicion. They view many Christians as arrogant, devoid of moral sentiments, and insensitive to a wide variety of human goods. They view Christian ethics as deeply problematic in public and private life. They wouldn’t want their child to marry a devout, Bible-believing Christian.
ii) Moreover, is this an inaccurate impression of atheism? In the very same book, one of the contributors makes the following admission:
iii) There’s also the bloody track record of secular regimes like Stalinism and Maoism.
iv) Furthermore, is secular moralism necessarily an improvement over secular nihilism? The average secular humanist takes positions on abortion, infanticide, eugenics, euthanasia (whether voluntary and involuntary), sodomy, pedophilia, organ-harvesting, homosexual adoption and marriage, as well as other social issues that are diametrically opposed to Christian ethics.[4]
Just consider Richard Dawkins’ social blueprint for a secular technocracy:
7. It’s also amusing to see Sinnott-Armstrong cast himself in the role of Mr. Nice Guy—brimming over with tolerance. You’d never know from Lowder’s excerpts that Sinnott-Armstrong has some very choice comments about Bible-believing Christians, in the very same chapter from which Lowder excerpted his quotes:
i) Why does Sinnott-Armstrong take such offense at the email when he himself is so harsh and denunciatory in his characterization of Christian ethics?
ii) How does Jeff feel about Sinnott-Armstrong’s description of Christians and Christian ethics?
iii) Notice that Sinnott-Armstrong is threatening to downgrade the term papers of his religious students. Isn’t that a way of saying that Christian students need not apply? Why is it wrong for the email correspondent to say that he has no right to be in the classroom while he insinuates that Christians have no right to be in the classroom?
Incidentally, there are well-attested case studies of “ghosts.”
iv) The gov’t does not restrict stem cell research. It only restricts gov’t funding of stem cell research. At even that only holds for the Federal gov’t.
If successful, stem cell research would be immensely lucrative. If private companies are not prepared to invest R&D capital in stem cell research, it must not be a very promising research program. So why should gov’t fork the bill?
v) Does he have any hard evidence that stem cell research will save lives?
vi) Assuming, for the sake of argument, that it would save lives, is it ethical to extinguish some human lives to save other human lives?
vii) Christians don’t oppose stem cell research. What they oppose is embryonic stem cell research.
viii) How many women actually need abortions? Is Sinnott-Arnold prepared to restrict abortion to women who actually need them? Would he legalize therapeutic abortions, but criminalize eugenic and elective abortions?
ix) Which is worse, to verbally abuse a tenured professor, or kill a baby?
x) Does he have any hard evidence that unbelievers murder homosexuals due to Christian preaching?
If anything, I’d suggest that Christian preaching restrains violence against homosexuals. Normal men are ordinarily contemptuous of homosexuals. Left to their own devices, normal men would be more likely to assault or murder homosexuals.
xi) To say that atheists kill, too. Russian and Chinese communist governments are famous examples. However, these atheists killed in the name of communism, not atheism is a lovely piece of special pleading inasmuch as these are militantly secular ideologies.
xii) Why does he think it’s wrong to kill homosexuals, but right to kill babies? Given how he’s cheapened the value of life, what does it matter who lives or dies?
xiii) Is the civil warfare in Ireland due to religion or colonialism?
xiv) What “openly religious groups” assassinate abortionists?
If nothing else, Sinnott-Armstrong is very loose with the truth. And just in case you think that he is over the top, Sinnott-Armstrong is downright charitable in comparison with another contributor to this very same volume. David Lewis thinks that Christians are even worse than Nazis, and he treats Christianity like an infectious disease:
Does Jeff agree with this comparison? Surely what the email correspondent said about Sinnott-Armstrong is pretty tame in relation to this. For that matter, what does Sinnott-Armstrong think of the Nazi comparison? Are Christians the moral equivalent of Nazis—or worse?
----------------
[1]http://naturalisticatheism.blogspot.com/2007/07/open-letter-to-theists-about-abusing.html
[2] L. Antony, “Introduction,” L. Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007), ix.
[3] Ibid. 15.
[4] For some concrete examples, go to http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/
[5] http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/print_format.php?id_article=1914
[6] Ibid. 73.
[7] Ibid. 76.
[8] Ibid. 76.
[9] Ibid. 76.
[10] Ibid. 76.
[11] Ibid. 78.
[12] Ibid. 78.
[13] Ibid. 79.
[14] Ibid. 238.
[15] Ibid. 238-39.
[16] Ibid. 339.
[17] Ibid. 239.
[18] Ibid. 240.
[19] Ibid. 240-41.
[20] Ibid. 241.
[21] Ibid. 241.
[22] Ibid. 277.
---------
Earlier this month, Jeff Lowder posted an open letter to theists about abusing atheists.[1]
This is what he said:
In his contribution to Philosophers Without God (ed. Louise Antony, Oxford University Press, 2007), Walter Sinnott Armstrong describes the sort of bigotry he encountered after his debate book God (co-authored with William Lane Craig) was published. One theist sent him an email calling Sinnott-ArmstrongAmong others, Victor Reppert responded. Among other things, he said the following:
a "small minded" "egotist," "an arrogant fool," and a "pompous PhD," then added "it is pathetic that the College allows you in a classroom," and "That you don't [believe in God], I am sorry to have to inform you, calls into question your intelligence." Then it concluded, "Please be assured that this theist will impartially consider any persuasive response you can offer and, as such, I look forward to continuing this dialogue with you."
Commenting on this email, Sinnott-Armstrong writes:
This exchange indicates a larger problem: Many theists feel perfectly justified in abusing atheists. I would never consider writing such a diatribe against a theist who argued for belief in God. I would remain calm even if a theist misrepresented atheism. Most atheists I know let ridiculous religious views go unchallenged.
I'd like to pose the following question to all theists, especially evangelical Christians:
What are your thoughts about the email sent to Sinnott-Armstrong? Do you condone the email? Do you condemn it? Or are you indifferent? Do you agree with Sinnott-Armstrong that "Many theists feel perfectly justified in abusing atheists"? Why?
In raising this issue, I recognize that there have been atheists who have been guilty of committing the same kind of abuse against theists. Nevertheless, I'd like to focus the discussion on the treatment of atheists by theists. Please share your thoughts with me.
I dislike Richard Dawkins, but I don't envy him his hate mail…I have no idea as to why Christians send these things to atheists.This raises a number of issues.
1.I don’t think that Christians should send “hate mail” to Dawkins. On the other hand, Dawkins writes in a deliberately offensive and provocative style, so he richly deserves whatever hate mail he gets.
2.I don’t know why Reppert is jumping to the conclusion that a Christian sent this “hate mail” to Sinnott-Armstrong. Maybe it was a Christian. But Sinnott-Armstrong doesn’t say that. And neither does Lowder.
It could also have been sent by a Muslim or Mormon or Hasidic Jew, among others. The fact that Reppert instantly assumes that it must have been sent by a Christian reflects a prejudicial stereotyping on his own part. One wonders if even Reppert bothered to read the book before he clambered onto the bandwagon.
3.Unfortunately, neither Sinnott-Armstrong nor Jeff Lowder defines what they mean by “abusing atheists.”
Maybe Jeff’s question is an invitation to Evangelical Christians define such abuse. Here are some examples of what I would consider an improper response:
i) It is wrong to knowingly speak falsehoods about an atheist.
ii) It is wrong to disrespect a respectable argument.
4.On the other hand, there are atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins who willfully misrepresent the Christian faith through their studied ignorance of Christian theology and Biblical scholarship.
Likewise, I’ve found that Darwinians such as Ridley, Futuyma, and Kitcher presume to critique creationism without making any good-faith effort to acquaint themselves with the standard creationist literature.
They also pass over in silence the secular critics of the standard evolutionary paradigm, thus leaving the reader with a very inaccurate or lopsided impression of the state of the evidence.
That flagrant misbehavior deserves to be denigrated. It’s especially egregious when an atheist is posing as a rationalist, lecturing the rest of us on the rational superiority of atheism, at the very same time he resorts to patent sophistries and pig-ignorant aspersions.
5.As to the specifics of the email sent to Sinnott-Armstrong, I do not condone the email. It’s derogatory to no good purpose. There is no attempt to present a counterargument to his stated position. So it’s a gratuitous putdown.
6.So that is roughly how I’d distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate Christian rhetoric. But I still don’t know how they define “abuse.” For example, what does Jeff think about the stream of invective which his coeditor, Robert Price, directed at William Lane Craig in TET? Does he condone it or condemn it?
By definition, an atheist has a more favorable view of atheism than a Christian. So there’s no value-free standard to invoke. In the same volume that Jeff referenced, we encounter this complaint:
Within this climate, skeptics and atheists are viewed with suspicion. We are presumed to be arrogant, devoid of moral sentiments, and insensitive to a wide variety of human goods. Indeed, according to the authors of a recent survey from the University of Minnesota, “Atheists are at the top of the list of groups that Americans find problematic in both public and private life.” Forty-seven percent of those surveyed said that they would “disapprove” if their child “wanted to marry a member of this group.”…these opinions…linked disbelief with egotism, consumerism, and ethical relativism.”[2]i) Does Jeff regard that as an example of abusing atheists? Up to a point, I can understand, from their perspective, why an atheist would resent this “suspicion.” On the other hand, it would be unreasonable of an atheist to expect a Christian to view atheism favorably. These are, after all, opposing positions. They find fault with each other.
Indeed, the very volume in question operates on the principle that the best defense is a good offense. It goes on the offensive by attacking Christian ethics in a very in-your-face manner.
A number of the contributors clearly view Christians with suspicion. They view many Christians as arrogant, devoid of moral sentiments, and insensitive to a wide variety of human goods. They view Christian ethics as deeply problematic in public and private life. They wouldn’t want their child to marry a devout, Bible-believing Christian.
ii) Moreover, is this an inaccurate impression of atheism? In the very same book, one of the contributors makes the following admission:
This is not to insist on moral realism, the thesis that moral discourse is objective. Moral non-cognitivists from Hume to Simon Blackburn insist that moral assertions, such as the wrongness of killing innocent children, do not express matters of fact, or have truth conditions.[3]Not all atheists take this position, but for those that do, why wouldn’t a Christian be well-warranted in viewing them with suspicion? In this case there is a direct link between disbelief and ethical relativism.
iii) There’s also the bloody track record of secular regimes like Stalinism and Maoism.
iv) Furthermore, is secular moralism necessarily an improvement over secular nihilism? The average secular humanist takes positions on abortion, infanticide, eugenics, euthanasia (whether voluntary and involuntary), sodomy, pedophilia, organ-harvesting, homosexual adoption and marriage, as well as other social issues that are diametrically opposed to Christian ethics.[4]
Just consider Richard Dawkins’ social blueprint for a secular technocracy:
Yet the book [The God Delusion] ranked number two in Amazon’s worldwide sales list, and is fueling an antireligious campaign in Britain, which Dawkins himself is leading, canvassing government ministers and promoting atheism in state schools. This effort has already notched successes in restricting religious rights, most notably in a new British law requiring Catholic adoption agencies to place children with gay and lesbian couples.Is it any wonder if Christians distrust militant unbelievers in positions of power? Why wouldn’t we view secular humanism as a mortal menace to our civil liberties? What is Jeff’s position on Dawkins’ sociopolitical vision?
The National Secular Society (NSS), of which Dawkins is an honorary associate, has campaigned for a godless Britain since the nineteenth century, and devotes its Web site to decrying and ridiculing religious faith. The NSS, whose associates include twenty British parliamentarians, as well as such establishment cultural figures as the playwright Harold Pinter, vows to combat “religious power-seekers” and “put them in their place once and for all.” For his part, Dawkins has said he would remove all financial support from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim schools and make them teach atheism; prohibit hospital chaplains from solacing the ill; and undertake other measures to combat the “infantile regression” of religious belief. And what about parents who persist in telling their children about religion? “It’s probably too strong to say the state should have the right to take children away from their parents,” Dawkins told an interviewer. “But I think we have got to look very carefully at the rights of parents-and whether they should have the right to indoctrinate their children.”
Asked why the twentieth century had witnessed so many atrocities, he insisted Hitler and Stalin had been “quite mild” compared to the religious “monsters of the Middle Ages.” In a series on Britain’s Channel Four TV, he equated elderly pilgrims at Lourdes with suicide bombers on the London Underground. “Far from being beaten, militant faith is on the march all across the world with terrifying consequences,” Dawkins told TV viewers. “It’s something we must resist, because irrational faith is fuelling murderous intolerance throughout the world.”
Language like this would sound familiar to those who remember the campaign against religious faith in Eastern Europe, where claims about religion’s social divisiveness were used by totalitarian regimes to justify savage repression. Under such regimes, scientific atheism was a requirement for teachers and educators, legislators and ministers. Schools and colleges were seen as the frontline in a struggle against religious belief, a struggle that included removing Christian symbols and place names and disrupting Christian influences in marriage and family life. These were political systems in which just being a Christian was enough to attract the cold glare of suspicion and hostility. The utilitarian morality favored by Dawkins was given free rein.
His atheist campaign, with its chilling eugenic undertones, appeals to many people raised with little knowledge or understanding of religious belief-people for whom the fear of Islam touched off by September 11 has metamorphosed into a public phobia about all religion. Such people may be tempted by Dawkins’s Darwinist notion of religious belief as a virus that infects inferior genes and needs “quarantining,” as well as by the summons to defend society against a rising tide of “religious fanaticism.”
For another, Dawkins has influential friends and formidable resources. Hostility to religion has a long tradition in the United Kingdom, where “organized religion” often sits uncomfortably alongside Anglo-Saxon empiricism and individualism, and anticlerical sentiment reflects the impatience of an antireligious elite that resents alternatives to its own way of thinking. Welcoming Dawkins’s new book, the veteran BBC broadcaster Joan Bakewell said the professor was right to be “not only angry but alarmed” at the spread of religious faith. The liberal peer, Lord Ralf Dahrendorf, who scrutinizes all legislation passing through the British Parliament, has also deplored threats to the “secular commitment” of Western societies. “The return of religion to politics-and to public life in general-is a serious challenge to the rule of democratically enacted law and the civil liberties that go with it,” Dahrendorf wrote in the Guardian, and he appealed to “enlightened communities” to respond accordingly.
Britain itself may already be feeling the effects of such “enlightened” thinking. A recent Education Bill amendment would have required Catholic schools and other church-owned colleges to reserve at least a quarter of their places for nonreligious children (it was reluctantly withdrawn by Britain’s education minister, Alan Johnson, after Catholic and Anglican leaders said they would create such places voluntarily). And an upcoming debate this month will center on the new Equality Bill, which threatens to deny religious organizations the right to follow conscience in dealings with homosexuals. Meanwhile, social services in several counties-including Dawkins’s native Oxfordshire-are reported to have denied adoption rights to Christian couples, after claiming the children in question could be “brainwashed.”
One church leader, Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow, has warned that the controversy over Catholic adoption agencies is just the “tip of the iceberg.” If enacted, new regulations “could compel religious organizations to renounce their activities or be removed from public life,” Conti warned. A new Charity Law is expected to withdraw tax-exempt status from religious bodies that fail to reflect “modern morals and existing orthodoxy,” even as Christian Union societies at British universities have had to resort to legal action after being denied facilities and having their bank accounts frozen. Meanwhile, Edinburgh University has banned copies of the Bible from student dormitories after condemning the Christian Union for violating its “equality and diversity policy” by claiming that “any sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage is not God-ordained.” And religious leaders have resisted attempts by secularist local councils to “de-Christianize” Christmas and Easter and remove Christian place-names from towns and cities-literally wiping religion off the map.
As for Dawkins, a new Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason was unveiled in December to fight the “scandal” of religious teaching in schools, and to prevent children from being “labeled with their parents’ religion.” With a Labor Party Humanist Group launched in Parliament earlier this year to “oppose faith schools,” Dawkins can be confident his campaign is flourishing. Britain’s crusading atheist looks set to fight on for his ideal utilitarian society, a brave new world in which secularism reigns supreme, while lives, values, and freedoms are ruled by scientists.[5]
7. It’s also amusing to see Sinnott-Armstrong cast himself in the role of Mr. Nice Guy—brimming over with tolerance. You’d never know from Lowder’s excerpts that Sinnott-Armstrong has some very choice comments about Bible-believing Christians, in the very same chapter from which Lowder excerpted his quotes:
You had to go along with whatever the Bible said, even when it was puerile.[6]This raises a number of apt questions:
My quietism ended when current events taught me the dangers of religion. I had always known how religions, including Christianity, led to wars in the Middle East, Ireland, and so on.[7]
On a more personal level, I was not prepared for the death of Matthew Shepard. When bigots kill defenseless homosexuals, they do not always cite religion as their reasons. Christianity still fuels their bigotry. If Christians did not broadcast their condemnation of homosexual, then the bigots would be less likely to kill. Christianity is at least part of the case. I came to see why Christianity should be held responsible for these deaths. The dangers of religion are even more evidence when abortion doctors are killed by openly religious groups.[8]
Of course, atheists kill, too. Russian and Chinese communist governments are famous examples. However, these atheists killed in the name of communism, not atheism.[9]
Other deaths are caused by religious views in less obvious ways. One such case was brought to my attention by a conference at Dartmouth College on stem-cell research…our government was restricting it.[10]
Most atheists I know let ridiculous religious views go unchallenged.[11]
This defeatist attitude means that fundamentalists get away with spouting harmful nonsense…If atheists let themselves be cowed, our country’s policies will continue to be distorted by ancient religious myths. More religious wars will arise. And there will be more suffering among people who need abortions or stem-cell treatments or just sexual freedom.[12]
Professors don’t put up with beliefs in ghosts, even in student papers. Why should we have to treat religion differently?[13]
i) Why does Sinnott-Armstrong take such offense at the email when he himself is so harsh and denunciatory in his characterization of Christian ethics?
ii) How does Jeff feel about Sinnott-Armstrong’s description of Christians and Christian ethics?
iii) Notice that Sinnott-Armstrong is threatening to downgrade the term papers of his religious students. Isn’t that a way of saying that Christian students need not apply? Why is it wrong for the email correspondent to say that he has no right to be in the classroom while he insinuates that Christians have no right to be in the classroom?
Incidentally, there are well-attested case studies of “ghosts.”
iv) The gov’t does not restrict stem cell research. It only restricts gov’t funding of stem cell research. At even that only holds for the Federal gov’t.
If successful, stem cell research would be immensely lucrative. If private companies are not prepared to invest R&D capital in stem cell research, it must not be a very promising research program. So why should gov’t fork the bill?
v) Does he have any hard evidence that stem cell research will save lives?
vi) Assuming, for the sake of argument, that it would save lives, is it ethical to extinguish some human lives to save other human lives?
vii) Christians don’t oppose stem cell research. What they oppose is embryonic stem cell research.
viii) How many women actually need abortions? Is Sinnott-Arnold prepared to restrict abortion to women who actually need them? Would he legalize therapeutic abortions, but criminalize eugenic and elective abortions?
ix) Which is worse, to verbally abuse a tenured professor, or kill a baby?
x) Does he have any hard evidence that unbelievers murder homosexuals due to Christian preaching?
If anything, I’d suggest that Christian preaching restrains violence against homosexuals. Normal men are ordinarily contemptuous of homosexuals. Left to their own devices, normal men would be more likely to assault or murder homosexuals.
xi) To say that atheists kill, too. Russian and Chinese communist governments are famous examples. However, these atheists killed in the name of communism, not atheism is a lovely piece of special pleading inasmuch as these are militantly secular ideologies.
xii) Why does he think it’s wrong to kill homosexuals, but right to kill babies? Given how he’s cheapened the value of life, what does it matter who lives or dies?
xiii) Is the civil warfare in Ireland due to religion or colonialism?
xiv) What “openly religious groups” assassinate abortionists?
If nothing else, Sinnott-Armstrong is very loose with the truth. And just in case you think that he is over the top, Sinnott-Armstrong is downright charitable in comparison with another contributor to this very same volume. David Lewis thinks that Christians are even worse than Nazis, and he treats Christianity like an infectious disease:
Many Christians appear to be good people, people worthy of the admiration of those of us who are non-Christians. From now on let us suppose, for simplicity’s sake, that these Christians accept a God who perpetrates divine evil, one who inflicts infinite torment on those who do not accept him. Appearances notwithstanding, are those who worship the perpetrator of divine evil themselves evil?[14]Incidentally, yet another contributor also compares Christians to Nazis.[22]
Consider Fritz. Fritz is a neo-Nazi. He admires Hitler. Fritz’s’ admiration of an evil man suffices, we might think, to make Fritz evil…Fritz is evil, it seems simply because it is evil to admire someone who is evil. Or more exactly, it is evil to admire someone evil in full recognition of the characteristics and actions that express their evil.[15]
Many other Christians…are sincerely compassionate; they genuinely forgive their enemies. Yet they knowingly worship the perpetrator…They endorse the divine evil. And that’s bad enough. [16]
We admire religious people famed for their selflessness, their courage, or their scholarship—Mother Teresa, Father Murphy, Jean Buridan. Yet we know that they worship the perpetrator. Moreover, since they worship the perpetrator, endorsing his judgments about the propriety of eternal torment for some (including us), the perpetrator’s evil extends to them.[17]
What attitude should we non-believers have toward our Christian friends? Can they avoid contagion? Can we admire them and not be infected?[18]
They genuinely think that their God will commit those who do not accept him to eternal torment. They may prefer not to dwell on the point, but when they consider it, they accept his judgment. Of course, they do not see this as divine evil. Instead they talk of divine justice and the fitting damnation of sinners. If Fritz is clear about Hitler’s actual deeds, he will tend to use similar locutions. He won’t talk about evil and genocide but will praise the proper purification of the highest form of culture and the justified wiping out of a disease.[19]
Modest Fritz isn’t disposed to persecute the Jews in his neighborhood. Nor are our Christians friends inclined to rain suffering and humiliation upon us. Yet if Hitler, or one of his appropriate representatives were there, beside Fritz and his mates and the potential Jewish victim, Fritz would approve of the persecution’s being carried out by the proper authorities. So, too, with the worshippers. If the day of judgment were to arrive now, and they were to stand by and observe God’s decision to punish us—their unbelieving friends—they would endorse it…in the end, they would worship the perpetrator; they would label divine evil as divine justice.[20]
We can admire their compassion, their perseverance, their selflessness. But can we admire them, despite their preparedness to worship the perpetrator?…Over all, it seems, our evaluation must be negative. They are like the tyrant whose many small contributions to his subjects’ welfare pale in contrast to the monstrous repression he will countenance.[21]
Does Jeff agree with this comparison? Surely what the email correspondent said about Sinnott-Armstrong is pretty tame in relation to this. For that matter, what does Sinnott-Armstrong think of the Nazi comparison? Are Christians the moral equivalent of Nazis—or worse?
----------------
[1]http://naturalisticatheism.blogspot.com/2007/07/open-letter-to-theists-about-abusing.html
[2] L. Antony, “Introduction,” L. Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007), ix.
[3] Ibid. 15.
[4] For some concrete examples, go to http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/
[5] http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/print_format.php?id_article=1914
[6] Ibid. 73.
[7] Ibid. 76.
[8] Ibid. 76.
[9] Ibid. 76.
[10] Ibid. 76.
[11] Ibid. 78.
[12] Ibid. 78.
[13] Ibid. 79.
[14] Ibid. 238.
[15] Ibid. 238-39.
[16] Ibid. 339.
[17] Ibid. 239.
[18] Ibid. 240.
[19] Ibid. 240-41.
[20] Ibid. 241.
[21] Ibid. 241.
[22] Ibid. 277.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Contours of Christian Theology
The Revelation of God by Peter Jensen
The Doctrine of God by Gerald Bray
The Providence of God by Paul Helm
The Person of Christ by Donald Macleod
The Work of Christ by Robert Letham
The Holy Spirit by Sinclair Ferguson
The Doctrine of Humanity by Charles Sherlock
The Church by Edmond Clowney
The Doctrine of God by Gerald Bray
The Providence of God by Paul Helm
The Person of Christ by Donald Macleod
The Work of Christ by Robert Letham
The Holy Spirit by Sinclair Ferguson
The Doctrine of Humanity by Charles Sherlock
The Church by Edmond Clowney
The Entropy Paradox
Our resident ignoramus, Touched By A Stone, has weighed in on my comments on Steve’s previous post about the Entropy Paradox. Never one to let knowledge get in the way of his vitriol, T-Stone has accused me of being “thoroughly confused” and presenting “pure hooey.”
This despite the fact that (as I told T-Stone) I was presenting arguments from Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos. Greene happens to be a physicist. T-Stone happens to be dimwitted. Which one wins this contest?
T-Stone says:
To carry on with Greene’s thought:
Now, T-Stone can certainly feel free to continue to mock me if he wishes, but his protestations do not affect reality. To use a metaphor from the book, he can continue to flail his arms around in the air, but it will not override the reality that the air is uniformly mixed.
This despite the fact that (as I told T-Stone) I was presenting arguments from Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos. Greene happens to be a physicist. T-Stone happens to be dimwitted. Which one wins this contest?
T-Stone says:
Parsimony isn't a statistical evaluation, it's an evaluation of *economy*.Unfortunately for T-Stone:
The notion of entropy was first developed during the industrial revolution by scientists concerned with the operation of furnaces and steam engines, who helped develop the field of thermodynamics. Through many years of research, the underlying ideas were sharply refined, culminating in Bolzmann’s approach. His version of entropy, expressed concisely by the equation on his tombstone [S = k log W], uses statistical reasoning to provide a link between the huge number of individual ingredients that make up a physical system and the overall properties the system has.
Greene, Brian. 2004. The Fabric of the Universe. New York: Vintage Books p. 151 (emphasis in bold added)
To carry on with Greene’s thought:
…[I]magine unbiding a copy of War and Peace, throwing its 693 double-sided pages high into the air, and then gathering the loose sheets into a neat pile. When you examine the resulting stack, it is enormously more likely that the pages will be out of order than in order. The reason is obvious. There are many ways in which the order of the pages can be jumbled, but only one way for the order to be correct. …A simple but essential observation is that, all else being equal, the more ways something can happen, the more likely it is that it will happen. And if something can happen in enormously more ways, like the pages landing in the wrong numerical order, it is enormously more likely that it will happen….Naturally, there are some differences between this and physics:
Entropy is a concept that makes this idea precise by counting the number of ways, consistent with the laws of physics, in which any given physical situation can be realized. High entropy means that there are many ways; low entropy means there are few ways. If the pages of War and Peace are stacked in proper numerical order, that is a low-entropy configuration, because there is one and only one ordering that meets the criterion. If the pages are out of numerical order, that is a high-entropy situation, because a little calculation shows that there are [Greene then writes a number that continues for the next page and a half which only a masochist would reproduce here]—about 10 ^ 1878—different out-of-order page arrangements.
(ibid, pp. 151-153, all italics his)
Of course, in making the concept of entropy precise and universal, the physics definition does not involve counting the number of page rearrangements of one book or another that leave it looking the same, either ordered or disordered. Instead, the physics definition counts the number of rearrangements of fundamental constituents—atoms, sub-atomic particles, and so on—that leave the gross, overall, “big-picture” properties of a given physical system unchanged. As in the example of War and Peace, low entropy means that very few rearrangements would go unnoticed, so the system is highly ordered, while high entropy means that many rearrangements would go unnoticed, and that means the system is very disordered.Now that we have established how unlikely it is for even one Coke bottle's worth of carbon dioxide to randomly form out of a high entropy situation, it is time for the paradox:
For a good physics example, and one that will shortly prove handy, let’s think about [a] bottle of Coke… When gas, like the carbon dioxide that was initially confined in the bottle, spreads evenly throughout a room, there are many rearrangements of the individual molecules that will have no noticeable effect. For example, if you flail your arms, the carbon dioxide molecules will move to and fro, rapidly changing positions and velocities. But overall, there will be no qualitative effect on their arrangements. The molecules were spread uniformly before you flailed your arms, and they will be spread uniformly after you’re done. …By contrast, if the gas were spread in a smaller space, as it was in the bottle, or confined by a barrier to a corner of the room, it has significantly lower entropy. The reason is simple. Just as thinner books have fewer page reorderings, smaller spaces provide fewer places for molecules to be located, and so allow for fewer rearrangements.
But when you twist off the bottle’s cap or remove the barrier, you open up a whole new universe to the gas molecules, and through their bumping and jostling they quickly disperse to explore it. Why? It’s the same statistical reasoning as with the pages of War and Peace. No doubt, some of the jostling will move a few gas molecules purely within the initial blob of gas or nudge a few that have left the blob back toward the initial dense gas cloud. But since the volume of the room exceeds that of the initial cloud of gas, there are many more rearrangements available to the molecules if they disperse out of the cloud than there are if they remain within it. On average, then, the gas molecules will diffuse from the initial cloud and slowly approach the state of being spread uniformly throughout the room. Thus, the lower-entropy initial configuration, with the gas all bunched in a small region, naturally evolves toward the higher-entropy configuration, with the gas uniformly spread in the larger space….
The tendency of physical systems to evolve toward states of higher entropy is known as the second law of thermodynamics. (The first law is the familiar conservation of energy.) As above, the basis of the law is simple statistical reasoning: there are more ways for a system to have higher entropy, and “more ways” means it is more likely that a system will evolve into one of these high-entropy configurations. [I note in passing that this is the third time Greene has used “statistical reasoning” in regards to entropy; perhaps T-Stone should e-mail him to correct Greene’s obvious stupidity!] Notice, though, that this is not a law in the conventional sense since, although such events are rare and unlikely, something can go from a state of high entropy to one of lower entropy. When you toss a jumbled stack of pages into the air and then gather them into a neat pile, they can turn out to be in perfect numerical order. You wouldn’t want to place a high wager on its happening, but it is possible. It is also possible that the bumping and jostling will be just right to cause all the dispersed carbon dioxide molecules to move in concert and swoosh back into your open bottle of Coke. Don’t hold your breath waiting for this outcome either, but it can happen.
The large number of pages in War and Peace and the large number of gas molecules in the room are what makes the entropy difference between the disordered and ordered so huge, and what causes low-entropy outcomes to be so terribly unlikely. If you tossed only two double-sided pages in the air over and over again, you’d find that they landed in the correct order about 12.5 percent of the time. With three pages this would drop to about 2 percent of the tosses, with four pages it’s about .3 percent, with five pages it’s about .03 percent, and with 693 pages the percentage of tosses that would yield the correct order is so small—it involves so many zeros after the decimal point—that I’ve been convinced by the publisher not to use another page to write it out explicitly. Similarly, if you dropped only two gas molecules side by side into an empty Coke bottle, you’d find that at room temperature their random motion would bring them back together (within a millimeter of each other), on average, roughly every few seconds. But for a group of three molecules, you’d have to wait days, for four molecules you’d have to wait years, and for an initial dense blob of a million billion billion molecules it would take a length of time far greater than the current age of the universe for their random, dispersive motion to bring them back together into a small, ordered bunch. With more certainty than death and taxes, we can count on systems with many constituents evolving toward disorder.
(ibid, pp. 153-157, italics his)
Earlier, we introduced the dilemma of past versus future by comparing our everyday observations with properties of Newton’s laws of classical physics. We emphasized that we continually experience an obvious directionality to the way things unfold in time but the laws themselves treat what we call forward and backward in time on an exactly equal footing. As there is no arrow within the laws of physics that assigns a direction to time, no pointer that declares, “Use these laws in this temporal orientation but not in reverse,” we were lead to ask: If the laws underlying experience treat both temporal orientations symmetrically, why are the experiences themselves so temporally lopsided, always happening in one direction but not the other? …Brian Greene includes a note here that illustrates even more clearly how absurd T-Stone has been in questioning what I previously wrote:
Notice that in our discussion of entropy and the second law, we did not modify the laws of classical physics in any way. Instead, all we did was use the laws in a “big picture” statistical [there’s that word again, T-Stone] framework: we ignored fine details…and instead focused our attention on gross, overall features…. We found that when physical systems are sufficiently complicated (books with many pages, fragile objects that can splatter into many fragments, gas with many molecules), there is a huge difference in entropy between their ordered and disordered configurations. And this means that there is a huge likelihood that the systems will evolve from lower to higher entropy, which is a rough statement of the second law of thermodynamics. But the key fact to notice is that the second law is derivative: it is merely a consequence of probalistic reasoning applied to Newton’s laws of motion.
This leads us to a simple but astounding point: Since Newton’s laws of physics have no built-in temporal orientation, all of the reasoning we have used to argue that systems will evolve from lower to higher entropy toward the future works equally well when applies toward the past. Again, since the underlying laws of physics are time-reversal symmetric, there is no way for them even to distinguish between what we call the past and what we call the future. …Thus, not only is there an overwhelming probability that the entropy of a physical system will be higher in what we call the future, but there is the same overwhelming probability that it was higher in what we call the past. …
This is the key point for all that follows, but it’s also deceptively subtle. A common misconception is that if, according to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy increases toward the future, then entropy necessarily decreases toward the past. But that’s where the subtlety comes in. The second law actually says that if at any give moment of interest, a physical system happens not to possess the maximum possible entropy, it is extraordinarily likely that the physical system will subsequently have and previously had more entropy. …With laws that are blind to past-versus-future distinction, such time symmetry is inevitable.
That’s the essential lesson. It tells us that the entropic arrow of time is double-headed. From any specified moment, the arrow of entropy increase points toward the future and toward the past. And that makes it decidedly awkward to propose entropy as the explanation of the one-way arrow of experiential time.
Think about what the double-headed entropic arrow implies in concrete terms. If it’s a warm day and you see partially melted ice cubes in a glass of water, you have full confidence that half an hour later the cubes will be more melted, since the more melted they are, the more entropy they will have. But you should have exactly the same confidence that half an hour earlier they were also more melted, since exactly the same statistical reasoning implies that entropy should increase toward the past. And the same conclusion applies to the countless other examples we encounter every day….
Toward this end, imagine it’s 10:30 p.m. and for the past half hour you’ve been staring at a glass of ice water (it’s a slow night at the bar), watching the cubes slowly melt into small, misshapen forms. You have absolutely no doubt that a half hour earlier the bartender put fully formed ice cubes into the glass; you have no doubt because you trust your memory. And if, by some chance, your confidence regarding what happened during the last half hour should be shaken, you can ask the guy across the way, who was also watching the ice cubes melt (it’s a really slow night at the bar), or perhaps the video taken by the bar’s surveillance camera, both of which would confirm that your memory is accurate….
But as we’ve seen, such entropic reasoning—reasoning that simply says things are more likely to be disordered since there are more ways to be disordered, reasoning which is demonstrably powerful at explaining how things unfold toward the future—proclaims that entropy is just as likely to have been higher in the past. This would mean that the partially melted cubes you see at 10:30 p.m. would actually have been more melted at earlier times; it would mean that at 10:00 p.m. they did not begin as solid ice cubes, but, instead, slowly coalesced out of room-temperature water on the way to 10:30 p.m., just as surely as they will slowly melt into room-temperature water on their way to 11:00 p.m.
No doubt, that sounds weird—or perhaps you’d say nutty. To be true, not only would H2O molecules in a glass of room-temperature water have to coalesce spontaneously into partially formed cubes of ice, but the digital bits in the surveillance camera, as well as the neurons in your brain and those in the brain of the guy across the way, would all need to spontaneously arrange themselves by 10:30 p.m. to attest to there having been a collection of fully formed ice cubes that melted, even though there never was. Yet this bizarre-sounding conclusion is where a faithful application of entropic reasoning—the same reasoning that you embrace without hesitation to explain why the partially melted ice you see at 10:30 p.m. continues to melt toward 11:00 p.m.—leads when applied in the time-symmetric manner dictated by the laws of physics. This is the trouble with having fundamental laws of motion with no inbuilt distinction between past and future, laws whose mathematics treats the future and past of any given moment in exactly the same way….
Math and intuition concur that if there really were fully formed ice cubes at 10 p.m., then the most likely sequence of events would be for them to melt into the partial cubes you see at 10:30 p.m.: the resulting increase in entropy is in line both with the second law of thermodynamics and with experience. But where math and intuition deviate is that our intuition, unlike math, fails to take account of the likelihood, or lack thereof, of actually having fully formed ice cubes at 10 p.m., given the observation we are taking as unassailable, as fully trustworthy, that right now, at 10:30 p.m., you see partially melted cubes.
This is the pivotal point, so let me explain. The main lesson of the second law of thermodynamics is that physical systems have an overwhelming tendency to be in high-entropy configurations because there are so many ways such states can be realized. And once in such high-entropy states, physical systems have an overwhelming tendency to stay in them. High entropy is the natural state of being. You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high-entropy state. Such states are the norm. On the contrary, what does need explaining is why any given physical system is in a state of order, a state of low entropy. These states are not the norm. They can certainly happen. But from the viewpoint of entropy, such ordered states are rare aberrations that cry out for an explanation. So the one fact in the episode we are taking as unquestionably true—your observation at 10:30 p.m. of low-entropy partially formed ice cubes—is in fact in need of an explanation.
And from the point of view of probability, it is absurd to explain this low-entropy state by invoking the even lower-entropy state, the even less likely state, that at 10 p.m. there were even more ordered, more fully formed ice cubes being observed in a more pristine, more ordered environment. Instead, it is enormously more likely that things began in an unsurprising, totally normal, high-entropy state: a glass of uniform liquid water with absolutely no ice. Then, through an unlikely but ever-so-often-expectable statistical fluctuation, the glass of water went against the grain of the second law and evolved to a state of lower entropy in which partially formed ice cubes appeared. This evolution, although requiring rare and unfamiliar processes, completely avoids the even lower-entropy, the even less likely, the even more rare state of having fully formed ice cubes. At every moment between 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., this strange-sounding evolution has higher entropy than the normal ice-melting scenario…and so it realizes the accepted observation at 10:30 p.m. in a way that is more likely--hugely more likely—than the scenario in which fully formed ice cubes melt. That is the crux of the matter.
(ibid p.157-165, italics his)
Remember, on pages 152-53 we showed the huge difference between the number of ordered and disordered configurations for a mere 693 double-sided sheets of paper. We are now discussing the behavior of roughly 10^24 H2O molecules, so the difference between the number of ordered and disordered configurations is breathtakingly monumental. Moreover, the same reasoning holds for all other atoms and molecules within you and within the environment (brains, security cameras, air molecules, and so on). Namely, in the standard explanation in which you can trust your memories, not only would the partially melted ice cubes have begun, at 10 p.m., in a more ordered—less likely—state, but so would everything else: when a video camera records a sequence of events, there is a net increase in entropy (from the heat and noise released by the recording process); similarly, when a brain records a memory, although we understand the microscopic details with less accuracy, there is a net increase in entropy (the brain may gain order but as with any order-producing process, if we take account of heat generated, there is a net increase in entropy). Thus, if we compare the total entropy in the bar between 10 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. in the two scenarios—one in which you trust your memories, and the other in which things spontaneously arrange themselves from an initial state of disorder to be consistent with what you see, now, at 10:30 p.m.—there is an enormous entropy difference. The latter scenario, every step of the way, has hugely more entropy than the former scenario, and so, from the standpoint of probability, is hugely more likely.So now we can see that when T-Stone offers his “trick question” about two decks of cards and asking which has more entropy, he’s not even in the right playing field. The fact is that the entropy paradox does exist, and scientists do choose the value that is less statistically likely—that is, they trust their observations are correct. In so doing, they continually stipulate that the further back we push time, the less entropy was in the universe, which means that the further back in time we go the less likely it was to have spontaneously arisen this way and the more likely it is that our memories are wrong. But since very few people want to live in a universe where we cannot trust our own experiences, the net result is that scientists ignore the entropy paradox and assume the least parsimonious explanation. To be sure, there have been attempts to imagine how the big bang could have introduced low entropy at the beginning of the universe, but these theories are untestable (and, as T-Stone is so fond of saying, untestability means it’s not science).
(ibid. p. 165 note)
Now, T-Stone can certainly feel free to continue to mock me if he wishes, but his protestations do not affect reality. To use a metaphor from the book, he can continue to flail his arms around in the air, but it will not override the reality that the air is uniformly mixed.
Teleology in medical science
Richard Dawkins is often commended for his mastery of the English language. Actually, the English are ordinarily commended for their mastery of ironic understatement, but understatement is hardly a prominent feature of Dawkins’ prose style, especially when attacking Christian theism.
For example, Dawkins has characterized intelligent design theory as a “lazy cop-out” and a “Get Out Of Jail Free card.” To flesh this out, let’s consider Daniel Dennett’s threefold analysis:
“According to Daniel Dennett, there are three different strategies that we might use when confronted with objects or systems: the physical stance, the design stance, and the intentional stance.”
“When we make a prediction from the design stance, we assume that the entity in question has been designed in a certain way, and we predict that the entity will thus behave as designed… Design stance predictions are riskier than physical stance predictions. Predictions made from the design stance rest on at least two assumptions: first, that the entity in question is designed as it is assumed to be; and second, the entity will perform as it is designed without malfunctioning.”
“The sorts of entities so far discussed in relation to design-stance predictions have been artifacts, but the design stance also works well when it comes to living things and their parts. For example, even without any understanding of the biology and chemistry underlying anatomy we can nonetheless predict that a heart will pump blood throughout the body of a living thing. The adoption of the design stance supports this prediction; that is what hearts are supposed to do (i.e., what nature has ‘designed’ them to do).”
“As already noted, we often gain predictive power when moving from the physical stance to the design stance. Often, we can improve our predictions yet further by adopting the intentional stance. When making predictions from this stance, we interpret the behavior of the entity in question by treating it as a rational agent whose behavior is governed by intentional states. (Intentional states are mental states such as beliefs and desires which have the property of ‘aboutness,’ that is, they are about, or directed at, objects or states of affairs in the world.”
http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/intentionalstance.html
Of course, Dennett doesn’t believe that natural objects were designed to do anything in particular. He simply regards the design stance as well as the intentional stance as a useful fiction.
From a Christian standpoint, we can take this literally. Natural objects were designed by God.
And we can attribute an intentional state even to a natural object that has no mental states in the indirect sense that it exemplifies divine intentionality—like a remote control toy airplane that goes wherever it’s directed to fly.
There is a deeply entrenched tradition within modern science of banning teleological explanations from nature. I’m going to quote some observations by a modern philosopher, and then discuss the repercussions were we to carry the denial of natural teleology to its logical denouement.
“The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented cosmos,” D. Owens, “Disenchantment,” L. Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007), 165.
“My worry is that the truth of science would not be liberating. To empower, science must extend our ability to act; yet by draining the cosmos of meaning or purpose, science threatens to undermine this very capacity. And this should make us wonder if we can live in a disenchanted world. Religious worldviews may not be true, but we may not be able to do without them unless we can find some other way of imbuing the cosmos with meaning,” ibid. 165-66.
“There are other nonscientific beliefs that stop our using technology without questioning its power. Say there is an ancient oak in my garden, in just the place I would like to build a little crazy golf course for the kids. I decide to cut the oak down with my chainsaw. Many of us would have qualms about this, but not because we have any doubts about the reliability of the chainsaw. Wouldn’t it be wrong to cut down such a magnificent tree just to build a crazy golf course? We might think this wrong because other people, my neighbors and future generations, would be deprived of the sight of this grand old tree. But, some say, it is wrong to destroy this tree for a quite different reason, a reason that has nothing to do with the interests of human beings, present or future. In their view, living things like an oak have a certain place in the natural order. They grow leaves, produce acorns, and become gnarled. In so doing, they discharge their natural function. We have no right to interfere with the natural functioning of the oak just because we want another crazy golf course. We have no right to frustrate the aims implicit in the oak’s activities and terminate its existence. To cut the oak down and burn it in order to make way for a crazy gold course would be to misuse that bit of nature, to pervert its natural functioning. Here, the application of technology must be curbed,” ibid. 167.
“There is nothing in the scientific picture of the world to support this line of thought. The scientist acknowledges that we human beings have purposes and we impose those purposes on the world: we fix our environment to suit ourselves. But the things we work on, our physical material, has no purpose of its own. I may make some sticks of wood into a chair and thus give them a function. But, apart from me, these sticks have no function. They could be used as a seat, as a doorstop, or as a bludgeon. Anything these sticks can do I could use them to do and that would become their function. It is people who determine what parts of the natural world are for: in themselves they have no purpose,” ibid. 167.
“Oaks, like all other species of living things, are not designed; rather they are a product of random mutation and natural selection…There is nothing here to support the idea that the tree’s shedding its acorns is a more natural event than my applying a chainsaw to its trunk,” ibid. 167-68.
“When I speak of science’s disenchantment of the world, I mean science’s removal of natural purposes and meaning from the world…Science’s powers of disenchantment now affect our understanding of human beings themselves. It is our turn to be disenchanted,” ibid. 168.
“We must drop this talk of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ where the human body is concerned. The body is a machine that is there to serve our purposes. Once we know how this machine works, we can treat it just as we would our car or our house,” ibid. 169-70.
“A few years ago, I saw a television program about a man who fervently wished to be rid of his healthy left leg: this leg was a part of his body he simply did not want to have. His left leg felt like an imposition, an encumbrance, even a deformity. The man’s misery was clearly genuine, and we watched him search desperately for a surgeon willing to amputate. Unsurprisingly, all the doctors he approached turned him down,” ibid. 171.
“The doctors refused this man because, they thought, a doctor’s job is to make people healthy, not to give them whatever they want. It was not biochemistry, physiology, or anatomy that taught them this. These sciences explain only how human bodies actually work and how they came to exist. Evolutionary biology no more prevents doctors from cutting off a man’s leg to make him happy than it forbids me to cut down the ancient oak in my garden because it makes me happy. What we ought and ought not do with the human body is beyond science’s scope…Is such thinking mere superstition, a harmful vestige of a prescientific age we should have outgrown long ago?” ibid. 171.
Now for three more comments:
i) Owens says that “we human beings have purposes and we impose those purposes on the world.”
But eliminative materialism has extended the program of disenchanting the world to disenchanting the human mind. It denies intentional states to the human mind. We are not goal-oriented creatures.
ii) Suppose we were to consistently apply the denial of teleological explanation to medical science. Owens already touched on that point, but his argument can be taken a step further.
Why do I go to the doctor? Because I feel unwell. It may be due to aches and pains that interfere with my performance. In some cases, the symptoms may be debilitating. In other cases, the symptoms may be life-threatening.
The doctor attempts to diagnose the source of the problem. He can’t fix the problem unless he can identify the problem.
But if science denies the teleological structure of natural objects, then there’s nothing to fix since nothing went wrong in the first place. Unless the brain was designed to perform a particular function, brain cancer is not a malfunction. There’s nothing to cure.
iii) Finally, notice the tension between Dawkins complaint against IDT and the denial of teleological explanation in the secular scientific method. Dawkins regards IDT as a stopgap theory. According to him it short-circuits the ultimate explanation.
But if a scientific explanation must exclude a teleological explanation, then what is there left to explain? If natural objects have no natural functions, or if they only have whatever function we artificially assign to them, then what does a scientific explanation amount to?
For example, Dawkins has characterized intelligent design theory as a “lazy cop-out” and a “Get Out Of Jail Free card.” To flesh this out, let’s consider Daniel Dennett’s threefold analysis:
“According to Daniel Dennett, there are three different strategies that we might use when confronted with objects or systems: the physical stance, the design stance, and the intentional stance.”
“When we make a prediction from the design stance, we assume that the entity in question has been designed in a certain way, and we predict that the entity will thus behave as designed… Design stance predictions are riskier than physical stance predictions. Predictions made from the design stance rest on at least two assumptions: first, that the entity in question is designed as it is assumed to be; and second, the entity will perform as it is designed without malfunctioning.”
“The sorts of entities so far discussed in relation to design-stance predictions have been artifacts, but the design stance also works well when it comes to living things and their parts. For example, even without any understanding of the biology and chemistry underlying anatomy we can nonetheless predict that a heart will pump blood throughout the body of a living thing. The adoption of the design stance supports this prediction; that is what hearts are supposed to do (i.e., what nature has ‘designed’ them to do).”
“As already noted, we often gain predictive power when moving from the physical stance to the design stance. Often, we can improve our predictions yet further by adopting the intentional stance. When making predictions from this stance, we interpret the behavior of the entity in question by treating it as a rational agent whose behavior is governed by intentional states. (Intentional states are mental states such as beliefs and desires which have the property of ‘aboutness,’ that is, they are about, or directed at, objects or states of affairs in the world.”
http://philosophy.uwaterloo.ca/MindDict/intentionalstance.html
Of course, Dennett doesn’t believe that natural objects were designed to do anything in particular. He simply regards the design stance as well as the intentional stance as a useful fiction.
From a Christian standpoint, we can take this literally. Natural objects were designed by God.
And we can attribute an intentional state even to a natural object that has no mental states in the indirect sense that it exemplifies divine intentionality—like a remote control toy airplane that goes wherever it’s directed to fly.
There is a deeply entrenched tradition within modern science of banning teleological explanations from nature. I’m going to quote some observations by a modern philosopher, and then discuss the repercussions were we to carry the denial of natural teleology to its logical denouement.
“The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented cosmos,” D. Owens, “Disenchantment,” L. Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007), 165.
“My worry is that the truth of science would not be liberating. To empower, science must extend our ability to act; yet by draining the cosmos of meaning or purpose, science threatens to undermine this very capacity. And this should make us wonder if we can live in a disenchanted world. Religious worldviews may not be true, but we may not be able to do without them unless we can find some other way of imbuing the cosmos with meaning,” ibid. 165-66.
“There are other nonscientific beliefs that stop our using technology without questioning its power. Say there is an ancient oak in my garden, in just the place I would like to build a little crazy golf course for the kids. I decide to cut the oak down with my chainsaw. Many of us would have qualms about this, but not because we have any doubts about the reliability of the chainsaw. Wouldn’t it be wrong to cut down such a magnificent tree just to build a crazy golf course? We might think this wrong because other people, my neighbors and future generations, would be deprived of the sight of this grand old tree. But, some say, it is wrong to destroy this tree for a quite different reason, a reason that has nothing to do with the interests of human beings, present or future. In their view, living things like an oak have a certain place in the natural order. They grow leaves, produce acorns, and become gnarled. In so doing, they discharge their natural function. We have no right to interfere with the natural functioning of the oak just because we want another crazy golf course. We have no right to frustrate the aims implicit in the oak’s activities and terminate its existence. To cut the oak down and burn it in order to make way for a crazy gold course would be to misuse that bit of nature, to pervert its natural functioning. Here, the application of technology must be curbed,” ibid. 167.
“There is nothing in the scientific picture of the world to support this line of thought. The scientist acknowledges that we human beings have purposes and we impose those purposes on the world: we fix our environment to suit ourselves. But the things we work on, our physical material, has no purpose of its own. I may make some sticks of wood into a chair and thus give them a function. But, apart from me, these sticks have no function. They could be used as a seat, as a doorstop, or as a bludgeon. Anything these sticks can do I could use them to do and that would become their function. It is people who determine what parts of the natural world are for: in themselves they have no purpose,” ibid. 167.
“Oaks, like all other species of living things, are not designed; rather they are a product of random mutation and natural selection…There is nothing here to support the idea that the tree’s shedding its acorns is a more natural event than my applying a chainsaw to its trunk,” ibid. 167-68.
“When I speak of science’s disenchantment of the world, I mean science’s removal of natural purposes and meaning from the world…Science’s powers of disenchantment now affect our understanding of human beings themselves. It is our turn to be disenchanted,” ibid. 168.
“We must drop this talk of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ where the human body is concerned. The body is a machine that is there to serve our purposes. Once we know how this machine works, we can treat it just as we would our car or our house,” ibid. 169-70.
“A few years ago, I saw a television program about a man who fervently wished to be rid of his healthy left leg: this leg was a part of his body he simply did not want to have. His left leg felt like an imposition, an encumbrance, even a deformity. The man’s misery was clearly genuine, and we watched him search desperately for a surgeon willing to amputate. Unsurprisingly, all the doctors he approached turned him down,” ibid. 171.
“The doctors refused this man because, they thought, a doctor’s job is to make people healthy, not to give them whatever they want. It was not biochemistry, physiology, or anatomy that taught them this. These sciences explain only how human bodies actually work and how they came to exist. Evolutionary biology no more prevents doctors from cutting off a man’s leg to make him happy than it forbids me to cut down the ancient oak in my garden because it makes me happy. What we ought and ought not do with the human body is beyond science’s scope…Is such thinking mere superstition, a harmful vestige of a prescientific age we should have outgrown long ago?” ibid. 171.
Now for three more comments:
i) Owens says that “we human beings have purposes and we impose those purposes on the world.”
But eliminative materialism has extended the program of disenchanting the world to disenchanting the human mind. It denies intentional states to the human mind. We are not goal-oriented creatures.
ii) Suppose we were to consistently apply the denial of teleological explanation to medical science. Owens already touched on that point, but his argument can be taken a step further.
Why do I go to the doctor? Because I feel unwell. It may be due to aches and pains that interfere with my performance. In some cases, the symptoms may be debilitating. In other cases, the symptoms may be life-threatening.
The doctor attempts to diagnose the source of the problem. He can’t fix the problem unless he can identify the problem.
But if science denies the teleological structure of natural objects, then there’s nothing to fix since nothing went wrong in the first place. Unless the brain was designed to perform a particular function, brain cancer is not a malfunction. There’s nothing to cure.
iii) Finally, notice the tension between Dawkins complaint against IDT and the denial of teleological explanation in the secular scientific method. Dawkins regards IDT as a stopgap theory. According to him it short-circuits the ultimate explanation.
But if a scientific explanation must exclude a teleological explanation, then what is there left to explain? If natural objects have no natural functions, or if they only have whatever function we artificially assign to them, then what does a scientific explanation amount to?
The identity of indiscernibles
A stock objection to predestination, original sin, and the like is that such doctrines are unfair. It would be unfair if we didn’t have the freedom to do otherwise.
This objection enjoys a knee-jerk appeal. But it’s superficial. One can think of counterexamples.
One I’ve often used is a card game. Ordinarily, we think it’s cheating if the deck is stacked. But, just as a matter of the odds, there are going to be occasions when a randomly shuffled deck will have the same sequence as a stacked deck. On those occasions the outcome will be the same. So, on those occasions, what difference would it make if the dealer were a cardsharp?
The late David Lewis was one of the foremost philosophers of the 20C. I see that Lewis has an argument similar to mine:
“I question the supreme value of incompatibilist freedom. Imagine two worlds. In one of these, actions are produced by psychological states, themselves caused by prior psychological conditions and by the pressure of the environment, those conditions and environments in turn being caused by earlier circumstances, all in accordance with the conditions philosophers introduce to allow for compatibilist freedom. In the second world, just the same actions are performed, but in accordance with your favorite incompatibilist account. Why should we think of the second world as a great advance on the first? In what, precisely, does its superiority reside?”
L. Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007), 234.
This objection enjoys a knee-jerk appeal. But it’s superficial. One can think of counterexamples.
One I’ve often used is a card game. Ordinarily, we think it’s cheating if the deck is stacked. But, just as a matter of the odds, there are going to be occasions when a randomly shuffled deck will have the same sequence as a stacked deck. On those occasions the outcome will be the same. So, on those occasions, what difference would it make if the dealer were a cardsharp?
The late David Lewis was one of the foremost philosophers of the 20C. I see that Lewis has an argument similar to mine:
“I question the supreme value of incompatibilist freedom. Imagine two worlds. In one of these, actions are produced by psychological states, themselves caused by prior psychological conditions and by the pressure of the environment, those conditions and environments in turn being caused by earlier circumstances, all in accordance with the conditions philosophers introduce to allow for compatibilist freedom. In the second world, just the same actions are performed, but in accordance with your favorite incompatibilist account. Why should we think of the second world as a great advance on the first? In what, precisely, does its superiority reside?”
L. Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007), 234.
Hostile Corroboration Of New Testament Authorship
One of the problems facing the critic of Christianity is how much he not only has to look for ways to dismiss the beliefs of the earliest Christians, but also has to attempt to dismiss what the earliest enemies of Christianity believed. Not only were the earliest Christians wrong about the empty tomb, for example, but so were the early Jewish opponents of Christianity who acknowledged that the tomb was empty. We see a similar situation with regard to the authorship of the New Testament.
We wouldn't need hostile corroboration to justify an acceptance of the traditional New Testament authorship attributions. The evidence we have from Christian sources is credible. It's early, widespread, and comes from sources who were in a position to know the relevant issues sufficiently well.
Disciples of the apostles lived into the second half of the second century. When Polycarp visited Rome in the middle of the second century to discuss some issues of controversy with the Roman bishop Anicetus, for example, he surely would have interacted with the beliefs of the Roman Christians on issues of New Testament authorship. We have some idea of how those documents were used at that time in Roman church services, for example, from sources like Justin Martyr. Would documents like the gospels and the letters of Paul have been used without any reference to their authorship? When controversial issues arose, like the ones Polycarp discussed with Anicetus, New Testament documents would have been cited in the process. The concept that somebody like Polycarp could live for several decades as a Christian and travel and involve himself in teaching and controversies, as he did, yet have little effect on the authorship attributions of his day, is untenable.
When there were significant disputes over New Testament authorship, such as who wrote Hebrews or whether Peter wrote 2 Peter, those disputes were explicitly and widely acknowledged. Even insignificant disputes, such as those involving the absurd claim that the heretic Cerinthus wrote the gospel of John (a view advocated by only a small minority), left traces in the historical record. For these and other reasons, which I outline here, we have good reason to trust the New Testament authorship attributions of the early Christians.
And just as we should question the motives of the early Christians who commented on such issues, we should question the motives of non-Christian sources as well. It's not as if a Trypho, a Celsus, or a Porphyry is sure to have no bad motives, and to be highly knowledgeable of the subjects he discusses, because he's a non-Christian. We wouldn't conclude that a New Testament authorship attribution must be wrong just because an opponent of Christianity suggested that it was. But the testimony of non-Christian sources is one line of evidence among others. It has some significance.
We know that the early enemies of Christianity were concerned about the subject. The early Christians made much of the significance of eyewitness testimony, for instance, as did the surrounding culture of their day, and Porphyry's efforts in arguing against the traditional authorship attribution of the book of Daniel are a reflection of what we could see with the New Testament documents. But we don't. One of the most significant indications of how the early opponents of Christianity viewed the authorship attributions of the New Testament documents is the lack of interaction with arguments against those attributions. The early Christians widely interacted with Porphyry's arguments against Daniel, and they widely discussed disagreements on issues like who wrote Hebrews and whether the apostle John wrote Revelation. As the historian Paul Maier notes, Dionysius of Alexandria's arguments against Johannine authorship of Revelation are reminiscent of "a good, critical scholar", and the modern scholars who reject Johannine authorship do so "for the very reasons advanced by Dionysius" (Eusebius - The Church History [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 1999], p. 285). The people of that time didn't have our level of scholarship, much as we don't have the level of scholarship that will exist a hundred or a thousand years from now, but they weren't so ignorant as to be deceived by a long series of New Testament forgeries that appeared thirty, fifty, or eighty years after the purported authors had died. And if the early Christians had been so undiscerning, at least their enemies would have had reason to exercise more discernment.
Even when a book's authorship attribution was widely accepted, there was an awareness that the attribution could be incorrect. Origen repeatedly affirms the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, yet he's aware of the possibility that Celsus and other critics of Christianity might deny it (Against Celsus, 4:42). When Origen comments elsewhere that the gospels are "unquestionable in the church" (cited in Eusebius, Church History, 6:25:4), he isn't referring to ignorance of other possibilities or a refusal to consider counterarguments. He's referring to a consensus that was reached by a community of people who were concerned with evidence and had repeatedly shown a willingness to question other books.
Augustine refers to how critics of the gospels in his day would "assert that the disciples claimed more [in the gospels] for their Master than He really was" (The Harmony Of The Gospels, 1:7:11; see also 1:16:24), and would object that Jesus didn't leave any writings Himself, but there seems to have been widespread acceptance of the attribution of the gospels to Jesus' disciples (Matthew and John) and their followers (Mark and Luke). These critics weren't objecting to the authorship attributions, but were objecting on other grounds instead. Other sources suggest that Augustine's assessment was accurate.
Below are some comments Charles McIlvaine wrote on this subject in the nineteenth century. His focus is on the gospels and Acts, not the entirety of the New Testament, and I don't agree with every comment he makes. He's discussing enemies of Christianity such as Celsus and Porphyry, so he doesn't mention some less hostile sources who could be included. For example, heretical groups like the Ebionites often accepted the authorship attributions of New Testament documents they opposed, even though arguing against those attributions, if that seemed plausible to them, would have been more effective. The historian Philip Schaff gives another example:
"These heretical testimonies [in support of the fourth gospel] are almost decisive by themselves. The Gnostics would rather have rejected the fourth Gospel altogether, as Marcion actually did, from doctrinal objection. They certainly would not have received it from the Catholic church, as little as the church would have received it from the Gnostics. The concurrent reception of the Gospel by both at so early a date is conclusive evidence of its genuineness. 'The Gnostics of that date,' says Dr. Abbot, 'received it because they could not help it. They would not have admitted the authority of a book which could be reconciled with their doctrines only by the most forced interpretation, if they could have destroyed its authority by denying its genuineness. Its genuineness could then be easily ascertained. Ephesus was one of the principal cities of the Eastern world, the centre of extensive commerce, the metropolis of Asia Minor. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people were living who had known the apostle John. The question whether he, the beloved disciple, had committed to writing his recollections of his Master’s life and teaching, was one of the greatest interest. The fact of the reception of the fourth Gospel as his work at so early a date, by parties so violently opposed to each other, proves that the evidence of its genuineness was decisive. This argument is further confirmed by the use of the Gospel by the opposing parties in the later Montanistic controversy, and in the disputes about the time of celebrating Easter.'" (History Of The Christian Church, 1:12:83)
Charles McIlvaine's focus, below, is on the most hostile enemies of Christianity, not individuals who considered themselves Christian. But we should keep groups like the Ebionites and the Gnostics in mind, since much the same can be said about them.
I've read all of the extant fragments of Celsus, but I haven't read all of the relevant fragments by or about the other sources McIlvaine discusses. (For those who have read some of these fragments in the works of R. Joseph Hoffmann, see here for a discussion of some of the problems with relying on his material.) I can't affirm everything McIlvaine writes below. I'm quoting him because he's generally credible, he makes some good points, and I agree with the general thrust of his comments. He writes:
We wouldn't need hostile corroboration to justify an acceptance of the traditional New Testament authorship attributions. The evidence we have from Christian sources is credible. It's early, widespread, and comes from sources who were in a position to know the relevant issues sufficiently well.
Disciples of the apostles lived into the second half of the second century. When Polycarp visited Rome in the middle of the second century to discuss some issues of controversy with the Roman bishop Anicetus, for example, he surely would have interacted with the beliefs of the Roman Christians on issues of New Testament authorship. We have some idea of how those documents were used at that time in Roman church services, for example, from sources like Justin Martyr. Would documents like the gospels and the letters of Paul have been used without any reference to their authorship? When controversial issues arose, like the ones Polycarp discussed with Anicetus, New Testament documents would have been cited in the process. The concept that somebody like Polycarp could live for several decades as a Christian and travel and involve himself in teaching and controversies, as he did, yet have little effect on the authorship attributions of his day, is untenable.
When there were significant disputes over New Testament authorship, such as who wrote Hebrews or whether Peter wrote 2 Peter, those disputes were explicitly and widely acknowledged. Even insignificant disputes, such as those involving the absurd claim that the heretic Cerinthus wrote the gospel of John (a view advocated by only a small minority), left traces in the historical record. For these and other reasons, which I outline here, we have good reason to trust the New Testament authorship attributions of the early Christians.
And just as we should question the motives of the early Christians who commented on such issues, we should question the motives of non-Christian sources as well. It's not as if a Trypho, a Celsus, or a Porphyry is sure to have no bad motives, and to be highly knowledgeable of the subjects he discusses, because he's a non-Christian. We wouldn't conclude that a New Testament authorship attribution must be wrong just because an opponent of Christianity suggested that it was. But the testimony of non-Christian sources is one line of evidence among others. It has some significance.
We know that the early enemies of Christianity were concerned about the subject. The early Christians made much of the significance of eyewitness testimony, for instance, as did the surrounding culture of their day, and Porphyry's efforts in arguing against the traditional authorship attribution of the book of Daniel are a reflection of what we could see with the New Testament documents. But we don't. One of the most significant indications of how the early opponents of Christianity viewed the authorship attributions of the New Testament documents is the lack of interaction with arguments against those attributions. The early Christians widely interacted with Porphyry's arguments against Daniel, and they widely discussed disagreements on issues like who wrote Hebrews and whether the apostle John wrote Revelation. As the historian Paul Maier notes, Dionysius of Alexandria's arguments against Johannine authorship of Revelation are reminiscent of "a good, critical scholar", and the modern scholars who reject Johannine authorship do so "for the very reasons advanced by Dionysius" (Eusebius - The Church History [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 1999], p. 285). The people of that time didn't have our level of scholarship, much as we don't have the level of scholarship that will exist a hundred or a thousand years from now, but they weren't so ignorant as to be deceived by a long series of New Testament forgeries that appeared thirty, fifty, or eighty years after the purported authors had died. And if the early Christians had been so undiscerning, at least their enemies would have had reason to exercise more discernment.
Even when a book's authorship attribution was widely accepted, there was an awareness that the attribution could be incorrect. Origen repeatedly affirms the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, yet he's aware of the possibility that Celsus and other critics of Christianity might deny it (Against Celsus, 4:42). When Origen comments elsewhere that the gospels are "unquestionable in the church" (cited in Eusebius, Church History, 6:25:4), he isn't referring to ignorance of other possibilities or a refusal to consider counterarguments. He's referring to a consensus that was reached by a community of people who were concerned with evidence and had repeatedly shown a willingness to question other books.
Augustine refers to how critics of the gospels in his day would "assert that the disciples claimed more [in the gospels] for their Master than He really was" (The Harmony Of The Gospels, 1:7:11; see also 1:16:24), and would object that Jesus didn't leave any writings Himself, but there seems to have been widespread acceptance of the attribution of the gospels to Jesus' disciples (Matthew and John) and their followers (Mark and Luke). These critics weren't objecting to the authorship attributions, but were objecting on other grounds instead. Other sources suggest that Augustine's assessment was accurate.
Below are some comments Charles McIlvaine wrote on this subject in the nineteenth century. His focus is on the gospels and Acts, not the entirety of the New Testament, and I don't agree with every comment he makes. He's discussing enemies of Christianity such as Celsus and Porphyry, so he doesn't mention some less hostile sources who could be included. For example, heretical groups like the Ebionites often accepted the authorship attributions of New Testament documents they opposed, even though arguing against those attributions, if that seemed plausible to them, would have been more effective. The historian Philip Schaff gives another example:
"These heretical testimonies [in support of the fourth gospel] are almost decisive by themselves. The Gnostics would rather have rejected the fourth Gospel altogether, as Marcion actually did, from doctrinal objection. They certainly would not have received it from the Catholic church, as little as the church would have received it from the Gnostics. The concurrent reception of the Gospel by both at so early a date is conclusive evidence of its genuineness. 'The Gnostics of that date,' says Dr. Abbot, 'received it because they could not help it. They would not have admitted the authority of a book which could be reconciled with their doctrines only by the most forced interpretation, if they could have destroyed its authority by denying its genuineness. Its genuineness could then be easily ascertained. Ephesus was one of the principal cities of the Eastern world, the centre of extensive commerce, the metropolis of Asia Minor. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people were living who had known the apostle John. The question whether he, the beloved disciple, had committed to writing his recollections of his Master’s life and teaching, was one of the greatest interest. The fact of the reception of the fourth Gospel as his work at so early a date, by parties so violently opposed to each other, proves that the evidence of its genuineness was decisive. This argument is further confirmed by the use of the Gospel by the opposing parties in the later Montanistic controversy, and in the disputes about the time of celebrating Easter.'" (History Of The Christian Church, 1:12:83)
Charles McIlvaine's focus, below, is on the most hostile enemies of Christianity, not individuals who considered themselves Christian. But we should keep groups like the Ebionites and the Gnostics in mind, since much the same can be said about them.
I've read all of the extant fragments of Celsus, but I haven't read all of the relevant fragments by or about the other sources McIlvaine discusses. (For those who have read some of these fragments in the works of R. Joseph Hoffmann, see here for a discussion of some of the problems with relying on his material.) I can't affirm everything McIlvaine writes below. I'm quoting him because he's generally credible, he makes some good points, and I agree with the general thrust of his comments. He writes:
It may be said, with some appearance of a plausible objection to the testimony hitherto produced, that it is all derived, either from the devoted friends of the gospel, or else from those who professed to be its disciples. Is there no testimony from enemies? The books of the New Testament were widely circulated; christian advocates, in their controversies with the Heathen, freely appealed to them; Heathens, in their works of attack and defence, must have spoken of them. In what light did they regard them? Did they ascribe them to their reputed authors, or question their authenticity? Now we do not grant that the testimony already produced is justly liable to the least disparagement on account of its having been derived exclusively from the friends of Christ. That certain ancients believed the facts contained in Caesar's Commentaries has never been supposed to diminish the value of their testimony to the authenticity of that work. We will take occasion, by and by, to show that the very fact that an early witness to the New Testament history was not an enemy, but a friend, of the gospel, and had become a friend from having been once an enemy, is just the ingredient in his testimony that gives it peculiar conclusiveness. Still, however, we are under no temptation to undervalue the importance of an appeal to the opinions of adversaries. Let us inquire of enemies as well as friends -- and first of Julian.
Julian, the emperor, united intelligence, learning, and power, with a persecuting zeal, in a resolute effort to root out christianity. In the year 361, he composed a work against its claims. We may be well assured that if any thing could have been said against the authenticity of its books, he would have used it. His work is not extant; but from long extracts, found in the answer by Cyril, a few tears after, as well as from the statements of his opinions and arguments by this writer, it is unquestionable that Julian bore witness to the authenticity of the four Gospels and of the Acts of the Apostles. He concedes, and argues from, their early date; quotes them by name as the genuine works of their reputed authors; proceeds upon the supposition, as a thing undeniable, that they were the only historical books which Christians received as canonical -- the only authentic narratives of Christ and his apostles, and of the doctrine they delivered. He has also quoted, or plainly referred to, the Epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians, and nowhere insinuates that the authenticity of any portion of the New Testament could reasonably be questioned. Let us ascend a little higher.
Hierocles, president of Bithynia, and a learned man, of about the year 303, united, with a cruel persecution of Christians, the publication of a book against christianity, in which, instead of issuing even the least suspicion that the New Testament was not written by those to whom its several parts were ascribed, he confines his effort to the hunt of internal flaws and contradictions. Besides this tacit acknowledgment, his work, or the extracts of it that remain, refer to, at least, six out of the eight writers of the books of the New Testament. Let us ascend still higher.
Porphyry, universally allowed to have been the most severe and formidable adversary, in all primitive antiquity, wrote, about the year 270, a work against christianity. It is evident that he was well acquainted with the New Testament. In the little that has been preserved of his writings, there are plain references to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistle to the Galatians. Speaking of Christians, he calls Matthew their evangelist. "He possessed every advantage which natural abilities or political situation could afford, to discover whether the New Testament was a genuine work of the apostles and evangelists, or whether it was imposed upon the world after the decease of its pretended authors. But no trace of this suspicion is any where to be found; nor did it ever occur to Porphyry to suppose that it was spurious." How well this ingenious writer understood the value of an argument against the authenticity of a book of scripture, and how greedily he would have enlisted it in his war against christianity, could he have found such a weapon, is evident from his well known effort to escape the prophetic inspiration of the book of Daniel, by denying that it was written in the times of that prophet. We may ascend still higher.
Celsus, esteemed a man of learning among the ancients, and a wonderful philosopher among modern infidels, wrote a laboured argument against the Christians. He flourished in the year 176, or about seventy-six years after the death of St. John. None can accuse him of a want of zeal to ruin christianity. None can complain against his testimony, as deficient in antiquity. An industrious, ingenious, learned, adversary of that age, must have known whatever was suspicious in the authorship of the New Testament writings. His book entitled "The True Word," is unhappily lost, but in the answer, composed by Origen, the extracts from it are so large that it is difficult to find of any ancient book, not extant, more extensive remains. The author quotes, from the Gospels, such a variety of particulars, even in these fragments, that the enumeration would prove almost an abridgement of the Gospel narrative. Origen has noticed in them about eighty quotations from the books of the New Testament, or references to them. Among these there is abundant evidence that Celsus was acquainted with the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John. Several of Paul's Epistles are alluded to. His whole argument proceeds upon the concession that the christian scriptures were the works of the authors to whom they were ascribed. Such a thing as a suspicion, to the contrary, is not breathed; and yet no man ever wrote against christianity with greater virulence. Hence it appears, "by the testimony of one of the most malicious adversaries the christian religion ever had, and who was also a man of considerable parts and learning, that the writings of the evangelists were extant in his time, which was the next century to that in which the apostles lived; and that those accounts were written by Christ's own disciples, and, consequently, in the very age in which the facts there related, were done, and when, therefore, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have convicted them of falsehood, if they had not been true." "Who can forbear (says the devout Doddridge) adoring the depth of divine wisdom, in laying up such a firm foundation of our faith in the gospel history, in the writings of one who was so inveterate an enemy to it, and so indefatigable in his attempts to overthrow it." Who, I will add, can help the acknowledgment that in Celsus, Porphyry, Hierocles, and Julian, all of them learned controversialists, as well as devoted opponents and persecutors of Christians, extending their testimony, from the seventieth year after the last of the apostles, to the year of our Lord 361 -- every reasonable demand for the testimony of enemies is fully met, and a gracious Providence has perfected the external evidence for the authenticity of the New Testament?
Sunday, July 29, 2007
"On Becoming a Heretic"
Calvinism comes under fire all the time by professing Christians of a more liberal stripe. And there’s a sense in which they’re half-right—as long as you buy into their operating assumptions. But their conclusions fall short of their premises—for these doctrines hang together with great inner cohesion and Scriptural support.
Edwin Curley is a seasoned philosopher who specializes in the Enlightenment. In describing his youthful apostasy, he presents the logical alternatives with the frank clarity and refreshing candor of someone who has nothing to lose since he long since ceased to have a personal investment (from his perspective) in the correct answer.
“My mother—and maternal grandmother, who had lived with us from my infancy—were Episcopalians. They saw to it that I went to the Episcopal church and Sunday school, and rejoiced when I became an acolyte,” “On Becoming a Heretic,” L. Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007), 80.
“As I became an adult, I began to have doubts about the religion in which I had been raised…Probably the most crucial factor was the prayer book my mother gave me when I was sixteen…At sixteen I read those articles of religion, carefully and critically, for the first time,” ibid. 80.
“I was disturbed that my church accepted predestination. Before the foundations of the world were laid, the articles said, God had chosen some vessels for honor and others for dishonor, that is, some of his human creatures for salvation and others for damnation. This did not seem fair. But one of the first principles of my church was that no one should be required to believe, as necessary for salvation, any doctrine that could not be proved from scripture. So far as I could see, there was as good scriptural foundation for this teaching as there was for any doctrine my church taught. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans seemed pretty unequivocal on this score,” ibid. 80-81.
“There also seemed to be strong philosophical reasons for accepting predestination. If God is omniscient, if he knows everything, he must have foreknowledge of the future, including his creatures’ ultimate destiny. So before they are born there must be a fact of the matter about what their fate will be, a fact that would seem to be unalterable, unless we suppose that God can be mistaken in his beliefs. So our belief that we might determine our destiny by the choices we have yet to make, choices that might go either way, must be an illusion,” ibid. 81.
“Some Christian philosophers will say that God’s omniscience requires only that he know everything that is knowable, and that propositions about the future (or more modestly, propositions about future human free actions, and all others that depend on them) lack a truth value; not being knowable, they are not in fact known, even by an omniscient being. This may be a way of reconciling God’s omniscience with human freedom, but it does so only by creating problems for the doctrine of divine providence,” ibid. 289n3.
“Moreover, if God is omnipotent, if he can do anything he wants to do (or any logically possible thing he wants to do), then nothing can happen except by his will. If I wind up going to hell, God must have willed that I go to hell. This takes it out of my hands. How can I prevent what an omnipotent being wills?” ibid. 81.
“Theologians sometimes try to save God from responsibility for our sins by saying that he merely permits them. But to permit something to happen when you could have prevented it, and when you knew what would happen if you didn’t act, is not to escape responsibility for it. In Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, Regina is having a quarrel with her husband when he suffers a heart attack. He asks her to bring him his medicine, and she refuses to do so. She has it in her power to bring him the medicine, and she knows what will happen if she does not. Her decision not to bring him the medicine makes her as much responsible for his death as if she had shot him,” ibid. 81.
“Some Christian philosophers will no doubt object that, although God could prevent me from committing the sins that will justly cause my damnation, he cannot do so in a way that would entitle me to moral credit for refraining…Even if we accept the libertarian conception of freedom that this reply presupposes, it doesn’t seem to work. It doesn’t show that God can’t cause me not to perform the act that, if done freely, would be a sin. It just shows that he can’t do this without depriving me of the libertarian freedom necessary for my refraining to accrue moral credit. It’s the value he places on human freedom that prevents him from causing me not to sin, and that value may seem, on reflection, too high,” ibid. 81.
“If I am destined to go to Hell, God will not only have known that from eternity, he will also have willed it from eternity. The scriptural texts supporting predestination seem to do no more than endorse the implications of deeper theological commitments to God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Sometimes Christians claim that the acceptance of predestination—or as they may say, double predestination, the predestination not only of the elect, but also the damned—is an example of Calvinist excess. It’s well to remember that the chief theologian of the Roman Catholic Church also accepted double predestination [‘See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, xxiii’],” ibid. 82, 289n4.
“Another doctrine of my church that disturbed me as an adolescent was the doctrine that we are all sinner, who require God’s grace if we are to be saved…This is the doctrine of original sin. I cannot believe in original sin. Original sin is less widely accepted now than when my church was founded. I find many Christians who reject original sin. I sympathize with them. Their hearts are in the right place, certainly. But Christians can reject original sin only at the cost of a substantial reinterpretation of their scriptures and traditions,” ibid. 82.
“Consistently with the doctrine of original sin, it is common among Christians to believe that we cannot earn salvation by our works. If we are to be ‘justified,’ that is, to achieve salvation, it must be by our faith in Jesus. Not that this is an action that is in our power to perform or not, an alternative to obeying God’s commandments, which is beyond our power. Rather, God is merciful; he may forgive us and treat us as if we were righteous. The mark of our having been forgiven is that God, by an act of grace, gives us faith (Rom 3:21-26),” ibid. 82.
“It implies that those among us who lack faith in Jesus have not received grace, have not been forgiven, and will, if we continue in that state, go to Hell. So the doctrine of justification by faith, which has strong support in the Christian scriptures, leads to exclusivism, to the idea that all who reject Christian doctrine must be damned, no matter how good they may be by ordinary standards. If God chose the beneficiaries of his grace on the ground of some distinctive merit they possessed, this might not be unfair to those he didn’t choose, whom we would presume to lack that merit. But that would be contrary to the idea of grace, which implies a free gift, not something given to someone who deserves it on account of merit,” ibid. 82-83.
“It’s a hard and ugly business, this doctrine of grace…Yet my church taught that these people could not be saved, not matter how good they might otherwise be, if they did not believe in Jesus. While there might not be any philosophical reason to believe this, there certainly seemed to be ample scriptural support for it, as is illustrated most clearly by the Gospel of John, though also by other texts,” ibid. 83.
“The scriptures that my church pronounced sacred seemed to teach that most of us will go to hell: ‘The gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it…the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it’ (Mt 7:13-14). Another passages reads: ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’ (Mt 22:144),” ibid. 83.
“So far, my objections have been mainly theological; they are objections to teachings whose basis is primarily scriptural rather than philosophical. The main exception to that generalization is the doctrine of predestination, which has philosophical grounds as well as scriptural grounds. I know many Christians will not feel that their understanding of Christianity requires them to accept all these doctrines, either because they have a different interpretation of scripture or because they do not regard the Christian scriptures as absolutely authoritative in determining their beliefs and conduct. I think those Christians who adopt a freer attitude toward scripture—and do not feel that their acceptance of Christianity commits them to predestination, or hell, or original sin, or justification by faith, or exclusivism—those Christians have their hearts in the right place, I say. But I also think their feet many be planted on the slippery slope to heresy, and that more conservative Christians, who would accord greater authority to scripture, have a clearer right to call themselves Christians. How much of traditional Christianity can you reject and still be a Christian?” ibid. 85.
Edwin Curley is a seasoned philosopher who specializes in the Enlightenment. In describing his youthful apostasy, he presents the logical alternatives with the frank clarity and refreshing candor of someone who has nothing to lose since he long since ceased to have a personal investment (from his perspective) in the correct answer.
“My mother—and maternal grandmother, who had lived with us from my infancy—were Episcopalians. They saw to it that I went to the Episcopal church and Sunday school, and rejoiced when I became an acolyte,” “On Becoming a Heretic,” L. Antony, ed. Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford 2007), 80.
“As I became an adult, I began to have doubts about the religion in which I had been raised…Probably the most crucial factor was the prayer book my mother gave me when I was sixteen…At sixteen I read those articles of religion, carefully and critically, for the first time,” ibid. 80.
“I was disturbed that my church accepted predestination. Before the foundations of the world were laid, the articles said, God had chosen some vessels for honor and others for dishonor, that is, some of his human creatures for salvation and others for damnation. This did not seem fair. But one of the first principles of my church was that no one should be required to believe, as necessary for salvation, any doctrine that could not be proved from scripture. So far as I could see, there was as good scriptural foundation for this teaching as there was for any doctrine my church taught. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans seemed pretty unequivocal on this score,” ibid. 80-81.
“There also seemed to be strong philosophical reasons for accepting predestination. If God is omniscient, if he knows everything, he must have foreknowledge of the future, including his creatures’ ultimate destiny. So before they are born there must be a fact of the matter about what their fate will be, a fact that would seem to be unalterable, unless we suppose that God can be mistaken in his beliefs. So our belief that we might determine our destiny by the choices we have yet to make, choices that might go either way, must be an illusion,” ibid. 81.
“Some Christian philosophers will say that God’s omniscience requires only that he know everything that is knowable, and that propositions about the future (or more modestly, propositions about future human free actions, and all others that depend on them) lack a truth value; not being knowable, they are not in fact known, even by an omniscient being. This may be a way of reconciling God’s omniscience with human freedom, but it does so only by creating problems for the doctrine of divine providence,” ibid. 289n3.
“Moreover, if God is omnipotent, if he can do anything he wants to do (or any logically possible thing he wants to do), then nothing can happen except by his will. If I wind up going to hell, God must have willed that I go to hell. This takes it out of my hands. How can I prevent what an omnipotent being wills?” ibid. 81.
“Theologians sometimes try to save God from responsibility for our sins by saying that he merely permits them. But to permit something to happen when you could have prevented it, and when you knew what would happen if you didn’t act, is not to escape responsibility for it. In Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, Regina is having a quarrel with her husband when he suffers a heart attack. He asks her to bring him his medicine, and she refuses to do so. She has it in her power to bring him the medicine, and she knows what will happen if she does not. Her decision not to bring him the medicine makes her as much responsible for his death as if she had shot him,” ibid. 81.
“Some Christian philosophers will no doubt object that, although God could prevent me from committing the sins that will justly cause my damnation, he cannot do so in a way that would entitle me to moral credit for refraining…Even if we accept the libertarian conception of freedom that this reply presupposes, it doesn’t seem to work. It doesn’t show that God can’t cause me not to perform the act that, if done freely, would be a sin. It just shows that he can’t do this without depriving me of the libertarian freedom necessary for my refraining to accrue moral credit. It’s the value he places on human freedom that prevents him from causing me not to sin, and that value may seem, on reflection, too high,” ibid. 81.
“If I am destined to go to Hell, God will not only have known that from eternity, he will also have willed it from eternity. The scriptural texts supporting predestination seem to do no more than endorse the implications of deeper theological commitments to God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Sometimes Christians claim that the acceptance of predestination—or as they may say, double predestination, the predestination not only of the elect, but also the damned—is an example of Calvinist excess. It’s well to remember that the chief theologian of the Roman Catholic Church also accepted double predestination [‘See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, xxiii’],” ibid. 82, 289n4.
“Another doctrine of my church that disturbed me as an adolescent was the doctrine that we are all sinner, who require God’s grace if we are to be saved…This is the doctrine of original sin. I cannot believe in original sin. Original sin is less widely accepted now than when my church was founded. I find many Christians who reject original sin. I sympathize with them. Their hearts are in the right place, certainly. But Christians can reject original sin only at the cost of a substantial reinterpretation of their scriptures and traditions,” ibid. 82.
“Consistently with the doctrine of original sin, it is common among Christians to believe that we cannot earn salvation by our works. If we are to be ‘justified,’ that is, to achieve salvation, it must be by our faith in Jesus. Not that this is an action that is in our power to perform or not, an alternative to obeying God’s commandments, which is beyond our power. Rather, God is merciful; he may forgive us and treat us as if we were righteous. The mark of our having been forgiven is that God, by an act of grace, gives us faith (Rom 3:21-26),” ibid. 82.
“It implies that those among us who lack faith in Jesus have not received grace, have not been forgiven, and will, if we continue in that state, go to Hell. So the doctrine of justification by faith, which has strong support in the Christian scriptures, leads to exclusivism, to the idea that all who reject Christian doctrine must be damned, no matter how good they may be by ordinary standards. If God chose the beneficiaries of his grace on the ground of some distinctive merit they possessed, this might not be unfair to those he didn’t choose, whom we would presume to lack that merit. But that would be contrary to the idea of grace, which implies a free gift, not something given to someone who deserves it on account of merit,” ibid. 82-83.
“It’s a hard and ugly business, this doctrine of grace…Yet my church taught that these people could not be saved, not matter how good they might otherwise be, if they did not believe in Jesus. While there might not be any philosophical reason to believe this, there certainly seemed to be ample scriptural support for it, as is illustrated most clearly by the Gospel of John, though also by other texts,” ibid. 83.
“The scriptures that my church pronounced sacred seemed to teach that most of us will go to hell: ‘The gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it…the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it’ (Mt 7:13-14). Another passages reads: ‘Many are called, but few are chosen’ (Mt 22:144),” ibid. 83.
“So far, my objections have been mainly theological; they are objections to teachings whose basis is primarily scriptural rather than philosophical. The main exception to that generalization is the doctrine of predestination, which has philosophical grounds as well as scriptural grounds. I know many Christians will not feel that their understanding of Christianity requires them to accept all these doctrines, either because they have a different interpretation of scripture or because they do not regard the Christian scriptures as absolutely authoritative in determining their beliefs and conduct. I think those Christians who adopt a freer attitude toward scripture—and do not feel that their acceptance of Christianity commits them to predestination, or hell, or original sin, or justification by faith, or exclusivism—those Christians have their hearts in the right place, I say. But I also think their feet many be planted on the slippery slope to heresy, and that more conservative Christians, who would accord greater authority to scripture, have a clearer right to call themselves Christians. How much of traditional Christianity can you reject and still be a Christian?” ibid. 85.
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