Sunday, November 22, 2015
Saturday, November 21, 2015
How often does God intervene?
Back to the stable nature theodicy:
i) To take a comparison, it's like healing and prayer. If God always healed in answer to prayer, then medical science would be pointless–and if God never healed in answer to prayer, then prayer (for healing) would be superfluous.
Occasional miraculous healing in answer to prayer doesn't make medical science useless. You don't know in advance which will do the trick, or whether either one will do the trick. Sometimes we pray for healing because medical science failed.
The dilemma for the stable environment theodicy is that it can't explain why God intervenes in some cases rather than others. So that must be supplemented by skeptical theism.
ii) I doubt it's possible to even guess at how often God prevents some natural evils. Physical events leave physical evidence in their wake, but nonevents leave no trace evidence of their nonoccurence. So what's the evidence that something didn't happen because God preempted it?
To take a comparison, consider those time-travel scenarios in which a Jewish scientist goes back in time to kill Hitler's granddad, thereby erasing Adolf from the space-time continuum. If successful, there will be no evidence that Adolf ever existed, because changing that one variable changes a host of affected variables. To be consistent, there must be corresponding adjustments.
Of course we know that's unrealistic: hence time-travel antinomies. But I'm just using that an an analogy to illustrate a point.
In the case of divine intervention to preempt a natural evil, that doesn't change the past, but prevent that past from happening in the first place–in which case, there's no empirical evidence that God intervened. We have no basis of comparison. We just have what actually happened.
It's not as if there's a gap or hole in the historical record or natural record when God prevents a natural evil. So in that sense, there's no direct evidence for divine preemption. Not like a missing folders in the filing cabinet between the As and the Cs where the Bs ought to be. All the "space" is filled.
So, from what I can see, there's no estimating the frequency of divine interventions in that respect. For all we know, divine intervention to prevent natural evils might be commonplace. It's imponderable.
I'm not saying it's never possible to identify divine preemption. In some cases you have plausible answers to prayer. But in other cases, no testimonial evidence will be available.
Charbroiled Bambi
i) Atheist William Rowe famously cited a fawn dying in a forest fire as a paradigm-case of gratuitous evil. On the face of it, that's not gratuitous evil, because forest fires are necessary to maintain the balance of nature. In fact, animal death is necessary to maintain the balance of nature. So that's purposeful suffering.
ii) Now perhaps Rowe would say it's gratuitous in the sense that an omnipotent God could create a world without predation, forest fires, &c. But there are problems with that response:
a) Yes, God could, but that would be so unrecognizably different from the actual world that we can't even begin to do a comparative axiological analysis. We can't say which is better and which is worse because a world without our type of ecosystem is so far removed from human experience that it's hard to even conceive of what that would be like. Atheists have a bad habit of artificially deleting "bad things" from the world, then leaving everything else intact. But, of course, that requires corresponding adjustments. It's unclear what's left after the dust settles.
b) Moreover, a world without animal suffering might be better in some respects, but worse in others. Even if it's better overall, the goods might not be as good as a world that's worse overall. You could have a world that's worse overall, but the peaks of goodness are higher. So there's no single criterion of goodness.
iii) Furthermore, animals lack our human viewpoint on suffering. Take the somewhat amorphous distinction between lower and higher animals. A continuum of sentience.
A few years ago I read about some men who discovered a rattlesnake pit right by the playground of an elementary school. A communal rattlesnake pit. That posed an obvious danger to the school kids.
So the men poured gasoline down the snakepit and set it afire. End of problem!
I'm sure the snakes writhed about as they were roasting alive. Does that mean they were in pain, or is that a reflexive reaction? For instance, decapitated snakes continue to writhe.
How does a snake brain process or interpret that stimulus? I doubt what it's like for a man or German Shepherd to burn alive is the same for a snake. For one thing, it has a much simpler brain. Does the same stimulus mean the same thing to reptile? Seems unlikely.
Same thing with cooks who put live crabs directly in boiling water. Seems cruel, but isn't that just an anthropormophic projection on our part?
iv) I don't necessarily mean that's reducible to neurological structures. It's possible that animals have souls. But if they have souls, they have animals souls. If a wolf has a soul, it has a soul specific to the nature of a wolf; a soul with a lupine viewpoint. An outlook in many respects alien to a human viewpoint.
I think it would be cruel to set a dog on fire. But I don't think it was cruel to incinerate the rattlesnakes.
v) To take another comparison, during the Vietnam War, some Buddhist monks protested the war by setting themselves on fire. There are Youtube videos of that horrific scene. Yet, as I recall, they were very stoic about it. They didn't scream or flail about.
If we were just judging by body language, we'd infer that a snake is in greater pain than a man. But, of course, because we're human, we know that's not the case. So body language can be deceptive.
vi) From the standpoint of Christian ethics, given borderline cases, it's best, all things being equal, to allow ourselves a wide margin of error in the avoidance of possible animal cruelty.
Another factor concerns intent. To set a dog on fire is an act of malice. That is done with the intent to inflict pain on the dog. The person who does it takes depraved pleasure in cruelty. Even if, unbeknownst to him, the effect is painless, his motivation is heinous.
Is there gratuitous evil?
i) Evils are rarely self-contained events. It's hard to think of events, even little incidents, that don't cause a chain of events. Even individual evils have a ripple effect. Preventing the evil would prevent some resultant good down the line. Moreover, preventing one particular evil might mean a worse evil would take its place–either the precipitating evil or the resulting evils.
ii) Even reflecting on an apparently gratuitous evil will affect the thinker who reflects on it. And because the thinker is an agent, whatever impacts him will impact what he does. So even if the evil was gratuitous in itself, it can have a purposeful influence on the thinker. It is only gratuitous if considered in isolation. But the very act of evaluating the evil changes the thinker in subtle ways, which–in turn–changes the world based on what he does, and others do in response to what he does.
That's a bit circular, where reflecting on an otherwise gratuitous event makes it non-gratuitous, but it's true nonetheless.
iii) A critic might object that if we all thought that way, we'd never intervene to advert a foreseeable tragedy. But that misses the point. Whether or not we intervene would depend on how farsighted we are. And in fact, God has prearranged things so that what we do is ultimately for the good.
iv) Whether inscrutability is a "cop-out" depends in part on whether that's simply invoked as a blocking maneuver or face-saving exercise to show that, for all we know, any state of affairs is consistent with a hypothetical God's existence, wisdom, and benevolence, absent positive evidence to that effect. But, of course, inscrutability isn't cited in an evidential vacuum. It presupposes multiple lines of evidence for God's actual existence, wisdom, and benevolence.
Losing Jesus
I'll comment on some recent statements by Peter Enns:
For Christians, I believe that condemning mass, ideologically driven, and horrific violence today means taking on the responsibility of deconstructing the violence in the Bible.
You can't "deconstruct" violence in the Bible. Rather, you either accept or reject the inspiration of Scripture.
—to be able to speak with integrity of our God who we believe condemns mass violence today but who is said to have commanded it long ago.
Why does he believe his God condemns that? What's his source of information? What's his standard of comparison? How does he know what God is really like–even assuming there is a God? Clearly he doesn't take the Bible as God's self-revelation. So what supplies the contrast?
It is our Christian responsibility to take this on and not avoid it.
Agreed.
—to reflect on what it says, work with others and make sober Christian decisions about what it means live and speak faithfully today and to be in step with the Spirit of God...
How does he identify what is from the Spirit of God? How does he decide what is contrary to the Spirit of God?
The New Testament, I would argue, is not on the same page as the Old when it comes to mass military violence toward other peoples. In fact it’s turned that page altogether. But neither does it get a free pass.
At the hands of the Gospel writers, in different ways and varying degrees, Jesus’s rhetoric also exhibits violence—though not as persistently and not against the world out there. The Gospel rhetoric of violence on Jesus’s lips is aimed at his fellow Jews for not understanding that he was God’s chosen messiah.
Christians today must also assume the responsibility of wrestling with the Gospel rhetoric, too, and determining when, if, or whether it should remain as part of our own rhetoric.
The God of the OT is the God that Jesus and Paul believed--simply took for granted, actually--was the same God behind the Sermon on the Mount, etc. That’s the theological issue. one can toss the OT out, of course, but that is the lazy way out.
But the OT still has to be addressed, because the same God who spoke there is the God that Jesus spoke of. At least that what’s Jesus thought. That’s what creates the hermeneutical and theological conundrum.
i) Enns makes a good point that "progressive Christians" can't compartmentalize the NT or the Gospels from the OT.
ii) To say Christians must take responsibility for Jesus is unintentionally comical. Are we his minders and handlers?
iii) Enns appears to be undecided on how to view the "Gospel rhetoric of violence". On the one hand, he seems to suggest this is something Gospel writers attribute to Jesus rather than something he actually said. On the other hand, he suggests this is what Jesus actually thought, said, and took for granted. As it stands, Enns leaves both options open. Maybe he can't decide which is right, or perhaps he thinks both may be right at one time or another.
iv) His own position drives a wedge between Christ and Christians. If, on the one hand, the "rhetoric of violence" is authentic to Jesus, then we must distance ourselves from Jesus. If, on the other hand, the Gospel writers put words in Christ's mouth, then the historical Jesus disappears behind the editorializing. We no longer know what Jesus really said or thought because the historical Jesus is hidden behind the literary Jesus. We lack access to the historical Jesus. The Gospels are a mirror of the writer rather than a window into Jesus.
Either way, that poses an intractable dilemma for "progressive Christians" like Enns. By their own admission, they can't follow Jesus–either because they disagree with Jesus or because they don't know where to find him.
True Christians, Muslims, and Scotsmen
Christian philosopher Jeremy Pierce recently made some interesting observations about the No True Scotsman Fallacy in relation to Muslims and Christians:
So is the No True Scotsman Fallacy only a fallacy if you're using it to say someone isn't really a genuine Christian?
To be clear: there's a huge difference between IS and what most Muslims believe and practice. Nevertheless, last I checked, the core of being Muslim is (1) to believe (a) there's one God and (b) Muhammad is his prophet and (2) to practice the five pillars of Islam. Those who say the Nation of Islam isn't really Muslim are wrong, even if there are some huge differences between the Nation of Islam and the predominant beliefs and practices of Islam.
There's a good amount of diversity within Islam, and there's no reason to assume of any particular Muslim that they fit any particular manifestation of the broader religion without knowing more about them. Nevertheless, it's very clear that it's a version of Islam that motivates al Qaeda and a different version of Islam that motives IS. They are both religiously motivated, and it's clear that they are both legitimately classified as Islamic extremism. IS is severely atypical of Islam worldwide, but that doesn't make them not Muslims.
I recommend being careful of applying the No True Scotsman Fallacy label in particular cases, because it's often abused. There are ways to go back to the original core of a belief system to see who is a genuine member of the group or to look to key documents that the group produced over time to indicate who is in and who is out. There are groups that consider themselves part of Christianity but who have clearly departed from central teachings. There are people who have adopted the label but have not believed or followed the central gospel message. And it's important to recognize that there are sometimes borderline cases where it's hard to know what the right answer is (or even if there is a right answer).
But I don't see how anyone can claim that it's the No True Scotsman Fallacy to say that Hitler wasn't really Christian in any important sense. He wasn't a follower of Jesus in any serious way, and he explicitly contradicted several core teachings of Christianity. Saying he wasn't really a Christian is not an instance of the fallacy. But saying that IS isn't Muslim is simply ridiculous, by the very standards that most Muslims use to explain their big tent admissions requirements for belonging to the religion. They do fit the criteria, and anyone who says otherwise is committing the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
I want to reiterate that most Muslims think IS theology is not just wrong but offensive. Their theology of rape, for instance, is offensive to the vast majority of Muslims, and their use of that theology to recruit men who will be able to rape sex slaves at will is pretty despicable and at odds with traditional Muslim teaching about sexual morality. Nevertheless, sexual morality, political philosophy, and other issues that set apart IS from the rest of Islam are not among the three criteria for whether someone counts as Muslim. There are Christians who believe offensive things but who accept the core Christian teaching. I wouldn't say they aren't Christian.
Yes, those would be genuine instances of the fallacy. Westboro Baptist theology is within orthodoxy, and for all we know people who murder doctors or bomb churches might as well be orthodox in their theology. Any church worth its salt would engage in church discipline with such people (and probably take the side of the law against them on legal questions), but their views are within orthodoxy.
1. Let's unpack this. When we consider criteria for Muslim identity, there are basically two questions: (i) What does it take to be a true Muslim? (ii) Is a certain practice (e.g. jihad, sex slavery) consistent with Islamic theology?
i) To be a Muslim involves observing the five pillars of Islam: The shahadah: there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet; five daily prayers; almsgiving; Ramadan fast, and a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Notice, here, the emphasis on actions rather than belief. Even in the case of the shahadah, it's less about personally believing the shahadah than publicly professing the shahadah.
To illustrate, when Queen Noor (née Lisa Najeeb Halaby) married the late King Hussein, a precondition was her conversion to Islam. But conversion to Islam doesn't mean the same thing as conversion in evangelical theology. It's not like she had an epiphany in which she became convinced that the Angel Gabriel dictated the Koran to Muhammad. It's not about conviction, but saying and doing the right things. Islam is a very public religion.
This goes to the fact that Islam is based on justification by works rather than justification by faith, unlike Christian theology.
Of course, Islam also has a detailed code of social ethics (Sharia). But in that case, I think the question of observance or nonobservance involves a distinction between good and bad Muslims rather than true and false Muslims.
ii) The other question is whether a particular practice is consistent with Islamic theology, or even required by Islamic theology. Islam isn't simply a religion of the book (Koran). It's a religion that's defined, not only by the Koran, but authoritative tradition, viz. Hadith, schools of jurisprudence. I think it's safe to say that in venerable Islamic tradition, jihad is considered a sacred duty. Killing the infidel is permissible or even mandatory.
2. Christian identity is more complex. By "Christian," I'm confining myself to evangelical theology. Unlike Islam, Christian identity is centered on faith. And that has different aspects:
i) Minimal orthodoxy is a necessary condition of saving faith. This involves belief in certain doctrines.
I say "minimal" because you don't have to be a theologian to be a Christian.
In that respect, Christian identity has a more personal orientation than Islam. Although Christian identity has a social dimension as well (e.g. the communal life of the church), even the social dimension is grounded in this individual component: personal conviction.
So we'd say John Spong or Dale Tuggy is not a true Christian because he lacks minimal orthodox belief. They flub that preliminary test.
ii) However, orthodox belief is a necessary rather than sufficient condition of Christian identity. There's more to saving faith than bare assent. There's trust. Trust that's rooted in the experience of saving grace.
For evangelical theology also has a category of dead orthodoxy. A person can be a believer but not be a true believer.
That's because Christianity, unlike Islam, has a doctrine of original sin, which, in turn, has the new birth as a corollary. To be a Christian, it is not enough to merely believe. You must be a regenerate believer. Have sanctifying grace. Have the Holy Spirit.
As a result, evangelical theology draws a principled distinction between nominal believers and true believers. You don't have the same distinction in Islam, because you don't have the same theological underpinnings.
By contrast, Islam has no doctrine of original sin. Indeed, every human is born Muslim.
So we might say someone doesn't seem to be a Christian, even if they are doctrinally orthodox, because something else, something crucial, is missing.
For instance, it's not something they live for. Not their frame of reference. If they ceased believing it, that would make little appreciable difference.
Or take loss faith. That's retrospective, but with the benefit of hindsight, we'd say they had an accidental faith. Apostasy waiting to happen. They lost their faith because even when they had it, the basis of their faith was deficient. Their apostasy exposed something that was deficient all along.
3. Let's consider some illustrations.
i) Are members of the Westboro cult Christian? They might pass the minimal orthodoxy test.
However, we might still have good reason to doubt their state of grace. There's a distinction between whether their overall theology is Christian, and whether they are Christian. A distinction between Christian identity in terms of doctrine and Christian identity in terms of appropriation. Has the theology been properly internalized?
In addition, their commitment to orthodox theology appears to be nominal. Their defining characteristic is hate-mongering.
ii) Are Confederate theologians like Thornwell and Dabney Christian? Certainly they pass the doctrinal test. And their personal piety is not in serious doubt.
So, yes, I'd say they were true Christians, despite their defense of Southern slavery.
iii) Ironically, their theology made it very challenging to defend the institution of slavery. Their theological commitment to monogenism meant they couldn't deny the common humanity of black Africans. But that, in turn, made it hard to justify enslaving blacks rather than whites. Why drawn the line along racial lines? That's arbitrary.
Likewise, in the Mosaic law, Hebrew slaves were term-limited. Moreover, indentured service was voluntary. And black Christians would be analogous to Hebrew slaves (or debt servants) rather than foreign slaves.
We could say Dabney and Thornwell were Christian, but their position on slavery was unchristian.
Friday, November 20, 2015
Coexist
In case some of you were wondering, zoo keepers evidently have the same coexist philosophy, with the same results, as the useful idiots who run interference for jihadis:
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A grizzly bear that had been placed with a grey wolf in a wildlife refuge atop Grouse Mountain last week killed the wolf while fighting over a bone on Tuesday night.
Grouse spokesperson Chris Dagenais says the bear killed the wolf with one swipe in front of a group of people.
"It happened very suddenly, sort of out of the blue. We're not exactly sure what prompted this aggressive behaviour between the two species, but needless to say it ended very sadly for one of our grey wolves."
Grouse has two grizzly bears and a small pack of wolves living in its five-acre refuge. But the two species had been kept in separate enclosures until last week.
Grouse has plans to double the size of the sanctuary to 10 acres – with the bears and wolves living together.
Dagenais says by all accounts, the experiment had been going smoothly, and the animals appearing to get along well.
The three remaining grey wolves and two grizzly bears have now been separated again, as researchers try to figure out what prompted the attack by the four-year-old bear.
One-way tolerance
“I don’t think we ought to have a religious test for our refugee policy,” Moore said, adding that a rigorous vetting process could still make room for innocent Muslims.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/conservative-christian-leader-blasts-anti-refugee-rhetoric-c#.jhVjrByG6R
You'd think he's a religious pluralist. That all religions are basically the same.
This is a leading spokesman for the SBC. He's too clueless to figure out that tolerance must be a two-way street.
Three stages of jihad
In sum:
- Stealth jihad (e.g. the US). "When Muslims are completely outnumbered and can't possibly win a physical confrontation with unbelievers, they are to live in peace with non-Muslims and preach a message of tolerance."
- Defensive jihad (e.g. parts of Europe and Africa). "When there are enough Muslims and resources to defend the Islamic community, Muslims are called to engage in defensive Jihad."
- Offensive jihad (e.g. Saudi Arabia). "When Muslims establish a majority and achieve political power in an area, they are commanded to engage in offensive Jihad."
David Wood has created a pamphlet on the three stages of jihad as well.
Winston Churchill once said:
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
Filial duty
Suppose a terrorist outfit kidnaps a father and son. Say the father is 70 and the son is 25. They separate them. They make the father an offer: they will kill one and let the other go. He can choose.
I suspect most cultures think a good father would lay down his own life to save his son.
Suppose they make the son the same offer. Now, there's a sense in which the son has far more to lose than the father. His dad could die of natural causes at anytime, whereas the son may well have another 50 years or so ahead of him.
Yet I suspect most cultures would consider it profoundly dishonorable if the son sacrificed his father to save himself. An act of supreme disloyalty.
So there's more to ethics than a cost/benefit ratio, although that's sometimes germane.
Stupid pill
We should remember the history of the 20th century, of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/11/19/stop-pitting-security-and-compassion-against-each-other-in-the-syrian-refugee-crisis/
I don't read Russell Moore on a regular basis, and this is why. I'm curious about the egotism of some Christians who assume positions of leadership when they are painfully out of their depth. Moore needs a 10 foot snorkel to keep from drowning.
I've seen other people cite the alleged parallel with Jews seeking asylum, viz. the MS St. Louis. Did Moore take a stupid pill?
The basic problem is when simpletons like Moore can only keep one idea in their head at a time. All they think is that both groups are "refugees." But the analogy is vitiated by disanalogies. As I often say, the rule is to treat like things alike and unlike things unalike.
From what I've read, most of the "Syrian refugees" are economic refugees. That's hardly comparable to Jews fleeing the Final Solution.
In addition, there is Moore's morally blind equivalence between Muslims and Jews. However, Muslim immigrants frequently embody the cultural pathologies of Islam. And that's apart from the additional fact that Muslim enclaves become hotbeds of domestic terrorism in the host country.
It's utterly brainless of Russell to compare the two. The real analogy would be:
Middle Eastern Christians fleeing jihadists are akin to Jews fleeing Nazis.
But people like Moore enable Muslims to pursue fleeing Christians whenever they go. Look at the plight of Jews in Paris. Thanks to the Muslim presence, Paris is no longer safe for Jewish residents. So, by all means, let's replicate that situation in American, so that no safe haven is left.
And the door was shut
25 “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. 2 Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. 3 For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, 4 but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. 5 As the bridegroom was delayed, they all became drowsy and slept. 6 But at midnight there was a cry, ‘Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ 7 Then all those virgins rose and trimmed their lamps. 8 And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9 But the wise answered, saying, ‘Since there will not be enough for us and for you, go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.’ 10 And while they were going to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut. 11 Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ 12 But he answered, ‘Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ 13 Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour (Mt 25:1-13).
The logistics are somewhat obscure, but the basic idea is that the torchlight procession escorts the bride and groom from her home to his home–where the wedding ceremony takes place. His home represents "heaven." The door between heaven and hell. The foolish bridesmaids are shut out.
This parable has two dichotomies: light and darkness; inside and outside. Suppose we were to update it a bit. Suppose Jesus was addressing a modern audience, using a modern equivalent.
Shopping malls often resemble city blocks, where walkways are streets, with stores on either side. The walkways are walled in by the stores. The main difference is this is covered space. You have a roof over the the walkways. A shopping mall is a a village under a common roof. A shopping mall inverts the spatial relationships: outside becomes inside and inside becomes outside. Interior doors become exterior doors, leading to the outside world.
Depending on the design, there may only be two sources of illumination. The main source is artificial lighting, provided by lights in the ceiling as well as store windows facing the walkways. An ancillary source is natural lighting from the mall entrance or exit. The entrance to the mall is often at right angles to the central aisle. In case of a power outage, the only source of light might be from exits that lie around the corner, if they have glass doors or open doors.
Suppose some girls go shopping. Because the weather forecast predicts a thunderstorm, they take the precaution of bringing flashlights in case the mall goes dark when they are inside. As a matter of fact, there's a power outage, plunging the mall into darkness, but thanks to the flashlights, they find their way to the exit. Indeed, once they round the corner, they no longer need their flashlights, because they can see the outside through the open door. A patch of light against the surrounding darkness.
Suppose some other girls go shopping. But they don't take the same precautions. When lightning knocks out power, the interior instantly becomes pitch black. They grope in the darkness, looking for the exit by feeling their way along the walls on either side of the aisle. Two or three go in the wrong direction.
By chance, another two or three go in the right direction. They round the corner and see the open door. They breathe a sigh of relief and leisurely walk towards the exit. But then the door begins to close. In panic, they run screaming towards the door, as the pool of light narrows to a sliver. But it closes before they get there. Now they can't even see where the door is. They are sealed in–forever! Eternal midnight. Trapped inside the darkened mall for all eternity.
Admittedly, that seems like a harsh penalty for ditzy shoppers, but that confuses the allegory with what it illustrates.
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Trump: the amnesty candidate
Trump's revolving door on deportation:
https://www.aei.org/publication/message-to-the-gop-trump-supports-amnesty/
https://www.aei.org/publication/message-to-the-gop-trump-supports-amnesty/
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