That
leads me into your question to the other writer, who said, "I want so
badly to embrace Christianity . . . to embrace faith in
God . . . ", to which you responded, "why? why?
why?" Well, I can't answer for the
other writer, but speaking for myself, it's quite simple ‑‑ there
are two reasons.
First,
I don't want to die. The thought of my
own extinction leaves me a huddled, quivering, amorphous mass of abject,
incoherent terror. I can't stand it
that when things age to a beautiful level of depth and maturity and wisdom and
peacefulness, they die. I can't stand
it that when humans who keep learning throughout life get old, they've finally
figured out how to live right and are truly beautiful to contemplate, and then they
die. Someone once asked me, "Isn't
your own discontent with the state of things as you think they are evidence
itself that maybe you're wrong?"
You asked a similar question of the other writer: "is this not
evidence ITSELF of your faith in such a wondrous God, who 'rewards those who
seek Him' (Heb 11)?" My answer:
No. There's a major difference between
wishes and facts. The fact that I want
something doesn't make it true.
I
THINK I addressed part of this in that “Seeking” piece, but let me make a
couple of brief observations here:
First, I cannot tell whether the ‘other person’ you
speak of was suggesting that your discontent was PROOF, or rather was merely
evidence, or rather still was merely interpretable as evidence…and
evidence that needs to be evaluating and interpreted—to the best of your
ability. Someone’s discontent over not being 6 foot 4 inches tall doesn’t PROVE
that they SHOULD be that tall. Discontent over not being able to ‘have your own
way’ all the time doesn’t PROVE you should be crowned emperor. Discontent over
seeing a news story about child abuse or political torture doesn’t PROVE these
acts should not be done, but it might provide EVIDENCE for built-in
moral notions (especially if others around you share your ‘discontent’ at
atrocity). Discontent over treachery,
oppression, and injustice doesn’t PROVE they are ‘wrong’, but it may provide
EVIDENCE for built-in standards of morality. Your discontent over death doesn’t
PROVE that you should live forever, but it may provide EVIDENCE of a built-in ‘moral rejection’ of
death. It—like a desire to rule the world—might be selfish, but it might
also—like a desire to see atrocity cease—be indicative of a ‘high’ nature
inside. But you still would have to evaluate that (along with the many other
things that might be evidence, which I mentioned in the Seeker
piece)
Secondly, I am not sure anyone is
suggesting that your WISHING for non-extinction proves the FACT of your
non-extinction at all. At most it might provide evidence that your existing
state is ‘out of synch’ with what you were ‘originally created’ to be. No
Christian I know argues that ‘wishing for something makes it true’…But ‘wishing
for something’ might SUGGEST that it was ‘true’ or at least 'possible to be
true' (as in “build-into” your aspirations, etc)…
Thirdly, my comment to the writer was about his
discontent with his experience of God, which showed an openness and sensitivity
to that relationship. In that case—as in ALL personal relationships—being
concerned about a dysfunctional relationship is a POSTIVE sign, and evidence
that insight was present. In that context, ‘discontent’ was a sign of
health. In your case, with the fear of death, the ‘discontent’ (fear) is a
motivation (and perhaps a suggestion that another outcome is possible). I
consider it also, personally, a ‘sign of health’ in that many people—Christian
and non—do NOT take this reality seriously, and do NOT ask the hard questions
of honesty and ‘have I overlooked something?’ and ‘am I REALLY confident of my
expectations?’, etc….
Fourthly, there are worse things
than extinction, friend. There is having to live in a prison of one's own
making--isolated by habits of isolating others, close-minded because of habits
of resisting truth, being exiled because of violent character, perpetually
anxious, because of chronic self-deception, forever being distrusted by others,
because of failure to ever trust others, etc. Remember C.S. Lewis' The Great
Divorce…
So,
I think it is a legitimate reason to re-consider God, and although you might
come under fire by some for being ‘selfish’ or ‘utilitarian’ in re-opening this
question for this reason, I cannot find anything ethically questionable
about self-preservation (as long as it is not at the involuntary expense of
others, of course) and indeed find plenty of biblical support that God ‘built
it in’ and desires us to know peace and confidence when faced with what seems
to be an intruder in our universe.
Second, I sometimes think of myself as an atheist who loves goodness and virtue--maybe EVEN IF its connected with a 'god'. It's only half (if that much) a joke. I feel a definite emotional pull toward phrases like, "Be ye perfect," and "Whatever is good and true and beautiful and pure, think on these things." Once, when recently pondering what my life's ambition is, I came up with the answer, "I want to be a virtue 'saint'." I find the call to consecrate every aspect of one's life to the highest and best to be compellingly attractive. Bizarre stuff for an atheist, eh?
Not
bizarre at all—unless you hang out with a different kind of atheist than I
know(!)…the few I know “up close” aspire to truth (but take very few epistemic
‘risks’—in the sense of William James’ “will to believe”) and certainly aspire
to good, altruistic behavior. They evidence clear appreciation for beauty--and,
like you, they love their kids.…So,
since I, fortunately, don’t know the
really rough crowd of them that YOU apparently
hang out with (chuckle), I have no reason to be surprised…you word
choice of ‘virtue saint’ of course, might be a bit ‘provocative’ but your
skeptic friends might be able to make that semantic leap, once they knew what
YOU meant by that…
But
there’s still an ambiguity here, friend—faced by us all--and one which Jesus
advanced to the Rich Young Ruler…he aspired to the highest, but Jesus
confronted him with the need to follow the servant-path, to consecrate his life
to others’ experiences of compassion and help, and to share Jesus’ solidarity
in suffering and rejection by the powerful, the elite, the ‘educated’, the
religious authorities…Jesus had to take Peter’s zeal-for-good down a notch, and
had to revolutionize Rabbi Saul’s quest for purity within Israel…as long as
‘highest and best’ means a solidarity and servant commitment to helping the
‘lowest and worst’ among us, then that aspiration is pure beauty and iridescent
love…
My
own life is a continual refinement and re-learning of what IS the
good/true/beautiful…and where my part is in that path…sometimes my heart’s
motivation is clouded or mixed for it—do I seek the good for its own sake, for
my ‘pleasure’ in experiencing it, for the “glitter of man’s praise” once I
‘achieve it’, for some psychic/other reward in the New Future, for the ability
to share it with others when it becomes part of my life? Or what? Or what
mixture of these?
You
passionate desire for this is a good, good fire…but you must make sure it is
also pure and warm and tender…can you be the Good Samaritan without being
self-conscious about how ‘good you look’ in so doing? Can you accept the task
of helping others and never receiving thanks from humanity (how many cured
lepers returned to give Jesus thanks?)? Motivations are so key in this search,
friend…as I wrote in that Seeker piece, the first
show-stopper is arrogance or self-centered pride…but your passionate desire for
the good (like mine) will need continual examination and self-honesty…
So, along comes the next question that people ask me: "Isn't that emotional longing in itself evidence that what you are seeking exists?" And again, my answer is: No. At least not in the sense of the existence of a deity or other "externalized" source of the things I love. My best (extremely abbreviated ‑‑ I don't want to get sidetracked here and waste your time) explanation for my emotional desire is that there are objective moral values hard‑wired into our very nature ‑‑ that just as eating vegetables is good for us and eating rocks is bad for us, truth and honesty and benevolence and purity are good for us and deceit and hypocrisy and malevolence and evil intent are bad for us ‑‑ not good or bad for us in the sense of "the greatest good for the greatest number", and not "bad for me and good for someone else", but good or bad for EACH INDIVIDUAL human, because he or she is by nature human. And that we respond with love to things that we perceive as being good for us and with hate to things that we perceive as being bad for us. We love those entities (people, animals, etc.) and things that embody our deepest values. We want to be "right" with respect to the virtues necessary for living, so we aspire to "goodness".
You
are quite right that we would get sidetracked here, and anyway, I wrote a
little on that topic in the Seeker piece…I would
suggest, however, that this view of ‘aspiration to goodness’ is (a) less than
obvious, given the scale, pervasiveness, and variety of human atrocity in the
world; (b) could be interpreted as evidence for some transcendent aspect of
your character, since you would also have competing ‘desires’, perhaps more
bestial, at the same time you had the ‘pull to the good’; (c) the
‘hard-wired’ aspect would be ambiguous, supporting either view [as ALL
‘naturalistic’ mechanisms are…they ‘underdetermine’ the results…they can be interpreted
as evidence of ‘nothing else’ OR as evidence of clever design…I use a couple of
cases of it as evidence of design in a couple of places in the Tank, as does
C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity (if I remember correctly)]; and (d) I am
not at all sure the definition/formulation of virtue you make here is even
conceptually coherent (e.g., the contrast between ‘for all individuals’ and
‘for most individuals’ gets one into practical trouble very quickly when
dealing with issues of distribution of scarce or limited resources). The ethics
of governance carry such additional difficulty over the ethics of individual
choice—I am appreciating the difficulty and burden of governance more and more
each day… My comments might be entirely off-base, and I might be ascribing
thoughts to you that are not at all present in your brief comment (if I have
misrepresented you, I apologize). You aims are no doubt noble, and you
obviously recognize the pull of goodness (which I agree is built-in, but I
understand that to be God-designed within the human species…since empathy, for
example, does not seem to be present in animals--as I have documented elsewhere
on the tank).
But
your belief in the existence of objective moral values implies the ability
of humans to violate those values, and thus creates the possible scenario
of ‘sin’ and the need for apologies/restitution to violated parties (and
perhaps even acts of exile from the community in the case of recalcitrant
violators of others)…the father who destroys his family through heroin
addiction, repeated child molesters, serial killers, investment fraud, the “friend” who destroys someone’s marriage
and family through infidelity, vandalism against the elderly—all occur DAILY
and rip holes in hearts and trust and relationships and hopes…and weakens the
ethics of others in the process…
So ‑‑ I find myself looking on wistfully at people who profoundly believe it's true that we are immortal and that nothing we do is wasted in this life, and that our deepest desires for virtue and goodness will someday be fulfilled. But I see absolutely NOTHING (except perhaps in the area of near‑death‑experience research and hypnotic regression studies of previous incarnations) to make me think that there is any factual basis for their beliefs. As I said, by now I've read far more sophisticated apologetics than YYY and ZZZ, and found that essentially they contain the same old arguments, phrased in different ways, with different illustrative examples, but all still containing the same gaping holes. Rather than getting into a detailed rebuttal of all of the classic apologetic arguments, I'll just say that I recently came across an excellent summary of many of the holes I found long ago in arguments I find so bad that I am embarrassed on behalf of the Christians who assert them: it's contained in ABC's site. It's available on the web at XYZ. I could go into a detailed rebuttal of each of the arguments myself, but I'm trying to save you time and effort in reading this letter; if your response to my letter hinges on my positions on the classical apologetic arguments, the chapters on evangelical apologetics in this piece would be a good starting point.
Nah,
if you read all the stuff, there’s no point in me restating the arguments…but I
must say that I hope your analysis and criticism of the better apologists is
considerably stronger and in-depth than ABC’s and that your rhetoric-to-rigor
ratio is much better…I have respect for many atheists and skeptics on the Web,
but ABC is not one of them…I struggle here to avoid lapsing into the long list
of my ‘issues’ with the caliber of his
work (especially of a Ph.D!), but his failure to ask the hard questions of the
fringe data he so cavalierly uses reduces much of his writing into the category
of “clever whining” in my opinion…(but
more on this later, when we get to the HomeWork section…smile).
Instead,
let’s start with a basic test of understanding. When I taught philosophy in
college, one of the first principles I taught my students was that they could not
‘attack’ a opponent’s position until they could restate the strengths
of the opponent’s position, to the opponent’s satisfaction.
In
scholarly, in-print debates, of course, all sides must be able to state the
opponent’s view fairly—or they get their face ripped off in the next issue of
the journal, under the sub-title “Who’s Who of superficial thinkers and
straw-man builders”…Pursuit of truth and evaluation of ‘opportunities’ such as
those ‘offered’ by the biblical worldview—a personal relationship with the
Living God(!)—requires a serious level of non-petty interaction and rejection
of ‘one-upmanship’ approaches…It is not enough to find ‘holes’ in the
opponent’s arguments—one has to evaluate the overall strength of the position
and the overall strength of an equally comprehensive alternative set of
beliefs…
Let
me try to explain this a little more—I realize this is terse and unclear…
Take
the case of predictive prophecy. We have already mentioned above some four
‘defeaters’ of such a case (post-dating, deliberate fulfillment, fulfillment
vagueness, and historical context suggesting a lucky guess), to which we could
also add charges that it actually wasn’t fulfilled. If we use the example of Ezekiel’s prophesy
of the destruction of Tyre, we can find massive amounts of discussion about
that on the web. I don’t want to resolve that issue one way or another here,
but what I want to focus on is simply what level of ‘over-throwing’
might one ‘standard’ objection have in this case.
The
prophesy of Tyre’s destruction has one feature I want to draw your attention
to: the scraping bare of the city into the sea. Ezky starts off the prophecy
with a declaration that God will bring ‘many nations’ against Tyre, using the
image of ‘waves’ pounding the surf (26.3). There is a vagueness about this,
even though it is clear that there will be plurality of assailants. Then, in
the amplification section (26.7ff), one specific nation is mentioned under the
rulership of Nebuchadnezzar. The description of his action included breaching
the walls and entering through the gates. There is a obvious pronoun/number
switch in verse 12, where the walls are now described as broken down and
everything thrown into the sea.
Conservative
and moderate biblical commentators note that the pronoun shift may indicate a
shift from Neby/Babylon to other future invasions (another ‘wave’ of the ‘many
nations’—possibly including the Persians, Greeks, and Romans). After the
pronoun shift, the description of scraping the city into the sea is mentioned again.
Historically,
we know Neby did NOT do any scraping, but did breach the walls and hauled off
some of the wealth (much of it probably was cloistered away to the Island
before his arrival), before making it a vassal city. But later, after the city
had passed from Babylonian to Persian hands, Alexander the Great “scraped” the
landside city into the sea, to make the causeway to the island fortress. Under
the conservative/moderate understanding of this passage, we have Ezekiel
prophesying of one specific event several centuries before its occurrence.
Now,
the most common skeptical argument advanced against this (there are others, but
my point here is to use this illustratively) is that Ezekiel was dead
wrong—that he thought Neby was the one to do the scraping. As such, it does NOT
constitute a case of predictive prophesy, but au contraire demonstrates
that the bible is clearly errant and/or that Ezekiel was a false prophet
because he made a mistake.
Now,
when I back up and look at this I wonder why no one seems to wonder how Ezekiel
could have prophesied something so ‘unthinkable’ as the scraping ever
happening to Tyre (or any major coastal town, for that matter). One never
destroyed important seaports, one merely subjugated them. One never ‘scraped
bare’ a town, one always preserved the best buildings for the ‘new owners’ (you
only destroyed fortifications and such). One never threw away/dumped building
materials (especially good Tyrian lumber!) into the ocean, one always reused
them. To do what Alex did was quite unforeseeable to someone in those days.
Thus, the prediction by Ezekiel was ‘bizarre’ and probably not even believed by
his contemporaries(!), but in retrospect, was fulfilled by SOMEONE in the
future quite literally.
Now,
this fact—that Ezky saw something relatively specific, and CERTAINLY above and
beyond the normal ‘doom, gloom, and judgment’ images the prophets “normally”
predicted for enemy capital cities (i.e., breached walls, captivity/death for
the elite, plunder of the palace, burning the surrounding landscape), and
something UNEXPECTED—seems to me to be quite ‘stubborn’ and difficult to
explain away. EVEN IF we say he made a ‘mistake’ in ascribing it to Neby, we
STILL have a phenomenon very difficult to dismiss.
In
other words, the argument about ‘who’ might be trivial compared to the fact of
‘what’…that ALONE might tip the scales on the ‘why’ of the plural of verse 12
in favor of referring to ‘another wave’ of the ‘many nations’ of verse 3f. [If
the only force involved in 7-14 is Neby, of course, you can't make sense of
‘many nations’ and ‘waves’…you raise a DIFFERENT problem as to why some idiot
would contradict himself within a verse or two…but that’s a different matter.]
My
point is this: we CAN raise many and varied skeptical objections to just about
every point within the Christian belief-system (just as we can raise similar
responses to the skeptical positions), but at the end of the day YOU will have
to make a judgment call on which data is more ‘stubborn’…
Some
objections merely cast doubt on a proposition (e.g., Ezeky was referring to
Neby), without removing all of its force (e.g., the bizarre accuracy of the
prediction). Some objections merely reduce the ‘confidence level’ we might have
toward something.
Let
me digress for a moment—onto this topic of ‘degrees of confidence’…
Some
of the propositions that I believe I have almost zero psychological uncertainty
about (e.g., my mother exists). Other propositions that I believe I have a great
deal of uncertainty about—even though I still believe them to be true (e.g.,
some fuzzy childhood memories).
Some
the propositions that I believe about the bible I also have zero psychological
uncertainty about (e.g., God exists, God is good-hearted). Other propositions
that I believe I have much less confidence in—but I still would have to say
“yes” to a “yes or no” question about whether I believed them or not (e.g., the
sequence of certain events in the life of Jesus, or the date of the exodus).
And the strength with which I hold a certain conviction or belief can vary with
time, temperament, and study. Some objections to a position are insufficient to
overthrow it, but MIGHT cause the ‘slider’ to move down a notch in terms of
certainty for some (e.g., if even ONE of
the ‘stones, timbers, rocks’ of Tyre remained, some people would
discount the prophecy a little—as if ordinary language was expected to manifest
the rigor and precision of the predicate calculus). But in the end, one has to
weigh the arguments pro and con, separate the quibbles from the substantive,
and make a choice on typically a wide range of criteria.
For
your journey, what this might mean is that you should go back through
your objections and ‘rank them’ in terms of “to what extent do they
reduce the confidence one might have in the original Christian position” and “to
what extent does the original position still have force?” In other words,
review your own position for whether it really ‘defeats’ an argument, or merely
‘casts doubt on’ / ‘reduces confidence in’ the original position…
When
I first launched the Tank, I had a survey form in which I asked the readers for
what they thought were the three strongest arguments FOR the Christian position
and the strongest arguments AGAINST the Christian position. Many Christians
would come through and say there WERE no arguments against the faith, and many
skeptics would say there were NO arguments FOR the biblical position. The whole
exercise showed how many people were either ignorant of the issues or dishonest
about the whole matter. But frequently I would get a believer that could
identify the weakest spots in the Christian worldview, and I would find
skeptics that could identify the main strengths in the Christian position—and I
knew I had ‘real’ people in front of me.
It
is my experience, both personally and as an observer of thousands upon
thousands of people who have sent in questions/comments to the Tank, that
the main challenge in getting to the truth is oneself. Scripture consistently
enjoins us with ‘he that trusteth in his own heart is a fool’; the calls to
self-examination and self-criticality are legion (I document many of these
passages in the Tank); and the warnings against deception, self-deception, and
“voluntary” ignorance/forgetfulness are pervasive…Arrogance of knowledge is a
constant impediment to further knowledge
(“knowledge puffs up”), and when accompanied by ‘warrior orientations’
(e.g., ‘gotcha!’ or “boy, I shut HIM up” or “nailed that argument shut”) can
deaden the heart and dull the faculty of sensitivity and discernment.
My
own experience is a constant watchfulness against these…every time I sense a
beginning ripple of ‘glee’ or ‘gloat’ over some argument I think is ‘superior’,
I drop my guns and pray, asking God to keep my heart oriented toward truth and
openness and sharing, and away from combat, one-upmanship, and striving to
‘beat someone’…we are all in community, trying to share what we have learned
and are learning, with each other…its not about ‘winning arguments’ or ‘shaming
the competition’ or ‘looking good’—its about truth…I learned a long time ago
that it was “easier to be bright than to be right”…and that God wanted
‘right’—truth and honesty.
The
challenge of this at the personal level for all of us is to be sure we know
what we really believe deep inside…when I am responding to someone’s
question or position, I sometimes find that I can make a decent/convincing case
on some sub-point, but that inside my heart I am not comfortable with my level
of confidence in that. In other words, I believe that I am correct in that
specific area of the argument (and might could ‘get away with it’, and
eventually 'mute' the internal dissonant conscience), but also that something
is ‘bothering me’ about it. And so, given my understanding of God’s desire for
me to believe AND be at peace with myself about that belief, I cannot rest
there—I MUST try to find the cause of my epistemic unease and dig further and
further until the issue and its resolution (or re-configuring, if I have
misunderstood the problem) has a much higher level of clear-conscience
confidence associated with them. I am constantly having to ask myself my degree
of confidence and degree of conscience-comfort about my own
arguments and evidence and data and perspective and weighting and judgment…
For
the case of an atheist, I think a possible effective tool for plumbing the
depths of one's heart might be to do this thought experiment:
Imagine for a moment that you ended up being wrong
about this, and that you are standing post-mortem before an exalted God-man
Jesus (fair-minded, gentle-mannered,
with the nail-prints, but very, very omniscient and before whom you are
standing in court/judgment—about truth). Jesus asks you “Why did you reject Me
during your life?” and you reply something like “Because the stories I received
about You and other supernatural aspects of life had too many errors in them
for me to believe them, and I couldn’t see any other evidences of God that
could be trusted”. And then Jesus says, “If you really believed what you just
said, I would not fault you and would honor your integrity—BUT your words do
not match what is in your deepest heart—your heart has always somehow
sensed My reality and the core truthfulness of my story. You toyed with
arguments pro and con, and delighted in discussions—but inside all along you
KNEW, didn’t you?”…So, what THEN do you say to an Omniscient God, who can
display your own innermost thoughts, feelings, and intuitions before you
as evidence of what you really knew/believed was the case? Will those thoughts
and feelings “betray” you? Will they testify that you REALLY did find the
evidence adequately (not “overwhelmingly”) persuasive? Will they testify that
you knew the ‘errors’ you found were only incidental and that you truly
perceived the reality of the Incarnation and reality of the Loving in-break by
a God who cared for you? Or will your heart say the opposite—that your
conscience is clean and that you never had the conviction that there really was
an Artist behind each sunset, and a Mathematician behind each galactic swirl,
and a genuine experience of the Risen Christ behind the earnest writings of the
gospels?
Now,
this thought experiment is intended solely to encourage the thinker to ponder
what is really deepest in their soul—not what arguments ‘look the best’.
It will do no good when we stand before God if we have a perfect, flawless
defense of agnosticism, atheism, Christianity, whatever—if our very heart will
testify against us! So, this experiment for the atheist (there is another very,
very serious version for the believer, btw, with EXACTLY the same issues of
what does my heart reveal about my 'confession') is simply to help them
isolate and get in touch with that lower-level ‘intuition’ and see the REAL
effect of the evidence offered by the scripture, believers, and nature (many of
which I mentioned in that Seeker article) on their
heart. The only real way to cut through the apologetic/skeptic ‘clutter’ is to
try to formulate—as honestly as possible—the strengths of the ‘rival’
positions, to look again at the proffered evidence in scripture, nature, and
history; and then to plumb your heart—deeply and honestly—as to what you ‘ended
up believing’…
Believe
me, I know how hard a process this is—it will humble you often, if you do it
right—because I have to do it constantly about my beliefs, about my morals,
about my values…are my beliefs merely convenient and ‘pleasing’, or are they
forged from honest response to truth? Are my morals merely self-justifying and
license-granting, or are they wise and based on transcendent values of
community, integrity, and loyalty? Are my values merely self-centered and
low-risk, or are do they grow from love for others and appreciation for true
beauty and grace?
I
realize I have rambled a good bit here, friend, but I went where my heart took
me…I hope some of these perspectives will be useful to you, in sorting through
the ‘winds of arguments’ that you have been immersed in for so long.