Moral relativism is driving me batty

Perhaps this is a topic better suited for my other blog, but I think as it doesn't pertain to a specific scripture but rather a number of different Biblical topics, it would be better to discuss here. It's very common when people are arguing against the Bible that they bring up one or more topic of contrast between common understandings in Biblical times and modern understandings. Often, it's a matter of morality, such as "Why does the Bible allow slavery?" or "Why does marriage in Biblical times seem to treat women as just slightly above livestock?" While those are good questions well worth asking, sometimes there are questions of a scientific nature that seem nearly as pressing, such as "Why does the Bible seem to indicate that the earth is only a few thousand years old?" or "Why does the Bible consider bats to be birds?"

A friend of mine posted a link recently on Facebook to an article about church-sanctioned prostitution in medieval England. The article made me think about the way morality changes from age to age, and how "traditional values" are a questionable concept, especially faced with stories like this. The article says that while prostitution wasn't quite considered a good thing, it was figured that it was better that men solicit prostitutes than practice masturbation or sodomy. While I think most conservative Christians today would consider masturbation less serious than prostitution (sodomy would depend on exactly what you meant by the term, which tends to be fluid in meaning), it only goes to show that even among Christians, ideas of what is moral and immoral are fluid from age to age and culture to culture.

Really this fact shouldn't come as a surprise to most people. Of course morality is fluid. I think we conveniently forget this, not only as Christians, but as Biblical skeptics. In respect to the former, I think that it is right for non-Christians to suggest that it is questionable for Christians to (as it is often phrased) "impose iron-age morality on modern society." Really, I think most Christians see the wisdom in this to some point; we don't stone people to death for committing adultery anymore, do we? And I think we're all glad that such a barbaric practice is out of style. I know I want nothing to do with it.

But when it comes to the Biblical skeptics, I think there is a similar problem going on. How can we think it makes sense to impose 21st-century morals on iron-age nomads? Doesn't it go both ways? Don't criticize an ancient culture for not classifying bats according to your modern taxonomy rules when all they really needed was a guideline for which winged animals they could and could not eat. Furthermore, why would you impose your 21st-century morality on anyone when most likely people in the 22nd century will look back on your morals as abhorrent? We're far from an enlightened utopia that has done away with racism, sexism, homophobia, and violence, and science has tended to show that the things we think to be true and good today will be proven to be twisted and harmful to us tomorrow.

In the end, what I think I'm really saying is that everyone should be willing to question their assumptions of morality and reality. Not just their own, but the morals and world-views of people they assume to be wrong. You don't have to change your mind, just keep it open, you know?

Thank God for small favors

There is a family at my church who's been going through a crisis. I'll probably get the details wrong because I don't know them personally, and I've only heard the story second-hand, but it doesn't matter so much. See, this family has a child, a boy slightly younger than two years old, who right around Christmas time started acting rather strange. Kids that age don't tend to do much anyway, but all of a sudden, he seemed to be especially quiet and inactive, and after he'd been like that for some time, they decided to take him to the hospital, just to be on the safe side.

Well, it turned out that there indeed was something wrong. A scan was taken and indicated that he was bleeding into his brain. Surgery was performed, and it was revealed that the boy had a large tumor which was removed. At the time I am writing this, the boy seems to have recovered; he's back home again and acting normally. He's going to undergo a series of chemotherapy treatments in the coming months, which of course won't be fun, but at least his prospects are good, and his life was saved.

People have sick children all the time. People get cancer. People get treatment. And people recover. Why bring up the story? Because of miracles, and how we perceive them.

Once again, I'm only hearing this story second-hand, but the mother is apparently brimming over with joy and thanksgiving that her son is going to be alright. Through an extensive prayer network, people all over the world have been praying for this boy, and have sent the mother e-mails expressing their thankfulness to God that the boy has recovered. Her response to this crisis is to declare that her son's diagnosis, treatment and recovery are a miracle of God.

Now, I know I wrote about this topic before, but it deserves a brief mention again, that sometimes I suspect the purpose of suffering and misfortune is to turn us to God. If our lives were smooth sailing, we probably would never look to a higher power. This mother was a Christian before all of this transpired, but something about what happened has caused a deepening of her faith. It may very well be that the boy, upon hearing this story when he is old enough to understand it, will also gain great faith from it. From a theistic perspective, suffering can serve a higher purpose (if indeed faith is important).

But I had a little epiphany when I heard the story, and it wasn't the one above, although it comes from the same source. I've spent a lot of time discussing religion, faith and theology with skeptics, and inside my head there's a little voice of a skeptic that goes with me into every conversation. That little voice, speaking out for the skeptics not physically present in the room as the story was told, said, "A kid has a brain tumor, and we're all thanking God for it, simply because he got over it? How stupid is that? If God was really looking out for the kid, wouldn't he have not had a tumor at all?"

I've heard this argument before in one form or another of course, and there does seem to be some logic to it. Wouldn't it be better to not suffer at all? You'd think so, but it's this very argument that tends to lead me to the thoughts I shared above and previously. Suffering leads to introspection, leading some theists to greater faith, some atheists to further skepticism, and various people of both persuasions to reevaluate what they believe. Yet there is another implication.

If indeed to not have a brain tumor is better than having one, what does that imply about those of us who don't have brain tumors? If recovery from a brain tumor can be considered a miracle, then doesn't that imply that not having one in the first place is better than a miracle?

I've heard it said in a sermon or two (paraphrased), "Instead of asking why some kid had a brain tumor, ask why you don't!" Suffering is a fact of life, and whether you are a theist who believes it to be the result of Original Sin or an atheist who sees it as a matter of "nature's red in tooth and claw", or whatever your belief persuasion may be, consider that any moment without suffering may be the biggest miracle of all!

Think of the implications. A couple who suffers from infertility managing to finally have a baby is not nearly as impressive of a miracle as a couple who has no trouble procreating in the first place. A man who survives a nasty automobile accident should, in some sense, not be nearly so thankful as an everyday commuter who manages to spend over an hour each day at speeds up to seventy miles per hour without her car ever coming into contact with an immobile object beyond the road passing beneath her wheels. Every plane that doesn't crash, every surgery that a patient lives through, every bank that doesn't go under when the stock market drops, every job you manage to keep, every walk through your house in the dark without a stubbed toe, and every day you wake up in the morning to find you're still drawing breath into your lungs: those are all profound miracles that we are blind to because we pass through them like a fish through water.

And then there's this: Can an atheist really say that it's better not to have a tumor in the first place? If suffering shows us the "truth" that there is no God, then wouldn't it be better for the boy to not only have a tumor, but to die? Shouldn't we all be wiped out by a plague, or even better, have a huge meteor ram into the earth and destroy all life?

It used to be that theodicies were about theists finding ways to reconcile suffering with the accepted concept of a good and loving God. In the modern age, discussions of the problem of suffering have often been the result of atheists arguing that there is no reconciliation of these concepts. But it seems there is an inherent flaw. If suffering turns us away from God, and it's true that there is no God, and truth is good, then suffering is good. But there can't possibly be enough suffering, because there is a lot of the world that is full of these little miracles.

I don't know that any of this makes any sense. Then again, is there any sense in the suffering of a little boy with a brain tumor? Yet it happens. When we try to make sense of the world, are we losing sight of the bigger picture? Are atheists' preconceived notions blocking their understanding of something profound? Are mine? Probably both.

The book of genesis?

I realized something this morning that for some reason struck me as funny. Skeptics of Christianity have often pointed out (quite rightly, mind you) that despite the fact that the world is full of people who claim to be Christians, it's surprisingly uncommon to find a Christian who has actually taken the time to read the Bible. How many of them know the Ten Commandments, which they claim to highly esteem? (Hey here's some fun a non-believer can have with an ignorant believer: convince them that there's something strange in the Ten Commandments. Remember, though, you've got to make it believable, so something like "Thou shalt not touch the flesh of the swine" or "Thou shalt not lie with man as with women." Your best chance is to lift a verse from elsewhere in the Bible and pretend it's in Exodus 20. Fun for you, hopefully educational for them.)

Let me be clear that I am not saying, as some have, that it's the "atheist Bible", but I was thinking about Darwin's Origin of Species, and wondered: how many people who believe in evolution have read that book?

Of course, the position that Origin of Species holds in the world of evolutionary science is not analogous in many ways to the position of the Bible. Really, the Bible is supposed to be the definitive book on Christianity, and while one can know a lot about Christianity and even be a Christian without ever having opened the book once, every book that there is on Christianity is in some way going to refer back to it. Origin of Species, on the other hand, while a book that was there in the beginning of evolutionary thinking, is far from required reading. Any reference work discussing evolution need not even give a simple nod to Darwin, but can formulate its own opinions on the meaning of fossil evidence and the like.

Still, a principle is there, hidden beneath the question of how many evolutionists have actually read Darwin's work. Just as one might wonder what sort of a Christian a non-Bible reading self-proclaimed Christian might be, isn't it fair to wonder about a believer in evolution who has never read a word on the subject, be it written by Darwin or not? I would say such a person has true "blind faith" in evolutionary theory, and even those who believe in evolution from a position of fuller knowledge ought to be worried by this sort of belief. Sure, most Christians can't name all Ten Commandments; how many people who would profess to believe in evolution can even define the word "evolution"? You might be surprised. (Try yourself: whatever you think the word means from a biological standpoint, jot it down, then check your answer against Dictionary.com or something. You might be surprised! Wait, didn't I just write that?)

Now, I myself have not read the book, but I'd like to. I'd also like to encourage others to do so. While not a "holy book", Origin of Species is a book that probably ranks up there with the scriptures of various religions in importance. Just as my fellow Christians are often found saying "How can you reject the Bible when you've never read it?" I ask how they can reject Darwin without reading his work. Even if you're convinced it's 100% crap, all the more reason to open it up and see what's inside: to know what sort of crap it is and let people know. As a believer in many of the concepts of evolution (creationists, make sure you completed the dictionary exercise above before criticizing me for my position) I do have expectations as to what I will find in Darwin when I get around to him: a man with great powers of observation, keen insight, and a touch of laxity in his scientific methods. Very thought-provoking, I'm sure.

I hope it's not the first time I've urged this when it comes to this subject, as well as many others: both skepticism and faith have their place in obtaining full understanding, and one should not blindly accept nor reject any significant piece of information that comes one's way. Just as I tell people they should read about Christianity from the source and judge for themselves, so I believe that they should read about evolution in the same way.

Once I do manage to get around to it, I'm sure I'll be more than happy to share my views on it far beyond what anyone cares to listen, just like everything else.

Does a hairless ape have the Buddha nature?

I spend a lot of time thinking about things that atheists say about the world and how so often it doesn't seem to make sense to me. Case in point, something that I love to bring up is the question of how evolutionary theory (that is, of the sort that claims humans evolved from "lower life forms", that's the interesting stuff, right?) is often claimed to have solid basis in scientific fact, and yet, I've never heard of any specific evidence. Those who truly understand science realize that science never "proves" anything anyway, and that's an apparent weakness and yet in many ways truly the strength of science that at its core, science is eternally skeptical.

Not so theists, obviously. A common claim made by theists is the concept that the existence of God is simply self-evident. The mere fact that atheists exist would seem to be a compelling counter-argument, but my fellow theists insist. Usually, the claim is the if one simply looks at the world around us, sees how amazing it is, one cannot reasonably reject the concept of an all-powerful creator. Okay, if you really think so.

Something always seems wrong with it to me, but it's hard to put a finger on specifics. Then I remembered a fascinating little observation I've heard a few theistic anti-evolutionists make: Ever seen a dog say grace before digging into a bowlful of chow? Of course not, dogs don't have religion, nor do any other animals, and clearly, that's what sets us apart and makes us superior.

I find that to be a much more interesting and perhaps far more astute observation, although it may not be so clear what conclusions we can draw from the fact. I realize that I have repeatedly talked on this blog about how we really are not well served in comparing humans to animals, yet I think it is a wellspring of philosophical, sociological and biological insight to note anything that does actually clearly delineate us from the rest of the living creatures in the world. We're not the only animals to use tools, build structures, or even use language, so while those things fail to fully set us apart, the fact that we are somehow fundamentally religious is striking. Even atheists are likely to occasionally ponder the possibility that God exists, even if they easily reject it out of hand. Does this really make us somehow superior, however?

While an atheist might say no out of sense of surety that theology is a waste of brain power, it occurs to me that theists themselves are implicitly putting forth a very good argument that something is wrong somewhere. Maybe you personally disagree, but I have never doubted that many animals are thinking, feeling beings. Our favorite pets, dogs and cats, seem to be very able to observe the world around them and evaluate what is going on. Their thought processes may be somewhat more simplistic, but I don't believe they are completely unable to abstract from sense data. When I was growing up, I had a dog. Surely that dog could have looked up into the night sky and seen the stars twinkling away across the galaxy. Surely that dog could have looked at the natural world about him and seen the beauty of nature. Yet all of these things that are supposed to inspire us as humans to realize that there is something greater than us in the world simply fail to elicit such a response in animals. Why is that?

Think about it: If the existence of God is supposed to be self-evident by simply looking at the world around us, so much so that in order to deny God's existence one would supposedly have to fool oneself into denying it, then why do we not see any evidence of Godly reverence among other species? Is it lack of intelligence? I don't think so. It's an oddity that one has to be intelligent before one can be fooled. Ever try to play a practical joke on a dog? It doesn't work. Either you fail completely, or you're successful in a mere mechanical way while the dog has no idea what's going on. Who fooled the animals of the world into ignoring God?

Really, in my mind there are only two possibilities. Either claims that the existence of God is self-evident are fundamentally flawed, or the fact that animals are non-religious shows us that we as humans are inferior. If you can look at the stars in the sky and "see God", not in a supernatural way, but in a mundane sense of it being simply self-evident, then you're deluded. Our ability as highly intellectually evolved creatures to imagine infinite possibilities from the limited information we gather with our senses has caused a glitch: the imagining of God.

That's not to say that God does not exist. Don't mistake me, I'm still a theist. The problem here is a short-circuiting of reason, but that doesn't automatically imply that the conclusion is wrong, just logically flawed. If I believe that every time I wash my car, it will rain within 24 hours, it may in fact be true, but that doesn't imply causality, only that I have poor timing in washing my car. I think God exists, but not because the world is so beautiful.

It may be that there is something supernatural to it, like God opening the eyes of a person in the Bible and letting them see the realm of the spirit for a moment. Even then, however, one cannot say it's self-evident, as divine intervention is needed. Is a special kind of sight that which has set us apart from the animals? If so, it may not be given to all, and we cannot say that an atheist is fooling themselves for not seeing what we see; for better or worse, they simply aren't experiencing that same glitch.

Why is the sky blue? (It has nothing to do with wavelengths.)

"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."

"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what a star is made of."

-Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis

I'm sure what I have to say here is a reiteration of what others have said hundreds of times if I cared to search through literature and what passes for it on the Internet, but perhaps it stands to be said once again anyway. There are a lot of people in the world these days who, whether they would state it this way or not, put science in the place of faith. I think this is a grave mistake, and a way of closing oneself off from truly glorious possibilities of experience in this life (not to mention the next) by being closed-minded.

Let me make something very clear, though. It is often such self-professed skeptics who hurl the accusation of closed-mindedness at those who do have faith. Hypocrisy? No, actually, because they can often be right. You see, the very point I wish to make here is that science and faith are not opposing sides such that one must choose one or the other, but two separate things that can and should coexist in harmony. Among those of us who have faith as a major aspect of our lives, there are more than a few who have taken a position wherein they have done the opposite of the skeptics, and put faith in the place of science. Given that faith tends to be a thing more rigid than science in general, a person in such a mindset might rightfully be said to be more closed-minded than a person of the opposing camp.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me, and it may to you, to find out that C.S. Lewis, arguably the most prominent Christian apologist of the 20th century, was a believer in evolution. Modern evangelicals love Lewis, but hate evolutionary theory; how many know of his views on this matter?

The thing is, recently I finally had a chance to read some of Lewis' science fiction. (I've been well-acquainted with his "Chronicles of Narnia" since I was about six. Prince Caspian is a book I fondly remember as being the first novel I managed to read within a 24-hour period, back when I was seven years old and I had just discovered that The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was only the first book in a series of seven!) Perhaps not as deeply engaging and enchanting as his Narnia books, but still a pretty good read, Lewis had written a trilogy of books involving space travel and aliens. The thing that seems odd about them is the manner in which the main character of the stories discusses with sentient beings on other planets his attempt to grasp what forces of nature might have caused them to evolve into the forms that they have come to be, while at the same time, it is quite clear that this protagonist is a devoted Christian in the midst of a very Christian story. The power of Lewis' interplanetary theology drips from every page of the tale, and is a strong, positive message. Yet I suspect that if these stories were to be written today, no Christian publishing house would touch them for the science that doesn't fit in with the popular evangelical world-view.

It's a shame. No really, I mean that not in the "Oh, it's too bad," sense, but in the real sense of meaning that I'm embarrassed for fellow Christians who might miss a good message for the sake of fighting a world-view that need not be the enemy of the faith we live. After all, who can doubt the fervor and intensity of Lewis' faith? Yet he maintained that faith while being quite comfortable accepting the science of the 20th century right alongside his faith. Is it so impossible that Christians could do the same?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to advocate that we all embrace evolutionary theory. It has its merits, but the strength of science is in the allowance of skepticism. By all means, doubt evolution, question it! But don't reject it out-of-hand as though it were blasphemous just because you can't fit it easily into your world-view. And I give the same message to those whose religion has become science, whether you realize it or not. There are a lot of scientists who feel that the natural world is pointing to the idea of a higher power: science and religion can and do mix freely.

What is it that has failed in our culture that so many of us can't see this? I think it is a lack of understanding of the basic questions we ask in order to understand the universe. I thought I had shared this allegory with you before, and if you've heard it excuse me, but it's one of my favorites: There once was a community of mice who all lived inside of a piano. Every day, as the mice went about their business, beautiful music floated down from above them and filled their world. The mice had come to believe that there was a being who was larger and more intelligent than them who lived outside of the piano, and this person, the Great Musicmaker, made the music because of a love of beauty. Some mice decided one day to go and try to find the Great Musicmaker, so they climbed up the insides of the piano to see what they would see. Eventually, they came to a large cavern filled with strings and hammers. As they stood there wondering what they were seeing, the music began playing. They were shocked at what they saw, and they returned immediately to the rest of the mice. Once back, they reported, "There is no Great Musicmaker, only hammers striking strings!"

What's the point of this story? The point of this story, and all that I am writing here is that the question of HOW things come to be is a separate one from WHY things come to be. When the mice looked on the hammers and strings, they understood the HOW, and were somehow blinded to the WHY. Likewise, in our world, many people examine the world and find "There is no God, only space-time and matter and forces, and all can be explained by gravity and chemistry and quantum forces." I've said it many times; yes, all can be explained by those things, but only the HOW of those things.

But there is an extension to this allegory that perhaps fits to the modern world. Suppose the mice chose to continue to believe in the Great Musicmaker? Really, they would be right to do so, wouldn't they? Where they would be wrong is if they denounced those mice who claimed that the strings and hammers existed, and said that is was wrong to believe in the existence of strings and hammers. That would be putting so much emphasis on the WHY that there was no room for the HOW.

It is my belief that everything that exists, exists for a reason. It is also my belief that this reason is twofold: one aspect is WHY the thing exists, and one aspect is HOW it came to exist. Those two aspects may be and probably are strongly intertwined, so I see no reason why either one should be divorced completely from the picture.

What's logic got to do with it?

I suppose I spend a lot of my spare time and energy arguing that faith is a good and rational thing. Heck, it's essentially the point of my other blog, if not expressly stated, then at least in fairly obvious subtext. I have a hard time sitting back while I hear people disparage (more or less) faith by describing it as something like "belief in that which has no evidence". I'm sure I've railed on it before, if not here then in countless other venues of public expression. And yet, I'm going to take a moment to say a few things that are a baby step if not a leap in the other direction.

I remember back in my early college days, there came a time when I began to describe myself as a Christian, although in truth, I no longer consider myself to have been one at the time. The stage of personal belief I was at was that I had recently taken the time to read the New Testament for the first time, and I was impressed with what I read. There was definitely something to Christ and his early followers, and I became convinced that Christianity was Truth-with-a-capital-T as one says, and Christians were not (necessarily) idiots following nonsense blindly.

At the same time, I remember an odd moment when I was hanging out with my Christian friends, and I saw something odd. It was one of those things you can't quite explain, you just experience it, and somehow it seems right. One of the young women in my group of Christian friends was looking at another discussing some theological point, and I saw an odd gleam in her eye. At that moment I was surprised and oddly convinced that this woman was completely insane. There was something unsettling and unbalanced in that gleam, and it gave me a thought. Maybe you have to be just a little bit insane to really, truly believe in God. Not to say that belief in God was a delusion of one's insanity, but that God, being the sort of being that He is supposed to be, so totally foreign to our mundane experiences of daily life, somehow causes a sort of mental short circuit when His presence invades our consciousness.

As I write on this, it sounds a bit in the same vein as some of my previous musings on the nature of the soul, and a Christian who followed that and understood it might think I'm talking about some sort of physical analogue to the concept of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but that's not what I'm talking about at all. I think this sort of short circuit (if indeed that is what it is) happens quite naturally, and to people of all sorts of faith. It's related to the idea espoused above that faith is a belief without evidence, but in this case, it's belief in that which is not completely logical. We live in a natural world, how can we be completely sane and yet accept the existence of the supernatural, in whatever form we might believe in it?

Yet there is a problem coming at this from the side of the skeptics and atheists. I think atheists are quite aware of this, and in reading the above, no doubt they nod their heads and say, "Finally, this Brucker guy is making sense!" There is definitely a belief among such people that there is nothing more illogical than belief in the supernatural. Nonetheless, I would like to say (and finally come to the main point of this writing--aren't essays supposed to start with the point and expand on it instead of building to it? I'm a really crappy writer sometimes...) that this is not what I am saying at all. Despite all I have said here, I still claim that faith is not illogical.

I wish to coin a term here, sort of. It's not in the dictionary, although a search on Google turns up nearly 60,000 hits, so perhaps the idea is not so new. I believe that faith is "nonlogical". In case you don't immediately grasp the term from its own form, consider this: It's logical to believe that 1+1=2. It's illogical to believe that 1+1=3. It's nonlogical to believe that 1+1 is possibly a symbolic representation of a concept such as human relationships. "Nonlogical" is the idea that something might be impossible to arrive at through logical reasoning, yet also there is no logical reasoning that can completely dismiss that something. Faith, love, beauty: these things have a truth-value based not on scientific principles or clear-cut definitions of tangible value, but simply stand on their own.

The fact is, there are statements about the world that are simply true, and other statements about the world that are simply false, but many, many statements about the world are in a gray area in between. That fictional champion of logic, "Star Trek's" Spock once said: "Logic is the beginning of wisdom...not the end." Logic can take you far in life, but it was something I realized back in those days and still remember, that in a journey to Truth-with-a-capital-T, there comes a point where logic comes to the end of itself and says, "I can take you no further." Some people get to that point and they let go of logic's hand and walk forward into the darkness. Some people get there and insist that there must simply be nothing more. Still, logic can't really tell you which one is right, can it?

Jagged Little Pill

Rather than reposting the whole discussion--which wasn't long, but why bother--I offer up a link to a post I made on Goosing the Antithesis some time ago. It's a subject that, in a way, I've been thinking about a lot more in the last few weeks, ever since the Skeptic's Annotated Bible actually managed to surprise me. Is the SAB the red pill or the blue pill?

What if reality was not what you thought it to be? In many ways, this is a sticky question most of all on the religious front. Most of us feel we're logically justified in not expecting a "Matrix"-style awakening, and definitely, there is very little reason to think that the wool is being pulled over our eyes to such an extent. Yet at the same time, it's the intangibles of the world that are always on some level very open to questioning. How do you know that your government has anyone's best interests in mind, much less your own? How do you know how the people in your life feel about you, really? How do you know that your brain is functioning right, and you're not insane? And how do you know that your beliefs about god(s) or lack thereof are on the mark?

The thing is, the day I was writing the ASAB blog entry (not the GtA one) I was experiencing a great deal of mixed emotion. I've said it before, and I really mean it, that there are days that I wish the whole Christianity thing was just a bad dream I'd wake up from and find that the universe is somehow simpler. I'm not the sort of person who believes that morality cannot exist apart from God, but definitely in the absence of God, there are numerous moral obligations that completely lose their foundations. In various parts of the Bible, religion is referred to as a "burden" that it would be a shame to saddle someone with unnecessarily, and if the Bible says it, it must be right, eh?

Anyway, the prospect of finding a serious flaw in the Bible was exciting. I've said many a time that while I'm aware of minor glitches in the Bible, the real thing that most Christians worry about is the possibility that there might be a doctrinal error. It's one thing to not know how many chariots Solomon had, it's a whole other issue to not know whether performing a particular action, failing to perform a particular action, or performing a particular action wrong will cause you some sort of torment at the hands of an angry supreme being. So while I would stop short of calling the (potential) problem a serious doctrinal error, the idea that contradictory punishments might be doled out, not just for a crime, but for a rather dubious crime was extremely troubling.

I've always liked Plato's Allegory of the Cave: the idea that we in the world are like people in a cave who only see dark, distorted shadows on a wall when the truth is bright sunlight out side that we didn't even dream of. Plato hypothesized that anyone forced to leave the cave and come out into the sunlight would be essentially traumatized by the change, and might at first fight against it. The fact is, we all believe that our own world-view is correct; that's natural and healthy. Although there might be a better, bigger truth out there, a first glimpse of it might be blinding or painful, and it would inevitably be scary to face the prospect of having to change everything that you know to fit a new set of perceptions.

For myself, the journey into Christianity was like that, and if I should discover it not to be true at some time in the future, the journey out would be similar. Nobody wants to discover that everything they thought made the world what it is is only a lie, even if the world they know is unpleasant. When Morpheus sits before you and offers you those pills, he doesn't give you a glass of water to swallow it with, you've got to choke that thing down, and on the way down it scratches a throat that is straining to reject it.

Maybe you should reject it. Many Christians would tell you that anyone who is trying to lead you away from Christianity is only a servant of Satan in some direct or indirect way. While an atheist isn't likely to appeal to the supernatural, many of them consider evangelistic Christians in the same manner: just charlatans looking to pull the wool over your eyes so you can join the flock and be fleeced along with the rest of the sheep. Whichever position you personally take, it bears contemplating. When I saw The Matrix for the first time, I thought the scene in which Neo is offered the two pills was incredibly creepy. Imagine yourself in a strange house you've never been to before with a bunch of freaky people you just met that day, and one of them says, "Hey, if you take this pill, you're going to see some wild stuff!" My personal response would be, "Uh, thanks, but I tried that stuff in college, and I think I'm pretty much done with it, okay?"

Of course, as I mentioned in the notes of the original post, there was a similar scene in the movie Total Recall in which the hero of the story is also offered a pill that will supposedly make the fantasy world around him disappear. He rejects the pill, and although the ending of the movie is left with a touch of vagueness, we are generally led to believe that rejection was the right choice, and the pill was a deception. In a less philosophical (and cinematic) vein, some people believe that when they take LSD, they are having some sort of supernatural experience of expanded consciousness, while others simply believe that the chemicals in their brain are being made to fire randomly, and it's all garbage. Who in the end is to say whether an atheist or a theist is the one who is having a "bad trip"? Each is convinced in their own mind that they are seeing the true reality.

The funny thing is, it's like you're sitting there with Morpheus, he holds out the pills and says his little speech, and as you reach for the pill, someone chimes up, saying, "Wait a minute, I think you've got it backwards. I'm pretty sure it's the blue pill that makes you wake up from the dream." On a side note, something I've always wondered is what would have happened if Neo had taken both pills? (Edit to add: Apparently, I'm not the only one to muse on this.) Of course, the pills being essentially a metaphor even in the original story, I think the whole thing breaks down at that point. The only reasonable alternative to taking one pill or the other is to take neither and just walk away. (I suppose in my metaphorical take, that would be like agnosticism.) In the real-world scenario, I think that's the choice I would take.

But not too many of us find ourself sitting in a room with a mysterious man offering us two pills that represent radically diverging life-paths. Most of us live a very mundane life. Still, those choices are offered to us nonetheless. "I can't think of any reason why I wouldn't take the red pill," says one commenter on the old post, and yet every day, so many people turn their back on the possibility of knowing the truth, certain (metaphorically) that the blue pill is all the reality they need. This is not a criticism of atheism; this is a criticism of closed-mindedness. Whatever it is that you believe, you should know and accept the possibility that you might be wrong, as logical and well-founded as your beliefs may seem.

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.

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.

Angels watching over my ass

About a week ago, I came across a sappy little Family Circus cartoon involving an angel. I'm not sure whether this is supposed to be cute or inspirational or what, but there it was in the paper, and thank goodness that Thel was attentive when that angel tapped her on the shoulder, or little PJ would have had a very bad day indeed. But you know, the whole thing bothered me, and it bothers me in the same way that hundreds of other stories like it bother me. I mean, even if you believe angels exist, isn't this sort of BS?

My mother, who is not a Christian, (at least in the more theologically conservative sense that I am: she's a Unitarian) had an incident in my own childhood that she attributes to the supernatural. See, one day she was making me macaroni and cheese, and I, a mere three-year-old at the time, thought I knew how this cooking thing was done, so I decided to get the noodles off of the stove myself, and in the process, poured about a gallon and a half of boiling water down my front. This is the sort of thing that would give most children a rather large scar for life, but my mother rushed into the kitchen, scooped me up, ripped off my clothes and dumped me in the bathtub under cold water. Having had no first-aid training, she confided to me many years later that the fact I am completely unmarked by that accident today is something she attributes to God. Surely, God somehow spoke to her and told her what to do. Do you see what might be lacking from this reasoning?

Well let me explain it with one more story that's truly my own, not my mother's. On a normal day in 1998, I was on my way to work. I was traveling south on a six-lane portion of Southern California freeway during rush hour at about 60 mph. There were four lanes to my left, and one lane to my right with a small concrete abutment separating it from an exit lane. In that lane to my right was a car being driven by a woman whom I somehow sensed was having trouble a second or two before anything happened; maybe I caught something in her facial expression out of the corner of my eye, I don't know.

In fifteen seconds, the following happened: Her car began to zigzag just slightly, and then spun out. One of the rear tires of her car made contact with the abutment and her car ricocheted off of it, and then her car was going straight, but at a 90-degree angle from the rest of rush hour traffic. The right front corner of her car plowed through the right rear corner of mine, and kept going across the freeway, leaving my car at a 45-degree angle to traffic, but still traveling in the same direction. As her car traveled across all lanes to my left, finally striking a pickup truck in the leftmost lane, my car resolved its contradictory momentum and position by flipping up and rolling end over end across the lane to my right, over the barrier and the exit lane, finally landing in a drainage ditch right side up. The pickup truck had landed on its roof, and the car that had started the whole thing came to a stop on the leftmost side of the southbound freeway. All three cars were demolished, but all three drivers were left without a scratch.

Later, someone commented to me upon hearing the story, "Wow, your guardian angel must have been working overtime that morning!" I responded with a polite nod, but was bewildered. It's not that I don't believe in angels. I believe in the Bible, and while it doesn't say much about angels, at does seem to be pretty clear that their existence is attested to in Scripture. It's not even that I don't believe in "guardian" angels. There's a bit of evidence for them in the Bible, and if angels exist at all, why not have them work as guardians? The problem is that if you suppose they exist and are going around tapping moms on the shoulder, delivering first aid advice and acting as divine airbags in serious auto crashes, you've got a lot of explaining to do.

Why would the Family Circus angel go tap Thel on the shoulder rather than just stop PJ, or even push the lamp out of the way? Why would my mother get a message on how to treat her son's burns rather than a message to go into the kitchen a few seconds earlier and stop me from doing something stupid? If angels can keep the accident that morning from effecting more than three cars, why not hold it to two cars, or one, or none? And what about all the children who do pull objects off of shelves onto themselves, be they lamps or pots of boiling water, and are injured and scarred for life? What of all those who are killed in auto accidents, whether they be believers in angels or avowed skeptics? I can't help but think that logically, it's all a bunch of hooey, you know?

Allow me to switch gears, though. I've been thinking about this subject off and on since I saw the cartoon, and that was over a week ago. I'd originally meant this as one of a series of posts talking about things that Christians generally believe that I find more than a bit dubious. I probably will still throw in a few things in future posts, but for some reason, I found myself rethinking this.

It's interesting to me that atheists do tend to point to religion as a practice of "blind faith". The truth is, there's not really any such thing. It's not like there are people who find a scrap of paper with the word "Jesus" on it and decide on the basis of that alone to become Christians. No, people have reasons, and one person's reason is different from another's. Some people were brought up in the culture of Christianity and never bothered to question it. Some people may have read the Bible and found it fulfilling something they thought they were lacking. A lot of people experience some sort of trauma in their life that makes them turn to spirituality to find meaning. I don't know anyone that became a Christian for no reason whatsoever.

It's that last point about traumatic experiences, though, that seems so suggestive. People who argue against God often bring up the bad things, the suffering, the hypocrisy, the disasters, etc., as a reason to disbelieve in God, but oddly enough, there are a lot of people who believe for those very reasons. A friend of mine who is a "pro-life" activist is not an activist because of her religious convictions, but developed religious convictions due to her activism. "When I saw the evil and violence that was at work in abortion, I was sure that nothing could be so evil unless there was something supernatural behind it. If there were supernatural forces at work in the world, then it made sense to me that God would be one of them." While her experience is quite different than most, I've met scores of people who decided to give their lives in service to Christ when they found they had reached rock bottom.

What is my point? Maybe it doesn't make much sense; it often doesn't to me. Still, could it not be possible that many instances of suffering are allowed by God and His angels for the purpose of a greater good? I remember years ago being at a Christian evangelistic rally at which two mishaps occurred in sequence. First, the P.A. system blew out, and those people who had gone forward to make a commitment to Christ were forced to crowd in closer to the stage in order to hear the pastor. Secondly, after the pastor was finished speaking, a technical problem occurred that would have easily killed someone who had been standing in the area many people were standing before the P.A. mishap forced them closer to the stage. Many in attendance chalked it up as a miracle that the P.A. system had gone out at such an opportune time, but I was skeptical; did two wrongs make a right? Why not have everything function properly with no mishaps at all? Perhaps for the person who had been standing on that spot, the malfunctioning P.A. system would somehow empower them to find greater faith than if they had just stood there with nothing happening.

In a perfect world where nothing ever went wrong, I doubt anyone would ever notice God.

Good grief!

I recently came across some material on another site trying to point out the old argument that there can't be a loving, omniscient, omnipotent God and suffering at the same time. It's an old argument that many far wiser heads than I will ever be have argued from either side, so I won't delve into the full argument, mostly to save space. (I dip into it in a later post anyway...)

The thing is, I remember discussing the topic a long time ago with an avowed agnostic. It was interesting to me at that time that the discussion turned to that topic, because at first, we had been discussing the idea of miracles. He referenced an argument from David Hume which I remember differently (and the given link seems to tell it the way I remember), but took his word for it. His version of the argument was as such:

A: A "miracle" is an event that defies the laws of nature.
B: An event that defies the laws of nature cannot be explained by science.
C: One cannot say with certainty that any event is impossible to be explained by science, only that with our current knowledge of scientific principles, we cannot understand it.
D: Therefore, rather than accepting an event as being a "miracle", it is more rational to assume it is simply something that future developments in science will explain to us.

Now, if you accept the definition of "miracle", which is reasonable enough for most people's purposes (although there's a bit more to "miracles" than that), then I think this argument, which was presented to me in less sloppy fashion than I have presented here, holds water pretty well. I admitted to the agnostic that he had a very good point, and as I think I have said in this blog as well, I don't doubt that science will one day explain everything, or at least has no limits to what it could potentially explain.

But the discussion went forward and evolved, as online discussions do, and it turned to what he presented as proof that God (as per the Bible, at least) does not exist. This argument was the argument from my first paragraph here. Now while his form of the argument was better than most I have heard, and he had managed to plug up most of the logical holes that exist in such arguments, I seem to recall two problems with his conclusions. One was very metaphysical, and I won't go into it here. The other was, to my delight, one that I presented in the same form as his previous argument. So many of these arguments for and against God are double-edged swords, and in the end, those who make them feel that they've closed the case, while at the same time, those on the other side remain utterly unconvinced. Oh well.

My argument? Well, the problem, as most people who argue for God to be able to coexist with suffering claim, is that it seems quite possible that good cannot exist without evil. Pleasure cannot exist without suffering. In order to make the world a truly wonderful place, God must allow some to suffer, and it may be beyond our comprehension why. A personal example from my own life was that I dated this woman for a while in college, but the relationship didn't go well. We broke up, and it was painful for both of us. Why should I have suffered that painful relationship and subsequent breakup? Well, I happen to know for a fact that if it were not for that failed relationship, and certain events that happened in the fallout from it, I would never have met the woman who became my wife. At the time I was suffering, I didn't know where it would lead, but it led somewhere good in the end.

That's a small example, but many Christians have heard of a more interesting one from the Holocaust. Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch woman whose family hid Jews in their house during the Nazi occupation, eventually ended up in a prison camp infested with fleas. She and her sister, who were in the same barracks, had smuggled in a Bible and were holding regular prayer meetings. Corrie was appalled on the night when her sister insisted that they should thank God for the fleas the barracks were infested with.

The fleas! This was too much. "Betsie, there's no way even God can make me grateful for a flea."

"Give thanks in all circumstances," she quoted [from 1Thess5]. "It doesn't say, 'in pleasant circumstances.' Fleas are part of this place where God has put us."

And so we stood between tiers of bunks and gave thanks for fleas. But this time I was sure Betsie was wrong.

Later, Betsie made an interesting discovery.

"You're looking extraordinarily pleased with yourself," I told her.

"You know, we've never understood why we had so much freedom in the big room," she said. "Well--I've found out."

That afternoon, she said, there'd been confusion in her knitting group about sock sizes and they'd asked the supervisor to come and settle it.

"But she wouldn't. She wouldn't step through the door and neither would the guards. And you know why?"

Betsie could not keep the triumph from her voice: "Because of the fleas! That's what she said, 'That place is crawling with fleas!' "

My mind rushed back to our first hour in this place. I remembered Betsie's bowed head, remembered her thanks to God for creatures I could see no use for.

And that's the sort of thing that I thought of when I was told that the world is too full of needless suffering. Just as he had faith in science being able to explain all, I had faith in God and His providence to explain all.

You cannot prove that any given instance of suffering has no point, you can only make the claim as an opinion. Therefore, there is no such thing as pointless suffering, only suffering that we do not yet understand the purpose of.

(Excerpts from Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place)

Pluto is not a bird, he's a dog

I had been rolling around the idea of a post about the recent downgrading of Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet" in the back of my mind, but I wasn't sure it was worthwhile. Last night, I was reading the letters section of Newsweek, and there were many, many letters from people responding to a recent article about Pluto, and what I thought was funny about the letters was the manner in which so many of them seemed to be expressing the sentiment that it just wasn't something to get worked up about. What made this funny for me is that these people actually took a chunk of their valuable time to sit down and write a formal letter to express to others that this was a non-issue; it reminds me of those people who call in to news programs to answer their polls with "I have no opinion." I myself have never written a letter to the editor of any publication, so I'm not sure what gets people so worked up to do such a thing, especially if they're worked up about how getting worked up--oh never mind, you get it I'm sure.

So I thought I'd let the issue drop. It really isn't a big deal for the most part, and by now, it's pretty much old news. Here in the 21st century, we seem to absorb information and quickly move on to the next big thing as soon as possible. Things must go more slowly on Pluto, where, as one letter writer pointed out, only about a quarter of a Plutonian year (248 Earth years) has gone by since it was discovered and placed on the list of planets in the first place. Pluto didn't change, our system of classifying celestial objects changed.

But that's what hit me with profoundness after setting down the magazine. It's something profound in its simplicity. For someone like me who spends a fair amount of his time explaining away the nitpicking of skeptics towards the Bible, this is a current-day moment that we can reflect on in light of some scientific issues people have with the Bible. Follow me here...

Back in junior high school, I took an astronomy class. In that astronomy class, among the many things we were taught was that Pluto was a planet: one of nine, actually. Since this is a new thing that has changed, you'll find Pluto called a planet in most science textbooks today that talk about planets; you'll even find it all over the internet. I ask you, were those textbooks and my instructor wrong? No! To say now that Pluto is a planet is technically wrong, but up until we changed the definition just a short time ago, it was not wrong. For 76 years, "Pluto is a planet." was a true statement. The fact that it has changed now is not the fault of those who said it then, but a natural result of a paradigm shift in astronomy.

Oddly enough, this is not the first time we have had a major paradigm shift in the definition of "planet". If you look up the word in the dictionary, and look at the etymology, you'll note that the word originally meant "wandering" and referred to "(def. 1c) a celestial body moving in the sky, as distinguished from a fixed star, applied also to the sun and moon." While until a couple months ago, we had nine planets which were Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, before the Copernican heliocentric model of the cosmos became popular, we had seven planets, which were Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. A planet was an object that you could see in the sky that didn't stay in one place like the stars did. This ruled out the earth, since it was not in the sky, and included the sun and moon. Pretty much from Ptolemy to Copernicus, it was acceptable and entirely correct to say "The sun is a planet." simply because the word meant something else then.

So, to get to my point... A verse that's often been a darling of the Bible skeptics is Leviticus 11:13-19, which reads:

And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: {long list of various birds, ending with} and the bat.

People love to point to this excerpt from the Bible and point out triumphantly that bats are not birds, some as though they are the first enlightened messenger in the history of Christendom to notice this fact. You are correct, bats are not birds. So what?

Do you think the Israelites thought that bats had wings and beaks and laid eggs? If you live in a place that has a lot of bats and you're interested in studying them, it's not hard to do. For a couple of months when I was a kid, I lived in a drafty old cabin in the mountains, and there were bats that nested in my bedroom. At night they would go out and fly around eating bugs, but in the morning when I got up for school, I could get out a flashlight and peek around in the nooks and crannies of the cabin and find them nestling down to go to sleep for the day. They don't look anything like the creatures we call birds; to me they actually looked like little furry winged pigs.

The Israelites knew the difference between bats and "other" birds, I assure you. It wouldn't be hard to figure out. So why does the Bible call them birds when they most surely are not? For the same reason the ancient Greeks called the sun a planet: at the time, it was the correct terminology. The word translated as "fowl" in verse 13 is a general-purpose word that might translate better to "flying things" than "fowl" or "birds". Case in point, the same word is actually used in verse 21 of the same chapter to refer to insects, and is translated "flying". The word is not wrong; the best one could say is that "fowl" is a questionable translation.

For those who wish to continue to think of Pluto as a planet, I personally don't care. By the 20th-century meaning of that word, it is a planet, after all. It's going to take some time for everybody to get used to the 21st-century definition, and in the meantime, while technically wrong, the old definition will still have cultural acceptance. For those ancient documents that want to commit the unforgivable sin of using terminology consistent with the time in which they were written rather than modern scientific terminology, I'll accept you, even if some people want to pick on you just for being what you are.

Rising to the Challenge, part III: Dog on, "Well, it's DNA!" and still, "Ew, no God."

I'm going to take a moment to go back to the comments of both Zondo Deb and Jono, and continue to expand on a concept I touched on in part I of this series of posts.

What if there was found in nature a message that unambiguously pointed to a higher power? Call me naive, but I still think there is. It's a message found inside every living thing on the planet, and it's called DNA. Now I admit I'm no biochemist, or whatever it is one might need to be to become an expert on DNA and all related sub-cellular information-carrying and processing molecules, but there is something fascinating going on at the microscopic level in living cells. Maybe it's the sort of thing that one would write off as creationist propaganda, but while I realize some creationists like to grasp at scientific and pseudoscientific straws, a lot of the things I plan to discuss here were things that I had mused over back in the days before I was a Christian, and I've never been a strict Biblical Fundamentalist Creationist. (Some of my views on creationism can be found at my other blog, mostly back about a year ago.)

What is DNA? It's a complicated molecule that carries within it a sort of chemical code. The code is written in four different chemical letters called "bases" which essentially come together to form various three-letter words that spell out sentences called "genes". Those words correspond to amino acids, which according to the gene they are in will be strung together to make a protein. Human DNA has about 3,000,000,000 bases which code for about 30,000 genes.

Now, admittedly human genetics are more complicated than those of lower forms of life, but you have to consider that the complexity goes down to a cellular level. Each individual cell of any living creature is made up of complicated little machineries which exist to process fluids, move minerals and burn fuel. The various genes coded onto DNA are accessed to formulize the creation of all the little proteins that make the parts that run the machinery of the cell.

Imagine trying to create a functioning automobile out of tinker toys. (Such a car would be huge, but scale isn't so important in imagining it, as the tinker toys at the cellular level aren't visible to the naked eye.) Just imagine fitting together tiny little pieces to make a machine that can transport things from one place to another under its own power, and has the standard amenities like power steering, anti-lock brakes, etc. That's an approach to the complexity that exists in a cell, but a cell is actually far more complicated than that. And aside from the complexity of the structures that make a cell simply function, there's also the fact that living cells have the property of self-replication. That is to say, imagine not only building a car out of tinker toys, but in the engine of your tinker toy car, you've got a sort of tinker toy encoded blueprint of the car that, rather than sitting there statically waiting for some tinker toy virtuoso to come along and read it to build another car, the car itself will gather loose tinker toy parts it finds and build more tinker toy cars as part of its normal function. Imagine building a car like that made from any material! And that's just a cell; imagine the further complexity of building a whole body!

Irreducible complexity is a popular concept among "Intelligent Design" proponents these days, but has some serious flaws scientifically, some of which I expect to address at a future date. The thing that really fascinates me, and something I've never heard addressed by any ID people, is a sub-cellular chicken-or-egg problem. (I actually heard this from an author who I believe is an atheist.) You've got DNA, right? It's a coded message that tells you how to build a human being, an amoeba, a redwood tree, whatever sort of massive "tinker toy car" it's a part of. How is the code read? Well, there are various sub-cellular structures such as RNA that serve various purposes like reading the code off, gathering the appropriate amino acids, stringing them together, checking the code for errors, making copies of DNA, and even cellular-level immune systems to protect from virus intrusion (these are totally separate from the system-level immune systems such as your white blood cells). All of these structures and systems are like the hardware on which the software of the DNA code is run.

Where does that hardware come from? Answer: it's built from certain parts of the code integrated into DNA. So you can't have the machineries that build living things on the cellular level unless you have the machinery to build them already in existence. Put raw DNA in a beaker and wait to see what happens. Nothing. Try with water, cold or hot. Nothing. Add a bunch of carbon, nitrogen and trace amounts of other important minerals. Still nothing. How about a warm soup of amino acids in varyingly oxygenated and heated environments? It will do nothing. Nothing whatsoever. No, DNA only functions in its natural environment, surrounded by a living cellular structure. And living cells don't come from nowhere.

So as usual, getting to the point after a wild series of paragraphs of blah-blah-blah-blah... Where does life come from, if not from an intelligence that is not life, at least, not as we know it? A DVD without a DVD player is useless, and vice versa. DNA without life does nothing, and if you somehow could remove all the DNA from a living organism, it would cease to function in fairly short order, and certainly would never fulfill its primary evolutionary function, which is to reproduce itself. So it seems logical, to me at least, that there must exist (or once have existed) an intelligent being that is not an earthly life form. While that intelligent being may not be "God" in the sense we tend to think about it, I have a hard time thinking of any alternate ideas that don't approach ridiculousness. It is for this reason that I have been fairly confident that there is a divine Creator, even in the days before I was a Christian.

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

Rising to the Challenge, part II: A freakin' miracle!

Back from my short vacation (or maybe longer one from the Internet if I don't finish this until Monday) I resume my commentary on the responses to my "atheist challenge" inspired in part from my posting on Goosing the Antithesis.

I might as well address the response given by Sharon, who, although not an atheist, is very close friends with one who makes an interesting suggestion that God might simply alter our brain structure so that we become believers. Aside from the logical problems I have with that and address there, my desire is definitely to address the question with the understanding that free choice continues to be a part of the process. (On a side note, if free choice does not exist anyway, then the question is in many ways meaningless.)

Finally getting back to the response by bookjunky, he makes one of the best suggestions I have heard, I think. He suggests that if the earth's rotation were reversed without harm being caused to life on the planet, that would be a clear-cut miracle, as such a thing should simply not be possible. I think this is a good answer, as this indeed would be hard to explain, and pretty much impossible as a natural phenomenon, as he suggests. The following suggestion that God would need to give an explanation to everyone on earth is probably a necessary part, as the miracle itself would have no reference. Some people might find it hard to fully understand why, but Jesus coming back from the dead or raising someone else from the dead is more meaningful than someone coming back from the dead without some sort of prophet around. A miracle without context is interesting, but meaningless.

Other suggestions given are parting the Pacific Ocean, and moving of the stars to spell out a message in all languages (possibly a logical impossibility). This latter suggestion is also essentially given by Jono. All interesting responses, but I believe flawed at their heart for the real reason I think is at the center of this question. As bookjunky says:

Would I then believe in a Christian version of God? Hell, no.

Ouch. I think this is significant. Is it enough to simply believe that there is a higher power out there, or is it necessary, in God (be it the Christian God or not) wanting us to believe, that we believe properly? This seems to be a foundational truth of most religions, despite some people claiming the contary. It's not enough just to "be sincere in your belief". You have to be sincere in the belief of the right thing.

Hey, maybe there's a good reason somebody has to disbelieve in the God of the Bible. Then again, there are some people who feel that they have good reason to disbelieve that God exists at all in any form. That's part of what makes Francois' response so appealing to me. He doesn't simply say he has no answer, he positively asserts that the answer does not exist! Even though I happen to believe in God, I, too believe there is no answer to this question, specifically because of our will to deny whatever we will. It may be faith, it may be logic, it may be a number of things, but there are people out there who do believe, people out there who would be willing to believe (or think they would), and people who will not believe. I don't think God can please them all.

Rising to the challenge, part I: My goose cooked?

Well, as I may have hinted in my last post, I have a number of subjects on deck, so to speak, and just haven't gotten around to polishing them up and posting them due to them being not up to my usual quality (insert self-deprecating blog humor here). In particular, let me foreshadow that I had a few things to say about the evolution vs. creation debate that I think will be thought-provoking, but maybe I'll break it down into several posts like I did with the separation of church and state posts (1 2 3 4).

At the moment, I am going to go back and revisit one of my previous posts that's one of my favorites, and has now become a much more popular one thanks to my sneaking a link into a much more popular blog. I think the post itself doesn't need much in the way of restatement, but various responses I have finally received lead to further discussion.

Francois Tremblay says something that I think cuts to the heart of the matter, partially because I asked for an opinion on whether the suggestion of God proving Himself or my responding challenge really has meaning. He says "it is quite impossible for us to know that any given event is non-natural" which I hope believers in the supernatural will see to be quite true! Hypothetically, if there was an event that was non-natural, how would we be able to tell? (I may take this in more detail as a future post soon.) He also points out that believing that God could exist implies living in a completely different mind frame than believing that God could not exist. What little significance the "atheist challenge" has, if any, depends largely on what sort of atheist a person is. A person who knows God does not exist will see it differently from a person who is of the opinion that God does not exist, who will in turn see it different from someone who simply doesn't know whether God exists or not.

On a side note to this last point, I've heard atheists make the clever comment that most people are atheists of some sort or another. I may believe in Jesus, but I am an atheist in respect to Zeus, get it? So one interesting restatement of the original question that will allow Christians and other theists to play along in this sort of philosophical train of thought is:

3: Give a hypothetical undeniable proof of the existence of the God of the Quran. (If you're a Muslim, you could still use the wording of challenge #2.) Essentially, suggest a way that "Allah" could send an unambiguous message to the world so that everyone could understand fully that our purpose in life should be to follow the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. You may have a good answer, or you may see from this perspective why the original question is not so meaningful.

Bookjunky makes some suggestions that I think are very good, but I will save for my next post. Partly because I he reposted much of his comment in my blog, and I'll respond to those posted here separately, and partially because his response is in an odd fashion related to Zachary Moore's response, in which he points out that while surely there may be miraculous signs that would make you give consideration to God, you might still not "worship a being so immoral". This is oddly enough a more difficult hurdle for people who do not believe than lack of physical evidence. People don't believe because they don't want to, and they feel perfectly justified in denying a perceived cruel deity.

Zendo Deb refers to the ending of Carl Sagan's book "Contact", which he says was "expunged" of all religious references when made into a movie. Oddly enough, I found "Contact" to be an incredibly spiritual movie myself, so I'm more eager than ever to read the book, which is high on my list of books to read sometime soon. His suggestion?

Obviously non-random information would have to be hidden in various computations. The digits of pi, when expanded to some large number of digits would be seen to contain certain messages, and so on for other non-rational real number representations.

I find this a fascinating suggestion, and one that I could devote a whole series of posts to. I may do at least one. My thought on this? In the movie "Contact", Jodie Foster's character hears some radio pulses coming from outer space and says, "Those are primes! 2,3,5,7, those are all prime numbers and there's no way that's a natural phenomenon!" If the pulses did come from a natural phenomenon, say a radio source that had a fifty/fifty chance of either pulsing or pausing, the chance of that particular sequence coming up is one in 1,048,576. That alone was enough to convince her that this was not natural, but on top of that, there was encoded within the signal the blueprints for a massive and complicated machine.

For me, the idea that we could discover a complicated code that gave instructions for the building of an elaborate machine that was not created by human intelligence would be evidence enough for me to assume a higher intelligence was out there and was interested in talking to us. Of course, as far as I'm concerned, that's a good description of DNA. Living things, down to the very cellular level are perplexingly intricate machines that are far beyond the ability of any human engineer to design. This message is obviously not unambiguous enough for everyone to believe there's something more than mere random effects of evolution walking about on our planet, but for me it tends to be enough to wonder. Is it enough for Zendo Deb or any other skeptic to at least consider agnosticism?

Challenge to atheists: prove God exists

Okay, this is essentially a reprint of the post below, but that one doesn't show up on Technorati right, and someone (Wade, whose new atheist blog is here, so give him some traffic) commented that the challenge was actually worded a little vaguely. To review, I have had many atheists/skeptics claim that if God really wants us to believe in Him, He ought to give "undeniable" proof of His existence. My contention is that there is no such thing as "undeniable proof". My challenge to skeptics who wish to make such an accusation is to come up with a hypothetical example of what such proof would look like. Remember, this is not just proof that you personally find acceptable (there are already about a couple billion people who seem to have that), but proof that nobody could deny. Either of the following would be permissable:

1: Give a hypothetical undeniable proof for the existence of an intelligent being that created the universe with a purpose in mind.

2: Give a hypothetical undeniable proof of the existence of the God of the Bible. Complete adherence to all facts presented in the Bible is not necessary, but the following aspects must be shown: omniscience, "quasiomnipotence" (that is, absolute power over matter, space and time, but not neccesarily over logical foundations of truth), absolute benevolence, and is the inspiration for (if not the actual author of) the Bible. Actually, it need not be the Bible, one could substitue the Quran or some other Holy Book of a major religion that has a fairly well-defined concept of the deity(s) within it.

I once asked an atheist, "If God pushed the sky aside as though it were a curtain, stuck His head down throught the gap and waved, saying, 'Hi, I'm up here!' would you be convinced that God exists?" He pondered and replied, "No, I'd probably think it was an hallucination." I actually admired him for his honesty.

Membership hath its privileges

There's an interesting facet of Christianity that I find sometimes hard to swallow on an intellectual level, despite the fact that I take it on faith. People that are not Christians, mostly agnostics and atheists, complain that it's unfair for Christianity to make the claim that it has exclusive access to Truth-with-a-capital-T. If Jesus is going to say "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6) then isn't he being rather intolerant? Well aside from the fact that I don't think that this technically fits the actual definition of intolerant, and that Jesus, being God, pretty much has the right to set the rules however He wants, the thing I think this objection misses very often is the fact that Christianity is not the only religion by far that makes claims of exclusivity. Lots and lots of religions claim to be the only "true" religion, and really, it's a whole topic in itself as to why I think that's not only acceptable, but desirable in a religious practice. But this topic of exclusivity is not the "facet" that I really wanted to talk about, although it's somewhat related, I suppose.

The thing about Christianity that I was pondering yesterday evening was part of the whole, "Don't say you'll believe it when you see it, but believe and then you'll see!" phenomenon. While I believe that there is a great deal of Christianity and its doctrines that can be intellectually understood without having to be a Christian, I think all (well, perhaps most) Christians realize that there is an element of faith that only true believers have a grasp on. We evangelicals have what we like to call "a personal relationship with God." What is that, exactly? I don't think I can describe it to someone who hasn't experienced it for themself, which is too bad, since it's what's really at the heart of Christianity when you strip everything else away.

Interestingly enough, and one of the reasons it's related to the topic in the first paragraph, I found myself pondering this in the midst of reading about Zen Buddhism. I realized that exclusivity is not the only thing by far about Christianity that's hard for an outsider to accept, yet is common to many religions. What is at the center of Zen Buddhism? The experience of zen. What is zen? Well, although philosophers of various religious beliefs can talk about it at length and discuss things about zen, zen itself is not something that can be put into words, even by those who have experienced it. In fact, the inability to describe zen is an inherent property of it, the word "zen" meaning essentially "wordlessness".

Such a concept is found in the Bible in a number of ways. Paul wrote about a vision in which "He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell." (2Cor. 12:4) But aside from that special incident, he writes more generally and practically that "The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1Cor. 2:14) There is a concept in many religions that there is just a certain level of spiritual enlightenment that only the true believers will ever experience.

Interestingly enough, I'd say that it's a belief that even some atheists harbor in an odd way. I've been told by atheists that if only I would cease to believe in God for a moment, I'd see how ridiculous the Bible and Christianity as a whole are. Perhaps they're right, but if so, aren't they essentially suggesting that there is such a thing as special atheistic enlightenment that only true atheists can experience? What a concept! (It's hardly a common view among atheists in general, though. If atheists were a religious classification as Christianity is, there would probably be as many "sects" of atheism as there are atheists.)

I'm wondering if the only point of this blog is to toss out thoughts on unanswerable questions that I'm not really asking, nor looking for feedback on. I'm not sure what my point is here in general, and it sounds like yesterday's post, with a lot of "well maybe, or maybe not". Are these facets of Christianity logically unacceptable? Yet they're used by so many. I remember the irony of once having a discussion on the value of various "ex-gay" ministries. There was a lesbian who claimed that if any of these sorts of ministries ever had any successes, it wasn't that they were turning homosexuals into non-homosexuals, but that they were turning bisexuals into operative heterosexuals. How could she be so sure? Because if they were able to be attracted to women ever, then they were simply not homosexuals, nor had they ever been. I thought this was a very familiar concept, and realized it was from 1John 2:19: "They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us." See, there's no such thing as an ex-Christian; if a person leaves Christianity, it means they were never really a part of it in the first place.

Christianity has its particulars that are strange and hard to understand, but they don't set it apart as particularly wrong so much as just one among many belief systems. Sure, Christianity is special, but not for any of the above reasons.