The God of Cosmic Success and Harmony?

I OFTEN FEEL prompted to write something following an Unbelievable? podcast - this week is no exception, on a topic that I feel leaves my Christian camp still wanting: creation. This week's title is Debating ID – Can evolution explain the bacterial flagellum? Jonathan McLatchie vs Keith Fox. Sounds kinda irrelevant, right? The title is unhelpful, and even these two Christian debators admit that this bacterial flagellum is almost besides the point: there are a near infinite incredible and frankly awe-inspiring (maybe more awe-inspiring than bacterial flagellum) aspects of nature that illustrate their differences of opinion. The question is, what do we do with aspects of nature that science cannot yet adequately account for?

Back in the 1990s, an important book came out by Michael Behe entitled "Darwin's Black Box". I say "important" because for Christian apologetics, Behe's book would put a qualified biochemist's name behind an intelligently-sounding principle of "irreducible complexity" that would substantiate religious claims to a scientific proof for God's (or a god's) direct involvement in the creation of the universe, because some aspects of nature are too complex to be accounted for by today's scientific models. At the time, the human eye was among his examples, which is obviously insanely complex and difficult to explain as a result of gradual mutations over millions of years. Unfortunately, as this debate seemed to concede, that one is no longer on the ID (Intelligent Design) super list, because twenty years of science has led us to better understand the development of the eye (I recently learned for example that the octopus' eye, for instance, has no "blind spot" - there is no nerve bundle-gathering within the octopus eye itself). But the flagellum still is just too whacky to explain, so maybe that is what gave rise to the sampled title. The fact alone that the list is not stable should make Christians super-wary about this kind of argumentation pushed out there by Christian apologists like Jonathan McLatchie. Here's another - google Michael Behe's name, and you should get a top hit of his wikipedia entry, entitled: Michael J. Behe is an American biochemist, author, and advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design. Note that word carefully: "pseudoscientific".

I will soon be reviewing Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? by Dennis Alexander (Alexander was actually hosted on the Unbelievable show shortly after his book came out back in 2010 and more recently interacted with anti-evolutionist Wayne Rossiter in 2017 here), who points out that despite the apparent sophistication of Behe's work and term "irreducible complexity", there have been no biochemist peer-reviewed journal articles even discussing this principle. The scientific community simply does not recognise Intelligent Design under this label.

So what are apologists like Behe and McLatchie arguing for here? Exactly what many closed Christian schools continue to teach: that science fails to explain the impossibly complex and balanced universe, that evolution is basically false, and they can prove it. How? Because of "irreducible complexity". Behe's approach was relegated (or perhaps promoted) to "pseudoscience" when a court in the States actually had to come to a ruling on the issue and if irreducible complexity had a religious or scientific foundation in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. 

Thus far, it seems that irreducible complexity has an unstable foundation and has yet to be recognised by any major peer-reviewed scientific journals. But it gets worse. Christian (or any religious person, but Christians seem to be the most vocal) anti-evolutionists who want to say that because God made us special, the "random" process of evolution cannot be the mechanism of God to bring about humankind, fail to see a major theological flaw in their reasoning. Christian evolutionists want to reconcile God's entire and ongoing creative act with scientific discovery. If you feel a religious urge to deny evolution then you are actually pushing for a biblically-unfounded splitting of God's creative act. Put crudely: God creates in some kind of naturally-observable or predictable way. Then he intervenes miraculously by creating humans. In other words, God intervenes into his own nature to do something that "left to its own course" would never have produced us, or indeed anything spectacular or unexplainable natural phenomenon. Do you see the picture? God is reduced to tweaking, as Keith Fox correctly points out. There's like a barren lifelessness to God's own work unless God intervenes miraculously, again and again and again.

There is a fourth problem: peculiar arrogance. This is actually connected to the unstable foundation of irreducible complexity I mentioned above. Why on earth should we assume that our advanced scientific knowledge of the universe has reached its zenith? Non-individualised knowledge will never reach such a stage, because we are learning more and more all the time, and expanding the knowledge package for each generation to come. Irreducible complexity basically is saying that TODAY something appears irreducibly complex. And that reliance is actually quite bizarre. It is based on the science of today, thus despite dismissive gesturing against science still coming in through the back door. It even trust's today's science more than today's science does, and does a quick mishmash with biblical texts to make sure that my assertions are shielded from view.

More serious biochemists like Alexander, Fox and many others are finding an increasing plausibility among lay thinkers like myself, and an excellent resource is available at biologos, where evolution is accepted as God's mechanism. So why the debate if evolutionary creation dodges the frankly dodgy problems of irreducible complexity? Despite their blindspots, the better apologists against evolution point out a problem of God's true involvement. If God is not involved in specially and directly in the ways they are proposing, then where is God at all in the process? Genetic mutation happens by chance. Biologos and proponents of such an approach like me have to face this, and we are still not doing a very good job at it in my opinion.

When left just to marvel and say, well God's ways are not ours, and to peer into how God intervenes so widely and cosmically is way beyond and outside what science can say, then you can quickly here the atheist tapping on his microphone to check it is working correctly. What difference does God make? This seems like a superficial and unnecessary faith stance, a leftover from an era of human development that did require religious causality, and is now being rehashed to fit around a scientific enterprise that bizarrely cannot factor Him at all. I'm uncomfortable with this.

Maybe I'm just uncomfortable with the fact that faith really does have personal choice and responsibility forever stamped into its DNA (sorry for some poor allusions there!).

But Success is not random. The mutations that succeed are not random. They occur in harmony within a given environment. It is the whole biosphere that emerges with success and harmony at its core, although forever at war within itself wherever internal successes come with defeats, like a cancer "succeeding" over a failed organism's defense mechanisms. But as a highly-complex, inter-related and dependent ecosystem, our planet has thus far succeeded in ways we see nowhere else *yet*.

Evolutionary creation correctly disconnects Adam's great Sin with general suffering and death, recognising that not only do these processes precede the development of humans (and other marvels), they even form the basis of apparently evil processes. Success comes at a cost. The Intelligent Design campers (back to that label in a sec) are left, ridiculously in my view, to imply that The Fall had retrospective consequences, like it works backwards in time or something. The only creationists exempt from such a problem are seven-day creationists, whose prominence in the church seems to be dwindling (these guys hold to a literal seven day creation even about six to ten thousand years ago). But they don't solve the problem of theodicy for us - and neither will I!

Evolution happened. We happened. Natural sufferings and evils are firmly dislocated from our own evil free choices, but why do people like me still seem to require non-human agency? Look at how I stated the problem in the plural.

I said: sufferings and evils, in the plural. Suffering and death are awful and horrendous experientially. I happen to have experienced more suffering recently than at other periods in my life. Although to varying degrees, we all do. The only way through as I can see it is that to be there at all, God must be the God of Cosmic Success and Harmony. He cannot be defined by any one situation, be it a glorious birth or a catalysmic catastrophe, but the overall adaptative life within in it all. That stream is founded on successful harmony.

Closing thought on Intelligent Design: I am unhappy that this title has been taken by such wrong-headed thinking. Evolutionary creation does not reject God as creator but has to steer clear of the word "design" because of what the Behe-s have done to it on the one hand, and the unnecessary specifics of it on the other (eg the statement "God designed us to have four fingers and a thumb on each hand"). However and in actual fact, the scientific community is not against all notions of design - it will resolutely avoid, however, adding the necessity of or reliance on a sentient independent intelligence, aka God, the Intelligent Designer.

Figures who have impacted my journey: Larry Hurtado 2, on Paul...

...including a fresh rediscovery of the gospel for me, how we carefully overlap the LXX and NT usages of Kyrios, why Joel became special.

On God being "our Lord" or "our LORD", results are as scant as I predicted, including Adonai.

Thanks for listening!

Some more thoughts on the interpretative process around The Father Is Greater Than I

LAST TIME RICOEUR was examined here on this blog we established three fundamentals:

1. Hermeneutic task of discerning the apparent and hidden meanings
2. Group persons are real agents, with memory, desires, goals, moral responsibility, etc. Personality is like a culture and vice versa.
3. Hermeneutic understanding of oneself via understanding of other. On this third point I am reminded of the "wildly divergent" (Holmes) attempts of certain Trinitarian theorists to see their own vision of the Trinity as a blueprint for the church. Take John Zizioulas, for instance. He sees the Trinity this way, and yet sees the connections between the Members as fundamentally relational not ontological. What would Ricoeur suggest this reflects about him and his relationships between churches or within churches? Leonardo Boff is adamant: Zizioulas' proposals are far from relational, they are heavy and political:

[T]he trinitarian vision produces a vision of a church that is more communion than hierarchy, more service than power, more circular than pyramidal, more loving embrace than bending the knee before authority. 

(L. Boff, Trinity and Society, (Liberation and Theology, vol. 2), Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1998, p154.)

The similarity in the goals between these two Trinitarian theologians seems to illustrate the point well. It would seem that the perception of the church and of God are indeed tightly bound up with who we are as persons and our personal history.

Moving onward today to p. 42 in Conflit des Interprétations, Ricoeur points out a certain insufficiency of the Cartesian "I think therefore I am". What's wrong with it? You have to start somewhere, don't you? The issue, for Ricoeur, is that you don't only start there, you stop there too. It is a deposited truth claim that can neither be verified or deduced: The cogito is not only a truth as vain as it is invincible; we must add, as well, it is like an empty space which has, from all time, been occupied by a false cogito. We have indeed learned from all the exegetic disciplines and from psychoanalysis in particular, that so-called immediate consciousness is first of all "false consciousness"... a philosophy of reflection must be just the opposite of a philosophy of a philosophy of consciousness...textual exegesis of consciousness collides with the initial "misinterpretation" of false consciousness. Moreover, since Schleiermacher, we know that hermeneutics is found wherever there was first misinterpretation. 

This is a long quote, but you'll see why we need all of it, please keep reading:

Thus reflection must be doubly indirect: first, because existence is evinced only in the documents of life, but also because consciousness is first false consciousness, and it is always necessary to rise by means of a corrective critique from misunderstanding to understanding.

Yes, you may have noticed that the translations are pretty good today - I have found an officially translated version of Conflits available here, p. 18, trans. Kathleen Mclaughlin).

I'm hoping readers are beginning to get the picture. Lots has been said in hermeneutics about how readers today might interpret a text (or misinterpret a text), how that interpreted meaning spirals back into a larger conceptual whole that is an integrated part of our being, modifying it, affirming it and preparing the person for the next interaction with that text. But since hermeneutics is associated with the contemporary task of interpreting important texts such as the Bible or the State Laws, it seems to have slipped our notice that this might well be a vital historical phenomenon as well. In fact, from all that we have seen of Ricoeur thus far, I would say it utterly confirms it, especially when we accept with List and Pettit (2011, 162-163) and Copp (1979) that we can correctly deduce "joint control" in a group via a mechanism of "multi-level causality", that the ecumenical decisions made were groupal and in response to opposing groupal misinterpretations.

So what you would do if you were an intelligent-but-stranded Amazonian who dug up an English Bible, somehow taught herself to read through it and read "the Father is greater than I", what a Unitarian might read when she reads "the Father is greater than I", and what a Trinitarian (Triune God Advocate) might read when she reads "the Father is greater than I" are three quite different processes, all of which contain groupal and multi-level components.

Let's take the Amazonian first. She has spent months, maybe years, trying to cypher this enormous book - not because she wants to waste her time, she has plenty of other tasks she would normally be doing to help maintain her tribe as specialised in fishing and preparing the tar needed to make fishing vessels. But time has been thrust upon her, and she is reading out of curiosity that is fed by the dream that she might one day be rescued and returned to her tribe to share her knowledge with her kinfolk. The fact that this extraordinary Jesus character even could have been considered as great as the creator god may simply add to her marvel of this historic man, and she may not gloss over it so quickly.

The Biblical Unitarian's core tenet, please excuse me Biblical Unitarians reading this and please feel free to correct me below, is that Jesus is not God since only the Father is God, and so when a member of this "tribe" comes across this Jesus statement, the thought flashes through her mind: What more evidence do you need?! She certainly is less likely to gloss over it, it will be actively affirming and feeding the self-knowledge of the reader in a profound way in preparation for subsequent readings. This is a particularly important process of integration of interpretation for the Biblical Unitarian, since, like with many small denominations, they represent a small minority, that sense of identity needs to be more carefully and intentionally hewn. Someone deciding to become a Catholic hardly need consider themselves too deeply with theology or church practice, but a thinly-spread minority group with a non-mainstream reading of the Christian texts, needs to have well-affirmed readers. Notice the potential for emotional reaction. That reaction is in line with the group's marginal status and potential for rejection. It is also a development within the Biblical Unitarian's interpretative matrix precisely because there exists a perceived misinterpretation (or "false consciousness"). Readers do well at this point to remember that we all belong to groups and that we as individuals are simply unable to fully bear the loads of our predecessors.

What about the Trinitarian coming to this passage? Well, I used to be a Triune-God advocate myself, as most readers know, and I also for a short time considered myself a Biblical Unitarian. Now I have run out of theological carparks to park my car, although I hope the Trinitarians might still find some space for me in their basement. My feeling is that Trinitarians probably read the text in the widest variety of ways. As Christians, we are free to read the text slowly, fast, for facts, for deep meditation, reading plans around a topic for a "biblical understanding" on a topic. We might put it to music or commit it to memory. As such, a single text to the human mind becomes a veritable plethora of meaning that cannot be reduced to any simple layer of meaning. It truly does dance and shape our sense of self. But what happens when the Triune God Advocate reads "The Father is Greater than I"? Such an apparently contravening statement to the idea of co-equality in the godhead might seem shocking, but as my exchange here with Sam Fornecker illustrates, there is no "feeling of tension" generated by this text that you might for Triune God Advocates - literally, none (I am still waiting for Sam to pick up the conversation there, I think he has left some of my questions in an unsatisfactory state of suspense). No feeling of tension in the face of such a "clear" text might leave the Unitarian at something of a loss for words. But the bigger interpretation is too deep, too historical, too liturgical, much brought forth in prayer and worship to be swept aside by a verse putting co-equality into question, as if for the first time. Generally speaking, the careful Trinitarian reader will simply keep reading. For any "difficult text", the general advice is almost invariably to "step back" from the text and try to get the bigger picture of what is going on here. However, and I mean no disrespect here, the majority of readers are not highly nuanced "Triune God Advocates". They are simply Christians reading through the popular gospel of John and looking for ways to deepen their faith and sense of connection with God. They may quite simply just keep reading, drinking in the depth of the outplaying of this threefold relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They may be imploring the Holy Spirit to now come powerfully into situation X, Y or Z in this amazing way that Jesus said we would do things, even more, with even more "greatness" than he did.

The Christian apologist, however, has a quite different reading process in mind. Like a great chess-player, he is trying to foresee his imaginary opponents' next moves and is not really in a deep interaction process of his own. Rather he or she is going through his armoury, checking the ammo stores are full, the key citation grenades pins are primed and the lie-guided missiles fully online... that's right, he's a warrior! A great fighter for the Church! I don't even want to probe his or her next steps on this verse. I tend to find some of their efforts a little sickening.

Notice not only the variety of these examples but their huge limitation. There are many, many more contemporary possibilities and nuances today, both individual and denominational (or groupal). Even if such an in-depth study were possible, it would be representative of the interpretative ranges operative today. That is why it is important for us to study the church fathers - and I intend to do some longer excursions on this blog in the future - in order to see how interpretation was operated in both "victorious" (orthodox) groups and, as far as it is possible to ascertain, the "unvictorious" groups.

To return, then, to the insufficiency of cogito, we see a disenfranchised uni-layered reading as both a non-starter and a non-finisher. It is nothing. But interpretation rises or rather arises out of a corrective movement by a victorious group of interpreters over misinterpreting opponents. What gives rise to that "victory"? That's a huge question I shan't attempt here, I simply mention it as it seems to a necessary one to ask in light of today's steps. Nonetheless, it is probably worth noting that the Triune Hub hypothesis suggests that in order for a stable religious bedrock to establish itself, it became increasingly clear as each off-kilter wave of teaching was refuted that this stability required co-centricity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, perhaps even more than the New Testament texts, in order to hold the New Testament texts. Every time the church went through a process of refutation, via apologists such as Irenaeus or Justin Marty, by ensuring the co-centricity of the Father, Son and Spirit, the church herself was constructing her own stability, her own "being" as the hermeneutic circle continued to turn, and so did the "WHOLE".

See also my post: https://faithandscripture.blogspot.fr/2017/07/hermeneutic-circle-and-asking-better.html

Taking on some mythicists and an update on how my "sting" evolved

MY APOLOGETICS ALERT meter is going beep - beep...

Here's why.

Have you ever heard of mythicists? Maybe not. Their basic view is that Jesus never existed, and the legend that developed around "Jesus Christ" borrowed from a number of pagan and middle eastern sources, not least of which being Zoroastrianism. Their views do not represent a mainstream historical perspective, regardless of religious commitment.

Since I am currently privileged enough to have the time and the resources of Hurtado's most significant contributions (Lord Jesus Christ and One God & One Lord), I realised I may be in a position to politely engage and defend the historical grounding of Jesus. If you'd like to see how I am getting along and watch the mythicist video I disagree with, you may do so here. Strangely, I seem to have been granted the last word!

I have also been fortunate to interact with Evan Powell, who is the author the website http://synoptic-problem.com/, which I can really recommend - although it is also where I got a faith "sting", mentioned in my previous post. I'm pleased to say that I have recovered from it, but with a fresh realisation of how some of the resurrection evidence fits together. The reason why I got stung by Evan's research and analysis, is that while he brought extra clarity and weight to my conviction that Matthew not only was later than Luke and Acts (which is important to note when researching the factors surrounding the emergence of a proto-trinitarianism in the first century), he also reports that Matthew's treatment of the burial story in Mark and Luke shows the story's weakness.

I think the reason why his views particularly affected me was because of how deeply I shared his other convictions about Matthew - and that should be a lesson to anyone. You probably agree with everyone about something, and you should probably check that you disagree with everyone about something. That's part of what makes you, you and me, me. And it certainly is true for theology.

Fortunately, I revisited his page about the burial and pushed him on it. We have had a very friendly and respectful exchange since then, and I have come to a conclusion I will probably now carry with me to my grave - and I am better for it. The point is this - it doesn't matter what you do with the existing evidence. You can realign it, reconstruct it. But if the basic building blocks are the same, you will *always* run into the following problem if you want to explain what happened to Jesus' body: at the time, the evidence pointed in favour of believing that Jesus had been raised by God back to life by his followers. Now, I'm a big sceptic when it comes to apologetics - the number of times I have dabbled in it positively on this blog could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

I'm not going to say to people, the evidence means the only possible explanation is that Jesus was raised. In my exchange with Evan, I came up with a scenario according to what I understood his interpretation of the facts required. But it was incomplete and created fresh problems that are hard to explain.

In his reply, Evan told me that I was creating an unnecessarily complex situation - all it would have taken was for Joseph of Arimathea to move the body at the end of Saturday. My complex situation had included that Joseph was ignorant of someone having removed Jesus' body, that someone perhaps being the indignant family tomb owner. Evan's brushing aside of the need for Joseph's ignorance shouldn't satisfy. How could this designated member of social and religious standing be recalled so positively by all four gospel writers as a positive witness to the events that unfolded during the first Easter if he had, in fact, moved the body to another location? Would he not have clarified the situation? Apologists are correct (I admit) that the recipe is something like this:

• EMPTY TOMB ON SUNDAY MORNING
• POWERFUL RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES OF THE RISEN CHRIST BY HIS FOLLOWERS
• NO OTHER CREDIBLE EXPLANATION GIVEN FOR THE BODY'S ABSENCE

The simple fact that brilliant minds and millions of people believe that this miracle could indeed have taken place should give us all pause for thought. Something strange happened to Jesus' body. If there *were* a simple explanation, then Christianity simply wouldn't have taken off. We wouldn't even be having this conversation. However, to my Christian friends who want to go take this and slam dunk their atheist friends, we must remember that strange things do happen (see an in-depth analysis of this natural and unpredictable phenomenon in The Black Swan). We must remember that we have sound reasons for believing what we believe, that we don't have all the answers. We also live in a surprising and unpredictable world in which we have to bind our beliefs to time-tested and storm-blasted foundations. Abandon them at your peril.

In my next post, I will feed back on my exchange with Professor Larry Hurtado! Yes, my theological hero responded to my post on his disagreement with James Dunn. We are also not done yet on a late Matthew. Back soon.

Unsurprised by injustice?

In the Bible, there seem to be conflicting views about quite what to expect from God in this life in terms of justice. On the one hand, you have the idea that if you are good, then God will reward that good attitude and action with blessings and safety, and conversely, woe betide the one who crosses God's law. The biblical authors, really early on, worked out that is not at all how it works out in reality. The sun rises on the good and the wicked. Job realised this; others realised this; yet they continued to believe.

Today, faced with the apparent injustices of our world, coupled with other reasons, many no longer feel a need to embrace theism. They don't "reject God". If the world rejected me, I would be the loneliest man alive, but I would still be alive. Rejecting-God language is the language of believers - not of unbelievers. But let's get back to this interesting slice of the biblical worldview that says:

- God is about justice!
- This world is unjust!
- God, what is going on?! This is rubbish, God!

What I like and what I don't like about this biblical view

I really like the way in which writers like Philip Yancey encourage honest and disappointed Christians and seekers (I put myself in both categories) to properly wrestle with the incompatibilities and ask God all the hard questions. Nothing - literally no deep, disgusting or shameful desire or emotion, should be kept from God. He wants 100% honesty, and as a result, we become more honest too. Who would not count it as a blessing to be more integrated and single-minded human?

I also like the fact that the biblical promises of justice can be interpreted eschatologically. That is to say that one day, from a Christian worldview, there really will no longer be any selfishness, pride, manipulation, pain, harm, and so on. To feel a sense of injustice now, is not only a confirmation of the later but a commissioning to do something about it. With Tom Wright's utter blessing, John Dominic Crossan describes the period in which we live as participative and collaborative. What he means is that God enrolls his people is a powerful Judeo-Christian mutation from within the Jewish worldview in order to advance to completion the establishment of his Kingdom, no longer through fairly dramatic and direct divine intervention, but from the new Christian perspective, Christ has spent his Father's Spirit in order to empower his people to usher in this future kingdom rule in the here-and-now.

What is there to not like? Well, like everyone else, there are times when I suffer and question. I hope that I will never give up my faith as a result. I very nearly did do exactly that when in 2014 I realised how weak I saw the direct biblical evidence to be for Jesus being "fully God" (according to my categories), and I can say it was not a very liberating experience. I always want to question things and doubt things - sounds awful, right? But in this context, not liking some aspects of how I see this biblical perspective I think can be healthy in keeping me honest in my faith.

I currently co-host a podcast with my friend Reinald in which I play a role - a role that is true to my mind - of being skeptical about some Christian apologetics. We are scheduled soon to do an episode or two on the question of biological evolution. I always want to identify the risks of the various positions that seem available. I side strongly with the dominant scientific consensus that evolution has indeed taken place to produce life. I enjoy linking this to God's enormous creative ability and the privilege of being shown more of his workings than previous generations (and thereby realise that this is less than future generations). Also, and in part thanks to Reinald's caution on evolution, I am in no way discouraged in thinking this happened despite the limitations in current explanatory power of the workings of evolution. It's humbling, that's all.

But I am nonetheless exposed to risk. There's nothing special about that - all views about pretty much most important things that people debate are exposed to risk. What is my risk? My risk is the deist God. This is the God who doesn't need to intervene much in human history. He set things up so perfectly, why should he? And there's the apparent paradox. A perfect creator doesn't need to fix anything.

What about apparent injustice? Well, it's just about drawing people closer to God, that way they can go deeper and get properly philosophical about truth and God and meaning? It mobilises people into a sense of empowered, corrective action? But what corrective action is there for the profoundly loving and caring Algerian mother in palliative care probably just months away from abandoning her three daughters?

The risk is the same as with evolution. On the one hand, it can be deeply inspiring and mobilising. On the other hand, you can legitimately ask the question: what difference does God actually make, i.e., what is the difference between belief in the active existence of God and active belief in the existence of God? That is my risk. The point is that, at the end of the day, we have a choice. To believe or not to believe, the choice is yours. It is a true choice. Since I am a skeptic, I am deeply skeptical of Christian views that overstep their bounds about the evidence for the active existence of God, and I also feel very skeptical about refutations of the Kalām cosmological argument, from which I am certain all theistic apologetics must flow.

So, belief that justice and injustice have meaning is a choice. To believe that they have theological meaning is another.

I have to confess, as I wrestle with my model of the Triune Hub of first-century Christian faith, why on Earth might God confer a new perspective through me, someone who struggles with the fundamental choices? Perhaps God needs skeptics, loves skeptics even! Maybe they help keep us sane and encourage honesty on important issues that affect him and how he is perceived in his world.

For me, the fundamental choice is eternally preserved by the New Testament writers, who insist over and over and over again, that God acts in this world through his agents. A lot of Christian apologetics ignores this, in part because it undercuts some of their other concerns, such as demonstrating the deity of Christ. But it is perhaps the most radical message of the Christian gospel, right there, that we are significant in this Kingdom-come melarky.

Blessings. Choose well. John

Justice: a means to a greater eschatological vision?

In preparation for the next podcast of FatScript, due for recording on Monday, I know that I need to think about this question of "ought-ness". This expression comes up quite frequently and is a reference to the idea that there are moral facts which, so the story goes, do not depend on humankind. Do you agree? How could you know that they existed independently to ingrained rules for your species' success? I think it's difficult to say.

But I need to think more carefully about justice, I realise that. It seemed from my exchange with my co-host, that justice issues might be a special case of the moral realm, that might require a perfect God, such as the God to whom I pray and worship. What can we say about justice from within and from without the Christian worldview?

When we say "justice" in English, the word "fair" is never far away. Another great friend and mentor of mine has been Dean, huge, humble, anti-corruption, American, IPA-lover, Dean. I love him, what a friendship blessing. One of the life lessons he taught me that I will take to my grave and hopefully communicate before that time, is that there is an illness that we can recover from, giving us another keyword connected to justice: entitlement. We are entitled to justice. Why? Because we feel it to be profoundly true?

I live in France, where droit (a literal translation might give you "right" or "rights") seems to give the frame for society's social and educational appatus. As a result, everyone wants to cash in on their entitlement, their inalienable rights. Part of the process of dying to self, in which I think I am caught up to some degree, has been to alienate some of those entitlement mental processes in my mind and life. Why?

It sounds stupid - okay. For humankind to make any kind of progress in this playground called planet Earth that we have been given, we probably need to recognise that every human being has the right to clean water (and probably a lot more given our developmental status, healthcare etc), which is desperately far from reality today in huge swathes of our population. We simply don't seem to have the critical mass of people and power willing to uphold and implement these kinds of rights. Jesus' profound justice statement of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is still a monumental struggle, made all the more so by the under-represented party of strugglers. The majority, albeit to varying degrees, would rather prefer others do unto us what we want, "end of".

But is there a problem in the notion of rights and justice itself? Who could ever sue for not having access to clean water? Never seen that case in court. Third world at-risk populations vs capitalism, 2017. Who'd be the judge of that case?

One of the most radical and subversive dimensions of the Christian faith is that human beings are not entitled to anything. We are owed squat. If we are owed a whole bunch of life-sustaining or enhancing stuff, then it is to insist that life itself is not a gift. That's the awkward part, seemingly propagating ideas that might be seen to endorse inequality. If you receive that to which you are entitled, then what space is left for gratitude? Gratitude has been demonstrated to be thereuptic to human minds. Should we then be grateful for our rights? Surely there has to be some middle ground if God is to be involved, and we are to acknowledge no fundamental (i.e. not God-attributed) rights, and yet that he is the God of justice, right?

Well, I suppose in a sense that is true - that human equality is a myth. There is one human whom I believe, along with 2 billion others, is not equal to the rest of us, and whom you might think might be "entitled" to more goodies than the rest of us, assuming I was right about this inequality. I'm thinking of Jesus of Nazareth, who humbled himself. Is he entitled to something more than the rest of us?

We can't answer that question without probing this word entitlement still further. What is in this word entitlement, that word to which I had to and still have to "die"? Firmly nestled in there is the word "title". The problem with titles is that they are not essential. In other words, you don't need your title in order to be you. Maybe you are a mother, or a boss, or a well-digger, an app encoder, or well, whatever. One crazy detail that I think is understated, is even your name doesn't really define you (I confess I often feel a real dissonance between "John" and me). You could have been born with a different name, or you could change your name. Those are big changes, but I believe not fundamental.

I think I believe that Jesus does not want his followers to think that he is entitled to worship. That would be worshipping the title, not the person. It would also be to rob us of also being givers of worship; merely debtors of worship.
So far, I guess my thought process is not very favourable of justice, as I see it as reductive of gratitude and the joy of gift.

But what about "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?"
Well, surprisingly enough, humankind, heck with that, I do not always reckon in terms of gratitude. I do not go to the supermarket and expect the products for free, nor do I bend the knee to the cachier in gratitude. A money transaction happens at the checkout, in which my bank account is debited the exact amount that we have agreed for the goods purchased. This is justice. A product fails to work as indicated, therefore I am entitled, surely, to a refund or an exchange.

So where is justice? What is justice? One way of checking its transcendental nature - for a Christian - is to look into the eschatological hope. Will justice be a feature of that eternal life, in which the "kingdom of God" has fully advanced, every tear is wiped away and death is no more? When all of humankind's evil's are forever eliminated? What need for justice is there when everything works perfectly?

I guess from my random forray, that for us now there has to be a functional, societal baseline of justice, that assumes injury.

Tertullian argues against Hermogenes in the third century that God is not eternally Lord, because to be Lord is to assume a title of lordship over....something. Yet before creation, God was not Lord over anything and so, argues Tertullian, with the apparent backing of the opening verses of Genesis chapter 1, God was not strictly "Lord" at that time. The inaugurator of the word "Trinity" also states that it is not appropriate to call him "Father" at that time either, since he had not yet begotten his Son, but that's probably another subject for another day!

If justice requires injury in order for its invocation, it would seem that it neither belongs to eternity past nor to the eschaton.

If NT Wright et al are correct about the two stage eschaton, i.e. that Christ's resurrection inaugurates the end-times, Christianity is not called to simply uphold justice, but to invoke something more eternal than that. So justice is not the goal, even if it may be the result. If it were the goal, then you might want to say that God sent his Son in order to die to pay for the sins of the repentant world. The fact that this is a massive understatement of the divine purpose should give us purpose to situate justice within a wider and more ambitious purpose.

An iteresting question might be to debate whether or not the pursuit of justice might ever achieve justice. A non-religious perspective could, I believe, look to the optimistic Christian worldview, wherein all is privilege and for others' deep benefit, as a greater vision to secure a more realistic outcome of justice, which remains desirable for individuals and the species as a whole.

Le problème du problème du mal

Ouéé enfin un article en français, cela fait une éternité, et j'en suis désolé puisque mon souhait de ce blog est quand même d'avoir cette articulation entre les deux langues et cultures face à l'autre articulation encore plus importante, entre les écritures de la Bible et la foi d'un chrétien.

Aujourd'hui je ne vais pas prendre beaucoup de votre temps (ni du miens!) puisque je voudrais juste attirer l'attention sur un problème du problème du mal que, lorsque j'écoute des débats sur ce problème philosophique et théologique, ne reçoit pas l'attention dont je pense il est digne....
 

Moral Arguments

I feel finally inspired to write something down after an informed but friendly debate held by Unbelievable on Christian Premier Radio on the legitimacy of the moral argument - or at least a certain form of it. You can listen to the episode here, and watch Craig's fun animated video presentation of it here. I'm not convinced by either Cranman or Craig's versions. I do agree, however, absolutely that discussing premise 2 first makes more sense.

It seemed to me that there was at least one more voice that needed to be heard, that of Christian - and why not, atheist - evolutionists and also a specialist in anthropology and sociology wouldn't have gone amiss either! I guess I'm aiming a bit high asking for a whole panel, but yet it is an important topic, so why not state the ideal conditions? :)

The keyword for my own response and argument is going to be "cluster". I think it can and should be argued that there is a phenomenon of clustering that takes place with regard to moral behaviour choices.

So we can observe that most people believe that it is "wrong" to kill but also, sadly, that war is sometimes necessary and will almost certainly involve killing. In the same way, a police officer might have to kill a crazed gunman. Even though killing is wrong, there is some kind of justifying principle at work: the greater good (or the least harm). I note how this word "greater" operates. It presupposes that degrees of goodness and wrong can be identified in order to make the moral decision possible and indeed to make the moral decision itself.

Here is a question that made an alternative argument seem necessary for Christians (like myself, who don't think you can easily get to the Christian God by apologetic argumentation) to have another way into the debate: Can a theist imagine a functional intelligent society in which individuals, groups and the species as a whole could thrive without "God"? What would the minimum contents be of that God?

It's difficult to imagine, but this may depend on our definitions of God.

We accept that consciousness is a spectrum. Awareness varies according to the complexity of the life-form, and even self-awareness in humans can vary from non-existence to heightened (and back again, e.g. in a fit of rage). The moral code that says don't harm my own species is necessarily built into every species for it to advance.

Could we imagine a mass-mutation of a species away from that moral law? Yes! Unfortunately, it would also involve the self-destruction of the species.

As the species that is human, our accumulated knowledge continues to increase and our legal systems inevitably complexify in accordance with that knowledge, and the clustering process continues in new moral scenarios either hitherto unforeseen (e.g. medical ethics) or better understood (e.g. LGBQT).

So it is probably pretty clear that I find the presentation of John Cranman's (and WL Craig's) moral argument untenable in its current format. But I also don't think it shouldn't be abandoned altogether either, despite my previous doubts. It is simply that some tighter and also some looser definitions must be properly integrated. I also think it is useful to break the argumentation into two halves, as I have attempted below, to cater for intelligent and less intelligent species.

Here we go:

1. For a species to thrive at any level of intelligence requires ingrained knowledge of the behavioural norms necessary for the survival of any given individual's offspring, of the individual itself and of the individual's group.

2. Human beings are a species.

3. For humans to thrive requires their ingrained knowledge of the behavioural norms necessary for the survival of their offspring, themselves and of their group.

4. Such ingrained knowledge in humans can be aptly described as moral values and duties.

5. Although not strictly universal, moral values and duties can be observed to cluster around certain norms that transcend a given human social group.

6. That which transcends can be aptly described by an observer from within that species as equivalent to objective reality.

7. Moral values and duties are at least equivalent to an objective reality.

And so, at last, we arrive, as in the podcast episode, at the second premise first. Note that thus far an appeal to God has not seemed to be necessary for the flow of this argument.

H O W E V E R

8. Moral decisions can be complex, such as those involving conflicting moral values, and in such cases require more knowledge about likely outcomes in order to imagine and assess the "greater good" (or benefit) and the "greater harm".

9. Such an increased need of knowledge vastly exceeds the speed at which humans can evolve, and may even require total knowledge, letting us then assert such decisions require perfect knowledge on the part of the moral navigator in order to be made safely.

10. Only "God" has perfect knowledge (be he real or imagined).

11. Therefore God or an unrealised ideal knowledge is necessarily sought for complex moral choices to truly enhance the human race.

12. The Christian God is a perfectly legitimate solution to complex moral problems.

13. Non-theistic models of improving knowledge are also perfectly legitimate solutions to making better complex moral choices.

On the basis of the moral argument alone, we cannot state which offers the best explanation.

The Moral Argument: is it any "good"?

I hate what appear to me to be bad arguments for Christianity - I always think it's such a bad mistake for apologists to get too excited about logical "proofs" for God that short-circuit actual belief and faith. The worst ones of course are the God of the Gaps arguments, that I have already discussed, which also touches on what is often called the "fine-tuning" argument for the existence of God. Before I look a little more into the moral argument for the existence of God with you, let me just spell out again why I think defending the faith in this way is most unhelpful - even destructive.  The whole project and approach, in my view, is off base. The apologist often wants you to feel required - by logic and reasoning alone - to believe in God's existence (or Christ's resurrection, or whatever theological point is in view). Sometimes the more careful ones may employ might use words like "compelling", but even in using such vocabulary as this, two things are at play: the apologist believes, and belongs to a tribe that believes, that the arguments she presents are compelling... to her! Secondly, despite the relativistic language these rare, more careful apologists use, the posture and theological commitment behind the presentation belies the apparent care.

If you can assess these arguments critically as I attempt, and find them wanting, you might actually feel your faith is being undermined. That, at least, is my feeling in both the instance of the fine tuning argument and the moral argument (I do not have much to say in criticism of the cosmological argument, mainly because I take refuge in it as the others "fail" me). It is not that the arguments themselves are bad, although they could be framed quite differently, it is that their goals of proving God precede their presentation, and thus skew it. Rather, why not say: let's try and see how God could have given us morality! The apologist says: let me show you how God miraculously downloaded morality into human brains.

William Lane Craig for me is definitely one of the more careful apologists, and I enjoy his work. In this debate with Shelly Kagan, however, I find even this high-level debate just confirm the points I have just made. Here's the debate if you want to watch it, with a few comments below.

One of the views expounded by Kagan is "Contractarianism": perfectly rational beings would be able to come to an agreement about what the common rules needed to make a functional society. Or something like that.

Another naturalist view (although my point is of course not limited to naturalism): it is necessary that rational beings would reason about what is normal interactions between themselves.

Still others: where there is a command, there is a commander; where there is a law, there is a law-giver. Things don't come from nothing (a nod to the cosmological argument, really). But not necessarily. E.g. no-one needs to lay down a rule of non-contradiction for that to be necessary as a practice. But in morality, we could agree, says Kagan: the law-giver is all of us, says philosopher Shelly Kagan.

"Given the finality of death it really does not matter how you live", says William Lane Craig.
Only on theism can you make choices that are altruistic.  Ultimately no difference to the heat-death of the universe.

Firstly, both debaters make a mistake: they assume that there are only two types of animals: humans and non-humans. That's a serious error when looking at why humans generally agree, regardless of culture, that murder is objectively bad. Although Kagan didn't seize on the opportunity, it is not the case that lions are only spared of being moral murderers when they kill lower animals for food because they are not subject to our moral codes. The argument would only stand if lions went about killing other lions. Guess what: they don't. Some animals do kill other other members of their own species, but still others will lay down their lives for the sake of their offspring - sometimes even systematically as a part of that specie's reproduction process.

Kagan was absolutely right to challenge Craig on the condemnation of holocaust being dependent on an ultimate and cosmic judge. However, he failed to point out an important part of the german regime's dogma. Firstly, those in charge did not really believe that they were doing something wrong. Secondly, the way that they justified this action to themselves and the rest of their tribe was to state that Jews were a harmful and lower race. Lions don't kill lions. Notice that in order for these atrocities to be performed it was absolutely necessary that in the Nazi mindset the victims really occupied a fundamentally different genus - a harmful genus.  

Another thing that was not debated here was how civilisations slowly shift their moral perspectives. While it might seem just really obvious that murder is wrong, war is at least legal and soldiers are generally not considered guilty of murder. The same is true of abortion - although that depends on which country you're in. From a Christian perspective as well, there are stacks of laws that are no longer considered binding despite their presence in our holy book.

So I reject the moral argument as proof for the existence of God. Its starting point is not neutral enough, its goals affect its methodology, and the animal couter-examples are insufficiently accounted for. I happen to believe that morality is of God, but is not necessarily of God in the miraculous way Craig and others will try to present it. As a Christian, it is important to me to pray to ask God to help me and my family make good choices, to reflect back to God more and more my understanding of Christ's character in my own. Christ was not just "good". In fact, as the perfect man, he was what Adam was born to be: very good. That is to say: pleasing. I want my humanity to please God, but I haven't a cat in hell's chance without his help.

Let's extinguish the flames of the god of the gaps

".... so how can you explain X, then?!"

And so concludes the unthinking Christian apologist. He thinks he is cleverly guiding folk toward an inevitable fact, that God is the cause of X because no-one can come close to explaining X in his day and age. Approaching the question from the faith perspective seems to make X just so blindingly obvious. X is a Gap in knowledge. Let's hold on to that word "blind" word for a moment. If it were so blindingly obvious, then we can see why the only reason very intelligent - and let's grant them some reasonable moral standing too - people could NOT see that self-evident divine explanation, is that must have been spiritually blinded, right? Here not only does the faith provide a dangerous logic loop (you could literally prove whatever you fancied), but it has  other poisonous side-effects.

All those Christians who are cheering along this methodology are in fact, without realising it, welcoming the highly toxic GOD OF THE GAPS into Christianity. Let's call him GG. GG only **really** acts when he does so directly, working through agents or over colossal expanses of time really is not so cool to be an impressive god. The Bible has stacks of counter examples to that claim, however - thus the apologist appeals to his rubbish logic over and against the far more profound shape of the inspired book he seems to have forgotten about. He blinds believers, and any converts to his perspective, to a god who is God of the Whole, of the Bible and of the cosmos, without whom everything would just collapse. Since the apologist is in the business of blinding, he goes a step further. He unwittingly has an infuriating tendency to label anything coincidental "miraculous". Finally, he unwittingly sows potentially catastrophic seeds of future **doubt** into his listeners, because once scientific consensus affects majority opinion to actually provide credible explanations on a certain point, church stances on those issues inevitably, albeit awkwardly, tend to negotiate their way towards it. I am amazed to see even in the generation transition I have witnessed just how many more Christians do not want to bury their heads in the fossil-filled sand and ignore evolution theory any more. It's not going away.

Multiverse options are also increasing their presence in mainstream consciousness at what seems to be to be an exponential rate. A majority of scientists agree that a theory of this type is correct. The most open and cutting-edge Christian media I listen to is engaging with these ideas, I am glad to hear. But given that GG has yet to be put into extinction, we cannot expect any real openness to how TG (True God) might have gone about his work, proven by some still shamefully brandish their 6000 year-old universe theories, and many more simply wishing this issue doesn't concern their Christian faith.

Phenomenal Podcast week

Hi everyone.
For the last couple of days I have just been marvelling at the quality of some podcasts out there that overlap with the theme of this blog, Faith and Scripture. This week in particular has just been phenomenal. So good, in fact I'd like to share some summaries here and provide you with the links.

* Unbelievable: Live! in California: Ryan Bell & Sean McDowell on ‘Why I am an atheist / Why I am a Christian’. Particularly high-level, well-mannered and good-humoured even by Unbelievable standards, raising many interesting questions.

* Reasonable Faith (William Lane Craig): Questions on the Moral Argument and Animal Suffering. See below.

* The Robcast (Rob Bell): Wisdom part 3: You the Steward. This is phenomenal. If you can only listen to one, listen to this one.

* Trinities: both part 1 and part 2 of the Larry Hurtado interview on his latest book, Destroyer of the gods. I'm a massive Larry Hurtado fan, so I was always going to be lapping this up. He is typically excellent at reconstructing the early societal dynamics affecting and affected by this new aggressively evangelistic religion we now call "Christianity".

Let's start with the second one. As I listened to Craig, I found myself disagreeing with a few of the things that he shared, which is rare.

In this short podcast, Craig answers two questioners (although it amounts to considerably more than two questions). The first question pertains to the distinction between how we acquire moral values & duties, and the fact that there appear to be moral absolutes, whatever our path to discovering those truths. Craig's moral argument on which others lean too (including CS Lewis) is that even the presence of evil in the world points toward the polar opposite, good, which has to be anchored to an unshakable source, God himself.

Another question is: how much knowledge is required about Christ for salvation? Craig admits it's a very difficult question to resolve, which of course reminded me about Trinity reflections (e.g. could Philip have explained the doctrines of the two natures of Christ and the Trinity to the Ethiopian eunuch?). The examples here, however, turn around minor or major description variations of Jesus. Craig doesn't define what is a major or minor detail might be, but does cite Paul in Romans 10:9

If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Another questioner really appealed to me. Here's his questions.
1) How can I know I know? Craig's reassurances about someone who is struggling and grappling does have faith, but needs to be sure of implementation of good spiritual practices. Also: looking at the positive evidence for bolstering faith (apologetics). I liked that response, although I don't think part 2 really applied to this guy.

2) Why are demons allowed to deceive us? Craig: demons also have free will, don't rob us of free will either, except in extreme cases.

3) There seems to be so much senseless suffering in the animal kingdom... couldn't God have made the nutrients we need from non-living things that can't feel pain? Craig now does two things, and doesn't do one other thing. The thing he doesn't do is point out the mega-obvious point that God does not seem to have made us dependent on "animal nutrients"! Of the two points he does make, one is justified. He differentiates the instinctive avoidance by low-level lifeforms, such as ants or amoebas, of harmful stimuli from other creatures, like dears and zebras. These more sophisticated creatures, he claims, do sense pain. Presumably, we have probably hooked up animals to neurological testing on this and compared it to human pain responses and seen a bunch of similarity. The difference, for Craig, is that humans are aware that they are suffering (i.e. they sense that they sense pain). Other animals don't have this developed sense of self-awareness.

In my view, this has to be an unacceptable simplification of the animal kingdom, of which we are most certainly a significant step removed from the rest with regard to general self-awareness - but does pain - or all types of pain - automatically fall into this category? First, it has to be a sliding scale. It cannot be amoeba, zebra, human. Especially bearing in mind that you have young human children and severely mentally disabled or brain-damaged people who probably don't have greater - maybe even less - self-awareness than the most intelligent elephants. Check out this incredible video of an elephant painting an elephant holding a flower! (Please note, however, that this is not pure creative genius)




Second, it is not at all clear to me that in a sudden response to pain, the human is responding in a distanced self-aware manner. In sudden pain, the person will generally emit a "aarrgh", and not a considered or internalised "gosh I am sensing pain right now". It is precisely in moments of severe duress like this that we are less distanced from other creatures.

Craig's "blind sight" illustration is very interesting, but still far too discrete. Unfortunately, he fails to point out that the condition does result from biological defections.

However, it's not clear that there would be no or less suffering if there were only herbivores. Here - and maybe I have only ever heard Craig on his subjects he is more specialist in - he seems to step into a realm of total and unconvincing unknowns. He now asserts that in this other world that God could-but-couldn't-have created, the herbivores would end up having to compete for the remaining vegetation, potentially killing each other. That is ludicrous. Of course God could create a world in which there were a sustainable level of vegetation for the herbivores! Either way, an ecosystem with herbivores only, or a mix with carnivores, if it has demographic expansion, could eventually reach its capacity on a limited planet. But that's an entirely separate point!

That might sound petty. But there is something deeper lurking in Craig's thinking that is worth bringing out: this is the only world that could  have existed. Take it a step further (as he indeed does): this is the only world that God could have created. Somehow, he connects this to the incredible expansion of Christian belief after terrible evils like Tsunamis as some kind of proof of the point he is obscurely making.

I have no comment on the far greater rate of growth of Christianity after natural evils (tsunamis, earthquakes), but it certainly didn't serve to save Craig's weak answer on the animal kingdom.

4) Why did God transmit his message to Moses one way, knowing that after Darwin a more convincing version would develop...
Here Craig is back to his usual excellent self. Is the Genesis narrative literal of figuratively? "There are indications in the text itself wholly apart from modern science that this is not supposed to be taken as a literal 24 hour-day creation week, and we don't know that the ancient Hebrew did understand it literally..."
He then provides fascinating evidence from an equivalent ancient Egyptian creation story, which said that each night the world reverted to the primordial ocean. Did no ancient Egyptian ever notice that actually that didn't literally happen every night?! Excellent point. I'd love to see the reference.
Literalistic reading of the creation timings could be a modern interpolation.
I loved the line: who knows what science will be saying 1000 years from now?! Doesn't that just blow your mind? What about 5000? Or 10000? The point here is though is to ask what is the point of this Genesis passage? It is to point out that the glorious creation - as beautiful as it is - is not to be worshiped, like the surrounding peoples do, for they are created like we are. This remains to be relevant.

5) What would disprove God?
I've heard this several times, yet I am not convinced that this has dawned on most involved in debates on this question, but Craig highlights that the classic "problem of Evil" is recognised to no longer hold sway by both theists and atheists (see here also). You cannot say that God and evil cannot co-exist.

6) If  God could create a world in which a maximum number of people come to him that has evil in it, why not create a world in which there is no evil but that same number come to him?
Apparently: it might not be feasible for God to create such a world (excluding a ridiculous example of a 2-minute universe that Craig gives, but that was hardly the maximum, more of a maximum percentage). Craig disappointed me on this question, for some of the same reasons as he did on the animal suffering question. He reinterprets the question to mean those same people somehow plucked from our world and inserted into another world. The questioner didn't say that.


Grace and peace :)

Resurrection and poor apologetic reasoning (1)

Resurrection is a massive topic that has not been treated much on this blog - sorry, there's so much going on for me with the divine Name (Yahweh, Kurios, articles...), my preferred topic!

There's often interesting chat on this subject of the resurrection on the Unbelievable podcast, why not check out the discussion this week? There are some good references for further exploration on the debate of Christ's bodily resurrection. One major name however was missed out, whom I may cover at some point (thus far I have only read one small book of his that covers the virginal birth and the resurrection): Raymond Brown. Awesome.

This Unbelievable! podcast, then, bears the title Did Hume Demolish Miracles? In the debate are Michael Ruse and Gary Habermas.

I guess the only thing I want to say is I find it surprising when lay arguments are laid out that don't cut the mustard, while good arguments are left in the background. I also don't get why another key sceptic question never seems to be asked by the sceptics, one that often comes to my mind.

What I did appreciate in the debate is Habermas' insistance to look for the strongest evidence in Paul, and not in the gospels, along with their agreement that good Christianity is not about simply believing a set of propositions, but rather love in action founded on those beliefs. Obviously for Habermas, there is the undeniable foundation of the resurrected Christ, king of love (it was not debated, however, about the possibility of goodness and love in the world, with a non-bodily resurrected messiah). As Christians, love and goodness are at the centre of our understanding of our God. Christianity is the faith I was raised with and for me still makes the most (although definitely not perfect) sense of the world I perceive around me, providing the greatest insights and gives me the most purpose. When I enter into that space of worship and love of the infinite and loving God, it is hard to see an alternative hypothesis to explain the empty tomb stories, which an increasing number of sceptics are now coming to agree probably is true (that there was an empty tomb discovered - not that Jesus was in fact bodily raised by God, otherwise they wouldn't be sceptics!).

But moving away from the resurrection debate for a moment, what do we actually do when we just throw some weak evidence for something that is very reasonable on different grounds?

We discredit it.

I believe we need to be putting ourselves more into the shoes of sceptics (or at least more neutral inquiry) and stop just singing to the choir. Do we care that we might defend our beliefs lamely?

Let me please try to debunk two unsatisfying defenses of the Christian faith. Firstly, Justin Brierly talks here about an argument based on mathematical odds. He shows just how perfect the expanding rate of the universe is, to permit the development of a stable universe. Incredibly unlikely, right? Ridiculously unlikely. So, goes the argument, this is great evidence for the intentionality and design of a Creator. But the argument's frailty is in the way it is stated: "first time", says Brierly. Yet, as he himself goes on to say in the same video, there is absolutely no consensus in the scientific world, the same scientific world **he is appealing to**, about what "multiverse" might look like. One view is most certainly that this "big bang" (William Craig seems to accept the 13.8 bn year dating for this universe) was not necessarily the first. Brierly does later mention it as a possibility, but goes on to state that this requires "faith" in order to believe it. But so does ours! This language or line of defense is not consistent with:

"the fact that we are shows us that someone has loaded the dice, in fact perhaps there is no dice at all... the product of an intelligent mind".

Put bluntly, Brierly is not showing from the facts why one option is more likely than the other, and could justifiably understood as singing to the choir (sorry Justin). Further, from that wobbly basis, he has now jumped to another position that I am not convinced he himself believes: that we were individually and perfectly planned. To be sure, I'd have to listen again to the debate with James White and the open Theist (not all details are decided by God in advance, but he knows all the possibilities and intevenes).

Although Ruse did not discuss the dice argument presented by Brierly, his point that we can look silly just trying to play catch-up with science and forcing our biblical interpretation into yet another mould needs careful consideration. If ever science could demonstrate good evidence for some sort of cyclical universe, what do we do with all the pseudo Christian science? Not only does it hit the bin with a bang, but all those who were bolstered in their faith by poor argumentation may find their faith actually stabbed in the back or feel manipulated. I would really like to avoid young folk from feeling that.

Part 2 of this article about weak reasoning to defend otherwise strong faith will be on a second post, and probably more controversial! You know me...

Thanks for your interest.