Calling Lucy Lowe!

Well Lucy, if you’re reading this, feel free to comment with a few examples of some of the more “awkward” Bible texts of which you’re aware, and your positions on them. It will be interesting to explore, consensus or not.

Back to Keith

Sometimes when I get an idea in my head, I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.  So, all these months later, I now have new insight into the “Thought Experiment” referenced a few posts back: I now think my first response to Keith is actually more solid than I originally thought. 

I basically said that if indeed those who would hurt a child fell into some sort of sleep just before the act, the Argument from Morality would be even stronger than it is, and I think it is one of the strongest arguments for supernaturalism and God as things are.  Only the most uncomfortable of rhetorical acrobatics could explain such a sleep in any non-supernatural way (although I’m sure some would try, perhaps postulating that natural selection selected the mechanism in order to preserve the genes in the children).  True free will requires choice, and if the alternative to believing in God isn’t somewhat reasonable, there really is no true choice but to believe in Him. In a similar way, Marshall “Why Does God Hate Amputees” Brain doesn’t think through what it would mean for practically all amputees to grow back their limbs after receiving prayer.  Suddenly, God would no longer be an option, but a requirement. 

There are two counters to this line of reasoning I’d like to tackle: 

1. God supposedly revealed Himself to people in the Bible, yet they still had choice
   a. However, He often only revealed Himself after a person had already become set in their path
   b. When (a) was not the case (i.e. Adam and Eve), a somewhat reasonable counter-choice against God was presented (”you will not surely die, God doesn’t want to you to become powerful like Him”, etc.)
   c. Further, the only cases I know of either (a) or (b) involve God working out the plan of salvation, and He seems to be pretty quiet in history otherwise 

2. If God allows for a world which is set up to create a seemingly reasonable alternative to Him, “God” is an unfalsifiable idea, since any proof against His existence could be swept under the umbrella of His allowing free will (somewhat along the lines of a young-earth creationist saying the world was created with apparent age).
   a. If God didn’t break into history, I would allow for that.  But since He did, and left behind numerous bits of falsifiable archeological/historical/textual evidence, this is a moot point.

Mad No Longer

After taking several months to ponder the last post, I feel I’ve come to somewhat of a conclusion: If a human’s possible moral freedom is limited even in the slightest way, humanity in general is wronged deeply, not unlike how human life in general is cheapened by a single murder. Possible moral freedom should be thought of as that freedom which exists inside the necessary limits of the physical world (as humans are physical) and of social/cultural behavior firewalls (as humans are social creatures).

Moral freedom is connected deeply to who we foundationally are, for much of our humanity comes from our ability to make moral choices.  Accordingly, there is no such thing as unnecessary evil.  For humans to exist as we know them, evil must exist, from minor to horrific levels.

After surveying the various views, this one seems to be the most resonant with reality.  Nonetheless, thinking through it all has really made me fall in love with God’s subtlety, respectfulness, and grandeur all the more.

Keith’s Thought Experiment Is Driving Me Mad!

I recently commented on a post which began a conversation which has really made me think about my beliefs in a new way. The post basically hypothesized about a world where God caused potential child murderers to fall into a deep sleep just before trying to carry out such an awful act. The blogger believed such a world, if it allowed for other evil, would be much more palatable than that which we currently inhabit, yet still allow for expressions of free will.

Here are some excerpts from our discussion:

______________________________________

Keith - You state that “we have total freedom within the range afforded us by physical and social limitations.” To me that sounds equivalent to saying that we are not totally free, for we are free only “within the range afforded us by physical and social limitations.” Since in comment 3 above your objection against God intervening was that “[a]ny universal limitations on moral action whatsoever” would mean that we are not really totally free, I thought that “limitations” were the stumbling block. But now you admit physical and social limitations, but still claim that we have total freedom. Again I ask you to please explain, what do you mean by total freedom?

If you force me to guess what you mean, I’ll hazard you mean by “total freedom” the choice to obey or disobey God. Thus, God preventing a child’s murder would be an unacceptable limitation on the murderer’s choice to disobey God. Is that what you believe?

Also, I wish you would explain how it is that the “slightest divine disrespect of human autonomy destroys free will.” For example, would God causing someone to fall into a deep sleep destroy that person’s free will? How?

Poppies - Your guess as to my belief is very accurate. I apologize for any perceived lack of clarity; it’s a result of my taking it for granted that certain limits are taken for granted in these types of discussions.

As for the mechanism of how any divine disrespect of human autonomy destroys free will: Let’s say people did fall asleep upon intending to kill children. If this were always the case, 100% repeatable under all conditions, such a situation would basically be fairly infallible proof of God. I say “fairly” because there will always be people for whom nothing is convincing due to a mindset utterly against God, but since most people in our current world believe in God I would have to imagine this child-murder-avoiding-sleep world would cause most people to feel as if they had no choice but to obey God’s commands. The reality of God’s 3-O existence would be incredibly palpable. It’s an important aspect of free will that God remain subtle, not particularly easily accessed, and dismissable. Hopefully that’s clear, I’ve made some assumptions that I think most people would find reasonable, but if you feel I should drill down further, I’m happy to do so.

Keith - I find your explanation of how any divine intervention would destroy free will unsatisfactory. Take the story of Adam and Eve. Certainly, they were quite sure that God exists — they were on speaking terms after all. Yet, they were obviously free to disobey. Also, consider Moses. He came upon God in the burning bush. He heard His voice. He saw the glory of God “from behind” after God passed by. Sounds to me like Moses would have been quite sure that God exists. Do you think that destroyed his free will? And there are many more examples of individuals portrayed in the Bible as knowing that God exists, yet appearing to still have free will.

How can you be sure that strong evidence of God’s existence would prevent people from disobeying? Most people agree that they have an obligation to obey the laws of the state, and they certainly believe that the state exists. They also know that if they are caught they will be punished. Yet, many still break laws. Now, if you replace “state” with “God” in the above, why would people not still be free to obey or disobey?

And let me point out to you — in ancient Israel as portrayed in the Old Testament, the state was headed by God. If what you are saying were true (and the events in the Old Testament really happened as written), then Adam, Abraham, Noah, Moses, the prophets, and the whole generation that witnessed the Exodus, would have had their free will destroyed. You’re theory may make sense (to you) philosophically, but it doesn’t fit with the stories told in the Bible. Unless you take all that stuff as metaphorical, I don’t see how you can believe such a theory as a Christian.

Poppies - To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before. I now see I can’t hold the theory I previously held. I’ll have to think about it more, because your thought experiment now takes on new meaning for me.

Keith - Now you’ve gone and done it! You’ve suprised me. I look forward to reading what you come up with.
______________________________________

I’ve been thinking about this for days, and I have yet to come up with anything conclusive. If taken to it’s logical conclusion, Keith’s train of thought could end up in a world where the only freedom to express evil would be by way of thought alone; stopping at child murder seems pretty arbitrary, there’s lots of other moral evil we could do without. This obviously wouldn’t jibe with any conception of robust freedom. Yet, it does seem that a pretty large amount of divine intervention could occur without destroying free will.

These ideas have really rocked some long-held conceptions of mine. It will be interesting to see how this ends up. I feel like I’m going mad!

Magnetic Atheism

I’ve wondered lately at the fact that those who make a decision to declare themselves atheists often remain with that label indefinitely, yet there are many former theists. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that most societies are theism-oriented, thus theism is seen as a sort of default. Accordingly, people will call themsleves theists though they have never really thought about or “owned” their beliefs. Meanwhile, atheists in such societies necessarily must go against the grain to embrace their beliefs, and it makes sense that this sort of hard-won worldview would be very “sticky”.

I must remember that no matter how hard-won my beliefs, if I find falsity in them, I must fight past the strong pull and discard them.

Switzerland is Impossible

I just got an unexpected free moment, so I’m going to jot down a post on a topic I feel is of great importance. A unique post was recently written by Evil Bender, one of my favorite atheist bloggers. In it, he states “humans, in short, cannot escape metaphor as a means of understanding.” I think this is true, depending on how one defines “metaphor”. I think of this kind of metaphor as “worldview”, a framework by which we interpret ideas.

Though I feel it’s very self-evident, it’s important to note that “facts” are always analyzed through the interpretive lens of a worldview. There is no such thing as an unbiased position on a fact, one can’t live in an analytical Switzerland. Thomas Kuhn’s work even implies that a priori worldview assumptions must be made before one can even know where and how to look for facts.

All this being said, the questions arise, how does one compare worldviews, and how are they chosen? Is either process rational, or will critical discussions and explorations on the topic always end fruitlessly?

Karl Popper’s “myth of the framework” idea is helpful to note here. Basically, he claims that people with entirely different worldviews, or sets of fact interpretations, can have meaningful dialogue if said dialogue is embarked upon in the the spirit of good faith rational criticism. Kuhn, on the other hand, wrote about the incommensurability of various worldviews. His work implies that people take up the banner of various worldviews for entirely irrational reasons (the verdict is out on whether he believed that implication).

I find it fascinating that atheists see these problems clearly when speaking of religion, but they typically refuse to see them when discussion turns to their own worldviews. They often speak in ways that imply an atheistic worldview is the clear default.

Presuppositionalism, typically spoken of as a style of defending religious beliefs based on the acceptance of scripture axiomatically, is, I think, probably the only coherent way to discuss theism and atheism. There is, ultimately, a large circularity inherent in any worldview, because all theories must gain authority from some axiomatic source. The comment discussion in my post Who Made God between myself and Arturo is a good example. Arturo felt I didn’t understand that the discussion was about an argument about arguments, because in his worldview, it is possible to use inferential deduction to show that it is necessary that inferential deduction is not necessary. This is axiomatic on his part, and no amount of my attempts to show the self-refuting nature of this idea would ever likely breach his worldview, because that one idea makes many other ideas he holds possible and justified. I don’t blame him at all, and in fact, I think the worldview built on this foundation is quite sophisticated. My own theistic worldview also requires axioms, and I readily admit it.

So then, back to the question of choosing and comparing worldviews. I currently think that a worldview is more or less justified depending on it’s degree of correspondence with reality. I think reality can be defined by both empirical and inferential evidence. I believe that critical rationalism is one of the best tools for determining correspondence, or what Popper called the “verisimilitude of truth”. I also think, though, that one’s worldview axiom must be highly systematic from that start, because arriving at justifiably actable knowledge via Popper’s critical rationalist system of essentially random (creative-imagination-based) hypothesis generation followed by attempts at falsification would require an almost infinitely long time period.

For anyone interested in determining their worldview’s correspondence to reality, I suggest the following (obviously biased) questions:

- does my worldview deny the orderliness and reasonably accurate measurability of the empirical world?
- does my worldview deny an objective source of morality and logic that exists independently of humanity?
- does my worldview deny immateriality (ideas, meanings, morality, value, etc.)

If your worldview does any of these things, I think it’s time to go shopping.

The Purpose-Driven Strife

I’ve been thinking much lately about how Naturalism could possibly account for humanity’s well-documented desire for purpose. I think this topic is pretty central to the tension between Naturalists and Theists, so it makes sense that discussion about meaning between the two camps tends to get ugly fast. I’ll try to make this post as open as possible considering it comes from a Theist.

I assume most Naturalists would begin their argument from the point of view of evolutionary adaptation, perhaps even describing this desire for purpose as a spandrel. In trying to imagine what environmental factors could cause a species to develop an overwhelming desire for a meaningful existence, though, I’m pretty lost.

Perhaps this desire for meaning could possibly be related to an instinctual drive to continue humanity’s gene pool, in a “selfish gene” (Richard Dawkins) sort of way. In seeking meaning, humans desire their everyday efforts to contribute to something greater than and outside of themselves, which may be an expression of their genes attempting to gain maximum reproduction. This doesn’t seem quite resonant with experience, though, in that there are manifold instances of human desire for purpose being satisfied by situations not only quite harmful to gene replication, i.e. war, setting records in extreme sports, etc., but even utterly neutral to said replication, i.e. Dawkins himself saying he finds meaning in feeling “privileged to be allowed to understand why the world exists”.

There are some who say it’s futile to seek purpose in life since there really is none beyond self-created existential purpose. However, this flies in the face of the beliefs and actions of such a great majority of history that it seems to me ignorant or prejudiced. Meaning seems to be one of the major driving forces of human history, and this doesn’t make much sense in a Naturalistic world.

Theists, however, can speak of purpose quite comfortably. It’s a cornerstone of their beliefs, and is woven throughout much of their arguments.

The question comes down to, as usual, to what does the available evidence point? And as usual, I’m pretty convinced the experiential arrow points to Theism, but I’m open to other ideas.

Keep them coming!

Open Letter to Suby

The following is in reaction to a commenter on my last post:

Suby, I first off must say your lack of vitriol is refreshing. Thanks.

You mention the Bible, so I’ll speak specifically of Christianity.

I’ll readily admit that most Christians have conclusions created before they see evidence. I’d add that most atheists, scientists, researchers, etc., also do this. Welcome to the true scientific method, which is: conjecture, refutation, conjecture, refutation…

Note that Christians have specific conjectures that are generally systematic; there’s not a great preponderance who claim that God is evil, or that green men run around rooms when no one’s looking. To say so is to show an ignorance (which is commonplace) of the systematic, logic-based quality of Christianity. Logic doesn’t make something true, but Christianity does have concrete barriers of possibility, so it doesn’t have the mark of utter randomness one sees in, say, Greek mythology.

You spoke of “stringent measures” taken by scientists, but you seem to have more faith in the lack of human fallibility than do other scientists and atheists. For instance, Karl Popper, atheist scientist, said “All scientific statements are hypotheses, or guesses, or conjectures, and the vast majority of these conjectures … have turned out to be false. Our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement; … our knowledge, our doctrine, is conjectural; … it consists of guesses, of hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths.” Bertrand Russell, the old-school king of atheism himself, said “All inductive arguments in the last resort reduce themselves to the following form: ‘If this is true, that is true: now that is true, therefore this is true.’ This argument is, of course, formally fallacious. Suppose I were to say: ‘If bread is a stone and stones are nourishing, then this bread will nourish me; now this bread does nourish me; therefore it is a stone, and stones are nourishing.’ If I were to advance such an argument, I should certainly be thought foolish, yet it would not be fundamentally different from the arguments upon which all scientific laws are based.”

All this is not to attack science; I’m simply pointing out that faith in the accuracy or completeness of science is just that, faith; it wasn’t that long ago that scientists thought friction was caused by “interlocking asperites” instead of chemical bonding (and that’ll probably be proven false also). My recommendation is to avoid Scientism, and to embrace true knowledge wherever it may be found and whatever ramifications it may have.

Regarding the Bible, with all due respect, you mention many “facts” that are false. For instance, you say that it has been “changed so many times” as if it has been a linear translation, but in actuality, most objective scholars are very impressed with the level of accuracy between modern translations and the earliest manuscripts, which are, as you may not know, still the source of modern translations. The common idea of the Bible as a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy is just erroneous.

Regarding Biblical interpretation, again, with as many Christians as there are in the world, there’s a significantly narrow range of interpretation that makes up orthodoxy. There’s little evidence of “convenient” interpretation (not that it doesn’t exist, just like there are scientists who conveniently intepret tobacco study data, for instance).

I just googled “atheist errors” and quickly found a site that listed pages and pages of them, but that doesn’t mean they’re accurate. Many religious people slander atheists without a concern for accuracy, just as many people say the Bible is full of contradictions without concern for accuracy. The Bible is a complex book, and requires contextual reading for an accurate understanding. If you can show me any true contradictions, I’d love to hear about them, I’ve been looking for one for about ten years now.

My main point is that atheists often have preconceived conclusions and hold fast to them through faith despite contradictory evidence, and claim a monopoly on truth, yet this is the behavior of which they accuse Christians. Lets all stop pretending that we’re not fallible, stop smearing those who think differently than us as less dedicated to logic and reason, and have real conversations that could lead to profound conclusions to which we would otherwise never come.

I’m open-minded and ready to truly take in the substantive arguments you may have; I hope you feel the same.

Embrace the truth; unless…

Based on a comment on my last post, I’ve been thinking much about how fascinating it is that many people superficially urge truth-seeking without committing to embracing the truth when it’s found. I myself am guilty of this at times; everyone pays lip service to the truth, but it’s hard to hold your views loosely enough to allow for frequent personal paradigm shifts. It’s a very human thing to do to pick out patterns from our experiences and learning, and it’s easy to become trapped by these patterns. Karl Popper illustrated this by the idea of a single black Australian swan falsifying the European hypothesis that all swans are white, which might have been based on thousands of observations.

Having said this, though, it also must be noted that while one must seriously take in counter examples to one’s world views to remain intellectually honest, one must also have realistic thresholds and categories for what one will accept as evidence. This is the argument at the heart of the tired old Russell’s Teapot spiel, and it’s modern, much less subtle variant “The Flying Spaghetti Monster”. One can never have any solid intellectual existence if one constantly engages in breaking down one’s world views in reaction to every absurd counter example that comes along. Whitman may have famously said he had the freedom to contradict himself because he “contained multitudes”, and Emerson denigrated a foolish consistency as “the hobgoblin of little minds”, but in everyday existence it’s a mark of mental instability to never have any constancy or pattern in one’s ideas.

This issue of realistic evidence categorization and threshold is at the heart of atheism, I believe. One can easily switch from atheism to theism and vice versa depending on which set of reality “filters” one chooses, and everyone has these filters. This is the foundation of what’s being spoken of in the term “worldview”.

So how does one go about analyzing the reasonableness of one’s reality filters? I personally think it comes down to explanatory power. If my worldview fails to explain much of the human experience, if it fails to explain aesthetics, the existence of the universe, morality, etc., then it may be time to examine my thresholds for accepting evidence contrary to my current beliefs.

In my experience, while atheists are often admirable in their congniscence of the necessity of explaining these aspects of reality, they accept evidence that’s far too flimsy and too much of an intellectual stretch to support their already unstable house of worldview cards. As an example, a helpful (but incomplete) analysis of some of atheist poster-boy Richard Dawkins’ intellectual canyon leaps can be found at this link.

As usual, I’d like to end this post with a reminder that though I feel pretty confident in my Christian worldview, I always welcome counter examples which may change my mind. In respect to my own reality filters, though, I ask that such submissions be pretty compelling. No lame, disrespectful divine pasta metaphors, please.

Lazy Faith

Several times this week I’ve seen religious people dismissed for intellectual laziness. The idea that religious people ascribe to their doctrines solely through blind faith is a very popular conception. I’ve certainly seen many examples of this stereotype in my lifetime, and in any people group as inclusive as “religious”, you’re bound to find examples of almost anything. Overwhelmingly, though, many of the most thoughtful and critical people I’ve met have been religious.

Though there have been rare exceptions, my general experience of the difference between the religious and non-religious is not intellectual rigor, but humility. Religious scientists and researchers I have known are particularly aware of the limits of human abilities and knowledge, and though they attempt to stretch those boundaries on a daily basis, they realize it is an intense wrestling match. The non-religious people I’ve known, on the other hand, tend (with some exceptions) to be strident in their views and feel that anyone who disagrees with them is intellectually shabby or perhaps even diabolical.

Have you ever noticed it’s often the most insecure people who trumpet their superiority most loudly?