Over at David Wood's blog, I've been debating the problem of evil in the combox. Here's my side of the exchange:
steve said...
Hi David,
I see you're using the freewill defense. That's a standard theodicy. No surprise there.
As a Calvinist, I'm not a big fan of the FWD.
However, that's beside the point since you're debating Loftus rather than me.
With that in mind, I'd like to make a few points if I might:
1. A cornerstone of Loftus' atheology is his assumption that Christians are, in principle, able to override their (religious) social conditioning.
That's one reason he writes and blogs and debates in favor of atheism.
Although he doesn't think he can dissuade every Christian, he believes it's possible to convince some Christians that Christianity is false.
The question this poses for him is whether it commits him to some version of (libertarian?) freewill.
Are we ever free to override our social conditioning, including our religious conditioning?
If not, then who is his audience? What is he trying to accomplish?
If need be, this could also be expanded to the question of biological or genetic determinism. From his viewpoint, we are strictly biochemical organisms.
So, if you combine physical determinism with social conditioning, it's hard to see where there's room to break our religious programming, for those of us who have been conditioned (on his view) to be Christian.
2. BTW, it's not clear to me whether he's attempting to mount an internal or external argument from evil in his debate with you.
That needs to be clarified, for it affects the burden of proof. If he is covertly operating with an external argument from evil, then the onus is on him to establish some version of secular ethics which will underwrite his paradigm-cases of evil.
3. On a related note, he would also need to establish some version of secular anthropology which makes room for pain and suffering, pace eliminative materialism.
I don't think he has any good answers to these questions, which is why he invariably dodges that challenge.
4. Yet another problem is that, even if he's mounting a consistently internal critique, unless he's a moral realist, who cares where the truth lies?
In other words, it's only (morally) wrong to be (factually) wrong if there's such a thing as right and wrong.
If you deny the distinction between right and wrong, then the distinction between truth and falsehood is trivialized.
For even if I'm mistaken, why should I care unless I'm under some moral obligation to hold true beliefs?
While it's logically possible to be both an ethical antirealist and an alethic realist, ethical antirealism detroys the logical incentive to be a truth-seeker.
9:09 AM
steve said...
david b. ellis said...
"Free will does not have to exist for one to be able to come to disagree with opinions they were brought up in. That should be obvious. Only an absurdly naive view of human psychology could claim otherwise."
You seem to be parachuting into this discussion without knowing much about Loftus' position. In his "Outsider Test," which he trots out ad nauseum, Loftus argues that religious beliefs are socially conditioned.
Therefore, the question of whether we are ever free to override our socially-conditioned beliefs (be they religious or irreligious) is directly relevant to his own position.
I'd add that his position on social conditioning logically commits him to cultural relativism, which—in turn—logically commits him to moral relativism. In that event he could never mount an external argument from evil, but, at best, an internal argument from evil.
"A secular ethic is no problem."
Surely you jest. There are many obstacles to secular ethics. Indeed, a number of secular philosophers subscribe to some version of moral relativism as a logical entailment of their secular outlook. For examples of both, see:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=6383
http://www.qsmithwmu.com/moral_realism_and_infinte_spacetime_imply_moral_nihilism_by_quentin_smith.htm
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200307/?read=interview_ruse
http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/evol-eth.htm
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/
http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/p20.htm
"But it isn't necessary to the argument from evil (so I won't go into my own meta-ethical views here). The argument from evil depends on the contradiction between calling a person loving and saying they would not help someone in dire need."
This is a straw man argument. What position are you opposing? Judeo-Christian theism? If so, such a simplistic formulation of the "contradiction" will hardly do. There's more at issue than a loving God and a person in need.
There is also the issue of how a *just* God should treat a *sinner*.
There are times when it would be immoral to help a person in dire need. If Joseph Stalin is in dire need of a heart transplant, and I'm a heart surgeon, should I supply his need? Hardly. He's a mass murderer. The longer his lives, the more innocent victims he murders.
"Please clarify. I'm not sure what you are saying here."
Eliminative materialism relegates pain and suffering to folk psychology. Eliminativism denies such mental states as pain and suffering.
"To be moral, fundamentally, is simply to be concerned for the well-being of others. To love."
That's all assertion and no argument.
"Love needs no external sanction. Divine or otherwise. It is of value in and of itself and, therefore, the basis of morality poses no difficultly for either I, an atheist, nor you, a theist."
That's another assertion absent an argument. You are *reducing* morality to love, and then *stipulating* that love is an intrinsic value.
How does a secular worldview underwrite your value system? How do you avoid the naturalistic fallacy or the is-ought fallacy?
"If you are going to argue that the nontheist has no basis for morality then you cannot, as I do, consider love of intrinsic value---for you it can only draw its worth from an external source. Surely that is not a position you are comfortable taking."
1. To begin with, I don't reduce the sum total of morality to love.
2. An external source can be quite germane to grounding morality. In Christian ethics, God endowed human beings with a certain nature. We are a specific *kind* of creature. Hence, what is licit or illicit conduct is in some measure indexed to our natural constitution. To the way in which we were designed to function.
"So far as I can recall, John never claimed to be an eliminative materialist, nor is that position the only or the the dominant position, among athiests. So why would he need to explain suffering in terms of it?"
If his argument from evil is, in part, an external argument, then he needs to establish that biochemical organisms like men and other animals are capable of pain and suffering. For if they are incapable of suffering, then they are incapable of *gratuitous* suffering—and the argument from evil turns on the alleged existence of gratuitous suffering.
Eliminativism is arguably the most consistent form of naturalized epistemology. A secularist is committed to a program of naturalized epistemology.
Yes, there are well-known critics of eliminativism like Nagel and Searle. And eliminativism is easy to critique on its own grounds.
But it's not so easy to critique of you share the operating assumptions of the eliminative materialist. The Churchlands argue that if you're a committed physicalist, then that, in turn, commits you to eliminative materialism.
Nagel and Searle don't attack it on that basis. They attack it on its own grounds.
But that doesn't relieve the dilemma. The relation between physicalism and eliminativism. They don't explain how physicalism fails to implicate eliminativism.
4:48 PM
steve said...
david b. ellis said...
"And I still contend that its quite obvious that, even if free will does not exist, that social conditioning is not necessarily absolute or inescapable. If you think otherwise please present an actual argument or evidence for this claim."
You're missing the point. This isn't *my* argument. This is Loftus' argument. I am merely pointing out a tension between his appeal to social conditioning in the Outsider Test, and his attempt to persuade readers of the moral and intellectual superiority of atheism.
He using social conditioning to discredit Christian faith, but he acts as if the secular humanist is exempt from social conditioning.
"The working out of this conflict in favor of abandoning religious beliefs is just as compatible with determinism as with free will."
Remember that my objections weren't originally directed at your position, whatever that is, but against Loftus' position.
Are you presuming to speak for him, or to speak for yourself?
"ReallY? Like an newborn slowly and agonizingly dying of a congenital defect? What is a just God's response to this newborn 'sinner'."
Once again, what position do you think you're opposing? Christian theology? According to Christian theology, why do some people die in infancy? Due to original sin.
If you don't like that rationale, you can attack it, but you can only do so by shifting from an internal critique, based on the allegation of inner tensions in Christian theology, to an external critique, in which you criticize original sin according to some principle of secular ethics.
"Its my understanding of how the concept of being moral is generally used (as in the Golden Rule)."
You're isolating the Golden Rule from the totality of Biblical ethics. The God of the Bible is the judge of mankind. He's a God who punishes sinners with historical as well as eternal penalties. He is a divine warrior as well as a redeemer.
If you're going to mount an internal critique of Christian theism, then you don't get to be arbitrarily selective and lopsided about the revealed character of God.
Thus far you're attacking a caricature of Christian theism. So your objections miss the target.
"According to you.....not according to any atheist posting in these comments."
The fact that the atheist commenters on this blog haven't throughout through their position is irrelevant to the inner logic of physicalism.
"We've certainly gotten far removed from the problem of evil."
No, eliminative materialism is not far removed from the problem of evil. Nothing could be more salient to the issue at hand.
An atheist can either try to mount an internal argument from evil or else an external argument from evil.
To do the latter, he must, among other things, show that, despite physicalism, biochemical organisms are capable of pain and suffering.
If he can't do that, then he's left with an internal critique.
8:37 PM
steve said...
I'd add that over at my blog, Loftus has commented favorably on Francis Crick and Daniel Dennett. That would point him in the direction of eliminative materialism.
5:37 AM
steve said...
david b. ellis said...
“So this is your explanation for a loving God's inaction to aid an infant in terrible pain? The infant is tainted with original sin and that makes inaction A-OK.”
You have a problem keeping track of your own argument. If you are presenting an *internal* critique of Christian theism according to the argument from evil, then you have to define the key terms in light of Christian *theology*.
This really shouldn’t be hard to grasp. What Christian theologians have you read? What Bible commentators have you read?
“Its perfectly subject to both critiques---inconsistent internally and, in terms of an external critique of the values expressed, it leads (as in your excuse for inaction in response to a suffering infant) to blatantly cruel moral principles.”
Internally inconsistent according to what yardstick? According to Biblical descriptions and ascriptions?
In order to substantiate your claim that it’s “blatantly cruel,” you will need to mount several interrelated arguments:
i) You will need to mount a general argument for some version of secular ethics.
ii) You will need to mount a general argument for some version of secular anthropology consistent with the notion of cruelty to biochemical organisms.
iii) You will need to mount a specific argument regarding the cruelty of original sin.
Thus far you are using adjectives to do the work of arguments. Do you have any supporting arguments for your position? Are you capable of making a reasoned case for your belief in the argument from evil? Or will you continually resort to tendentious assertions and question-begging adjectives?
“I, and so far as I can tell, no other atheist posting here, is an eliminative materialist. You can attempt to paint us with that brush all you like but you will only be attacking a strawman if you do.”
The question at issue is not what you *do* believe, but what you *should* believe given your secular precommitments.
If you’re going to shift to an external version of the argument from evil, then you have an intellectual obligation to deal with eliminative materialism since that is a potential secular defeater to your critique.
“I'm not a physicalism (as I said before). And, even if I were, eliminative physicalism is a minority position among atheists.”
i) That’s not a cogent objection.
ii) The leading contemporary critics of Christian theism are card-carrying materialists. And that’s integral to their attack on the faith.
“We all know pain and suffering exists because we've all experienced it. Any claim that they don't is simply too absurd to take seriously.”
I agree with you that eliminative materialism is absurd. But I agree with you on my grounds rather than yours.
While it is, indeed, absurd on its own grounds, it is not absurd in relation to metaphysical naturalism. If it’s absurd, then that represents a reductio ad absurdum of metaphysical naturalism.
“Why is it the theist posters are all attempting to divert the discussion from the problem of evil. It is, after all, the chosen topic of this blog. But every time we begin to discuss it someone want to divert the issue to some supposed problem they see with atheism. You can discuss that if you like, of course, but the evasiveness is telling all the same.”
You seem to lack a certain degree of mental discipline. Try to remember that we are answering you on your own grounds.
Either you are presenting an internal version or an external version of the argument from evil.
If internal, then you need to define the key terms according to Christian theology.
If you claim to be performing an internal critique, but fail to do this, then you are being inconsistent with your own stated agenda.
If external, then you need to do two or more things:
i) Establish a secular version of moral realism;
ii) Establish that biochemical organisms like human beings or higher animals are capable of being wronged and or suffering pain.
And that’s just for starters. Beyond the preliminaries, you would that have to show that:
iii) The evils in question are gratuitous evils.
Thus far you have failed every step of the way by assuming what you need to prove.
If it’s your position that atheism is intellectually superior to Christian theism, then you need to redeem your rationalistic claims with a commensurate level of argumentation.
Are you up to the task you set for yourself? Or is your atheism a blind faith-commitment? Secular fideism.
9:35 AM
steve said...
david b. ellis said...
“Anyway, Steve has given his answer to the problem of the infant slowly and agonizingly dying of a congenital defect (since its tainted with original sin, God is, apparently, willing to stand by and watch it suffer). What's your answer? Hopefully you can come up with something less blatantly cruel.”
i) Once again, Ellis is unable to stick to his own point. He was the one who, along with Loftus, and a number of others, chose to frame the argument from evil as an internal critique of Christian theism.
I am simply answering him according to the terms in which he himself chose to cast the issue. When, however, I answer within his chosen framework, I repeatedly encounter this unresponsive response.
So I guess the question we need to ask at this juncture is if Ellis was being sincere or disingenuous in the way he framed the issue?
Does he believe his own argument or not? If he doesn’t believe his own argument, why should anyone else?
By reiterating the charge of “blatant cruelty,” he has apparently reverted to an external version of the argument. If so, then how does he propose justify his external standard or morality?
The argument from evil is a philosophical argument. It will not do level intellectual objections to the Christian faith, only to resort to anti-intellectual question-begging as soon as someone takes you up on your challenge.
By shifting from an internal to an external argument, he is thereby shifting the burden of proof. The onus is back on him to justify his moral discourse. This is not something which is logically entailed by metaphysical naturalism, even if metaphysical naturalism were true. It isn’t even clear that this is at all consistent with metaphysical naturalism. So he needs to come up with an argument for his own position instead of ducking the burden of proof which he himself has implicitly assumed by switching over to an external version of the argument from evil.
ii) You also caricature the opposing position by saying that, on this view, God is willing to “stand by and watch it suffer,” as if God is indifferent to human suffering. Once again, that hardly constitutes an internal critique of Christian theism.
There is, in Scripture, an overarching rationale for the fall (e.g. Rom 11:32; Gal 3:22).
Has Ellis ever read the Bible? What Christian theologians or Bible commentators has he read, if any?
It should be needless to point out that you can’t very well perform an internal critique of Christian theism in ignorance of Christian theology. Why does Ellis find that such a novel or difficult concept to wrap his mind around?
Could I perform an internal critique of naturalistic evolution without bothering to read the standard evolutionary literature?
“It is your position that it is not inconsistent for the entity you call God to be described as loving and benevolent and yet to do nothing for an infant suffering excruciating pain over the course of days or weeks. You claim that this is so because of original sin.”
It is not inconsistent with the character of God in Scripture that babies sometimes suffer or die. Infant mortality was high in Bible times. Bible writers were certainly aware of infant mortality. More so that we are with the benefit of modern medical science.
The question at issue is whether such suffering is ever gratuitous. Is it unjust? Is it pointless? I’d say no on both counts.
“Please present an argument for this position, if you don't mind.”
An argument for what position? The justice of original sin? The purpose of pain and suffering?
One argument I’d direct you to is Alvin Plantinga’s supralapsarian theodicy:
Perhaps the most intriguing argument of the book is made by Alvin Plantinga in ‘Supralapsarianism, or ‘‘ O felix culpa ’’ ’. First Plantinga offers a careful discussion of a traditional position : The value of the Incarnation is so inestimably great that a world in which sin occurs and the need for atonement arises is a very, very good world. He responds to possible questions. Why suffering ? Some is the result of free creatures choosing evil and causing suffering, and some suffering may be instrumentally valuable, perhaps as a means towards improving our character, and especially as a way of our sharing in the redeeming passion of Christ. Why so much sin and suffering ? Plantinga writes, ‘ it seems to me that we have no way at all of estimating how much suffering the best worlds will contain ’.
journals.cambridge.org/production/ action/cjoGetFulltext?fulltextid=394002
1:31 PM
steve said...
david b. ellis said...
“Steve, I think we would all agree that if we were given the ability to make whatever we imagined come true and we saw an infant slowly dying in agony of a congenital defect we would cure it (or for that matter if we simply had a medicine which would cure it we would administer it). We would do so because we love and care for others and wish them well.”
1.Before addressing his question, I’d note for the record that Ellis has been running away from the internal version of the argument at every opportunity. He clearly doesn’t want to defend his version of the argument from evil because he cannot.
Instead, he wants to debate my own position on the problem of evil. I’m okay with that, but it represents a complete abdication of his original position. Even though this was his own argument, he has to abandon it.
2.His example also demonstrates the degree to which the persuasive force of the argument hinges on the apt choice a particular illustration.
For Ellis, it’s self-evident that one should help a child in need. But it only takes a little imagination to see how simplistic that is.
Sure, I’ll help a child if I can because all I see is the child. I don’t see his future career.
But if he’s healed, the child will grow up. Suppose I could see him as an adult.
Suppose I’m a Jewish physician. Suppose the child is little Hitler. Suppose I foresee that this child will be the instrument of the holocaust if I save him.
By saving this one child, countless other innocent children will be burned alive in the ovens of Dachau. By saving this child, I condemn my own children to death and destruction.
Suddenly, the moral clarity of Ellis’ illustration loses its moral clarity. Suddenly our moral intuitions become cloudy and conflicted.
I don’t wish everyone well. I don’t wish Bin Laden well. To wish Bin Laden well is to wish his victims ill.
This is one of the problems with Ellis’ myopic analysis. He never attempts to consider the counterexamples.
“But you feel that, although God also loves and cares for us all and wishes us well, he has some intervening valid reason why he refrains from doing what one would naturally expect a caring person to do in this situation.”
i) Actually, I don’t feel that way. I’m a supralapsarian Calvinist. I don’t believe that God loves everyone equally. I don’t believe that God loves the reprobate in the way he loves the elect.
ii) And this goes to another difficulty with the argument from evil. There is no uniform version which will target every theological tradition. You can’t use the same version on me that you can use on David Wood, or vice version.
Likewise, a libertarian will have a different theodicy than a Calvinist or Thomist.
iii) Ellis also operates with a fundamentally unscriptural assumption. From a Biblical standpoint, the real question is not, “Does God love everyone?” but “Does God love anyone?”
God is just, but we are unjust. Therefore, we would expect a just God to condemn everyone if everyone is sinful.
That’s what a just God is supposed to do. Exact judgment on evildoers.
If you’re going to present an internal critique, that’s the sort of consideration you must take into account. But you have the presumption exactly backwards.
BTW, there is a Scriptural solution to the Scriptural conundrum in the cross.
“I am not going to get into an argument with you concerning who knows more about christian theology. I just want an answer to this very important question: Why does a loving God refrain from coming to the aid of this infant?”
Depends on what you mean. A theodicy offers a general answer to the problem of evil. It doesn’t presume to explain how any particular evil fits into the grand scheme of things. Rather, it explains, at a general level, the ulterior rationale for the existence of evil in the plan and purpose of God.
4:40 PM
steve said...
david b. ellis said...
“Interesting response. However, when comforting a friend who has lost a child as an infant I don't recommend explaining to them ‘God had his reasons, perhaps your child would have been a Hitler, or a serial killer’.”
Now you’re posing a different question. And if you really think that’s a valid objection to my position, then it’s an equally valid objection to metaphysical naturalism.
How would Michael Ruse or Richard Dawkins answer your question? Well, if they were brutally frank, the answer would go something like this:
“Remember that for the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria. You child was just a survival machine—a robotic vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. Sure, you may grieve over his premature demise, but keep in mind that ethics is an illusion put into place by our genes to keep us social. Ultimately there is nothing—moral nihilism, if you wish.”
The problem with unbelievers like Ellis is that while they window-shop for atheism, they refuse to pay the high price for the goods they covet. They pretend that they can continue to retain their common sense morality. They don’t face up to how utterly grim their secular outlook really is.
Now, there are candid writers like Quentin Smith and Michael Ruse who do admit the cost of atheism.
You also have morally and intellectually conflicted unbelievers like Dawkins who are very moralistic even though they also champion a ruthlessly reductionistic view of human nature.
“An infant is an evildoer?”
No, but he would grow into an evildoer.
“OK, so far your answer for why God doesn't aid the, oh, I suppose it must be millions of infants over the ages who have died slow agonizing deaths is that they might have grown up to be terrible people like Hitler.”
No, I didn’t offer that as a comprehensive explanation. I’m merely commenting on the limitations of your chosen illustration. What you ignore or overlook by treating these cases in such a discrete, self-contained, compartmentalized fashion.
“Are there any other explanations you consider plausible?”
I’ve given you two other explanations. Original sin is a general explanation, and that, in turn, figures in a supralapsarian theodicy—which I pointed you to.
john w. loftus said...
“If this is God's excuse for not saving the lives of over 40,000 children who die every day of hunger…”
No, that’s not an all-purpose “excuse.” I’m merely answering Ellis on his own level. He gives an example, and I point out the shortsighted quality of his example.
david b. ellis said...
“And, remember as well, that there may well be people who visit this blog who HAVE experienced the loss of a beloved infant child. Such a comment as Steve made can only serve as salt in an already terrible wound.”
i) If that is his chief concern, then I trust that Mr. Ellis will write to Dawkins, Dennett, Michael Ruse, Peter Singer and the Churchlands to stop publishing books and articles in which they purvey such an utterly bleak outlook on human nature and human existence.
After all, we wouldn’t want grieving parents to stumble across such discouraging literature. If they took it to heart, it would leave them inconsolable.
Come to think of it, I trust that Mr. Ellis will lobby for the removal of naturalistic evolution or atheism generally from the public school and college curriculum since it presents such a depressing view of the human condition.
ii) Speaking of which, naturalistic evolution, unlike Christianity, offers no hope beyond the grave. It’s the counsel of despair.
iii) Oh, and why does Ellis think it’s wrong to hurt the feelings of grieving parents? What is his moral justification for that position? I can give a Christian justification. But what does he offer by way of secular warrant for his scruples?
john w. loftus said...
“So understood. But then let's have Steve give us some realistic examples for why 40,000 children die every single day of hunger while Hitler was allowed to live!”
As usual, Loftus is posing questions I’ve often answered on my blog.
“According to Steve these children go to hell.”
i) Really? Can he quote me on that? Where have I ever said that everyone who dies in infancy goes straight to hell?
All I said here is that infants die as a consequence of original sin.
The same holds true for Christians. Christians die. And they die as a result of original sin (Rom 5; 1 Cor 15).
ii) I’d add that while Loftus indulges in his Ingersoll-style of demagoguery, he has yet to make a case for secular ethics.
david b. ellis said...
“It would be equally valid to focus on the suffering of animals.”
i) Why does a naturalist fret over the suffering of animals? Animal suffering is a natural part of the ecosystem. This is not gratuitous evil. It has a natural function in the survival of the fittest.
Here is yet another example of how an unbeliever cannot bring himself to be true to his secular creed. He measures the natural world by some ideal yardstick. His yardstick is not derived from the natural world itself, for he measures the world by his yardstick.
Why does he, as a secularist, act as if things are not the way they are supposed to be? What’s his standard of comparison? Where does it come from? Isn’t the world all there is?
ii) Do animals suffer? The Churchlands regard that sort of claim as a relic of folk psychology.
iii) He should also read Nagel’s classic essay on what it’s like to be a bat. Nagel is another secularist.
11:34 AM
steve said...
david b. ellis said...
“Naturalism does not entail moral nihilism. I would ask you to present an argument for that claim but it would take us off topic (yet again) and I prefer not to keep getting sidetracked.”
1.Apparently you think my links are merely cosmetic or decorative. I already gave you what you ask for. If you scoll back up to my very first response to you, I link to a number of secular philosophers who argue for moral relativism. It would expedite the dialogue if you were to acquaint yourself with your own side of the argument.
In my last reply to you I was quoting verbatim from Dawkins and Ruse. For starters, read Ruse’s evolutionary argument for moral nihilism in the above-cited interview.
2.And, once again, you act as if this is a side-issue. To remind you once again of what you shouldn’t need to be reminded of, if the argument from evil amounts to an external argument, then whether an atheist can justify moral absolutes is hardly a side-issue.
Is there some reason you are either unwilling or unable to absorb these basic distinctions, no matter how ever they’re drawn to your attention?
Or are you just being evasive because you are unable to uphold your end of the argument?
“Does that mean its a morally perfect being has no motivation to come to his aid.”
Are you still attempting to deploy an *internal* argument from evil? If so, are you defining “moral perfection” according to Scripture, or your extraneous preconception of moral perfection? If you’re going to present an internal critique, then Christian theology must supply the lexicon.
Thus far you have made no effort to do so. If you don’t take your own argument seriously, why should anyone else?
“If it does, then being morally perfect sounds remarkably like being evil.”
The essence of justice involves a fundamental distinction between guilt and innocence, and the respective response appropriate to each.
If you can’t grasp that distinction, then it’s your position which is indistinguishable from evil.
“I am looking for YOUR position.”
I have stated MY position.
However, the onus hardly lies entirely on me. Each side has its own burden of proof to discharge. I realize that, at this point, you have no recourse but to shift the whole load over to me since you’ve been unable to make good on your original claims.
But I will continue to hold you to the terms in which you chose to frame the argument from evil unless and until you admit that your version of the argument was a failure, and you publicly withdraw that form of the objection. If you think I’m going to let you off the hook, you’re greatly mistaken.
“I do not equate the good with the natural.”
i) That’s an assertion, not an argument. If you think animal suffering is a defeater for Christian theism, then you need to work this up into an actual argument.
ii) And I don’t equate animal suffering with gratuitous suffering since animal suffering serves a natural purpose in the ecological balance. And if it’s purposeful, then—by definition—it isn’t gratuitous.
“I am able to imagine a world where there is no extreme suffering and living beings are able to live richer, more fulfilling lives. This is a state of affairs which would be intrinsically preferable to the world we observe.”
Several problems:
i) Not everything that’s conceivable is possible. You need to present a detailed, working model of your alternative. What are the unspoken or unforeseen trade-offs in your scenario?
ii) You are now appealing to hypotheticals and counterfactuals. What is the ontological status of abstract possibilities in your secular outlook? In what or whom do such possibilities inhere? Does your worldview have the metaphysical machinery to underwrite these modalities?
iii) Why would you, as a secularist, imagine a better world if the actual world is the only world you know? This is not an argument from experience.
iv) How do you get around the naturalistic fallacy and the is-ought problem?
“Are you contending animals cannot suffer?”
i) That’s a red-herring. Suffering, per se, is irrelevant to the argument from evil. The only thing that’s pertinent is the existence (or not) of *gratuitous* evil.
Do you think you can get away with dropping key features of the argument from evil and I won’t notice?
ii) BTW, are you still attempting to deploy the *internal* version of the argument from evil? If so, how is animal suffering incompatible with Christian theology? Does the Bible have a doctrine of animal rights? Did Peter Singer write a book of the Bible?
“I have.”
If you’ve read Nagel’s essay, then how does your ascription of animal suffering avoid the charge of anthropomorphism?
“Rather than namedropping, though, I would be more interested in hearing arguments for your position on the problem of evil.”
That’s a very vague request. And I’ve already spoken to that issue several times now.
eas239 said...
“Steve, just because you don't like the alternative doesn't prove Christianity is right.”
True, but irrelevant to the issue at hand. The argument from evil levels a moralistic objection to the Christian faith. Hence, the question of whether secularism devolves into moral nihilism is quite germane to the debate.
If the alternative is amoral, and if the argument from evil collapses into an external objection, then the argument from evil collapses of its own dead weight.
7:01 AM
steve said...
david b. ellis said...
“I am well aware there are naturalists who believe in moral relativism (as there are also naturalists arguing for practically every possible metaethical position). That no more necessitates that I agree with them than you are required to agree with a christian holding theological opinions contrary to your own.”
i) To begin with, I’m debating positions, not people. The fact that you choose to turn a blind eye to basic problems with metaphysical naturalism makes it easier for you to foster the illusion that you have a strong case against Christian theism—when, in fact, you’ve dealt yourself a losing hand.
I don’t limit myself to your arbitrarily restrictive and intellectually evasive version of metaphysical naturalism as it bears on the argument from evil.
I reserve the right to quote other representatives of atheism who don’t duck the hard questions the way you do.
You are not the only spokesman for the position you represent, and thus far, you are a very selective representative.
ii) The question is not whether Ruse et al. have a different *opinion* on the subject. Rather, the question is what supporting arguments they present for their opinions. Ruse has *argued* for moral nihilism on the basis of naturalistic evolution. So have others whom I cite.
So, yes, you, as a secular humanist or whatever you call yourself, are responsible for defending your version of atheism over against rival versions.
They have made a case for their position. You have offered no counterargument.
And if you are unable or unprepared to shoulder the intellectual responsibilities, that will not hinder me from citing other spokesmen who are either more candid or more thoughtful that you are.
iii) Oh, and incidentally, I spend a lot of time defending my theological position in relation to rival theological traditions.
“The other form of the problem avoids debate on meta-ethics and is for that reason simpler and preferable. That version claims not that God would be evil for his inaction but simply that it is entirely implausible to that a loving person would not act to come to the aid of a suffering infant.”
“Implausible” on what grounds? Internal or external?
“It does not make a moral judgment.”
i) Of course it makes a moral judgment. It makes a moral judgment about what constitutes a “loving” or “caring” person, and it makes another moral judgment about what constitutes an “unloving” or “uncaring” action. You are blind to your own, unconscious assumptions.
So you are knee-deep in moral judgments in order to leverage your version of the argument from evil.
ii) But even though the question of plausibility is irrelevant to the internal argument from evil, let’s say a couple of things about it anyway:
a) As David Wood rightly points out, when you start talking about whether a Christian theodicy is plausible or not, you cannot isolate the question of plausibility from your larger body of beliefs. What is plausible (or not) is plausible in relation, not only to the immediate issue at hand, but to what other evidence you have that bears on the existence of God.
b) Ironically, the argument from evil is only plausible if you believe in God. For if there is no God, there is no evil.
An atheologian must affirm in the premise what he denies in the conclusion. Without the existence of God feeding into the premise to underwrite moral absolutes, the argument from evil is a racecar with square wheels.
iii) Hence, nothing could be more implausible than the argument from evil. Its plausibility derives from our instinctual belief in evil, a belief which secularism falsifies. Put another way, evil falsifies secularism.
“And, therefore, one is not required to endorse a secular system of object moral truths to consider the problem of evil valid. Even the moral relativist and moral nihilist can consistently employ this argument.”
Even if this were true, which, as I just pointed out, it is not, who cares? If there is no right or wrong, then why should your or I care whether or not people are loving or caring?
If there is notright or wrong, then why should you or I care whether Christianity is true or false?
If it’s not morally wrong to be factually wrong, then what difference does it make whether I was right and you were wrong, or vice versa?
If moral antirealism is true, then there’s no duty to be truthful.
Like a lot of unbelievers, you blink in the face of the secular abyss. You refuse to consider the radical consequences of a consistently secular outlook.
“It is you that claims a secularist should consider what is natural some sort of moral standard.”
Since, for a secularist, nature is all there is, the only moral standard could be a naturalistic standard. A standard which in some sense derives from the natural world.
“Since an omnipotent being is able to order the world in ways that do not require animals to suffer it is, in fact, gratuitous.”
Now you’re redefining the terms of the argument from evil. The fact that there might be an alternative state of affairs doesn’t render the actual state of affairs gratuitous as long as the actual state of affairs is purposeful or functional in the sense that everything happens for a reason.
What you are trying to do is shift the debate from gratuitous evil to greater or lesser evils, or greater or lesser goods. Comparative goods and evils. That’s a completely different argument.
“A deity is not limited to a natural order that requires animal suffering. If he is he's a rather pathetically weak god.”
Which is not the issue. The issue is the gratuity (or not) of evil.
You would have to argue (i) that a world without animal suffering is a better world over all than a world with animal suffering, and furthermore, (ii) that God is obligated to choose between the greater of two alternative goods.
That’s a very different argument. And you have yet to offer such an argument. All you do is to verbally hypothesize about a better world without presenting a working model of what such a world would look like through-and-through.
“For omnipotent beings this would be achievable. And they certainly could improve on this world. “
i) When you say that God could improve on this world, is that an internal or external value-judgment?
ii) Christian theology doesn’t maintain that the present state of the world represents the best-case scenario. This is a fallen world. But you have left eschatology out of your evaluation.
iii) You *say* God could improve on it, but you fail to *show* how he could. You are only making verbal noises without *illustrating* your assertions in any detail.
It’s one thing to *talk* about a better world, quite another thing to *lay it out*.
It’s easy to postulate what seem to be discrete, self-contained improvements while freezing everything else in place. Quite another to integrate those hypothetical improvements into a fully-furnished world.
But apparently discrete changes may entail far-ranging adjustments or tradeoffs between one good and another good.
So show us your blueprint for a better world.
“Another effort to send the discussion into abstract metaphysical sidealleys. Sorry, but I'm not going to take the bait.”
i) I appreciate your felt need to argue on the cheap and limit exposure to your vulnerable outpost. But you don’t enjoy that luxury.
The argument from evil involves possible worlds semantics. Could God come up with a better world than the actual world? Is this the kind of world we would expect from him?
By definition, possible worlds involve global, maximal scenarios rather than localized tinkering, as if you can propose airtight changes that have no larger ramifications. But that’s not how possible worlds hang together.
ii) Much as you would rather not expose your soft underbelly to rational prodding, you don’t have the intellectual right to make convenient assumptions that have no place in a secular worldview.
You’re the one who’s floating hypotheticals and counterfactuals. Fine. You have to pay for merchandise on the way out door. No intellectual shoplifting or freeloading allowed.
I realize that, for tactical reasons, you’d like nothing better than to artificially and duplicitously restrict the range of issues by, on the one hand, helping yourself to cost-free assumptions while, on the other hand, debarring your opponent from charging you for the merchandise.
Either you argue from your worldview or mine. If from yours, then you will have to articulate a coherent worldview whenever you make claims that carry a metaphysical surcharge.
Unbelievers get away with a lot by taking many things for granted that are implicitly rescinded by their unbelieving viewpoint.
“Do you think God cares whether animals suffer?”
i) I can’t speak for God since God has never spoken to that issue.
ii) According to Scripture, animal suffering would not be on a par with human suffering. Animals are amoral. They are essentially mortal, disposable creatures.
iii) Ironically, I have a more pragmatic and hardnosed attitude towards the animal kingdom than the average unbeliever, who claims to be a naturalist and card-carrying Darwinian, but entertains a very teary-eyed view of the animal kingdom.
iv) From a Biblical standpoint, there’s a basic difference between Eden and the wilderness. The wilderness isn’t meant to be Edenic. It’s harsh and inhospitable. That’s one reason the expulsion from Eden was punitive.
A wilderness can be cultivated. Wild animals can be tamed. It can be turned into Eden. But that is part of the cultural mandate.
v) I don’t take the argument from animal suffering seriously. It’s an argument that’s appealing to decadent, pampered urbanites who like dogs, cats, and whales better than children.
Ranchers, farmers, and hunters aren’t so sentimental.
“Since I do not think you honestly believe animals are incapable of pain I am not going to waste my time on the above nonsense.”
You think that Thomas Nagel’s tightly-reasoned essay is nonsense?
Notice how frequently Ellis must retreat into anti-intellectual evasions and dismissals to salvage his secular outlook.
“You claimed that original sin is the reason it is not inconsistent with God's caring nature for him to not come to the aid of a suffering infant.”
i) No, I never made that claim. Observe the way in which Ellis builds his own question-begging assumptions into his mischaracterization of my claim.
Let’s step back a few paces and set the record straight. I have never bought into his tendentious talk about God’s “loving” or “caring” nature, because these are cipher terms which he chooses to define without recourse to Scripture or Christian theology.
ii) Incidentally, Ellis happen to believe that Peter Singer is a loving and caring person when he proposes to euthanize infants instead of intervening to save them?
iii) The internal argument from evil purports to generate a logical and theological dilemma for the Christian, thereby forcing the Christian to relinquish at least one of the key premises, and thereby forfeiting Christian theism.
I simply pointed out that, according to Scripture, human beings die as a consequence of original sin, including the death of infants or young children.
So infant morality doesn’t generate a logical or theological dilemma among the set of doctrines comprehending the Christian belief-system.
There is no even prima facie contradiction.
iv) The atheologian generates a false dilemma by presenting a severely stripped down version of the relevant data.
To begin with, there is more to the Christian faith than Christian theism. There is also Christian theology, which is inclusive of, but broader than, Christian theism. There is much more to the theological status of evil than the doctrine of God alone.
v) For purposes of rebutting the internal argument from evil, I don’t even need to demonstrate that original sin or a supralapsarian theodicy is *true*, but only that the problem of evil is *consistent* with Christian theology.
1:10 PM
steve said...
David B. Ellis said...
"If you wish to actually present your argument as to how original sin explains a loving Gods inaction in regard to the suffering of infants I'll be glad to respond to that though. So far you have consistently ducked that question."
You seem to be constitutionally unable to get inside a position you disagree with to attack it on its own grounds. Yet that is the essence of an internal critique.
As I said at the very outset of this thread, the question at issue is not how a *loving* God deals with people qua people, but how a *just* God deals with fallen creatures.
You invariably strip away the theological presuppositions which condition a Christian answer to the problem of evil.
Your mental block prevents you from ever mounting an internal argument from evil.
Monday, January 29, 2007
"I don't believe anything is intrinsically good"
john w. loftus said...
"David, I am a consequentialist. I do not believe anything is intrinsically good."
http://problemofevil.blogspot.com/2007/01/stepford-wives-and-problem-of-freedom.html
To my knowledge, this is the first time that Loftus has every come clean about his own ethical commitments.
And it's easy to see why he's been so reluctant to lay his cards on the table.
If nothing is intrinsically good, then nothing is intrinsically evil.
This admission instantly disqualifies him from ever mounting an external argument from evil.
And it also trivializes any attempt to deploy the internal argument from evil.
Let's assume, for discussion purposes, that he is able to successfully deploy a sound version of the internal argument from evil.
That would disprove Christianity.
But since, according to Loftus, nothing is intrinsically good or evil, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with believing a falsehood. There's no absolute obligation to choose truth over falsehood.
Hence, his victory would be a purely Pyrrhic victory. He inherits a necropolis.
So file away his disclaimer for future reference.
"David, I am a consequentialist. I do not believe anything is intrinsically good."
http://problemofevil.blogspot.com/2007/01/stepford-wives-and-problem-of-freedom.html
To my knowledge, this is the first time that Loftus has every come clean about his own ethical commitments.
And it's easy to see why he's been so reluctant to lay his cards on the table.
If nothing is intrinsically good, then nothing is intrinsically evil.
This admission instantly disqualifies him from ever mounting an external argument from evil.
And it also trivializes any attempt to deploy the internal argument from evil.
Let's assume, for discussion purposes, that he is able to successfully deploy a sound version of the internal argument from evil.
That would disprove Christianity.
But since, according to Loftus, nothing is intrinsically good or evil, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with believing a falsehood. There's no absolute obligation to choose truth over falsehood.
Hence, his victory would be a purely Pyrrhic victory. He inherits a necropolis.
So file away his disclaimer for future reference.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
What's the problem of evil?
Since a number of unbelievers who deploy the argument from evil lack an elementary grasp of the essential distinctions or underlying issues, here are a couple of expository essays:
The Problem of Evil
The Cosmos as a Work of Art
The Problem of Evil
The Cosmos as a Work of Art
Licona/Ataie Debate
Kumikata from the New Testament Research Ministries board recently brought to my attention an online version of a debate Michael Licona had with a Muslim, Ali Ataie. The debate occurred on November 30, 2006 at the University of California, Davis. The topic is "Was Jesus Resurrected Or Rescued?".
I'm The Best Around, Nothing's Ever Gonna Bring Me Down
So goes the chorus to the song You're The Best from the 80's that made movie fans cheer as Daniel LaRusso, The Karate Kid, got ready to take on Johnny. Perhaps Vincent Cheung watched this movie too many times. Reading his latest post conjured images in my head of Vince sitting at his desk with his iTunes headphones on, rocking out to Joe Esposito's You're The Best:
You’re the best!
Around!
Nothing’s gonna ever keep you down
You’re the Best!
Around!
Nothing’s gonna ever keep you down
You’re the Best!
Around!
Nothing’s gonna ever keep you dow-ow-ow-ow-own
Vince must have internalized much of the movie, The Karate Kid. He treats his position as if it were the "Crane Technique." Says Mr. Miyagi about the "Crane Technique: "If done right, none can defend."
So, Cheung "responds" to one of Steve Hays' criticisms against Cheung's occasionalism. Cheung writes,
Notice the bolded word. One thing is clear, Cheung is offering a "response" to Hays. But why should that cause us to cast an evil eye upon what Cheung is doing. After all, that's what you do when someone critiques you - you write a response. Well, that would seem like the regular course of action for us, but not for Cheung. How does one come to that conclusion you're wondering. Simple. Cheung previously told us in a blog entry titled Taking Time To Refute Cheung that, "Nevertheless, if I ever realize that my materials are inadequate to handle a particular refutation, then of course I will take time to write a specific response." He has also stated that he doesn't feel the need to respond unless the critique is "earth shattering."
Now, you'll probably notice that I have no link to the old blog entry by Cheung (written on 06/27/05). Let me offer an apologetic for that. I don't because I cannot find it anymore. Cheung probably felt the need to hide this embarrassing quote. But why should he considering how smart he is and how everyone besides him is stupid? In case you doubt me, though, let me provide (Cheung forbid!) and inductive argument for my case. Take this post by James Anderson back in June of '05. You'll note that the first comment has a link to the Taking Time To Refute Cheung blog entry:
But as of the writing of this post, the link is down. I have also searched Cheung's archives, can't find it. Now, unless James Anderson is a precog like those in Minority Report, why would he link to a post that never existed? Could he see that I'd write this post and so he set the chain of events in motion almost two years ago. Well, since I cannot deduce from Scripture that James Anderson is not a precog, and therefore can't know that he's not (according to Cheung, of course), I suppose this is all possible. Unlikely, though. Or, one could argue that Cheung did write that entry, but the quotes I cited are fabricated. But, I pulled those quotes from an July '05 entry of mine entitled Cheung, Knowledge, and Occasionalism. I'm no precog. So why would I make those quotes up almost two years ago? Perhaps I am a precog, but God (as Cheung conceives him) is allowing me to believe a lie. Possible, however unlikely.
But why have I gone to such lengths to show that Cheung did write said piece? Simple. His missing blog post is embarrassing (that he needed to take it down is even more embarrassing. He pretends like he never said such things so he can continue to portray the image of "invincible warrior" to the world). Take note of how Cheung belittles Steve Hays' critique:
First, Cheung wrote a blog entry once titled "Seminary Elitism." In part two he writes,
Second, Cheung previously claim of Hays,
And so Cheung appears to have an unstable mind. He acts like an elitist, but chastises elitists. He says he'll not respond to hays anymore unless Steve comes up with something spectacular. But he belittled and made fun of Steve's post. Does he now think it's "spectacular?" If not, then why "say anything else in reference to him?" Was your response "inadequate?" Putting aside these problems, let's go back to the main criticism.
Recall above that Cheung previously had said, "Nevertheless, if I ever realize that my materials are inadequate to handle a particular refutation, then of course I will take time to write a specific response." He has also stated that he doesn't feel the need to respond unless the critique is "earth shattering."
So, above we have a "specific response" to Hays. According to Cheung, then, he must have "realize[d] that [his] materials are inadequate to handle a particular refutation." He had also said that he would respond if the critiques were "earth shattering." But in the quoted passage directly above Cheung says Hays' critiques are "mischaracterizations," and that they are "trivial," not "good enough," and from a "lower class of intellect." And so if we are to take Cheung at his word, and assume that he's so smart, never making mistakes, then we must assume that Cheung's "materials" were "inadequate to handle" some weak, trivial, ignorant, and stupid objections, from a stupid person. That doesn't bode to well for Cheung's "materials." Indeed, why would something "trivial" be considered "earth shattering?" How does Cheung handle this seeming inconsistency from his own words? Perhaps he's just talking smack? He didn't really mean what he wrote. He wasn't being honest (and, he was, because elsewhere he's written that, "Here I will just refer all of you to the recommended readings listed on the blog entry in question (and listed again below) as my response to ALL criticisms that you can find ANYWHERE written by ANYONE on this subject. I have confidence in my products — they are accurate and irrefutable"). Well, how much stock should we put into his most recent smack talking then? If Cheung was serious in his missing post, then dire consequences result. If he was not serious, then dire consequences result.
But more can be said. Cheung's response to Hays' critique of Occasionalism is essentially to say that Hays doesn't take God into account. Hays in an atheist, according to Cheung. Says Cheung,
Note the bolded word. Cheung thinks he has "knowledge" of his occasionalism as the biblical model. Cheung thinks he has "knowledge" of all the little pieces to his Scripturalist package. All the knowledge Cheung has, he has via his occasionalist model. But that model has two parts (P1 and P2) to it which turn against Cheung. Cheung claims:
God immediately and directly causes people to believe everything they believe. Lie or truth. At this point I would like to know how Cheung knows anything? How does he know that God is not deceiving Cheung? If he replies that he has deductively valid arguments, deduced from scriptural premises, he doesn't escape. This is because the argument is only good if the premises are true. Cheung takes his understanding of verses and this understanding he has was immediately conveyed to his mind by God. Could God be deceiving Cheung? How would Cheung know? Cheung could take an externalist out here, but he has not done so yet. To date, he's still and internalist. He always asks his interlocutors how they know X is true, and, how do they know that they know.
Cheung believes that the most brilliant theological minds have all had non-truths conveyed to them since he says that he has his own system and doesn't think any theologian got everything right. So, when those divines who argued for an infralapsarian position, from the texts of Scripture, their understanding of those texts was wrong, according to Cheung, and their understanding, according to Cheung, was immediately conveyed by God on the occasion that they read those texts. Is Cheung better than those men? Would God not deceive Cheung? What absolute standard does Cheung use to determine if God has not caused him to believe a lie? How was this standard obtained? If by his doctrine of occasionalism, then Cheung would need to show in a non-question begging manor that he was not deceived in this instance. But then we may ask Cheung how he came to the belief that his standard was correct and God did not deceive him in conveying this information? If by occassionalism (and it would have to be, see P1), then Cheung needs to know that God did not deceive him into thinking that his standard was the ultimate standard he could employ to determine if he had been deceived or not... ad infinitum.
Let's now give a concrete example to this argument: Cheung appears to think that he knows his apologetic method is true. On his blog he writes: "Here I will just refer all of you to the recommended readings listed on the blog entry in question (and listed again below) as my response to ALL criticisms that you can find ANYWHERE written by ANYONE on this subject. I have confidence in my products — they are accurate and irrefutable." Very well then, Cheung thinks his apologetic method is correct and he thinks he knows this. To claim to know something one must know that there is no possibility that one is wrong, according to Cheung. Or, one must have a reliable method which does not admit for error or mistake. But the method of Cheung's belief formation is just as unreliable and subject to false belief and error as, say, his points against intuition are (if not more so!). This infallibilist criteria is summed up nicely by Aquascum. Aquascum writes:
"Despite all this, we have hit upon something interesting: what Cheung is after is “an objective and infallible foundation,” and intuition is definitely not it. When one reads through “Arguing By Intuition,” Cheung’s main reason for rejecting intuition is because it doesn’t satisfy an infallibilist constraint on knowledge. Because intuition doesn’t give us certainty, then it can’t be a source of knowledge, because knowledge requires certainty, that is, a way of proceeding that is guaranteed not to lead to error.
For proof of this, consider the following, which immediately follows the quotes above:
What is the main reason Cheung rejects the appeal to intuition? Here it is clear: intuitions are fallible, while knowledge must be infallible. Thus, just because some premises “seem to be true,” or you are “convinced that these premises are true,” or your “‘seems like’ seems unquestionable” to you, this is a very bad way of proceeding. Why? Because “all the ‘seems like’ could be wrong,” that is, because intuition is fallible. To put it another way, it might be consistent with everything else we know (i.e., epistemically possible) that the intuition in question is false. As Clark puts it, “it might be that… we don’t know something,” or “it might be that some people intuitively think certain things are true because they are ignorant.” Or as Luther puts it, we might be “deceived by Satan.” Indeed, it “might be” any number of possibilities that is the source of the deception or mistake."
So if Cheung knows that his apologetic method is correct then he knows that God is not deceiving him into falsely believing it is correct. Cheung does not know this. Therefore Cheung does not know that his apologetic method is correct. Cheung would need to be able to "deduce from scripture, or find verses in scripture" which tell us that God is not deceiving Vincent Cheung in order to even have a fighting chance that God is not deceiving Vincent Cheung. But the second problem is that if he does find such a verse he needs to know that God has not deceived him into falsely understanding what the verse(s) mean!
And so Vince can keep thinking he's the best, a rou hound, but in all actuality he decimates Christianity and Christian apologetics rather than his Christian interlocutors. Oh, and by the way, we're still all waiting for Cheung to respond to his critics. But if he does, he's admitting his work is inadequate and our critiques are earth shattering. Quite a dilemma. Wouldn't want to be in his shoes.
{Note: Thanks to Patrick Chan who found the link to Taking Time To Refute Cheung via the internet archives "way back machine." If you go here and click on July 3, then scroll down until you get to the Taking Time To Refute Cheung entry. It's interesting that you cannot find it on his site, though. I searched his archives, and it is gone.}
You’re the best!
Around!
Nothing’s gonna ever keep you down
You’re the Best!
Around!
Nothing’s gonna ever keep you down
You’re the Best!
Around!
Nothing’s gonna ever keep you dow-ow-ow-ow-own
Vince must have internalized much of the movie, The Karate Kid. He treats his position as if it were the "Crane Technique." Says Mr. Miyagi about the "Crane Technique: "If done right, none can defend."
So, Cheung "responds" to one of Steve Hays' criticisms against Cheung's occasionalism. Cheung writes,
"As for the critic who raised the objection, he might read this response and attempt another one. I will probably ignore him, or more likely, I will be unaware of his new attack. But this does not mean that I cannot answer him, or that you cannot answer him."
Notice the bolded word. One thing is clear, Cheung is offering a "response" to Hays. But why should that cause us to cast an evil eye upon what Cheung is doing. After all, that's what you do when someone critiques you - you write a response. Well, that would seem like the regular course of action for us, but not for Cheung. How does one come to that conclusion you're wondering. Simple. Cheung previously told us in a blog entry titled Taking Time To Refute Cheung that, "Nevertheless, if I ever realize that my materials are inadequate to handle a particular refutation, then of course I will take time to write a specific response." He has also stated that he doesn't feel the need to respond unless the critique is "earth shattering."
Now, you'll probably notice that I have no link to the old blog entry by Cheung (written on 06/27/05). Let me offer an apologetic for that. I don't because I cannot find it anymore. Cheung probably felt the need to hide this embarrassing quote. But why should he considering how smart he is and how everyone besides him is stupid? In case you doubt me, though, let me provide (Cheung forbid!) and inductive argument for my case. Take this post by James Anderson back in June of '05. You'll note that the first comment has a link to the Taking Time To Refute Cheung blog entry:
http://www.vincentcheung.com/2005/06/27/taking-time-to-refute-cheung/
But as of the writing of this post, the link is down. I have also searched Cheung's archives, can't find it. Now, unless James Anderson is a precog like those in Minority Report, why would he link to a post that never existed? Could he see that I'd write this post and so he set the chain of events in motion almost two years ago. Well, since I cannot deduce from Scripture that James Anderson is not a precog, and therefore can't know that he's not (according to Cheung, of course), I suppose this is all possible. Unlikely, though. Or, one could argue that Cheung did write that entry, but the quotes I cited are fabricated. But, I pulled those quotes from an July '05 entry of mine entitled Cheung, Knowledge, and Occasionalism. I'm no precog. So why would I make those quotes up almost two years ago? Perhaps I am a precog, but God (as Cheung conceives him) is allowing me to believe a lie. Possible, however unlikely.
But why have I gone to such lengths to show that Cheung did write said piece? Simple. His missing blog post is embarrassing (that he needed to take it down is even more embarrassing. He pretends like he never said such things so he can continue to portray the image of "invincible warrior" to the world). Take note of how Cheung belittles Steve Hays' critique:
"The fact that he was unable to even describe my position, but left God completely out of the picture, betrayed his incompetence and irreverence. [...] What he has against me is trivial [...] please, do not send me anymore objections from this person or anyone related to him. He is just not good enough. He possesses an altogether lower class of intellect. There is no competition, no comparison — I have no interest in him and no use for him."
First, Cheung wrote a blog entry once titled "Seminary Elitism." In part two he writes,
"If I ever find out that someone I’ve trained were to exhibit elitism, I would privately rebuke him and make him ask forgiveness from those whom he has offended. If he refuses, then he is a piece of spiritual garbage, and I would publicly denounce and humiliate him. I regard elitism in a believer as this serious and sinful, and teachers who do not correct this in their students partake in their sins." ("Seminary Elitism," pt. 2)
Second, Cheung previously claim of Hays,
"So, I will say this now: Unless Mr. H comes up with something spectacular against me, I will not say anything else in reference to him."
And so Cheung appears to have an unstable mind. He acts like an elitist, but chastises elitists. He says he'll not respond to hays anymore unless Steve comes up with something spectacular. But he belittled and made fun of Steve's post. Does he now think it's "spectacular?" If not, then why "say anything else in reference to him?" Was your response "inadequate?" Putting aside these problems, let's go back to the main criticism.
Recall above that Cheung previously had said, "Nevertheless, if I ever realize that my materials are inadequate to handle a particular refutation, then of course I will take time to write a specific response." He has also stated that he doesn't feel the need to respond unless the critique is "earth shattering."
So, above we have a "specific response" to Hays. According to Cheung, then, he must have "realize[d] that [his] materials are inadequate to handle a particular refutation." He had also said that he would respond if the critiques were "earth shattering." But in the quoted passage directly above Cheung says Hays' critiques are "mischaracterizations," and that they are "trivial," not "good enough," and from a "lower class of intellect." And so if we are to take Cheung at his word, and assume that he's so smart, never making mistakes, then we must assume that Cheung's "materials" were "inadequate to handle" some weak, trivial, ignorant, and stupid objections, from a stupid person. That doesn't bode to well for Cheung's "materials." Indeed, why would something "trivial" be considered "earth shattering?" How does Cheung handle this seeming inconsistency from his own words? Perhaps he's just talking smack? He didn't really mean what he wrote. He wasn't being honest (and, he was, because elsewhere he's written that, "Here I will just refer all of you to the recommended readings listed on the blog entry in question (and listed again below) as my response to ALL criticisms that you can find ANYWHERE written by ANYONE on this subject. I have confidence in my products — they are accurate and irrefutable"). Well, how much stock should we put into his most recent smack talking then? If Cheung was serious in his missing post, then dire consequences result. If he was not serious, then dire consequences result.
But more can be said. Cheung's response to Hays' critique of Occasionalism is essentially to say that Hays doesn't take God into account. Hays in an atheist, according to Cheung. Says Cheung,
"Here is the problem: Where in the world is GOD in this analogy? God — remember him? In my exposition of biblical occasionalism, I refer to God's constant and active power again, and again, and again, and again, and again. It is the defining factor in both my metaphysics and epistemology. So, although I put God before him over, and over, and over, and over again, this critic completely blocks God out in his thinking, and in his representation of my epistemology. If the critic is an unbeliever, then he has simply disregarded my belief in God — the very thing we disagree about in the first place — in order to refute my knowledge of God. If the critic is a professing believer, then it is even worse, for this betrays the irreverence — even secret atheism — in his thinking. How is it possible that I can put God before the face of a "Christian" again and again, and then he answers me as if God is absent from the conversation, as if I never mentioned him? This is his "secret fudge-factor" — atheism."
Note the bolded word. Cheung thinks he has "knowledge" of his occasionalism as the biblical model. Cheung thinks he has "knowledge" of all the little pieces to his Scripturalist package. All the knowledge Cheung has, he has via his occasionalist model. But that model has two parts (P1 and P2) to it which turn against Cheung. Cheung claims:
P1: "Christian epistemology affirms that all knowledge must be immediately – that is, without mediation – granted and conveyed to the human mind by God. Thus on the occasion that you look at the words of the Bible, God directly communicates what is written to your mind, without going through the senses themselves. That is, your sensations provide the occasions upon which God directly conveys information to your mind apart from the sensations themselves. Therefore, although we do read the Bible, knowledge never comes from sensation." (Cheung, (“Ultimate Questions,” p. 38)
P2: "God causes people to believe lies as he wishes (and as Scripture teaches)..." (Cheung, "Short Answers To Several Criticisms")
God immediately and directly causes people to believe everything they believe. Lie or truth. At this point I would like to know how Cheung knows anything? How does he know that God is not deceiving Cheung? If he replies that he has deductively valid arguments, deduced from scriptural premises, he doesn't escape. This is because the argument is only good if the premises are true. Cheung takes his understanding of verses and this understanding he has was immediately conveyed to his mind by God. Could God be deceiving Cheung? How would Cheung know? Cheung could take an externalist out here, but he has not done so yet. To date, he's still and internalist. He always asks his interlocutors how they know X is true, and, how do they know that they know.
Cheung believes that the most brilliant theological minds have all had non-truths conveyed to them since he says that he has his own system and doesn't think any theologian got everything right. So, when those divines who argued for an infralapsarian position, from the texts of Scripture, their understanding of those texts was wrong, according to Cheung, and their understanding, according to Cheung, was immediately conveyed by God on the occasion that they read those texts. Is Cheung better than those men? Would God not deceive Cheung? What absolute standard does Cheung use to determine if God has not caused him to believe a lie? How was this standard obtained? If by his doctrine of occasionalism, then Cheung would need to show in a non-question begging manor that he was not deceived in this instance. But then we may ask Cheung how he came to the belief that his standard was correct and God did not deceive him in conveying this information? If by occassionalism (and it would have to be, see P1), then Cheung needs to know that God did not deceive him into thinking that his standard was the ultimate standard he could employ to determine if he had been deceived or not... ad infinitum.
Let's now give a concrete example to this argument: Cheung appears to think that he knows his apologetic method is true. On his blog he writes: "Here I will just refer all of you to the recommended readings listed on the blog entry in question (and listed again below) as my response to ALL criticisms that you can find ANYWHERE written by ANYONE on this subject. I have confidence in my products — they are accurate and irrefutable." Very well then, Cheung thinks his apologetic method is correct and he thinks he knows this. To claim to know something one must know that there is no possibility that one is wrong, according to Cheung. Or, one must have a reliable method which does not admit for error or mistake. But the method of Cheung's belief formation is just as unreliable and subject to false belief and error as, say, his points against intuition are (if not more so!). This infallibilist criteria is summed up nicely by Aquascum. Aquascum writes:
"Despite all this, we have hit upon something interesting: what Cheung is after is “an objective and infallible foundation,” and intuition is definitely not it. When one reads through “Arguing By Intuition,” Cheung’s main reason for rejecting intuition is because it doesn’t satisfy an infallibilist constraint on knowledge. Because intuition doesn’t give us certainty, then it can’t be a source of knowledge, because knowledge requires certainty, that is, a way of proceeding that is guaranteed not to lead to error.
For proof of this, consider the following, which immediately follows the quotes above:
When debating Arminians, or when reading their literature, you will notice that many of them base many of their crucial premises on intuition, and often on intuition alone. Ganssle’s pattern of argument is very common with them – they just assume that their needed premises are true because to them they seem to be true. They say that they are convinced that these premises are true (often they say that we are all convinced), and then they proceed on that basis. One of these premises is that we all seem to have free will; another is that it would seem unjust to hold someone morally accountable who does not have free will. At least in these instances, their ultimate standard of truth and morality is not God’s revelation but their own intuition. Their “seems like” seems unquestionable to them.
However, all the “seems like” could be wrong. To paraphrase Clark, it might be that we think we have free will not because we know something (that we have free will), but because we don’t know something (that we really don't have free will). It might be that some people intuitively think certain things are true because they are ignorant. Luther puts it stronger, saying that we think we have free will because we have been deceived by Satan. In any case, the debate cannot be settled by intuition alone. (Cheung,“Arguing By Intuition,” pp. 3-4)
What is the main reason Cheung rejects the appeal to intuition? Here it is clear: intuitions are fallible, while knowledge must be infallible. Thus, just because some premises “seem to be true,” or you are “convinced that these premises are true,” or your “‘seems like’ seems unquestionable” to you, this is a very bad way of proceeding. Why? Because “all the ‘seems like’ could be wrong,” that is, because intuition is fallible. To put it another way, it might be consistent with everything else we know (i.e., epistemically possible) that the intuition in question is false. As Clark puts it, “it might be that… we don’t know something,” or “it might be that some people intuitively think certain things are true because they are ignorant.” Or as Luther puts it, we might be “deceived by Satan.” Indeed, it “might be” any number of possibilities that is the source of the deception or mistake."
So if Cheung knows that his apologetic method is correct then he knows that God is not deceiving him into falsely believing it is correct. Cheung does not know this. Therefore Cheung does not know that his apologetic method is correct. Cheung would need to be able to "deduce from scripture, or find verses in scripture" which tell us that God is not deceiving Vincent Cheung in order to even have a fighting chance that God is not deceiving Vincent Cheung. But the second problem is that if he does find such a verse he needs to know that God has not deceived him into falsely understanding what the verse(s) mean!
And so Vince can keep thinking he's the best, a rou hound, but in all actuality he decimates Christianity and Christian apologetics rather than his Christian interlocutors. Oh, and by the way, we're still all waiting for Cheung to respond to his critics. But if he does, he's admitting his work is inadequate and our critiques are earth shattering. Quite a dilemma. Wouldn't want to be in his shoes.
{Note: Thanks to Patrick Chan who found the link to Taking Time To Refute Cheung via the internet archives "way back machine." If you go here and click on July 3, then scroll down until you get to the Taking Time To Refute Cheung entry. It's interesting that you cannot find it on his site, though. I searched his archives, and it is gone.}
Saturday, January 27, 2007
"It can be lonely up here looking down at the rest of you poor pions from the top of the world!" :-(
His Exaltedness, the Right Rev. Vincent Cheung, Dominus Apostolicus, Pontifex Maximus, Archiepiscopal Exarch, Hierarch of all Hierarchs, and Prefect of the per obitum hath graciously condescended to proffer a reply to his most lowly and unworthy servants. In the red-lettered words of the Exalted One:
If you think that something like this can threaten my ministry's survival, I seriously question your intelligence and wonder how much confidence you can have in Christianity itself. I had no respect for you by the time I finished the first paragraph of your message. You are a weakling.
I take great offense that you call many of them "cripples" when it comes to argumentation, and reduce all of them to your level of incompetence. Speak for yourself. I certainly did not allow you to "enter into the world of argument" with this bad attitude. It got my attention this time, but not in a good way, and only so that I could make an example of you.
Do not think that this ministry is mainly about apologetics just because we are very good at it — there is no simpler way to put this.
In fact, I wonder if these objections are meant to destroy me by flattery rather than by argument, because if this is my Achilles heel, and if to misrepresent me as an atheist is one of the best objections, then I am pretty much invincible.
I have spoken harshly to the sender of the message, but I still want this person to do well. I wish him to realize that it is wrong to blame me when the problem lies within himself.
There is no need to despair, but humble yourself and do not blame other people for your shortcoming.
As for the critic who raised the objection, he might read this response and attempt another one. I will probably ignore him, or more likely, I will be unaware of his new attack. But this does not mean that I cannot answer him, or that you cannot answer him. The fact that he was unable to even describe my position, but left God completely out of the picture, betrayed his incompetence and irreverence. Whether he is a man of no account or one of reputation makes no difference to me, I implore him to repent of his atheism and embrace the simple reality and power of God. What he has against me is trivial and I harbor no bitterness toward him — he has a much greater problem than I can ever give him or wish upon anyone. And please, do not send me anymore objections from this person or anyone related to him. He is just not good enough. He possesses an altogether lower class of intellect. There is no competition, no comparison — I have no interest in him and no use for him.
Because the wisdom of God is so vastly superior to the wisdom of man, I will always win any debate with almost disheartening ease. It is this confidence that I wish to impart to every Christian. Indeed, humanly speaking, it can be lonely here looking down at the rest from the top of the world.
http://www.vincentcheung.com/2007/01/23/blinded-by-atheism/
Wow! I haven’t seen such abject modesty since Adenoid Hynkel played bounce the ball with his inflatable globe of the world.
The only difference is that Charlie Chaplin was trying to be funny, while Cheung is unintentionally comical.
Other scenes which come to mind include Herr Hynkel’s attempt to seat Napoloni on a low-lying chair so that Hynkel can tower over him—as well as the barber-seat competition, in which Hynkel tries to pump himself higher than Napolini, and vice versa.
But I digress.
Continuing with His Exaltedness:
“Call me a liar first before you call me a coward.”
This, friends, is what is known in logic as a false dichotomy.
At last we come to the Exalted One’s crushing confutation of my Lilliputian argument:
***QUOTE***
THE SECRET ATHEISM
As for the objection, I could protest the analogy, but for now let us work with it anyway. As usual, there is a whole list of things wrong with this one. Here I will take time to mention only the most crucial error. This alone is sufficient to refute the objection, and to do a whole lot more.
Read the entire objection again. I will repeat a portion of it here: "You see, for Cheung, Scripture is like a safe. Occasionalism is the combination. But there's one little snag: the combination is locked away in the safe. Cheung is telling us that he gets the combination (occasionalism) from the safe. But he can only open the safe if he already has the combination in hand. How does he know that occasionalism is the correct combination to open the safe if the combination is written on a piece of paper inside the safe?"
What is wrong with this picture? Do you see what is missing? THINK! Do not assume this person has it right. Whether or not you agree with my epistemology or occasionalism, recount in your mind the process or all the factors involved in my exposition. Then, read the analogy again and see what is missing. Please take at least several seconds to do this before reading on.
Here is the problem: Where in the world is GOD in this analogy? God — remember him? In my exposition of biblical occasionalism, I refer to God's constant and active power again, and again, and again, and again, and again. It is the defining factor in both my metaphysics and epistemology. So, although I put God before him over, and over, and over, and over again, this critic completely blocks God out in his thinking, and in his representation of my epistemology. If the critic is an unbeliever, then he has simply disregarded my belief in God — the very thing we disagree about in the first place — in order to refute my knowledge of God. If the critic is a professing believer, then it is even worse, for this betrays the irreverence — even secret atheism — in his thinking. How is it possible that I can put God before the face of a "Christian" again and again, and then he answers me as if God is absent from the conversation, as if I never mentioned him? This is his "secret fudge-factor" — atheism.
He writes, "He can only open the safe if he already has the combination in hand." This might be true in his atheistic analogy, but in my Christian worldview, where there is a God, the Almighty tears open the door — or any other barrier — and imparts to me his knowledge. Biblical occasionalism is God-centered and God-empowered. But just as an atheist often makes the mistake of removing God out of a believer's worldview when interacting with it, this man-centered critic assumes that his opponent is man-centered as well. Whereas the most crucial factor in my occasionalism is God, in his representation of my view, he puts everything into the analogy except God. He refers to occasionalism as if it is an independent and impersonal thing or a method that is operated by the human person, which is precisely the opposite of what I affirm, although this might be how a self-centered empiricist think [sic.] about his sensations.
"Cheung is cheating"? But who is really cheating? This person removes God from my epistemology when this is the crucial factor. And in fact, from the metaphysical viewpoint, God is the only necessary factor in my position. This relates to another problem with the analogy that I will not discuss in detail — it represents my entire position in physical terms, even though my occasionalism is such that it can work in a dream, in a purely spiritual world, or in heaven, and the Bible is the physical representation of that portion of God's mind that he has revealed to us. That is, if you destroy all physical copies of the Bible, you have not destroyed the "word of God" that is in my epistemology. I have said this a number of times in different ways.
If you take out God from my epistemology, then of course it is going to fail. There is no shame in admitting this. In fact, if you remove God, then Christianity itself fails. Yes, if Christianity becomes atheism, that is indeed a problem. But if you remove God by force and rule him out of the conversation, then there is really no point to this debate at all. For me, if God is gone, then all is lost. You might as well take it all, since it will no longer matter to me what epistemology is right or wrong, or which approach to philosophy and apologetics is best. Still less will I care about what this critic has to say.
I have laid out my case for biblical occasionalism in metaphysics and epistemology in several places and in different ways. I have responded to attacks a number of times. But how about my critics? Where is the case for empiricism? If there is no proof for it, then who is riding this out? And now that I have answered this objection, I ask again: If my critics cannot defend empiricism, then how are they able to read the Bible, and how are they able to read my works so as to criticize them?
***END-QUOTE***
At risk of being struck by lightening for my impiety, for presuming to question the Lord High Commissioner of the Universe, I will tender a few obsequious comments on His unanswerable answer:
1.The Exalted One fails to distinguish between my position and His own. I am not presenting my own position. I am merely critiquing His. What role God may play in my own epistemology is irrelevant to what role God may play in His.
For a man of His colossal intellect—and don’t take my word for it, just ask Him!—Cheung is oddly obtuse about this rather elementary distinction.
2.For the record, special revelation is far more central to my own epistemology than to Cheung’s.
As an indirect realist, I do not believe that, left to our own devices, we can know very much about what the sensible world is really like. For we are unable to escape our own subjectivity and interiority.
But with the benefit of special revelation, we can enjoy a God’s-eye view of the world. Special revelation supplies an intersubjectival check on our sensory impressions.
God’s knowledge isn’t filtered through the senses. And by knowing a little of what God knows, via God’s self-disclosure, we can compare our impressions of the world with the world depicted in Scripture.
And there is also, thanks to God, a systematic correlation between sense and object. For God as made the sensible world and the human percipient in a state of mutual adaptation.
3.By contrast, Cheung’s epistemology, as He Himself admits, renders Scripture superfluous—for occasionalism is a form of immediate and private revelation. If there were no Bible, the content of the Bible would, according to him, be piped directly into the consciousness of the Christian.
In fact, in Cheung’s epistemology, that scenario is more than hypothetical. For Him, the paper and ink of Scripture just is a stage prop since occasionalism is implanting Scriptural ideas in the mind of the subject by direct divine illumination.
So Cheung’s position is the polar opposite of sola Scriptura. His occasionalism represents the triumph of nulla Scriptura over sola Scriptura. Who needs a book when you have an instant, neural interface between God’s mind and man’s?
4.By definition, occasionalism is a form of divine agency. Cheung says I leave God out of my analogy. But God is already implicit in the very concept of occasionalism.
5.Notice that Cheung has not done a single thing to rebut my objection. He only says that God is the agent of occasionalism. But that was never in dispute.
What He’s failed to address, and what remains to resolve, is how He’d be in a position to know that. All He’s done is to paraphrase the original conundrum without moving one inch closer to its resolution. Interjecting “God” into every other sentence does nothing to extricate Himself from His self-inflicted quandary.
Once again, it’s passing strange that a thinker of His Olympian brilliance would be unable to see this.
6.Why does Cheung imagine that God needs to tear down natural barriers to knowledge? To whom does He attribute the creation of the world? Why does He regard God’s handiwork as a barrier to the revelation of God rather than a medium of divine revelation? Why would God erect a barrier to tear it down? Is Cheung an open theist?
Of does He believe that our world was made by a runaway Demiurge? And occasionalism must intervene to counteract the blinding effects of this rogue elephant? Is Cheung a Manichaean?
Why should nature be a door rather than a window? Wouldn’t it be simpler for God to install a window rather than bust down a door?
Any why does God need to bust the door open? Did he forget where he put the key?
7. He says He’s responded to His critics. Uh-huh:
http://www.reformed.plus.com/aquascum/
8.Finally, if Cheung is the invincible slayer of the infidels, why doesn’t he challenge a sophisticated atheist like Graham Oppy, Howard Sobel, or Nicholas Everitt to a formal, public debate? Watch Him route the enemy once and for all!
If you think that something like this can threaten my ministry's survival, I seriously question your intelligence and wonder how much confidence you can have in Christianity itself. I had no respect for you by the time I finished the first paragraph of your message. You are a weakling.
I take great offense that you call many of them "cripples" when it comes to argumentation, and reduce all of them to your level of incompetence. Speak for yourself. I certainly did not allow you to "enter into the world of argument" with this bad attitude. It got my attention this time, but not in a good way, and only so that I could make an example of you.
Do not think that this ministry is mainly about apologetics just because we are very good at it — there is no simpler way to put this.
In fact, I wonder if these objections are meant to destroy me by flattery rather than by argument, because if this is my Achilles heel, and if to misrepresent me as an atheist is one of the best objections, then I am pretty much invincible.
I have spoken harshly to the sender of the message, but I still want this person to do well. I wish him to realize that it is wrong to blame me when the problem lies within himself.
There is no need to despair, but humble yourself and do not blame other people for your shortcoming.
As for the critic who raised the objection, he might read this response and attempt another one. I will probably ignore him, or more likely, I will be unaware of his new attack. But this does not mean that I cannot answer him, or that you cannot answer him. The fact that he was unable to even describe my position, but left God completely out of the picture, betrayed his incompetence and irreverence. Whether he is a man of no account or one of reputation makes no difference to me, I implore him to repent of his atheism and embrace the simple reality and power of God. What he has against me is trivial and I harbor no bitterness toward him — he has a much greater problem than I can ever give him or wish upon anyone. And please, do not send me anymore objections from this person or anyone related to him. He is just not good enough. He possesses an altogether lower class of intellect. There is no competition, no comparison — I have no interest in him and no use for him.
Because the wisdom of God is so vastly superior to the wisdom of man, I will always win any debate with almost disheartening ease. It is this confidence that I wish to impart to every Christian. Indeed, humanly speaking, it can be lonely here looking down at the rest from the top of the world.
http://www.vincentcheung.com/2007/01/23/blinded-by-atheism/
Wow! I haven’t seen such abject modesty since Adenoid Hynkel played bounce the ball with his inflatable globe of the world.
The only difference is that Charlie Chaplin was trying to be funny, while Cheung is unintentionally comical.
Other scenes which come to mind include Herr Hynkel’s attempt to seat Napoloni on a low-lying chair so that Hynkel can tower over him—as well as the barber-seat competition, in which Hynkel tries to pump himself higher than Napolini, and vice versa.
But I digress.
Continuing with His Exaltedness:
“Call me a liar first before you call me a coward.”
This, friends, is what is known in logic as a false dichotomy.
At last we come to the Exalted One’s crushing confutation of my Lilliputian argument:
***QUOTE***
THE SECRET ATHEISM
As for the objection, I could protest the analogy, but for now let us work with it anyway. As usual, there is a whole list of things wrong with this one. Here I will take time to mention only the most crucial error. This alone is sufficient to refute the objection, and to do a whole lot more.
Read the entire objection again. I will repeat a portion of it here: "You see, for Cheung, Scripture is like a safe. Occasionalism is the combination. But there's one little snag: the combination is locked away in the safe. Cheung is telling us that he gets the combination (occasionalism) from the safe. But he can only open the safe if he already has the combination in hand. How does he know that occasionalism is the correct combination to open the safe if the combination is written on a piece of paper inside the safe?"
What is wrong with this picture? Do you see what is missing? THINK! Do not assume this person has it right. Whether or not you agree with my epistemology or occasionalism, recount in your mind the process or all the factors involved in my exposition. Then, read the analogy again and see what is missing. Please take at least several seconds to do this before reading on.
Here is the problem: Where in the world is GOD in this analogy? God — remember him? In my exposition of biblical occasionalism, I refer to God's constant and active power again, and again, and again, and again, and again. It is the defining factor in both my metaphysics and epistemology. So, although I put God before him over, and over, and over, and over again, this critic completely blocks God out in his thinking, and in his representation of my epistemology. If the critic is an unbeliever, then he has simply disregarded my belief in God — the very thing we disagree about in the first place — in order to refute my knowledge of God. If the critic is a professing believer, then it is even worse, for this betrays the irreverence — even secret atheism — in his thinking. How is it possible that I can put God before the face of a "Christian" again and again, and then he answers me as if God is absent from the conversation, as if I never mentioned him? This is his "secret fudge-factor" — atheism.
He writes, "He can only open the safe if he already has the combination in hand." This might be true in his atheistic analogy, but in my Christian worldview, where there is a God, the Almighty tears open the door — or any other barrier — and imparts to me his knowledge. Biblical occasionalism is God-centered and God-empowered. But just as an atheist often makes the mistake of removing God out of a believer's worldview when interacting with it, this man-centered critic assumes that his opponent is man-centered as well. Whereas the most crucial factor in my occasionalism is God, in his representation of my view, he puts everything into the analogy except God. He refers to occasionalism as if it is an independent and impersonal thing or a method that is operated by the human person, which is precisely the opposite of what I affirm, although this might be how a self-centered empiricist think [sic.] about his sensations.
"Cheung is cheating"? But who is really cheating? This person removes God from my epistemology when this is the crucial factor. And in fact, from the metaphysical viewpoint, God is the only necessary factor in my position. This relates to another problem with the analogy that I will not discuss in detail — it represents my entire position in physical terms, even though my occasionalism is such that it can work in a dream, in a purely spiritual world, or in heaven, and the Bible is the physical representation of that portion of God's mind that he has revealed to us. That is, if you destroy all physical copies of the Bible, you have not destroyed the "word of God" that is in my epistemology. I have said this a number of times in different ways.
If you take out God from my epistemology, then of course it is going to fail. There is no shame in admitting this. In fact, if you remove God, then Christianity itself fails. Yes, if Christianity becomes atheism, that is indeed a problem. But if you remove God by force and rule him out of the conversation, then there is really no point to this debate at all. For me, if God is gone, then all is lost. You might as well take it all, since it will no longer matter to me what epistemology is right or wrong, or which approach to philosophy and apologetics is best. Still less will I care about what this critic has to say.
I have laid out my case for biblical occasionalism in metaphysics and epistemology in several places and in different ways. I have responded to attacks a number of times. But how about my critics? Where is the case for empiricism? If there is no proof for it, then who is riding this out? And now that I have answered this objection, I ask again: If my critics cannot defend empiricism, then how are they able to read the Bible, and how are they able to read my works so as to criticize them?
***END-QUOTE***
At risk of being struck by lightening for my impiety, for presuming to question the Lord High Commissioner of the Universe, I will tender a few obsequious comments on His unanswerable answer:
1.The Exalted One fails to distinguish between my position and His own. I am not presenting my own position. I am merely critiquing His. What role God may play in my own epistemology is irrelevant to what role God may play in His.
For a man of His colossal intellect—and don’t take my word for it, just ask Him!—Cheung is oddly obtuse about this rather elementary distinction.
2.For the record, special revelation is far more central to my own epistemology than to Cheung’s.
As an indirect realist, I do not believe that, left to our own devices, we can know very much about what the sensible world is really like. For we are unable to escape our own subjectivity and interiority.
But with the benefit of special revelation, we can enjoy a God’s-eye view of the world. Special revelation supplies an intersubjectival check on our sensory impressions.
God’s knowledge isn’t filtered through the senses. And by knowing a little of what God knows, via God’s self-disclosure, we can compare our impressions of the world with the world depicted in Scripture.
And there is also, thanks to God, a systematic correlation between sense and object. For God as made the sensible world and the human percipient in a state of mutual adaptation.
3.By contrast, Cheung’s epistemology, as He Himself admits, renders Scripture superfluous—for occasionalism is a form of immediate and private revelation. If there were no Bible, the content of the Bible would, according to him, be piped directly into the consciousness of the Christian.
In fact, in Cheung’s epistemology, that scenario is more than hypothetical. For Him, the paper and ink of Scripture just is a stage prop since occasionalism is implanting Scriptural ideas in the mind of the subject by direct divine illumination.
So Cheung’s position is the polar opposite of sola Scriptura. His occasionalism represents the triumph of nulla Scriptura over sola Scriptura. Who needs a book when you have an instant, neural interface between God’s mind and man’s?
4.By definition, occasionalism is a form of divine agency. Cheung says I leave God out of my analogy. But God is already implicit in the very concept of occasionalism.
5.Notice that Cheung has not done a single thing to rebut my objection. He only says that God is the agent of occasionalism. But that was never in dispute.
What He’s failed to address, and what remains to resolve, is how He’d be in a position to know that. All He’s done is to paraphrase the original conundrum without moving one inch closer to its resolution. Interjecting “God” into every other sentence does nothing to extricate Himself from His self-inflicted quandary.
Once again, it’s passing strange that a thinker of His Olympian brilliance would be unable to see this.
6.Why does Cheung imagine that God needs to tear down natural barriers to knowledge? To whom does He attribute the creation of the world? Why does He regard God’s handiwork as a barrier to the revelation of God rather than a medium of divine revelation? Why would God erect a barrier to tear it down? Is Cheung an open theist?
Of does He believe that our world was made by a runaway Demiurge? And occasionalism must intervene to counteract the blinding effects of this rogue elephant? Is Cheung a Manichaean?
Why should nature be a door rather than a window? Wouldn’t it be simpler for God to install a window rather than bust down a door?
Any why does God need to bust the door open? Did he forget where he put the key?
7. He says He’s responded to His critics. Uh-huh:
http://www.reformed.plus.com/aquascum/
8.Finally, if Cheung is the invincible slayer of the infidels, why doesn’t he challenge a sophisticated atheist like Graham Oppy, Howard Sobel, or Nicholas Everitt to a formal, public debate? Watch Him route the enemy once and for all!
Paleocracy
“Actually, my skepticism started with a rather simple question: Where would I have attended church during the first 1,500 years of church history? This question, posed by Jargon, has haunted me every day since. Given my Calvinist distinctives, which church would have claimed me as one of their own? Which church father would identify with my protestant doctrines?”
http://www.xanga.com/Paleocrat_etc/565237564/rome-sweet-home.html
Which church father would identify with the views of Karl Rahner or Bernard Lonergan? This question is equally anachronistic whether you put it on the lips of a Catholic or a Protestant.
Does he think that high mass at St. Peter’s is the same thing as a worship service at 1C house-church in Rome?
“Why do I feel spiritually disconnected from the first 1,500 years of the church?”
i) I don’t know why he feels disconnected. And how does he think that connecting with the Church of Rome reconnects him with the first 1500 years of the church?
The unspoken assumption here is that the Church of Rome is a self-identical entity for the past 2000 years. But even Roman Catholics since the days of Cardinal Newman have given up on that historical fantasy. There’s too much historical discontinuity.
The Paleocrat reminds me of liberals who personify the Federal gov’t, and then accuse the gov’t of hypocrisy if the foreign policy of George Bush differs from the foreign policy of Dwight Eisenhower.
It also reminds me of malcontents who demand reparations from a modern company that happens to have the same name as a company that existed 200 years ago, despite 200 years of continuous turnover.
What we call the Catholic church is not an ageless, timeless, suprapersonal being who was born 2000 years ago, and has been of one mind ever since.
What we call the Catholic church is just a bunch of somewhat like-minded people. Some of them lives at the same time. Others live at other times. What makes one generation somewhat like-minded varies from one generation to the next.
Too many Christians are captive to metaphors. They begin to reify metaphors, as if Mother church really were our mother.
ii) Other issues aside, why does he think that joining the Catholic church reconnects him with the Church of the first 1500 years?
Why not join the Greek Orthodox church, or Coptic church, or Armenian church?
iii) Ironically, it’s the Calvinist who has a far stronger sense of historical continuity with the people of God. With the elect of all ages.
We don’t begin with the NT covenant community. We identify with the people of God during the Intertestamental era, postexilic era, exilic era, preexilic era, theocratic monarchy, era of the Judges, patriarchal period, and prediluvian era, all the way back to Enosh (Gen 4:26) and Abel (Heb 11:4).
We identify with the pilgrim church of Acts 7 and Hebrews 11. With a portable tabernacle rather than a stony temple.
iv) There are two different ways to connect. You can connect with one another at a horizontal level.
Or you can connect at a vertical level. If you’re connected to God, then you are connected to all of God’s people. From the peak of the pyramid to the base.
Connecting to the head automatically connects you to the body. But connecting with various members of the visible church doesn’t automatically connect you to God. Some church bodies are decapitated.
http://www.xanga.com/Paleocrat_etc/565237564/rome-sweet-home.html
Which church father would identify with the views of Karl Rahner or Bernard Lonergan? This question is equally anachronistic whether you put it on the lips of a Catholic or a Protestant.
Does he think that high mass at St. Peter’s is the same thing as a worship service at 1C house-church in Rome?
“Why do I feel spiritually disconnected from the first 1,500 years of the church?”
i) I don’t know why he feels disconnected. And how does he think that connecting with the Church of Rome reconnects him with the first 1500 years of the church?
The unspoken assumption here is that the Church of Rome is a self-identical entity for the past 2000 years. But even Roman Catholics since the days of Cardinal Newman have given up on that historical fantasy. There’s too much historical discontinuity.
The Paleocrat reminds me of liberals who personify the Federal gov’t, and then accuse the gov’t of hypocrisy if the foreign policy of George Bush differs from the foreign policy of Dwight Eisenhower.
It also reminds me of malcontents who demand reparations from a modern company that happens to have the same name as a company that existed 200 years ago, despite 200 years of continuous turnover.
What we call the Catholic church is not an ageless, timeless, suprapersonal being who was born 2000 years ago, and has been of one mind ever since.
What we call the Catholic church is just a bunch of somewhat like-minded people. Some of them lives at the same time. Others live at other times. What makes one generation somewhat like-minded varies from one generation to the next.
Too many Christians are captive to metaphors. They begin to reify metaphors, as if Mother church really were our mother.
ii) Other issues aside, why does he think that joining the Catholic church reconnects him with the Church of the first 1500 years?
Why not join the Greek Orthodox church, or Coptic church, or Armenian church?
iii) Ironically, it’s the Calvinist who has a far stronger sense of historical continuity with the people of God. With the elect of all ages.
We don’t begin with the NT covenant community. We identify with the people of God during the Intertestamental era, postexilic era, exilic era, preexilic era, theocratic monarchy, era of the Judges, patriarchal period, and prediluvian era, all the way back to Enosh (Gen 4:26) and Abel (Heb 11:4).
We identify with the pilgrim church of Acts 7 and Hebrews 11. With a portable tabernacle rather than a stony temple.
iv) There are two different ways to connect. You can connect with one another at a horizontal level.
Or you can connect at a vertical level. If you’re connected to God, then you are connected to all of God’s people. From the peak of the pyramid to the base.
Connecting to the head automatically connects you to the body. But connecting with various members of the visible church doesn’t automatically connect you to God. Some church bodies are decapitated.
The church, the whole church, and nothing but the church
Michael Pahls has written a response to something I said:
http://www.reformedcatholicism.com/?p=906
Actually, my remarks were not directed at Michael.
From what I’ve read of his stuff, and I’m not a regular at reformedcatholicism.com, Michael, along with Peter Escalante, is a man with whom it’s quite possible to have a constructive dialogue. Both men are erudite and reasonable.
“I don’t have a particular beef with Reformed Baptists (though there are numerous differences).”
For the record, I’m not a Reformed Baptist. I’m a Calvinist, but I don’t fee the need to choose between the Reformed Baptist tradition, Reformed Anglican tradition, Reformed Presbyterian tradition, or Reformed Welsh tradition.
On the sacraments, I’m closer to the Baptist end of the spectrum than the Presbyterian. But I’m not opposed to infant baptism.
However, I do think that one useful way of telling a Christian’s theological priorities is which side of the divide he’d break with if push came to shove.
For example, when a disgruntled Anglican leaves the Anglican Communion, he will often leave it for something more catholic (Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy) rather than something more Evangelical (e.g. Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, SBC). That tells you a lot about his basic theological orientation.
So, to take the example of infant baptism, if I were forced to choose between credobaptism and the Federal Vision, I would, without hesitation, throw in my lot with the Baptists.
I don’t think I have to make that choice, but that is where my theological center of gravity lies.
Continuing with Michael:
“First, one must make the distinction between the original delivery of the ‘bread of life’ discourse and its situation in the Fourth Gospel. The Gospels never claim to present the ipsissima verba (very words) of Jesus and indeed cannot. Jesus likely spoke Aramaic or possibly Hebrew, but the Gospel autographs are all Greek (unless you propose a Hebrew original for Matthew, of course). Thus, the debate will really be the degree to which the recollections of Jesus’ statements in the Gospels diverge from the statements of the historical Jesus. Faith in an inspired Bible requires us to affirm that the Gospels do not falsify the words of Jesus and that they faithfully transmit his very voice (impsissima vox), but it is impossible to claim that the Gospels are a kind of transcript.”
This is not where Michael and I diverge. I stipulate to just about everything he says here, although his thesis is a bit overstated. Maurice Casey, in his studies on the Synoptic Gospels, has demonstrated the degree to which it's possible to retrotranslate the Greek back into the underlying Aramaic.
Continuing:
“All of this is faithful to an Evangelical understanding of inspiration and infallibility. Consult the various articles in Geisler’s Inerrancy to establish the distinction I am making. More importantly, it is true to John’s description of his own task. If stories of the words and works of Jesus are so numerous that the world couldn’t contain the volumes written (John 21:25) and if John selected from this pool a specific number of recollections to establish the faith of his audience (John 20:30-31), then the context of the late first century Johannine community does become important, and in some ways determinative for a proper apprehension of its theological content.”
i) This is true, but it can be misapplied. The understanding of the literary audience (for the Gospel) is a factor in our interpretations. That, however, does not override or cancel out the understanding of the narrative audience (for the speeches recorded in the Gospel).
ii) I’d add that I generally agree with the arguments of Barnett, Robinson, and Daniel Wallace in favoring a pre-70 AD dating for the Fourth Gospel.
(Conversely, the evidence seems to be a bit better for a post-70 AD dating of the Apocalypse, although there are first-rate scholars on both sides of that question.)
iii) Moreover, the Johannine community is responsible for being sensitive to the original setting of the discourses.
iv) And it’s more than possible that the Johannine community included Messianic Diaspora Jews who would appreciate the original setting as well.
“Secondly, this does not require a kind of independent historical access to the makeup of the Johannine community. The Gospel, Johannine epistles, and the Apocalypse allow us to isolate many of the central concerns of the community.”
This is true, although it necessitates the use of the grammatico-historical method to attempt a reconstruction of the Johannine community.
“We do know a bit about docetic/proto-Gnostic thinking in the Greco-Roman world that would have made their obsession with the physicality of Jesus intelligible. The preference for sarx over soma in John 6 is one such example. Its not that Jesus didn’t mandate the consumption of his flesh and blood to an audience of Jews, but the manner in which Jesus raises the stakes of the debate to make flesh and blood explicit probably proved useful to a much later community with a very different ideological opponent.”
This is where Michael and I more clearly diverge. It’s possible that proto-Gnostic thinking was afoot at the time John wrote the Gospel. At it’s possible that his selective emphasis, say, in Jn 20-21, is shadowboxing with that incipient heresy.
However, Jesus was not addressing proto-Gnostics in Jn 6. To backdate that idea to Jn 6 is too much like the old Bultmannian, form-critical view according to which the gospel narratives are not actually about the events they apparently descibe, but are really etiological allegories about the sitz-im-leben of the Church—wherein a fin de siècle church is inventing a backstory to illustrate and validate its later doctrine and practice.
That is not my view of the gospels, and I doubt it’s Michael’s.
“We can also know a bit about the liturgical context of the community from the various descriptions of the heavenly court in the Apocalypse. To the extent that John was anything of a biblical theologian, he would have noted how the Old Testament Tabernacle/Temple mirrored the divine throne room. He would have also been familiar with the manner in which synagogues were constructed as a kind of Temple in miniature (see Donald Binder’s work here). This presumes that the altar, the incense, the degrees of proximity to the throne, etc. found a counterpart in the liturgical space and liturgical practice of the Johannine community.”
Two problems:
i) This assumes that the Johannine community was worshipping in a synagogue rather than a house-church.
(Actually, it would be more logical of Michael to argue that the original discourse was delivered in a synagogue, and use that as his springboard, rather than appealing to the church architecture of the Johannine community.)
ii) Even if we made that very debatable assumption, vis-à-vis (i), it further assumes that tabernacular symbolism is sacramental in character.
Put another way, there were covenant signs under the Old Covenant as well as the New Covenant. So you could possibly speak of OT sacraments.
But that would simply relocate the debate over the nature of covenant signs from the NT to the OT milieu. Instead of debating the efficacy of communion, we debate the efficacy of the Passover.
“Finally, I really don’t have a problem with historical-grammatical exegesis per se. In fact, one can really establish most of what I have written here without recourse to the history of interpretation and reception of these texts in later Christian communities. That said, attending to this can give clues to how an audience could hear these texts without the pressing intrusions of our Western, modernist, post-industrial ontology. If there is a fairly unbroken sacramental understanding of these passages in the Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation-era churches, the burden of proof is really on the modern interpreter who denies that import. Its not that historical-grammatical exegesis is off base, but practitioners need to have a fairly healthy appreciation of the doctrine of Original Sin and thus need to acknowledge its noetic effects.”
Once again we disagree:
i) Appeal to the noetic effects of sin can cut both ways. A high churchman can invoke this against a low churchman, but a low churchman can invoke this against a high churchman. So it’s a wash.
ii) How is an *unbroken* sacramental understanding relevant to exegesis? At most, the only pertinent interpretive consideration would be early Patristic testimony in case that happened to be a historical witness to the primitive understanding of the text.
iii) Even that is very precarious. After all, Michael’s defense of the sacramental reading is that the Fourth Gospel was shaped, in part, by the need to refute certain heresies which were already afoot during the time of the apostolic church.
So it is more than possible for a primitive error to creep into the subapostolic church.
“This latter point might be the most important. Historical grammatical exegesis is an attempt at a quasi-scientific method. As such it is designed to mitigate the presuppositions and biases of the interpreter. The only problem is that the method itself reflects the concerns and pitfalls of post-Cartesian modernity and does not sufficiently deliver on what it promises. Thus the need for the Church and its rule of faith.”
That is not how I’d characterize the grammatico-historical method:
i) It is designed to mitigate anachronistic interpretations, in which the cultural presuppositions of the modern interpreter swap out the original presuppositions of the text.
We will always bring a set of presuppositions to the text. But we can become self-aware of our presuppositions, and thereby position ourselves to compare and contrast our initial cultural viewpoint with the viewpoint of the text, as a result of which we, as Christians, adjust our operating assumptions by allowing the text to correct our initial assumptions.
ii)”Science” is a slippery word. For example, Charles Hodge is often criticized for describing theology as a science.
But the question is whether we are using “science” in the modern sense of the natural *sciences* and the scientific method, or in the Medieval Latin sense of *scientia*.
Hodge, for one, stood at the crossroads of both usages. The motion of theology as the queen of the sciences is hardly a modern, post-Cartesian idea. So this would involve a rather complicated investigation into the history of ideas.
“This is not to say that the church is somehow above the Scripture, but only that there is wisdom in much counsel. If only the whole Church knows the whole truth (a necessary conclusion from 1 Cor. 12), it would seem more probable that reading the Scriptures with the people of God would yield a surer testimony than going it alone with only your self-selected method to save you from error.”
This is riddled with equivocations:
1.Where does Michael locate “the whole Church”? Who is included or excluded in this identification?
2.How does he map 1 Cor 12 onto church history? Where does he draw the boundaries?
3.When he speaks of “the people of God,” who is he really talking about? Is he, in fact, referring to “the whole Church,” or is he really referring a tiny subset of “the whole Church,” consisting in the Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church?
4.What happens when one part of the whole church disagrees with another part of the whole church? How does he adjudicate a difference between the way John Chrysostom construes a passage of Scripture and the way Jerome or Theodore of Mopsuestia construes the same passage of Scripture?
“The Spirit has been given to the Church first and to her individual children only secondarily for her edification. The ability to study the Scriptures with Spirit illuminated insight is not simply something to be kept in some private Spiritual cruvenet for our exclusive personal enjoyment. It is the common possession of the Church and other believers have a claim on our obedience as well as our insights.”
What does this actually mean? Does this mean the Holy Spirit gives the Christian (or the Church) a crash-course in Egyptology when he reads Exodus? Does the Holy Spirit give him a crash-course in Assyriology when he reads 1-2 Kings?
Thomas Aquinas wrote commentaries on the Bible. And they are not without penetrating insights along the way. He was a man of genuine piety, profound erudition, and supreme intellect.
But, in all honestly, I can learn a whole lot more about Job by reading Clines rather than Aquinas; more about John by reading Keener rather than Aquinas; more about Romans by reading Fitzmyer rather than Aquinas.
http://www.reformedcatholicism.com/?p=906
Actually, my remarks were not directed at Michael.
From what I’ve read of his stuff, and I’m not a regular at reformedcatholicism.com, Michael, along with Peter Escalante, is a man with whom it’s quite possible to have a constructive dialogue. Both men are erudite and reasonable.
“I don’t have a particular beef with Reformed Baptists (though there are numerous differences).”
For the record, I’m not a Reformed Baptist. I’m a Calvinist, but I don’t fee the need to choose between the Reformed Baptist tradition, Reformed Anglican tradition, Reformed Presbyterian tradition, or Reformed Welsh tradition.
On the sacraments, I’m closer to the Baptist end of the spectrum than the Presbyterian. But I’m not opposed to infant baptism.
However, I do think that one useful way of telling a Christian’s theological priorities is which side of the divide he’d break with if push came to shove.
For example, when a disgruntled Anglican leaves the Anglican Communion, he will often leave it for something more catholic (Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy) rather than something more Evangelical (e.g. Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, SBC). That tells you a lot about his basic theological orientation.
So, to take the example of infant baptism, if I were forced to choose between credobaptism and the Federal Vision, I would, without hesitation, throw in my lot with the Baptists.
I don’t think I have to make that choice, but that is where my theological center of gravity lies.
Continuing with Michael:
“First, one must make the distinction between the original delivery of the ‘bread of life’ discourse and its situation in the Fourth Gospel. The Gospels never claim to present the ipsissima verba (very words) of Jesus and indeed cannot. Jesus likely spoke Aramaic or possibly Hebrew, but the Gospel autographs are all Greek (unless you propose a Hebrew original for Matthew, of course). Thus, the debate will really be the degree to which the recollections of Jesus’ statements in the Gospels diverge from the statements of the historical Jesus. Faith in an inspired Bible requires us to affirm that the Gospels do not falsify the words of Jesus and that they faithfully transmit his very voice (impsissima vox), but it is impossible to claim that the Gospels are a kind of transcript.”
This is not where Michael and I diverge. I stipulate to just about everything he says here, although his thesis is a bit overstated. Maurice Casey, in his studies on the Synoptic Gospels, has demonstrated the degree to which it's possible to retrotranslate the Greek back into the underlying Aramaic.
Continuing:
“All of this is faithful to an Evangelical understanding of inspiration and infallibility. Consult the various articles in Geisler’s Inerrancy to establish the distinction I am making. More importantly, it is true to John’s description of his own task. If stories of the words and works of Jesus are so numerous that the world couldn’t contain the volumes written (John 21:25) and if John selected from this pool a specific number of recollections to establish the faith of his audience (John 20:30-31), then the context of the late first century Johannine community does become important, and in some ways determinative for a proper apprehension of its theological content.”
i) This is true, but it can be misapplied. The understanding of the literary audience (for the Gospel) is a factor in our interpretations. That, however, does not override or cancel out the understanding of the narrative audience (for the speeches recorded in the Gospel).
ii) I’d add that I generally agree with the arguments of Barnett, Robinson, and Daniel Wallace in favoring a pre-70 AD dating for the Fourth Gospel.
(Conversely, the evidence seems to be a bit better for a post-70 AD dating of the Apocalypse, although there are first-rate scholars on both sides of that question.)
iii) Moreover, the Johannine community is responsible for being sensitive to the original setting of the discourses.
iv) And it’s more than possible that the Johannine community included Messianic Diaspora Jews who would appreciate the original setting as well.
“Secondly, this does not require a kind of independent historical access to the makeup of the Johannine community. The Gospel, Johannine epistles, and the Apocalypse allow us to isolate many of the central concerns of the community.”
This is true, although it necessitates the use of the grammatico-historical method to attempt a reconstruction of the Johannine community.
“We do know a bit about docetic/proto-Gnostic thinking in the Greco-Roman world that would have made their obsession with the physicality of Jesus intelligible. The preference for sarx over soma in John 6 is one such example. Its not that Jesus didn’t mandate the consumption of his flesh and blood to an audience of Jews, but the manner in which Jesus raises the stakes of the debate to make flesh and blood explicit probably proved useful to a much later community with a very different ideological opponent.”
This is where Michael and I more clearly diverge. It’s possible that proto-Gnostic thinking was afoot at the time John wrote the Gospel. At it’s possible that his selective emphasis, say, in Jn 20-21, is shadowboxing with that incipient heresy.
However, Jesus was not addressing proto-Gnostics in Jn 6. To backdate that idea to Jn 6 is too much like the old Bultmannian, form-critical view according to which the gospel narratives are not actually about the events they apparently descibe, but are really etiological allegories about the sitz-im-leben of the Church—wherein a fin de siècle church is inventing a backstory to illustrate and validate its later doctrine and practice.
That is not my view of the gospels, and I doubt it’s Michael’s.
“We can also know a bit about the liturgical context of the community from the various descriptions of the heavenly court in the Apocalypse. To the extent that John was anything of a biblical theologian, he would have noted how the Old Testament Tabernacle/Temple mirrored the divine throne room. He would have also been familiar with the manner in which synagogues were constructed as a kind of Temple in miniature (see Donald Binder’s work here). This presumes that the altar, the incense, the degrees of proximity to the throne, etc. found a counterpart in the liturgical space and liturgical practice of the Johannine community.”
Two problems:
i) This assumes that the Johannine community was worshipping in a synagogue rather than a house-church.
(Actually, it would be more logical of Michael to argue that the original discourse was delivered in a synagogue, and use that as his springboard, rather than appealing to the church architecture of the Johannine community.)
ii) Even if we made that very debatable assumption, vis-à-vis (i), it further assumes that tabernacular symbolism is sacramental in character.
Put another way, there were covenant signs under the Old Covenant as well as the New Covenant. So you could possibly speak of OT sacraments.
But that would simply relocate the debate over the nature of covenant signs from the NT to the OT milieu. Instead of debating the efficacy of communion, we debate the efficacy of the Passover.
“Finally, I really don’t have a problem with historical-grammatical exegesis per se. In fact, one can really establish most of what I have written here without recourse to the history of interpretation and reception of these texts in later Christian communities. That said, attending to this can give clues to how an audience could hear these texts without the pressing intrusions of our Western, modernist, post-industrial ontology. If there is a fairly unbroken sacramental understanding of these passages in the Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation-era churches, the burden of proof is really on the modern interpreter who denies that import. Its not that historical-grammatical exegesis is off base, but practitioners need to have a fairly healthy appreciation of the doctrine of Original Sin and thus need to acknowledge its noetic effects.”
Once again we disagree:
i) Appeal to the noetic effects of sin can cut both ways. A high churchman can invoke this against a low churchman, but a low churchman can invoke this against a high churchman. So it’s a wash.
ii) How is an *unbroken* sacramental understanding relevant to exegesis? At most, the only pertinent interpretive consideration would be early Patristic testimony in case that happened to be a historical witness to the primitive understanding of the text.
iii) Even that is very precarious. After all, Michael’s defense of the sacramental reading is that the Fourth Gospel was shaped, in part, by the need to refute certain heresies which were already afoot during the time of the apostolic church.
So it is more than possible for a primitive error to creep into the subapostolic church.
“This latter point might be the most important. Historical grammatical exegesis is an attempt at a quasi-scientific method. As such it is designed to mitigate the presuppositions and biases of the interpreter. The only problem is that the method itself reflects the concerns and pitfalls of post-Cartesian modernity and does not sufficiently deliver on what it promises. Thus the need for the Church and its rule of faith.”
That is not how I’d characterize the grammatico-historical method:
i) It is designed to mitigate anachronistic interpretations, in which the cultural presuppositions of the modern interpreter swap out the original presuppositions of the text.
We will always bring a set of presuppositions to the text. But we can become self-aware of our presuppositions, and thereby position ourselves to compare and contrast our initial cultural viewpoint with the viewpoint of the text, as a result of which we, as Christians, adjust our operating assumptions by allowing the text to correct our initial assumptions.
ii)”Science” is a slippery word. For example, Charles Hodge is often criticized for describing theology as a science.
But the question is whether we are using “science” in the modern sense of the natural *sciences* and the scientific method, or in the Medieval Latin sense of *scientia*.
Hodge, for one, stood at the crossroads of both usages. The motion of theology as the queen of the sciences is hardly a modern, post-Cartesian idea. So this would involve a rather complicated investigation into the history of ideas.
“This is not to say that the church is somehow above the Scripture, but only that there is wisdom in much counsel. If only the whole Church knows the whole truth (a necessary conclusion from 1 Cor. 12), it would seem more probable that reading the Scriptures with the people of God would yield a surer testimony than going it alone with only your self-selected method to save you from error.”
This is riddled with equivocations:
1.Where does Michael locate “the whole Church”? Who is included or excluded in this identification?
2.How does he map 1 Cor 12 onto church history? Where does he draw the boundaries?
3.When he speaks of “the people of God,” who is he really talking about? Is he, in fact, referring to “the whole Church,” or is he really referring a tiny subset of “the whole Church,” consisting in the Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church?
4.What happens when one part of the whole church disagrees with another part of the whole church? How does he adjudicate a difference between the way John Chrysostom construes a passage of Scripture and the way Jerome or Theodore of Mopsuestia construes the same passage of Scripture?
“The Spirit has been given to the Church first and to her individual children only secondarily for her edification. The ability to study the Scriptures with Spirit illuminated insight is not simply something to be kept in some private Spiritual cruvenet for our exclusive personal enjoyment. It is the common possession of the Church and other believers have a claim on our obedience as well as our insights.”
What does this actually mean? Does this mean the Holy Spirit gives the Christian (or the Church) a crash-course in Egyptology when he reads Exodus? Does the Holy Spirit give him a crash-course in Assyriology when he reads 1-2 Kings?
Thomas Aquinas wrote commentaries on the Bible. And they are not without penetrating insights along the way. He was a man of genuine piety, profound erudition, and supreme intellect.
But, in all honestly, I can learn a whole lot more about Job by reading Clines rather than Aquinas; more about John by reading Keener rather than Aquinas; more about Romans by reading Fitzmyer rather than Aquinas.
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