Abortion and the Bible

I'm a cisgendered man, I've never had an abortion, nor will I ever. But I am a Christian and have studied the Bible and ancient Palestinian culture.

In Genesis 38:24, Judah finds out his daughter-in-law is pregnant from being a prostitute, and orders her killed immediately, with no thought of waiting for the birth of the "innocent baby".

Exodus 21:22-25 outlines the penalty for making a woman have a miscarriage, and the only punishment is for whatever damage was done to the woman.

Numbers 5 has instructions to the priests on how to induce a miscarriage in an adulterous wife, the only passage in the Bible clearly about abortion.

Numerous passages in the Bible have God ordering the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child of a nation, which would certainly include killing pregnant women.

Despite the fact that Jews believed in the first century (and still do to this day) that a fetus does not have a soul until it draws its first breath of air, and therefore abortion (which was certainly around in the first century, including what we call "late-term" abortion") is not murder, Jesus never bothered to correct this doctrine, even though he actually took time in the Sermon on the Mount to say that calling someone a fool was the equivalent of murder.

Anti-abortion Christians love to quote Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." They claim that the fact God knew Jeremiah before birth proves that life begins at conception, but God is omniscient; he knew Jeremiah, you, and me all before he even created the world, as Ephesians 1:4 "According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love:" shows. Does this mean life begins "before the foundation of the world"? That would be nonsense. Show me a place in the Bible where God "knows" a fetus that is miscarried, stillborn, or aborted, and I'll buy that logic, but *spoiler alert* you won't find that in the Bible.

All that said, I actually want to see abortion rates go down, because I don't believe abortion is healthy for the pregnant woman, and I see it as a sign of society in decline when abortion rates are high. But make abortion illegal, and women just get illegal abortions. Take away the causes of abortion, and abortion goes away on its own. As a society, we need to fight poverty, have solid sex education in all schools, supply the public with cheap or free contraception, give everyone affordable medical care (especially during pregnancy!), have cheap child care and early childhood education, and take rape more seriously as a crime. THOSE are the things that will stop abortion, so when will so-called "pro-life" activists petition the government for those things?

The Problem

So after writing my last post here dealing with the problem of evil and God, and writing They shall be burnt with fire on my other blog, I had an extensive email exchange with Steve Wells about how God seems to him to be quite evil as portrayed in the Bible, and yet predictably I, as a Christian, manage to see God differently. Then this morning, something was said that hit me profoundly. In the midst of a rather large email, I said to Wells,

I respect your opinion on the Bible; it's not unreasonable. I respect the views of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. Is it really so impossible in your mind that there exist rational and moral people who believe in these holy scriptures? People manage to see things differently from each other, and that's okay.

I pressed him for an answer to this question, and this morning he came back with the following email I quote in its entirety:

I'm not sure there's much more to say, Brucker.

Donald Trump could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, and his followers would still believe in him.

The Bible could say that you should stone to death your entire family if they believe differently than you, and you would still believe in it. (Which, of course, it does in Dt 13:6-10, and you do.)

As for your last comments and questions, no I don't believe that "Hebrew slavery was intended to be a system of helping out the poor." Or that Moses wrote Deuteronomy forty years after writing Exodus. (There's no evidence that Moses ever existed, but if he did, he didn't write either book. They were written by different authors at different times and the text was changed and edited over several centuries.)

You ask if I think it's possible for rational and moral people to believe in the Bible. My answer to that is a qualified yes. Many people who are rational and moral in their daily lives and beliefs believe in the Bible. But their reason and morals are suspended when they look at the Bible. Since they believe the Bible is both true and good, they can't question its truth or morals - because they believe the Bible is both true and good.

They are like people who believe in Trump. They've already decided that he is good and truthful. They can be good and rational about everything else, except for when it comes to him. It is the same for Bible believers.

The tl;dr version of this email is, "Belief in God is like belief in Trump; they're both horrible, but if you've already decided they're great, maybe nothing will convince you otherwise."

This shook me. I have a hard time understanding why there are so many Christians who continue to support President Trump when he's obviously (to nearly everyone who isn't a Trump supporter) a horrible person.* However, what if many atheists feel the same exact way about people who love the God of the Bible, and what if they're right?

There's actually some real soundness to this argument. The God of the Bible never denounces slavery. The God of the Bible demands capital punishment for the victims of rape. The God of the Bible instructed the Israelites to commit genocide several times (a timely issue for 2024!). There's more, so much more that can be said, and it's not just the Old Testament, either; the God of the Bible killed Ananias and Sapphira for lying! It's actually not hard for a person to make the case that the God of the Bible is a terrible being!

It's something that on some level every person who believes in the goodness of God needs to reconcile, even if they don't believe in the Bible. How can you believe that God is good when (fill in the blank)? And there are so many things that can fill in the blank! As I've blogged so many times, this is an issue philosophers wrestle with, but we also have to deal with on a basic level in tangible reality.

I haven't mentioned it either in my blogs or in emails to Wells, but I suffer from chronic pain. It comes and goes in varying degrees from day to day, but on several occasions it has been so intense that I have contemplated suicide, not out of depression, but as a painkiller! No painkiller can touch it, though, because it's something neurological. I don't understand why God would allow me to have this condition. It's not the result of any sin that I've committed. Do I quote 2Corinthians 12:6-9 again as I did in the comments of my last post? Is that really a good answer? Maybe, but it can sound like a cop-out. Isn't Paul just making excuses for God's bad behavior?

I received Wells's email this morning, as I said, but it was actually specifically as I sat in my church's auditorium waiting for the Sunday service to begin. Here I was, about to do the church thing, and Wells hits me right in the faith! And what did church bring to me? Well, there was an announcement that the church was starting a support group for people with chronic pain. And then the sermon, which delivered the message that (1) sometimes life is confusing, but (2) God is always in control. Maybe it's odd, given all that I was contemplating about God, but I found this message to be very comforting.

I talked with my wife about the email and the sermon, and found that she was one of the people in the camp that I'm sure I've talked about before, the ones who say, "It's God's house, so it's God's rules." This viewpoint implies that God by definition of being the creator of the universe is not beholden to our measurement of morality. It may be true, but I don't personally find it satisfying. If God subjects humans to his rules of morality, it seems that they should at least be consistent. (How do you reconcile "Thou shalt not kill" with genocide? Yes, I know I tried to address this issue when I covered the book of Joshua, but how many atheists found that argument convincing or reasonable?)

If you can convince yourself that genocide is ever justified, maybe you can convince yourself of anything? But what if the argument is logically sound nonetheless? Maybe logic and morality aren't as compatible as I like to think? These are big questions without easy answers. The Bible teaches that God is perfect, but it also teaches that God prefers to work out his perfect will through the actions of imperfect people. Modern-day Israelis are largely convinced that their genocide of the Palestinians is completely justified. I believe they are wrong. Yet the genocide continues, at the hand of God's "chosen people". My government under President Biden is complicit in the genocide, and my omnipotent God is not stepping in to stop it. Why do I protest the one and continue to accept the other?

I'm not presenting an argument here as I often do; I'm presenting moral conflict. I do still believe that God is good, but I admit it isn't always easy to explain why. Am I a model of good faith, or am I a model of moral failure? I think sometimes that this conundrum is very like the conundrum of believing that God exists at all: there is some compelling evidence on either side, but no real proof that one can cling to. At least, I haven't seen it. Is the Bible a fit moral guide when it tells me I can sell my daughters into slavery, but I'm appalled by the idea? Steve Wells would tell me that alone is proof enough, I'm sure; but I'm still not convinced. It's not my belief that every part of the Bible is meant to be all things for all people for all time. So what do I believe the Bible is? It's a collection of books that tells a story about imperfect people and their imperfect relationships with God. It's a story that is mostly real history, but it functions like one of Jesus's parables; it doesn't hand us morality and wisdom on a neat little plate, but makes us think about it. It's simple for some people, while being far from simple for others, and I'm definitely in the latter camp in the end.

I don't pretend to have the Answer-with-a-capital-A, but see myself as occasionally having an answer-with-a-little-a, and from there, I work out my own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12).



*I always have to note here whenever I denounce Trump that I'm no fan of President Biden, either. I feel they are both racist rapists who are pushing our country toward fascism; Biden's just fascism with a smiling face on it.

The Problem of Evil and God

So... I came across a real conundrum in my other blog; see Behold, this evil is of the LORD (Isaiah 31) and the comments thereon.

I have touched many times on the Problem of Evil in this blog, but it deserves a revisit due to the issues brought up in that post and the KJV. While more modern translations of the Bible take advantage of the nuance of the Hebrew word mostly translated "evil" in the KJV to translate it into words like "calamity" or "misfortune" or some other less charged word, the Hebrew word "raʿ" is the word used in Genesis chapters two and three in the phrase "tree of the knowledge of good and evil,"which seems unequivocally about evil, and there are many verses in the Bible that have God being the creator of "raʿ". Now nuanced translation of this word is not necessarily wrong, but it's still quite suggestive. To me it suggests that for the Jew and the Christian, there is a need to solve this conundrum:

A) God is good.
B) God is all-powerful.
C) God is all-knowing.
D) Evil and suffering exist, and...
E) Some evil and suffering is created by God.

It's much more challenging to formulate a convincing theodicy with statement (E) in the mix, don't you agree? Yet based on the Biblical evidence, (E) is difficult to deny.

My approach to a theodicy has always been first of all to place a caveat on statement (B) and say that God must be limited by the boundaries of logic. If God is not bound by logic, then nonsense becomes possible and throws all logic out the window. God can make himself not exist. God can give humans free will and make us always choose right. And especially apropos to this discussion, God can remove evil while letting evil still exist, therefore (D) is false regardless of your personal experience of evil and suffering. I hope people can see this is nonsense.

If we suggest that it is not logically possible to create a world full of beings with free will without allowing evil, that's a beginning, but it doesn't quite address (E). Particularly, of course, it would seem that (E) clashes with (A) almost in itself. I think there are two issues that need to be addressed with respect to this clash. The first issue is why a good God would add evil to a world that already has evil. I think this is easier to address than it may seem. I believe chiefly when God visits evil upon people, it's for the purpose of discipline. We as a society recognize a need to discipline children, although there are vast differences of opinion on how best to do so. Even if you are a parent who doesn't believe in corporal punishment, discipline of any sort tends to involve creating some sort of discomfort in children to make them reflect on why their actions were wrong. In other words, we feel that when children act in an evil manner, they need to suffer for it; it sounds more cruel when phrased this way, but I believe that is essentially the nature of discipline. On a wider level, society accepts that when people break the law, it is required to make them suffer. Maybe that is in some form of restitution, maybe incarceration, and sometimes even death. (While I am personally aganst the death penalty for numerous reasons, it can't be denied that there is a large segment of society that feels it is justified.) So, extrapolating from the moral standards we hold in society to the moral standards held by God, I would say that God is sometimes enacting evil for the sake of justice and discipline, which I suggest are greater goods.

The second issue is the more difficult one: why does God allow or even enact evil upon good people? As I said in the post on my other blog, the Book of Job shows us that sometimes God inflicts evil on good people. Perhaps Job is a special case, but it's quite evident from real-life experience that everyone experiences evil and suffering, and it's quite possible that some is inflicted by God. Let's question Job first; is there a purpose for Job's suffering? When I was in high school, we read Job in our humanities class; everyone in my class except for me was convinced Job must have done something to deserve him suffering, but if that was true, wouldn't God say so? No, Job was definitely suffering through no fault of his own, so why? I've heard it posited that Job is actually a key piece of scripture, because in a way it asks and anwers the question, "Is humanity really worth God's love and grace?" Do people just follow God for rewards, or is there a recognition of God's inherent goodness and sovereignty? Job is a test case, being one of the most upright and moral men God had at that time. If Job can be put through loss of all he has and further suffering on top of that and still praise God, then it shows there is something deeper in the relationship between God and mankind. And Job passes the test, even with God showing up at the end of the book to pretty much taunt him!

Now God, being omniscient, already knew this would happen before it happened. God knows how every individual will stand in the face of adversity. So why go through with it? Because everyone who witnessed it, including Job, Job's wife, Job's friends, and the "sons of God" (i.e. angels, including Satan), now can see Job's character for themselves. Adversity reveals character, which is useful for spiritual growth, and spiritual growth is very important. Towards the end of John's gospel, Jesus talks a lot about the adversity his disciples will see once he's gone to Heaven; Paul talks about his personal sufferings in his letters, and says it's for the glory of God. The Bible teaches that being a follower of God is a good thing, but not that it's pleasant; quite the opposite. God often promises to send comfort in times of trouble, but also, you should expect that trouble.

So what is my conclusion? Sometimes evil and suffering are tools to make people become better people. Sometimes we need to be pushed out of complacency and grow, and evil and suffering do that. Whether we're doing something wrong that needs correcting or doing something right that we need to be pressured in to persevering, sometimes we suffer for the greater good. Of course, I know not everyone will find this convincing, and there is always suffering and evil that seem too much to be appropriate, but it's always a possibility that it has purpose. As always, please feel free to comment.

Homosexuality and the Bible

(This is a concise version of an argument I put together last year that I may flesh out further because my blog posts always need to be incredibly verbose.)

Christians commonly will cite 1Corinthians 6:9 and 1Timothy 1:10 as verses that call out homosexuality as a sin. However, both verses in the original Greek use the word "αρσενοκοιται", which is a word found nowhere else in 1st century Greek literature, because Paul made it up. The truth is, nobody really knows what it means, so people have had to guess. 

Modern English is a relatively young language, really dating back to the publication of the King James Bible and Shakespeare's works. There are lots of older languages that had the Bible before that, most notably, German. In German Bibles, "αρσενοκοιται" is translated into "Knabenschänder", a word which we do know the meaning of; it's "boy molester". 

Now of course some scholars will make the claim that Paul's "αρσενοκοιται" is a neologism that comes from the Greek version of Leviticus 20:13, which in the KJV reads "If a man also lie with mankind," or in Greek, the phrase ends with "ἄρσενος κοίτην". However, there's a problem with this translation as well. This command comes in the middle of a list of defined sexual sins, mostly reading "If a man lie with..." In the original Hebrew, each and every one of those instances of "man" is the same Hebrew word, "אִישׁ", so one might expect that verse 13 would read: if an "אִישׁ" lie with an "אִישׁ"; but it doesn't. It reads: if an "אִישׁ" lie with a "זָכָר". Why use a different word here, unless you mean a different concept? "זָכָר" is translated into a number of different English words, but one of them is "child". Indeed, looking at the German again, they translate it "Knaben" or "boy". 

Throughout the Bible there are a lot of sexual sins listed, and almost every one comes with an explanation of why it's a sin. Why is homosexuality a sin? I don't know, but if all the verses that are claimed to be about homosexuality are actually about paedophilia, is any explanation needed?

Why do you speak to the people in parables?

There's a side of Jesus that I think a lot of people either forget or miss entirely. It's weird.

Ask a Christian what the purpose of Jesus's parables was, and they'll probably tell you something like, they're little allegories to illustrate spiritual truths for people to understand. But Jesus actually specifically explained in Scripture the purpose of parables, and it's nothing like that:

Matthew 13:10-17 New International Version (NIV)
10 The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”

11 He replied, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. 12 Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. 13 This is why I speak to them in parables:

“Though seeing, they do not see;
    though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

14 In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:

“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
    you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15 For this people’s heart has become calloused;
    they hardly hear with their ears,
    and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
    hear with their ears,
    understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’

16 But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. 17 For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.

What do my Christian friends make of this?

Situational Ethics as taught by the Bible

I have often heard it said by Christians that ethics are not situational, but rather absolute. It is my intention to illustrate the fact that not only is situational ethics an acceptable thing, but that it is in fact supported Biblically. In order to do so, I will run through the Ten Commandments, and give an example from the Bible--for as many as I can--of someone breaking that Commandment and either being blessed for breaking that Commandment, or being clearly right in breaking that Commandment due to context.

1. Exodus 20:3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

This is a pretty straightforward one. The Bible contains plenty of people who do not follow this Commandment, but I can't think of anyone who was said to be in the right for not doing so. As the First Commandment, this may be a principle that cannot be superseded by a higher one.

2. Exodus 20:4-6 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

In 2 Kings, a man named Naaman comes to the prophet Elisha to be cleaned from leprosy. After his skin is healed, he makes a request: 2 Kings 5:17-19 "And Naaman said, Shall there not then, I pray thee, be given to thy servant two mules' burden of earth? for thy servant will henceforth offer neither burnt offering nor sacrifice unto other gods, but unto the LORD. In this thing the LORD pardon thy servant, that when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon: when I bow down myself in the house of Rimmon, the LORD pardon thy servant in this thing. And he said unto him, Go in peace. So he departed from him a little way." So for whatever reason (I don't see that it's given here) Naaman is given permission to bow down to idols, and still be a faithful follower of the God of Israel.

3. Exodus 20:7 Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

The Third Commandment is an odd one, as I don't know of a single instance of it being broken in the Bible. Moving on...

4. Exodus 20:8-11 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

This is an interesting one, as Jesus repeatedly breaks the sabbath and talks about instances in which a person might break the sabbath and be excused. Matthew 12 has some good examples, including the opening story: Matthew 12:1-2 "At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath day." Not only is Jesus breaking the sabbath (and I am going to make the assumption that if Jesus does something, it's not wrong to do so), but he gives the Pharisees a short lesson on situational ethics using David as an example.

5. Exodus 20:12 Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

Later in Matthew 12, Jesus' mother shows up. Matthew 12:46-49 "While he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him. Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!" I would argue that Jesus is dishonoring his mother here; I don't know why, but I'm willing to accept that since it was Jesus, it was the right thing to do, and he had a good reason to do so.

6. Exodus 20:13 Thou shalt not kill.

Where to begin? The whole Old Testament is filled with justified killing, and instead of picking a particular passage, I'll choose as my example the entire book of Joshua, which tells the story of not just justified killing but repeated outright genocides of entire nations. Now I know that a lot has been written about the justification of the actions of the Israelites under the leadership of Joshua (I've written on it myself in my other blog) but the fact remains that this is killing, justified by the situation that Joshua and his people were in.

7. Exodus 20:14 Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Who can forget Genesis chapter 38? Here's the highlight that shows even adultery can be right due to situational ethics: Genesis 38:24-26 "And it came to pass about three months after, that it was told Judah, saying, Tamar thy daughter in law hath played the harlot; and also, behold, she is with child by whoredom. And Judah said, Bring her forth, and let her be burnt. When she was brought forth, she sent to her father in law, saying, By the man, whose these are, am I with child: and she said, Discern, I pray thee, whose are these, the signet, and bracelets, and staff. And Judah acknowledged them, and said, She hath been more righteous than I; because that I gave her not to Shelah my son. And he knew her again no more." Here is an example of a woman who was judged righteous for engaging in prostitution! Why? Because the situation of her being a childless widow demanded her to be given a son. She gives birth to twins, and ends up being the descendent of King David and her name is mentioned in Jesus' genealogy  in the New Testament.

8. Exodus 20:15 Thou shalt not steal.

The wording in various versions of the Bible may make this one a bit tricky to understand. Exodus 12:35-36 "And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment: And the LORD gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians." This is not "borrowed", as there is never going to be a time that this is given back. The Israelites are taking riches that belong to the Egyptians, and keeping them; why? It's reparations for slavery; they're trying to get 400 years of back wages. 

9. Exodus 20:16 Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

In the beginning of the book of Exodus, Pharaoh tells a pair of Hebrew midwives to kill male children that they deliver. They don't, which is following the Sixth Commandment, but then they break the Ninth Commandment: Exodus 1:18-20 "And the king of Egypt called for the midwives, and said unto them, Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men children alive? And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them. Therefore God dealt well with the midwives: and the people multiplied, and waxed very mighty." This in the past has always been my go-to verse for situational ethics. The midwives are clearly breaking the Ninth Commandment, yet God blesses them for doing so, I assume because the lying saved lives. 

10. Exodus 20:17 Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

The Tenth Commandment, in my opinion, is a strange one, because it's the only Commandment that is broken entirely in secret. There are very few instances of this Commandment being broken in the Bible, but like the first, I don't know of any instances where someone was blessed for coveting.

But still, I think I have examples here for seven out of ten, and while someone may have an explanation as to why I'm misinterpreting one or two of these, I really don't think all seven can be denied (and if the example for number six can be dismissed on a technicality, I'm sure I could find another example that's better). My conclusion is that situational ethics is entirely Biblical.

The Bill Nye - Ken Ham debate

I don't know if I need to explain this as it seemed to be a pretty big media event, but Tuesday there was a creationism/evolution debate between Bill Nye ("The Science Guy") and Ken Ham (CEO of "Answers in Genesis"). As far as such debates usually go, this was a good one, and I felt that since it was a topic I like to cover on my blog from time to time, I'd give a sort of after-commentary here outlining what I think each debater did well as well as what they did poorly.

Interestingly, Bill Nye did extraordinarily well, considering that he is not a biologist, nor does he seem to know much of anything about the Bible. It seems to me that for debates like this, the evolution side would best be served by a debater who really knows their biology. I don't think that ended up being as big of a handicap for Nye as his lack of knowledge about the Bible in the end, as he made some arguments against the Bible that any reasonably-informed Christian could sweep aside as misinformation.

But I wanted to start with Ken Ham, both because he was the one who won the coin toss to speak first, and because I was far more impressed with his arguments than I think I ever have been with a creationist. As I think I've said before many times, creationists seem to often have a near-complete lack of knowledge of what evolution really means or how it works. Ham, however, seems to have a good grasp on the science, and doesn't make the mistake of outright denying evolution in any form. Rather, he points out what are really some near-obvious facts: Darwin spent a lot of time studying finch beaks in the Galapagos, and while there really is a striking amount of variation to be found there, the fact remains that with all that variation, they're all still finches. The point that Ham makes here is that while evolution definitely occurs, it's hard to show that animals evolve into entirely different kinds of animals. Yes, lions, tigers, pumas, and housecats all have a common ancestor, but they're still all cats.

Ham furthermore makes an important distinction between what he calls "observational" science and "historical" science. Observational science is science where you do experiments and make real-time observations of phenomena, while historical science is where you take what you know about natural phenomena and extrapolate that knowledge into the unobservable past. Since the past is unobservable, then historical science consists largely of guesswork, and standard evolutionary scientists have suggested that all life comes from a single, large family tree, while Ham is suggesting that we should think of all of life as being comprised of a sort of "family orchard" where different classes or "kinds" of animals all branch from a single ancestor that is completely unrelated to any other "kind". He points out that this model fits in just as well with biology as we know it today, but happens to also fit with the Biblical account of creation.

Also, a minor, but vital point that Ham makes is that there are plenty of young-earth creationist scientists that are doing just as much for innovation and technology as any atheist scientist. One of his chief examples is that of the inventor of the MRI, which revolutionized modern medicine, and yet that scientist/inventor believes that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

Bill Nye, however, had plenty of interesting things to say, many of which were seemingly pretty devastating to Ham's position. Nye had a lot to say about the fossil record, which consistently progresses from simple animals to more complex organisms, showing evidence that the modern species that we know must have had simpler biological ancestors. Also, he points out that if all the animals in the world at one time were kept on Noah's ark, which landed after the flood in the Middle East, then there should be fossil remains of Australian animals like kangaroos in the Middle East, but no such fossils have ever been found.

Actually, Noah's ark was a big point of contention for Nye. Mathematically he showed that if the ark had had only a few thousand "kinds" of animals that led to the millions of species that exist today, that would imply evolution that operated at a rate of 11 new species daily for the last 4,000 years. Evolution like that would be hard to miss!

One of Nye's last points was that the standard model of evolution has actually at times predicted archaeological finds, and one of the things that is considered the hallmark of a scientific theory is that it has predictive ability. Nye suggested that Ham's model does not have predictive ability, a challenge that Ham never addressed.

As for weaknesses (apart from the fact that neither debater seemed to me to successfully rebut any claims made by the other), Ham at one point made the claim that science is being forced into a naturalistic mindset, and it needs to be opened to other possibilities. While I agree that alternative theories like creationism need to be considered, I can't say that I'm convinced that there is a value to non-naturalistic science. Nye repeatedly attacked the validity of the Bible by using the "telephone game" metaphor, which implies that the Bible is a translation of a translation of a translation, etc., when in fact each new version of the Bible that is published makes use of better textual evidence than previous ones, and is usually a translation directly from what are considered the best ancient texts.

In the end, I think both men really knew their stuff well, and presented their own arguments excellently, but like so many debates before, I don't think either of them was at all swayed by the opposing argument, and I bet both men considered themselves the winner. I found it entertaining, but I'm not sure that anything really useful was accomplished on either side.

No one really believes in my blog

A long time ago, I was a guest blogger on the atheist blog Goosing the Antithesis. It was a pretty sharp blog, and I think it showed a degree of open-mindedness that they allowed me as a Christian to make an occasional post there. The blog however is no more; that is to say, while it's still there for anyone to read, there hasn't been a new post since January of 2009, and there clearly is no intention of changing this. Still, every once in a while I drop in there to peruse posts and reminisce a bit, and that final post by Francois Tremblay in particular has a lot of potential for encouraging thought, and I thought it might be interesting to address some of the issues it brings up.

...[N]o one really believes in God. How could you? It's impossible to even conceptualize the idea of God, and you can't believe in what you can't conceptualize. The person who says "I believe in God" believes in some image in his head which he believes is the image of God, but which cannot in any way have any relation to what God is actually supposed to be according to the theologians. They believe in a father in the sky, not an abstract absolute existing in Dimension X.

This is an interesting statement on many levels. One thing that makes it interesting to me is that you will find theists who demand the exact opposite is true. Maybe not in the fine details, but on the whole, there are a lot of theists who don't believe that any atheist can seriously, in full honesty, say that they don't believe in God, but rather are in some state of fancy theological denial. I just note this as interesting, though, as I do not share this belief. I'm willing to accept that any given atheist or theist is fully sincere in stating their disbelief or belief in God.

Yet Tremblay has what seems like a valid point to be made here, and many theists will agree there's something to it. There are qualities that God possesses that are in essence infinite, and infinity is not really something that the human mind can fully grasp in a meaningful way. Indeed, I think most of us will at times have a mental image in our heads of what God is like, and that that image by necessity must be lacking in comparison to God's true nature. So how can we believe in that which we cannot truly fathom?

I think the answer to that is to be found in the subtleties of the way religion is expressed in practice. I've had discussions with many people ever since I became a Christian about how both Judaism and Christianity forbid idolatry, and yet to an outsider might seem to be practicing it all the time. What church is there out there that is not at the very least adorned by a huge wooden cross which everyone faces while in worship if not ornate stained glass figures of famous historic saints? What synagogue fails to exhibit great fawning reverence for the Torah as a physical object? How is this not idolatry? Aren't we taking our inability to grasp the concept of God and refocusing our religious reverence on physical objects?

There's an important distinction to be made here, and it's the distinction between idolatry and iconism. Idolatry is taking a physical object like a statue and saying, "This is my God." Iconism is taking a physical object like a cross, or a picture, or a book and saying, "This is how I access my God."

The term "icon" is a very telling one in the computer age, too. It's my experience that there are very few people who understand Microsoft Excel, and in fact, when you talk about Excel as a full concept in code built from the ground up, there really is probably next to nobody who understands it. Despite this fact, all a computer user has to do to use Excel is click on its icon, and then they have full access to all of Excel's functions and features, even if they don't understand them. Clearly, the greater the depth of understanding a user has of Excel, the more they will likely get out of it, but even the most basic user can get something out of it.

Why does a Jew revere the Torah? Because he believes that it is through the words written on that Holy scroll that he will better come to understand the mind of God. Why does a Christian revere the cross? Because it reminds her of a physical act of sacrifice that God performed that gives her insight into the heart of God. We all know that full understanding is impossible, but that does not change the fact that we have access to God in a very real way. Because we are helpless to fully understand God, God has condescended to give us the tools we need to come closer to him in a very real way without that full understanding.

No, perhaps nobody really believes in God, but we believe in God's goodness. We trust in God's character. We follow God's will. We study God's word. And in the end, God believes in us, which is all that really matters.

The book of joshua

Sometimes, no make that all the time, I think we're bound to be surprised by what God has in store for us. Just when you think God is finished with His work, it may turn out that God was only just beginning.

My friend and associate in crimes against orthodoxy, Marauder, has recently been posting links to me, and I was considering it might be kind to post links back, but I was in the middle of this series, you know? Still, I suppose he's theoretically boosting my traffic, and I sort of owed him one or two links, especially after a butt-kissing post such as this, so I gotta send a shout-out back and return the favor. (We'll see how he likes being linked to me when I do an upcoming post I've been working on in the back of my mind on the subject of pedophilia.)

How does this all relate to God and new beginnings? Bear with me, it comes together eventually. Marauder talks about the nature of Satan as modern Christendom sees him/it, and muses as to whether it's really an accurate reflection of the spiritual reality. The view has definitely spilled over into mainstream society, where we live with an understanding of Satan as this powerful being who opposes God and all forms of goodness. You know the guy: wears a red suit, carries a pitchfork, has a fondness for heavy metal music? Of course, that image is all crap, but various parts of it are widely accepted as true in various degrees, and that's not even the parts cribbed from Milton's Paradise Lost.

Actually, there are Biblical bases for a lot of these ideas, although they're few and far between. The fact is that orthodox Jews, modern Christians, and mainstream society each have their own understandings as to the nature of Satan, and it may very well be that all of them are off the mark. The Bible says so little about Satan and his nature that it's really an educated guess on our part, whatever we may think of this being. What is true however is that Satan was still created by God, and therefore, one may assume He has a purpose in mind for him. The Bible actually teaches that Satan is to be treated with respect, and that's in the New Testament!

Jude 8-9 says, "In the very same way, these dreamers pollute their own bodies, reject authority and slander celestial beings. But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not dare to bring a slanderous accusation against him, but said, 'The Lord rebuke you!' " This is a weird verse for various reasons, most of which I won't go into now, but one of which I was specifically wanting to address, as it directly relates to my previous essay on spiritual/Biblical authority.

"The body of Moses"? What is this about? Assuming this story is an actual event, one might assume it took place right after the end of the book of Deuteronomy. Just as you thought Moses' story was over, it turns out there's another chapter to be told. Moses drops dead in Moab, and instead of simply returning to dust as the way of all men, apparently conflict ensues, and spiritual powers are fighting for control of whatever it is he's left behind. This may be symbolic and literal on many levels.

Have you ever thought about the transition from Moses to Joshua? I have considered the fact many times that Moses (if he indeed wrote the Torah, but we'll not go back to that question) was the first person to write a book that was meant to be the Holy Word of the God of Israel. Pretty much from day one--and we can go back to Deuteronomy 6 for this--this was writing that was considered deeply important from the moment it was written. Here's the Law of God; keep it and revere it!

Then comes Joshua, who is also writing Scripture (supposedly the author of the book bearing his name, although doubted for many of the same reasons people doubt the authorship of Deuteronomy), but does he think of it that way? He's got to fill the sandals of Moses. Do you think he thought his writings were deserving of being put in the same volume as the great prophet Moses? There were probably moments, especially during the early days of his leadership, that he might have thought that Moses was the be-all and end-all of God's involvement with Israel.

So on a certain level, and as a certain person once suggested to me concerning the passage in Jude, there was a possibility, even in the very day its writing was completed, of a "disputing... about the body of Moses", that is, not just his physical body, but his life's work. With Moses gone, what happens to the nation he created, and the books that he had written? Every time God wraps up a chapter in history, surely there must be a temptation to think that it's all done. God's finished giving the Law, the Israelites must have thought, so we've got all we need. Indeed, there have been those, including the "Saducees" in the New Testament, that have felt that the Torah is God's Word, complete and final. And they disputed with Jesus about it.

Now as Christians, we have the blessing of hindsight to even a greater degree than they did, knowing that not only was there more to come after the Law, but more to come after the Writings and the Prophets. Scripture was about to be opened again in their very day, and was to be written about events that unfolded in their presence. Why? Because God had sent another Joshua, whose name in Greek is of course rendered "Jesus".

Who was Jesus? It's a fascinating thing to me that the very person who opened up the idea to me that the "body of Moses" might refer to the Torah made another implication far more startling, and one that many mainstream Christians would consider blasphemous: that the "archangel Michael" was Jesus Himself. You may or may not be aware that this is a belief held dearly by Jehovah's Witnesses, among other out-of-the-mainstream Christian groups: that Jesus was not an incarnation of God, but rather an incarnation of the Archangel Michael.

It fascinates me because I wonder if indeed this is technically heresy. After all, what is an "archangel"? It's not a term that the Bible uses too often. (In fact, it's only used in one other verse, at which time it is more closely and clearly associated with Jesus than in Jude.) An "angel" is, once again contrary to popular culture, simply a "messenger". That's what the word in both the original Hebrew and Greek means. It follows that an "archangel" (literally "ruling messenger") would be a high-level messenger, and indeed, who is a more important messenger in history than Jesus Himself, at least as far as the Christian mindset is concerned? And the name Michael? It's understood to be Hebrew for "Who is like unto God?" I think any Christian would have a ready and obvious answer to that question. (Or is it possibly wrong that it's rendered as a question in the first place?)

At the death of Moses, there's a danger. The danger is that with the end of the giving of the Law, we close the book of God's truth, and consequently close our minds. "Here are the rules, now you're on your own. -God." Don't question, don't grow, don't seek deeper understanding and maturity. But God sent Joshua to take them forward into the Promised Land, where Moses could not take them. Likewise, our New Testament Joshua takes us to a place that Moses could not. The old book is closed, but a new book opens. The Law has guided you all the way to the border of the Promised Land, and now Jesus takes your hand and carries you across the Jordan in into the full blessing of God.

I think Christians know this, but they may miss a deeper implication of the history that the Bible presents to us. Once the children of Israel became slaves in Egypt, it wasn't yet over. Once Moses finished his farewell address and died in Moab, it wasn't over. Once they crossed into Canaan, and subsequently crossed into idolatry and paganism, it wasn't over. Once a dynasty was established for King David, it wasn't over. Once they were taken away into exile and lost their land, it wasn't over. Every event in the Old Testament that seemed like a moment when things could have either settled into stability or degraded into utter destruction, it wasn't the end, but just another chapter of God's plan. Do we have the audacity to think that's no longer the way things work?

When Jesus hung on the cross, he famously said, "It is finished." What exactly was finished? Theologically, we understand that it was His payment for our sins that was finished, but the story was not finished. It wasn't the end of the chapter, the chapter was not the end of the book, and after each of the four Gospels come to a close, there are still over 20 books left in the Bible to tell us the story of God and how He is working it out for our benefit. For those of us who believe that the book of Revelation is a description mainly of events that come in the future, we're not even out of the Bible yet in our own lives!

This is the lesson of both the first and last Joshua: that the book is never closed. So many people would be offended by the questions raised in Marauder's short piece on the nature of Satan, but really, is there anything that contradicts what God has told us? Throughout history, times have passed in which people were ostracized or even killed for simply asking questions. But whatever you may think of the nature of Jesus/Joshua and the devil/Satan, the two share something in common that conservative voices don't often like to hear: the purpose of suggesting that there is something more to life and to God than that which we already know. One leads to truth, and the other to deception, but indeed, both of them lead.

The book of deuteronomy

This was a hard series of essays to figure out, at least for me. I sort of like these odd little series that take off on a theme and go wherever they go. Initially, when I wrote the "Book of genesis" one, my thought had been merely how interesting it was that Darwin was actually so little-known in a very personal way; what with his works being considered far more important to the modern secularist than the Bible, why is it that he is still not widely read? Actually, the practical answer for that is that while secularists do often claim the Bible to be a very boring book, the book of Genesis with its tales of incest and intrigue are bound to be more stimulating reading than a treatise on biology could ever hope to be.

Yet once I started in on the thought, I realized there was more that could be said. These are the words of the Bible (and supposedly God) on one hand, and on the other hand, the secular world has its own words to live by. A guest speaker at my church a few weeks ago actually said something that stirred up a bit of controversy, although I hope I was far from the only one in attendance that got his point. He said that when we look for a basis for our morality in life, if we decide (among other options he discussed) that basis should be the Bible, we're actually making a bad judgment. The only basis we should have for our morality is truth. (Now as Christians, we probably have come to the conclusion that the Bible is true, so there's no conflict there, but it sounds subversive.) How that plays out may be problematic, of course, as most of us feel that "truth" is subjective.

In the end, whatever the truth may be, it's inescapable. If Darwin is speaking truth, if Marx is speaking truth, if people of religions and cultures differing from your own are speaking truth, then it doesn't matter whether you like what they say or not. It's still truth.

The Bible is claimed by Christians (and others) to be truth, but truth of what nature? The first five books of the Bible are supposedly truth given to us from God by way of Moses. But is this truth about the Bible itself true? The book of Deuteronomy is probably the one book in particular that is Moses' own. Genesis? Moses' book of ancient history of his people. Exodus? Moses' book of recent history of his people. Leviticus? Moses' book of the laws of his people. Numbers? Moses' book about where his people are now, and what they're going through. Deuteronomy? This is Moses giving a speech summing it all up in his own words, telling his people what it's all about.

It's Moses' farewell speech, and he takes a lot of time to say a number of things we've already heard, just for review. But there are a number of new things as well, and significant things. While Christians tend to view John 3:16 as a verse that sums it all up, Jews go for Deuteronomy 6:4: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our G-d, the LORD is one." It's a prayer that virtually every Jew knows by heart, and holds dearest to their heart. Jesus, when asked what the "greatest commandment" is, didn't quote from the Ten Commandments back in Exodus, he quoted the very next verse, 6:5: "Love the LORD you G-d with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." One of my personal favorite verses from the Bible comes from this book as well, 29:5, which paraphrased says, "Hey, did you notice that after walking in the desert for 40 years, nobody ever needed a new pair of shoes?" For some reason, I find that wild!

But detractors of the Bible find a favorite verse in Deuteronomy as well, one to highlight what they see as "truth" trumping over what those of "blind faith" see in the Bible. Deuteronomy 34:5, "And Moses the servant of the LORD died there in Moab, as the LORD had said." Hmm, how many people in history, when writing their autobiography, include a chapter on their own death? (Actually, I'd really like to know, as I suspect that Moses isn't unique in this respect, just rare. I believe Graham Chapman's autobiography includes info on his death, as well as a few interesting stories that happened years after he died that have to do with his life. Of course, these stories were "ghost written", a very appropriate term in these particular circumstances, and a possibility concerning Deut. 34 that few people seem to accept despite it being the most likely case.) Yes, it seems unlikely that the (whole) book was written by Moses after all; but then, who did write the thing?

I was in the library, looking for a book on this particular subject that I knew was out there. I didn't find it (Dewey Decimal section 222.1066 was unfortunately empty, which is apparently where it should have been; it was probably checked out.) but I did find another interesting book that referred back to it. The book I did come across was Kenneth C. Davis' Don't Know Much About the Bible, perhaps a very appropriate title for one of the subjects of the first essay in this series. Davis is the author of several books in this vein, such as Don't Know Much About the Civil War, which are largely books of interesting factoids about whatever subject. Good reads, but from the bit I perused, the author sometimes falls prey to the same sort of problems he accuses the Bible of having: he takes some bit out of the Bible and says "Hey, the Bible claims to know the truth on this subject, but it's way off, because actually I'm the one that knows the truth!" Cute. Not as bad as I make it sound, though; it's a good read overall, I think, but I base this on reading probably less than a tenth of the book.

As I said, the book does refer to the other book I was looking for, Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible?, a book that I think may be the definitive source for what is known as the "Documentary Hypothesis". For those not highly familiar with the concept, many modern scholars have come up with a theory as to how the Books of Moses came to be, and it involves the postulation of essentially five people given letters as code names, since their true identities are not known.

J is an author that writes a lot of the parts of the Bible that deal with people having more personal interaction with God, known in these sections of scripture as "YHWH" or "Jehovah", which is where the J comes from. In contrast, portions where God is referred to as "Elohim" are considered to have been written by author E, whose style is more prosaic. Author D is who is usually credited with writing the bulk of the Book of Deuteronomy (thus the D designation) and other sections that review and revise parts given elsewhere. Author P is mainly concerned with the establishment of the Jewish priesthood and codification of laws concerning it. Lastly, but far from least in importance, is R, the Redactor (a fancy word for "editor"), the one who took all the works of the other writers and wove it together into a single storyline, and rather poorly, if many textual critics are to be believed.

It's an interesting theory for a number of reasons. One thing that's interesting about it is that even being a strong Bible-believer, the first time I heard of this I was far from surprised. I don't know if it was something I was taught as a boy in synagogue, but I'd always believed that in particular the Book of Genesis was a collection of oral history put down on paper by Moses. Yes, those old stories came from multiple sources and were "redacted" by a later author, this person being Moses. As for the rest of the books of Moses, I do suppose that certainly that final chapter was likely to have been added after the fact, although given the supposed supernatural aspect of the books of Moses, it might be the case that Moses knew the circumstances that would surround his death and wrote about them before the fact. (It's also a possibility, although one purists would like much less, that Moses wrote about his death and then simply wandered off by himself, thereafter dying in a manner not actually recorded in Deuteronomy that remains a mystery to this day.) Be it a plus or minus to his authenticity, Moses is the fellow who called himself "more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth", as pointed out by Davis, who asks the obvious question as to whether a truly humble man would make such a statement. It seems like a rhetorical question, but if it were true, then couldn't he? No matter.

The fact is, in the end, whatever the source of the Bible, it's a very unique book. (Is "very unique" redundant?) Even assuming Moses is the one and only writer of these five books, the story would suggest to us that he wrote them over the course of forty years in a number of different situations, in a number of different locations, during a turbulent and difficult time for the country he was trying to lead. He traveled back and forth between continents, lived in different cultures, and played numerous roles in his life, including prince, outlaw, shepherd, prophet, and priest. Proponents of the veracity of the Bible often point out how remarkable it is that the Bible holds together so well given the fact that it was written across a vast span of time by a broad spectrum of authors in a variety of cultures and moments in history; much the same could be said of Moses' writtings alone.

The real problem with the Documentary Hypothesis is that it's just like the views that those of us of "blind faith" hold: it doesn't hold up to logical scrutiny. There are plenty of books in the Bible that have never been questioned as to being authored by a single person that have changes in style and/or preferred usage of certain names for God. The changing of style of writing within a single work can just as easily be a matter of change of mood or subject as change of author. So many of the bases for this theory have the same sort of self-contradicting tone as criticisms of the Gospels have: If a story is told twice in the Bible, and the two tellings match, critics will say that one was simply a copying of the other, and therefore meaningless. If, on the other hand, the two tellings do not match in any particular point whether major or minor, then there is a grievous contradiction that the editor has sloppily failed to fix. If a bit of the story indicates a prohibition of unusual practices, then it's labeled "intolerant", but if it allows unusual practices, it's labeled "inconsistent". If the story matches with a well-known event in history or in the folklore of other cultures' traditions, it's plagiarism, but if it tells a unique story, it's unsubstantiated. In short, just as there are certain people you will never be able to convince that the Bible has anything wrong with it, there are certain other people you will never be able to please when it comes to the Bible. To them, it's just plain wrong, and any and all evidence that supports this view will be accepted with joy.

But there's a middle ground here, and one that's not often explored for some reason. Yes, there are certain issues that the Bible has that need explaining, but I'm not sure this is one of them. How great of a blow falls upon the faith of those who believe in the Bible to suggest the possibility that the first five books of the Bible were not written by Moses? Does it really matter when all is said and done? When we're trying to determine what basis we have for religious belief and for our morality, if saying the Bible is our basis is inherently less sound of a choice than calling for a basis of truth, then how much less solid is a foundation that bases our core beliefs on oral tradition about a translation of a book that is an edited revision of an earlier oral tradition? Bible purists, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to minimize the significance of the Bible here. What I am trying to do is point out that the real point of the Bible, the real meat of its message, is not in who may or may not have written any given portion of Scripture, but in what the source of that Scripture ultimately is. Does it matter whether God dictated the Torah letter by letter to Moses as he chiseled it into stone on Mount Sinai, directed Moses to write it down over the course of his forty-year wanderings, or inspired one of the followers of Moses to piece together the traditions of the people years after Moses died, so long as it is the case that God was the one behind the work in the end?

On the skeptics' side there is even something to be said. Robert Alter, in his translation of the books of 1&2 Samuel (The David Story), points out some interesting things about the nature of redaction. I've often quoted him on scriptural matters because although as far as I can tell from his writings he is an atheist, he also is a lover of the beauty of the Hebrew Scriptures, and doesn't let his theological bias detract from seeing a good story. Although he makes the claim that the book(s) of Samuel are likely the result of editing long after the death of David, there are parts of the story that are viewed by skeptics as contradictory, but in fact should be seen as a beautiful bit of artistry on the part of whoever put these stories together. Both 1Sam.10 and 1Sam.19 include a reason why "...they say, 'Is Saul, too, among the prophets?' " which is considered by many to be a problem.

"The doublet, far from being a stammer of transmission or inept or automatically inclusive redaction, is vividly purposeful...To the ancient audience, however, the recurrence would not have seemed a contradiction, and the conflicting valences given to the explanation of the proverbial saying add to the richness of the portrait of Saul, formally framing it at beginning and end." (The David Story, p. 122)

In other words, this is just an ancient style of writing that is out of the norm for today, but totally acceptable in ancient Israel. Sometimes we insist on interpreting ancient writings through our modern filters, and they simply don't fit. The problem may not be with the writings, but with the filters, which are being used in the wrong context. I understand and accept that people will refuse to believe the truths put forth in the Bible, but I have a hard time standing idly by when people reject supposed faulty logic on the basis of their own faulty logic.

Of course, I'm sure many skeptics feel the same way about me. Maybe I've just had too much coffee today?

The book of numbers

I remember many years ago, a couple of people came knocking at my door. I seem to recall they were Jehovah's Witnesses, but I may be remembering wrong; it's not important.

"Do you know what the most popular book in history is?" they asked me, their way of starting up a conversation. This is the sort of conversation I enjoy greatly; not the theological conversation, which I also enjoy and of course they were aiming towards, but the conversation of interesting but ultimately pointless trivia.

"That's an easy one," I replied, "The Bible of course. Now here's a stumper for you: what's number two?" See how I did the very thing that so often annoys me (probably most people, actually)? I took their train of thought and switched it off to a different track so they had no idea where we were going. Next stop: Trivialand.

Actually, the funny thing about pointless trivia is that often enough, it's not even so vital that it's true, which, in thinking about the story lately, I realized that I may have been incorrectly parroting back what I had been told. I'm fond of asking the trivia question: "What's the only animal with four knees?" This confuses people, who mostly don't notice that most quadrupeds don't have knees on their front legs. The answer is supposedly "elephants", but I not only don't know if this is true, but I don't know if even elephants truly have four knees. I don't think they do, actually.

...and I'm going on a tangent again, and from a tangent off of a story about going off on tangents, at that! So, back to my first tangent, the one I gave the poor confused representatives of the Watchtower Society: I had been told repeatedly in college that the #2 book--whether it was supposed to be in popularity or influence or what, I do not know--was Euclid's Elements, an ancient textbook on the fundamentals of mathematics. Wikipedia says it is "second only to the Bible in the number of editions published", which may be the basis for its supposed #2 slot.

I definitely think there's something very significant in the fact that a math textbook holds such a vital place in world history. The average person may find mathematics a very dull subject, but it has been said, and I believe quite truly that "Mathematics is the only true universal language." Some people find it strange for a Christian to say such things, but I believe that even God cannot subvert some of the basic principles of mathematics. As Galileo said, "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

Numbers interest me deeply. They have a power in them that people do not realize. I've worked for years as a computer programmer, not because I love computers, but because there's something in me that greatly distrusts computers, and wants to know as much about them as I can. Understand HTML, JavaScript, PHP, ASP, etc., and you understand how the web works. Understand mathematics, and you understand how reality works.

People shy away from understanding numbers and how they interrelate, but they don't realize the vulnerability it gives them. As a someone who has also worked as a statistician, I also understand that. Another famous quote is "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." People who control the numbers can have power over those who don't understand the numbers. Even my father, who was not good at math, understood the principle. He once told me, "I noticed there was a brand of soup in the local supermarket that nobody wanted to buy at 25¢. The managers of the store took away the 25¢ sign and put one up that said '4 for $1', and they couldn't keep the stuff in stock!" Lack of a basic understanding of mathematics clearly leaves one wandering in the wilderness of confused ideas. And manipulation of statistics can be even worse than this sort of amateurish manipulation of simple fractions.

Statistics is a "science" of mathematics that involves sometimes a process of incredibly complicated calculations and delicate statements of degrees of confidence that are actually quite precise and accurate. But most people don't operate on that level, and don't want to operate on that level, so statistics tends to come at people with a simple pecentage, or a cutesy chart; a method that tends to simplify things to the point of meaninglessness.

Case in point: a friend elsewhere on the web posted a link to an article suggesting that statistics show gun ownership decreases the rate of "hot" burglary, i.e. burglary that happens while the residents are in the house. Here's the article. Can you spot the problem with this? In the first paragraph, we are told, "In studies involving interviews of felons, one of the reasons the majority of burglars..." Now a citation is given, so the original study may show more, but here we are told about "studies" which may mean anything. When I was in high school, I was fond of bolstering my arguments in research papers by interviewing classmates and citing useful responses. There's no good reason to assume that's what's going on here, yet there's not really any reason to assume something better. As far as the numbers go, "one of the reasons the majority" is worded so nebulously I'm not even sure it's safe to say that 50% of the interviewed felons feel this is important. Of course on top of that, we also don't know if this claim holds true in real life. Some felons (and which ones? I assume these are felons who were caught; who knows if those who got away with their crimes have the same feelings?) may claim that they behave this way, but how do we know how they act in real-life situations?

Here's where the numbers come in, right? The numbers were compared to Britain and the Netherlands in the second paragraph. Questions here that occur to me are: How do we know that theses are reasonable comparisons at all? What are the actual levels of gun ownership in those countries versus the U.S.? Do criminals know the statistics before they approach a house to burglarize it? What was the computation used to come up with the number of 450,000, and assuming this is a reasonable computation, what's the current number? I mean, is this 450,000 "hot" burglaries that would have still ocurred, but would not have been "hot", or brand-new burglaries that simply wouldn't have happened? Are we talking about doubling the number of burglaries, or increasing by 50%? (For that matter, do you know that those aren't the same thing?) That last statistic of 30% is tossed in with no comparison to the other two countries, so what's the significance?

The most important question to ask, however, is whether guns are really the deciding factor behind these numbers. Another article my friend linked to pointed out that in Britain, many people are getting high-tech security systems for their homes, making it a necessity that burglars need to strike while someome is home. Many years ago, I remember hearing that the proliferation of "The Club" device for securing one's car was causing a rise in carjackings. Does that mean security systems are bad? I don't know much about the Netherlands other than the fact that drug use is much higher there. Could that have something to do with crime rates? Look, the conclusion that the article is trying to support may actually be true, but the numbers and info given are largely meaningless. How many people realize that, though? People love to say, look, I've got statistics! I am right! But who knows what numbers really mean, and who knows when numbers are misleading, whether intentionally or accidentally?

Our whole world is made of numbers. Numbers to count items, numbers to measure time and distance, numbers to represent complicated concepts. They're simultaneously the most abstract concepts of our minds and the most fundamental building blocks of concrete reality. They're powerful, they're meaningful, and they're there whether you try to understand them or not. Ignore their power at your own peril.

Elizabeth: "The Oath of God"

I had a few other topics I was considering blogging on, including the lovely but somewhat unusual seder I went to last night, the death of Anna Nicole Smith (which ought to be old news by now, but you'd hardly tell it by watching television) and actually something strange I recently saw at McDonald's; but I had something that really touched my heart in a surprisingly special way in the last 24 hours, and I intend to write on that.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, has recently had a remission of her cancer, for those who didn't manage to pick up that tidbit of information from between reports of Anna Nicole's death. Back in 2004, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and while it seemed for some time that she had managed to beat it, it seems that the cancer had spread to her bones, and this time, there is nothing that can be done about it.

The latest issue of Newsweek features a short interview with Edwards on the topic of her coping with cancer, and in reading it, I found a lot of truly inspirational stuff. The one thing that really jumped out at me was that the interviewer asked her essentially about how it had affected her faith. Years before, Edwards had lost her 16-year-old son in a car accident, and she started to speak about her reflections on God's treatment of her and her family.

I had to think about a God who would not save my son. Wade was—and I have lots of evidence; it's not just his mother saying it—a gentle and good boy.

This is the sort of thing that I hear so many people struggle with when they talk about faith. I've blogged on it several times. It seems so often that I hear people who come to this issue, and they don't so much "struggle" with the idea, it seems, but come to a quick conclusion: There must be no God. (Not that I want to cheapen the power of that conclusion; some people may not have jumped to it so easily, and yet still arrived there. Faith (or lack thereof) is a personal thing.)

Philosophers discuss it. Pastors preach on it. Complex theological concepts are batted around by both professionals and laymen like myself. However, there is something simple and profound that perhaps is typified in the book of Job.

Most of you are probably somewhat familiar, but let's review the basics of that book of the Bible, considered by many scholars to probably be the oldest book of the Bible, and one of the oldest philosophical discussions of the problem of suffering. (You may read it here, if you want to, but the book is rather long; you can get the gist of it by reading the first three and last three chapters.) There's this guy Job, and he's an exceedingly good man. God is discussing him with Satan, and Satan claims that Job is only good because he gets rewarded for his goodness by God, and if he had nothing, he wouldn't be such a great guy. So God allows Satan to take away everything Job has, and leave him in poverty. Job's response?

"Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised." (Job 1:21)

This alone is pretty impressive. Most of us wouldn't be so complacent. Satan is not satisfied, however. He claims that so long as a man has his health, he hardly is suffering. So God allows Satan to make Job break out in "painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head." Now Job has really sunk to a low point, and most people would expect him to give up his faith. Indeed,

His wife said to him, "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!"

He replied, "You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?" (Job 2:9-10)

To me, that is real faith, deep faith. Faith that doesn't just expect God to be like a genie that grants your every wish, but knows that God is good and righteous even when you can't see His justice in action. Faith that says,

"Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him..." (Job 13:15)

And that's really the point of the book of Job in many ways: that we have to accept God on His own terms, even if that means suffering for our faith. People will make accusations against people of faith (as Job's friends do, later in the book) and against God because they want and expect God to behave a particular way. But God does not live by our rules, if indeed He lives by any rules at all. Should we expect the Creator of the universe to live up to our expectations, or should we only expect Him to be who He claims to be?

What did Edwards come to believe as a result of her personal losses?

...I had to accept that my God was a God who promised enlightenment and salvation. And that's all.

This is what touched my heart. It sometimes made me seem like a pessimist to my fellow Christians, but in times past, when I had gone through suffering and loss, there were people who told me that I should expect things to improve, because God was looking out for me. My response? "God was looking out for Job, too, wasn't He?"

But for me, this wasn't pessimism, it was realism. If I take God and say that He's a powerful being who exists to take care of my problems, I don't think I'm being Biblical. Jesus Himself promised that we would have trouble (John 16:33), and who am I to say that Jesus is wrong? This isn't bad. Sure I should hope for the best, but just as I'm not going to limit God by saying that He can't fix all of my problems, on the flipside of that, I'm not going to limit Him by saying that He will fix them. Sure, it takes great faith to expect miracles, but doesn't it also take great faith, to say, like Edwards:

I'm not praying for God to save me from cancer. I'm not. God will enlighten me when the time comes. And if I've done the right thing, I will be enlightened. And if I believe, I'll be saved. And that's all he promises me.

I pray that for so many of us unsure in our faith through hard times, that will be enough.

Moralists Anonymous

I have another post I've been working on, but I put it aside for this. This post is dedicated to one of my biggest fans, who posts quite often on my other blog, and even occasionally here: Anonymous. This guy is great, not so much that he's always the kindest comment poster or deepest thinker, but I am flattered that he takes time out from all his poetry writing, clever quipping and police informant work to drop in on my blog and give me his opinion. Lately, he had a lot to say in response to my post on slavery (scroll to the comments), but in the end, it apparently boiled down to an issue that I haven't addressed there, and probably never will, due to the nature of the blog.

The issue is the moral nature of God. Anonymous claimed, as many before him have done, that there is good reason to question whether or not God is morally right in His actions and overall interaction with humanity. For many people, this issue is raised as part of the Problem of Evil. Short version: (A) God is good. (B) God is all-powerful. (C) Evil exists. It is claimed that all three of these cannot be true, and if this is so, and rational people cannot reject (C), then (A) and/or (B) must be false, and Christianity cannot be based on truth. This is also related very closely to the problem of suffering, which is essentially the same, but with "evil" replaced by "suffering". Anyway, the point is that the nature of God becomes questionable in this light, and one must wonder what Bible believer can say about it.

I'm pretty sure I have addressed elsewhere the issue of questioning (B), but due to Anonymous' questioning, I think it might be time to shed some light on (A). Why does it sometimes appear to some that God is immoral, and how do Christians reconcile this? Why does God allow evil that seems like it would be simple enough for an all-powerful God to stop, and on top of that, why does the Bible condone things like slavery and capital punishment that many of us find morally distasteful? I'm not going to pretend to have the answer, although I may highlight my favorite theory before I wrap this up.

One of the very common ways to respond to the issue is to simply say "We have no right to judge God." This actually comes in a number of different forms, some of which blur the boundaries with other types of responses that I plan to discuss here. One form is that of the defaulted reverential approach to God, where one has simply been taught that God is Holy and wonderful and that one should never question God's goodness because...well, just because! What are you, some sort of heretic? A more abstract but actually in a way more reasoned approach is to simply point out that since God created the universe and the living creatures in it, they belong to Him, and he gets to do whatever He wants with them, and if you don't like it, go make your own universe! Maybe that's alright for some people in their own minds to take a position like this, but for someone who is not a believer to begin with, this approach will be sadly lacking in weight. Furthermore for those of us that are believers that want to have any sort of serious discussions of theology, there is a need for a reasoned approach. This isn't it.

As I said, there is a blurring of the boundaries between these different types of responses, and it may not be really clear why this is different, but another approach is to claim that morality is actually a creation of God, and since God made it, He has a certain amount of control over it. This is a strange and many-faceted idea that sometimes is approached from the other direction in a manner of speaking, when someone tries to argue that without God, there is no morality, period. The idea in such an approach is to suggest that the fact we can make moral judgments somehow verifies the existence of a higher moral standard, and that that standard can only be the almighty creator of the universe. Perhaps somebody can suggest to me a good book or essay to read on the subject because I frankly have never understood this position, and every time I've heard it, it seems to be stated as though it's self-evident. Putting that aside and getting back to the subect of God's "control" over morality, a good metaphor is that life is like a game where the rules exist in God's head. Whatever God does, He can bend the rules to fit his actions, or, more to the point due to God's omniscence, God has created the rules with loopholes for Himself. (That's an over-simplification, but I'm really convinced that the argument boils down to that in essence.) Those who don't like this argument seem to feel that it's a matter of hypocrisy that God doesn't have to obey moral law while His creation does, and there might be something to that. One thing that Christians in particular have claimed is that in the person of Jesus, God lived the life of a mortal, and in the thirty-odd years He spent on earth, He willingly subjected Himself to those laws. Whether that helps the argument or is even plausible to those who read the Gospels with a skeptical eye, who can say?

Similarly, but with some deeper theological implications, there are those who claim that God, a being of a higher order and quite different from us in many ways, does obey moral law, but has a completely different set of moral laws that apply to Him. Generally, this is hard to explain in the particular case of God, but perhaps can be illustrated in a different way. Let's talk fleas. Most people would not think it immoral of a person to buy a flea collar for their pet. The flea collar kills fleas, but we recognize that the fleas are detrimental to the health of the pet, and for the pet's sake, should be eliminated. If the pet chose to wear it or managed to remove it, either way, most people would not think such an action on the part of the pet would be immoral. Now despite the fact that the pet and the owner are unhappy with the flea, nobody would particularly feel that the flea was immoral for biting the pet (or the owner, for that matter) since that is the way it survives, and cannot be expected to do otherwise. Also, the flea has no comprehension of why it is unwanted (if indeed it is aware of it at all!)

So, as the difference between fleas, pets, and pet owners implies different moralities not just in degree, but in kind, so God exists in a state where His morality is perhaps as unrecognizable to us as ours is to a flea. And the comparison is perhaps appropriate, as many have wondered about the morality of God creating fleas in the first place. It may be that God has created fleas (and evil and suffering in many other forms) for reasons that we simply cannot fathom, not being God. I think a likely objection to this view is that if God's morality is of a kind that is not related to ours in such a fantastic manner, how can one even know that God is moral? Really, we'd just be guessing and/or taking God's word for it. While that objection is basically true, this may nonetheless be the case, like it or not.

Now, my preferred manner of viewing the morality of God is that God's morality is of a higher order than ours, but not so much of a different type. The distinction between this position and the last one is that while we often do not understand the moral aim of any choice God makes, it is not because it is intrinsically unknowable. The issue for God is that God sees the big picture. My children don't understand why it's not good to eat nothing but candy all the time. They're too young to understand nutrition. Frankly, I don't understand nutrition either, but I'm mature enough to recognize that there is a right and wrong way to choose foods, even if I don't always do it. My kids could grow up to become nutritionists or doctors, and have a much better grasp on the concept, the potential is there. Now while we can't "grow up" and become God, I think that God has knowledge that leads Him to do things that is often beyond our current grasp.

One of the biggest things that I feel that God understands better than any person alive is the concept of death. There's a bit of a trend I've seen lately, perhaps started by Steve Wells in his blog Dwindling In Unbelief, to point out that if one goes through the Bible, we see God killing more people than Satan. I am personally of the belief that when God (and perhaps Satan as well?) kills a person, it is a different matter than when a human kills another. This is not a matter of God having the right to kill because He created life (a fairly popular response), but God having the right to kill because He and He alone, being omniscient, knows the full implications of ending any particular life at any particular time. One of these days, I'm going to have to do a post on my view of the spiritual aspect of murder, I have what I think is an interesting personal take on the matter. Why do I take away my kids' candy before dinner? Because I know something that they don't. Why does God take away a life or allow some other form of suffering? Because God knows something we don't. People can complain that God allowed a man like Hitler to exist, and then turn around and complain the He allowed a baby to die. We may not be aware that had that baby grown to adulthood, he would have become a man far worse than Hitler, and it was better that he died before setting off down the path that led to that end. Wildly theoretical, I know, but not at all impossible.

A person might object to this sort of speculation as being the same sort of grasping at straws that "blind faith" breeds, and heck, they might be right. However, I have met many atheists that have a similar view of materialistic science. If we only knew more about the universe, they assure us, then we'd have no need for God or miracles or an afterlife. Well, how do they know that? The same way that I know that God is moral. The more I investigate, the more I understand, and as yet, nothing has given me strong reason to think otherwise. And anyway, I do have faith in science in that way as well (well, short the part about not needing God), and I don't think it's wrong. I think science can tell us everything we will ever need to know about the physical universe, if we only investigate carefully. I simply feel that the physical universe is not all there is. There is God, there is the spiritual aspect of our world, and there is a morality, both of man and God that shapes it all in ways that we only partly understand.

Do as Foley says, not as he does

Something happened recently in the news that I'm sure hundreds of people are blogging about. Republican Congressman Mark Foley was recently accused of being a pedophile, and the evidence looks pretty damning, I guess. (I haven't been following the story in great detail.) In addition to the damning fact that he was propositioning teenage boys online, there was the ironic fact that he was a founding member and chairman of the "House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children". Now as a lot of people are blogging on this, there's no need for me to go into the hypocrisy of the Republican party's self-proclaimed reputation of being the party with the high moral ground, the possibility of Democrats intentianally pushing this information into the light at the most politically opportune time, FoxNews' repeated incorrect labeling of Foley as a Democrat, or the most obvious and straightforward critique of Foley as simply being a creep who might need to be locked up, regardless of his political party or social standing. (From what I hear, it's not clear whether or not Foley has actually broken the law. You know, when I was 16, I was sexually propositioned...by a fifteen-year-old female schoolmate, which as far as I know is perfectly legal, raising some possible interesting questions for a future post on the technicalities of sex laws.) Instead, I'm going to take what I think will be a unique approach and use this event as a jumping-off point for a positive moral lesson that will give, I hope, insight into the Bible in specific, and human nature in general.

I wish to neither condemn nor defend the actions of Foley that are at the center of this scandal, but point out something interesting about the irony of his position and various public statements. As someone who had worked a great deal on protecting children and had been very publicly outspoken on the matter of tracking down sexual predators and taking away their civil liberties, it may be very easy to call him a hypocrite, and you'd probably be right to do so. If you stop there, however, you'd be doing a great disservice to the message itself.

Foley's guilt or innocence aside, the purpose of the caucus he was chairing is one that most of us, regardless of our political views, can get behind. At least on an idealistic level, I'd guess that 99.9% of the population would like to see children guarded from exploitation and abuse. While most of us may have different opinions as to the manner in which we choose to protect our children, we all agree that protection of some sort is needed, and hopefully we admire the fact that there are people doing something about it. Whatever Foley may have done in his personal life seems to me to be something that we can separate from the aims of his political committee. Yet I don't know if anyone is taking the time to talk about the committee itself, and what it has or has not accomplished. I certainly haven't heard anything. Is it because the issue is unimportant?

When I was growing up, my stepfather used to punish me if he caught me swearing. I always thought it was the height of hypocrisy because, well, I'd say he swore like a sailor but I never met a sailor with a mouth that foul. For whatever reason, my stepfather had the annoying habit of seemingly being unable to get out three sentences in a row without using some form of the f-word. And that was when he was in a good mood; when he was angry about something, yikes! So I often wondered how he thought he had the right to tell me to watch my language. I even asked him once, to which he actually replied, I kid you not, "Do as I say, not as I do." The fact is, swearing is not a good thing to do, and while his hypocrisy made me more inclined to disrespect his words, he was nonetheless right that I should not be using vocabulary like that, and as my (more or less) parent, he had a right to have a say-so in my behavior.

As a child (heck, and as an adult) one often comes up against this sort of situation often in a non-hypocritical context. Upon being told of some rule in life that we have to abide by, there's often a tendency to point out that there are plenty of people that break the rule. "Why can't I go see that movie? All my friends are going to see it!" or "You mean I can't go to the party because there's drinking? Lots of other parents let their kids go!" or even "It's not like making marijuana illegal is going to stop people from smoking it!" It's not that the person who told you what you have to do is violating their own standard, but that you know the standard is being violated, and feel that it somehow lessens the standard anyway.

So what does all this have to do with the Bible? Well, if it's not obvious, there are a lot of people in the Bible that seem like very bad examples of morality, and it seems like people who wish to play down the validity of Judeo-Christian morality often point to these people as evidence that the Bible and God do not represent morality. Who in the Bible made a poor choice and did something immoral that led to something unfortunate happening? It would be easier to ask who didn't! Essentially, of all the major characters in the Bible, you've got about half a dozen, if that many, that don't have some tale of their personal moral failure included in their life story. Adam chose to disobey God in the one and only way he could. Noah was a drunk. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were all liars. Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of soup. Judah had sex with his daughter-in-law because he thought she was a prostitute. Moses was a murderer. Aaron encouraged the Israelites into idolatry. Miriam was racist. And the list goes on.

How can we look to these people as examples and models for how we are to live our own lives? Isn't the Bible contradictory and hypocritical to tell us about all these people? Well, no, and I don't think it takes a genius to figure it out. I remember as a child trying to read through the Bible on my own for the first time to really understand what it was about, and thinking to myself what a horrible bunch of people these were. It hit me then that these people's flawed lives were being laid bare before us as object lessons.

One of the most difficult to fully understand but important characters in the Bible is King David. (I have intended myself to write a post to this blog with the very same title as the post linked, although you might guess that mine would be different in many ways.) The guy is full of all sorts of character flaws, does a number of terrible things, and when you read everything the Bible says about him, it certainly can be difficult to understand what exactly it was that God saw in him. In the end, though, David is a prime example of what this is all about. Yes, David was flawed. He had sexual problems, he had violence problems, he had parenting problems, and he screwed up a lot of that stuff like nobody ever did. But God wants us to look at David as one example among many of people who mess up their lives and do the wrong thing as indeed, we all do. After it all, despite his failures David kept trying to be a better person. David kept turning to God to ask for forgiveness and guidance in how to make things right again. The Bible isn't there to show us perfection (except supposedly in the person of God), but to show us the flaws in all of us, and make us understand that we're a whole planet full of screw-ups--but lovable screw-ups!

My hope and expectation is that in the wake of the Foley scandal, our national leaders will continue the fight to protect our children from exploitation. It would be wrong to dismiss the seriousness of the cause because it was sullied by contact with someone of questionable moral standards. It is also my hope, but not at all my expectation that people would not reject the Bible on the basis of the questionable moral character of some of the people featured within it. They are neither better nor worse than any of us, they are just people, and the message that they are a part of conveying doesn't rest on their perfection, but the power of what it means in our lives.