One belief that is ubiquitous among those who write off Christianity is the suspicion that the persons who lived in biblical times were highly gullible. When I was an atheist teenager I looked down on the Biblical authors because I thought they didn’t understand the physical world and thought that it was inhabited by fairies and trolls at every turn. I found comfort in writing them off in this way. Richard Carrier in a recent episode of ‘The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ said that "The average person on the street would be like, 'Oh you saw God and he spoke to you? That must be for real!' That was the order of things.” It is common to hear the Israelite ancients referred to contemptuously as superstitious and gullible individuals. To anyone who knows the Bible this is, of course, a laughable generalization.
As I read the Bible each night with my kids one of the things I try to instill in them is that these are not stupid superstitious people, and this is easy to prove. It takes no manipulation of the text or reading in information that isn’t there; it rests on the surface and can be scooped up without any digging at all. Almost every time a miracle happens in the text I try to point out to them the amazement people have. Tonight in 2 Kings 4 we read about Elisha and the Shunnemite woman. We got to the part where he tells her she will get pregnant in spite of her husband’s advanced age and the woman says, "O man of God, do not lie to your servant." I asked them why she said this and my oldest daughter was very quick: "Because she knew that getting pregnant would have been a miracle, just like with Abraham's wife.”
My daughter was referring, of course, to Sarah’s unbelief (Gen. 18:12) — and Abraham’s unbelief (Gen. 17:17) — at God’s promise to give Abraham a child in his old age. He and his wife laughed at the thought that she would ever have a child. Why? Because old ladies don’t have babies, and Sarah knew this fact just like we do today. These were people who believed in the regularity and stability of the natural order. The sort of people who laughed when a miracle was promised. They didn’t believe that God’s existence meant that the universe was a place of pixies, fairies, confusion and flux.
Skepticism is a frequent response to the miraculous in Scripture. Think of Moses, who expects skepticism when he comes to the Israelites claiming to speak for God (Exodus 4:1). Or think of when Jesus healed the blind man and the text says “The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight” (John 9:18). Or think of Thomas who famously said “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe” (John 20:25). Dead men don’t come back! These ancient, unsophisticated people which no knowledge of Newtonian physics or string theory react to the miraculous with the sort of healthy skepticism that we normally associate with Sherlock Holmes or Gregory House. Skepticism. From such gullible people! Perhaps they weren’t as gullible as modern folks cartoonishly imagine them. Perhaps people need to be educated on what gullibility really looks like.
Being sophisticated enough to know that miracles are weird and rare and out of the ordinary shouldn't preclude miracles.
How tempting it is to speak on subjects that we really don't understand! Especially when we know just enough about the subject to sound like we know what we're talking about. Consider the ease with which scientists slip back and forth between playing with science and playing with metaphysics. Think, for instance, of Stephen Hawking's book The Grand Design, where he argues that God's existence is not necessary and attempts to do so on scientific grounds.
Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
Hawking does his best to give scientific-sounding arguments for this conclusion, but at the end of the day one has to ask how one could ever come to such theological conclusions from physical observations without making some sort of metaphysical assumptions at the beginning of the whole enterprise?
It isn't only scientists, however, who are guilty of moonlighting as poor theologians. Sometimes the shoe is on the other foot. Consider William Lane Craig, who almost a year ago pointed out in answer to a question on his blog that the "evidence for inflation" is confirmed by the research of the BICEP team.
The team went to great lengths to ensure that the polarization pattern detected was not due to error in instrumentation or the influence of cosmic dust or galactic factors.
Earlier that week, Craig appeared on Fox News arguing that the BICEP team's research confirms "the Christian view of the universe." He also spoke with Kerby Anderson on the subject. Inflationary expansion, of course, serves as a powerful confirmation for the cosmological argument for God's existence, which argues that if the universe had a beginning, it must have been God who was the cause of that beginning. This argument is a favorite arrow in the quiver of many Christian Apologists. This may be exciting for the moment when the news emerges, but things get less exciting when backpedalling becomes necessary.
The New York Times, in an article posted yesterday, says that things have changed since March of last year: "Now a new analysis, undertaken jointly by the Bicep group and the Planck group, has confirmed that the Bicep signal was mostly, if not all, stardust, and that there is no convincing evidence of the gravitational waves. No evidence of inflation." Is God's existence now more likely? Less likely? Has anything changed? If inflation is no longer "confirmed" does that mean Christian theologians will need to wait for further research before they can feel comfortable telling people that God exists?
As time goes on, I suspect more and more that theologians are far better off speaking of that which they know and not having an apologetic methodology that can be buttressed by one team of scientists only to be thrown into disarray the next moment when that team's flawed methodology is later exposed.
Earlier this week in one of my classes, my homiletics professor, Dr. Charlie Wingard, made an important comment in passing. He said, "In your preaching, when you give an illustration or an argument, never pretend as if you're a scientist or a doctor if that isn't your area of expertise. Inevitably someone in the audience will know better than you and you will lose your credibility."
In the latest episode of The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy (a podcast that I normally enjoy because I'm a geek) two "experts" in the Bible (Robert Price and Richard Carrier) joined David Barr Kirtley to discuss the new Ridley Scott film Exodus: Gods and Kings. I was interested in what these "experts" (one of them a former baptist minister/member of the Jesus Seminar, and the other a humanistic expert in Roman history) would say about the movie. I shouldn't have been surprised to hear that the experts they called in were unbelievers who consider the entire Exodus narrative to be total myth.
Pick a Side!
In some places, this bias is helpful and even welcome. In particular, when it comes to discussing the film's curious relationship with rationalism, Carrier and Price observe (helpfully, I think) that Ridley Scott's decision to try to follow the narrative of the Bible, but with a naturalistic slant hurts the film's overall narrative and doesn't even end up making scientific sense. As they observe (rightly), it's better for somebody to decide whether they're going to portray the events as the text portrays them or don't portray them at all. Instead, Scott tries to do what Price and Carrier refer to as the 20th century Protestant Rationalist thing by saying that the events happened but can all be traced to naturalistic causes (49:30). As naturalists, they mock and laugh at the liberal approach that wants to offer a glib hat-tip to the Bible but also have a philosophical sophistication that will appeal to the modern scientifically minded person (liberals end up doing neither, of course).
The Gullible Ancients
If you've listened to the episode and you know me, then you will perhaps guess that I was far less impressed with the rest of the discussion. Early in the episode, Carrier talks about whether there even would have been naturalistic thinkers in 1300 BC Egypt. He presumes ancient people to be tremendously naive when he says that the average person would be prone to believe claims of people who said they spoke with God: "The average person on the street would be like, 'Oh you saw God and he spoke to you? That must be for real!' That was the order of things" (8:00-9:30). The narrative, of course, presumes that the actual people Moses is speaking to will not believe him. "But behold, they will not believe me or listen to my voice, for they will say, 'The LORD did not appear to you'" (Ex. 4:1). Why would Moses have a concern that he will be met with skepticism if the people were so naive and prone to believe anyone who claimed to have a word from God? The most obvious answer is that the people Moses was speaking to were far less naive than would serve Carrier's purposes. Richard Carrier simplifies the mindset of the ancient people turning them into a manageable caricature, but one far more gullible than Moses himself knows them to be in the context of the narrative.
Of course, the problem with Carrier is ultimately foundational. In his mind the text itself cannot be offered as evidence that the people were not gullible since only a gullible person would believe that these people were not gullible. Carrier, however, as a perfect example of gullibility himself, doesn't see anything naive in his own unprovable anti-supernaturalistic foundational assumptions which preclude the text as evidence of anything.
Constant Smug Laughter
Subjectively speaking, what really bothered me about the discussion was the smugly dismissive way that Carrier in particular laughed throughout the episode whenever Price or Kirtley would bring up those who actually believe that these events took place. Near the beginning of the episode Carrier laughs off the film as horrible history since there was no evidence that the Hebrews ever even lived in Egypt (6:50). "That's just something that was made up in Jewish literature centuries later." Later, Carrier almost seems unable to control his laughter even at the thought that somebody might actually believe the Exodus narrative to be historical. Kirtley asks if it would be possible to make a movie of the Exodus where God comes off as heroic instead of as a scary monster, which again causes Carrier to giggle extensively. Because he doesn't see God as heroic, he chooses to laugh at anybody who can see God as heroic in Exodus (36:00). His laughter reaches an almost fever pitch when they discuss why on earth people would need to place lamb's blood over the doors if God is all-powerful. Why require lamb's blood when God could just by fiat decide not to kill the Israelite children? Of course, any possible answer to this doesn't even seem cross their minds. I suspect that they know that it could conceivably make sense that God would require people to perform gestures for both didactic and symbolic reasons, but again - that isn't as funny and doesn't make them look as smart.
The Inconsistent Irrationality of Pharaoh
Price and Carrier don't use equal weights and measures in their complaints about the Exodus narrative. For instance, at one point Price complains that Pharaoh is made by God to be "irrationally stubborn" (32:40) in the Exodus narrative, but then he argues that Pharaoh's refusal to give the Israelites straw to make bricks is irrational (45:50). He offers this irrationality of refusing to help the Israelites make bricks as evidence that there is nothing remotely historical about the narrative. One wonders how it is possible for Pharaoh to be acknowledged as "irrationally stubborn" and then have his irrationality criticized as nonsensical. Price would like to have it both ways, of course: Pharaoh is irrational through and through, yet he clearly can't be real because he behaves irrationally toward the Israelites.
Listening to the Other Side?
Later in the podcast, Kirtley asks his panel members how religious believers reconcile God killing "innocent children" during the final plague against Egypt. The answers they give are all caricatures. They seem to not know how "religious people now explain it." Carrier himself admits that he has no idea how real believing interpreters deal with the text. It's at this point that I just paused the narrative and said to myself, "This is the part where they will now make up unfair, simplistic, ludicrous explanations and then attribute them to people who believe these events to be historical." (By the way, if I find the time, I may offer a post where I mention some of the views that Carrier and Price failed to consider, but that is not my purpose here.)
Carrier, to begin with suggests that some with a "medieval mindset" would see the death of the Egyptian children as just recompense for the Pharaoh's own murder of the Israelite boys in Exodus 1:22. Unable to come up with anything better, he passes the baton to Price, who admits to having "never actually heard them wrestle with it" (32:50). This is curious, of course, since Price supposedly spent years involved in apologetics and even had a degree in systematic theology. And during his "orthodox years" he never once wrestled with this question or heard anyone else wrestle with it? Rather than deal with anybody's actual approach to the narrative Price takes the opportunity to opine on the subject of hell and then talk about how the Bible's narrative doesn't make sense to him. It would be more honest for them to simply say, "I am a supposed expert in systematic theology, but I'm not open minded enough to read believing commentators on this passage, so I can't answer your question."
Concluding Thoughts: A Plea for Fairness
I definitely think that this episode of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy would have been far fairer and way more interesting to have a fair-minded Christian or Jewish theist who isn't a screaming fire breather and would be willing to offer their own side of the discussion. I can think of believing experts who are also movie lovers and would be eager to engage in such a discussion in a winsome way. Instead, GGG decided to turn the discussion over to two naturalists who see the Exodus narrative as myth and aren't even experts in the Old Testament. In the process they missed out on the chance to be exposed to the opinion of someone who approaches the Old Testament far less combatively.
Jamie Smith's book How (Not) To Be Secular is a shortening, a condensing, and an attempt at simplifying Charles Taylor's 900 page behemoth A Secular Age. I have only begun reading Smith's book, but something important has stood out regarding Taylor's approach. Taylor basically says that when most western people think of secularism today they're thinking of a neutral, nonsectarian space or standpoint. But Taylor says that society today is a different kind of secular -- what he calls "secular3." He says that a society is secular3 "insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable (and contested)."
This is a bit like the toothpaste in the tube problem. There was a time when exclusive humanism was implausible to the vast majority of people. They just did not live in a world where denial of the supernatural made plausible sense of the world to them. However, once exclusive humanism did become plausible, that humanism became an ever-present, haunting possibility. Christian belief has therefore become more challenging because other approaches to reality now exist as plausible alternatives which didn't exist before.
What Smith does early on in the book is point out that the problem of belief cuts both ways. Yes, it is harder to be a Christian today than it has ever been before, but it's also equally hard to be an unbeliever, too. He uses the work of David Foster Wallace as representative of the fact that life is much more muddy, grey, and difficult than either the New Atheists or Religious Fundamentalists would portray it to be. There is an ongoing transcendent haunting that takes place in the heart of the skeptic. People yearn for transcendence, but they largely despise the source of transcendence. This yearning for transcendence is everywhere around us and easily demonstrable. There is truly a deep, yearning hunger within humanity for more than what we can see. But there is a cynicism and an infectious pessimism that essentially says that we cannot have this transcendence that we want because we no longer find it to be plausible. This yearning, then, is interpreted by some (one thinks of Richard Dawkins) as a sickness or a parasite that humanity must find a way to shake.
Viewers of the TV show House may recall that the nihilistic lead character, Gregory House, goes into every situation with a head-first rationalism and almost always enters conversations with religious individuals trouncing them with rationalism and mocking them for their beliefs. But nearly every time he in some measure reaches the end of the episode and finds himself rebuffed for his cynicism and a bit in doubt about whether he really understands what life is like. This metaphysical tension never quite goes away on the show.
One episode in particular features a priest who doesn't believe in God. He is an atheist. In one poignant moment at the end of the episode, House, being his usual self, tells the priest, in spite of the massive amount of coincidences that went into his healing, "Don't worry your life will go back to sucking soon enough. Everything that happened can be rationally explained." To which the priest responds with a measure of doubt in his voice, "I know. It's just... a lot of coincidences." The atheist is shaken in his faith. The atheist, the skeptic, the unbeliever, will always be haunted by transcendence because he was made to know God and yet lives in a time in which it is culturally plausible to reject that being who can rationally account for transcendence.
This is what it is to inhabit the secular world today. It is hard to be a believer, sure, but it sure is hard to be an unbeliever, as well, constantly dogged by the memory of a transcendent and holy God. The people we meet need to hear that there are answers to their questions and they need to hear us without shame or embarrassment tell them that God's Word has the answers they are looking for. But they also need to hear us say that we know that the search for answers isn't always easy, and we don't always have the answers to every question, and that's okay. Part of the challenge of living in this day and age is that the answers don't always come easily.
Mark Driscoll has attempted to briefly answer a very pressing and important question that should be on the radar screen of each and every Christian. The post is titled "Does God hate cotton blend T-shirts?" and deals with the prohibition against mixed threads in Deuteronomy 22:11 and Leviticus 19:19.
Deuteronomy 22:11:
“You shall not wear cloth of wool and linen mixed together.” Leviticus 19:19:
Nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material.”
Driscoll, in his post, deals very superficially with the above question and basically ends up appealing to the classic three-fold division of the law: civil, ceremonial, and moral and says, "These laws are no longer binding on us because Jesus is our priest, temple, sacrifice, cleanser, and so forth." Period. End of discussion. Now, for my own part, I agree with Driscoll's conclusion. The ceremonial law was done away with in the coming of Christ (WCF 19.3). However, readers of his post will still not be any closer to understanding the prohibition under discussion than when they first began.
Just as with Driscoll, my own interest in this prohibition relates to a renewed contemporary (albeit superficial) fascination in these prohibitions by skeptics. One skeptic, for example, says "There is nothing in the Christian bible to suggest that this portion of Leviticus is any less serious than the part about homosexuality. And yet, the inescapable conclusion is that wearing clothing made of linen-wool blends is wrong in the same way homosexuality is wrong." Richard Dawkins, similarly, alludes to this prohibition as he mocks the sort of minutiae often found detailed in the Pentateuch.
It is not only atheists and skeptics who think texts like Lev. 19:19 and Deut. 22:11 are some sort of linchpin to show the inconsistency of Christian ethics. More than ever, with the push in our society to normalize homosexual behavior, these texts are increasingly being leaned on, even within supposed Christian circles.
I wonder how much people really understand the prohibition, however. I know that in my own studies, looking for discussion of these verses in any helpful way was about as difficult as finding a sensible statement in YouTube's comments section. That is to say, these verses are often spoken of generally, even in the best commentaries (with a few exceptions).
There are several possible approaches to these passages. For the sake of simplicity, I will deal primarily with the prohibition as it appears in Deut. 22:11.
1. Spiritualize It
Some commentaries, from Reformed theologians I've consulted, say that the prohibition against mixed threads is to picture Israel's own holiness. It is a way of showing that Israel's holiness is to be untainted by the nations around. One OT scholar, whom I highly respect, says that the command is literal, but that it pictures that "God has created things to act according to their natures, and they are to stay in their proper spheres." Nevertheless, the advocates of this view which I have read discuss the larger ethical message of these commandments more than the commandments themselves. They also tend not to deal with the fact that God actually commands his priests to have this same mixed fabric in their garb in Exodus 28:6, 15 and in Exodus 39:29. The priest wore a belt of mixed threads. Furthermore, Exodus 26:1-2, 7-8 commands that the curtain of the tabernacle be made from this same "forbidden" mixture of wool and linen. In my own opinion, and based on my own research, the "spiritualized" interpretation of the passage does not wrestle sufficiently with the apparent conflict between the prescribed priestly garb and these prohibitions.
Carmichael also holds to what might be called a metaphorical view. Essentially, he sees this passage specifically dealing with intermarriage of Israelites and Canaanites by way of euphemism.
2. Reject It
Some commentators, coming from a more liberal perspective than myself, follow the JEDP documentary view of the construction of the Pentateuch and say that the prohibitions of Deut. 22:11 and Lev. 19:19 are leftover vestiges of an earlier editor before the Pentateuch was finalized. They call this editor the Deuteronomist. Crediting these passages to the Deuteronomist, they say he was “unready to throw off this primitive concept” of refusing to mix unlike things. Unable to resist the urge to teach modern readers a lesson, they continue: “Unless religion does cast off such encumbrances from the dead past, progress is stifled. Ancient Egyptian religion kept its primitiveness and so was unable to achieve spiritual monotheism.” Some readers may find this line of thought compelling, but as someone who believes in the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, I find this approach far less than compelling. It fails to understand the Old Testament as a coherent whole.
3. Embrace It as Rejecting Prostitute Garb
Those to whom Moses is delivering these laws are only a generation removed from life in Egypt. Carmichael, in his discussion of this law, says that clothing of mixed fabrics was suggestive of Egyptian cultic prostitution which, of course, Israel was to have not even the least bit to do with. If Lambdin’s is right that these verses use an Egyptian loan word (šaʿaṭnēz), then it may just be that the word in question is referring to a way that the Israelites would have either dressed themselves, or seen their Egyptians masters dress, or might have seen cult prostitutes in Egypt dress. In this scenario, God’s command in Deut. 22:11 and Leviticus 19:19 is a polemical command intended to separate Israel from the nation that they have just left behind. The greatest problem with this view is that it does not adequately account for the legislation that requires the priests to make their garments from these same mixed threads.
4. Embrace It as Rejection of Priestly Garb for the Laity
This view says that the passage is not prohibiting mixed threads because it was the clothing of prostitutes. Nor is this prohibition merely meant to be a picture of holiness and Israel's distinction from among the nations. Rather, this prohibition had a very practical purpose. Numbers 16:1-40 records an incident when the laity sought to take priestly duties for themselves. In this view Deut. 22:11 (and Lev. 19:19) actually address a real and pressing issue: namely the temptation for the laity to resent or break down the distinction between priests and laity among the Israelites. Given this understanding of the prohibition of mixed threads, we see that God is placing barriers between the people and the Levites to keep such events as the rebellion of Korah from taking place. It is also easy to explain to the skeptic why Christians no longer observe this prohibition. Since the New Testament no longer distinguishes elders from the laity by clothing this command regarding mixed threads is no longer relevant except perhaps in terms of a persistent recognition that the Church still has leaders and elders whom the members are to submit to (Hebrews 13:17). Although there is nothing wrong with appealing to the threefold division of the law, it is often hard for skeptics to grasp (or they are unwilling to grasp) the fact that this distinction is not simply a convenient "out" for the defensive believer. If it is possible to answer the challenge without invoking the threefold division, I think it is best to do so from an apologetic (or at least from a didactic) perspective.
Just to put my cards on the table, this is the view which I find to be most compelling for several reasons:
a) It has ancient pedigree.
Jeffrey Tigay, in the JPS Torah Commentary on Deuteronomy points out that Josephus, while recognizing that the passage is difficult and not always understood, believed that "the prohibition applies to the laity, because the priests, when they officiate, do wear garments made of such mixtures" (Ant. 4.208). According to Josephus, this view of the passage goes back before his own time. And so it can safely be said that this view goes back at least a couple of millennia.
b) It accounts for the previous command for the priests to wear mixed threads.
As I mentioned earlier, the commands of Exodus 28:6, 15; 39:29 need to be reckoned with by anyone who wants to understand this command. Because God does command the mixing of threads elsewhere, we should reject the idea that God is prohibiting mixed threads in all situations in Deut. 22:11.
c) It allows for harmonization within the Pentateuch rather than disharmony.
God speaks with one voice in Scripture. He does not speak out of both sides of His mouth. We need to understand all of God's commands in relation to one another.
Summary
Christians, once they have a firm understanding of passages like these, will be ready to quickly, with clarity, and simplicity, answer skeptics. More and more the environment in which we live demands sound-bite answers. As soon as someone says that Christians are ethically inconsistent and bring up their polyester/cotton T-Shirt, the Christian can offer their own soundbite: "That passage in Deuteronomy is not a blanket prohibition of mixing threads all the time. Rather, it is prohibiting the average Israelite to dress like the priests. Since we don't have priests anymore and because there is no biblical command to differentiate pastors from the laity by clothing, we no longer obey this particular commandment." We obviously do still have regard for the difference between civil, ceremonial, and moral laws in the Old Testament, but in this particular case, the command is far less ridiculous or humorous than the skeptic thinks.
When I first came to believe the truth of the Christian faith, I did so - in large part - because of books like Hugh Ross' The Creator and the Cosmos and Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ. This was over a decade ago, when I was a high schooler. I was a 17 year old kid, just learning that there even was a such thing as "apologetics" - and that can be a dangerous thing.
Now, I didn't become a Christian because of those books. I became a Christian when God brought me to a realization (by reading Paul's Letter to the Romans) of my sinfulness, of my need of a redeemer, and of my need to repent. It's important to distinguish between winning an argument and winning a soul.
My theology in the years following my conversion was not shaped - first and foremost - by attention to the Word of God, I freely confess it! Rather, I had enamored myself with these apologists whom I had been first exposed to, and who had first shown me the reasonableness of the Christian faith. The debates of William Lane Craig, the near death experience talks given by J.P. Moreland, even books like Norm Geisler's Chosen But Free all made an early impact on me because I had - from the beginning - prioritized apologetic thinking over theological thinking. You might even say that all of those things appealed to me because I still came at my theology thinking like an unsaved person, peeking in and figuring things out from the perspective of an outsider trying to "solve" the problems of God and eternity. Of course, I thought I could find ways to locate scraps of these innovative doctrines (arminianism, molinism, etc.) in Scripture later on down the road, if I tried hard enough. I don't mean this as a slander against those men, but rather as a self-critical assessment of how I came at theology.
This last week, Kurt Jaros and Scott Oliphint had an interesting exchange on the Unbelievable radio program. After listening to this program, as a former classical apologetics junkie, all I could do was reflect on what a worldly approach I used to take to thinking about the doctrine of God. If you prioritize apologetics over theology, then your theology will be shaped by your ability to defend your views. You may even hold to certain doctrines because it is easier to defend against unregenerate debate opponents rather than because you found them in the Scriptures. This is absolutely upside down from the way it should be. Herman Bavinck says this better than I could ever possibly try in the prolegomena of his Reformed Dogmatics.
As Bavinck explains it, "Placing apologetics at the head of all the other theological disciplines...is explicable only from the fact that these theologians no longer recognize theology's own principles and [are] forced to look elsewhere for a foundation on which the building of theology [can] rest" (1:55-56). And here Bavinck exposes the reality that theology, on its own, is an inadequate starting point for many theologians (but it shouldn't be!). In Bavinck's day it was men like Schliemacher who placed apologetics prior to theology. In our own day, men like William Lane Craig (and his young disciples) do the same. This manifests itself, of course, in grossly unbiblical theological aberrations such as Craig's Molinism. But this is only a manifestation of theological method, not the real problem. The problem is the core of how one does theology. What is one's beginning source for what we know about God? Is it reason, unaided by revelation?
Bavinck goes on: "If...theology is deduced from its own source, i.e., from revelation, it has its own certainty and does not need corroboration of philosophical reasoning." And this is a big problem I saw in Jaros' own approach on Unbelievable. Jaros has what you might call an "unbeliever-friendly" apologetic method. Jaros might be happy with that assessment, but what it means is that his apologetics and philosophy must come first in priority. If revelation came first in priority, his approach would no longer be appealing to unbelievers, because it would be built upon God's self-revelation.
This is a problem, however: "Apologetics cannot and may not precede dogmatics but presupposes dogma and now gets the modest but still splendid task of maintaining and defending this dogma against all opposition." The person who prioritizes apologetics over theology might respond by saying that the person who puts theology first loses the ability to use arguments from nature or history in his defense of the faith (what Bavinck refers to as "dogma"). But Bavinck also has a response to this line of thinking:
[This defense of] the entire content of revelation and of Christianity as a whole, is possible for the reason that nature and grace, creation and redemption, coming as they do from one and the same God, are not and cannot be in conflict. Only sin, which consists not only in a perverse disposition of the heart but also in the darkening of the mind, has brought opposition and conflict between the two (p. 56)
I would encourage up and coming apologists/theologians to flip their priorities. In order to defend the faith you must first have a faith to defend. If your defense of the faith involves principally abandoning the very fabric of reality to prove its truthfulness, something at the core of your approach is desperately wrong, indeed.
Early on in Michael Kruger's book Canon Revisited, he makes a very pointed and helpful observation regarding the Catholic complaint that protestants do not have a "inspired table of contents" to determine their canon.
The fundamental claim of the Roman Catholic model is that sola scriptura is untenable because, without some external infallible authority, there is no way to know which books are to be included in the canon. This epistemological challenge in the words of Catholic author Patrick Madrid, is that Christians do not have an "inspired table of contents" that reveals "which books belong and which books do not." If only Christians had this inspired table of contents, then we would not need the authoritative rulings of the Roman Catholic Church to authenticate the Canon. Although such an argument is made repeatedly within Catholic writings, it proves to be problematic upon closer examination.
Imagine for a moment that God has inspired another document in the first century that contained this "table of contents" and had given it to the church. We will call this the twenty-eighth book of the New Testament canon. Would the existence of such a book have satisfied the Catholic concerns? Would this allow Catholics to affirm sola scriptura and deny the need for an infallible church? Not at all. Instead, they would simply ask the next logical question: "On what basis do you know that this twenty-eighth book comes from God?" And even if it were argued that God has given a twenty-ninth book saying the twenty-eighth book came from God, and the same objection would still apply: "Yes, but how do you know the twenty-ninth book came from God?" And on it would go. The Catholic objection about the need for a "table of contents," therefore, misses the point entirely. Even if there were another document with such a table, this document would still need to be authenticated as part of the Canon. After all, what if there were multiple table-of-contents-type books floating around in the early church? How would we know which one was from God? In the end, therefore, the Roman Catholic objection is to some extent artificial. Such a "table of contents" would never satisfy their concerns, even if it were to exist, because they have already determined, a priori, that no document could ever be self-attesting. In other words, built into the Roman Catholic model is that any written revelation (whether it contains a "table of contents" or not) will require external approval and authentication from an infallible church (Pg. 42-43).
I recall some time back, someone on Jason Stellman's Facebook page asked him if he had read Kruger's book, (someone, perhaps Jason, had mentioned the supposed Protestant lack of an inspired canon) and he responded something to the effect that any Protestant answer to the question of canon was irrelevant since it begins by begging the question. Chew on that one for a bit, and if you're a thinking person it should trouble you endlessly. There is no answering someone who has truly decided the magisterium holds all answers, truth, and authority. But if it were possible, Canon Revisited would be a great place to start.
Penn Jillette says he is beyond atheism, since atheism is simply not believing in God. Rather, Jillette says, he believes that there IS no God. Evidently he has recently been blessed with the gift of omniscience. Or at least the belief that he has omniscience. He comments briefly on the aesthetic advantages of his true-blue atheism:
Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.
Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
The thing that I can't help but reflect on is that the same subjective advantages Jillette sees in atheism are totally absent when I look at it. What ground does Jillette have for believing that the blobs of DNA he has chosen to call 'family' are any more worth valuing than the other blobs walking around? What reason other than his own physical sensations does Jillette have for his notion that suffering is 'bad' or something not to be done to others?
The fact is, Penn Jillette is a terrifically moral man who cannot account for his morality. He can assert it all the live-long day, and he has in his book. I've seen how mad he gets when people lie, for example. I love it. It's just that in his universe, I should be able to lie to him without him getting all morally superior and telling me to cut it out. And even if he does, in his universe, there is no higher court of appeal.
Back to the aesthetic point for a moment. Jillette sees a beauty to human solitude, apart from God. That is to say, he sees a universe full of suffering and evil. He admits that there is misery and sorrow all around him. He lives in a toilet. But he has accustomed himself to it and comforted himself by thinking, "At least nobody is going to flush the toilet." The best nihilism can give its adherents is the thought that a future nothing is better than a future something.
I imagine Penn Jillette and Cornelius Van Til going on a walk together. As they stroll along they come across a bird who has fallen out of its tree, its wing broken. What do they each see? Consistent with the atheistic worldview, Jillette sees an inferior biological creature. He of course, explains to Van Til that this creature was beautiful and that the suffering of said creature is even more proof that there is no God, for why would a loving God allow this beautiful creature to suffer like this?
Van Til, on the other hand, waits for Jillette to finish and looks from Jillette to the bird, and then back to Jillette. After some time of looking between them, Van Til says, "This bird can only suffer in a universe where 'oughts' exist. Either this bird 'ought' or 'ought not' to suffer, but you can not tell me what the difference is between the bird and the tree it fell out of. You assert that there is a difference, but you cannot account for a reason to actually distinguish the two other than your intuition. My worldview makes sense of suffering. Yours can't even account for distinguishing between objects."
In the end, Jillette is making due with what he has. He knows there must be beauty in the universe and he is choosing to enjoy the toilet bowl because that's the only choice that he has.
Piggybacking on my last post, I wanted to note a few sporadic and yet related thoughts.
It is worth noting that Christianity does, in fact, have its own branches which wouldn't care or even notice if God didn't exist. Things would move along pretty much as they always have if it turned out He never existed or if He just up and disappeared. Christianity is infected with what often gets termed 'moralistic therapeutic deism.' These churches have given up worship of God in exchange for moralizing their members - making them good citizens who obey the golden rule and teach their kids that God will let them into heaven if they just follow God's rules and check all the marks on the list.
Many churches have such little belief in the sovereignty of God that they believe they must be the ones to make God come within their midst. Inspired by Charles Finney and his axiomatic belief that it is man and not God who decides when revival happens, much of Christendom has set to work doing religion when the show has already left the building. The sad reality is, many churches have gotten so used to 'making church happen' that it now bears no urgent dependency upon the Divine. If God were to depart, such churches would scarcely even notice.
Other experiments in fulfilling John Gray's supposedly 'novel' idea have been tried. Back in the 60s, Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton posited a 'Christian' denial of God's existence known as the "God is dead" movement. It is of course, a relic of the old liberalism which is long forgotten by most Christians today. Such men truly argued that God is dead and gone - most specifically that Christian theism is not true. And yet they insisted on calling themselves Christian. They may have made great elders in most churches in the PCUSA.
In truth, attempts throughout recent church history have been made to separate the existence of God from the practice of religion. One need only look at the demise of the mainline protestant denominations in the United States to see that a divorce of God from religion is not sustainable in the long-term for more than the obvious reasons. When experience of God and devotion to God is split off from liturgy and sacraments, one is left with a rank and odious procession which is more a funeral for the divine than worship or celebration.
In the end, it is sad to say that despite my own protestations, I'm afraid John Gray's arguments may have been unwittingly adopted by large portions of American Christianity without their conscious awareness. Is there help for such churches? Sure. But the changes needed are fundamental, and I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to turn around.
An opinion piece in the NY Times sets forth the thesis (from philosopher John Gray) that it doesn't really matter whether God exists. In the piece, which is admittedly very interesting, the author, Gary Gutting, explains Gray's view by pointing to eastern religions which are atheist/agnostic-friendly such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Of course, Gray marginalizes people who disagree with his theological indifference by calling them "religious fundamentalists and ignorant rationalists who think the myths we live by are literal truths."
To the best of my knowledge, all of the Semitic religions believe that God really exists and that the universe is centered around His person. Some are more God-centered than others, but it seems harmful to Gray's case that most of the people on the planet who worship and follow God actually do believe that God exists and that his existence is important. Regardless of percentages or opinions, the author evidently thinks that the strongest response by someone such as myself who believes that God's existence is very important is the following:
The obvious response to Gray is that it all depends on what you hope to find in a religion. If your hope is simply for guidance and assistance in leading a fulfilling life here on earth, a “way of living” without firm beliefs in any supernatural being may well be all you need. But many religions, including mainline versions of Christianity and Islam, promise much more. They promise ultimate salvation. If we are faithful to their teachings, they say, we will be safe from final annihilation when we die and will be happy eternally in our life after death.
To me, this is far from the strongest response. My reaction is not to offer a subjective answer to an objective claim. And for those of you new to Christian apologetics, let me just offer this little tidbit. If somebody says, "It doesn't matter if God exists," your best reaction should not be, "That's not what I want out of a religion. I want a God who really exists!" The cynic will rightly respond, "I want to see a ladybug eat the cast of Twilight whole, but it ain't happening."
I'll digress, however, and keep following Gray's argument. He goes on to argue that even if God's existence could be sufficiently established to one's satisfaction, that still would not prove that such a God wants to save said person and take them to heaven.
Here, discussions of the problem of evil become crucial. An all-good being, even with maximal power, may have to allow considerable local evils for the sake of the overall good of the universe; some evils may be necessary for the sake of avoiding even worse evils. We have no way of knowing whether we humans might be the victims of this necessity.
In other words, if the universe is even a little bit out of the control of God, there is no guarantee that the most devoted saint will be able to enter heaven since the existence of any counterfactuals means that God's will is not ultimately supreme. If there were 'rules' for going to heaven, doesn't the existence of evil and sin in the universe mean there is no guarantee that evil will not triumph in the salvation process of said saint?
It may seem to us that if we live as we should, God will ensure our salvation. But it also seems, from our limited viewpoint, that God would not permit things like the Holocaust or the death of innocent children from painful diseases. Once we appeal to the gap between our limited knowledge and God’s omniscience, we cannot move from what we think God will do to what he will in fact do. So the fact that we think an all-good God would ensure our salvation does not support the conclusion that, all things considered, he will in fact do so.
He then goes into a bit of a digression about how there are people who appeal to their experience with God as proof that He will save them, but then Gray points out that even if the deity does exist and is communicating to this person, how does one have assurance that the deity will be able to ensure that this salvation will happen? How does the person know that the deity is not malevolent and fooling them, or simply unable to actualize the salvation? After all, He does dwell in a universe where evil has happened before. Perhaps evil will show its ugly mug again.
Aside from the fact that this does sound a bit like a monologue that the guy holding his sixth Guinness next to you at Rosie McCafferty's Pub might be spouting off, there is a reasonable point here. Fortunately, the author does get to that point by the end of the piece.
We can, of course, simply will to believe that we are not being deceived. But that amounts to blind faith, not assured hope. If that doesn’t satisfy us, we need to find a better response to the problem of evil than an appeal to our ignorance.
The point which I accept is that we need a robust view of God and his sovereignty. 99% of this article does not apply to Reformed people who do not appeal to free will to explain the sin which is in this universe. The truth is, the first sin was not out of the control or sovereignty of God, and so any and all evils which happen are under the self-determination of God.
Gray would, I think, argue from his position of skepticism that our problem is not the impotence of God to stop evil, but rather, the claim that God may be evil or deceptive. There are effective responses to this, however.
First, it is important to remember that God has revealed Himself to us, and He has told us that He is good. If men want to hypothesize that he is evil, then they must posit the alternative and consider what that leaves them with (read the next points to see what that is).
Second, if you even grant for the sake of argument that God might be immoral/deceptive/evil, you remove all possibility of morality. John Gray might say, "well, there you are," but I'm not entirely sure John Gray - in all his skepticism - would be willing to posit a totally amoral universe.
Third, if you grant that God is deceptive for the sake of argument, then you destroy the foundations for epistemology. In other words, you become unscientific. Knowledge itself becomes totally uprooted.
From Gray's position of entrenched skepticism, he is not free from criticism. Often skepticism is enjoyed because it is seen as unassailable. However, even the skevptic must be able to account for some things. Even the skeptic wants to believe true things. Even the skeptic wants to offer arguments which are logical. Even the skeptic believes that lies are immoral. How can he account for a universe where truth, logic, and morality can co-exist? Does the skeptic's universe even allow for universal, immaterial, invariant laws? If so, why is he exempted from enunciating a basic defense of his skeptical worldview?
In the end, the skeptic goes into a tail dive because he speaks as someone who is standing outside the conversation, without a horse in the race. However, the reality is that he is quite invested and is far from the disinterested observer that he likes to paint himself as. So speak up, skeptics. Criticize dishonesty and bad arguments when you see it, but remember that you also must account for the universe as we know it.
Christian apologetics tends to be extremely defensive in nature. “Defending the faith” is the way we often think of apologetics. Of course we know that apologetics is more than simply defensive, but it is fair to say that a large amount of energy by Christians is spent responding to atheists – be it the so-called four horsemen of atheism (Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, or the late Chris Hitchens) or simply the run-of-the-mill atheists whom we've all encountered at one time or another.
Right out of the gate, I want to say this about Alvin Plantinga’s new book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism - he takes the fight to the atheists. After reading this book, it becomes apparent that if they want to carry the mantle of rationality then naturalists/atheists have a lot of work to do.
From the beginning, in typical philosophical fashion, Plantinga is straightforward about the case he is about to spend the book making:
My overall claim in this book: there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism. (90-91) [All references are from the Kindle edition of the book]
He does not insist that science is at peace with every metaphysical commitment, however: “there is a science/religion (or science/ quasi-religion) conflict, all right, but it isn’t between science and theistic religion: it’s between science and naturalism” (103-104).
In Part I of the book, Plantinga recounts the alleged conflict that is said to exist between theism and science. He reviews arguments by Dawkins, Dennett, and Paul Draper, demonstrating that their commitment to naturalism is a metaphysical commitment and that science (and especially evolution) ought not to necessarily entail naturalism as the atheists are wont to insist. He also spends an extended amount of time discussing the question of whether a belief in a God who does miracles and “intervenes” in the world undermines the possibility of scientific exploration or knowledge. Arguing that science deals with the possibility of knowledge within a system when it is closed, it is silent on laws within a system when it is open (such as when a being intervenes from the outside).
Some may find Plantinga’s method of apologetics to be somewhat difficult to swallow. He believes that God’s existence cannot be strictly proven, but his view that God has implanted a sensus divinitatis within mankind means that a belief in God is properly basic and provides an epistemic ground for theistic belief. That is to say, just as we do not perceive other minds to exist, or perceive this house to be standing in front of us through a chain of arguments or inferences, we likewise do not believe that God exists because of a chain of inferences or arguments. Plantinga says that we perceive God rather than arguing to God.
That does not mean that defeaters cannot be presented to the perceiver of God. Theism is not, in principle, nonfalsifiable. Plantinga's argument for proper basicality cannot be used to prove any and every belief. The atheist, it is alleged, offers alleged defeaters for this belief, and the alleged defeaters are to be dealt with.
It is perfectly obvious that theists won’t be able to give an explanation of mind in general—they won’t be able to offer an explanation for the state of affairs consisting in there being at least one mind—because, naturally enough, there isn’t any explanation of the existence of God. But that is certainly not a point against theism. Explanations come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God. For any other view of the same level of generality they also come to an end. The materialist or physicalist, for example, doesn’t have an explanation for the existence of elementary particles or, more generally, contingent physical or material beings; that there are some is, from that perspective, a brute fact. It isn’t easy to say precisely what counts as begging the question; but to fault theism for failing to have an ultimate explanation of mind is as good a candidate as any. (545-551)
One of the most important claims Plantinga defends in the book is that evolution does not entail the claim that natural selection is an unguided process. The claim that evolution is unguided is a metaphysical commitment which makes a judgment in an area where science cannot speak with authority.
On the one hand, therefore, we have the scientific theory, and on the other, there is the claim that the course of evolution is not directed or guided or orchestrated by anyone; it displays no teleology; it is blind and unforeseeing; as Dawkins says, it has no aim or goal in its mind’s eye, mainly because it has no mind’s eye. This claim, however, despite its strident proclamation, is no part of the scientific theory as such; it is instead a metaphysical or theological add-on. On the one hand there is the scientific theory; on the other, the metaphysical add-on, according to which the process is unguided. The first is part of current science, and deserves the respect properly accorded to a pillar of science; but the first is entirely compatible with theism. The second supports naturalism, all right, but is not part of science, and does not deserve the respect properly accorded science. And the confusion of the two—confusing the scientific theory with the result of annexing that add-on to it, confusing evolution as such with unguided evolution—deserves not respect, but disdain. (4233-4240)
This claim of Plantinga’s will meet with some resistance from orthodox Christians who have (justifiably) less than friendly feelings towards evolution (especially given the new arguments surrounding Adam & Eve). The point, which is not to be missed, however, is that evolution as such, does not present a defeater for theism. It may present a defeater for a literal reading of Genesis, it may present a defeater for the Westminster Confession’s statements on creation, and it may present a defeater for inerrancy in general, but it does not present a defeater for Christian theism.
The truth of the theory of natural selection, therefore, doesn’t for a moment show that all of life has come to be by way of unguided natural selection, or even that it is biologically possible that it has come to be that way. It is therefore a mistake to say with Dennett that “the theory of natural selection shows how every feature of the world can be the product of a blind, unforesightful, nonteleological, ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction.” (717-720)
The point in Plantinga’s discussion is not whether evolution is true or how old the universe is – the point is that even if one believes in evolution, the metaphysical claim of naturalism, which is often attached to evolution, is an added assumption. The one does not necessarily entail the other.
In Part II of the book, Plantinga reviews the superficial conflict that does exist between theism and modern science. He talks about evolutionary psychology as well as modern naturalistic methodologies in scripture scholarship (higher biblical criticism). Plantinga concedes that evolutionary psychology and higher biblical criticism cannot co-exist happily with a theistic worldview. However, he also argues that these issues are superficial in nature and that they do not offer defeaters for theistic belief since they entail the very metaphysical assumptions that are at issue.
In Part III Plantinga reviews the ways in which theism finds happy concord with science. He discusses the merits of fine-tuning arguments and Behe’s irreducible complexity. Some may be interested Plantinga’s evaluation of fine-tuning arguments from his analytical-philosophical perspective. In sum, he does not find the arguments to be nearly as strong as some classical apologists have:
The right conclusion, I think, is that the [Fine Tuning Argument] offers some slight support for theism. It does offer support, but only mild support. Granted: this is not a very exciting conclusion, not nearly as exciting as the conclusion that the argument is extremely powerful, or the conclusion that it is wholly worthless. It does, however, have the virtue of being correct. (3138-3140)
It is worth the effort to read his arguments for this conclusion, though we don’t have time to work through them in this review. He also has this conclusion regarding Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity:
On balance, then: Behe’s design discourses do not constitute irrefragable arguments for theism, or even for the proposition that the structures he considers have in fact been designed. Taken not as arguments but as design discourses they fare better. They present us with epistemic situations in which the rational response is design belief—design belief for which there aren’t strong defeaters. The proper conclusion to be drawn, I think, is that Behe’s design discourses do support theism, although it isn’t easy to say how much support they offer. (3679-3683)
He also discusses the “deep concord” between theism and science. He discusses the friendliness between the theistic view of human knowledge and the reliability of the senses, mathematics, simplicity, and contingency. Pointing to the Christian view of the image of God in man, his argument centers on the fact that God has made man to be a knower and has designed man’s mind to have a correspondence with the world around him.
According to theism, God has created us in such a way that we reason in inductive fashion; he has created our world in such a way that inductive reasoning is successful. This is one more manifestation of the deep concord between theism and science. (4111-4113)
Atheists cannot make such a claim. Part IV of the book is where Plantinga gets the knives out. Whereas Christians are able to account for induction, simplicity, the constancy of physical laws, the abstract non-physical laws of mathematics, and reliability of the senses, atheists have no such ground for rationality. Regarding physical laws,
[F]rom the point of view of naturalism, the character of these laws is something of an enigma. What is this alleged necessity they display, weaker than logical necessity, but necessity nonetheless? What if anything explains the fact that these laws govern what happens? What reason if any is there for expecting them to continue to govern these phenomena? Theism provides a natural answer to these questions; naturalism stands mute before them. (3939-3942)
Plantinga goes farther than to simply argue that atheists can’t explain the universe. He actually argues that rationality and atheism are mutually destructive. His argument that naturalism is self-defeating has been around in printed form for years. However, in this book it forms the meat and potatoes of his argument against naturalism.
What I will argue is that naturalism is in conflict with evolution, a main pillar of contemporary science. And the conflict in question is not that they can’t both be true (the conflict is not that there is a contradiction between them); it is rather that one can’t sensibly accept them both. (4252-4254)
What Plantinga essentially argues is that unguided natural selection only promotes the survival of the organism in question - not the gaining of truth. This means that while Christians believe we are designed to know truth and that there is a correspondence between the world and our senses, naturalism can make no such claim. Plantinga’s entire argument, formally stated, goes as follows. [KEY: P=Probability R=Rationality N=Naturalism E=Evolution]
(1) P(R/N&E) is low. (2) Anyone who accepts (believes) N&E and sees that P(R/ N&E) is low has a defeater for R. (3) Anyone who has a defeater for R has a defeater for any other belief she thinks she has, including N&E itself. (4) If one who accepts N&E thereby acquires a defeater for N&E, N&E is self-defeating and can’t rationally be accepted. Conclusion: N&E can’t rationally be accepted. This argument shows that if someone accepts N&E and sees that P(R/N&E) is low, then she have a defeater for N&E, a reason to reject it, a reason to doubt or be agnostic with respect to it.
After stating the argument, Plantinga reviews a possible attempt by the naturalist to squirm out from under it:
Naturalistic evolution gives its adherents a reason for doubting that our beliefs are mostly true; chances are they are mostly mistaken. If so, it won’t help to argue that they can’t be mostly mistaken; for the very reason for mistrusting our cognitive faculties generally, will be a reason for mistrusting the faculties that produce belief in the goodness of that argument. This defeater, therefore, can’t be defeated. Hence the devotee of N&E has an undefeated defeater for N&E. N&E, therefore, cannot rationally be accepted—at any rate by someone who is apprised of this argument and sees the connections between N&E and R. (4757-4762)
All in all, Plantinga’s book takes the fight to the atheists. They have serious problems to work through which are endemic to their worldview. How an atheist proposes to solve the problem of rationality with unguided natural selection is beyond me. I am not heavily involved enough in the contemporary debates to really know for myself whether there even has been a proposed solution offered to Plantinga’s past iterations of the argument that naturalism is self-defeating.
Presuppositionalists will have mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, they will utterly despise Plantinga's philosophical approach, which involves a great deal of discussion about probabilities (presuppositionalists are allergic to probabilities). They will also not agree with Plantinga's method of arguing for theism in general rather than Christian theism particularly. On the other hand, this book puts a large number of arguments and tools into the hands of the presuppositional apologist.
All in all, Plantinga’s book is an apologetic tour de force. Philosophically rigorous and yet written at a popular level, it constitutes a bold introduction to Alvin Plantinga which many lay Christians have heretofore not had popular access to, and it constitutes one of the strongest challenges to atheism in print. It may not be the book that many want, and most of his readers will not agree with Plantinga on everything (especially his apparent concession to theistic evolution), but one thing is for certain – this is the book which Christendom has needed for years, it is the pinnacle and summation of Plantinga’s philosophical prowess, and distills years of Plantinga's work into a single volume. We are blessed to finally have it.
12 years. I've been an old-earth creationist for twelve years. More precisely, I've held what is often called a Day-Age View of creation. While refusing to believe in evolution, I have often scoffed at the idea of being a young earth creationist. And so, I have stood by Hugh Ross and his interpretation of Genesis since as long as I can remember.
This began ages ago. I was once an atheist. While I was in high school, I defaulted to atheism because I did not like my parents' religion, and frankly, I didn't like the idea of God and was embarrassed by the tongues-speaking, word-of-knowledge loving, 700 Club watching Christianity of my father. When I was 17, however, I had a change of heart. It was the Spirit of God changing me and making me into a new person, though I just thought it was my own great idea at the time. One of the tools God used was Hugh Ross' books The Fingerprint of God and The Creator and the Cosmos. These books not only affected the way I looked at the universe, but they opened me up to the truth that I was created by someone and that I could not live my life as a rebel against Him and expect to escape unscathed. I will never forget Hugh Ross, and I hope someday to meet him and thank him for his ministry at Reasons to Believe. I know that many young-earthers demonize his ministry, but he was used of God to change my life.
In becoming a Christian, I was never asked to put away my old presuppositions about the universe (especially the age of it). In fact, the beauty of Ross' approach to apologetics was that it met me where I was at and showed me that, in my view of the universe, I still had to acknowledge a creator. It disarmed me without my permission, yet never asked me to lay down my arms. For me, it was never a question of science vs. revelation. I always saw them as complementary.
Early on in my life, and even after coming to faith, I was exposed to the ministry of Kent Hovind. I remember bits and pieces, but what I do remember was embarassing. I saw a wild-eyed guy who, in my mind, took some facts that he learned from reading Stephen Hawking, put a Christian twist on them, and then spent most of his time arguing that old-earthers like me were wrong. He followed up his presentation by claiming that the Loch Ness Monster (Nessie) was real, that there may still be dinosaurs alive today, and even showing slides of people and dinosaurs living side-by-side. I also remember a suggestion on his part that at one point men may have domesticated dinosaurs (complete with a slide of a man riding on a saddled triceratops).
Ludicrous. Just ludicrous. I was an intelligent, thoughtful, scientific person, and I knew a crackpot when I saw one. In truth, I remember little of Hovind's ministry. I only remember the crazy parts that I recalled here. The point of this is not that I want to defame a godly man like Kent Hovind. The point here is to explain that my old-earth views which I have held for a dozen years were a combination of unabandoned presuppositions and reaction against a brand of fundamentalism which I found ugly and embarrassing.
My exposure to young-earth ministries since meeting Hovind's has not faired much better. Earlier this year our church hosted a speaking engagement with Jonathan Sarfati which I found to be far less than compelling. Like most creationist ministries, Sarfati's ministry seemed to be more focused on showing old-earth Christians that they were wrong than with meeting evolutionists in battle. This is still my perception of most creationist-focused ministries.
In the last couple of years I decided to revisit my assumptions about the book of Genesis, and one thing which I came to believe was that the Day-Age view of Genesis which I held did not stand up to the reading I was giving to it. For one thing, my interpretation of Genesis required the creation of stars (including the sun) on day one, while on day four I merely understood God's "making" the sun to be a revealing of the sun through some sort of primordeal mist. To my mind, this did not do the text justice because pulling back a mist is not the same thing as "making" the sun.
I did not hold to any sort of de-chronologized reading of Genesis, and so generally the order of the events in the text began to bother me, from my old-earth perspective. Perhaps my project to make science and scripture comport could not stand up to the scrutiny. Within the last year I turned towards the Framework view of Genesis and for a time was pleasantly surprised that many of my problems seemed to disappear with the Framework view. After all, the Framework view is not about science. It does not claim to know how old the earth is because the Framework view of Scripture does not understand the Bible as even speaking to the age of the universe. I found the chiastic structure between day 2 and day 5 to be quite compelling. I found the dual triadic structure of days 1-3 (creation kingdoms) and days 4-6 (creation kings) to be very insightful. I found Meredith Kline's argument that Genesis 2:5-6 establishes that creation happened through normal providence to be devastatingly helpful. In the end, I was ready to hold and defend the Framework view. The only thing is, I realized that I could appreciate the chiastic structure of the days of creation without actually de-chronologizing Genesis. I also knew that there were ways of reading Gen. 2:5-6 from a young-earth perspective that seemed perfectly acceptable, exegetically speaking. To make it simple, I realized that I wasn't being dragged kicking and screaming by the text towards the Day-Age view or the Framework view. It was the Young-Earth view which I was being dragged kicking and screaming towards.
In a conversation with my pastor, he asked me a pointed question. Though I don't remember the exact wording, he asked me essentially whether there was something prideful or stubborn that was keeping me from accepting the plain reading of the text. Although I have never found the argument that the plain meaning of the text is the right meaning compelling (it isn't) his question cut through a lot of the issues and got to the state of my heart, which is what I needed. The truth is, I was resisting a young-earth reading of Genesis because I was too proud to be a part of the Kent Hovind crowd. I was so judgmental and proud all these years against Kent Hovind's weirdness that I kept myself from what I now believe is the most sensible and accurate reading of the words of Genesis.
I have come to believe, after all of these years, that God did, in fact, create in six literal 24-hour days. I resisted holding this view for negative, rather than positive reasons. I was sinning these many years by judging my fellow Christians who I deemed to be less sophisticated than me because they held to a literal, 24-hour view of creation, and I suppose this blog is as good a place as any for me to repent of my sinful attitude.
Let me add a postscript here and just say that I do not believe that day-agers or frameworkers hold to the views they do because of the reasons I did. I am not interested in imputing any motives to those with whom I used to agree on this issue. The truth is, we are all complex creatures, and if it took 12 years for God to root this single strand of pride out of my heart, I would not presume that the issue is the same with others.
Speaking of the failure of the modern scientific age, Percy in his essay "The Delta Factor" speaks of man's unique position, not as homo sapien but as homo loquens, man the talker. Alone among animals, humans speak constantly and unceasingly. Modern scientists only see man as an organism in an environment, but as I shared earlier, man behaves like anything other than this (just look at how miserable people are, even in good environments).
But scientists, though their enterprise is doomed from the beginning, must batton down the hatches and dig in their heels.
Accordingly, it did not strike anyone as peculiar when scientists sought an explanation for man's perversity and upsidedownness in this or that atavism from man's evolutionary past. Man blamed beasts for his madness. Next, it seemed natural to look for the source of man's "aggressive" behavior in the aggression and "territoriality" of more primitive species...even though no...creature but man has been observed to wage war against itself (suicide) or against its own kind (war).
Curious, I took advantage of my modern age and used the internet to look for people who do think that animals commit suicide (I knew somebody must believe it). I was not disappointed.
One article, by Stefan Anitei, "Do Animals Commit Suicide?" says from the beginning that it is hard to really know if animals commit suicide, but then goes on to argue that they do, anyway. The entire article is a series of anecdotes which tell us more about the author than about the behavior of animals. If you enjoy Milo and Otis-style articles filled with anthropomorphic animal tales, this article will quite fit your fancy. The highlight of the article is actually the comments section, which I have a hard time taking seriously. Here is a standout written by "Brad":
I happen to know that animals DO commit suicide, and quite often... In fact I used to have a pet turtle who is my living proof. It enjoyed watching movies with me, some of its favorite's were films like Forest Gump, and Kill Bill. One day we watched Requrium [sic] For A Dream, and instantly after the movie, it crawled to its fake log in its cage, lifted it, then slammed it down on its neck, resulting in a catastrophic paralysis injury. I then had no other choice but to batter it with a heavy spoon to put it out of its own misery. Animals DO commit suicide.
Hilarious as this story might seem, I believe the author is sincere. Look at this response I found a little further down the page.
wow truly emotional brad..... yea wow. Animals have feelings like humans. People tend to think since animals are not so complex as us that they are less superior therefore less capable of emotions. Also that animals follow a daily ritual everyday. Just because they dont have a civilization or just because they dont have as many genes as us. does that mean they arent as complex as us? If you think about it, some animals minds work just like us. just because they cant speak a language or do other things like us dosnt mean that they are not capable of feeling emotions. cats and dogs show great emotion. if you have a dog or a cat when you are down about something (my cats atleast) will jump up on my lap and start purring and loving on me because they sense depresion. they obvioulsy can point it out so why do we think that they arent capiable to feeling it. thus deppression is the leading emotion to suicide in humans. So if animals can reconize depression and feel depression whats stopping them. plus we can argue that humans are animals too. just because we get out of the "state of nature" dosnt mean we arent animals, or mamals we are apart of them and they are apart of us.
Brilliantly, this comment by "vash" illustrates the absurdity of modern man which Percy is addressing. Professing to be unique among the animals for his ability to "get out of the 'state of nature'," vash still says that we are animals. There is nothing tongue-in-cheek about vash's response to the tale of the suicidal turtle. These people really believe that this turtle is capable of comprehending the crushing depth of man's lostness illustrated in Requiem and then responding with existential hopelessness by devising a mechanism of crushing its own skull.
If ever Percy needed help substantiating his claim that "Man blames beasts for his madness," Brad and Vash have done it for him.
I wonder if an internet search might find someone who believes that animals tell tales to one another of their human masters committing suicide...
I have recently become increasingly aware of the importance of self-knowledge - primarily as a result of my new infatuation with the writings of Walker Percy. I wanted to share a series of quotes dealing with self-knowledge and man's inability to find himself apart from God. I'll begin with a quote from Walker Percy's magnificent book Lost in the Cosmos. This quote alone has had such a profound impact on my own life, in existential terms, which I find difficult to describe. It's been about a month since I first read it, and I continue to be grateful for having read it:
The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war. The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one’s own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being. Amazing! Indeed, the most amazing of all the creatures of the Cosmos: a ghost with an erection! Yet not really amazing, for only if the abstracted ghost has an erection can it, like Jove spying Europa on the beach, enter the human condition.
How empty are our pursuits of pleasure! If they do not find their root in God, then they are meaningless and we remain lost in the cosmos.
Many do not like Kierkegaard because of his high philosophical language and because of his "leap of faith" approach to apologetics, which one may or may not see much virtue in. Kierkegaard was a Lutheran, however, and understood that human antipathy against God lies at the heart of all human problems. For all of his faults he was a great thinker and had a profound grasp of the human condition. In this age of alienation, despair, and lostness, modern man could do worse than to grasp the reality of what Kierkegaard understood about the self and despair.
The human being is essentially spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is to be a self. But what is the self? In short, the self is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. The self is the conscious unity of these factors, which relates to itself, whose task is to become itself. This, of course, can only be done in relationship to God, who holds the synthesis together. When is despair completely eradicated? It occurs when the self, in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, is grounded nakedly in the power that established it. In other words, when it is related openly to and dependently on God. To transcend despair is neither to become finite nor to become infinite but to become an individual in their synthesis, which God alone holds together. In so far as the self does not become itself in this way, it is not itself. And not to be oneself, as God created you, is despair.
Lest one think all this talk about self-knowledge sounds a bit to high and philosophical, I wanted to bring in the friend of all good Presbyterians, John Calvin. Calvin famously argued at the very beginning of his Institutes (1.1.1) that self-knowledge is crucial to Divine knowledge, and that Divine knowledge is the only thing which would make true self-knowledge possible.
Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves...it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. For (such is our innate pride) we always seem to ourselves just, and upright, and wise, and holy, until we are convinced, by clear evidence, of our injustice, vileness, folly, and impurity. Convinced, however, we are not, if we look to ourselves only, and not to the Lord also —He being the only standard by the application of which this conviction can be produced...But though the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are bound together by a mutual tie, due arrangement requires that we treat of the former in the first place, and then descend to the latter.
I believe it entirely possible that in our apologetics, we have - in terms of our language, in terms of our overall approach, so emphasized the objective truth of God's existence extra nous that we have neglected the one area where our fellow human beings cannot deny a lack in themselves. They do not understand themselves, and they hate the One who can make sense of their existence and self-hood.
It is patently obvious, though perhaps not scientifically provable, that human beings are, as Percy says, "something more than an organism in an environment, because for one thing he acts like anything but an organism in an environment." Is it possible that in reformed apologetics we have made the same mistake Percy says scientists are making, and that we are approaching the universe (and perhaps even God Himself) as a scientific observer rather than as one who is to "know and be known" by God?
AOL TV summarizes an interview with singer/actress Kristin Chernoweth, where she claims that "her staunch Christian beliefs are not at odds with her support for the gay community."
In an interview with 'The Advocate' Chenoweth says that people are born gay or straight, just like they're either tall or short, and that it's not a choice. In response to a question about people who cite Christianity as justification for passing discriminatory laws, she said "I would ask, 'What would Jesus do?'"
She added that, "It sounds so cliché and Pollyanna-ish, but I have a feeling if he were on the earth today, he wouldn't be walking around saying, 'You're going to hell' and 'You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong.' I think he'd be accepting and loving."
Chenoweth continued, using her own tiny stature to illustrate her point. "What would I do if it was a sin to be short? That's the way God made me, so what could I do? Let's see, I could wear heels, I could tease my hair, and maybe on a good day I could be 5'1". But the bottom line is, I'm 4'11" and that's the way I was put together. And that's what I believe about homosexuals."
The example of "if it was a sin to be short" is of course, ridiculous. The fact is that there are lots of things that people believe are wrong even though people have a natural inclination to do them. From lusting in your heart after someone to the fact that by nature we enjoy stealing and talking about our neighbor behind their back, we are by nature sinners. Our natural condition or desire is no gauge for morality. I hate to drop a bomb like Lewis on Chernoweth's head, because she's such a sweet lady, but this notion that our natural desires are good and are the measure of goodness needs to be laid to rest once and for all. Take it, Lewis:
Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey 'people'. People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding it in its own favour would be rather simple-minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.
As far as I'm concerned, Christians ought to stop fighting the battle over whether or not some people are born with homosexual desires. Let us grant it. Supporters of the morality of homosexual behavior are still left in the position of defending a morality which is rooted in the human condition rather than in an external natural law. As Lewis says in the above quote from The Abolition of Man, this position is circular in nature.
