An open and affirming shire

Here's how one “Confessional” blog coddles evident, militant enemies of the faith. It's like one of those "open and affirming" churches that hangs pink triangles in the sanctuary:

Stephen said,

April 7, 2011 at 9:22 am

Let me briefly come at this from another angle. For me this came down to constantly encountering how in order to uphold inerrancy I had to decide ahead of time (don’t get me wrong, this “decision” is potentially in line with some of the Bible’s self-claims) that the Bible is and must be inerrant. This brings with it an interpretive methodology that inherently favors interpretive options not involving the Bible in an error (whatever we mean by that). Over time I found this to inhibit accurate readings of the Bible. Thus I jettisoned inerrancy because, frankly, I found it problematic for a truly “high view of Scripture,” one truly willing to follow the Bible and God’s challenges in it to us and our doctrines wherever they take us.

Reed Here said,

April 7, 2011 at 10:31 am

I do appreciate your reasons and am sympathetic.

Reed Here said,

April 7, 2011 at 9:24 pm

Stephen: I value and appreciate your approach. I was contemplating along the same lines after posted...Sincerely, thanks for your intent here Stephen. I share it with you. I’ll respond soon.

paigebritton said,

April 8, 2011 at 6:20 am

Hey, Stephen,

Thanks for taking the time to write that! I value your thoughts for the spirit in which they’re offered and the care you take to articulate them.

Stephen said,

April 13, 2011 at 11:35 pm

Where I differ from classical Evangelical-Reformed understandings of Scripture may be categorized in terms of what I think it means that the Bible is fully God’s Word. For me that doesn’t mean lack of error because I refuse to prejudge what God can or did do when inspiring his word. Furthermore, it remains patently obvious to me (I do not mean that polemically) that the Bible is FULL of errors in the classic sense (inaccuracies where a claim about history or science is meant; “contradictions;” and so on).

paigebritton said,

April 14, 2011 at 7:05 am

Stephen, (#112)

Wow, thank you so much for taking the time to write all that out.

paigebritton said,

April 15, 2011 at 3:59 am

Stephen,

I hope you saw my #122 (re. your #112). Thank you so much for #113, too, and your interest in carefully articulating your position. I, for one, value understanding it better (and I didn’t find it long-winded! :)...At some level I resonate with this: intellectual integrity is important to me, too, and I can see how someone with your convictions & abilities would feel this is the best way to “love God with all your mind.”

paigebritton said,

April 16, 2011 at 5:58 am

Hey, Stephen,

I think that TUAD’s pasting of parts of my comment (#164) into his “does this help?” comment (#175) gave my words a de-contextualized clout that I certainly didn’t intend. I respect your desire for scholarly integrity and for trying to “love God with all your mind,” and I tried to frame the observations I was making with this tone. (And sorry for the caricature — “in the teeth of the evidence” — which was meant only playfully!) Unfortunately, TUAD left off the “frame” parts so my words took on a more belligerent tone.

 

Apologies for the unintended consequences of a cut-and-pasted comment!

paigebritton said,

April 18, 2011 at 7:01 am

Hey, Stephen!

Thanks for your kind words. Didn’t mean to sound pessimistic there about the possibility of our communication with your well-read self; just wanted to give the heads-up that you were pretty far along in considering ideas, so the basic answers we might come up with probably won’t suffice.

Reed Here said,

April 18, 2011 at 9:45 am

Stephen:

 

I want to address your response, but no time right now. Let it suffice that we’re sincerely searching for the right answers, and sometimes we speak past one another.

paigebritton said,

April 20, 2011 at 7:08 am

Jed & Stephen & everybody,

 

I am assuming (based on Stephen’s earlier comments) that we are all in agreement that the Bible is inspired by God, whether or not we are in agreement about inerrancy.

paigebritton said,

April 22, 2011 at 6:41 am

TUAD -

Please don’t keep bringing in Stephen’s past comments from other blogs, okay? He’s taken that very graciously, but let’s just let him choose for himself what he wants to say in this conversation.

Thanks.

 

Sorry, Stephen, that I was not aware Truth was doing that yesterday. I will nix the bits you didn’t interact with.

Reed Here said,

April 23, 2011 at 12:24 pm

Paige: agreed. While I think Stephen is horribly wrong, we did invite him here to interact on the topic. As valuable as our conversation on GB may be (more or less, I know, I know), it is not as vital as what happens Sunday in and Sunday out. 

A few questions for Bart Ehrman

Riffing off of my last post and Bart Ehrman's recent appearance on the Unbelievable? radio show, I'd like to transcribe here something that Ehrman said, at minute 44:12.

This isn't the biggest argument against Jesus having been raised from the dead, but one always has to look at what kind of witnesses you have, and when you look at the Gospels of the New Testament, it's striking just how many differences there are in their accounts of the resurrection.  I have my students do an exercise, my undergrads; I have them simply do a careful study of what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all say about what happened on the morning of the resurrection, the alleged resurrection, and compare their notes, and they're struck at just how different they are. Who actually goes to the tomb that morning? Is it Mary Magdalene by herself or with other women? If with other women, how many other women? What are they named? It depends on which Gospel you read.  Was the stone rolled away before they got there or after they got there? It depends on which Gospel you read. 

So, given that, I have a few questions for Dr Ehrman.  

Where in your writings, scholarly or popular, or your lectures, have you interacted with harmonisations of these 4 accounts proposed by others who are a bit better educated in Bible exposition and exegesis than undergraduate students at a secular university, and demonstrated that they are insufficient? 

Do you commend the practice of having undergraduate students at a university that is not set up to appeal to the best and brightest on a given topic perform a "careful study" of that topic as a decisive test for truth? 

(After all, one would expect to find a much higher percentage of gifted and focused Bible exposition students in the PhD program at Reformed Theological Seminary or Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, not in New Testament 101 at UNC Chapel Hill.)

Since you apparently do, would you accept as a definitive conclusion that "Darwinian evolution as described by modern science did not happen, and the Earth is ~6-8000 years old" if I were to have 19 year old Bible college students perform a "careful study" of it? Would you nod in agreement or shake your head in bemused "What were they thinking?" dissent if I were to take that conclusion to a worldwide podcast, in conversation with a PhD-holding, leading proponent of Darwinian evolution like Richard Dawkins?  Should anyone expect that Dawkins would take such an assertion seriously?

"Inspired errors"

I'm posting my side of a recent email exchange:

I remember him [Stephen Young].

I don't comment at Green Baggins anymore. Reed, Lane, et al. are on their own now.

He's being ham-handed about OT law. OT case laws deal with typical situations. General conditions.

But take the case of Rahab and her family. There was no explicit provision for her particular situation. Still, she's an exception to the rule–precisely because the rule was never meant to rule out relevant exceptions. Case law doesn't address every conceivable contingency. It lays down broad guidelines.

He's also wooden about idiomatic or hyperbolic expressions like "forever." These are stock linguistic conventions, not unconditional oracles. 

Testimony

Brian Leftow argues:

Atheism is all the rage. It sells lots of books, and they are angry books. It is also close to being the majority creed of the UK. A recent survey has it that 28% of Brits believe in a personal God. Another 26% believe in "something," but do not know what (no mean feat). (Maybe it's a toaster.) By contrast, 26% believe in UFOs. 42% think religion is harmful, and I think it's a safe bet almost all of those are atheists. The new sort of atheist is aggressive. They would like to convert you. One move they all tend to make is to challenge you to prove God's existence, and claim that you're irrational or stupid to believe in God if you can't provide an argument that does so to their satisfaction. The criticisms they offer for standard arguments are mostly pretty poor. Alvin Plantinga reviewed Dawkins' book, and said that he'd call the philosophy in it sophomoric except that this would be too hard on sophomores. But the more basic idea the polemicists take for granted - that you need something like an argument for God's existence that would convince anyone to be rational believing it - is what I want to challenge.

To begin with, the atheist making this challenge suggests that if you can't convince anyone - i.e., in the circumstances, him - you shouldn’t be convinced yourself. The thought is that to be a rational religious believer, you would have to put yourself in the atheist's position, supposing only what he supposes, and argue yourself into theism, using only considerations that would convince anyone. But why? Why should the standpoint of the atheist or agnostic be the touchstone from which rationality is assessed? And the thought that only considerations that would convince any neutral observer are rational bases for religious belief is surely wrong. For religious experience is a sound basis for belief. It is rational to be convinced by your own experience. If it seems to you that God appears to you, or speaks to you, that is an excellent reason to think that God exists, as long as you know you weren't drunk etc. at the time. Prima facie, having God appear to you is as good a reason to believe in God as having a crested woodpecker appear to you is to believe in them. But the one who hasn't had this experience may legitimately be more skeptical. He may wonder whether it could have been as you say, whether your environment and background beliefs led you to misinterpret something, etc. You may legitimately not take these doubts seriously: you know what it was like. He doesn't, and so legitimately may. Which makes the point that not all rational bases for belief are person-neutral. People can rationally believe based on evidence others may rationally reject.

But you don't need experience to be rational in believing. Nor do you need philosophical arguments. I believe in God ultimately due to my acceptance of testimony on the subject. I'm going to suggest that testimony is enough.

I grew up believing that there was some sort of God because this was what the grownups told me. If this was irrational, then I ought also not to have believed that 2+2=4, that "dog" means dog, or that the Magna Carta was signed in England, because I believed these too only because that was what the grownups told me. I was not under a rational obligation to doubt their testimony. Nor was I under a rational obligation to investigate history and the set-theoretic foundations of mathematics for myself when I got older, to replace my testimonial basis for belief with some other sort. I was not required to look up my history teacher's university marks, or travel to England, to believe rationally. I still believe that the Magna Carta was signed in England for no better reason than that I was told it, others still tell me it, and I haven't come across anything that made me doubt it, or ought to have done so. And surely I am rational to believe it, and perhaps even know it. You might think that as a philosopher, I've learned some nifty arguments for God's existence, and these are now the supports of my belief. Well, yes, I've found arguments I find convincing. But the same arguments fail to convince people who come to them as atheists, and this rather suggests that other bases for belief are playing a large role in how I evaluate the arguments, and that I haven't really ultimately gotten away from testimony.

We learn most of what we know about the world by testimony. What you know about history, science, and mathematics came to you not because you did research or proofs. You simply accepted your teachers' words, as your teachers did for most of what they learned from their teachers, and their teachers for most of what they learned, and so on. If testimony were not a rational basis for belief, we could not rationally believe any of this. If accepting it were not on its own a sufficient basis for knowledge, you could not claim to know one bit of history, science, mathematics, or even current political events. (Newsreaders are giving testimony.) Either testimony is on its own sufficient to justify belief and render it rational, or no jury ever decides a case on the basis of rational, justified belief. And either testimony is on its own sufficient for knowledge or no one but a few archaeologists knows anything about ancient history.

I suspect that the only rational attitude is to give all testimony a prima facie pass. What this means is: suppose someone tells you something. There are things that should lead you immediately to doubt a story. Maybe he says that David Cameron is PM, but you've heard otherwise. (Notice, though, that it's what you've heard - testimony.) Maybe the story is simply crazy. (But could you judge it so without relying on beliefs you'd acquired by accepting testimony?) There are also things that should lead you to doubt a story's teller. Maybe he looks drunk. Maybe he has shifty, dishonest eyes. Maybe his friends call him Liar Joe. But if nothing like that is true, then the only rational attitude is to believe him, perhaps not with maximal confidence, but with confidence enough.

The reason is simple. If you did not do this, you'd be committed to one of two things: either finding some other principled basis to doubt the given story or teller, even though it "passes" the initial tests mentioned, or trying to sift all testimony as you received it - to try to accredit the witness, or test it for yourself, etc. But could you know enough to do this without accepting other testimony? Could you know what stories are crazy without relying on testimony? You can judge who's drunk easily, and maybe you've seen firsthand that drunks can get things wrong or perhaps reasoned this out on the basis of experience - but maybe even that is only something you've heard. The friends' calling him Liar Joe is testimony. You don't know whether Cameron is PM without accepting the testimony of newsreaders and reporters: you aren't going to get to see him to ask, and surely you don't have to do so to be rational in believing this. You couldn't speak a language without having accepted testimony about words. In most cases, you're not even in a position of knowing enough to do the relevant checks and tests without first accepting testimony. So: you can't sift testimony without relying on other testimony. And it's not clear that you can have a principled basis for deciding which testimony to take initially on sheer trust (given the initial "pass" of the speaker, as someone who does not seem untrustworthy). If that turns out true, the only rational choice is to take all testimony initially on trust if the teller seems trustworthy.

You may continue to be justified in believing the testimony even if you find things that make you doubt the story or the teller somewhat, or ought to do so. If the basis for doubt is considerable, perhaps you need to do something to allay it. But that's the most you need do. If you do it, your testimonial justification for belief remains undefeated and your belief is justified and rational.

And finally there is no non-question-begging basis for denying the same prima facie acceptance to religious testimony. If it is rational to accept a story about physics, given that you have no particular reason to doubt the teller, why not one about God? If all you need to do to remain rational is find a reasonable response to bases for doubts about physics, so too here. And whoever claims that we have an obligation to become skeptical about religious testimony, to investigate whether the sources are credible, etc., needs to explain why the same doesn't hold for scientific testimony (e.g. looking up your teacher's undergraduate marks). There is only one well-known argument about this, Hume's against believing testimony about miracles. But not all religious testimony concerns the miraculous. Some is just testimony to religious experience, or prophesied/fulfilled historical events. And in any case, Hume's argument is a bust.

It might seem that testimony to experience of God, or to miracles, should not get prima facie acceptance because it runs up against some of the barriers I mentioned earlier. It is rational to doubt testimony if the teller seems crazy - and perhaps Dawkins thinks that anyone who claims to have heard God's voice shows himself to be crazy. It is rational to doubt testimony if the story is literally incredible, or close to it - and perhaps Dawkins thinks that any miracle story is ipso facto incredible, and ditto any story about seeing a vision or hearing God's voice. But why?

It's probably craziness to seem to hear God's voice if it is very improbable that God exists - so perhaps Dawkins thinks that he has a good argument for this. (The absence of independent proof that God exists isn't an argument. We have no independent proof that North American woodpeckers exist, save that some people have seen them and reported it. If it's rational to believe them, other things being equal, it's just because there's no particular argument that they don't exist.) The only one out there is the argument from evil. And while that argument can impress, the truth of the matter is that there are pretty good answers to it out there. Of course, you know by testimony that some philosophers think there are, and some think there aren't. It's a peculiar fact about philosophy that an argument that seems crushing to some seems irrelevant to others. One thing you could do is examine the argument and the answers for yourself. But that's of limited value if you're not a philosopher: you should know that someone who spends more time on it might well see considerations you don't, and defer to some degree to expert opinion - which is divided. So what's the rational answer in the face of that, given that you're not a philosopher? I suggest that the absence of a consensus against God's existence on the basis of this argument, among people who've considered the question seriously, leaves you with little reason to think that people who think they've heard God's voice are crazy. That's not to say no reason, but if there are a fair number of people who seem otherwise sane who claim this, the craziness block on accepting testimony doesn’t seem to apply.

The theist's position may well be this. He believes in God growing up, because the grownups say so. As he grows, he learns that their testimony traces ultimately back to a book in most cases. There are in that book testimonies to religious experience he finds convincing - say, someone's account of a vision of a burning bush. On testimonial basis, he continues to believe. Someone who as a child or young adult simply believes what they hear is behaving perfectly rationally. And they may remain rational even after they come into contact with testimony to other religions, and critical discussion of testimony to miracles, and critical Scriptural scholarship where that exists: all they need is a sufficiently reasonable response to the problems raised, or a good reason to think that an expert has such a response. If someone is skeptical of your story about the Big Bang, to be rational in resisting his skepticism, you don't have to be a physicist. You need only have good reason to think a physicist could do it for you, and refer your inquirer to the expert. So too here: if you have reason to think someone can do the job for you, you can farm out the work. If the theist can rebut the atheist's case against his testimonially based belief, or believe rationally that others can do it for him, the theist is fully rational. Nothing more is required.

One angel or two?

Unbelievers make heavy weather of the fact that Mark mentions one angel at the tomb while Luke mentions two. But if you ask me, I’d chalk this up to Lukan/dominical numerology. Consider the stereotypical use of “2” in parabolic discourse:

“A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty” (Lk 7:41).

“There was a man who had two sons” (Lk 15:11).

“I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed. One will be taken and the other left” (Lk 17:34).

“There will be two women grinding together. One will be taken and the other left” (Lk 17:35).

“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector” (Lk 18:10).

Numbering things by two seems to be a narrative cliché.

Consider some other parallels:

While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel” (Lk 24:4).

“And behold, two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah” (Lk 9:30).

“That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem” (Lk 24:13).

So Luke is fond of grouping things by two. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every use of “two” must be conventional. But the use of “two” as a storytelling convention ought to forewarn us not to press Lukan usage with mechanical literality. 

Etiquette

Should There Have Been More Resurrection Witnesses?

The objection that Jesus didn't appear to enough people isn't new. It was raised by Celsus in the second century, and Origen considered it something "which is not to be lightly passed over" (Against Celsus, 2:63). The objection has taken different forms. Sometimes it will be asked why Jesus didn't appear to more non-Christians. Other times, it's asked why He didn't appear to more people in general. Or both points might be brought up.

From Easter to Pentecost

One of the stock objections which the village atheist raises to the Bible are alleged contradictions in the Resurrection accounts.

Village atheism suffers from self-reinforcing ignorance. There’s a typical failure on the part of your average village atheist to acquaint himself with evangelical scholarship–or other types of literature which fall outside his provincial outlook. So he repeats the same stale objections ad nauseam as if these had gone unanswered.

So we need to give the village atheist a remedial tutorial on the question at issue:

1. At the risk of stating the obvious, the more complex an event–which is to say, the more things happening, at different times and places, involving different participants–the more difficult it will be to reconstruct the original sequence of events. There are so many possible combinations. So many different ways to correlate the same data points.

2. Keep in mind that where you have overlapping events, it isn’t even possible to reduce the sequence to a single linear series.

3. In the case of the Gospels, an already complicated situation (1) is further complicated by the rhetorical strategies and compositional techniques of the respective writers:

i) The gospel writers are selective in what they report. They omit details which are extrinsic to their purpose.

ii) They sometimes rearrange the order of events to create a thematic rather than chronological sequence.

iii) They engage in narrative compression.

iv) Sometimes they employ literary conventions like numerology.

v) The same person or place may go by more than one name.

4. In addition, what one writer includes or omits won’t be the same as what another writer includes or omits. One writer’s thematic sequence may differ from another writer’s thematic sequence. One writer’s numerology, or narrative compression, may differ from another writer’s numerology, or narrative compression.

Since we don’t have direct access to the original sequence of events, we may not be able to retroengineer a thematic sequence back into a chronological sequence. Indeed, that’s not a reasonable expectation at our distance from the time and place.

To know how the reported events go together, you need to know everything that happened, in time and place. For you need to know the connecting events. How two events are interrelated in time and space is often determined by intervening events. That’s how historical causation works. Where an earlier event causes, or leads up to, or leads into, a later event. But you can’t retrace a stepwise progression if there are too many missing steps in the record.

5. Then there’s a fairly unique complication in harmonizing the Resurrection accounts. Normally a person can only be at one place at a time. But even before the Resurrection, Jesus could do remarkable things in time and space. He could walk on water. He could disappear in the middle of a crowd. And in John 20, he has the ability to appear or disappear at will. Physical barriers pose no obstacle. 

So in harmonizing the Resurrection accounts, we must also make allowance for paranormal phenomena like bilocation. Which, in turn, raises the issue of spatiotemporal displacement. Variables like that introduce a degree of flexibility which you don’t ordinarily have in a spatiotemporal series. But Jesus is not an ordinary person.

Of course, infidels don’t believe that. But if they’re going to attack the coherence of the Resurrection accounts, then that’s a case of judging each account on its own terms, given the theological assumptions of the narrator.

6. Some village atheists seem to imagine that merely showing how the Resurrection accounts are formally contradictory somehow disproves the inerrancy or historicity or reliability of the accounts. But that’s terribly naïve. That would only be a problem if each writer intended to mirror the original series of events. Since that is manifestly not what they meant to do, the problem is a pseudoproblem. 

Linguistic/Thematic Parallels between Revelation 12 and 20

Obviously a major debate in eschatology is the question of what the vision of Revelation 20 refers to. While Premillennialists contend that Revelation 20 should be read as chronologically following chapter 19, Amillennialists hold that chapter 20 begins a new recapitulation of the series of events that are discussed repeatedly in the book. One argument in favor of the Amillennial position cites the parallels between chapter 12 and 20, concluding that these two texts are discussing the same events in redemptive history but from different perspectives. That is, if chapter 12 is referring to the cross/resurrection/church age, then chapter 20 is as well. Here are some of the parallels:

	Revelation 12:7-12			Revelation 20:1-6
v. 7	ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ		v. 1	ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ
v. 7	ἄγγελοι		v. 1	ἄγγελον
v.9	ὁ δράκων ὁ μέγας, ὁ ὄφις ὁ ἀρχαῖος, ὁ καλούμενος Διάβολος καὶ ὁ Σατανᾶς		v. 2	τὸν δράκοντα, ὁ ὄφις ὁ ἀρχαῖος, ὅς ἐστιν Διάβολος καὶ ὁ Σατανᾶς
v. 9	ἐβλήθη		v. 3	ἔβαλεν
v. 9	ὁ πλανῶν τὴν οἰκουμένην ὅλην		v. 3	ἵνα μὴ πλανήσῃ ἔτι τὰ ἔθνη
v. 12	ὀλίγον καιρὸν ἔχει		v. 3	μικρὸν χρόνον
v. 10	ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ ἡ ἐξουσία τοῦ Χριστοῦ αὐτοῦ		v. 6	ἱερεῖς τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ τοῦ Χριστοῦ, καὶ βασιλεύσουσιν
v. 11	διὰ τὸν λόγον τῆς μαρτυρίας αὐτῶν		v. 4	διὰ τὴν μαρτυρίαν Ἰησοῦ καὶ διὰ τὸν λόγον τοῦ θεοῦ

Everybody Harmonizes

In light of Rhology's recent harmonization of the gospel resurrection accounts, I thought it would be useful to post some comments about harmonization in general. One of the skeptics who posted in Rhology's thread, Zilch, wrote:

Bock reviews Forged

Darrell Bock has apparently completed his serial review of Bart Ehrman's Forged:

http://blogs.bible.org/bock/darrell_l._bock/and_a_look_at_forged_by_bart_ehrman_and_another_nt_blog_recommendation_ben_witheringtons_site

http://blogs.bible.org/bock/darrell_l._bock/issues_of_ancient_composition_thucydides_and_ehrman

http://blogs.bible.org/bock/darrell_l._bock/ehrman_chapter_2-_forgeries_and_the_name_of_peter_apples_oranges_and_scripture

http://blogs.bible.org/bock/darrell_l._bock/ehrman_on_paul_part_1_pastorals_and_2_thessalonians

http://blogs.bible.org/bock/darrell_l._bock/erhman_on_paul_part_2_ephesians_and_colossians

http://blogs.bible.org/bock/darrell_l._bock/ehrman_chapter_4_agreement_but_more_nuancing_is_necessary_and_crucial

http://blogs.bible.org/bock/darrell_l._bock/ehrman_chapter_5_on_conflicts_with_jews_and_pagans_revised

http://blogs.bible.org/bock/darrell_l._bock/ehrman_chapter_6on_forgeries_and_false_teachers

http://blogs.bible.org/bock/darrell_l._bock/ehrman_chapter_7_and_8_false_attribution_and_the_book_as_a_whole

The Misanthropic Universalist

Re: Rob Bell's Love Wins

by tomtalbott » Wed Apr 20, 2011 7:41 am

The reaction of the evangelical community to Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins, continues to be quite remarkable, in some cases even disgraceful, and reveals a lot more about today’s evangelical community than it does about Rob Bell or his book. So when a host of evangelicals began pointing to Martin Bashir’s interview of Bell as if it were a tour de force and had supposedly made him squirm, I decided to watch the interview for myself. I was stunned, not by Bell’s answers, which were both intelligent and appealing, but by the absurdity of Bashir’s questions, which were more like dogmatic assertions than real questions.

 

As the interview came to an end, I found Bashir’s approach merely bewildering—until, that is, I later learned that he was a member of a conservative Calvinist church at the heart of the firestorm.

http://www.evangelicaluniversalist.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=1624&p=21989&hilit=bell#p21989

i) Before getting around to my main point, I’ll make a parenthetical observation: critics of Bashir act as if this is the first TV interview they ever saw. But to anyone who’s not been living under a rock, there’s nothing unusual about Bashir’s style. As a rule, there are two kinds of TV interviews:

a) You have the softball interview, in which a gushy, sympathetic interviewer poses leading questions to help the guest make his case.

b) You have the adversarial interview, in which a pushy interviewer tries to put his guest on the defensive.

What Bashir did is nothing out of the ordinary.

ii) Now to my main point: Observe the palpable hostility of universalists like Talbott towards Calvinists and other exclusivists. For folks who believe in universal love and universal reconciliation, why do they treat exclusivists as their mortal enemies? Given their seething animosity towards Calvinists and other exclusivists, they convey the impression that universalists only love universalists.

No one is more exclusivist than your average inclusive universalist. But isn’t the acid test of universalism to love those who don’t believe in universalism?

Indeed, from the way they carry on about exclusivism, you have to wonder if universalists believe exclusivists are damned. Do they think exclusivists are going to hell, to purge them of their wicked exclusivist theology? Must the exclusivist practice postmortem contrition, to repent of his evil exclusivist theology, before he’s allowed to join the saintly universalists in heaven?

Does the eschatology of universalism entail heaven for universalists, and purgatorial hell for exclusivists? Will exclusivists be subjected to coercive torment until they recant their exclusivism and beg Thomas Talbott to forgive them?

Just spend a little time browsing the Misanthropic Universalist...uh...I mean, the Evangelical Universalist forum, and sample the antagonism, the resentment, the vindictive barbs directed at Calvinists and other exclusivists. Notice the whole in-group/out-group mindtrip. It's all about drawing lines. Us v. them. Bunker universalism. 

The view from anywhere

The following are a few notable atheist scholars who, insofar as I understand, do not hold either (1) one can know objective morality (epistemology) or (2) objective morality exists (ontology). Some presumably reject both.

In addition, I've cited representative quotes and/or literature from each atheist scholar.

---

1. Richard Joyce
   
   See his books:
   
   The Evolution of Morality
   
   The Myth of Morality
   
   
2. J.L. Mackie
   
   In his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong:
   
   "There are no objective values."
   
   and
   
   "If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe."
   
   Note also the argument from queerness:
   

   The first argument is that our ordinary moral discourse purports to refer to intrinsically prescriptive properties and facts "that would somehow motivate us or provide us with reasons for action independent of our desires and aversions" — but such properties and facts do not comport with philosophical naturalism (page 50).
   
   The second argument is that, if moral realism posits the existence of objective moral properties that supervene upon natural properties (such as biological or psychological properties), then the relation between the moral properties and the natural properties is metaphysically mysterious and does not comport with philosophical naturalism (p. 51).

   Also see:
   
   Mackie, J. L. (1946). "A Refutation of Morals", Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 24: 77-90.
   
   
3. Will Provine
   
   In his debate with Phillip Johnson:
   

   Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear -- and these are basically Darwin's views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That's the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. What an unintelligible idea.

   In the following abstract:
   

   "Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life"
   
   (Abstract)
   Dr. William Provine
   
   Second Annual Darwin Day Celebration
   University of Tennessee, Knoxville
   Feb. 12, 1998
   
   Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.
   
   Free Will
   
   The first 4 implications are so obvious to modern naturalistic evolutionists that I will spend little time defending them. Human free will, however, is another matter. Even evolutionists have trouble swallowing that implication. I will argue that humans are locally determined systems that make choices. They have, however, no free will.
   
   Without free will, moral responsibility seems impossible. But I will argue that moral responsibility is actually based upon the lack of free will.
   
   Free will is a disastrous and mean social myth. Using free will as an excuse, we condone a vicious attitude of revenge toward anyone who does wrong in our society. Most of the movies in a video store are based upon getting even with some nasty person. This attitude leads to a gross ly expensive and hopeless systems of punishment in America , though much the same attitude can be found in most countries around the world.
   
   Without free will, justification for revenge disappears and rehabilitation is the main job of judicial systems and prisons. We will all live in a better society when the myth of free will is dispelled.
   
   Devout Christians also believe in forgiveness and rehabilitation. Agreement here is possible between atheism and religion.
   
   Meaning in Life
   
   How can we have meaning in life? When we die we are really dead; nothing of us survives. Natural selection is a process leading every species almost certainly to extinction and "cares" as much for the HIV virus as for humans. Nothing could be more uncaring than the entire process of organic evolution. Life has been on earth for about 3.6 billion years. In less that one billion more years our sun will turn into a red giant. All life on earth will be burnt to a crisp. Other cosmic processes absolutely guarantee the extinction of all life anywhere in the universe. When all life is extinguished, no memory whatsoever will be left that life ever existed.
   
   Yet our lives are filled with meaning. Proximate meaning is more important than ultimate. Even if we die, we can have deeply meaningful lives.
   
   Meaning in life is shared. We cannot have even proximate meaning except in the context of culture. This is true for religious people as for agnostics or atheists. No group can cut out the others.
   
   Evolution in the classroom
   
   Evolution is of interest to all. 50% of Americans believe humans were created by God in the last 10,000 years. Most other Americans who do believe in evolution think that God guided it. But a small group of powerful naturalist evolutionists have taken control of our schools. They want to stifle discussion of evolution in the classroom by everyone according to his or her beliefs Discussion may then change minds. Evolutionists are their own worst enemies by preventing free discussion of all views in the biology classroom.
   
   Dr. William Provine
   Professor of History of Biology
   in the Section of Ecology and Systematics and in the Department of History
   Cornell University

4. Michael Ruse
   
   In an interview:
   

   I think I would still say—part of my position on morality is very much that we regard morality in some sense as being objective, even if it isn’t. So the claim that we intuit morality as objective reality—I would still say that. Of course, what I would want to add is that from the fact that we do this, it doesn’t follow that morality really is objective.
   
   I’m saying that if in fact you’re Christian then you believe you were made in the image of God. And that means—and this is traditional Christian theology—that means that you have intelligence and self-awareness and moral ability… it’s a very important part of Christianity that our intelligence is not just a contingent thing, but is in fact that which makes us in the image of God.
   
   What I would argue is that the connection between Darwinism and ethics is not what the traditional social Darwinian argues. He or she argues that evolution is progressive, humans came out on top and therefore are a good thing, hence we should promote evolution to keep humans up there and to prevent decline. I think that is a straight violation of the is/ought dichotomy…I take Hume’s Law to be the claim that you cannot go from statements of fact—“Duke University is the school attended by Eddy Nahmias”—to statements of value—“Duke University is an excellent school.”
   
   Ed [Edward O. Wilson] does violate Hume’s Law, and no matter what I say he cannot see that there is anything wrong in doing this. It comes from his commitment to the progressive nature of evolution. No doubt he would normally say that one should not go from “is” to “ought”—for example from “I like that student” to “It is OK to have sex with her, even though I am married.” But in this case of *evolution* he allows it. If you say to him, “But ‘ought’ statements are not like ‘is’ statements,” he replies that in science, when we have reduction, we do this all the time, going from one kind of statement to another kind of statement. We start talking about little balls buzzing in a container and end talking about temperature and pressure. No less a jump than going from “is” to “ought.”
   
   My position is that the ethical sense can be explained by Darwinian evolution—the ethical sense is an adaptation to keep us social. More than this, I argue that sometimes (and this is one of those times), when you give an account of the way something occurs and is as it is, this is also to give an explanation of its status. I think that once you see that ethics is simply an adaptation, you see that it has no justification. It just is. So in metaethics[4] I am a nonrealist. I think ethics is an illusion put into place by our genes to keep us social.
   
   I distinguish normative ethics from metaethics. In normative ethics I think evolution can go a long way to explain our feelings of obligation: be just, be fair, treat others like yourself. We humans are social animals and we need these sentiments to get on. I like John Rawls’s[5] thinking on this. On about page 500 of his Theory of Justice book, Rawls says he thinks the social contract was put in place by evolution rather than by a group of old men many years ago. Then in metaethics, I think we see that morality is an adaptation merely and hence has no justification. Having said this, I agree with the philosopher J.L Mackie[6] (who influenced me a lot) that we feel the need to “objectify” ethics. If we did not think ethics was objective, it would collapse under cheating.
   
   If we knew that it was all just subjective, and we felt that, then of course we’d start to cheat. If I thought there was no real reason not to sleep with someone else’s wife and that it was just a belief system put in place to keep me from doing it, then I think the system would start to break down. And if I didn’t share these beliefs, I’d say to hell with it, I’m going to do it. So I think at some level, morality has to have some sort of, what should I say, some sort of force. Put it this way, I shouldn’t cheat, not because I can’t get away with it, or maybe I *can* get away with it, but because it is fundamentally wrong.
   
   We’re like dogs, social animals, and so we have morality and this part of the phenomenology of morality, how it appears to us, that it is not subjective, that we think it *is* objective…So I think ethics is essentially subjective but it appears to us as objective and this appearance, too, is an adaptation.
   
   Within the system, of course, rape is objectively wrong—just like three strikes and you are out in baseball. But I’m a nonrealist, so ultimately there is no objective right and wrong for me. Having said that, I *am* part of the system and cannot escape. The truth does not necessarily make you free.
   
   There is no ultimate truth about morality. It is an invention—an invention of the genes rather than of humans, and we cannot change games at will, as one might baseball if one went to England and played cricket. Within the system, the human moral system, it is objectively true that rape is wrong. That follows from the principles of morality and from human nature. If our females came into heat, it would not necessarily be objectively wrong to rape—in fact, I doubt we would have the concept of rape at all. So, within the system, I can justify. But I deny that human morality at the highest level—love your neighbor as yourself, etc.—is justifiable. That is why I am not deriving “is” from “ought,” in the illicit sense of justification. I am deriving it in the sense of explaining *why we have* moral sentiments, but that is a different matter.
   
   I think ultimately there is nothing—moral nihilism, if you wish.

5. Bertrand Russell
   
   In a debate with Frederick Copleston where "R" refers to Russell and "C" to Copleston:
   

   R: But aren't you now saying in effect, I mean by God whatever is good or the sum total of what is good -- the system of what is good, and, therefore, when a young man loves anything that is good he is loving God. Is that what you're saying, because if so, it wants a bit of arguing.
   
   C: I don't say, of course, that God is the sum-total or system of what is good in the pantheistic sense; I'm not a pantheist, but I do think that all goodness reflects God in some way and proceeds from Him, so that in a sense the man who loves what is truly good, loves God even if he doesn't advert to God. But still I agree that the validity of such an interpretation of a man's conduct depends on the recognition of God's existence, obviously.
   
   R: Yes, but that's a point to be proved.
   
   C: Quite so, but I regard the metaphysical argument as probative, but there we differ.
   
   R: You see, I feel that some things are good and that other things are bad. I love the things that are good, that I think are good, and I hate the things that I think are bad. I don't say that these things are good because they participate in the Divine goodness.
   
   C: Yes, but what's your justification for distinguishing between good and bad or how do you view the distinction between them?
   
   R: I don't have any justification any more than I have when I distinguish between blue and yellow. What is my justification for distinguishing between blue and yellow? I can see they are different.
   
   C: Well, that is an excellent justification, I agree. You distinguish blue and yellow by seeing them, so you distinguish good and bad by what faculty?
   
   R: By my feelings.
   
   C: By your feelings. Well, that's what I was asking. You think that good and evil have reference simply to feeling?
   
   R: Well, why does one type of object look yellow and another look blue? I can more or less give an answer to that thanks to the physicists, and as to why I think one sort of thing good and another evil, probably there is an answer of the same sort, but it hasn't been gone into in the same way and I couldn't give it [to] you.
   
   C: Well, let's take the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen. That appears to you as undesirable and evil and to me too. To Adolf Hitler we suppose it appeared as something good and desirable, I suppose you'd have to admit that for Hitler it was good and for you it is evil.
   
   R: No, I shouldn't quite go so far as that. I mean, I think people can make mistakes in that as they can in other things. if you have jaundice you see things yellow that are not yellow. You're making a mistake.
   
   C: Yes, one can make mistakes, but can you make a mistake if it's simply a question of reference to a feeling or emotion? Surely Hitler would be the only possible judge of what appealed to his emotions.
   
   R: It would be quite right to say that it appealed to his emotions, but you can say various things about that among others, that if that sort of thing makes that sort of appeal to Hitler's emotions, then Hitler makes quite a different appeal to my emotions.
   
   C: Granted. But there's no objective criterion outside feeling then for condemning the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen, in your view?
   
   R: No more than there is for the color-blind person who's in exactly the same state. Why do we intellectually condemn the color-blind man? Isn't it because he's in the minority?
   
   C: I would say because he is lacking in a thing which normally belongs to human nature.
   
   R: Yes, but if he were in the majority, we shouldn't say that.
   
   C: Then you'd say that there's no criterion outside feeling that will enable one to distinguish between the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen and the behavior, say, of Sir Stafford Cripps or the Archbishop of Canterbury.
   
   R: The feeling is a little too simplified. You've got to take account of the effects of actions and your feelings toward those effects. You see, you can have an argument about it if you can say that certain sorts of occurrences are the sort you like and certain others the sort you don't like. Then you have to take account of the effects of actions. You can very well say that the effects of the actions of the Commandant of Belsen were painful and unpleasant.
   
   C: They certainly were, I agree, very painful and unpleasant to all the people in the camp.
   
   R: Yes, but not only to the people in the camp, but to outsiders contemplating them also.
   
   C: Yes, quite true in imagination. But that's my point. I don't approve of them, and I know you don't approve of them, but I don't see what ground you have for not approving of them, because after all, to the Commandant of Belsen himself, they're pleasant, those actions.
   
   R: Yes, but you see I don't need any more ground in that case than I do in the case of color perception. There are some people who think everything is yellow, there are people suffering from jaundice, and I don't agree with these people. I can't prove that the things are not yellow, there isn't any proof, but most people agree with him that they're not yellow, and most people agree with me that the Commandant of Belsen was making mistakes.
   
   C: Well, do you accept any moral obligation?
   
   R: Well, I should have to answer at considerable length to answer that. Practically speaking -- yes. Theoretically speaking I should have to define moral obligation rather carefully.
   
   C: Well, do you think that the word "ought" simply has an emotional connotation?
   
   R: No, I don't think that, because you see, as I was saying a moment ago, one has to take account of the effects, and I think right conduct is that which would probably produce the greatest possible balance in intrinsic value of all the acts possible in the circumstances, and you've got to take account of the probable effects of your action in considering what is right.
   
   C: Well, I brought in moral obligation because I think that one can approach the question of God's existence in that way. The vast majority of the human race will make, and always have made, some distinction between right and wrong. The vast majority I think has some consciousness of an obligation in the moral sphere. It's my opinion that the perception of values and the consciousness of moral law and obligation are best explained through the hypothesis of a transcendent ground of value and of an author of the moral law. I do mean by "author of the moral law" an arbitrary author of the moral law. I think, in fact, that those modern atheists who have argued in a converse way "there is no God; therefore, there are no absolute values and no absolute law," are quite logical.
   
   R: I don't like the word "absolute." I don't think there is anything absolute whatever. The moral law, for example, is always changing. At one period in the development of the human race, almost everybody thought cannibalism was a duty.
   
   C: Well, I don't see that differences in particular moral judgments are any conclusive argument against the universality of the moral law. Let's assume for the moment that there are absolute moral values, even on that hypothesis it's only to be expected that different individuals and different groups should enjoy varying degrees of insight into those values.
   
   R: I'm inclined to think that "ought," the feeling that one has about "ought" is an echo of what has been told one by one's parents or one's nurses.

UNCG Outreach Report 4-20-2011

INTRODUCTION:  Today was a great day of outreach.  I didn't do any open-air preaching as I was engaged in several evangelistic conversations as the crowd of passersby was growing quite large.  This is when a team of evangelists can be helpful, but until the Lord provides another evangelist, we will continue doing what we can by God's grace.

Questions of the Day:  "Does absolute truth exist?" and "In your opinion, what does it take for a person to go to heaven?"  

Rejection Question

I want to talk a little about the "question of the day" and rejection.  I've noticed that different questions lend themselves to more positive evangelistic encounters whereas others seem to cause people to cut you off.  For instance, I've had several people cut me off (usually done politely) and tell me that they don't really want to talk to me anymore once I have started asking more penetrating questions about absolute truth.  I've asked the above question of people hundreds of times, and each time the conversation goes South, it seems to almost always be with relativists who get caught affirming the very thing they just denied, and then because they end up making themselves look stupid in front of their friends, they get frustrated, and say, "I'm really not interested in talking anymore."  I had this happen today when I spoke with my first two people and one girl got herself somewhat in a dither when she contradicted herself a few times, realized what was happening, and then gave up on the conversation.  What's worse is that they think that you are trying to trap them even though you qualify with something like this, "I'm not trying to give you a hard time or trap you, I'm just interested in finding out how you answer this dilemma."  Also, I think that conversations about absolute truth are too abstract for some people, and so they simply shut down intellectually after they have made themselves look and feel stupid when they really didn't understand the real issues to begin with.   Given the fact that they have all of that working against them due to a combination of misunderstanding and nil philosophical self-reflection, I can't say that I blame them!  Thus, I think that crafting more basic, less abstract questions might be helpful in the future and if and when the conversation gets further than the 1 minute mark, popping off with questions about absolute truth might then be helpful.  In other words, my experience is teaching me that using a question to find out where a person is from a worldview perspective that gives them "permission" to express their opinion about issues of ultimacy seems to be more well received than other questions that almost immediately place them on the horns of a dilemma.  As a result, any advice from experienced evangelists and apologists is certainly welcomed.

Being Thankful for Praying Christians cum Professional Philosophers

I was witnessing to a group of pleasant young ladies, and two of them said they thought they were good people.  So I went through a modified form of the "Good Person Test" and one of them said "You can't go to heaven if you're gay" to which I admitted, "That's true, but God is an equal opportunity judge and will also condemn unrepentant liars, fornicators, adulterers, blasphemers, covetous people, and every other kind of sinner, including homosexuals."  While I explained the gospel to this young lady, unbeknownst to be, I had a Christian sitting a few feet away who was walking by and overheard the conversation and decided to come back and pray for me while I was witnessing to this young lady  The young lady listened attentively to what I said, thanked me for the conversation, and said she would call me to talk about these things later.  It was then that I turned around from where I was sitting, and an older student came up and told me that he had been praying for me and the young lady almost the entire time.  This was so encouraging.  We then proceeded to enjoy some fellowship for at least 30-45 minutes and we learned that we had so much in common both from the standpoint of religious backgrounds to virtually the same theological and philosophical views.  Thus, it was truly a pleasure to fellowship with this dear brother before he had to go to his mythology class.  I am so thankful for people like this more than words can express. 

An Existentialist turned Inquirer

Last semester I had a long conversation with a young, existentialist student named Adam.  Adam and I had a conversation that lasted well over an hour last fall in front of Yum Yum hot dogs at the edge of campus.  He listened well when I refuted his existentialism that day, and as I was leaving campus today walking back to my car, I recognized him walking toward me and I said, "Hey man, I spoke to you last semester in front of Yum Yums!"  He warmly shook my hand and then told me that that conversation last semester changed his life!  He said he was going to church with his girlfriend and investigating the truth claims of Jesus Christ.  I was so encouraged.  He then explained that after our conversation he saw the vacuous nature of his worldview and started looking into the claims of Christ.  I gave him some apologetic materials that I had in my backpack and then told him to call me anytime if he wanted to chat or if he had any questions.

IN CONCLUSION, it is so important to be open, willing, and ready to talk to people with compassion and concern for their souls.  Remember, Jesus too looked at the crowds who were distressed like sheep without a shepherd and had compassion on them.  We too, should be willing to consider our next door neighbors, our co-workers, and our own family as Jesus did, for you may be the only source of spiritual light they are ever exposed to, so "let your light so shine."

Evaluating NDEs

I have a limited interest in NDEs. I haven’t read everything of relevance on the subject. I’ll supply a bibliography of my sources at the end of this post. For the record, I think proponents of NDEs have the better of the argument. But that’s subject to various caveats.

Jason Engwer continues to research the issue, and his treatment will no doubt improve on mine when he’s done.

The incredible shrinking church of Rome

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=14269

"Justification in Galatians"

http://static.crossway.org/excerpt/understanding-the-times/understanding-the-times-download.pdf

Bird reviews Bell

Michael Bird has apparently completed his serial review of Bell's book:

http://euangelizomai.blogspot.com/2011/04/love-wins-2.html

http://euangelizomai.blogspot.com/2011/04/love-wins-3.html

http://euangelizomai.blogspot.com/2011/04/love-wins-4.html

Arminian Roger Olson thinks God is the author of sin

Roger Olson says capital punishment is sin. Of course, God commanded capital punishment for a variety of crimes. Therefore, Olson must logically believe that God commanded his people to commit sin. So doesn't that make God the author of their sin?

http://rogereolson.com/2011/04/17/capital-punishment-is-sin/

Near-Death Experiences

For those who don't know, there's a lengthy discussion about near-death experiences in the comments section of a recent thread. I'm still in the early stages of my study of this issue, so there's a lot I don't know, and I don't have much confidence in some of my conclusions at this point. It's a subject that Christians have handled poorly so far. We can, and should, do better. I think the thread I've linked above goes into more depth than most Christian discussions of the subject. If anybody wants to offer corrections of what I or others have said, recommend some resources, or contribute in some other way, I'd be interested.