Metacrock's Blog

Answering Brap: Understanding Mystical Eperience

2012-01-27T06:58:00.000-08:00

These are comments that were sent to me by Brap a we days ago. Brap is an atheist who makes good comments and pretends to be an alien exploring our world for the first time, which enables him to play the stranger and force me to explain the obvious (at least I think he's pretending...).

Brap:

He [Sam Harris] is saying there is more to these experiences than simply being in awe of nature, but there is no basis to extrapolate from these personal experiences (universal or not) to anything about the origin of the universe.

Meta: certainly there is. the historical association says it all. It's just a matter of preferring a different metaphor.

Brap:

Can you expand on “the historical association?” I don’t recall seeing that term in this context before.

Meta: The original term "super nature" was coined in 500 by pseudo Dionysus.what he meant by the term was the transformative sense of the experiences. So Mystical experience is by its every nature a priori supernatural. It's in the enlightenment that the term SN was changed to mean magic or other realms of something beyond what is natural. The real term refers to the process of experince whereby one is elevated in consciousness.

So by that definition the word “supernatural” simply refers to the changes (mental, physical, whatever) one goes through during (and after?) a mystical experience, correct? I’m ok with that definition, so let’s go with that. Now since that doesn’t seem to imply the existence of anything outside of the natural world, how does one get from “mystical experience” to “God exists?”

The historical association goes back way before that. It could go back to stone age or even Nanderthal times. That's harder to prove, but as we look at late neolithic humans we see they seemed to experience a sense of the numinous in they developed thoughts of after life, decoration of implements pertaining to it, mazes and other artifacts that seem to indicate the were experiencing spiritual phenomena. Certainly as long as writing has been around people have written about such things.

Moreover,not only the historical association but also the content of the experience indicates its an experience of the divine. Most of them time people say they are experiencing holiness, or deity or the divine, all pervasive love; it's giving them a sense of the oneness of things but more than that, it's most often wrapped up in a sense of the divine.

Brap:

Can you provide some examples of outcomes (of mystical experiences) that can’t be explained by natural means?

two of the best early studies demonstrate the experimental group as a whole experienced certain things:

Wuthnow, Robert (1978). "Peak Experiences: Some Empirical Tests." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18 (3), 59-75.

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

21% more likely to experience these things lasting for the first year after the experience. One can also have them again.

Noble, Kathleen D. (1987). ``Psychological Health and the Experience of Transcendence.'' The Counseling Psychologist, 15 (4), 601-614.

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

From Council on Spiritual Practices Website

"States of Univtive Consciousness"

Brap:

When you say “the content of the experience is usually about God or the divine or the meaning of life,” what exactly do you mean? Is that how the people who have a mystical experience describe it?

Yes, they are overwhelmingly religious in content, meaning in most cases they are associated this way.

Examples:

An example of the sort of experience is found in a study by Robinson.[i]

Finally, Robinson (1977) found that 15% of his adult respondents spoke of childhood mystical experiences. As this from a 40 year old female:

When I was eleven years old I spent part of a summer holiday in the Wye Valley. Waking up very early one bright morning, before any of the household was about, I left my bed and went to kneel on the window seat, to look out over the curve, which the river took just below the house. The trees between the house and river ... The scene was very beautiful, and quite suddenly I felt myself on the verge of a great revelation. It was as if I had stumbled unwittingly on a place where I was not expected, and was about to be initiated into some wonderful mystery, something of indescribable significance. Then, just as suddenly, the feeling faded. But for the brief seconds while it lasted I had known that in some strange way I, the essential "me", was a part of the trees, of the sunshine, and the river, that we all belonged to some great unity. I was left filled with exhilaration and exultation of spirit. This is one of the most memorable experiences of my life, of a quite different quality and greater intensity than the sudden lift of the spirit one may often feel when confronted with beauty in Nature (p. 37).(quoted by Gackenback)[ii]

Another example (this one from William James used by William Alston):

“…all at once I…felt the presence of God—I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it—as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether…I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life and took pity both on the insignificant creature and on the sinner that I was. I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his will. I felt his reply, which was that I should do his will from day to day, in humility and poverty, leaving him the Almighty God, to judge of whether I should some time be called to bear witness more conspicuously. Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the communion, which he had granted.[iii]

Still another example, used by Alston:

There was no sensible vision, but the room was filled by a Presence, which in a strange way was both about me and within me. I was overwhelmingly possessed by Someone who was not myself, and yet I felt I was more myself than I had ever been before.[iv]

Brap:

Or do people have a hard time describing it, so that’s the closest our language can come to describing it? If people have a hard time describing it in our current language, how do we know it’s really about God or the divine and not simply some mental state not yet fully explained or documented by science?

The concept is that you can't communicate the experience in words. It's like trying to transcribe music you hear in your head to paper, it's never going to be the same. The nature of language is metaphorical and religoius language is analogy. Within an analogical framework people are lucid about what they describe. The examples above seem lucid to me.

Brap:

The following quote is attributed to Hippocrates: “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things.” Is it possible that mystical experiences are considered divine because we don't really understand what's going on in that state of consciousness?

That's argument from analogy. Epilepsy seems like mystical experience, not because its not understood but becuase both convey a sense of total peace and a sense of understanding all things for a certain time, which then fades away. This is argument from analogy since both seem similar in texture of the experience that doesn't mean they are cased by the same things. It's possible that both effect similar centers of the brain. That doesnt' reduce mystical experince to something that originates only in Brain Chemistry. Epilepsy doesn't have the kind of track record for totally transforming people's lives in ways that make them better across the board. A couple of hindered studies show that mystical experience dos so.

[i]Quoted in Gackenback , Jayne. website: “Trans personal Childhood Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness: Literature Review and Theoretical Integration” (unpublished paper 1992) URL: http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/cehsc/ipure.htm (last visited summer 2008)

[ii] ibid

[iii] anonymous report in James (Verities of Religious Experience, 67-68) Quoted by William Alston, Perceiving God, the Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1991, 1993, 13.

[iv] Timothy Breadsworth, A Sense of Presence (1977) in Ibid, 17.

Proto-pan-psychism:Tying up Lose ends in theology

2012-01-23T04:15:00.001-08:00

I said that I would answer certain comments made by Brap in the comment section which pertain to my arguments on religious experience. I'm still going to get around to those and I hope Brap will forgive me for pushing them back to Wednesday. This was a post I put on CARM the other where atheists were going wild with certain kinds of statements they always make, such as "where did God come from, what caused God?" that sort of thing.I decided to try and tie it all up in one post.

I see a whole host of problems talked about in many threads that can be all done away with just a couple of simple ideas.

problems:
God simple or complex?
where does God come from?
why doesn't God need a cause?
Is God a brute fact?
Is God indifferent?

Answers:

"God" is a term for a category of existence not a name for a guy. god is not a big man in the sky but a from of existence all its own--eternal, necessary, aka "primordial being."
The nature of that level of existence (the divine) can be varied and debated: for my money the most rational understanding is that God is a mind and the reality we know and take to be so solid is a thought in that mind.

"God" is the framework in which all this stuff of matter, and chemicals and biology cohere and take place. It's analogous to a big mind that is thinking the processes that are contained in that framework.

Because it's a mind is not indifferent, it does love it capable of caring but since it works on a level beyond our understanding we can't really know what it's up to or how it's worked things out or how it's concern is motivated except in so far as we can become agents of its will and express its love for others.

Because it's the basis of reality we can't compare it to things we understand. So we can't say "it's simple," "it's complex" those terms have no more meaning for that level of being as do the terms "up" and "down"in outer space. To use those terms one must have a standard where "up" is always a certain pole and it's opposite is "down." you can't establish that with God becuase God is not a thing in creation but is the mind that creates the reality we think of as "the world."

We are figments in an imagination we take that to be solid "reality" when in reality it's just an idea in a mind. I call this idea "proto-pan-pshychism." Pan psychism is the idea that mind is part of nature. Or that matter is conscoius. I don't any reason to assume that when the same basic evidence of it can also point to a mind not part of matter but standing behind nature, so to speak. This view related to Berkeley but of cousre isn't exactly the same. Berkeley thought that God's observation of reality made it real. I am arguing that God actively thinks reality into being. A similar view is hinted at in my Berkeley-Gaswami God argument. This argument tends to really anger atheists and they always demand immediate proof. Some proof is offered in the argument from temporal beginning (another God argument) where I argue that only a mind really answers the problem of temporal beginning. One might also see my fire in the equations re-boot, as well as my version of the fine tuning argument as these also imply the necessity of a mind in creation.

New paradigms in scientific thinking are on the horizon which radically change our notions of what consciousness is. We tend to think of consciousness as the side effect or sellf awareness that comes from brain activity. This is no longer the only way to think about it as some physicists are actaully willing to consider other views.
One of those is Amit Goswamai, a Physicist teaching at the university of Organ.
Craig Hamilton tells us:

Goswami is convinced, along with a number of others who subscribe to the same view, that the universe, in order to exist, requires a conscious sentient being to be aware of it. Without an observer, he claims, it only exists as a possibility. And as they say in the world of science, Goswami has done his math. Marshaling evidence from recent research in cognitive psychology, biology, parapsychology and quantum physics, and leaning heavily on the ancient mystical traditions of the world, Goswami is building a case for a new paradigm that he calls "monistic idealism," the view that consciousness, not matter, is the foundation of everything that is.

Goswami himself says:

The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter, the basic constituents—building blocks—of matter. And cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary particles. This is the belief—all cause moves from the elementary particles. This is what we call "upward causation." So in this view, what human beings—you and I—think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an illusion. This is the current paradigm.

Now, the opposite view is that everything starts with consciousness.That is, consciousness is the ground of all being. In this view, consciousness imposes "downward causation." In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world we really are acting with causal power. This view does not deny that matter also has causal potency—it does not deny that there is causal power from elementary particles upward, so there is upward causation—but in addition it insists that there is also downward causation. It shows up in our creativity and acts of free will, or when we make moral decisions. In those occasions we are actually witnessing downward causation by consciousness.

Goswami actually says that consciousness is the ground of being. This is because the ground of being is what being is grounded in, and if that is consciousness, if the nature of existence is to be a thought in a mind, than the ground of being is consciousness.

Another Physicist, Peter Russell, who studied at Cambridge with professor Hawking also supports Goswami's Vedantic assumptions.

The really hard problem-as David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, has said-is consciousness itself. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain lead to an inner experience? Why doesn't it all go on in the dark, without any subjective aspect? Why do we have any inner life at all?

This paradox-namely, the absolutely undeniable existence of human consciousness set against the complete absence of any satisfactory scientific account for it-suggests to me that something is seriously amiss with the contemporary scientific worldview. For a long time I could not put my finger on exactly what it was. Then suddenly, about four years ago on a flight back to San Francisco, I saw where the error lay.

If consciousness is not some emergent property of life, as Western science supposes, but is instead a primary quality of the cosmos-as fundamental as space, time, and matter, perhaps even more fundamental-then we arrive at a very different picture of reality. As far as our understanding of the material world goes, nothing much changes; but when it comes to our understanding of mind, we are led to a very different worldview indeed. I realized that the hard problem of consciousness was not a problem to be solved so much as the trigger that would, in time, push Western science into what the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a "paradigm shift."

The continued failure of science to make any appreciable headway into this fundamental problem suggests that, to date, all approaches may be on the wrong track. They are all based on the assumption that consciousness emerges from, or is dependent upon, the physical world of space, time, and matter. In one way or another they are trying to accommodate the anomaly of consciousness within a worldview that is intrinsically materialist. As happened with the medieval astronomers, who kept adding more and more epicycles to explain the anomalous motions of the planets, the underlying assumptions are seldom, if ever, questioned.

I now believe that rather than trying to explain consciousness in terms of the material world, we should be developing a new worldview in which consciousness is a fundamental component of reality. The key ingredients for this new paradigm-a "superparadigm"-are already in place. We need not wait for any new discoveries. All we need do is put various pieces of our existing knowledge together, and consider the new picture of reality that emerges.

Consciousness and Reality
Because the word "consciousness" can be used in so many different ways, confusion often arises around statements about its nature. The way I use the word is not in reference to a particular state of consciousness, or particular way of thinking, but to the faculty of consciousness itself-the capacity for inner experience, whatever the nature or degree of the experience.

A useful analogy is the image from a video projector. The projector shines light onto a screen, modifying the light so as to produce any one of an infinity of images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we experience-what I call the "contents of consciousness." The light itself, without which no images would be possible, corresponds to the faculty of consciousness.

We know all the images on the screen are composed of this light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself; our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but we are usually aware only of the many different experiences, thoughts, and feelings that appear in the mind. We are seldom aware of consciousness itself. Yet without this faculty there would be no experience of any kind.

The faculty of consciousness is one thing we all share, but what goes on in our consciousness, the content of our consciousness, varies widely. This is our personal reality, the reality we each know and experience. Most of the time, however, we forget that this is just our personal reality and think we are experiencing physical reality directly. We see the ground beneath our feet; we can pick up a rock, and throw it through the air; we feel the heat from a fire, and smell its burning wood. It feels as if we are in direct contact with the world "out there." But this is not so. The colors, textures, smells, and sounds we experience are not really "out there"; they are all images of reality constructed in the mind.

It was this aspect of perception that most caught my attention during my studies of experimental psychology (and amplified by my readings of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant). At that time, scientists were beginning to discover the ways in which the brain pieces together its perception of the world, and I was fascinated by the implications of these discoveries for the way we construct our picture of reality. It was clear that what we perceive and what is actually out there are two different things.

This, I know, runs counter to common sense. Right now you are aware of the pages in front of you, various objects around you, sensations in your own body, and sounds in the air. Even though you may understand that all of this is just your reconstruction of reality, it still seems as if you are having a direct perception of the physical world. And I am not suggesting you should try to see it otherwise. What is important for now is the understanding that all our experience is an image of reality constructed in the mind.

At least some scientists are willing to think of consciousness along new lines, not just as a property of an biological organism stemming from brain chemistry. These two are practicing a form of Hindu mysticism called "Vedanta," I am not in line with Vedanta. But I do agree that reality is a thought in the mind of God. I think this is the answer to many theological problems.

It would make no sense to ask where this primordial nature of being comes from because it's eternal. Time is created by the mind that thinks the universe it s function is that of a conventional frame of reference for us like up and down. It's a temporal up and down.

God is no more subject to these things than we are to day dreams.

For this same reason God doesn't need a cause. We can't speak of God as "brute fact." Brute facts are problematic and may be discounted as exiting merely becuase they are brute facts. God is not a brute fact because the definition of that it has no purpose either within itself or from without.

God's purpose can't be bestowed upon him from without because there's nothing higher.He's the end of the series. The purpose of God is within God. The purpose stems form God's postilion as eternal necessary being, and that is giving and bestowing upon the beings (the contingencies the consequences of its thinking).

In other words love. Love (giving--the will to the good of the other) is the primary attribute of god and is linked to being at the primordial level.

Thus God is not indifferent. God is not without purpose but the purpose of God is within God himself as the mind.

This has often prompted atheists to charge that I'm not a Christian and they call it "new age" to mock it. I'm not new age. I have no affilation with anything one might call "new age." I think new age is bubble brain. This is not new age, pan psychism is not what I support. My view is not that it just bounces off the body of evidence they use and bends the trajectory of some of it to the service of God. There is no statement in Christian doctrine that ays "God is not thinking the universe." The Bible says God spoke creation into existence. What's the difference in speaking it and thinking it? Just becuase I've thought of a way that most christian haven't hit upon yet to answer certain questions doesn't mean it's not within the bounds of Christian doctrine. I use evidence from eclectic sources. Russell and Gaswami are not Christians and do qualify closer to being "new age" than I would like. They also offer knowledge of physicists and show there is a movement among phsyicists, which dos illicit the ire of colleagues, I want to expose both Christians and atheists to thinking outside the box.

Answering Brap: Understanding Mystical Expernice

2012-01-20T08:44:00.001-08:00

He [Sam Harris] is saying there is more to these experiences than simply being in awe of nature, but there is no basis to extrapolate from these personal experiences (universal or not) to anything about the origin of the universe.

Meta: certainly there is. the historical association says it all. It's just a matter of preferring a different metaphor.

Brap:

Can you expand on “the historical association?” I don’t recall seeing that term in this context before.

Can you provide some examples of outcomes (of mystical experiences) that can’t be explained by natural means?

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

From Council on Spiritual Practices Website

"States of Univtive Consciousness"

Brap:

When you say “the content of the experience is usually about God or the divine or the meaning of life,” what exactly do you mean? Is that how the people who have a mystical experience describe it?

Yes, they are overwhelmingly religious in content, meaning in most cases they are associated this way.

Examples:

An example of the sort of experience is found in a study by Robinson.[i]

Finally, Robinson (1977) found that 15% of his adult respondents spoke of childhood mystical experiences. As this from a 40 year old female:

Another example (this one from William James used by William Alston):

Still another example, used by Alston:

Brap:

Or do people have a hard time describing it, so that’s the closest our language can come to describing it? If people have a hard time describing it in our current language, how do we know it’s really about God or the divine and not simply some mental state not yet fully explained or documented by science?

The following quote is attributed to Hippocrates: “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things.” Is it possible that mystical experiences are considered divine because we don't really understand what's going on in that state of consciousness?

[ii] ibid

[iv] Timothy Breadsworth, A Sense of Presence (1977) in Ibid, 17.

The Importance of Humans and the Importance of Self Acceptence

2012-01-20T08:39:00.001-08:00

Originally Posted by Dr Pepper

Some theists will say that Atheism is a self-centered ego-centric belief since does not acknowledges a superior being. I maintain that it is exactly the opposite case.

Theists maintain that they are so important that they had to be created special in the image of a God. Not only that, but said God is concerned about them personally to the point that it cares about their behavior, even about who they sleep with. In addition, they are so loved that all they have to do is believe in a specific dogma and they will be resurrected from death to spend eternity in a special place specifically designed for them.

This has got to be one of the most bizarre ideas a mind can conceive. And they have the audacity to call atheists self-centered and egotistical.

It has always been very curious to me how atheists can so thoroughly warp the meanings of the gospel and then when one straightens them out it doesn't even phase them that they got it wrong. This mess really muddles the Gospel and totally distorts Christian belief. We find out latter in the thread that he knows he's doing that.

Theists maintain that they are so important that they had to be created special in the image of a God.

This makes it sound like theists (Of cousre by that he means Christians) thnk they personally were created special but other humans were not. In fact of course Christians believe that human are created in the image of God.

Not only that, but said God is concerned about them personally to the point that it cares about their behavior, even about who they sleep with.

That creates the impression that God is just concerned with a given Christian sleeping with the wrong person. Can you imagine God telling a Christian woman "that guy isn't rich enough, you need to be sleeping with this other guy." That's how he makes it sound. Not only is it all people that God is concerned with but not because of some petty sense or micro-managing of sleeping arrangements. It's about emotional behavior and what we do to hurt others.

In addition, they are so loved that all they have to do is believe in a specific dogma and they will be resurrected from death to spend eternity in a special place specifically designed for them.

Of course it's not about getting off easy with some specialty dogma. It's not the act of accepting dogma that saves its the act of trusting Jesus' atonement on the cross that saves. Jesus death on the cross is God's statement of solidarity with humanity. When we accept and trust that statement we are in effect returning the agreement of solidarity with God. If we re in solidarity God has forgiven us a prori. That means the act of trusting trusting God's solidarity (his desire to identify with and be related to us) creates the ground of forgiveness. That's an act of love basically. It's not meeting a requirement for special belief system that saves us but God's love and your acceptance of God's forgiveness.

This has got to be one of the most bizarre ideas a mind can conceive. And they have the audacity to call atheists self-centered and egotistical.

Actually I think self centered is really a compensation for lack of self acceptance.I've shown that there are studies* that show atheists have low self esteem.

People with low self esteem often seem to think that those who have self confidence or a positive self image are arrogant and egotistical. Those who are truly egocentric are trying to compensate for real feelings of inferiority or fears about their ability. One thing that atheists can't accept is the fact that knowing God will fix your self image if you allow it to. I used to have a total inferiority complex and feelings of self loathing. Atheists always accuse me of being egotistical becuase I know I'm loved and I'm confident in who I am in the Lord. To them that's unforgivable pride. I also don't see any reason to persuade the otherwise. The prospect of making posts that say "I am humble, I really am" is absurd.

DP makes it sound like he thinks Christians believe God creates only Christians in the image of God. Yet latter he admits he knows better, he just thinks Christians make it sound that way. Well maybe some do. I can see making that criticism of the fundie Calvinist types. Yet HRG (the Austrian Mathematician and atheist guru of the CARM atheist board) answers a question in saying that "man is the only known measure of all things." So how does that make atheism sound?

*part 2

How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong

2012-01-18T05:29:00.000-08:00

Book Review:
The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong. by by William C. Placher, John Knox Press, 1996.

This is a ground breaking book. I would not be surprised to learn that it was ignored for the most part. I read part of it in the 90s and forgot all about until recently when my old professor form Perkins, William S. Babcock, recommended it for something things I am studying at present. This book brought back for me some of my former quests as a beginning and pre seminarian and observations I made by then, late 80s and wanted to make good on and was side tracked from. This book is ground breaking and deserves to be seen as the seminal literary event in theology for that 90s. I'm sure it wasn't seen that way by the theological community.

Placher was writting mid 90s and begins his work discussing how theology in that decade was laced with either talk of postmodenism and atteapts to expalin what "modern" is, or attacks upon "classical theism" which focus on "static" notions of a remote God distantly orchastrating hierarchies and all the other bad things Derridians feared. These were the classic signs of the times in '96. These concerns promped Placher to seek the divide that separates seventeenth century form per seventeenth century Christianity. That there is a divide is seperated by the distinction bewteen the Luther talks about God and the way those arguign against Deism in the time of Tillotson and Stillingfleet argued about God. They God seem like a thing in creation. Here one will recognize a great deal of the terminology I use which I find all over this book. I didn't read it that much I don't think I got it form the book. Yet he definitely has the same concerns and use many of the phrases I thought were my own. Some of these concerns cross paths with Tillich. So how did we go from Augustine's "God who is closer to me than my inmost being" to God as an efficient cause for things that happen in the world?

Placher focuses on seventeenth century divines who were no longer content to experience a reality beyond our understanding, but wanted to think it out to the level of obliterating all problems of understanding. For theologians before the seventeenth century God's transcendence was not "contrastive." Talk about transcendence did not make God less immanent. The mystics of the mid dark ages (Dionysus 500AD) spoke of God as totally remote in some vastly far flung realm, but didn't make God non participatory or absent from the world. It was becasue God was transcendent (transcendence also includes immanence) that God could be immanent in all of creation (Placher, 128).

Since God was not one agent among others, but operated at a different level of agency it made no sense to ask which things had been done by God or which things has been done by someone or something else.AT the begining of the modern era, however,theologians and philosophers began to worry about just where to put God in the universe. Debates about miracles and about Grace and free will dominated the theology of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and both of those debates involved asking which things God, as oppossed to someone or something else, did.(ibid)

The nature of thought about the world at that time creates forces that influenced theologians to seek to explain God's place in the world in such a way as to locate him in the world alongside things. Placher talks about language growing in univocity, that means stripping it of indications of higher realms. Also the turn away from viewing reality as a hierarchy of levels made up of remote realms (ibid). This all goes hand in hand with what Fairweather says in his essay on "Christianity and the Supernatural" (New Theology No 1, circa 1964, ed. Martin E. Marty). He traces the bifurcation of immanence and transcendence to enlightenment univocity and Reformation equivocity. In other words, the enlightenment became reductionist and grounding everything in phsyical scinece sought immediate and visible sense data oriented explaitions for psychical reality alone. While the Calvinist severed the relation between the world and the spirit, the immanent and transcendent, the harmonious relation between the two facets of the one reality that Fairweather talks about and put emphasis upon the "other worldly." Then becuase the two (immanent and transcendent, nature and super nature) are not harmoionous anymore to bind them together a phony supernaturalism that magnifies some aspect of nature (the will) and places it over against the rest of nature as a false transcendent based upon something we know and can understand.

This is all Fariweather's notion form the article in the anthology edited by Marty but Placher follows along those same lines. He goes into much greater detail in his book than Fairweather did in an article. These are also the ideas behind my essay on Supernature on Doxa. Placher's work is invaluable for understanding the SN and for answering the problematic questions raised by atheists in their desire to disprove concept of alternative realms. The athist oncept of SN as a realm beyond the natural is an extension of both tendencies form the enlightenment and from the Calvinists. It's an attempt to put God on a level with things in creation while denouncing the concept of God as 'removed' or 'unnecessary' or 'something beyond the realm we can control.'

Placher provides a complex and nuanced understanding of the thinking which created the divide between a world charged by supernatural and world forever collapsed into one dimension of nature, one voice (univocal).This has to be understood if we are going to re-claim historical Christianity and move beyond the reductionism that currently threatens the very possibility of belief. It's a powerful weapon in my arsenal to wave about in the face of those who butcher the meaning of supernatural. It belongs up there with books like Nature and Grace by Mathias Joseph Scheeben which explicated the meaning of the Supernatural.

Why Did God Create? Atheist Assumptions about Free Will Defense

2012-01-16T04:13:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted by hsmithson

In discussions about fine-tuning/design, it is usually taken for granted that God would want to create stuff. But it doesn’t seem obvious to me that he would want to create anything. Outside of pointing to a specific theology (which seems kind of question-begging), how could we possibly know what God’s preferences are when it comes to creating versus not creating? Could we perhaps argue as follows?

(1) If God exists, then he would ensure that the best possible world exists.
(2) Because God is maximally great, the possible world containing God and nothing else is the best possible world.
(3) Therefore, if God exists, he would not create anything.

I don’t have any real confidence in this argument, but I’m curious how people would object to it. And aside from the argument's success/failure, I’m curious how we can know whether or not God would create stuff.

That's just tailor made to find fault with God. set up your own expectations which obviously haven't been met, then you can blame God for not meeting them.

You are also assuming God is like a big man becuase you seem him as building contractor in the sky. He has to have a man's style of rational reason for doing something, he's gonna do it in a way that you can understand and approve. There's no reason to assume that.

You don't even understand all human motivations for doing things. if God were a big artist in the sky he might create for a pure reason of artistic creativity. Could you relate to that? Could you call it a failure?

The basic assumption in p1 is basically utilitarian at least. That's going to be a major assumption that most atheists will make. It's assumes the only consideration God has to work with is pleasure over pain. It also assumes there can't be any higher goal than avoiding pain. Atheits are often asking things like "why God just ignore sin? why can't God just give amnesty and everyone enjoy themselves?" This assumes there's no higher reason than pleasure over pain.

In my view God created becuase he wanted free moral agents who willing choose the good. That's why he constructs a world that is morally neutral and that doesn't give off obvious indications of having been created. That way we have to seek truth and come to a conclusion about why we are here and the existence of God.

He's left obvious clues that set us on the right path if we are to seek with he heart. If what I'm saying is true the real challenge is to find what it means to seek with the heart. This has a close bearing on my free will defense. Atheists most often ask why did God create so they can charge God with being absent since the world is so screwed up. The answer to that is the free will defense.

Let's examine my basic assumptions in making this arguemnt, and I will show how I use it to answer arguments about why does God allow pain and evil?

Basic assumptions

There are three basic assumptions that are hidden, or perhaps not so obivioius, but nevertheless must be dealt with here.

(1) The assumption that God wants a "moral universe" and that this value outweighs all others.

The idea that God wants a moral universe I take from my basic view of God and morality. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics) I assume that love is the background of the moral universe (this is also an Augustinian view). I also assume that there is a deeply ontological connection between love and Being. Axiomatically, in my view point, love is the basic impetus of Being itself. Thus, it seems reasonable to me that, if morality is an upshot of love, or if love motivates moral behavior, then the creation of a moral universe is essential.

(2) that internal "seeking" leads to greater internalization of values than forced compliance or complaisance that would be the result of intimidation.

That's a pretty fair assumption. We all know that people will a lot more to achieve a goal they truly beileve in than one they merely feel forced or obligated to follow but couldn't care less about.

(3)the the drama or the big mystery is the only way to accomplish that end.

The pursuit of the value system becomes a search of the heart for ultimate meaning,that ensures that people continue to seek it until it has been fully internalized.

The argument would look like this:

(1)God's purpose in creation: to create a Moral Universe, that is one in which free moral agents willingly choose the Good.

(2) Moral choice requires absolutely that choice be free (thus free will is necessitated).

(3) Allowance of free choices requires the risk that the chooser will make evil choices

(4)The possibility of evil choices is a risk God must run, thus the value of free outweighs all other considerations, since without there would be no moral universe and the purpose of creation would be thwarted.

This leaves the atheist in the position of demanding to know why God doesn't just tell everyone that he's there, and that he requires moral behavior, and what that entails. Thus there would be no mystery and people would be much less inclined to sin.

This is the point where Soteriological Drama figures into it. Argument on Soteriological Drama:

(5) Life is a "Drama" not for the sake of entertainment, but in the sense that a dramatic tension exists between our ordinary observations of life on a daily basis, and the ultimate goals, ends and purposes for which we are on this earth.

(6) Clearly God wants us to seek on a level other than the obvious, daily, demonstrative level or he would have made the situation more plain to us

(7) We can assume that the reason for the "big mystery" is the internalization of choices. If God appeared to the world in open objective fashion and laid down the rules, we would probably all try to follow them, but we would not want to follow them. Thus our obedience would be lip service and not from the heart.

(8) therefore, God wants a heart felt response which is internationalized value system that comes through the search for existential answers; that search is phenomenological; introspective, internal, not amenable to ordinary demonstrative evidence.

In other words, we are part of a great drama and our actions and our dilemmas and our choices are all part of the way we respond to the situation as characters in a drama.

This theory also explains why God doesn't often regenerate limbs in healing the sick. That would be a dead giveaway. God creates criteria under which healing takes place, that criteria can't negate the overall plan of a search.

Objection:

One might object that this couldn't outweigh babies dying or the horrors of war or the all the countless injustices and outrages that must be allowed and that permeate human history. It may seem at first glance that free will is petty compared to human suffering. But I am advocating free will for the sake any sort of pleasure or imagined moral victory that accrues from having free will, it's a totally pragmatic issue; that internalizing the value of the good requires that one choose to do so, and free will is essential if choice is required. Thus it is not a capricious or selfish defense of free will, not a matter of choosing our advantage or our pleasure over that of dying babies, but of choosing the key to saving the babies in the long run,and to understanding why we want to save them, and to care about saving them, and to actually choosing their saving over our own good.

In deciding what values outweigh other values we have to be clear about our decision making paradigm. From a utilitarian standpoint the determinate of lexically ordered values would be utility, what is the greatest good for the greatest number? This would be determined by means of outcome, what is the final tally sheet in terms of pleasure over pain to the greatest aggregate? But why that be the value system we decide by? It's just one value system and much has been written about the bankruptcy of consequentialist ethics. If one uses a deontological standard it might be a different thing to consider the lexically ordered values. Free will predominates because it allows internalization of the good. The good is the key to any moral value system. This could be justified on both deontolgoical and teleological premises.

My own moral decision making paradigm is deontological, because I believe that teleological ethics reduces morality to the decision making of a ledger sheet and forces the individual to do immoral things in the name of "the greatest good for the greatest number." I find most atheists are utilitarians so this will make no sense to them. They can't help but think of the greatest good/greatest number as the ultimate adage, and deontology as empty duty with no logic to it. But that is not the case. Deontology is not just rule keeping, it is also duty oriented ethics. The duty that we must internalize is that ultimate duty that love demands of any action. Robots don't love. One must freely choose to give up self and make a selfless act in order to act from Love. Thus we cannot have a loved oriented ethics, or we cannot have love as the background of the moral universe without free will, because love involves the will.

The choice of free will at the expense of countless lives and untold suffering cannot be an easy thing, but it is essential and can be justified from either deontolgoical or teleological perspective. Although I think the deontologcial makes more sense. From the teleological stand point, free will ultimately leads to the greatest good for the greatest number because in the long run it assumes us that one is willing to die for the other, or sacrifice for the other, or live for the other. That is essential to promoting a good beyond ourselves. The individual sacrifices for the good of the whole, very utilitarian. It is also deontolgocially justifiable since duty would tell us that we must give of ourselves for the good of the other.

Thus anyway you slice it free will outweighs all other concerns because it makes available the values of the good and of love. Free will is the key to ultimately saving the babies, and saving them because we care about them, a triumph of the heart, not just action from wrote. It's internalization of a value system without which other and greater injustices could be foisted upon an unsuspecting humanity that has not been thought to choose to lay down one's own life for the other.

Objection 2: questions

(from "UCOA" On CARM boards (atheism)

Quote:

In addition, there is no explanation of why god randomly decided to make a "moral universe".

Why do you describe the decision as random? Of course all of this is second guessing God, so the real answer is "I don't know, duh" But far be it form me to give-up without an opinion. My opinion as to why God would create moral universe:
to understand this you must understand my view of God, and that will take some doing. I'll try to just put it in a nut shell. In my view love is the background of the moral universe. The essence of "the good" or of what is moral is that which conforms to "lug." But love in the apogee sense, the will to the good of the other. I do not believe that that this is just derived arbitrarily, but is the outpouring of the wellspring of God's character. God is love, thus love is the background of the moral universe because God is the background of the moral universe.

Now I also describe God as "being itself." Meaning God is the foundation of all that is. I see a connection between love and being. Both are positive and giving and turning on in the face of nothingness, which is negativity. To say that another way, if we think of nothingness as a big drain pipe, it is threatening to **** all that exits into it. Being is the power to resist nothingness, being the stopper in the great cosmic drain pipe of non existence.

The act of bestowing being upon the beings is the nature of God because God is being. Those the two things God does because that's what he is, he "BES" (um, exists) and he gives out being bestowing it upon other beings. This is connected to love which also gives out and bestows. So being and love are connected, thus the moral universe is an outgrowth of the nature of God as giving and bestowing and being and loving.

Quote:
Thus the question isn't really answered. Why does god allow/create evil? To create a "moral universe". Why? The only answer that is given is, because he wants to. Putting it together, Why does god allow/create evil? Because he wants to?

In a nut shell, God allows evil as an inherent risk in allowing moral agency. (the reason for which is given above).

There is a big difference in doing something and allowing it to be done. God does not create evil, he allows the risk of evil to be run by the beings, because that risk is required to have free moral agency. The answer is not "because he wants to" the answer is because he wants free moral agency so that free moral agents will internalize the values of love. To have free moral agency he must allow them to:

(1)run the risk of evil choices

(2) live in a real world where hurt is part of the dice throw.

see my answers to atheist attacks on this idea in my essay: "Twelve Angry Stereotypes"

Science is a Cultural Construct: Supernatural is a Fact

2012-01-13T06:58:00.000-08:00

Last time I wrote an article about the atheist IQ scam, round II, the latest go round with Nybrog and friends. One aspect of that bear further reflection, that's what Brown said about the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect is the notion that IQ's have been rising, that the IQ's of our great grand parents would have been extremely low, low enough to count as restarted. The reason is because, as I said in that article:

Meta:

This is all very self referential because IQ is only measuring IQ not intelligence. Brown talks about the Flynn ects which shows that IQ's are getting higher. Our children will be smarter than us, we are smarter than our parents and grandparents. The problem is they are only getting higher not because people are really smarter but because the concentrated urban environment re-writes cultural literacy. It's the same problem as the bell curve. In the olden days people lived in the country and hunted. So a question "what do a god and rabbit have in common?" the old answer was "use dog to hunt rabbit." Yet this is now a wrong answer. Now we don't hunt and we are all into scinece, so the right answer is they are both mammals. Thus people in the ancient past are automatically stupid compared to us. Flynn finds that by modern stagehands the average student around 1900 had an IQ between 50-70. So how did they even function? A person today with an IQ of 50 would be profoundly restarted, live in an insinuation and not be able to tie his shoes. Yet doctors, Lawyers, and bankers rant he world with IQ that would today be 60-70.

Andrew Brown's Blog
online Gurdian
Brown reflects:

The answer, he [Flynn--of Flynn effect] says, is that one of the things that IQ tests measure is "post-scientific operational thinking". This is not the same as scientific thinking. But it is thinking about the world in terms of the categories by which science understands it. For instance, if you ask, "What do dogs and rabbits have in common", the post-scientific answer, that we would now regard as evidence of intelligence, is that they are both mammals. The pre-scientific answer is that you use a dog to hunt a rabbit. That's what matters about the two animals, not what class they belong to.

It is that kind of difference in reasoning which accounts for the huge measured IQ differences between urban and rural Brazil, and, of course, the fantastically low IQs measured in African countries.

But could something similar be true of religion? In particular, could dogmatic and fundamentalist religion be more useful to the poor and wretched? Could it lift them to the stage where they could experiment with doubt, with nuance, with novelistic thinking? The history of the early Methodists suggests exactly this. Remember John Wesley's reflection on his own success:

The Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.

Brown is putting the spin on poverty as the dig divide in culture.. There's more to it than that. What is being tested it seem in the IQ tests are cultural literacy and puzzle working. Cultural literacy is part of the world of cultural constructs. Of cousre how could it not be. When I say that science is a cultural constrict atheists go nuts laughing and mocking because they think scinece is a fact only new age Postmodern knit wits think things like this. Here's a perfect example. The mammalian answer becomes a scientific answer. It's based upon a scientific fact, rather a perceived fact. Lesson one in cultural constructs: taxonomy is a construct. We don't have to classify rabbits or dogs as mammals, all we have to do is change the way we define mammal. That's taxonomy, that's how you classify stuff and we can classify stuff anyway we want to. That means its' not a "fact" of nature, it's not written into the gene code, the genome for rabbits doesn't have a gene that says "I am a mammal." To assume there is a scientific fact that can' t change is to says "rabbits are mammals" is to say there's a mammalian essence that is somehow extracted from the natural and exits in some real apart form actual rabbits in the woods. That's Paternalism, that's actually part of the world world of philosophy and spiritual stuff that's been done away by scinece.

What does it mean that scinece nerds can't see this? I can just see some atheists saying "that's crazy you just don't know anything about scinece (that's what they say when I point out their mistakes) you don't know what mammals are. I do know what mammals are, but I also know that taxonomy is not based upon essences but upon the way we see things. The way we agree to classify mammals could change. Chinese classified horses as "ordinary," "superlative" and "belonging to the emperor." Those were written into nature, for them, as much as mammals are born live, have hair and drink milk, is written in for us. That's all a matter of the way you want to see it. You can re-order your classification system anyway you wish. This sort of thing is discussed at length by Michele Foucault, in his ground breaking work The Order of Things. I highly recommend it for some eye opening truths about postmodern thinking.

This is a perfect exampel of science as a cultural construct. Because the mammal answer no the IQ test is not only based upon a "scientific fact" (the fact is that we classify both animals as mammals not that there is some essence of mammal hood that both contain) and the fact of it as the right answer on the IQ test as contributing a small bit to the modern perception of IQ's becomes a scientific fact as well. The fact of it being "the right answer." The reality that the "right answer" is purely a matter of cultural reactivity remains obscured. Thus the illusion that scientific facts can't change or be products of culture is enhanced by the fact that if you don't answer the question in such a way as to give the assumption that it's a fact, then you are stupid.

This same phenomenon is undoubtedly true for all the spiritual and theological things that are being ignored and set and mocked and ridiculed by atheists. Look at easily the atheists say "theology is stupid," having never read any not known anything about it. If those guys were writing the IQ test they would say "the supernatural is false and stupid" is a true answer. Then they look back and say "ok this means people who believe in supernatural are less intelligent." hey a standardized test says so! that's proof that' a fact. If the test says it that' it it's fact. you are are even stupider if you don't believe it. They don't have an IQ on which the atheists who get this culturally relative bit are ranked as stupid, but I rank them so--the one's that don't get this.

So far we have a good illustration of science as a cultural construct, especially true of taxonomy related ideas, and the failure of standardized testing (yech! on that I say "poowie") there's more. My concerns are greater. Think of what it's doing to the culture. The culture takes this stuff and uncritically disseminates it. They way our parents and grand parents thought about the world just becomes this fossil that no one understands, even the people who study history and anthropology are separated form it forever by a think film of cultural relativity. Belief in the spirit and what means changes, becomes a thing of ridicule, and so on. Saying "smart people don't believe that" is really more like saying "the cool don't believe that." That's all it is. We are not doing this for survival. Its' not like our neolithic ancestors so really modern culture that enshrines such relativity is more a matter of cultural acceptance (being cool or not) than "fact."

This does mean all of us who believe in a supernatural (whatever that is) are like fossils or frozen out of the "modern" scene. We are officially stupid becuase belief in things not "scientifically factual" become "scientific fact." Even though one would have to go thruogh scientific fact with a fine tooth comb to separate what is truly fact from what is culturally relative. This is why I feel a dinosaur knowing about the musical career of Joan Baez or who Richard Farnina was. There's more to it than that. It's going to mean that we don't associate art and literature with factual thins. These are not longer marks of intelligence they are now decoration or hobby or whatever. The culture itself becomes shaped around "scientific thinking." The so called "scientific" answer is the right answer on the IQ test, even though others kinds of answer could be right given a different cultural context. This is what we in the olden days used to call "cultural bias." The mentality and insight that saw it that way is now part of the stupid answer, and enshrining the pseudo-scientific as fact is now the smart answer.

The quote by Wesley above puts the dichotomy between spirit and materialism in terms of prosperity chocking out the spiritual. Even that is part of the antiquated view of the past that becomes the stupid answer on the IQ test. The other dichotomy there that Brown might not have thought of is between culturally relative pseudo-science and reality. The reality is the experience of the spirit (religious experience) can't be stopped or made null and void by an IQ test. People will have these experiences and be drawn closer to God even if they call it that. The experiences are the supernatural. This was the case when the words was coined by Dionysus in 500 AD (on Divine Names and Mythical Theology). Even if we don't classify it that way (theology is a kind of taxonomy in it's own right) it will continue to be real and people will go on having it.

Atheist IQ Clalims Based upon Racism And False Assumptions

2012-01-11T05:48:00.000-08:00

Einstein believed in God.

On Atheistwatch I've written about the New Attempts of atheist to prove that they have higher IQ's than religious people: Atheism's Psychology Today Scam, and, The Atheist IQ Scam (part 1)
(see part 2). Today I find an article by Andrew Brown in the American Guardian (Andrew Brown's Blog) where he demonstates the racist background of the atheist assumptions. He also discusses the idea that IQ tests are not measuring intelligence but cultural norms.

First of all I originally wrote about Atheist IQ claims (that atheists are Smarter because they ahve higher IQ's) on Doxa. This was roughly somewhere in the early ought (2001-2004). At that time the atheist website making the claims put up a bunch of old studies that pre dated the 60s. they had small samples and their basic assumptions where veg. they used the term "liberal" interchangeably with atheism and most of them never made clear that they had any atheist in the study. My criticism was "liberal" might as well mean theological liberal. They didn't have data that shows that people who identified themselves "I don't believe in God or gods" score higher on IQ tests than "I believe in God but in a liberal theology sense." I think for this purpose we can assume that "liberal theology " is broad and can include "new Evangelicals." I had some basis to suspect that the studies used were of liberal ethological believers. Studies done after the 60s, which the atheist sight didn't include, showed uniformly no correlation between intelligence and religious belief or that religious believers were smarter. These studies all used bigger samples and data bases. There had not been a study done showing atheist were smarter since the early 60s and there three in the 1990s (by Leslie Francis) showing no correlation.

The Brown article demonstrates the truth of my basic criticism. The atheist are doing a bait and switch to identify "liberal" with atheist when in fact it includes theological liberals.
Brown, "Brown's Blog"
on Guardian

OK, it's a naughty headline, but no less true than the one put on this survey at the aggressively atheist Sandwalk blog, which said "Atheists are smarter than agnostics". Both readings are justified. A large-scale analysis of the religious allegiance and measured IQ of a representative sample of 3,742 American adolescents found a clear trend: the more fundamentalist denominations had the more stupid believers, so that the bottom four places were occupied, from the bottom, by Pentecostalists, Baptists, Holiness churches and "Personal Philosophy", which I presume means a new-age-ish syncretism, while the top four places, again in ascending order, were taken by agnostics, atheists, Jews, and Episcopalians (Anglicans). So, atheists are smarter than agnostics, Jews are smarter than atheists, and Anglicans the smartest of the lot

...

The atheist came back on it in the late ought with a whole new batch of studies. They have three major researchers: Helmuth Nyborg, Richard Lynn and Satoshi Kanazawa (from psycholoy today). Now I find the Andrew Brown article blows the lid off of that research. I already hinted at big problems with those guys in my previous articles. Nyborg has been criticized as a racist. Brown took at look at his work:

The research was done by a retired Danish professor of psychology, Helmuth Nyborg, and he really does believe that he has found the explanation for the persistence of religious belief in the modern world: believers are measurably more stupid than atheists. His tone of elevated scorn will be familiar:

The study begins with two sets of a priori assumptions. First, [intelligent] people have a brain based biological capacity for solving complex problems, and for acting rationally when confronted with fundamental questions about existence, human nature, underlying causes, or the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Second, [unintelligent] people lack this protection and are therefore unfairly ordained to live in a pre-rational world based on poorly validated evidence and little accumulated insight. They accordingly often ﬁnd themselves in cognitively, emotionally, or morally challenging situations and have to use plan B, that is, to call upon easily comprehensible religious authoritative guidance and to submit more or less uncritically to culturally given stereotyped rituals. Frustration with their life may also make them seek redemption or faith in an after life.
High-IQ people are able to curb magical, supernatural thinking and tend to deal with the uncertainties of life on a rational-critical-empirical basis, and to become prosperous servants of society, whereas low-IQ people easily become trapped in religious magical thinking, in addition to achieving, earning and serving less well.

They are doing another bait and switch here. By "SN" they mean magical thinking but it creates the impression that liberal theology, philosophy and anything not "scinece" is automatically stupid. It's not hard to prove that non religious people are smarter when you define religion as "stupid" a priori. Of course they don't distinguish bewteen an ancient world religious view and a modern one. But it get's worse.

ibid:

So I did a little digging around. I downloaded the paper, which costs, alas, $37.50 with VAT, and read it carefully through. It turns out that Nyborg is an enthusiast for scientific racism. It's not just believers who are more stupid, in his world: it's black people and women, too. In a collaboration with Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, he measured religiosity against IQ in 137 countries, and concluded that low IQ countries always had higher rates of religion. It's not religion that makes you stupid, he told a Christian paper at the time: but if you live in a very religious country, you are very likely to be stupid. And of course the correlation of religion and poverty is in global terms very clear, while the most religious continent of all is Africa.
In the paper under review, he writes,
The ultimate causal level presumes that geographically separated peoples were subjected to different evolutionary pressures over extended time-periods. Those living under the hardest of evolutionary pressures, in cold or arctic areas, were gradually and over many generations selected for enhanced g (for details of the Climate Theory, see Lynn, 2006; Rushton, 2000). They had to replace ancient pre-rational supernatural beliefs with more effective rational approaches in order to survive under the harsh conditions given. People living in warm or tropical areas enjoyed in general more relaxed selective conditions, and low g individuals were not severely punished, as their survival was not seriously compromised by uncritical reference to ancient supernatural thinking, irrational beliefs in souls, invisible worlds, Gods, forces, angels, devils, hell, or holy spirits. A contemporary belief that supernatural forces control behavior, feelings and thinking is accordingly seen as a reminiscence of pre-historic animism and magical thinking.
Oops!
(In case anyone is tempted to take this seriously, it's worth pointing out that one of the most demographically successful populations in human history were the New England puritans, many of them descendants of Vikings, who managed to combine life in a very cold climate with fervent religiosity.)
But Nyborg is entirely serious. He argues – in the spirit of Murray and Herrnstein's Bell Curve – that intelligence is IQ; IQ is biological, and biology is destiny:

High g individuals will gravitate towards atheism or science, will discard supernatural phenomena, and will learn fast and prosper. Average g individuals will ﬁnd one of several moderate liberal denominations more to their taste, will display average learning, and will accordingly assume an intermediate socio-economic standing. Low g individuals will to submit to one of the many dogmatic denominations, will be slow learners, and will attain a low socio-economic status that accord with their limited cognitive
complexity and closed mind. Variations in disbelief, denominational complexity, educability and income are accordingly expected to follow from essentially heritable g differences, and to manifest themselves as today's mainly biologically brain based religious class differences.
By now I imagine that you are recoiling from these ideas. The belief that religion can simply be explained by stupidity suddenly looks a lot less attractive when it is presented scientifically by an intelligent man who also believes that poverty, too, can be explained by stupidity, and stupidity in its turn by race.

Of course only scinece people are intelligent. Since philosophy, literature, art don't count as real knowledge people who are do them are not smart. only number crunchers matter.

This is all very self referential because IQ is only measuring IQ not intelligence. Brown talks about the Flynn ects which shows that IQ's are getting higher. Our children will be smarter than us, we are smarter than our parents and grandparents. The problem is they are only getting higher not because people are really smarter but because the concentrated urban environment re-writes cultural literacy. It's the same problem as the bell curve. In the olden days people lived in the country and hunted. So a question "what do a god and rabit have in common?" the old answer was "use dog to hunt rabbit." Yet this is now a wrong answer. Now we don't hunt and we are all into scinece, so the right answer is they are both mammals. Thus people in the ancient past are automatically stupid compared to us. Flynn finds that by modern stagehands the average student around 1900 had an IQ between 50-70. So how did they even function? A person today with an IQ of 50 would be profoundly restarted, live in an insinuation and not be able to tie his shoes. Yet doctors, Lawyers, and bankers rant he world with IQ that would today be 60-70.

Brown reflects:

The answer, he says, is that one of the things that IQ tests measure is "post-scientific operational thinking". This is not the same as scientific thinking. But it is thinking about the world in terms of the categories by which science understands it. For instance, if you ask, "What do dogs and rabbits have in common", the post-scientific answer, that we would now regard as evidence of intelligence, is that they are both mammals. The pre-scientific answer is that you use a dog to hunt a rabbit. That's what matters about the two animals, not what class they belong to.
It is that kind of difference in reasoning which accounts for the huge measured IQ differences between urban and rural Brazil, and, of course, the fantastically low IQs measured in African countries.
But could something similar be true of religion? In particular, could dogmatic and fundamentalist religion be more useful to the poor and wretched? Could it lift them to the stage where they could experiment with doubt, with nuance, with novelistic thinking? The history of the early Methodists suggests exactly this. Remember John Wesley's reflection on his own success:
The Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.:

Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints and Healing: Medical Miracles in the Modern World.

2012-01-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

Review: Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints and Healing: Medical Miracles in the Modern World. a book by Jacalyn Duffin. This is an extremely valuable archive. It may well be the most imporant miracle book to be pubilshed since Dr. Casdrouph's The Miracles A Doctor says "Yes." See Doxa.

The Miracles: A Doctor says "Yes"
by Richard H. Casdorph.(Logos International, 1976)

Duffin's work is meticulously scholarly. She is both a fine historian and a top level medical researcher. She began her quest to investigate the secret arches of the Vatican regarding their saint making miracles and the records for healing in 1986. At that time someone brought her some medical records of a woman with Lukemia. She assumed the woman must be dead as the records shows the Leukemia was in advanced stages. She was amazed to find the woman was alive and perfectly well. She then learned that her diagnosis was part of the validation process for the Vatican in a saint making miracle. She had not been told until after the diagnosis what it was about. Years latter the saint was canonized she was invited to ceremony and when she realized her work would be in the secret Vatican archives forever she began seeking permission to examine their records of healing.

The resulting book, published so many years latter (1986 when she first examined the medical x rays to 2009 when the book was punished) is a scholarly work of the highest caliber. It is not an apologetics book. She does comment in the work that she believes in miracles, but she says what she believes in more than miracles is the honesty of the doctors and witnesses involved int he process. What the reader will not come away with in reading this book is some hackney cheapo apologetically argument about "miracles are proved therefore God is proved." this is nothing of the sort. This book could have been read in my Ph.D. work in secular university and not been rejected as scholarly. What the reader does get is an answer the mocking atheists who assert with bigotry and boldness that anyone who believes in miracles is an idiot and dupe and that the doctoral "work the Vatican" they are just trying to get more miracles. That's obviously silly if all they wanted was lots of miracles they wouldn't have such rigid rules and they would not have so few miracles. She voices a real confidence in the doctors and one can see why becuase she documents their total skepticism. Even the doctors working in the Vatican process are not just eager miracles mongers they re scrupulosity skeptical of all claims. That's the major thing a reader will take away from the book.

Duffin examines 1,400 miracles from the middle ages to modern times. This is not the full number. There's a huge archive with lots more where those came from. These are not Lourdes miracles they are miracles involved with saint making. Although, they use the same committee and the same rules. One of the most surprising things she shows is that the miracles go through cycles. That's not so amazing if you think about it. One major reason is the awareness of medicine and diseases improves over time and that changes our understanding of what peopl eight be healed from. For example tuberculosis and leukemia didn't exist int he middle ages, not as thing of which we were consciously aware. So if someone was weak and sick and got better they might say she was held of "weakness" or something like that then she could die a couple of years latter of some unknown cause which would be written off as "fever." That would be listed as "healing for weakness" a miracle whereas she goes on to die of Leukemia.

This is a problem and it's a reason for the modern debacle with the medical committee being on strike. The Vatican wants lower the standards. The researchers are totally against it. Even without that problem there's another in terms of better diagnostics. As we become more aware and more able to cure there are fewer people who have not been treated by modern medicine more awareness of natural healing. It's not going to turn out that all the former miracles are mistakes of diagnosis. There are some can't be explained. There many resurrections form the dead, not two are three, but a whole huge body of work on the subject, hundreds of resurrections. Of course early ones can be suspected because they might have been in a coma. It's not that cut and dried when a person is dead. There are latter ones as well. There are also overnight miracles such as Charles Anne's lungs growing back over night. That's not a problem of diagnosis becuase no process can grow new lungs in people overnight.

The book is written in a scholarly fashion, although accessible to the layman. It has a welth of information in the form of charts, graphs, and tables. It traces the rise and decline of various miracles as their diseases become medically known or forgotten. No healing from "Dropsy" becuase it's not considered a disease anymore. One has to like this kind of writing, but it doesn't go into detail on grotesque aspects. This is a great book, this is the documentation for modern miracles we have been waiting for. Although it is only scratching the surface of investigation in the wealth of documents at the Vatican archives, all all ground breaking works it does get the ground turned up.

Reasons for Belief

2012-01-06T05:33:00.000-08:00

Atheists have a new trick--which is actually their original trick but dusted off. They seem to be on a tangent of arguing that "there's no proof for your God." Of course, they have never really stopped saying that. But perhaps a new generation is coming up. I find more of them more often arguing that there is not "one single piece of scientific evidence..." When I put out several posts on the CARM atheist board similar to the previous post here, Kuhn, science is a social construct, they just went ape. One of them was saying "you are making such a fool of yourself to say these things..." Of course it takes real ignorance not to know that not so long ago (mid 90's perhaps) Kuhn was hot stuff. He was a major force, considered a major thinker in the world for about four decades. But I'm making a fool of myself! When I told them we should not expect to find scientific of evdience of God because God is not a scientific question they just sort of blinked their eyes (in writing so to speak) and said "that's why you shouldn't believe in him." Before it was all said and done one of them had made several pronouncements to the effect that "science tells us everything that is worth knowing and if something isn't given in science it's not worth knowing." Moreover, "the only meaningful questions are scientific questions because that's what makes them meaningful." I bet that guy is magic in a relationship.

There's even a more recent gimmick of arguing that God is just an idea in the mind and nothing more. The erason for this is--well--there's no hard phsyical data for God so therefore, he must just an idea in the mind. Afer all everything we can't see touch or smell is just an idea in the mind, right? I say "what about dark matter?" What about sub-atomic articles. Then they say (they being "big Thinker" atheist on CARM, and others) those are just place holders. Then they explain that there's a correlatin between those concepts and some kind of phenomena that might suggest them, so they are theoretical construct meant to mark that relationship whle we try to find out what it really is. Then I say I can do the same thing with God, the object the religious experiences people have, the results of which are concrete and can be studied and have definitely measurable effects on their lives. They say "no that can't be because God is just an idea in the mind. So when it's there place holder it's concrete and has a pile a facts behind it, when it's a place holder they don't want it's pile of facts is just BS and it's only an idea in the mind.

What can one say? Everyone likes a booster. When confronted with the challenge to prove that science is the only valid form of knowledge--with scientific data only--of course they responded with philosophical arguments and logic. Naturally they never tried to offer one single piece of evidence from science, and when I put up the post defending religious experience with 300 studies they just poo pooed and said it wasn't science. So science is the only valid knowledge, but you can't prove that with science, and when it supports religion it's not science. Of course the real problem is its impossible to really tell people why we believe in God. No one actually comes to believe because of some fact or argument. It's so ultra foolish to expect scientific proof because belief is a world view, it's not based upon any one fact, but upon thousands of fact, upon the way we look at ourselves and the world. It's important to make God arguments, not to prove the existence of God, but because you can't say "I have reasons, they are supported by lots of things and deal and junk and stuff." God arguments help us to focus on detailed reasons that support belief, but they are not meant to prove anything.

The real problem is, on the one hand, the believer really doesn't have a single cogent provable reason for belief, on the other hand, the atheist doesn't understand the nature of world views. Atheists don't understand their own unbelief. They can't get it that they are touting an ideology. They think all the have to do is say "it's the absence of a belief" and that's suppose to make it real simple and clear it of any ideological connotations. But its' not that simple. Belief is a world view.It's foundational, that is is serves as the basis for everything else you think and the ways you view the world. You can't just take out the centerpiece of a world view and not replace it with something. Its' absurd to say "atheism is just the absence of a belief" there is no such thing. The absence of a belief is the presence of unbelief and that is an ideology. This is what Derrida teaches us: absence is presence and presence is absence. It's easy to be a skeptic all you have to do is just keep doubting things and demeaning that no evidence is of any value until it lines up with the ideology. But they have a very clear ideology to fill in the blank left by God and it is based upon reductionism. Nothing short of absolute scientific proof will do becasue the absence of the foudnation requires the presence of a replacement foundation.

atheists can only see the primitive misunderstanding, they can't see the sense of transcendence behind it.

Maslow talks about the psychological necessity of being able to maintain a tranformative symbology. He is not merely saying that we should do this, but that we do it, it is universal and through many different technqiues and psychological schools of thought he shows that this has been gleaned over and over again. What Jung called the Archetypes are universal symbols of transfomration which we understand in the uncoscious, and we must be able to hold them in proper relation to the mundane (the Sacred and the Profane) in order to enjoy healthy growth, or we stagnate and become pathological. It is crucial to human psychology to maintain this balance. Far from merely being stupid and not understanding science, striving to expalin a pre-Newtonian world, the primatives understood this balance and held it better than we do. Religious beleif is crucial to our psychological well being, and this fact far more than social order or the need for examplianation exaplians the origins of religion.

Quote:

"For practically all primitives, these matters that I have spoken about are seen in a more pious, sacred way, as Eliade has stressed, i.e., as rituals, ceremonies, and mysteries. The ceremony of puberty, which we make nothing of, is extremely important for most primitive cultures. When the girl menstruates for the first time and becomes a woman, it is truly a great event and a great ceremony; and it is truly, in the profound and naturalistic and human sense, a great religious moment in the life not only of the girl herself but also of the whole tribe. She steps into the realm of those who can carry on life and those who can produce life; so also for the boy's puberty; so also for the ceremonies of death, of old age, of marriage, of the mysteries of women, the mysteries of men. I think that an examination of primitive or preliterate cultures would show that they often manage the unitive life better than we do, at least as far as relations between the sexes are concerned and also as between adults and children. They combine better than we do the B and the D, as Eliade has pointed out. He defined primitive cultures as different from industrial cultures because they have kept their sense of the sacred about the basic biological things of life.

"We must remember, after all, that all these happenings are in truth mysteries. Even though they happen a million times, they are still mysteries. If we lose our sense of the mysterious, or the numinous, if we lose our sense of awe, of humility, of being struck dumb, if we lose our sense of good fortune, then we have lost a very real and basic human capacity and are diminished thereby."

"Now that may be taken as a frank admission of a naturalistic psychological origin, except that it invovles a universal symbology which is not explicable through merely naturalistic means. How is it that all humans come to hold these same archetypical symbols? (For more on archetypes see Jesus Chrsit and Mythology page II) The "prematives" viewed and understood a sense of transformation which gave them an integration into the universe. This is crucial for human development. They sensed a power in the numenous, that is the origin of religion."

He is saying that the reductionist can only see a flimsy superstition in such primitive doings, but the real knight of faith sees in it the sense of the numinous the way religion really affects people on in daily life. In the words of Thomas Indinopulos:

I think this is a healthy development. When emphasis shifts away from what a Christian believes or does not believe, we can begin to understand the power and meaning of Christianity in a given culture, at a certain time. In other words, I should say that a better way to ascertain Christian belief is to focus on how Christians actually live their lives. I say this on the basis of years spent with Greek villagers who, when asked what they believe, can hardly answer in any precise way. But ask them how they would identify themselves as Greek Orthodox and you will hear a recital of ritual observances and traditional acts of faith that leave no doubt that their faith is not a matter of what is believed or thought about, but rather what is done or felt or imagined. For such villagers the daily life of faith is not reducible to or equatable with a set of formal beliefs. The academic or pedagogical implications here are enormous. When professors teach Christianity as a matter of beliefs, ideas, and institutions, they may be teaching something that is not at all equivalent to the religion practiced by the people who claim the Christian religion as their own. But if they were to teach Christianity as practiced, they would have to pay attention to that which is not so easily categorized as doctrine -- the unspoken, often emotional undertones of faith on the part of ordinary believers.

My point being that real belief is faith, not words on paper. The reasons people relay believe in God have to do with the way they sense their presence in the world and the relation to that sense of God which they also intuit in the world. A good example of this came out in a message board discussion I had on CARM recently:

I don't remember who the other party in the discussion was, I'll just call him "friendly atheist."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
the studies show believers are less depressed. you should encourage her faith even if you dont' believe in it. I'm not saying it's your fault but obviously it's very damaging to someone who fervently believes to have that crushed. Please don't think I'm accusing you.

FA:Many of us who are no longer believers have dealt with the transition. I'm not sure that 'damaging' is the correct word. Sometimes growth is hard. Sometimes realizing that what you believed for a long time is false can be hard to deal with. It requires a commitment to intellectual honesty and a desire to know rather than to believe.

Meta: a lot will depend upon why the loss of faith. If one outgrows the Provencal nature of one's faith context, then it's not damaging it's actually a form of growth. Unfortunately due to the fundies and other religious people a lot of people never find the more progressive style of faith so they don't go on with it. But to lose faith due to personal tragedy or just being worn down and not having a chance to cultivate it is deadly. it's killing.

Quote:
FA:My wife and I don't argue about it. I'm not 'anti' about it.

Meta: that's good. what do you hope for? The best you can do is momentary happiness and not really that if you have hard times.

FA:Even in hard times there are things that can be hoped for. I hope for ease, happiness, love, the same as anyone

Meta:Yes but I have someone to trust in hard times. I know from personal experince I can trust God to me through anything. I'm not the least bit worried about the backing collapse. I expect to die in the gutter but I'm looking froward to a lot of republicans learning something!

more than just beyond life. It's the hope that some force of love cares about you.

FA:I prefer to be loved by someone rather than think that I am loved by a 'force'. Perhaps being loved by a force is sufficient for many people but 'love' to me is an active thing.

Meta:I understand why it would be hard for you to think of god as real, but It's not all hard for me. In fact the opposite. it's nearly impossible for the to deny God's reality, becasue the experinces I've had cannot be denied.

even in times when I thought God abandoned me I was still not wiling to give up the concept, I was willing to think of God as impersonal before I was willing to say there wasn't one. Then he came through and I knew I just needed to trust.

I know it's hard for you think of that as a reality since you have not experienced it. but I have and i know it's real. I know it as well as I know I exist myself.

Meta:It's not the hope of getting money because you pray for it anything like that. But meaning in life gives hope.

FA:I agree. I would rather have real meaning than imaginary meaning. But either way, whether one believes that God has a purpose or if one gives credit to something else for their purpose, ultimately it all comes from the self. WE determine our purpose, our meaning.

Meta:meaning that I get from God is a priroi. IT is real and it doesn't depend upon the existence of a God with a mind who knows who I am. Just the attitude to being that undersatnd from studying theology gives me a rock solid meaning that can't be deneied. It is real and I prove it's real (the meaning that is not the being named God who thinks and knows who I am).

Now I believe God is mind and knows who I am but even at a default of an impersonal ;God who si just being itself and nothing ore the meaning that comes from that is undeniable.

but the experinces I've had lead me to have a major hope because I know God is real and is more than just being.

Quote:
Quote:
Atheists can only have localized small letter meaning, meaning that is related to the immediate context. Believers in God can have big capital letter meaning.

FA:Atheists and believers are no different here, the 'meaning' in our lives comes from the same place, ourselves. Some just have the need to put the cause on something else.

Meta:I disagree. I've been both. I was a Sartean atheist so the idea of making youkr own meaning was crucial to my thinking. it was total revolution when I got saved. It was day from night.

repentance is not just saying words. It means "turn from sin" so you are changing your thinking and your behavior. if one really repents one does not want to do the same things again.

FA:Did the thief on the cross do more than just say the words?

Meta:Yes, he sure as hell did. His words were not empty they were backed by the attitude of the heart, which is true repentance. He did more than say words, he repented, he turned his heart toward God!

Story of Empty Tomb Dated to Mid First Century (part 2)

2012-01-02T04:28:00.000-08:00

this is the part that's not in the book Defending the Resurrection.

Authorship and Inspiration

Skeptics tend to assume that redaction means no inspiration. They tend to have a very fundamentalist view of inspiration, the author is a robot essentially or doing automatic writing and just copying words God speaks in his head. We need to not assume this. Avery Dulles, in his fine work Models of Revelation, shows that many of the major conservative evangelical theologians who deal with inspiration have different views of what inerrancy means. Here are the examples that he uses:

*Inerrency of original autographs and divine protection of manuscripts.
Proponents of this view include Harold Lindsell.

*Inspiration of autographs with minor mistakes in transmission of an unessential kind.
Carl C.F. Henry.

*Inerrency of Textual intention without textual specifics.
Clark Pinnock.

*Inerrancy in Soteric (salvation) knowledge but not in historical or scientific matters.
Bernard Ramm

*Inerrent in major theological assertions but not in religion or morality.
Donald Blosche and Paul K. Jewett[23]

These are conservative Evangelical options remember. Anyone of these options could include the redaction process by a community, this does not rule out the process of inspiration.
Skeptics also tend to assume that if the autographs were not written by the name sakes, Matthew not written by Matthew, John not written by John, then it can’t be inspired. Many conservative evangelicals in the pew believe this as well but I am not sure any serious evangelical theologians argue it. I do not accept this idea. The names were put on latter; we only go by what the apostolic fathers told us. But we need not assume that even the Apostles were not part of the process of authorship. Modern scholars think of authorship more in terms of community now then of a single author, but as will be argued below that does not remove inspiration form the picture. While the final products as we know them (ie “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” “John”) are more the products of communities than of single authors that need not indicate that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John themselves were not the originators of that process. For one thing Mark and Luke were not Apostles, we all know this. No one ever claimed they were. In fact I really see much less reason to doubt those authorship's because why would anyone trying to lend prestige to a manuscript by ascribing it to a great authority choose Mark and Luke rather than Peter or Paul? Mark and Luke were secondary figures, they were not very well known and don’t play major roles in Acts (aside for writing it). So while authorship by a community for Mark or Luke is not the death knell of those gospels, it is not necessary to assume that they not authored by Mark and Luke.
Why would Mark and Luke use the Ur Gospel reading when they had Peter and Paul to draw from? Luke also had Andronicus and Junia (Romans 16) who were apparently in on the early days of the faith, and others? Luke tells us he consulting the many attempts already made at writing the account of Jesus life. Mark, Papias tells us, recorded the Memoirs of Peter, but not in order.[24] The lack of chronological order could be significant because it would furnish a reason why the redactors would redact it; to change the chronological order to one that was known from other witnesses to be more accurate. In fact we can assume perhaps the Ur Gospel would be that source. Mark himself could have used the Ur Gospel of the reason but the redactors after Mark could have done so. The theory of an Ur Mark, a primary core to the Gospel of Mark has been circulating since the nineteenth century. The Ur Mark could be the original core that Mark recorded.[25] We know that Matthew and Luke did not use quite the same versions of Mark, so Mark was a work in progress that started very early around a core set of data and continued to be worked out in many versions.[26] There are reasons to assume that Mark did hear from Peter and used his memoirs as the basis for the work, because the action in Mark tends to center around Galilee. Galilee is the realm of goodness in Mark, as opposed to the evil city.[27] Luke Timothy Johnson states: "Two main preoccupations characterize the study of Mark's Gospel today. The first takes seriously the ability of Mark's Gospel to reveal something of the historical setting it addressed, and seeks to find within Mark's narrative clues for the deciphering of history."[28]
Matthew need not be removed from the proceedings either. As a child it always bothered me when I learned that Mark was written first and Mat copied him, why would an Apostle who was there follow the outline of a non Apostle who was not? Latter I learned to rationalize by saying because he knew Mark followed Peter’s account. There’s a much better explanation. There is a way Mat could have bee responsible for the gospel that bears his name without having it written it. Papias says that he wrote the Gospel in his own language (presumably Hebrew or Aramaic) and “everyone copied it and translated it as best he could.”[29] The translation would be one level of removal from Mat. Moreover, Papias refers to Matthew’s works as “the Logia.” This literally means “the words.”[30] Thus is could well be that he wrote a saying source, and someone else latter worked the sayings into a narrative. Again here’s this idea of a core work looking for a narrative order. The same chronological order that Mark’s core was pumped into also could have served as the narrative framework for Mat’s saying source. Mat’s Logia could have been Q for that matter, although that is getting a bit fanciful.[31] We might also speculate that the names were applied to the community and the gospels named after the communities that produced them. Thus the “Matthew community” followed Matthew and produced the Gospel of Matthew by redacting the saying source with a narrative frame.
My feeling has been to remove John the Son of Zebedee (John the Apostle) from the process, and this has been my view for some time now. Cullman, in The Johnnie Circle, effectively argued the Apostle out of authorship.[32] Richard Buckham doesn’t buy authorship of John the Apostle and seems to think the beloved was the Elder John whom Papias mentions.[33] What seems pretty clear is that it’s doubtful the Apostle would call himself “that disciple who Jesus loved.” There are other reasons Cullman and Buckham use, for example places where the “BD” (beloved Disciple) is mentioned In addition to the son of Zebedee. It also doesn’t make sense that the author would set up anonymity by calling himself “the Beloved disciple” then blow it by naming himself as John the son of Zebedee. It may not make much sense that he would call himself “that disciple whom Jesus loved” at all, but we can understand this as an addition by redactors, the same redactors who make their appearance at the end of the book and attest to the greatness of the author “this is that one.” We have always known this group of other people stuck their say on the back of the gospel. Why assume they had no other hand in its production than this? It makes perfect sense they would redact it and call the author “the beloved disciple.” They did feel authorized to stick their say on the end of the book. In so doing they also give us the indication of communal authorship, the elders of emphasis who actually produced the book in its final form and in so doing they all attest to its eye witness nature. They are at least if nothing else eye witnesses to the teachings of this disciple who Jesus loved.

Community as Author

The idea that the whole community was the author may be confusing to some. It really does explain the facts far better than the idea that the gospels were written by their name sakes. The fact of redaction is obvious; anyone who compares the gospels in a gospel parallel has to realize this. The idea of four or two (Matthew and John) telling what they saw from their own perspectives cannot be the same because no two witnesses could match up on exact syntax and have all their sentences clearly related to one another. Yet the community authorship thing also means eye witness testimony is the basis of the documents. The idea skeptics argue for, wild rumor spreading unchecked has nothing to do with it. The community told the story in controlled and orderly fashion so that each and every member would understand it and know it by heart. It makes no sense that eye witnesses such as Matthew would copy non eye witness John. To deny that conservatives get into dyeing what the vast majority of scholars see, that Mark was written first. But the communal authorship theory explains it. The community told the stories in communal setting, the eye witnesses probably began the process and then latter as the eye witnesses died off the other members demonstrated their memorization and told the stories with those who heard them countless times checking to make sure they got it right. Eventually he church began to grow and spread beyond Jerusalem and they could not hold that sort of transmission together forever. But they only had to hold it together for about 20 years, and then began to circulate the written documents. Of course this is speculation. How do we know this is what happened? There are good reasons to believe that here was some sort of controlled telling in a communal setting.

Fist, by “controlled telling” I don’t mean too controlled. They did not have the modern concept of “court rooms” and “eye witness testimony.” They were not telling the story to prove to skeptics that they had eye witnesses. They were telling it for reasons related more to the life and health of the group. They wanted to remember the events and the teachings of Jesus, not to prove to anything to anyone, but as a devotion to their beliefs. But the expectation of literal history is a false one. The Gospel of Mark is not a biography; it doesn't provide enough information to be a biography. Nor is it an attempt at writing a history book. In fact the Church's claim for the document is that Mark wrote the memories of Peter but he did not record them in order. Rather he records units placed in order by narrow bridge passages which are often rather veg. These units are known as pericopies and they are the point of the work; they are like pearls on a string, placed in a certain order to get across a point. That point is not a literal blow by blow description of what happened in the sense of a literal history book; rather, they are there for the edification of the church. The Gospels are primarily oriented around the needs of the church community and pertain to worship rather than apologetics.[34] We should not expect to find that the material is arranged in such a manner as to form a history book. While the mistakes in geography and other aspects of Palestinian Jewish life do indicate that the author is not Jewish, there is also an indication that the "author" is really a redactor. It is not the original source of the material that is not Jewish but the redactor who put it in its present form probably in Syria around A.D. 70. But a much older layer of material stands behind this surface reading, a layer of historical material which does link the Gospel of Mark with he original events and may actually link the work with its namesake and with Peter's Testimony. Secondly, the period of “controlled telling” would not have lasted long. After just 20 years the movement has spread to other cities[35] and began to change and grow to an extent that there could not have been even one eye witness in every group. The controlled nature would have fallen apart. On the other hand it’s obvious certain facts had been set into stone even at this early period, since there are a basic set of facts common to all tellings of the Gospel story even in non canonical Gospels; he’s always crucified in Jerusalem at noon, his mother is always Mary, his side kicks are always Peter and John, and there’s always an empty tomb. That configuration only had to hold together for about 20 years before it began to circulate in writing, by that time the facts had been established.

It makes sense to think that they had controlled telling, by “controlled” I mean they conformed to known methods of oral tradition that can be found in all bardic cultures and in the Hebrew culture for oral traditions. The earliest Christian groups lived together communally. They are reputed to have shared everything, studied together and to have been of one mind.

Acts 1:12-15

12 Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olive Grove, which is near Jerusalem--a Sabbath day's journey away. 13 When they arrived, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying: Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas the son of James. 14 All these were continually united in prayer, along with the women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, and His brothers. 15 During these days Peter stood up among the brothers--the number of people who were together was about 120--

From the first time the community is mentioned we see the story is being formed and the attitudes toward it are being shaped.

Acts 2:42-47

42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayers. 43 Then fear came over everyone, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles. 44 Now all the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 So they sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as anyone had a need. 46 And every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple complex, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And every day the Lord added those being saved to them.

Devoted themselves to the Apostle’s teaching has to include a recitation of the events of Jesus life and his arrest, death, and resurrection. Why they devote themselves to the Apostle’s teachings but not mention what happened at the end, or discuss the great confirming miracle that grounded everything in the stamp of God’s approval? Moreover we see the communal structure that extended to ever facet from eating to studying the teachings.

Acts 4:32-37

32 Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common. 33 And with great power the apostles were giving testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was on all of them. 34 For there was not a needy person among them, because all those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, 35 and laid them at the apostles' feet. This was then distributed to each person as anyone had a need. 36 Joseph, who was named by the apostles Barnabas, which is translated Son of Encouragement, a Levite and a Cypriot by birth, 37 sold a field he owned, brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet.

In this quotation we see they were using the resurrection as testimony and they were talking about it the communal setting. In spite of the fact that we can be sure this was an idealized account, few scholars believe Luke just fabricated the events in Acts. He had some people from that era to draw upon. Paul got in on the end of it, Andronicus and Junia were there, and Pricilla and Aquialla were around. The four daughters of Philip of Hiropolis probably served major sources for Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. Even though some of this is an exaggeration, he could easily have known the basic flavor of the times and the events.
Moreover, we know that the Hebrews had an oral tradition, and as an oral culture they knew how to keep orally transmitted information straight and correct.

"No one is likely to deny that a tradition that is being handed on by word of mouth is likely to undergo modification. This is bound to happen, unless the tradition has been rigidly formulated and has been learned with careful safeguard against the intrusion of error"

This is exactly the way in which the tradition was handed on among the Jews. IT is precisely on this ground that Scandinavian scholar H. Risenfeld in an essay entitled "The Gospel Tradition and its Beginnings (1957).”[36]

Oral tradition in first-century Judaism was not uncontrolled as was/is often assumed, based on comparisons with non-Jewish models. B.D. Chilton and C.A. Evans:

"...[T]he early form criticism tied the theory of oral transmission to the conjecture that Gospel traditions were mediated like folk traditions, being freely altered and even created ad hoc by various and sundry wandering charismatic jackleg preachers. This view, however, was rooted more in the eighteenth century romanticism of J. G. Herder than in an understanding of the handling of religious tradition in first-century Judaism. As O. Cullmann, B. Gerhardsson, H. Riesenfeld and R. Riesner have demonstrated, the Judaism of the period treated such traditions very carefully, and the New Testament writers in numerous passages applied to apostolic traditions the same technical terminology found elsewhere in Judaism for 'delivering', 'receiving', 'learning', 'holding', 'keeping', and 'guarding', the traditional 'teaching'. In this way they both identified their traditions as 'holy word' and showed their concern for a careful and ordered transmission of it. The word and work of Jesus were an important albeit distinct part of these apostolic traditions.*

"Luke used one of the same technical terms, speaking of eyewitnesses who 'delivered to us' the things contained in his Gospel and about which his patron Theophilus had been instructed. Similarly, the amanuenses or co-worker-secretaries who composed the Gospel of John speak of the Evangelist, the beloved disciple, 'who is witnessing concerning these things and who wrote these things', as an eyewitness and a member of the inner circle of Jesus' disciples. In the same connection it is not insignificant that those to whom Jesus entrusted his teachings are not called 'preachers' but 'pupils' and 'apostles', semi-technical terms for those who represent and mediate the teachings and instructions of their mentor or principal..[37]

The classical skeptical argument that the Gospels were written sixty years or latter after the original events so myth developed and changed and evolved into a resurrection that never happened, is invalidated by the fact that the empty tomb was part of the early telling and circulated in writing from a period only twenty years after the events. For only two decades (at most) the infant church had to hold together the truth as passed on to them by eye witnesses, and they would have had eye witnesses among them to help keep it in check. The argument that myth takes a long time to develop is not saying that it takes a long time to make up a rumor. Skeptics have pointed this out always, myth could begin in one afternoon, but what takes time is a concrete from of story telling. A mythos is more than just a bunch of wild rumors; it’s a literary work that includes a standardized form. This standardized form is seen clearly in the canonicals. Due to this fact we know there are traces of an earlier from shared by the canonicals and latter finished works such as the Gospel of Peter. This standardized form includes the empty tomb. These facts speak clearly to presence of the empty tomb as an early historical event that was part of the earlier telling of the resurrection and existed in the life of the community from the beginning.

[23] Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation, New York: Double Day, 1985
I highly recommend Dulle’s book for anyone interested in thinking through the nature of Biblical inspiration and understanding the major schools of thought in modern theology.

[24] Richard Buckham, Jesus and The Eye Witnesses: The Gospels as Eye Witness Testimony. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing co. 2006, 203

[25] Neil, 239

[26]Koester, 289

[27] Neil, 239

[28] Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament, Philadelphia: Fortress Press p.1986, 148

[29] Papias quote on Mat’s logia, in New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, online version, URL: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11457c.htm . article on “st. Papias.” Visited 1/19/10
[30]Buckham,202

[31] Buckham remarks in fn 1 that he does not translate the term “logia” because its meaning not clear and its disputed. But he also says it would mean “something like “amounts of what Jesus did and said.” My attempt at translating as “the words” is based upon my pigeon Greek derived form three years of struggle to fulfill my undergraduate language requirement, but that is literally what the words mean. That doesn’t mean my translation is good as a finished product. As Buckham says “it means something like…”

[31[Major scholars such as Koester have speculated that Q could be the Logia because Q contains many Q sayings.

[32] Oscar Cullman, the Johanine Circle, Philadelsphia: Fortress Press, 1976

[33] Buckham, 411-420.

[34] Neil,.234, 258

[35]Johnson 117.

[36] Neil, 250

[37] B.D. Chilton and C.A. Evans* (eds.), Authenticating the Activities of Jesus (NTTS, 28.2; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998): 53-55

Story of Empty Tomb Dated to Mid First Century (part 1)

2012-01-02T04:26:00.000-08:00

Helmutt Koester

This is my contribution to a book Called Defending the Resurrection edited by J.P. Holiding. I urge the reader to buy it as there are many fine arguments made in it. Not all of this article was used. This is its original form it was changed substantially in several ways, such are the needs of editors.

Introduction

Skeptical machinations are endless, anytime the tide turns toward the apologist the skeptic will take a further step back and seek to change the ground rules in a fundamental way. So it is with the perennial resurrection debate since the tide was shifted by McDowell and then by Craig, years ago. One of the major tactics used by skeptics to change the ground rules has been to uproot all points of the compass so the apologist can’t get his/her bearings as to what events are actually historical and thus defensible. To accomplish this, the skeptic has partly pulled off a resurrection of his own, by resurrecting old ninetieth century clap trap that was dismissed ages ago. One of the major examples is the historical nature of the empty tomb. McDowell then Craig both did fine jobs of demonstrating that if the facts about the tomb are in place the debate goes to the apologist. But then the atheists used the Jesus myth idea, long disproved and discarded, to set up a new round of doubt about the historicity of the tomb. For skeptics today the four Gospels are not even factors, they are totally ignored as though they offer no evidence at all, and all that they proclaim is regarded as pure fiction. It is of paramount importance, therefore, to establish some historical facts about the case and to nail down some of the points of reference. In this department of points of reference pertaining to the narrative there can be no more important point of reference than the issue of when the story of the empty tomb began to circulate. This is a crucial issue for several reasons: (1) it’s the lynch pin upon which is hung all the empty tomb logic arguments of the major apolitical moves of the last fifty years. That means two things: (a) it would mean the writing is too early for the events to allow for development of elaborate myth; (b) it would mean that a large number of eye witnesses were still around, depending of course on how close to the events the writing could be placed. (2) The earlier the date the more it would undermine the Earl Doherty’s Jesus myth theories by distorting their time table. Thus in this article I will be focusing upon the one issue: when did the empty tomb story begin to circulate in writing?

There are a few assumptions that must be discussed up front. Why focus on writing if we can assume it was told orally first? Obviously whatever point at which the writing started, we can assume the material was orally transmitted before that point. Writing gives us a concrete means of pinning down a time frame. There’s no way to trace oral tradition as to when it began except in the most general of terms. But dating a text, however, we can be much more precise as to when the circulation began. The other major assumption that must be understood is that no one single individual wrote the Gospels. There were redactors and they came out of the communities and the communities are regarded as the authors now, not merely individuals. These communities of which I speak are those into which the earliest follows of Jesus began to group after the events which ultimately come to be represented in the Gospels. Each of the Gospels is taken by scholars today as representative of its own community.[1] So there was a Matthew community, a Mark community, a John community, and perhaps a Luke community, although I tend to attribute Luke to the Pauline circle as a whole and to the individual Luke himself. The problem this sets up for the Evangelical apologist is that it may open some other areas of conflict depending upon how deeply committed one is to an inerrant view of the Gospels. I have encountered atheists who just assert that redaction itself is proof enough that “it was all made up.” No serious scholar believes this and it’s simply a matter of understanding the more adult and sophisticated view to dismiss that bit of amateurish thinking. Yet accepting the liberal assumptions may create more problems for apologetics than it solves, this is a major issue that must be solved, and it must be solved it in the most decisive way. I will suggest solutions to the problems that are more evangelical friendly, and I assert these positions for the sake of argument, to show that even granting the assumptions of liberal scholarship the resurrection still enjoys the support of the evidence. Be that as it may my one overriding concern in this article is in proving that the resurrection circulated, in writing, by mid first century period. Therefore, I will be using the assumptions of liberal scholarship and the evidence of liberal scholars. My reason for doing this is to demonstrate that the case can be made not merely with materials from writers skeptics expect to take the conservative side, but with fairly liberal scholars who skeptics would expect to be skeptical.

In order to understand what we need to answer we must first understand the skeptical claim. The major point undermining the historicity of the empty tomb is the argument form silence; the tomb is never mentioned as such in any of the epistles or any other early Christian literature until the middle of the second century. Dale Allison remarks: "Paul did not know about Jesus' grave, and if he did not know about it, then surely no one else before him did either. The story of the empty tomb must, it follows, have originated after Paul."[2] For certain kinds of skeptics that seems like a crushing indictment. It’s actually not as powerful as it seems since it’s only an argument form silence, and argument from silence doesn’t prove anything. The apologist is apt to answer that some of the passages in the Pauline corpus imply the empty tomb, even though they don’t actually speak of it directly. While these are good points, we can do better. There’s some pretty strong evidence that the story of the empty tomb was circulating, in writing, as part of the end to the Passion narrative as early as middle of first century. The great scholar Helmutt Koester argues for a conclusion of textual criticism that can be demonstrated by scholarly methods. The point he’s making is that all four canonical Gospels and the non canonical Gospel of Peter all share mutual connection to an earlier text that included the passion narrative and that ended with the empty tomb. He says:

"Studies of the passion narrative have shown that all gospels were dependent upon one and the same basic account of the suffering, crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus. But this account ended with the discovery of the empty tomb.[3]

[and again]

"John Dominic Crosson has gone further [than Denker]...he argues that this activity results in the composition of a literary document at a very early date i.e. in the middle of the First century CE" (Ibid). Said another way, the interpretation of Scripture as the formation of the passion narrative became an independent document, a ur-Gospel, as early as the middle of the first century![4]

He is talking in both cases about the original passion Narrative of “Ur Gospel” that he sees standing behind these five works. Here he tells us that this original work, this “Ur gospel” was circulating at the mid century point and that it contained the story of the empty tomb. Thus, the empty Tomb was part of the Gospel narrative as early as mid century. If we take the conventional accepted dates it was within 20 years after the original events. How does he prove this?

The argument Koester is making comes from another scholar named Jurgen Denker, a textual critic. The basic proof of the argument is the result of textual criticism. Textual criticism is a science. Though many on both sides of the fence, skeptics and apologists find textual criticism assailable, they both assume and use it when it suits them. The atheists who argue for Q as a proof that “it’s all made up” have to accept the validity of textual criticism in order to support the idea of Q. Evangelicals, who quote Josh McDowell talking about how the NT text is 98% reliable, are actually accepted whole sale the validity of textual criticism, because that is how such a figure is arrived at. The evidence of an Ur Gospel in the passion narrative comes from readings in several manuscripts which seem to date from periods much latter than the canonical Gospels. This is deceptive, however, because even though the texts are latter than the canonical gospels, the readings in the texts are much earlier. That sounds contradictory but it is not because the manuscripts (MS) are copied from earlier readings. The earlier readings leave traces of their original sources in the way they read. In other words if we had a book written in 1950 it would probably read like a 1950’s book. The speech, the form of the language, the slang would all be like the 50s. But suppose parts of that book were copied from a book written in Shakespeare’s time. In addition to the fifties slang you would have some parts that would read like Elizabethan English. Those parts would be easy to pick out and we would know that the author was either copying something old or trying to sound old. The situation with these MS is similar. For example one of them called “The Diatessaron” is an attempt by Tatian at making a harmony of the four Gospels. This attempt dates to about 170 AD. But some readings in the Diatessaron seem to from a much earlier time. So we know by this that they are copied form very early copies that were written in a more Jewish style.

There are a couple of other aspects of this copying phenomenon that need to be understood. First of all, one often hears conservatives saying things like “there is no textual evidence for Q.” The reason for that is that when Q was incorporated into the synoptic people stopped copying it and eventually stopped using it, because it was incorporated into a text that seemed more complete. Overtime the copies of Q rotted away and on one bothered to copy it further. Secondly, as to the assumption that redaction (which simply means “editing”) in and of itself is proof that “It was all made up,” this is manifestly wrong. The assumption is based upon the fallacy that no one could purposely combine two holy books without believing that they were not “inspired.” But the reason this is a fallacy in relation to the New Testament is because at the time the process of redaction on the Gospels started the redactors did not imagine that they were editing “the New Testament!” They were not regarded as holy books. While some might think that’s a green light to make things up, its’ also reason why they would not make things up, because while they did not have a concept that they were writing the Bible (thus no need to conjure up the fabricated essence of a new religion) it does not prove in any way that they had no respect for the truth. They were neither making up the Bible nor creating the rudiments of a new religion; they had no idea of either of those things. They were merely producing a sermonic document for the edification of the community. They intended these works to be read by people they were living with and perhaps to spread into a larger circle of those who worshipped with them. But they did not think of themselves as writing “the Bible.” The process is more analogous to a modern preacher writing a sermon for Sunday; he doesn’t want to fabricates thing that aren’t true, but he’s free to change certain aspects of the order, combine different portions of other “sermons” and place ideas in different contexts and create a document that will hold the audience’s attention and teach them things, but in so doing communicate truth and a story they already knew. No intention of “make things up” need be read into it.
This is not to say that the redactors did not have great reverence for the sources they used. They saw the prior sources as testimonies of holy men signifying holy truth, even if they did not see them as scripture. As we move up in time to the post apostolic age they have an ever greater reverence for anything that tells them about the origins of the faith and the words of Christ. Yet that doesn’t mean they thought of themselves as writing the Bible. They were free to quote and blend the quotes in with other quotes from other valuable sources, but not free to “make thing up,” not free to lie or fabricate. Thus we have the creation of the works we know as the canonical Gospels as “patch works” put together out of prior sources. They didn’t see themselves as producing the canonical Gospels, they saw themselves as accurately reflecting truth for the edification of their flocks, and pulling together the great sources of truth left to the church into their own little humble sermonic contributions. In so doing they left traces of early versions and as their products were copied some of those traces hung on and they continue to testify to us of the earliest roots of the faith. Several traces of these early documents, these lost “Ur gospels” show up in the latter works of non canonical gospels, some of which are tainted with Gnosticism. The famous Nag Hammadi find The Gospel of Thomas is such a work. While it is clearly set within a heavily Gnostic framework of the third century, some of the passages prove to be an early core some of which are thought to be authentically spoken by Jesus, some of which have been theorized as making up the Q source. While Thomas is Cleary Gnostic some very anti-Gnostic traces are left. The same process of redaction we see at work in the canonicals is also at work in the non canonical gospels. So we find traces of an earlier age. Of more direct bearing on the resurrection story is the non canonical Gospel of Peter.

Gospel of Peter and the Empty Tomb

The Gospel of Peter (aka “GPet”) was discovered in the ninetieth century at Oxryranchus, Egypt. It was probably written around 200 AD and contains some Gnostic elements, but is basically Orthodox. There are certain basic differences between Gospel of Peter (GPet) and the canonical story, but mainly the two are in agreement. Gpet follows the OT as a means of describing the passion narrative, rather than following Matthew. Jurgen Denker uses this observation to argue that GPet is independent and is based upon an independent source. In addition to Denker, Koester, Raymond Brown, and John Dominick Crossan also agree.[5] It is upon this basis that Crossan constructs his "cross Gospel" which he dates in the middle of the first century, meaning, an independent source upon which all the canonical and GPet draw. But the independence of GPet from all of these sources is also guaranteed by its failure to follow any one of them. Raymond Brown, who built his early reputation on study of GPet, follows the sequence of narrative in GPet and compares it in very close reading with that of the canonical Gospels. He finds that GPet is not dependent upon the canonical, although it is closer in the order of events to Matt/Mark rather than to Luke and John. Many Christian apologists think it’s their duty to show that GPet is dependent upon the canonical gospels, but it is basically a proved fact that it’s not. Such apologists are misguided in understanding the true apologetic gold mine in this fact. The fact that GPet is not dependent enables it to prove common ancestry with the canonicals and that establishes the early date of the circulation of the empty tomb as a part of the Jesus narrative. As documented on the Jesus Puzzle II page, and on Res part I. GPet is neither a copy of the canonical, nor are they a copy of GPet, but both use a common source in the Passion narrative which dates to AD 50 according to Crosson and Koester. Brown follows the flow of the narrative closely and presents a 23 point list in a huge table that illustrates the point just made above. I cannot reproduce the entire table, but just to give a few examples:

Helmutt Koester argues for the “Ur Gosepl” and passion narrative that ends with the empty tomb. He sees GPet as indicative of this ancient source. Again, the argument is not that GPet is older than the Canonicals but that they all five share common ancestry with the Ur source. There is much secondary material in Gpet, meaning, additions that crept in and are not part of the Ur Gospel material; the anti-Jewish propaganda is intensified, for example Hared condemns Jesus rather than Pilate.[6] Koester believes that the epiphanies (sightings of Jesus after the resurrection) are from different sources, while the passion narrative up to the empty tomb is from the Ur Gospel. It is on this latter point that he Differs with Crosson, who believes that the epiphanies were part of the Cross Gospel.[7] GPet was at first thought to be a derivative of the four canonicals but some scholars began to doubt this because it seemed like a collection of snippets from the four and as Brown pointed out, that’s not the way copying is done. Koester points out that Philipp Vielhauer following Martin Dieblius,[8] noticed that in GPet the suffering of Jesus is described in terms of the OT (though literary allusion) and lacked the quotation formulae (such as “he said to him saying” or “as it has been written”) which indicated that it came from an older tradition, since it would not be nature to take those out. Koester also points out that Jurgen Denker argues that GPet is dependent upon traditions of interpretation of the OT rather than it is the four canonicals, it shares these traditions with the canonicals because they all share the same prior source.[9] Crossan uses Denker and takes it further, they both see dependence upon Psalms rather than the canonicals as a sign of being earlier than the canonicals, but Crossan theorizes the date as mid first century. Koester says in describing it, “he argues that this activity resulted in the composition of a literary document at a very early date, in the middle of the first century,” (notice he does not say “around” mid century but “in the middle”).[10] He argues that the earlier source (the Ur Gospel) was used by Mark as well as Matthew and Luke and even John, as well as Gpet.
Koester agrees with Crossan and Denker about the passion narrative (what he calls the Passion Narrative—which includes the empty tomb) circulating early. He disagrees with three specific points none of which negates this basis thesis. The three points are these: (1) Reliability of the text (of Gpet) which comes to us from one latter fragment and could have been influenced by oral traditions and the canonical gospels as read by latter copyists. (2) Crossan believes that all the variations in Gospel tradition came from a core nucleolus of very early writings that form the cross Gospel and that is the basis of the canonical Gospels (combining a saying source (Q) with a narrative Gospel). But Koester believes that the oral tradition was still going up to the early part of the second century,[11[and that it was a fountain of information for various gospel writings all along the way. (3) Crossan holds that the epiphanies (resurrection sightings) were all from the Cross Gospel; Koester holds that they were from various sources. But none of them negates the basic core thesis which all three of them hold to, which is that the Ur Gospel passion Narrative includes the empty tomb and that it circulated early, perhaps mid century. Koester tell us his true opinion when the sates at the end of his list of these three problems:

“The account of the passion of Jesus must have developed quite early because it is one and the same account that was used by Mark (and subsequently by Matthew and Luke) and by John and as will be argued below by the Gospel of Peter, However except for the story of the discovery of the empty tomb, the different stories of the appearance of Jesus after his resurrection in the various Gospels cannot derive from one single source. They are independent of one another. Each of the authors of the extant gospels and of their secondary endings drew these epiphany stories from their own particular tradition, not from a common source.”[12]

What is he saying? First he is not disputing that the story of the empty tomb circulated early, he affirms it. He says “except for the story of the empty tomb” he means that is included with the original material, the other resurrection related sightings came from other sources.[13] Are those other sources fictional? In Koester’s mind they may be, but his conclusions are based upon the logic derived from the texts and the fragments of readings found in them, so they could be fictional or factual. They just don’t happen to be from that one original Ur Gospel; there’s noting in logic that prevents them from being part of other eye witness accounts. When he says the authors got these stories from their “own particular tradition” he means each of the communities that produced the individual canonical gospels has their own tradition sources, so these could well have been eye witness sources. Let’s bracket this for now and get back to it toward the end of the essay.

Koester sets out to demonstrate his first objection to Crossan by showing that the evolution of the gospel traditions were not set in stone and were fed by the oral tradition, I am not conserved with, but in so demonstrating he also illustrates one of the major arguments through which we know that there was an Ur Gospel passion narrative that preceded the canonical gospels. His argument against Crossan on the side point also serves to illustrate the major issue here before us in this essay. By “gospel traditions” he does not mean new fictional material was being made up, he means the way the story is told. By mid century how one told it was just as important as the content. The particular order, and traditions these were still evolving but were shaping up into a style and the style was being codified. That point is alluded to earlier where it is said that reliance on the psalms to describe Jesus suffering is earlier and that lack of certain kinds of quotation allusions are earlier than the canonical writing, that’s saying that telling it a certain way was forming up and when we see that formation not present that is an indication of an early source. When he says that Jesus’ suffering is described in terms of the psalms he is not saying the psalms gave them the idea of making up Jesus’ suffering. This is close to the idea of midrash. The Jews liked to tell things about history in terms of the Scriptures, it was like reinforcing the truth to show that what God is doing today unfolds in ways that allude to earlier acts of God. So they tell the story by making a bunch of literary allusions to the scripture.
Two such examples: the way Pilate speaks corresponds to Psalms and the response of the people to Jesus’ crucifixion is patterned after Deut. 21:8 in guilt of the people is expressed in tones that mock the prayer in the ritual:[14]

Matt 27: 24-25 Ps 26: 25-26
“so when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing….he took water before the crowd saying: ‘I am Innocent of this man’s blood, see to it yourselves.’ I hate the company of evil doers and I will not sit with the wicked, I wash my hands in innocence and go about thy alter, O lord.
“and all the people answered, his blood be upon us and upon our children.” “Set not the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of thy people O Israel.”

In acculturating these points Koester also, without explicitly saying it until latter, shows that no one would copy anything in this way. Ray Brown will make the same point as well and with a much more elaborate chart. Here are elements from one of Koester’s small charts that demonstrate the point; this deal with the mocking of Jesus after the trail before Pilate.

Gpete 3:6-9

And they put him in a purple robe Mark 5:17 they dressed him with a purple robe
Matt 27:28 they stripped him and put a scarlet robe upon him
Luke 23:11 they put a shining garment on him
John 19:2 and arrayed him in a purple robe
And sat him on the judgment seat and said judge righteously o King of Israel. John 19:13 and he sat down on the judgment seat
And one f them brought a crown of thorns and put it on his head Mark 27:15 /Matt 27-19 and plaiting a crown of thorns John 19:2 and the soldiers plaited a crown of thorns and put it on his head.

And others who stood by spat on his face Mark 14:65 one of the servants standing by struck Jesus with his hand

The supposition most skeptics will make is that the author of Gpete merely copies the existing gospels that were already known, changing a bit here and there to suit his own taste. The problem is there are so many allusions it’ clear the author was copying a tradition, and it’s a tradition a kin to the canonicals in some way, either as the common source they used or the canonicals themselves directly. No one copies in the way that it that it seems to have worked. No one would say “I want to talk about the purple robe so I’ll copy ‘they dressed him with a purple robe’ from Mark but I’ll say ‘put’ rather than dressed like Luke does.” No one copies by breaking down actual sentences from the difference sources and using a word from this and a phrase from that to make nuclear fragments like a sentence all the way thought the whole document. It could be that one would take a chapter from one and chapter from another and wedge in between still another segment from a third source, not for each and every sentence. This is a disproof of the idea that the author of Gpete merely copied the canonicals. No one copies this way. As Raymond Brown states in The Death of the Messiah:

GPet follows the classical flow from trail through crucifixion to burial to tomb presumably with post resurrection appearances to follow. The GPete sequence of individual episodes, however, is not the same as that of any canonical Gospel...When one looks at the overall sequence in the 23 items I listed in table 10, it would take very great imagination to picture the author of GPete studying Matthew carefully, deliberately shifting episodes around and copying in episodes form Luke and John to produce the present sequence. [Brown, Death of the Messiah,[15]

"IN the Canonical Gospel's Passion Narrative we have an example of Matt. working conservatively and Luke working more freely with the Marcan outline and of each adding material: but neither produced an end product so radically diverse from Mark as GPet is from Matt."[16]

Brown proves the tradition that Gpet follows is old and independent. It’s much less likely that the author of Gepet merely copied all his material form the canonicals. One copies an exegetical tradition, and that tradition by the time of Gpet (late second century) was already formed up in one way, and GPet shows examples of another form which should be considered earlier because it’s based upon the Psalms not upon Mark or Matthew. No one would copy in such a way as to instill all four from of the canonicals into the text, but traces of an original might be combined with latter works in that way. The arguments that Brown makes are elaborate, he presents several huge charts (no. 10 mentioned above). I can’t reproduce them here, but the marital is very important. The arguments Koester makes are extremely intricate. I do not have the time or space here to present these arguments because they take up whole books, but suffice to say many scholars, in fact the majority agree with Koester on these points. “Nevertheless, the idea of a pre-Markan passion narrative continues to seem probable to a majority of scholars. One recent study is presented by Gerd Theissen in The Gospels in Context, on which I am dependent for the following observations.”[17]

The issues are enormously complex and due to their complexity they lead to confusion when people try to argue and prove things. May of Koester’s statements have been misinterpreted by skeptics seeking to refute my use of his material merely because they don’t read the book or consider the context. I urge the reader to read Koester’s book, Ancient Christian Gospels, and Brown’s book Death of the Messiah, as Well as Crosson’s Cross Gospel.

"The Gospel of Peter, as a whole, is not dependent upon any of the canonical gospels. It is a composition which is analogous to the Gospel of Mark and John. All three writings, independently of each other, use older passion narrative which is based upon an exegetical tradition that was still alive when these gospels were composed and to which the Gospel of Matthew also had access. All five gospels under consideration, Mark, John, and Peter, as well as Matthew and Luke, concluded their gospels with narratives of the appearances of Jesus on the basis of different epiphany stories that were told in different contexts. However, fragments of the epiphany story of Jesus being raised form the tomb, which the Gospel of Peter has preserved in its entirety, were employed in different literary contexts in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew."[18]

The other major reason for assuming the earlier date for readings in Gpet, aside from the fact that no one would copy the synoptic the way the readings indicate it would have to be copied if it was based upon the synoptic, is that the reliance of these readings upon the OT indicates a stage of transmission prior to the development that would obtain after the synoptic. In other words, as said above, the story comes to be told in a certain way; even historically true stores develop hermeneutical traditions. When a reading demonstrates characteristics prior to that development, we know it was written earlier. The Synoptic do show some reliance on the Psalms. That’s because those are traces hanging on from the Ur Gospel that show up in the synoptic. The four canonical gospels and Gpet all use these readings as they draw from the Ur Gospel but they also use other readings and had Gpet been dependent upon the canonicals exclusively it would not show such total reliance upon the Psalms but would include a great dependence upon the canonicals. Brown’s charts prove this reliance of Gpet upon the Psalms and not upon Matthew or the other canonicals.[19]

Koester shows that the scenes of mocking Jesus were based upon Isaiah 50:6, Zach 12:10 and the scapegoat ritual are also brought into it. One can understand the meaning in drawing parallels between Jesus passion and the scapegoat of atonement for Israel. The robe and the crown of thorns are derived form the scapegoat ritual as well.[20] The Gospel of Peter reveals a close relationship between the mocking to the exegetical scapegoat tradition. He argues that these parallels are closer than those drawn between that tradition and the canonicals. He presents a fairly large chart to prove it. This compares seven examples between the scapegoat tradition, Gpet and all four canonicals.[21]

“It is evident that alone in the Gospel of Peter all three Items form the Isaiah passage appear together while John only includes the first and second (scourge and strikes) and Mark and Matthew only the first and third (scourge and spitting). Moreover, only the Gospel of Peter contains the same Greek terminology for scourging in agreement with Isaiah while Mark and Matthew substitute the common Roman term for this punishment only Isaiah and the Gospel of Peter mention the cheeks explicitly with respect to the strikes.” The piercing with the reed from the scapegoat allegory is preserved only in the Gospel of Peter while John has used this item for the piercing of Jesus’ side after his death; Mark and Matthew misread the tradition and change it to “strikes with a reed.”…the relationship of the Gospel of Peter to the parallel accounts of the canonical gospels cannot be explained by a random compilation of canonical passages. It is evident that the mocking scene in this gospel is a narrative version that it is directly dependent upon the exegetical version of the tradition which is visible in Barnabas.[22]

That tradition he argues is earlier than the canonicals by virtue of his greater adherence to the OT. The date of mid first century fro the circulation of the Ur Gospel with empty tomb is based upon old rule of thumb assumptions that textual critics always work by, ten years for copy time and ten years for travel time. In other words, travel time means the time it took for it to be copied and travel times mean the time it too to circulate to other places. Counting back from the 70, the standard assumption for the Date of Mark, twenty years is about 50 years. That is how Koester explains it.

[1]Stephen Neil, The Interpritation of the New Testament 1861-1961. London, NY: Oxford University press, 1964, 239.

[2]Dale C. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus: “The Earliest Christian Tradition and It’s Interpreters,” Journal for the Sutdy of Pseudepigrapha: supplement. T & T Cllark Publishers (September 30, 2005) 305-6.

[3]Helmutt Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, Their History and Development. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990, 208.

[4] Ibid. 220

[5] Ibid, 218

[6] Ibid. 217

[7] Koester, find

[8] Ibid, 218

[9] Ibid.

[10]Ibid

[11]That’s based upon Papias reportedly saying he enjoyed hearing the voices of the great men speaking the words more than reading it on paper. That does indicate that there was some use or oral tradition at that time but if Papias was really old then he could have been referring to practice that had died out in his youth.

[12]Ibid, 220

[12] Ibid., 231 fn 3 he again clarifies his position from that of Crossan. Atheists reacting to material on my website where I speak of this habitually quote Koester assuming that the issue between him and Crossan is Koster’s objection to the idea of a pre Mark redaction that includes the empty tomb. That is not it at all. He makes It quite clear he agrees with that. The issue is entirely about how material after the initiation discovery of the tomb cam to be in the account, was it original (Crossan) or latter (Koester).

[14] Ibid, 221

[15]Raymond Brown, Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, A commentary on the Passionnarratives in the Four Gospels. Volume 2. New York: Dobuleday 1994 1322

[16]Ibid. 1325

[17] Peter Kirby, Early Christian Writings, Website, URL: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/passion.html last visited Jan 3, 2010.

[18] Koester, 240

[19] Brown, find

[20] Koester, 224-25

[21] Ibid, 226

[22] Ibid, 226-227

Properly Basic Belief and Extraordinary Claims

2011-12-27T08:41:00.000-08:00

Dec 28, CARM, Christian apologist Occam:

It still seems to me, after discussing the subject with atheists for a little while, that there are significant counter-examples to the claim that every belief must be supported by sufficient evidence:

(1) The past exists.
(2) The external world exists.
(3) People other than myself have minds.

Now, maybe I'm wrong in thinking that we hold these beliefs without sufficient evidence, but for the purposes of this thread, let's assume I'm right. What follows from that?

For one thing, it follows that the statement, "there is not enough evidence for the existence of God," is insufficient as an explanation of one's atheism. After all, if there are counter-examples to the claim that every belief must be supported by sufficient evidence, then the fact that there is not sufficient evidence for a belief does not, in and of itself, explain why one does not hold that belief.

So, if I'm right that there are counter-examples to the claim that every belief must be supported by sufficient evidence, I think that atheists should explain their atheism in terms of properly basic belief rather than in terms of evidence.

How might they do this? Well, they might say that their atheism is a properly basic response to the suffering and other evils that they see in the world. The atheist might say that he can just look at, say, an infant born with severe deformities, and know that there is no God. This might be stronger than the traditional argument from evil, which, being an argument, allows the theist to divert the discussion away from the sheer horror of evil, and turn it into an abstract discussion of the argument's formal validity.

This illicits Response by Atheist "Ben The Biased"
see ibid pot no. 3

Or we could just use your standard for evaluating beliefs...

Originally Posted by Occam

I wouldn't put Sagan's dragon in the same category as God, because it's crazy. There are obviously some things that can be known in the properly basic way, and some that can't.

I could just as easily say that I wouldn't put God in the same category as the past, the external world, and other minds because it's crazy.

my response to both:

Meta:

I don't think the problem is with the concept that everything needs sufficient evidence. That's basically what a rational warrant is. The term essentially means just that (0r "good reason to believe it").

Even Plantinga's idea of properly basic is not saying there's no reason to believe something you just believe it anyway. It's saying that one need not have to prove what one finds valid as a warrant for belief.

Now atheists have always assumed they have that in the form of an absence of convincing evidence. Really I am not included to dispute that. It seems reasonable to me to say "I don't find X conciliating as a reason to believe Y so, therefore,I don't believe Y." That also means that if one say "well, I do believe Y becuase I do find X convincing" then they really can't back on it.

I think what all of this points to is a sense of tolerance and let believers believe and unbelievers not believe.

Now enter the "extraordinary claims" (ECREE) bit:
Atheist poster Captian Obvious (post 5):

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not less or no evidence.
So, for the notion that "people other than myself have minds" to be analogous to the notion of god, you have to suggest that they have approximately the same probability.

Even if, (which I don't accept) I believe that people have minds without sufficient evidence to do so, that does not compel me to accept every claim for which there is insufficient evidence. It certainly doesn't compel me to accept claims that would actually run counter to existing measurable evidence (depending on how god is defined).

I have posted several blog spots on this concept (ECREE) over the years. the last three are basically the same one form 2008 and that's probably the best answer I have given it. The most recent was in 20011.

My Answer to him:
Meta:

Originally Posted by CaptainObvious

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not less or no evidence.

Meta:
no they don't. I have never been able to find a logical reason from anyone why that should be true and not the dictum "adequate means of proof are adequate." That's matter of definition. If something is "adequate" then by definition it's enough.

the whole issue is going to revolve around what's what, that is, what really constitutes "extraordinary" and "adequate?"

CA:

So, for the notion that "people other than myself have minds" to be analogous to the notion of god, you have to suggest that they have approximately the same probability.

Meta:

No you don't. you have no way to attach probability to God. the whole concept is silly. That's like saying "what's the probalby that something is real rather than all reality being illusion?" How can make a basis for measurement? If all of reality is an illusion then obviously the idea that it's not illusory is part of the illusion.

Even if, (which I don't accept) I believe that people have minds without sufficient evidence to do so, that does not compel me to accept every claim for which there is insufficient evidence. It certainly doesn't compel me to accept claims that would actually run counter to existing measurable evidence (depending on how god is defined).

there are some levels of knowing that are illusive and must be based upon a judgment rather than proof.

What Difference God Makes: Reverse Design Argument

2011-12-26T06:21:00.001-08:00

On carm just before Christmas an atheist called "1337" argues:

I contend that the theistic version of god doesn't exist. Why do I say this? Because the assertion that there is a personal god seems to be baseless. In fact, it is christian apologists that eroded my faith away. They continue to make qualifications about why it seems that god does nothing, until eventually the view that god exists is no different from the view that he doesn't exist.

People assert that god makes a difference in their lives. My question to you is, what would the world look like if that god didn't exist? What differences would we notice?

(NOTE: If anyone responds by saying "without god the world couldn't exist at all" I'll just ignore it, that's not the point of the discussion)

In the discussion that ensued this turned into a reverse design argument. Its' reversal because he's saying basically that Chrsitians can show anything that would actually be different if there wasn't a God.

I made two criticisms. They have booth gone unanswered.

(1) It's the same mistake the design argument makes, it doesn't have another universe to compare to.

(2) It treats belief in God as though it's just adding a fact to the universe in tread of a whole other universe. Belief in God entails a totally different universe than the one atheists believe in.

The second one evolved into an answer that we can say without God the world wouldn't be. This is because God is the ground of being, without God there would be no being.

Part of the exchange with 1337:
Originally Posted by 1337

I'm going to take this a lot slower so that you can understand the argument.

1337

To start off, I'm going to assume that god exists as most christians say he does. He answers prayers, he heals the sick, he gives us salvation, he holds the universe together, he can affect nature.

Meta:

that doesn't mean we see his universe holding activity. the strong force holds the universe but we don't see the strong force. do you understand can you think about that?

1337

That's it, that's the beginning of my argument. I didn't assume there was no god, I assumed that there is a god as Christians claim (contrary to your point #1 above). I am not assuming that god is a thing of this world, I am assuming he has an effect on this world (contrary to your point #2 listed above).

Crucified God, Moltmann, part 2

2011-12-21T08:05:00.001-08:00

Moltmann has no mockish sentiments comparing bogus stories about kings sacrificing their sons, nor does he communicate the meaning of cross by multiplying examples of the physical torment a crucifixion victim undergoes. Those are all third rate apologetic and they have no place in Moltmann's thinking. Moltmann talks about the eschatological meaning of the cross. He had already laid down the most sophisticated eschatology in his first groundbreaking work Theology of Hope. He goes on to talk about the meaning of the cross in terms of the solidarity statement.

The participation of Christ in the life of humanity creates the basis for God's solidarity. Other martyr figures died for their noble causes but Jesus did not die for a noble cause. No one understood that he was making a statement of God's solidarity. He was tagged as a blasphemer by the religious authorities and he was being crucified as a criminal with criminals. It was understood that his cause was political power and he was labeled as such. Thus he was not sen as atoning for the sins of the world but as another misguided terrorist who tried to take power and didn't make it. He was crucified among thieves which to the masses "this guy is no better than a thief."

Atheists on message boards sometimes go through gyrations trying to deny that the atonement meant anything. They will say "that was no sweat for God. He was invulnerable like superman and so he didn't feel a thing." Motlmann doesn't mention atheists but that kind of response, which carries all the subtly and sensitivity of a lynch mob, is totally inapplicable. Even though Moltmann doesn't talk about the physical torturer of the cross he illustrates the devastating nature of its meaning in the abandonment by God. This is not an attempt to say "see Jesus really suffered after all." The God haters who long to think of God as suffering will have to be disappointed. The issue of solidarity is not an issue of "did he really suffer?" Instead it's an issue abandonment.

Jesus was abandoned by God. Moltmann makes that point in showing that only one evangelist records that cry "my God, my God why have you forsaken me?" The others all soften it up (Luke, Matt, John). They change it to "into thy hands I commend my spirit," or "it is finished." Mark records the original abandonment cry and Jesus life ends there. Jesus dies abandoned by God. He has no noble cause to die for, he's labeled and classed at the lowest level of society, and dies misunderstood and alone. Moltmann is not wallowing in how much he suffered because the abandonment plays a much more important role in the drama of salvation. It's not that it gives Jesus "street cred" as suffering. It links him to humanity. It establishes the solidarity because he died as a man at the lowest level of humanity, tragically and alone, as we die. He was a man and he died as men die. He felt abandoned by God as we all feel and as some of us feel in extreme measure.

Of cousre that sets up the hope of the resurrection.
As Paul says:

...all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were Baptized into his death.? We were therefore buried with him in baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the death through the glory of the father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him in his death we will certainly be united with him in his resurrection.For we know that the old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.--because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.Now if we have died with Christ we believe that we will also live with him, for we know that since Christ was raised from the dead he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him; the death he died to sin he died once for all; but the life he lives he lives to God. In the same way count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Chrsit Jesus.(Romans 6:1-5)

As I express it on my website doxa:

Jurgen Moltmann's notion of Solidarity (see The Crucified God) is based upon the notion of Political solidarity. Christ died in Solidarity with victims. He took upon himself a political death by purposely angering the powers of the day. Thus in his death he identifies with victims of oppression. But we are all vitims of oppression. Sin has a social dimension, the injustice we experience as the hands of society and social and governmental institutions is primarily and at a very basic level the result of the social aspects of sin. Power, and political machinations begin in the sinful heart, the ego, the desire for power, and they manifest themselves through institutions built by the will to power over the other. But in a more fundamental sense we are all victims of our own sinful natures. We scheme against others on some level to build ourselve up and secure our conditions in life. IN this sense we cannot help but do injustice to others. In return injustice is done to us.Jesus died in solidarity with us, he underwent the ultimate consequences of living in a sinful world, in order to demonstrate the depths of God's love and God's desire to save us. Take an analogy from political organizing. IN Central America governments often send "death squads" to murder labor unionists and political dissenter. IN Guatemala there were some American organizations which organized for college students to go to Guatemala and escourt the leaders of dissenting groups so that they would not be murdered.

The logic was that the death squads wouldn't hurt an American Student because it would bring bad press and shut off U.S. government funds to their military. As disturbing as these political implications are, let's stay focused on the Gospel. Jesus is like those students, and like some of them, he was actually killed. But unlike them he went out of his way to be killed, to be victimized by the the rage of the sinful and power seeking so that he could illustrate to us the desire of God; that God is on our side, God is on the side of the poor, the victimized, the marginalized, and the lost. Jesus said "a physician is not sent to the well but to the sick."The key to salvation is to accept God's statement of solidarity, to express our solidarity with God by placing ourselves into the death of Christ (by identification with it, by trust in it's efficacy for our salvation).

When we put ourselves into Christ's death and reckon ourselves dead with him then we are in solidarity with God and that puts in the stream of the hope of resurrection which is real and truly had through Christ's actual resurrection. That is the real meaning of Christmas.

The Crucified God by Jurgen Moltmann: a Christmas refelction (part 1)

2011-12-18T12:24:00.000-08:00

Jurgen Moltmann

Every Christmas I used to read this book, The Crucified God (Jurgan Motlmann*). I haven't read it in a few years because in 2007 we had an apartment foold and I haven't seen my copy since. Last a mentioned this and a good friend sent me a new copy! I'm reading it again now. It's one of the best books to read for Christmas because it sets the atonement in context with the incarnation and orients it in Hegelian fashion toward the resurrection as a synthesis of incarnation by the father and rejection by the father.. This book has it all, moving passages that reflect for of and for Christ, and abstruse theological and philosophical points that only a seminarian could love, and a German cultural bias. Hot dog (Wienerschnitzel) it's just made for Christmas.

Christmas is about the baby Jesus and celebrating his birth. Yet lurking behind this innocent facade is the brunt of Christian Trinitarian theology. The whole point of baby Jesus is the cross and the empty tomb. Why did he manifest in hsitory as a man (beginning as baby) but to die on the cross for the sin of the world and raise from the dead. Why do that anyway? what's it all about. That's the true point of Christmas. The holiday is the hopeful side of it all because it starts with unffulled potential of the baby Jesus and looks forward to what he will do in the future when he grows up. The resurrection is positive but not hopeful because it's the fruition of the thing. It' not hoping in something its obtaining it. The Christmas story is hope becuase it looks to the future.

I am going to do at least two if not more summaries of Moltmann's book and I hope the reader will get hold of a copy. There is an online copy on Google books the reader can use now. It's not complete and I hope the reader will buy a copy or at least go to the library and get a copy.

The time I was leaving Perkins (school of theology SMU--1990) Moltmann was being called "the greatest living Protestant theologian." I don't know who get's that title today, as far as I know Moltmann is still alive. He was born in Hamberg in 1926. His family was secular. He grew up interested in German Idealism and philosophy. He was drafted at 18 in 1944 and taken prisoner at the end of the war. Those experienced started him on a theological search. He studied at Göttingen University under Barthian influenced teachers. Something of a rarity he is a Calvinist not a Lutheran. The kind of Calvinist he is I have only encountered in seminary. I would call thm "liberal." Predestination is not important to them. I guess they are neo-orthodox that's what Barth was. He was not a Calvinist.

Moltmann first gained recognition in the mid 60s with his ground breaking work Theology of Hope.(on line text). The Crucified God came out in 68 it coincided with the times. 1968 was a seminal year for the coutner culture and the political movements from Parish (May 68) to Mexico (the massacre of the students at the university in Mexico City), the the riots at Columbia (in New York). Not to mention the police riot at the Dem's convention in Chicago. The Crucified God served as a justification theologically for taking part in the protests. It served as a lunching pad for the liberation theology and the struggles of Latin America. Moltmann was no sooner hailed as a liberation theologian than he was denounced by those wishing to lead such movements and feeling their third world origins deprived them of leadership. They disparaged his contribution. Moltmann was undaunted because he didn't care about leading he cared about the struggle.

The reason the book serves in this way was a liberation is becuase of the new light it sheds on the atonement. Motlmann changes the focus on the meaning of atonement from the efficacy of the act itself to the meaning of the act and it's wider implications due to that meaning. This is not a spoiler.It is the crux of the book. You get this concept here you know what the book says it's still well worth reading in my opinion. This is no more a spoiler than revealing that the allies win in the movie The Longest Day. It's a concept I have called participatory atonement. I've talked about it on this blog I have a page about on Doxa, it's my view of the atonement.

The basic idea is that the atonement is not a commercial transaction or a work of magic. It's not because Jesus shed blood that it atones but because the act itself is a statement of solidarity. It is in creating a mutual solidarity between us and God that the ground for forgiveness is created. That means if we are in solidarity, we signify this by acceptance of God's statement of solidarity, that is by placing faith in Jesus act of atonement, we are in solidarity with God and we can't be held in condemnation.

To get to this point Moltmann begins by talking about Christian identity. He asks where should we find a Christian on Sunday morning? Should we find one in the pew doing the religoius thing? Or should we find one on the barricades fighting the government? He concludes we should find a Christian on the barricades (very 60s you see). This is more than just a sense of identification "I am a Christian and I feel good about it." But the question of "what makes one a Christian?" Doctrine alone doesn't do it, he finds. Of course we know just taking part in ceremony and being present in chruch doesn't' do it. Just touting a doctrine is not personal it doesn't engage one's life. Moltmann finds that living God's love engages our lives in the sense of identity. We live that by taking God's act of solidarity into the world. So having solidarity with the poor ourselves is an expression of God's act of solidarity for all humanity.

There's a lot more going on here than just "live out your faith by being a protester." In this coming I'll try to unpack it. I hope as the reader reads all of this that he/she will think about it in relation to Christmas as the celebration of all of Christ's work not just his birth. WE embrace the hope of the infant in the manger becasue we know how the story wound up.

____________
*there's an umlout over the u in Jurgen but I don't have an umlout key.

Phenomenology and Method

2011-12-14T06:56:00.000-08:00

Many Atheists are hung up on empirical knowledge. Thats why so many of them (not all by many) insist that we have no info about God, you can't verfy God and so forth.Many posts on CARM lattely have criticized "religious subjectivity." Even many christians have fallen into the trap of dicotomizing between subect and object, such that they think: subjectivity = bad, objectivity = good.
But God cannot be the subject of empirical data becasue is not given in sense data. That's becasue God is not just another object along side objects in creation. God is not just another thing, God is the basis of reality. That's like a fish scientist saying "they assinged me to study this thing called 'water' but I can't find any water." he says that because it never dawns on him that its' all around him, the medium in which he lives and he's always looking through it. he can't see the water because he's looking through it.

That's sort of the case with God because God is the basis of reality, the ground of Being. "in him we live and move and have our being." When we try to look at God and see him directly we look through him because in a sense he's the medium in which we live.

The only answer to this is to search for something else. We don't look for empirical evdience of God, we look for a "co-detemrinate." That is, we look for the signatrue of God, or to use a Derridian term the "trace of God." Like the arua of a neutrino. We can't photogrpah neutrinos directly but we have photographed their auruas that are the reaction of Nuetrinos with other particals. When you see that aurua you know you have one.

But the trace of God has to be the result of a subjective or intersubjective understanding. So rather than subject it to empirical means, we need allow the sense data to determine the categories under which we organize our thinking about God.

Schleiermacher was the originater of this kind of thinking (prior to Brintono who is attributed to be the inventer of Phenomenology). Here is Schleiermacher's take on God consciousness. We don't search for God in objective terms we search for "God consciousness."

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is very important because it is the altenative way of htinking to either empirical science and hangs ups on iductive data, or deudtive reasoing and hang ups on the a prori. When I say "allow the sense data to determine the categories," what do I mean? (this is very crucial to understanding every point I make on message boards):

What that means is, you have a bit of qualia, an impression of the say sense data strikes us,the way something appears to us. Let's say the desk my computer sits upon. Our tendency is to tuck it away into a neat category based upon our preconcieved notions of desks. This is a bit of wodden furniture, it's funciton is proving a surface for writting and bit of storage for what we write. We plug in the label "made in Hong Kong" and we say "it's a cheap desk." Now we have a sub category. all that is pre set in our minds based upon our understanding of the universe vis a vie writting surfaces. But if we appraoch the desk phenomenologically, we don't say "o a cheap peice of furniture for holding my computer--manufactured in formerly British colony, the home of Jackie Chan, thus a Kung fu capitalist cheap desk. but we just say "there is this object that appears in my sense data, and it seems to provide uses x,y,z. So it may not be a desk at all in terms of its functionality, perhaps it would work better as a door stop. Or perhaps this door put across two saw horses would make a better desk. That's not part of my preconcieved notion because it's not made to be a desk, but it might work better."

Ok that's a trivial example, so much for my understanding of desks and their place in the univrese. But, when we consider other thins, things of more gravity such as empirical science and reilgion, or religious belief and expeirnce, the nautre of myth and religious texts, you can see how the outcome might might be a lot more significant if we do it one way as oppossed to another.

The way the atheists want to to it is to demand certian things, and those things require sense data and that sense data is preconcieved to belong in certain categories and to rule out other sense data. Thus they wind up asking for probability of miracles when in fact by defition a miracle cannot be probable. So they rule out any kind of miracle based upon the pre convieved category of "things that do no happen because we don't observe them so they are too impoprobable." Whereas in reality, since miracles are things taht are impossible, but happen anyway because some higher law overrides that of probablity, they are just arbitrarly crossing out the category of the possible and arbitraily arranging their understanding of the universe to exclude the SN, then demanding that, well there's no evidence for it (because we have filed all the evidence under the preconvcieved category of "that which does not happen.").

Religion not Reduceable to Knowledge

Frederick Schleiermacher, (1768-1834) in On Religion: Speeches to it's Cultured Dispisers, and The Chrisitian Faith (Glogenschleurer) (I know my German spell has to worse than my English spelling),sets forth the view that religion is not reduceable to kowledge or ethical systems. It is primarily a phenomenoloigcal apprehension of God consciusness through means of religious affections. Affections is a term not used much anymore, and it is easily confussed with mere emotion. Sometimes Schleiermacher is udnerstood as saying that "I become emotional when I pay and thus there must be an object of my emotional feelings." Though he does vinture close to this position in one form of the arugment, this is not exactly what he's saying.

In the earlier form of his argument he was saying that affections were indicative of a sense of God, but in the Christian Faith he argues that there is a greater sense of unity in the life world and a snese of the dependance of all things in the life world upon something higher.

What is this feeling of utter depenedence? It is the sense of the unity in the life world and it's greater reliance upon a higher reality. It is not to be confussed with the stary sky at night in the desert feeling, but is akin to it. I like to think about the feeling of being in my backyard late on a summer night, listening to the sounds of the freeway dying out andrealizing a certain harmony in the lfie world and the sense that all of this exists because it stemms form a higher thing. There is more to it than thatbut I don't have time to go into it. That's just a short hand for those of us to whom this is a new concept to get some sort of handle on it. Nor does"feeling" here mean "emotion" but it is connected to the religiousaffections. In the early version S. thought it was a corrolate between thereligious affections and God; God must be there because I can feel love for him when I pray to him. But that's not what it's saying in the better version.

The basic assumptions Schleiermacher is making are Plaontic. He believes that the feeling of utter dependence is the backdrop, the pre-given, pre-cognative notion behind the ontological argument. IN other words, what Anselm tried to capture in his logical argument is felt by everyone, if they were honest, in a pre-cognative way. In other words, before one thinks about it, it is this "feeling" of utter dependence. After one thinks it out and makes it into a logical arguemnt it is the ontological arguement.

Unity in the Life world.

"Life world," or Labeinswelt is a term used in German philosophy. It implies the world of one's culturally contructed life, the "world" we 'live in.' Life as we expeirence it on a daily basis. The unity one senses in the life world is intuative and unites the experiences and aspirations of the individual in a sense of integration and belonging in in the world. As Heidegger says "a being in the world." Schleiermacher is saying that there is a special intuative sense that everyone can grasp of this whole, this unity, being bound up with a higher relatiy, being dependent upon a higher unity. In other words, the "feeling" can be understood as an intuative sense of "radical constingency" (int he sense of the above ontolgoical arugments).

He goes on to say that the feeling is based upon the ontological principle as its theoretical background, but doesnt' depend on the argument because it proceeds the argument as the pre-given pre-theorectical pre-cognative relaitzation of what Anslem sat down and thought about and turned into a rational argument: why has the fools said in his heart 'there is no God?' Why a fool? Becasue in the heart we know God. To deny this is to deny the most basic realization about reality.

All religions seek to do three things:

a) to identify the human problematic, b) to identify an ultimate transformative experience (UTE) which resolves the problematic, and c) to mediate between the two.

But not all religions are equal. All are relative to the truth but not all are equal. Some mediate the UTE better than others, or in a more accessible way than others. Given the foregoing, my criteria are that:

1) a religious tradition reflect a human problematic which is meaningful in terms of the what we find in the world.

2) the UTE be found to really resolve the problematic.

3) it mediates the UTE in such a way as to be effective and accessible. 4) its putative and crucial historical claims be historically probable given the ontological and epistemological assumptions that are required within the inner logic of that belief system.

5) it be consistent with itself and with the external world in a way that touches these factors.

These mean that I am not interested in piddling Biblical contradictions such as how many women went to the tomb, ect. but in terms of the major claims of the faith as they touch the human problematic and its resolution.

A religious tradition is like a language, and theology is a converation. Since God is mystyical reality, beyond words, to speak of our experiences of God one must encode those experinces into cutlural constructs, that makes for the differences in different religons. Traditions are like languages in that they furnish a vocabulary for dealing with such experinces based upon past experiences in an inter-subjective fashion. The point of the discussion is to mediate transformation. One moves into mediation through the conversation of theology. One is then able to come terms with mediation on a personal and experiential level as is still able to relate intersubjectively with others who have similar expeirnces.

The question then,is not which religion is "true," but which one best mediates transformation. For the individual who answers that question, and comes to identify with a tradition, that is the conversation to take up; join that traidion. For me its Christianity. As part of the conversation one can set up cirteria for understanding the conversation, criteria such as those listed above.

How Does the Bible fulfill these criteria? First, what is the Bible? Is it a rule book? Is it a manual of discipline? Is it a science textbook? A history book? No it is none of these. The Bible, the Canon, the NT in particular, is a means of bestowing Grace. What does that mean? It means first, it is not an epistemology! It is not a method of knowing how we know, nor is it a history book. It is a means of coming into contact with the UTE mentioned above. This means that the primary thing it has to do to demonstrate its veracity is not be accurate historically, although it is that in the main; but rather, its task is to connect one to the depository of truth in the teachings of Jesus such that one is made open to the ultimate transformative experience. Thus the main thing the Bible has to do to fulfill these criteria is to communicate this transformation. This can only be judged phenomenologically. It is not a matter of proving that the events are true, although there are ensconces where that becomes important.

Thus the main problem is not the existence of these piddling so-called contradictions (and my experience is 90% of them stem from not knowing how to read a text), but rather the extent to which the world and life stack up to the picture presented as a fallen world, engaged in the human problematic and transformed by the light of Christ. Now that means that the extent to which the problematic is adequately reflected, that being sin, separation from God, meaninglessness, the wages of sin, the dregs of life, and so forth, vs. the saving power of God's grace to transform life and change the direction in which one lives to face God and to hope and future. This is something that cannot be decided by the historical aspects or by any objective account. It is merely the individual's problem to understand and to experience. That is the nature of what religion does and the extent to which Christianity does it more accessibly and more efficaciously is the extent to which it should be seen as valid.

The efficacy is not an objective issue either, but the fact that only a couple of religions in the world share the concept of Grace should be a clue. No other religion (save Pure Land Buddhism) have this notion. For all the others there is a problem of one's own efforts. The Grace mediates and administrates through *****ures is experienced in the life of the believer, and can be found also in prayer, in the sacraments and so forth.

Where the historical questions should enter into it are where the mediation of the UTE hedges upon these historical aspects. Obviously the existence of Jesus of Nazareth would be one, his death on the cross another. The Resurrection of course, doctrinally is also crucial, but since that cannot be established in an empirical sense, seeing as no historical question can be, we must use historical probability. That is not blunted by the minor discrepancies in the number of women at the tomb or who got there first. That sort of thinking is to think in terms of a video documentary. We expect the NT to have the sort of accuracy we find in a court room because we are moderns and we watch too much television. The number of women and when they got to the tomb etc. does not have a bearing on whether the tomb actually existed, was guarded and was found empty. Nor does it really change the fact that people claimed to have seen Jesus after his death alive and well and ascending into heaven. We can view the different strands of NT witness as separate sources, since they were not written as one book, but by different authors at different times and brought together later.

The historicity of the NT is a logical assumption given the nature of the works. We can expect that the Gospels will be polemical. We do not need to assume, however, that they will be fabricated from whole cloth. They are the product of the communities that redacted them. That is viewed as a fatal weakness in fundamentalist circles, tantamount to saying that they are lies. But that is silly. In reality there is no particular reason why the community cannot be a witness. The differences in the accounts are produced by either the ordering of periscopes to underscore various theological points or the use of witnesses who fanned out through the various communities and whose individual view points make up the variety of the text. This is not to be confused with contradiction simply because it reflects differences in individual's view points and distracts us from the more important points of agreement; the tomb was empty, the Lord was seen risen, there were people who put there hands in his nail prints, etc.

The overall question about Biblical contradiction goes back to the basic nature of the text. What sort of text is it? Is it a Sunday school book? A science text book? A history book? And how does inspiration work? The question about the nature of inspiration is the most crucial. This is because the basic notion of the fundamentalists is that of verbal plenary inspiration. If we assume that this is the only sort of inspiration than we have a problem. One mistake and verbal plenary inspiration is out the window. The assumption that every verse is inspired and every word is true comes not from the Church fathers or from the Christian tradition. It actually starts with Humanists in the Renaissance and finds its final development in the 19th century with people like J. N. Drably and Warfield. (see, Avery Dulles Models of Revelation).

One of my major reasons for rejecting this model of revelation is because it is not true to the nature of transformation. Verbal plenary inspiration assumes that God uses authors like we use pencils or like businessmen use secretaries, to take dictation (that is). But why should we assume that this is the only form of inspiration? Only because we have been conditioned by American Christianity to assume that this must be the case. This comes from the Reformation's tendency to see the Bible as epistemology rather than as a means of bestowing grace (see William Abraham, Canon and Criterion). Why should be approach the text with this kind of baggage? We should approach it, not assuming that Moses et al. were fundamentalist preachers, but that they experienced God in their lives through the transformative power of the Spirit and that their writings and redactions are a reflection of this experience. That is more in keeping with the nature of religion as we find it around the world. That being the case, we should have no problem with finding that mythology of Babylonian and Suzerain cultures are used in Genesis, with the view toward standing them on their heads, or that some passages are idealized history that reflect a nationalistic agenda. But the experiences of God come through in the text in spite of these problems because the text itself, when viewed in dialectical relation between reader and text (Barth/Dulles) does bestow grace and does enable transformation.

After all the Biblical texts were not written as "The Bible" but were complied from a huge voluminous body of works which were accepted as "holy books" for quite some time before they were collected and put in a single list and even longer before they were printed as one book: the Bible. Therefore, that this book may contradict itself on some points is of no consequence. Rather than reflecting dictation, or literal writing as though the author was merely a pencil in the hands of God, what they really reflect is the record of people's experiences of God in their lives and the way in which those experiences suggested their choice of material/redaction. In short, inspiration of text is a product of the transformation afore mentioned. It is the verbalization of inner-experience which mediates grace, and in turn it mediates grace itself.

The Bible is not the Perfect Revelation of God to humanity. Jesus is that perfect revelation. The Gospels are merely the record of Jesus' teachings, deposited with the communities and encoded for safe keeping in the list chosen through Apostolic backing to assure Christian identity. For that matter the Bible as a whole is a reflection of the experience of transformation and as such, since it was the product of human agents we can expect it to have human flaws. The extent to which those flaws are negligible can be judge the ability of that deposit of truth to adequately promote transformation. Christ authorizes the Apostles, the Apostles authorize the community, the community authorizes the tradition, and the tradition authorizes the canon.

Faith is not beliving things without proof

2011-12-11T12:32:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted by aussiedave
Faith is a belief and does not require any intellectual basis. An "intellectual belief" is still a belief.
Neither have any facts to substantiate them.

One finds atheists saying things like this all the time. Atheists tend to define faith as "belief of soemthing without any evidence or a valid reason." for support they sometimes turn to Webster's on-line Dicitonary

Definition of FAITH

1
a : allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions
2
a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust
3
: something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs faith>

Of course it usually doesn't dawn on them that this is three different definitions and not a collective one. The third one can't be taken as indicative of all religious faith. There's another reason not to let them use Wesbter's, not at all. That's because it's only indicative of popular use and not theological teaching. Because they don't use a technological dictionary atheists make a straw man argument. They are not dealing with the way the teaching authority of Christian theology uses the term "faith." They are only reflecting the general conception, or misconception of faith, apart from Christian teaching. The whole idea of their argument is that Christian teaching accepts faith as belief with no evidence, when in reality there is no such dictum in any Christian teaching.

The theological authoritative dictionary for Christian Theology is called Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology (ed Alan Richardson and John Bowden SCM pres ltd 1983) (on Amazon). That is to the theology what the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary is to the English language. It's what Black's Law Dictionary is to the Lawyer. Really all Chrsitians should own a copy. There are two volumes one is about theologians the other about doctrines. I will concern myself today only with the latter.

The Westminster dictionary of Christian Theology has a long article on faith starting on page 207. Believers often use the term faith as a short hand term for those living according to apostolic teaching (207). The Dictionary points out that the only actual Biblical definition of faith is found in Hebrews 11.1 (evidence of things not seen) and that it "does not encapsulate all that the Bible says on the subject."(ibid). Westminster translates Hebrews 11.1 as "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." This changes certain nuances but reinforces other. I have always liked to point that that faith is a kind of evidence in its own right. That's becuase something has to prompt faith. It's insane to assert that faith is ever held for no reaosn at all. Of cousre the atheist wants to assert that the reason is stupid but that's his burden of proof. What is the stimulus that prompts the response of faith?

Westminster's Dictionary understands faith in many contexts and constructs a complex picture of the term.Faith "...is an obedient confident trust in the reality love of God known through his acts, and awaiting their future consummation." (ibid). The dictionary brings out a variety of nuances from scripture. In OT faith is comparatively rare. When it is used it indicates faithfulness or loyalty rather than passive reliance. Yet dependence upon God and not human powers is important for Issiah (7:9, 30:15). Faith is concieved as Obedient action. (Dud 6:1) Faith as trust is also echoed in the psalms. In the NT belief and trust in Jesus' salvation is referred to as faith.(Mark 2:5, 5:34). Unbelief is hardness of heart, so the opposite of faith, unbelief, involves a refusal of the heart. Again making faith more a matter of some deep relationship than just a passive acceptance of an affirmation. (Mark 6:1).

There's no particular reason to understand this notion of faithfulness as bestowed for no reason. There is no statement about "faithfulness with no proof for no reason." Indeed the whole concept of faith in being about a condition of the heart is removed a step from this idea of accepting an intellectual proposition for no reason. In the Johonine epistles we see doctrinally oriented faith in a credal formula. In that community faith took on doctrinal proportions. Christ came in the flesh, Jesus is he son of God, (20:31, 1 J. 5:1). There is no indication that this is a matter of belief for no reason. NO reason is given but it's obvious the reason is bound up with the faith of the community as a community. One sees the community itself as the witness. The community as a whole testifies "we saw this, we heard this."

In Pauline Theology faith is utter reliance upon God's grace. The person of faith is the one who knows that grace cannot be obtained by works, that justification is only through union with Christ and reliance upon God's grace rather than works or by the law. Faith is not merely assent to an intellectual proposition but a relationship of trust culminating in the acceptance of God's Grace. Grace through faith means reliance upon God's ability to make us holy, nothing of our own effort.

The article points out several tensions that emerge from the centrality of faith to Christian doctrine. This is the kind of subtle theological idea that makes theology interesting and maddening to atheist who can't think subtly. Tension is mistaken for contradiction by skeptics but it's not contradiction. It's a good thing in theology to have tension. As one of my professors at Perkins (school of ethology SMU) put it "if you have no tension on your kite string your kite is not in the air."

One such tension is between weather faith is the response of trust in God or the acceptance of doctrinal propositions.The issues clearly transcend the notion of faith as rule keeping or merely an acceptance of intellectual propositions.

The article winds up with a discussion of Kierkegaard's notion of the leap of faith. This mind tend to make one think that faith means the irrational acceptance of of a proposition with no evidence.SK says faith is irrational and that it's achieved by an irrational leap. Yet one must note that the leap itself is an epistemological ploy, it's an attempt to get over the final chasm which can't be bridged by evidence or logic. The road up to the final gap can be paved with argument and reason. One can make a find philosophical diving board to prepare for the leap. The point at which one makes the leap can be narrowed. The leap is always there. Even in the world view there are epistemic blind alleys from which there are no returns. So in the final analysis there is no basis to the atheist straw man definition of faith as "believing things without evidence."

I am sick

2011-12-09T14:40:00.000-08:00

sorry I missed posting this week. I was too sick. I am still under the weather although better. I have cold. Should be back on Monday.

feel free to talk among yourselves.

The King's new Clothes, he's not nake he's just into the lack of clothes

2011-12-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

Atheists want to use the story of the Emperor's new Clothes to say that theologians are such ideas they have nothing there but convince everyone that they do. If theolgoians are like he king parading around in invisible clothes, meaning he's really just naked and no one has the tuts to say it, the atheists are like the guys selling him the clothes. They have a movement based upon neither believing nor kn0wing anything. They turn the lack of understanding into a positive by calling it "the lack of a belief." That's what they really sell, the lack of a belief; which amounts to nothing. The try to pawn that off as wisdom and smarts and acuity and so so forth. In reality they merely anti-intellectual which is proved by their mockery of intellectual theology which they refuse to learn bout but still claim to understand.

Atheists are always coming up with little gimmicks. Anytime you trump them with real knowledge they get up set and find a gimmick. The Jesus myth theory was such a gimmick. Jesus was such a compelling figure and there is some decent evidence he rose from the dead, so to counter that they just pretend he never existed, and give it a little name and make up some pseudo intelligent sounding crap pertaining to it. The "default" and the "extraordinary evidence credo" these are all gimmicks atheists made up and they are passed off as pseudo official sounding quasi logical tactics that in actuality mean nothing.

The latest is the Courtier's reply. This is it:

I recently referred to the "Courtier's Reply", a term invented by PZ Myers to rebut the claims of believers who insist that their superstitious beliefs are ever so much more sophisticated than the simple version that Dawkins attacks.

PZ's response deserves much more publicity because it goes to the heart of the debate between rationalism and supersition. I'm going to post his original Courtier's Reply below (without permission, but I'm sure he'll understand) but before doing so I need to remind everyone about the original fairy tale [The Emperor's New Clothes].

This is a statement by a reductionist scientism king Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. He's on a blog called Sand Walk.

So what this couriter's reply is saying is that if the sketpic says stupid things about theology and demonstrates that he knows nothin gabout it and the theist says "O your criticism is invalid because you don't understand what you are criticizing" then al lthe atheist has to do is say "that's the courtiers reply" and the theist is supposed to go "O my God, I've violated a law of logic!" and give up and stop believing in God. But in realty it's nto a log of logic, I never heard it in a logic class.It's not in a lgoic text book, and the menaing of it is silly. I'ts just saying 'You can't point out my ignorance of theology because I will not allow theology to have any kind of validity or importance and religous people may not not any sort of human dignity." That's all it's saying. It's nothing more than anti-intellectual stupidity.

Here is Myers statement about it:

The Courtier's Reply
by PZ Myers

I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor's raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.

Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.

Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed — how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry — but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form.

Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

In other words, knowledge of theological subjects is just plain bull shit and it doesn't matter if Dawkins doesn't understand it because it's not worth understanding. So it's not valid criticism of him to say that. Except the problem is, if he understood theology he would see that his criticisms are wrong. The criticisms he makes are almost always about fundamentalists views. Since he refuses to accept that there are other non fundamentalist types of theology, when you point it out he just says O that's ridiculous because all theology is crap so it doesn't matter--but if he knew that he might not make the criticisms becasue they don't apply. But it's not worthing knowing that. he's just reasoning in a cirlce.

Here's his logic:

Him: religion is evil superstiion because fundies believe X

Liberal: we don't beileve x

him: that doesn't matter becasue religion is all crap no matter what. so even if you don't believe the thing I say is crap you still your own crap that must be stupid because you are religious. I know it's stupid because religion is stupid. Of course that's based on the stuff that you don't believe but that doesn't matter.

Narrow minded anti-intellectual brinkman ship in a most unsophisticated manner.

A very emotionally immature atheist tried this on me recently. Here's how it went.

Brent: All religious people believe in big man in the sky.

Me: process theology doesn't believe in big man in the sky

Brent: that's nonsesne all religous people do so they mustt.

Me; you clearly don't know enoguh about theology to say that

Brent: Courteiers reply! Courtiers' replay!

Like some magic king'x X that's suppossed to mean something. Clearly it's stupid because they are only trying to dodge the fact that their criticisms are based upon things they don't understand and that don't apply. Its' an attempt to hide their ignorance. They are committing an informal fallacy with the use of this gimmick. It's called "ipsie dixit." It means "truth by stipulation." They are saying in effect "I simply stipulate that I will not allow you to have knowledge. AT this point on your knowledge is now void becasue I declare to be so, since it's religion and religion is stupid."

Again their reasoning is quite circular since the reasons they would give for reducing religion to superstition don't' apply to modern sophisticated theology, but the fact that it can be labeled "theology" and they don't even know what that means, they stipulate that it must be stupid. So even though their reasons don't apply they just demand that they must do so any way.

Again they are merely stipulating truth and insisting they are right without any just reasons. It's idiotic to try and criticize a whole field you know nothing about. To make up for appalling ignorance they imply a third rate gimmick that is actually made up of two informal fallacies: ipsie dixit and circular reasoning.

The Nature of Biblical Revelation

2011-11-29T17:37:00.001-08:00

Atheists on the internet are always talking about contradictions in the Bible. These alleged contradictions fall into many categories. Most can be extinguished simply by remembering that all language had connotative meanings and all good writing uses literary devices, but many are based upon an inadequate understanding of the nature of divine revelation.

The problem with the notions of revelation in the Christian tradition is that they don't really conform to the earthly or human idea of what revelation should be. The human notion can be seen with the Book of Mormon—handed down from angels on high on Gold tablets—or the Koran—dictated by an Angel who grabbed Mohammed by the throat and forced him to write. The human notion tells us that there should be no mistakes, no problems, and the revelation should be ushered in with fanfare and pomp, clear and indisputable. But that is not the way of many religious traditions, and certainly not Christianity. There are problems, and even though most of them are conceived by ignorant people (most of the Internet atheists claims to "contradictions in the Bible" are based largely on not understanding metaphor or literary devices), there are some real problems and they are thorny. There are even more problems when it comes to the historicity of the text. But the important thing to note is that the revelations of the Christian faith are passed through human vessels. They contain human problems, and they are passed on safeguarded through human testimony. Even if the eye-witness nature of the individual authors of the NT cannot be established, the testimony of the community as a whole can be. The NT and its canon is a community event. It was a community at large that produced the Gospels, that passed on the Testimony and that created the canon. This communal nature of the revelation guarantees, if not individual authenticity, at least a sort of group validation, that a whole bunch of people as a community attest to these books and this witness.

The Traditional view of "Inerrancy."

Most people tend to think in terms of all or nothing, black and white, true and false. So when they think about the Bible, they think it's either all literally true in every word or it can't be "inspired." This is not only a fallacy, but it is not even the "traditional" view. Even in the inherency camp there exists three differing views of exactly what is inerrant and to what extent. Oddly enough, the notion of verbal inspiration was invented in the Renaissance by Humanists! Yes, the dreaded enemy of humanism actually came up with the doctrine of inerrancy which didn't exist before the 19th century, in its current form, but which actually began in the Renaissance with humanists. The documentation on this point comes mainly from Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation, New York: Double Day, 1985. The humanist argument is documented on p. 36. He also demonstrates that the current Evangelical view basically dates form the 19th century, the Princeton movement, and people such as Benjamin Warfield (1851-1921). Proponents of this view include Carl C.F. Henry, Clark Pinnock, James I Packer, Francis Shaffer, Charles Warwick Montgomery, and others.

Dulles Lists Five Versions of Inerrancy.

*Inerrency of original autographs and divine protection of manuscripts.
Proponents of this view include Harold Lindsell.

*Inspiration of autographs with minor mistakes in transmission of an unessential kind.
Carl C.F. Henry.

*Inerrency of Textual intention without textual specifics.
Clark Pinnock.

*Inerrancy in Soteric (salvation) knowledge but not in historical or scientific matters.
Bernard Ramm

*Inerrent in major theological assertions but not in religion or morality.
Donald Blosche and Paul K. Jewett

Basic Models of Revelation:

Dulles presents five models of revelation, but the faith model really amounts to little more than "the Bible helps you feel good," so I am presenting only four. This core summery will not come close to doing justice to these views. But time and space limitations do not allow a discourse that would do them justice.

Revelation as History:

The Events themselves are inspired but not the text. John Ballie, David Kelsey, James Barr. This view can include oral events; the inspiration of the prophets, the early kerygma of the church (C.H. Dodd) Creedal formulation, as well as historical events such as the atonement. This view was largely held by a flood of theologians up to the 1960s. According to this view the Bible is the record of revelation not revelation itself.

Revelation as Inner Experience:

This view would include mystical experience and views such as Frederich Schleiermacher's feeling of utter dependence (see argument III on existence of God). Religious doctrines are verbalizations of the feeling; the intuitive sense of the radical contingency of all things upon the higher aegis of their existence; part of the religious a priori.

Revelation as Doctirne:

This is the basic doctrine of inerrancy as stated above. In most cases it is believed that the autographs were inspired but some allow for mistakes in transmission and other inaccuracies of an inconsequential nature. This means that 90% of the criticisms made my atheists and skeptics on the internet don't count, because most of them turn on metaphorical use of language or scribal error. I take this position based upon personal experience on many apologetic boards.

Revelation as Dialectical Presence:

The view that there is a dialectical relation between the reader and the text. The Bible contains the word of God and it becomes the word of God for us when we encounter it in transformative way. Karl Barth is an example of a major theologian who held this view.

No one of these views is really adequate. I urge a view based upon all of them. In some sense, that is, the Bible manifests versions of each of these views. So it is not just governed by one revelatory model, but is made of redacted material which exhibits all of these views. For example, the prophets spoke from their experience of God--their inner experience of God's prompting. Their words are recorded as the books of the prophets in the Bible. The Biblical prophetic books are then the written record of the inner experience of these men. The Gospels exhibit all of these tendencies. Passed on from oral tradition, redacted by members of the communities which passed on the traditions, they represent the written record of the events of Christ's life and ministry. In that sense the events themselves were inspired. But Jesus teachings, which we can assume were transmitted accurately for the most part, represent the word actually spoken by Jesus, and thus by God's perfect revelation to humanity. Jesus is the revelation; the Gospels are merely the written record of that revelation passed on by the Apostles to the communities. Thus we see both the event model and the revelation as doctrine model (traditional view). In the Epistles we see the inner-experience model clearly as Paul, for example, did not know that he was writing the New Testament. He demonstrates confusion at points, as when (in I Corinthians) he didn't recall how many of Stephan’s household he had baptized, but when it came to his answers on doctrinal matters he wrote out of the inner-experience of God. We can also assume that the redactions occurred in relation to some sort of inner-experience, they reflect some divine guidance in the sense that the redactors are reflecting their own experiences of God.

I know these views sound wildly radical to most Christians, but they are based on the works of major theologians, including those of the most conservative schools. The dialectical model is vague and sounds unimpressive. It really seems to be tautological statement: the word of God becomes meaningful when we encounter it in a meaningful way. Therefore, I adopt a model of revelation based upon all four models (granting that we do encounter it in more meaningful ways at some times than at others, but provided we understand that this is not saying that it ceases to be the word of God when we don't so encounter it), and of the doctrinal model accepting the views that say inerrant in intent but not specific transmission. The transmission includes some mistakes but of a minor kind.

"The Bible is Just Mythology"

The most radical view will be that of mythology in the Bible. This is a difficult concept for most Christians to grasp, because most of us are taught that "myth" means a lie, that it's a dirty word, an insult, and that it is really debunking the Bible or rejecting it as God's word. The problem is in our understanding of myth. "Myth" does not mean lie; it does not mean something that is necessarily untrue. It is a literary genre—a way of telling a story. In Genesis, for example, the creation story and the story of the Garden are mythological. They are based on Babylonian and Sumerian myths that contain the same elements and follow the same outlines. But three things must be noted: 1) Myth is not a dirty word, not a lie. Myth is a very healthy thing. 2) The point of the myth is the point the story is making--not the literal historical events of the story. So the point of mythologizing creation is not to transmit historical events but to make a point. We will look more closely at these two points. 3) I don't assume mythology in the Bible out of any tendency to doubt miracles or the supernatural, I believe in them. I base this purely on the way the text is written.

The purpose of myth is often assumed to be the attempt of unscientific or superstitious people to explain scientific facts of nature in an unscientific way. That is not the purpose of myth. A whole new discipline has developed over the past 60 years called "history of religions." Its two major figures are C.G. Jung and Marcea Eliade. In addition to these two, another great scholarly figure arises in Carl Kerenyi. In addition to these three, the scholarly popularizer Joseph Campbell is important. Champell is best known for his work The Hero with A Thousand Faces. This is a great book and I urge everyone to read it. Champbell, and Elliade both disliked Christianity intensely, but their views can be pressed into service for an understanding of the nature of myth. Myth is, according to Champbell a cultural transmission of symbols for the purpose of providing the members of the tribe with a sense of guidance through life. They are psychological, not explanatory of the physical world. This is easily seen in their elaborate natures. Why develop a whole story with so many elements when it will suffice as an explanation to say "we have fire because Prometheus stole it form the gods?" For example, Champell demonstrates in The Hero that heroic myths chart the journey of the individual through life. They are not explanatory, but clinical and healing. They prepare the individual for the journey of life; that's why in so many cultures we meet the same hero over and over again; because people have much the same experiences as they journey though life, gaining adulthood, talking their place in the group, marriage, children, old age and death. The hero goes out, he experiences adventures, he proves himself, he returns, and he prepares the next hero for his journey. We meet this over and over in mythology.

In Kerenyi's essays on a Science of Mythology we find the two figures of the maiden and the Krone. These are standard figures repeated throughout myths of every culture. They serve different functions, but are symbolic of the same woman at different times in her life. The Krone is the enlightener, the guide, the old wise woman who guides the younger into maidenhood. In Genesis we find something different. Here the Pagan myths follow the same outline and contain many of the same characters (Adam and Adapa—see, Cornfeld Archaeology of the Bible 1976). But in Genesis we find something different. The chaotic creation story of Babylon is ordered and the source of creation is different. Rather than being emerging out of Tiamot (chaos) we find "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Order is imposed. We have a logical and orderly progression (as opposed to the Pagan primordial chaos). The seven days of creation represent perfection and it is another aspect of order, seven periods, the seventh being rest. Moreover, the point of the story changes. In the Babylonian myth the primordial chaos is the ages of creation, and there is no moral overtone, the story revolves around other things. This is a common element in mythology, a world in which the myths happen, mythological time and place. All of these elements taken together are called Myths, and every mythos has a cosmogony, an explanation of creation and being (I didn't say there were no explanations in myth.). We find these elements in the Genesis story, Cosmogony included. But, the point of the story becomes moral: it becomes a story about man rebelling against God, the entrance of sin into the world. So the Genesis account is a literary rendering of pagan myth, but it stands that myth on its head. It is saying God is the true source of creation and the true point is that life is about knowing God.

The mythological elements are more common in the early books of the Bible. The material becomes more historical as we go along. How do we know? Because the mythical elements of the first account immediately drop away. Elements such as the talking serpent, the timeless time ("in the beginning"), the firmament and other aspects of the myth all drop away. The firmament was the ancient world's notion of the world itself. It was a flat earth set upon angular pillars, with a dome over it. On the inside of the dome stars were stuck on, and it contained doors in the dome through which snow and rain could be forced through by the gods (that's why Genesis says "he divided the waters above the firmament from the waters below”). We are clearly in a mythological world in Genesis. The Great flood is mythology as well, as all nations have their flood myths. But as we move through the Bible things become more historical.

The NT is not mythological at all. The Resurrection of Christ is an historical event and can be argued as such (see Resurrection page). Christ is a flesh and blood historical person who can be validated as having existed. The resurrection is set in an historical setting, names, dates, places are all historically verifiable and many have been validated. So the major point I'm making is that God uses myth to communicate to humanity. The mythical elements create the sort of psychological healing and force of literary strength and guidance that any mythos conjures up. God is novelist, he inspires myth. That is to say, the inner experience model led the redactors to remake ancient myth with a divine message. But the Bible is not all mythology; in fact most of it is an historical record and has been largely validated as such.

The upshot of all of this is that there is no need to argue evolution or the great flood. Evolution is just a scientific understanding of the development of life. It doesn't contradict the true account because we don't have a "true" scientific account. In Genesis, God was not trying to write a science text book. We are not told how life developed after creation. That is a point of concern for science not theology.

How do we know the Bible is the Word of God? Not because it contains big amazing miracle prophecy fulfillments, not because it reveals scientific information which no one could know at the time of writing, but for the simplest of reasons. Because it does what religious literature should do, it is transformative.

All religions seek to do three things.

All religions seek to do three things:

a) to identify the human problematic,
b) to identify an ultimate transformative experience (UTE) which resolves the problematic, and
c) to mediate between the two.

But not all religions are equal. All are relative to the truth but not all are equal. Some mediate the UTE better than others, or in a more accessible way than others. Given the foregoing, my criteria are that:

1) a religious tradition reflect a human problematic which is meaningful in terms of the what we find in the world.

2) the UTE be found to really resolve the problematic

3) it mediates the UTE in such a way as to be effective and accessible.

4) its putative and crucial historical claims be historically probable given the ontological and epistemological assumptions that are required within the inner logic of that belief system.

5) it be consistent with itself and with the external world in a way that touches these factors.

These mean that I am not interested in piddling Biblical contradictions such as how many women went to the tomb, ect. but in terms of the major claims of the faith as they touch the human problematic and its resolution.

How Does the Bible fulfill these criteria? First, what is the Bible? Is it a rule book? Is it a manual of discipline? Is it a science textbook? A history book? No it is none of these. The Bible, the Canon, the NT in particular, is a means of bestowing Grace. What does that mean? It means first, it is not an epistemology! It is not a method of knowing how we know, nor is it a history book. It is a means of coming into contact with the UTE mentioned above. This means that the primary thing it has to do to demonstrate its veracity is not be accurate historically, although it is that in the main; but rather, its task is to connect one to the depository of truth in the teachings of Jesus such that one is made open to the ultimate transformative experience. Thus the main thing the Bible has to do to fulfill these criteria is to communicate this transformation. This can only be judged phenomenologically. It is not a matter of proving that the events are true, although there are ensconces where that becomes important.

Thus the main problem is not the existence of these piddling so-called contradictions (and my experience is 90% of them stem from not knowing how to read a text), but rather the extent to which the world and life stack up to the picture presented as a fallen world, engaged in the human problematic and transformed by the light of Christ. Now that means that the extent to which the problematic is adequately reflected, that being sin, separation from God, meaninglessness, the wages of sin, the dregs of life, and so forth, vs. the saving power of God's grace to transform life and change the direction in which one lives to face God and to hope and future. This is something that cannot be decided by the historical aspects or by any objective account. It is merely the individual's problem to understand and to experience. That is the nature of what religion does and the extent to which Christianity does it more accessibly and more efficaciously is the extent to which it should be seen as valid.

The efficacy is not an objective issue either, but the fact that only a couple of religions in the world share the concept of Grace should be a clue. No other religion (save Pure Land Buddhism) have this notion. For all the others there is a problem of one's own efforts. The Grace mediates and administrates through Scriptures is experienced in the life of the believer, and can be found also in prayer, in the sacraments and so forth.

Where the historical questions should enter into it are where the mediation of the UTE hedges upon these historical aspects. Obviously the existence of Jesus of Nazareth would be one, his death on the cross another. The Resurrection of course, doctrinally is also crucial, but since that cannot be established in an empirical sense, seeing as no historical question can be, we must use historical probability. That is not blunted by the minor discrepancies in the number of women at the tomb or who got there first. That sort of thinking is to think in terms of a video documentary. We expect the NT to have the sort of accuracy we find in a court room because we are moderns and we watch too much television. The number of women and when they got to the tomb etc. does not have a bearing on whether the tomb actually existed, was guarded and was found empty. Nor does it really change the fact that people claimed to have seen Jesus after his death alive and well and ascending into heaven. We can view the different strands of NT witness as separate sources, since they were not written as one book, but by different authors at different times and brought together later.

The historicity of the NT is a logical assumption given the nature of the works. We can expect that the Gospels will be polemical. We do not need to assume, however, that they will be fabricated from whole cloth. They are the product of the communities that redacted them. That is viewed as a fatal weakness in fundamentalist circles, tantamount to saying that they are lies. But that is silly. In reality there is no particular reason why the community cannot be a witness. The differences in the accounts are produced by either the ordering of periscopes to underscore various theological points or the use of witnesses who fanned out through the various communities and whose individual view points make up the variety of the text. This is not to be confused with contradiction simply because it reflects differences in individual's view points and distracts us from the more important points of agreement; the tomb was empty, the Lord was seen risen, there were people who put there hands in his nail prints, etc.

The overall question about Biblical contradiction goes back to the basic nature of the text. What sort of text is it? Is it a Sunday school book? A science text book? A history book? And how does inspiration work? The question about the nature of inspiration is the most crucial. This is because the basic notion of the fundamentalists is that of verbal plenary inspiration. If we assume that this is the only sort of inspiration than we have a problem. One mistake and verbal plenary inspiration is out the window. The assumption that every verse is inspired and every word is true comes not from the Church fathers or from the Christian tradition. It actually starts with Humanists in the Renaissance and finds its final development in the 19th century with people like J. N. Drably and Warfield. (see, Avery Dulles Models of Revelation).

One of my major reasons for rejecting this model of revelation is because it is not true to the nature of transformation. Verbal plenary inspiration assumes that God uses authors like we use pencils or like businessmen use secretaries, to take dictation (that is). But why should we assume that this is the only form of inspiration? Only because we have been conditioned by American Christianity to assume that this must be the case. This comes from the Reformation's tendency to see the Bible as epistemology rather than as a means of bestowing grace (see William Abraham, Canon and Criterion). Why should be approach the text with this kind of baggage? We should approach it, not assuming that Moses et al. were fundamentalist preachers, but that they experienced God in their lives through the transformative power of the Spirit and that their writings and redactions are a reflection of this experience. That is more in keeping with the nature of religion as we find it around the world. That being the case, we should have no problem with finding that mythology of Babylonian and Suzerain cultures are used in Genesis, with the view toward standing them on their heads, or that some passages are idealized history that reflect a nationalistic agenda. But the experiences of God come through in the text in spite of these problems because the text itself, when viewed in dialectical relation between reader and text (Barth/Dulles) does bestow grace and does enable transformation.

After all the Biblical texts were not written as "The Bible" but were complied from a huge voluminous body of works which were accepted as scripture or as "holy books" for quite some time before they were collected and put in a single list and even longer before they were printed as one book: the Bible. Therefore, that this book may contradict itself on some points is of no consequence. Rather than reflecting dictation, or literal writing as though the author was merely a pencil in the hands of God, what they really reflect is the record of people's experiences of God in their lives and the way in which those experiences suggested their choice of material/redaction. In short, inspiration of scripture is a product of the transformation afore mentioned. It is the verbalization of inner-experience which mediates grace, and in turn it mediates grace itself.

The Bible is not the Perfect Revelation of God to humanity. Jesus is that perfect revelation. The Gospels are merely the record of Jesus' teachings, deposited with the communities and encoded for safe keeping in the list chosen through Apostolic backing to assure Christian identity. For that matter the Bible as a whole is a reflection of the experience of transformation and as such, since it was the product of human agents we can expect it to have human flaws. The extent to which those flaws are negligible can be judge the ability of that deposit of truth to adequately promote transformation. Christ authorizes the Apostles, the Apostles authorize the community, the community authorizes the tradition, and the tradition authorizes the canon.

Is Self Sacrafice Ethical?

2011-11-27T10:36:00.001-08:00

I am having a good discussion with Rob Yerginson on my boards, Doxa Forums. His position is something like obejctivism, but he disavows the extremes of Ayn Rand. I think he does advocate a self oriented perspective as the basis of value and rejects self sacrifice. I feel that self sacrafice (when it's reasonable does some good--not just a martyr complex) is the highest expression of ethical behavior. I think what's lost in our society today is a understanding of the spirit as the basis of value and that self sacrifice has become a dirty word--we live in an extremely self obsessed age.

Rob:That’s too bad. Somehow man in his effort to identify and pursue value has duped himself into believing that the very thing that gives rise to the notion of value needs to be devalued itself. Such a travesty. It’s like a disease that has infected our minds, causing us to view good as evil and evil as good.

Meta:
I'm not doing that. What enables us to value is not just our own selfishness, that's not a very stable value. What enables valuing is the transcendent nature of truth. The society we live in has gone totally material and has totally forgotten and turned against all spiritual things. Value is a spiritual thing.

If you reduce it all to the material valuations of the individual then those can controlled by 1DM. (one dimensional-man).

Rob:

The good news is that logic still works. Even in our severely confused state we can go back to the source of our confusion and expose the error. The trick is to get to the root, which means that we have to be willing to “test all things.” When we discover an arbitrary presupposition without base, we root it up. So, allow me to lay it out again:

Meta:
You can't do logic without accepting the transcendent nature of truth.It's basically the concept of non contradiction. so you can't have logic without truth.

Rob:1. It is fundamental to our nature to prefer to live and thrive.

Meta
we can also direct our thriving to the group rather than the individual. We are able to give ourselves to higher things and care about others. This is the one thing upon which I agree with Mill; there is a distinction between higher pleasure and the swinish pleasure. Swinish values rooted in me ME! MY wants becuase they are ME! the higher values in "what I care about which goes beyond me."

Rob2. If we are to obtain living and thriving there are actions that we ought to take.

Meta
we may have to sacrifice lour own living and thriving for a greater good.

Rob3. While there are many values worth pursuing, we must avoid pursuing lesser values at the expense of greater values.

Meta
swinish values are lesser. the value system that puts me first above the higher values is lesser.
(not to say that Rob--who is a fine fellow-- is "swinish.")

Rob4. So long as our existence is required in order to coherently discuss those things that are of value to us, our existence is at the bottom of our value chain, whether we grasp that fact or not.

Meta
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. IF you are saying you have to secure your own good in order to support things you care about; true but there are also times when you have to give up your own good for those things.

Rob5. Since moral actions are those actions that we ought to take, then this hierarchical order of values and actions is what gives rise to objective morality (morality that is actual, that is rooted in reality, in our nature, and the natural order rather than an arbitrary morality based on whim, tradition, and the dictates of others).

Meta
I still don't accept the concept of objective morality, nevertheless, you are getting something out of place, unless I'm not following you accurately. You are doing a bait and switch you stick the necessity of our own participation into the works then make a value higher than the values we would participate to preserve. that's like he corporation becoming an entity that works for it's own survive and thus abandoning the reason for which it was founded.

Rob6. This is the correct morality for us all whether you and I happen to agree or not.

Meta
No offense that's a ridiculous thing to say. That's like truth by stipulation. I"m right whether you know it or not. then what's the point of discussion?

Rob

Now, these statements are either true of false. If you are going to accuse me of “destroying ethical thinking” you are going to have to offer some support for your claim by demonstrating the error rather than referring me to some "deontological" rabbit hole. Given these six points, where is the error?

Meta
I've already apologized for putting it on such a personal basis. we don't have to keep dragging that into it. we aer not saving the world from each other we are just exchanging views.

I think in the comments I've made I've demonstrated what is feel is the problem with each of your statements.

Realizing Answers to Dave's Comments on Realizing God Part 2

2011-11-21T06:12:00.001-08:00

I think one misunderstanding that might have brewed out of the exchanges in comment section is that Dave is saying there are other possible explainations. He seems to not hear me saying 'yes there are other possible explanations but i think mine is the most likely." That's what I'm saying, he seems to hear me saying "No I've proved this is the only one." I don't want to second guess what he thinks. I am not claiming I have absolute proof. My argument has always been a prima facie justification argument. That means it's not a claim of proof it's a claim that the case I make is justified on face value (prima face) given the evidence.

(continued)
6:43 AM
Dave said...

Nor should we limit this to sense data. It is also true that we can have flaws in our reasoning, so that we come to erroneous conclusions. This is especially true of basic, everyday reasoning that is largely subconscious and which results in what are referred to as common logical fallacies.

That's why I don't make the argument in terms of "proof" but rational warrant. I don't claim anything absolute.

So your assumption that assumes that if we have an impression of something, a sense that something exists, that we can assume that A) it exists and that B) it is what we think it is, is flawed.

That's a flawed description of what I said. Here's the argument as I make it on Doxa:

Thomas Reid
Theory of Knowledge lecture notes.
G.J. Mattey
Philosophy, UC Davis

"Consider the question whether we are justified in believing that a physical world exists. As David Hume pointed out, the skepticism generated by philosophical arguments is contrary to our natural inclination to believe that there are physical objects." "[T]he skeptic . . . must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body, tho' he cannot pretend by any arguments of philosophy to maintain its veracity. Nature has not left this to his choice, and has doubtless esteem'd it an affair of too great importance to be trusted to our uncertain reasonings and speculations. We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body?, but 'tis in vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasoning." (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Section II)

Mattey again:

"Thomas Reid, who was a later contemporary of Hume's, claimed that our beliefs in the external world are justified.'I shall take it for granted that the evidence of sense, when the proper circumstances concur, is good evidence, and a just ground of belief' (Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, Chapter XX). This evidence is different from that of reasoning from premises to a conclusion, however."

"That the evidence of sense is of a different kind, needs little proof. No man seeks a reason for believing what he sees or feels; and, if he did, it would be difficult to find one. But, though he can give no reason for believing his senses, his belief remains as firm as if it were grounded on demonstration. Many eminent philosophers, thinking it unreasonable to believe when the could not shew a reason, have laboured to furnish us with reasons for believing our senses; but their reasons are very insufficient, and will not bear examination. Other philosophers have shewn very clearly the fallacy of these reasons, and have, as they imagine, discovered invincible reasons agains this belief; but they have never been able either to shake it themselves or to convince others. The statesman continues to plod, the soldier to fight, and the merchant to export and import, without being in the least moved by the demonstrations that have been offered of the non-existence of those things about which they are so seriously employed. And a man may as soon by reasoning, pull the moon out of her orbit, as destroy the belief of the objects of sense." (Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, Chapter XX)

"Here Reid shows himself to have foundationalist tendencies, in the sense that our beliefs about physical objects are not justified by appeal to other beliefs. On the other hand, all he has established at this point is what Hume had already observed, that beliefs about physical objects are very hard to shake off. Hume himself admitted only to lose his faith in the senses when he was deeply immersed in skeptical reflections. But why should Reid think these deeply-held beliefs are based on "good evidence" or "a just ground?" One particularly telling observation is that a philosopher's "knowledge of what really exists, or did exist, comes by another channel [than reason], which is open to those who cannot reason. He is led to it in the dark, and knows not how he came by it" (Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, Chapter XX). Philosophers "cannot account for" this knowledge and must humbly accept it s a gift of heaven."

"If there is no philosophical account of justification of beliefs about the physical world, how could Reid claim that they are justified at all? The answer is the way in which they support common sense."

"Such original and natural judgments [based on sense-experience] are, therefore, a part of that furniture which Nature hath given to the human understanding. They are the inspiration of the Almighty, no less than our notions or simple apprehensions. They serve to direct us in the common affairs of life, where our reasoning faculty would leave us in the dark. They are part of our constitution; and all the discoveries of our reason are grounded upon them. They make up what is called the common sense of mankind; and, what is manifestly contrary to any of those first principles, is what we call absurd. (An Inquiry into the Human Mind, Chapter VII, Section 4)"

"One might say that judgments from sense-experience they are justified insofar as they justify other beliefs we have, or perhaps because they are the output of a perceptual system designed by God to convey the truth. (Of course, if the latter is what gives these beliefs their justification, the claim that we are designed in this way needs to be justified as well.)"

In other words, We accept the existence of the external world as a matter of course merely because we perceive it.

(me on Doxa)
Meta:

1) Acceptance of Perceptions about the world.

But it is not merely because we percieve it that we accept it. It is because we perceive it in a particular sort of way. Because we perceive it in a regular and consistent way. This has been stated above by Reid. The common man goes on with his lot never giving a second thought to the fact that he can no more prove the veracity of the things around him than he can the existence of God or anything else in philosophy. Yet we accept it, as does the skeptic demanding his data, while we live out our lives making these assumptions all the time.

2) Consistency and Regularity.

If every time we woke up in the morning it was in a different house, with a different family, but one which make the assumption that we did nevertheless belong there and always had, and if the route to work changed every morning, if we never went to the same job twice, if our names and our looks were always different each day, we might think less of direct observation. But because these things are always the same from moment to moment and they never differ, we learn to trust them and we trust them implicitly as a matter of course. We do not try to prove to our selves each day when we get up "I am the same person today that I was yesterday," precisely because we learn very early that we always are the same person. We observe early on that we cannot penetrate physical objects without leaving holes and so we do not try to walk though walls; we know that doesn't work because it never works.

Hume observed that when we see two billiard balls we do not really see the cause of one making the other one move. What we really observe is one stopping and the other one starting. But, in practical terms, we do not observe the causality of a car running over the pedestrian as causing the pedestrian to fly across the road, but we know from experience that these two factors usually go hand in hand and so we don't play in the street.

a) Empirical proof?

In making this argument on boards many skeptics have argued "I see that the world is real with my own eyes." That's the point, why trust your eyes? You cannot prove they are seeing things properly. Everything could be an illusion everything we observe could be wrong. We cannot prove the existence of the external world, we assume it because it is always there. Some try to claim this direct observation as empirical proof. But they are confusing the notion of scientific empiricism with epistemological empiricism. Before we make the assumption that scientific data is valid we first make the epistemological assumption that perception is valid. Otherwise there would be no point in assuming the data. So epistemological empiricism is prior to scientific methods. In fact we have to simply make this assumption a priori with no proof and no way around the problem in order to able to make the assumptions necessary to accept scientific data. WE do usually make these assumptions, but they are assumptions none the less.

Dave:

Just because a sense of the numinous *feels* extremely important, profoundly meaningful, and strongly connected to something greater than oneself, it does not automatically follow that this is so. That is, that one has found and plugged into some pre-existing transcendent order to the universe. That is certainly a possibility, but it isn't necessarily true.

Meta:At that point all you are saying is that everything can be doubted. I never claimed to offer absolute proof. That's also a bit of straw man argument, because the basis upon which you are arguing ("feels extremely important") is not the basis upon I make the argument. I never said this is true because it feels important. I based the argument upon the way it fits epistemic judgment criteria (regular, consistent,inter-subjective).

Dave:

That alone leaves the door open for other potential explanations of why some people have such experiences, which supports the assertion you were contesting. But that isn't all. Because there isn't just an opening for other explanations, other explanations exist.

Meta:Just giving an alternative is not enough. You must prove the greater likelihood of it.

Dave:

Nor do they involve dismissive claims such as saying that people who have a sense of embracing and nurturing transcendence are just victims of brainwashing or wishful thinking or perhaps mentally ill.

Meta: Ok

Dave:

Take an evolutionary argument. A currently popular hypothesis is that the human brain didn't just get better and better at particular tasks by increasing neural processing power to particular area; rather, the increased interconnections between these various functional loci in the brain was just as if not more important.

All brains try impose artificial meaning on the world based on certain goals such as finding food, detecting danger, and the like. This can include making general assumptions about the nature of the world and its properties based on experience and sense data.

This also extends to making predictions about what will happen next. In more sophisticated brains, this includes an assumption of agency on other living creatures, which itself extends to attributing purpose and motive to what is happening around the organism.

Meta:
sure but we do not assume as a matter of course that what we perceive is merely imposing order on the world.If we assume this why do we act as though our perceptions are true. If it is the case that we impose order why does acting consistently with our perceptions work to get us by? The order must be there or it wouldn't work to act as though it is. Moreover, the basic assumption of science is that it is there. Otherwise why study it?

Dave:

An even more advanced feature is empathy, the capacity to guess what another creature is experiencing and to mimic that experience; examples would include sharing another organisms fear or pain. This is thought to be more common among more social animals with more sophisticated brains.

Meta: that doesn't prove that pain isn't real. We are not imposing a non existent order on the world by sharing fear of pain, pain is real and it should be avoided. That's real order. Your arguments seem to be assuming that perceiving something is the worst evidence for its existence, yet that is still considered the best evdience in all quarters.

Dave:

Now if we take these and similar features and qualities of the brain, and we boost their capacity and then increase the interconnections of their circuits, we might expect that this would lead to new properties of the brain and qualities of the mind. Complexity theorists would call them emergent properties.

Some of these properties might be beneficial, some might be detrimental, and some may be neither. Some may also be both depending on circumstance. If we assume this kind of model, a more balanced system may lead to artistic and intellectual genius, intense creativity, and a heightened capacity for social perceptiveness. A less balanced system could lead to obsession, neurosis, schizophrenia, etc.

(continued)
6:44 AM
Dave said...

Now, consider a species where fitting in, security in belonging, social and personal empathy was important; where agency detection and theory of mind (being able to "get inside someone else's head) was important; where recognizing or creating sophisticated and overarching patterns of causality is important; and where attributes such as creativity and suspension of disbelief (needed as much for activities such as thought experiments as for enjoying a good story) are important.

It is not at all unlikely that such a species, when the connections between the circuits for these attributes are increased, might have develop a tendency for an innate sense that the world is ordered and logical, that this is due to a greater intelligence or consciousness, and that one is connected to this greater whole. It would need not be something clearly articulated, say, in the strictly logical aspects of conscious awareness. It could instead hover as a profound sense of wonder and interrelatedness. It could even seem to precede the subjectively created experience of the world that one takes for granted as actual reality.

Now, could this suffice as an explanation for the sense of the numinous? Sure it could. It could also explain why some people have such a sense or have it more readily and experience it in a more pronounced way while others seems to lack it or to experience it less frequently or in a more subtle fashion.

Meta: not really. that's not adequate to account for all of the aspects of the phenomena. Yet, moreover, it's also just playing off of this assumption above that if perceptions work out then they must be false. you are really just arguing that my argument works too well. There is no premia facie reason for assuming your answer. we don't normally assume that if things work out they must be false. We don't assume "I perceive order therefore I'm just projecting it and it's not there." Sure that could be the case at some point, it also has to be that order is really there when it consistently works out that we follow it and we wind up walking off a cliff. We see the road ahead is clear and of all the amazing things we make it. We don't assume "wow that must have totally false as a perception, that's why it worked out." There's no reason to make that connection.It's a possibility as you say,I never claim an absolute proof. It's not a likely hood.

It doesn't account for all the phenomena. Why is the sense of the numinous the same in all cultures and all times, and its' always beneficial and life transforming? The prima facie sense, On face value, is that our perceptions have paid off. The mere possibility that they might be false is not a likelihood when they consistently work out. The sense of the numinous is transmitted by brain function, is it a mis fire? An imbalance, or just some perceptual sense that is normal but not often noticed and is now begin taken as a reflection of some reality when in fact it really serves some other purpose in the evolutionary endowment? This is a fair question, but to the extent that it's consistantly positive, that doesn't seem likely that it's an imbalance or"misfire" when those usually are not beneficial.

The possibility that it serves another purpose and we are misapplying is a real possibility, but that in itself doesn't disprove the argument. It's a justification argument not a proof. That means assuming the conclusion is valid based upon the result of following the perception is a valid assumption. There is no prima facie reason to assume it's wrong just because it worked out, when all our other assumption are prima facie that the perception is true when it works out. That amounts to dogmatic doubt for doubt's sake. This especially true as long as one doesn't show this alledged hidden purpose for the experience.

Dave:

One could counter that the same evolutionary process and reconfiguration of the brain could have enabled people to sense an actual pre-existing transcendent order in the same way that the evolution of photosensitive cells allowed for an awareness of the phenomena of light, but this would still pre-suppose the existence of this transcendent order. And it would also mean that some people would, biologically, have little or no access to it.

Meta: At this point that's just an empty possibility. In order to over turn a prima facie assumption you must show that the evidence justifying it isn't enough. That requires more than just a mere possibility that "this might be the case."

Dave:

Again, the point at this time is not an argument over which explanation is best, but rather that there are multiple explanations. Peak experiences, the sense of the numinous, etc, COULD point to God but don't necessarily do so.

Meta: just hanging out bunch of possibilities is not enough to overturn a prmia facie argument. If the standard is a prima facie case, then the presentation of empirical studies that back the case in all its major aspect with no counter data is a strong PF case.

Here's a good book, one which I actually researched from and quoted from in my book in making this argument. It's a fine defense, by a great philosopher (William Alston) better than I can ever do. This is a google book so this link will take you to an online copy of the actual book.
Perceiving God William P. Alston.

Realizing Answers to Dave's Comments on Realizing God Part 1

2011-11-21T05:36:00.000-08:00

This Dave character who has been arguing with me in the comment section is actually a long time friend. He also helped proof some of my forthcoming book we talk about here. That's how it comes to be that he's read chapter 3 in a book I haven't published yet. I think he's bored but that's not to dismiss the concerns he voices. Nor am I saying he's not serous about them. Dave is one of the brightest people I know so it's important to take his views seriously. He raises questions in regard to the thing about "realizing God." I was going to follow up on some of the concerns he voiced anyway, then he lays this huge set of questions and arguments on me over the week end. I thought it would be good to just put them up front and answer them here. I break it into 2 parts. I'll do part 2 tomorrow or Wednesday.

Dave wrote: Moreover, many people do in fact participate in religion and or assume God exists as a sociological phenomenon, not as an unambiguous revelation of God's presence. That cuts down the numbers a bit. Peak experiences cannot be seen as clear evidence of God, as there are many different ways to explain or understand them. God is one possibility but not the only one.

William James theorized and Wuthnow and Nobel back him up with data from their studies that there is a continuum of experience. So we find people at all levels of awareness from shedding a tear at the sight of a sun set to full blown mystical experience, to complete sainthood. There is a good reason to think that no one just holds a purely intellectual belief based either only upon logic or entirely upon society, culture, or family. everyone has had some kind of experience of of God's presence even if it is just a fleeting sense. Peak experience can most certainly be seen as clear evidence of God, the alternate explainations are easily disproved and have been debuncked in my book.

My arguments are not an attempt to show some empirical proof that God is there. My argument is that the fact of sensing a presence proves the presence is real in way that seeing a red patch proves that we can see red, or not in the way that seeing a crime proves a crime was committed. I argued that we should understand it as proof, we should see it that way. One of the major reasons is the experiences fit the criteria we use to determine the reality of experiences.

William James--famous Shrink

Metacrock replied: that's not true, read chapter 3 of my book.

Dave:
It isn't true that God is one of the explanations for peak experiences, or that God is only one potential explanation? Seriously though, you are incorrect. And I am well aware of what you wrote in Chapter 3 of your book.

It isn't true that God is ONE of the exhalations it sure as hell is! You must have mistyped that because all I have to do is show someone saying that God is one explanation and voila, it is so! Just read Hood! The above argument about criteria was in chapter three, you have no answered, neither you nor anyone. No one arguing against my argument has ever even addressed the issue, nor have you. You did not say a word about the epistemic criteria and until you do you have not answered the argument.

The problem with your assertions there and here is that you seem to presume that a sense of the numinous or a connection to the transcendent must be extra-physical and even extra-mental. That is, that it extends to something beyond the body and even beyond the mind as these terms are conventionally understood.

First of all I don't know what you mean by "extra mental" unless you mean outside of the mind. That's the standard assumption of mysticism; if by that you mean "beyond our understanding." If by extra mental you mean that reality is outside the mind, yes that's my assumption, I think it is the assumption of all people, most of us anyway. As for assuming that it has to be beyond (extra) physical I think that's a pretty reasonable and safe assumption. The current of thinking that everything must be physical is stupid. Eventually it's all going to collapse into nothing becuase it already has reduced from solid mater to energy. The term changed from "materialism" to "physicalism" because they realized that energy is a form of matter but is not solid or tangible like a brick. If you unravel the phsyics of electricity you see that subatomic particles are "charges" not little balls (which I am sure you well know). What charges are, we cant' say because so far all we have said is that charges are made up of smaller charges. you keep peeling away the solid and find there is nothing solid there. If physical means solid it ant physical.

Yes I am still convinced that eventually we will get down to mind. I am certain it will turn out that energy is mental. Reality is the thought in a transcendent mind. So does that make it "physical" or beyond physical? I don't know. You tell me. What does "physical" mean? In my opinion the meaning has changed. In the old days it meant tangible, something that can be touched. Now in phsyics and with physicialism it appears to mean something like "whatever can be taken as actually real, weather it's tangible or not." That means it's really a tautology. They might as well be saying "that which we agree to."

Dave:

Even granting that we are not talking about sense impressions from external sources, that does not tell us anything about what is actually happening other than the subjective descriptions offered by those who have so-called peak experiences. Your logic assumes that if we have an impression of something, a sense that something exists, that we can assume that A) it exists and that B) it is what we think it is.

That's a contradiction to your previous criticism. Above you seem to be criticizing me in part because I think that God is beyond our understanding. This is how I read the assertion that my views employ "extra mental." Now your criticizing becuase you seem to think I assert that we do know and what we know is given clearly and accurately and unmediated in qulia. These are obviously not true. I thought you proofed chapter 9 but guess you didn't. You should have becuase I spend half of that chapter talking about mediation of experience, weather we really understand what we experience or not and the metaphorical nature of words. My whole idea is that we don't know what heck is out there. We can know it loves us, we know it's good, we know it's all powerful but we can't know much else. The corollary to that view is that it doesn't flipping matter. That's one of the main differences between religion and scinece. Religion is helping you make it through the night, scinece is about scratching the itch to know "why does X happen?" We can't always know that, and we don't have to to get through the night. Those are two totally different needs and they are met in totally different ways. We don't need the kind of precision with religion that we have with science. Yes, I am using the image of "help me make it through the night" (the old song) in as a metaphor for getting through life and dealing with emotional pain and spiritual healing and whole ugly mess of living in a world of pain.

Dave:

If we go to sense data just for an easier analogy, that would be like saying that just because we think we see a ghost that a ghost exists. However, it may be that our senses are being fooled or that our perception (the interpretation of our senses) is inaccurate. That is, what we think we see may not actually be there and if there is something there it may not be what we think it is.

You are arguing from analogy Dave. I understand the concept here and that illustrates the issue gut it does not prove anything. Argument form analysis cannot be used as proof. Just because we are fooled by ghost phenomena doesn't' mean we are being fooled by religious experience. Even if we are that's not the issue. I never argued we can know we are not being fooled. That's very important to realize because I think that clears up a lot of misunderstanding. I am most certainly not arguing that religious experience gives us the kind of certainty we get in scinece. We don't need that kind of certainty,. It gives us existential certainty, we might call it "private" certainty. We don't' need any other kind in terms of the meaning of life. We are not going to get it anyway. In terms of life's journey that kind of certainty is exactly what we need and we certainly do get that from religious experience. There is a huge body of empirical evidence that proves that point.

More on Realizing God

2011-11-16T07:09:00.000-08:00

On CARM this guy "sofa King" one of the major trolls makes the bold assertion that
if God existed he would know it.

That's a good question. To make the statement "if God existed I would know it" requires several assumptions not in evidence:

(1) That God can't be be hidden

(2) that belief in God is only adding a fact to the universe

(3) That you don't know it and aren't just refusing to accept what you know.
(atheists really hate that one)

(4) That god is given in sense data

All of these assertions are wrong headed. You can know and you would know if you would allow yourself to realize God's reality; but you can't know by proofs or by empriical observational of sense data.

Since the latter is the only kind of evidence you accept then you can't know and you will never know.

It's not a matter of proof but realization. This is because God is not given in sense data, God is not another fact about the universe. God is not just another thing in the universe.

God is the basis of all reality. I used to make an analogy that was whimsical and meant to be; a fish scientist is hired to find water. He spends all his time looking at the ocean floor and never finds it because it never occurs to him he's looking through it. God is the medium in which we live. God sit he basis of reality and what we call reality is a thought God entertains. Thus you can't find God by examining empirical data.

you can only find god by ascertaining the nature of being and your place in being (ie a contingent creature). You can't prove God, you can't discover God you have to realize God and you do that by realizing the nature of being and your place in it.

God wants to be hidden because the point of life is the search; the search is a mechanism whereby we can internalize the values be gain by doing the search.

God arguments serves as focal points that enable to us lack on to coordinates so we aren't just saying 'all kinds of junk and stuff proves God." You have to have a place to start making realizations, but the place to end up is in the heart. the heart is the field where all actions takes place God-wise.

The idea that "I would know if there is a God" I suggest you do know, but you have yet to realize what you know, and the reason is becasue you don't want to face what it means to realize your place in being.

For example, the transcendental signifier argument (or "focal point"). There has to be a thing at the top of the metaphysical hierarchy that lends meaning to all the lesser meanings which we use to mark the world.

We cannot think coherently or communicate with out this. We may think of it as "reason," or "maths" or "laws of physics" but there is a top to the metaphysical hierarchy, even if you say "I don't believe in Metaphysics, that's bull" you are making a metaphysical statement and assumption by saying that. You cannot escape Metaphysics, you have to engage in it even to reject it, and thus you must subjective to an organizing principle because that's what Metaphysics is, grouping and organizing the world under some single organizing principle (Here I"m speaking of Heideggerian metaphysics).

Even the most Dawkamentalistic atheist has an er zots version of God.

This is just a part of the overall realization that the basis of reality is "holy" and special and has everything to do with the meaning of our place in the world.

That's the bottom line of belief in God, the object of ultimate concerns. Realizing that there is an object of our ultimate concerns is realizing God.

Realizing God

2011-11-14T06:54:00.000-08:00

Even though I have 42 arguments for the existence of God (42 = answer to God the universe and everything) I feel that making God arguments is beneficial but not necessary. Atheists often react with chagrin when told this. But the fact is I don't ever claim to "prove the existence of God." I really do believe that God is beyond our understanding and thus, would be unnameable to objective proof. This flys in the face of the way most atheists see things. Most atheist tend to orbit around the concept of objective proof, empirical science, absolute demonstration and on. In fct most atheists use a warfare model of discussion.They don't discuss beliefs, they "attack arguments." It's all about proving and that means conquering the enemy.

I want to side step that entire attitude. God is beyond our understanding, but not beyond are experince. We can't prove objectively that God exists, this is far form meaning that it's not worth it to believe or that belief is irrational or makes you stupid if you believe. There are many beliefs atheists take for granted that can't be proved, but that doesn't even give the pause since these are essential to getting by in the world: like the concept of other minds, or the idea that the sun will come up tomorrow. That we are not brains in vats. Atheists scough at this stuff all the time, but they rarely stop to consider what it means. It means your mockery of it due to the fact that you take it for granted. You don't have any scientific evidence that proves you exist, or that other minds exist, or that the future will be like the past and so on. all of that is obtained through the very means that people of faith use to belief. You mock their beliefs and take your own for granted. That's because that warfare model of argumentation doesn't allow for a searing self examination.

The basic model would be not to argue for the existence of God, but to realize that God is reality. It's a matter of opening your eyes to see something that is already there, that you know it there you just never bothered to understand it before.It's just that, open your eyes and realize God is there. How is this done? By expanding the categories of knowledge so that they now include the relevant information necessary to see things in a new way. Here are the categories required:

Phenomenology
existentialism
cultural constructivism
modal logic
the transcendental signifer
(and with it deconstruction and postmodernism)

these things are not augments. They the basis out of which arguments might be made, but more importantly, they are fields of thought which include both logic and data the apprehension of which will help one understand why people believe in God. Once understanding that one will see the reality of God is plain. God's reality has been masked by Western thought since philosophy and modern science has segmented our understanding, breaking up epistemology from metaphysics and ontology, make seperate categories so we can't connect globally to different categories of knowledge that make it possible to see connections.

I am not saying that if you read all this stuff you will agree with me. But to understand why belief with being able to prove it "objectively" is not irrational you have to expand your understanding of what knowledge is and what it means to have beliefs.

Belief in God is not merely adding a fact to the universe. Yesterday I did not know there is a God now I know there is one. So the universe yesterday had swizzle sticks and pop corn and tooth brushes and combs, and today it has those things and God. This is not what belief in God is. It is not just adding a fact to the universe. It's understanding the nature of being in such a way that we see the holy aspect of being.

Paul Tillich said "if you know that being has depth you cannot be an atheist." What does this mean? That's what reading this stuff is about.If you expand your knwoledge categories and broader your understanding then you see that being is more than just a fact of existence, you come to realize God is reality; The ground of Being.

Please read that link there, several pages to get the idea of what I mean by saying that God is the ground of being. When you realize the nature of being you can't help but understand that God has to be. Now to explain about these knowledge categories.

Phenomenology

this is an approach to ontology (the study of being) through which one allows the sense data to suggest it's own categories.It was pioneered by Brintano in the late nineteenth century but is best known for its two major thinkers: Hulleral and Heidegger. Science, and all forms of metaphysics (in Heidegger's sense of the term) sense data is pre screened into pre selected categories. This is what the atheist is doing when he says "I want objective evidence." Hes saying I have already decide what evidence I will accept and what I want accept. Any evidence that doesn't tally with his pre set ideology is automatically discounted. What one needs to do is allow the experinces of the divine, or so we don't beg question, experinces which some might take to be the divine--the sense of the numinous to suggest their own categories.

existentialism

Philosophy made famous by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. But it has a strong Christian wing the van Guard of which was led by Kierkegaard, and brought up in its main body by Gabriel Marcel. Existentialism starts from the premiise of the individual's own understanding of the authenticity of his existence and it's meaning in the universe.

cultural constructivism

The idea that any idea that can or must be put into language is a cultural construct, that is an idea constructed by previously constructed meaning in society. These ideas are found in all language because all language is an artifact of culture. So everything we can rationally talk about is a cultural construct.

this means that science is not absolute knowledge, It' not objective, objectivity is impossible. Science is just another culturally bound language game.

modal logic

this comes much closer to real truth anything in science. but of course it depends upon pre selected premises. Yet is essential for understanding concepts about God.

the transcendental signifier
(and with it deconstruction and postmodernism)

The "TS" as I will call it is essentially God. That is to say God functions in the economy of a religious tradition as a Transcendental signifier. This is a very complex idea and requires a lot of real close reading. I have two blog spots in which I explained it pretty good.

Here's the "arguemnt" (except now it's not an argument but it's why the TS is a connection Between the TS and God.

these are background to understand the idea of the Trascendental Signifer.

Derridian Background of the TS

TS part 2

Finally, you need to know about the vast body of scientist work surrounding mystical experinces. When all of this comes together you realize there's really point to deny the reality of God. the nature of the universe takes shape around God and you realize that concept is the center.

The Religous a priori: Shameless Plug

2011-11-11T04:41:00.000-08:00

It's friday, and hit rates dip on Friday. Please excuse my shameless plugs. I thought this would be a good time to talk about my new website that I think is grossly overlooked. I have had my site Doxa now for about twelve years. It's a good sight but my dyslexia got the better of me and correcting all that text is such a daunting task. Moreover, there's so much of it. I've decided Doxa is a completed work. I no longer add new stuff to it. The new website that I am using to put up updated material is The Religious A prori.

Unfortunately the nature of the net being what it is, they have killed off the ability to have a good cheap free static website like Doxa was. Working in Geocities made it easy and fun. Now that's gone everything is hard. They want you to spend a hundred a month paying some professional to do your site for you. The only free easy sites left are blogs. I just used a blog on this company, blogger. I put up a static website on a blog. For some reason people wont look at it.

It's really going to waste because I've got dynamite stuff on that site. I've got a good mix of all the major categories I had on Doxa. I haven't transferred the woman's part over yet (the egalitarian section). I might make that into a separate site. The Religious A prori. is actually three sites in one. They are all linked through the stand along pages which serves as a navigation.

I have the main body, then Bogus atheist social sciences, where I debunk ideas like Christians go to prison ore often and Christianity is dying out and all that stuff. I have a great thing on the Atheist IQ scam (where they try to claim that atheists are smarter than believers) proving nothing they say on that has any validity to it. I've actually demonstrated they have fabricated the statistics, caught them in the act of changing the data, on the prison thing.

The third section is Jesus and the Bible. It's got all of Doxa's greatest hits on the Jesus pages, Plus new material such as the Revolutionary Jesus post I did here on the blog. Some of the Jesus part is still under construction.

the arguments for God section is very different from Doxa. I am not putting up 42 arguments. That's too many to mess with. I have nine so far, I'll probalby add a few more. Four of them are new not on Doxa. Two new versions of the Tillich arguments. Clarke's Cosmological Argument and a new re-invented version of the "God pod" which I now call God on the Brain.

for some reason people don't keep going to the site. there will be a bit of activity and then it's dead for weeks. I think it's because it's on a blog. It's designed to navigate like a static website. Please check it out, sigh up to follow and it and go back periodically and read it all.

The Religious A prori.

Is the Phrase "God Exists" a "Meaningful" Phrase?

2011-11-09T06:43:00.000-08:00

The Internet Infidels blog Secular Outpost
6/09/10

A discussion is launched by Bradley Bowen over the concept of alleged incoherence of the statement "God exists."

In The Coherence of Theism (original:1977, revised ed.:1993), Richard Swinburne argues that the sentence “God exists” is a meaningful indicative sentence that expresses a coherent proposition. He does this by raising objections to arguments that have been given against this view, and by also making a detailed positive case.

For the negative or defensive case, Swinburne starts out by raising objections to some general arguments against this view, and later in the book he raises objections to more specific arguments that focus on the alleged incoherence of specific characteristics or combinations of specific characteristics that are used to define the word “God”.

The main general argument against his position that is examined by Swinburne is a logical positivist argument about the sentence “God exists”, derived primarily from A.J. Ayer’s book Language, Truth, and Logic (1936).

This is how Swinburne interprets the skeptical argument presented by Ayer:

(1) If the sentence "God exists" expresses a coherent statement, then the sentence "God exists" expresses either an analytic proposition or else it expresses a synthetic proposition.
(2) The sentence "God exists" does not express an analytic proposition.
(3) The sentence "God exists" does not express a synthetic proposition.
Therefore,
(4) It is not the case that "God exists" expresses a coherent statement.

The logic of this argument is fine, and Swinburne accepts premises (1) and (2), so his focus is on the question of whether premise (3) is true or well-supported.

This skeptical argument is basically a modern version of Hume’s fork. Hume divided claims into two categories: (a) relations of ideas and (b) matters of fact. Hume argued that all claims fall into one or the other category, so since metaphysical sentences do not express either “the relations of ideas” or “matters of fact”, such sentences do not express claims or propositions.

It seems unclear to me why this would have anything to do with Hume's fork. This concept says that one cannot derive an ought from an is. This would seem to have nothing to do with the attempt to make a coherent metaphysical statement. Moreover, the idea that metaphysical claims do not express relations of ideas seems absurd and ridiculous. First of all if that were true than science si incoherent. We have known since days of A.E. Burtt and well before that, that scinece is based upon metaphysical assumptions. See Burtt's great famous book The Metaphysical Foundations of Early Modern Science. Most aspect of modern knowledge relate to metaphysical assumptions, any attempt to organize an understanding of the world and group sense data under pre conceived categories is basically a metaphysical assumption. In this connection one might enjoy Edward Feser's commentary on "Recovering Sight After Scientism."

Nor is it logical that Metaphysical claims cannot be matter of fact. If that were the case then scinece would be unable to assert matters of fact. The assertion of materialism (physicalism) is a metaphysical assertion. Come to to that the assertion that Metaphysical claims cannot be matters of fact is a metaphysical claim. The whole concept is meaningless and the reason for this is because one runs a huge risk when basing one's views on Hume. Atheist worship Hume as the great thinker who launched modern atheism not realizing the was the considered the Derrida of his day. That is to say an opportunistic game player more concerned with his own greatness with truth, and hankering to be known as a genius at all cost, and advocating radical concepts he could not pull off. He was brilliant, but not serious, not truth seeking, obsessed with his own advancement. Moreover, Hume's take on religion is nothing short of amateurish and bombastic and nonfactual. In fact I would use the term "propaganda" in relation to this description. Most of the great ideas Hume stumbled on to came from Bishop Berkeley whom he admired (even though he was a Christian so even atheist in that day could recognize that Chrsitians were intellectually valid). Hume set's forth an empiricist understanding that defines religious thought in straw man terms as jaundiced and silly but takes the most absurd view as it's point of attack. Where does he come off asserting that metaphysical claims are not matters of fact when his assertions of empiricism must of necessity be metaphysical? The Empiricist brackets all knowledge but his own perceptions and that is a metaphysical move because it asserts that all sense data but be herded into pre conceived categories.

The concept of an analytic proposition can be viewed as a clarification of Hume’s notion of statements that express “the relations of ideas”. The concept of a synthetic proposition can be viewed as a refinement of Hume’s notion of statements that express “matters of fact”. Given the assumption that all coherent propositions can be categorized as either being an analytic or a synthetic proposition, a dilemma simliar to Hume's fork can be constructed for the sentence "God exists".

Posted by Bradley Bowen at 9:27 PM

There are some problem's with using Hume's categories. One such problem is was well before the problems of positivism and A.J. Ayer so he was totally out of the loop when Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) proved that the verification principle caused to wither everything other than the verification principle, including scinece, history, knowledge in general. There's a good article by Thomas F. Torrance on Polanyi's Christian faith. That move spelled the beginning of the end for the Ayer form of positivism as a force able to accomplish its task being so valuable to scinece.. See Polyani's book Personal Knowledge: Toward a post critical Philosophy. Hume lived before any of this, before Phenomenology, before positivism and before the modern and post modern understandings of philosophy of since. In fact it's monumentally crucial that Hume never knew anything about Heidegger's Metaphysics. In Hume's day Philosophies and skeptics were reacting against Scholasticism and agaisnt views of the Church that had been shaped by Austine and Aquinas. They were not cognizant to any degree of the people of science and knowledge, they were trying to dig themselves out from under the middle ages. They were busy destroying the intellectual roots of Western culture which were planted firmly in the soil of the Christian faith. So I suggest that Hume's categories are antiquated and that is pronouncements are irrelevant.

This further bit is in the comment section. Bowen talks about Swinburne's philosophical background.

Bowen in Comment section:

Bradley Bowen said...Uzza said...

does Swineburn ever define what he means by "god"?
===========
Yes.

Swinburne is a modern analytic philosopher. When he was a student of philosophy, he took courses from Ordinary Language philosophers, including John Austin.

Swinburne provides a general definition of the term "God" and then also provides clarification and analysis of each word or phrase in that general definition.

One of the main tasks of his book COT is to describe circumstances in which each of the alleged characteristics of "God" would occur. He does this in order to demonstrate that each characteristic is coherent in itself, and then he procedes to try to describe circumstances in which combinations of these characteristics occur together in one person.

Here is the general definition given by Swinburne in Part II of the book ("A Contingent God"):

"In this part I shall consider what it means to claim that there exists eternally an omnipresent spirit, free, creator of the universe, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and a source of moral obligation, and whether this is a coherent claim." (COT, revised edition, p.99)

That's all fine and good and I would assert that Swinburne can handle himself in a fight. There's an even bigger problem with this whole discussion and the very concept of the argument, it's a problem that would outdated even Swinburne's answer. The very question itself "the existence of God" is wrong headed and asserts the wrong concept about the nature of God of Christianity. The problem is the atheists are right here, but they are right for the wrong reason. Yes I said they are right! They don't know why they are right. "God exists" is a theologically inadequate statement, at least in the view of Paul Tillich, which I agree with. The atheists take it to mean that there is no God. But in reality it's just that existing is something that only "things" do, contingent things that is. So God is not a thing in creation, but the basis of reality. So the atheists are wright that "God exists" is not coheent as a statement but not becasue there is no God.

Duan Olson explains:

Famously or infamously, Tillich denied that God exists, or that God is a being, and identified God with being-itself. In typical quotes, he says, “It would be a great victory for Christian apologetics if the words ‘God’ and ‘existence’ were very definitely separated,” and “God is being-itself, not a being.”[iii] What often gets overlooked in discussions of Tillich’s idea of God is its theological justification. I bring this justification to the fore in my analysis.
Tillich denied that God exists, or that God is a being, in order to preserve the notion of God’s aseity. In traditional theology, for God to be “a se” means God is neither derived from nor dependent upon anything. Tillich points out repeatedly that if you take this idea seriously, then no aspect of finite reality and no category of thought can be applied literally to God[iv]. If some characteristic of finite reality applies literally to God, it means that aspect of reality is greater than God in the sense that God relies on it being there in order to be. It is unconditioned, and it conditions God. God is dependent upon it, and is not a se. Finite reality and all of its parts must be made possible by God, but if anything in finite reality is literally applied to God, or if we can subsume God under any categories applicable to finite reality, this shows that God is subject to some part of reality and is not a se.

(III:Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 205, 237. IV: Ibid, vol 2, 6).(From "Paul Tillich and the Ontological Argument" Quodlibet Journal, vol 6, no 3, July 2004).

This is aspect of Tillich’s work that really baffles and angers atheists, his denial that God “exists.” Many have claimed that he is actually an atheist, but that’s because they don’t bother to understand his ontology, it doesn’t occur to them that he’s using the term “exist” in a specialized way. Even though he doesn’t explain it this way, what he’s really saying is that “existence” is for contingent things. Contingencies exist and necessary things have being, or be or they are “part of reality.” Look at the terms he uses in the quotation above as alternatives to “existence.” He speaks of “the validity of truth of God.” Another term he uses as an alternative for God’s’ mode of being is “reality.” God doesn’t exist but he is real none the less. Existence, for Tillich is part of the “surface” of things, the level at which things merely exists. Another aspect that both skeptics and believers alike have trouble with is the notion that God is not something (he means some thing) or someone. What he means by that is that God is not a thing or an individual entity. God is not just another thing in creation alongside “things:” if we made a list of everything in the universe, stop lights, tooth brushes, swizzle sticks, fish, bananas, Petula Clarke albums, we could not then put God on the list alongside those things. Nor is God a “he” or a “she” or a “someone.” God blows away your conveniently understood categories; God defies our sense of the appropriate nature of pronouns and grammar. God transcends our understanding, there is no analogy that is totally appropriate but all religious language is analogical because that’s the only way we can approach something beyond our understanding. The idea that God is not someone is anathema to a lot of believers, and I can sympathize with them. But this does not mean that I don’t related to God as my “heavenly father” or that I don’t feel intense intimate love emotions connected with God, both from God to me and me to God. Nor does this mean that I think God has no will to be followed. The nature of God and the problem of mind and consciousness will be dealt with in a latter chapter. The important point right now is that the hall mark of Tillich’s view of God is that God is the unconditioned!

To insist upon the ordinary use of the categories in relation to God would be equally misleading, as to use Tillich specialized sense and not explain it. We can't speak of God as "existing" and properly understand God as the basis of reality, as something transcendent of thing hood. The basic problem goes all the way back to that of using Hume and his categories as a critical tool in evaluating belief in God in the first place. Hume was just ill equipped to understand the concept once the trashed the categories of Christian thought that has been set up by the original mystics who famed concepts like Being itself in the first place. The real problem here is making the assumption that if empiricism is the basis of modern scinece then it must be the only valid basis for knowledge and thus we can subject all aspects of reality that basis. The problem is you can't subject the foundations of reality to any sort of study as though the foundation is just another piece of qualia or a side effect of the whole. That really sums up the whole mistake of atheism in the first place.

Whose Side is God on in Politics?

2011-11-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

God doesn't take the side of parties. He takes the side of the poor.

This is another one where I'm going to risk losing some "followers." As I like to think of it, they are not really my followers anyway, they are either Jesus' followers or followers of their own quest for truth (not they aren't following Jesus). I"m just barrowing them for hits on the blog. I have this on my heart so I'm going to write about it. Don't worry this is not a tirad about how you should vote the way I hope you do. I'm not even going to say anything about voting or political parties.

I was posting on carm the other day, I got in an argument with a Christian, which doesn't often happen. Someone had put up a post asking "what is the Christian perspective on Capitalism and Economic Disparity." I had come across this great list of everything the Bible says about God's attitudes toward the poor, it's complied by the guy who runs world vision. I put up a thread of my own called "God takes the side of the poor." The list is really good. It's real long and give many verses. I'll give a couple on each category to show the categories and the kinds of verses.

Psalm 12:5 “‘Because of the oppression of the weak and the groaning of the needy, I will now arise,’ says the LORD. I will protect them from those who malign them."

Psalm 140:12 “I know that the LORD secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy.”

Isaiah 25:4 “You have been a refuge for the poor, a refuge for the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat. For the breath of the ruthless is like a storm driving against a wall.”

Isaiah 41:17 “The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; tongues are parched with thirst. But I the LORD will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.”

14 passages in that section.

God's commands concerning the poor

Deuteronomy 15:7 “If there is a poor man among your brothers in any of the towns of the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward your poor brother.”

Deuteronomy 26:12 “When you have finished setting aside a tenth of all your produce in the third year, the year of the tithe, you shall give it to the Levite, the alien, the fatherless and the widow, so that they may eat in your towns and be satisfied.”

Leviticus 19:9-10 “'When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.”

more than 10 in that section

Blessings for those who serve the poor.

Deuteronomy 15:10 “Give generously to him and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to.”

Psalm 41:1 “Blessed is he who has regard for the weak; the LORD delivers him in times of trouble.”

Proverbs 19:17 “He who is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will reward him for what he has done.”

Proverbs 22:9 “A generous man will himself be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor.”

Isaiah 58:10 "And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday."

Jeremiah 7:5-7 "If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever."

9 passages.

One might also be interested in my blog piece "on Being in Need in America."

Of coure there was a brother in Christ who was offended. He laid down a bunch of coutner verses:

(Prov 10:4 NKJV) He who has a slack hand becomes poor, But the hand of the diligent makes rich.

(Prov 6:6) Go to the ant, you sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise, (7) Which, having no captain, Overseer or ruler, (8) Provides her supplies in the summer, And gathers her food in the harvest. (9) How long will you slumber, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? (10) A little sleep, a little slumber, A little folding of the hands to sleep; (11) So shall your poverty come on you like a prowler, And your need like an armed man.

(Prov 12:24 NKJV) The hand of the diligent will rule, But the lazy man will be put to forced labor.

(Prov 13:4 NKJV) The soul of a lazy man desires, and has nothing; But the soul of the diligent shall be made rich.

(Prov 19:15 NKJV) Laziness casts one into a deep sleep, And an idle person will suffer hunger.

(Prov 19:24 NKJV) A lazy man buries his hand in the bowl, And will not so much as bring it to his mouth again.

(Prov 20:4 NKJV) The lazy man will not plow because of winter; He will beg during harvest and have nothing.

(Prov 20:13 NKJV) Do not love sleep, lest you come to poverty; Open your eyes, and you will be satisfied with bread.

(Prov 22:29 NKJV) Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings; He will not stand before unknown men.

(Prov 24:30 NKJV) I went by the field of the lazy man, And by the vineyard of the man devoid of understanding; (31) And there it was, all overgrown with thorns; Its surface was covered with nettles; Its stone wall was broken down. (32) When I saw it, I considered it well; I looked on it and received instruction: (33) A little sleep, a little slumber, A little folding of the hands to rest; (34) So shall your poverty come like a prowler, And your need like an armed man.

(Eccl 10:18 NKJV) Because of laziness the building decays, And through idleness of hands the house leaks.

(1 Ki 11:28 NKJV) The man Jeroboam was a mighty man of valor; and Solomon, seeing that the young man was industrious, made him the officer over all the labor force of the house of Joseph.

The thing all of these have in common is the view that poverty is caused by laziness. If people are poor they are poor because they are lazy. Poor = lazy. Now that view may have made sense in ancient Israel, but is doesn't make much sense today. A lo of middle class want to believe it does. They have psychological motivations for believing that. They want to aswage their guilt because they have money or a job and don't help the poor they see around them. So the answer is to blame the poor, they want to be poor it's their fault.

In ancient Israel where everyone subsisted by family farms those who didn't want to work died. Those people had to work their you know what's off to survive. In modern America we have people whose lives are lied to plants and factories. When those factories close who towns can be unemployed. When that happen where do they go? If the whole twon is unemployed where do you get a job? If you don't have money to move to another place and look for a job what do you do? That's not laziness if there's no opportuntiy. Poverty has gone up in America and 1 in 10 live in poverty. Many can't meet their bills even working two jobs:

Guardian|observer

Americans have always believed that hard work will bring rewards, but vast numbers now cannot meet their bills even with two or three jobs. More than one in 10 citizens live below the poverty line, and the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening...
A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown...
Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.
Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck - a medical bill or factory closure - away from disaster. The minimum wage of $5.15 (£2.95) an hour has not risen since 1997 and, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest since 1956. The gap between the haves and the have-nots looms wider than ever. Faced with rising poverty rates, Bush's trillion-dollar federal budget recently raised massive amounts of defence spending for the war in Iraq and slashed billions from welfare programmes.
..

Another ridiculous aspect of that stereo-type that poor = lazy is the fact that most poor people have more than one job one need not be unemployed to be starving.

CNNMoney

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Being poor doesn't mean being jobless, said a recent Challenger, Gray & Christmas report that found more and more working families are living at or below the poverty line.

"Poverty and hunger are rapidly becoming a workplace issue... if for no other reason than the fact that an employee who is worried about where his or her next meal will come from is not going to be very productive," said John Challenger, company CEO, in a statement.

But that's just the job placement firm's assessment. Aside from wage laws, there are no other rules telling businesses what they must give their employees.

"There is no mandate for corporations except for the minimum wage, which is set at $5.15 an hour. After that, the issue's up to the ethicists," said William Dickens, a labor economist with the Brookings Institution.

Several economists, labor activists and legal analysts also agreed that placing the welfare of American workers at the mercy of corporate largesse is dangerous for employees because of what Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has dubbed Wall Street's "infectious greed."

I've seen some make the argument that the welfare system takes care of everyone so homeless are derelicts who want to be homeless. That's a joke. Where I live, Dallas Texas, it takes at least 2 years to get housing, and you have to qualify for it and most of that means putting money down, if you don't have the money you are out. The shelters are alarming. People get robbed and abused and they also have to be imprisoned in the shelter to stay there. You can't leave and go out in the day and look for work. You can't get welfare in Dallas without children. Single white males can't get it without being disabled. One get's just barely enough on disability to starve with a roof over your head, not much of a roof. When I was in seminary we all went down to work at soup kitchen for a day, some interned there. They told us that after six months on the street people go through mental break downs where they become unable to get out of the situation then are just trapped in a life of gutter vs abusive shelter. When these selish people see the homeless and think "they want to be homeless" it's probably becuase they have reached a point where they really can't get out of it.

When you are homeless you are a non person. Everyone thinks you were is gone. the person you were is dead. People don't regard you as human anymore, you become garbage. It's totally idiotic that a person who claims to follow the teachings of Jesus would actually think that way about people just becuase they can't make it. It's to aswage guilt.

Seek God in our hearts and let's pray will show us how he thinks about the poor. Then go be a republican. I wont tell you how to vote. Let God show what he feels about these non people who you think don't want to work.

If we want to talk about sin and equate poverty with sin, it's far more apt to be the social sins such as greed-spawned collusion, price fixing, economic trends based upon short term profits at the expense of workers, exploitation, people treated as inanimate capital in economic decision making that causes poverty rather personal initiative. Sixty Mintues showed former bank officials whose jobs it was to approve papers for foreclosure. They admitted they fabricated thousands, not hundreds, thousands of false papers thus stealing the homes of thousands of people, people who had kept up the payments and did not owe. Their homes were stolen, they have no recourse and now they are in poverty, struggling, trying to once again get back in the middle class, how many of them actually will? Are they just lazy? The system does nothing to help them.

The predictable results:The Foreclosure crisis is now spread over 2 million homes.

PBS News Hour Extra. Oct 22, 2010

Since the economic crisis began in December 2007, millions of Americans have lost their homes to foreclosure, sending families scrambling to find a place to live -- sometimes moving into relatives' houses, settling in homeless shelters or on the streets.

Foreclosure, which is when a bank takes away a house because the owner cannot pay back a loan, is at the heart of the economic crisis. During the 1990s and up until 2007, banks and lenders encouraged people to buy expensive homes with loans far beyond their earnings. In some cases, lenders tricked homebuyers with payment schedules designed to start out low, but balloon after a few years.
More than 2.5 million Americans are currently at risk of losing their homes. In recent weeks there have been halts to foreclosures due to questions about paperwork and whether lenders and banks followed the rules when processing foreclosure paperwork. In Florida, activists such as Lisa Epstein have been investigating banks' fraudulent mortgage practices, including using ”robo-signers” to sign legal documents necessary to evict vulnerable homeowners.

Confirmation on the number from real estate sources

Based on RealtyTrac data, since December 2007 (the official start of the recession) and through June 2010 there have been a total of 2.36 million U.S. properties repossessed by lenders through foreclosure (REO). In addition there have been 3.48 million default notices and 3.46 million scheduled foreclosure auctions.

Thanks to action by States Attorneys general there was a temporary moratorium on the illegal house stealing. but that's back on now. Their house stealing only slacked off for a few weeks. That's just a temporary lull. The temporary stop is due to action by attorneys general. It has been found that mortgage companies were illegally foreclosing, just rushing paperwork through without any actual regard to real documentation of the house. This is nothing more than thieving. They are literally house thieves.

PBS

Bank of America, the nation’s largest bank, had stopped foreclosures as it investigated its methods, but plans to restart its foreclosure offices as early as October 25.

Illegal Foreclosures? The State investigates Three Top South Florida Law Firms....
all Business a D&B company

By By KIMBERLY MILLER Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Publication: LexisNexis
Date: Wednesday, August 11 2010

Three of Florida's largest foreclosure law firms are under investigation by the state attorney general following allegations they illegally rushed thousands of cases through the court system.
The firms, dubbed "foreclosure mills" because of the large volume they handle, are the Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson in Fort Lauderdale; Shapiro & Fishman, which has offices in Boca Raton and Tampa; and the Plantation-based firm of David J. Stern. All three handle foreclosures in Palm Beach County.
Tuesday's announcement of the investigation by the Economic Crimes Division of the attorney general's office says "thousands of final judgments of foreclosure against Florida homeowners may have been the result of the allegedly improper actions of the law firms."

Several reports have surfaced in recent months of judges throwing out foreclosure cases in which key documents, such as assignments of mortgages and notes, appear to be doctored, backdated or filed by groups with no standing to foreclose on a property.
Also, attorneys defending homeowners against foreclosure have complained the amount owed a lender on a defaulted loan sometimes cannot be substantiated.
The convoluted boom-time financial practice of repeatedly buying, selling and bundling mortgages exacerbates the situation, making it difficult sometimes to determine who is truly owed the balance of a home loan.
"On numerous occasions, allegedly fabricated documents have been presented to the courts in foreclosure actions to obtain final judgments against homeowners," the statement from Attorney General Bill McCollum says.

Foreclosure mills cranking out the theft of houses. Not just in Florida. It's all 50 states:

Action Alert
Carl C. Asbury Save My Home Lawgroup

Action Alert – Foreclosure Fraud – Tell your Attorney General “Don’t Sit Down with the Banks! Stand up Against Fraud!”

Posted by Foreclosure Fraud on October 29, 2010 ·

A 50-state task force investigating U.S. foreclosure practices may meet with lenders as early as this week, less than a month after JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. suspended some home seizures.

“We’ve had several conference calls with major lenders,” Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said in an interview, declining to specify which ones. “The banks want to sit down with the attorneys general. These meetings are being set up,” said Suthers, whose office is a member of the executive committee of the task force.

All 50 states on Oct. 13 announced a coordinated inquiry into whether banks and loan servicers used false documents and signatures to justify hundreds of thousands of foreclosures. The probe came after JPMorgan and Ally Financial Inc.’s GMAC mortgage unit said they would stop repossessions in 23 states where courts supervise home seizures and Bank of America froze foreclosures nationwide.

Not only have the mortgage companies been found to be actual thieves, as I thought way back when I was dealing with them, but even the people claim to have you, the knights in shining armor who are going to come to your rescue are merely vultures circling waiting end. The state of Indiana has taken action

Indiana Real estate Rama

Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller urges Hoosiers to avoid foreclosure rescue scams

VINCENNES, IN - October 21, 2010 - (RealEstateRama) — Many homeowners facing foreclosure who are frustrated with their loan servicers turn to for-profit foreclosure consultants whose advertisements often promise any home can be saved from foreclosure and their services are 100% guaranteed. Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller today announced the filing of 10 lawsuits against companies making such claims calling them false and illegal, including one complaint which was filed today in Knox County against Integrated Financial Solutions, headquartered in New Jersey.

These so-called ‘foreclosure consultants’ are taking advantage of Hoosiers who are facing desperate financial hardships and scamming them out of thousands of dollars. They are operating illegally and this will not be tolerated in Indiana,” Zoeller said. “Working to protect Hoosier consumers includes bringing actions against those who violate our state laws and also warning people to protect themselves, their family and their neighbors - don’t let a loved one fall victim to these scams, no matter how convinced they may be of their legitimacy.”

The lawsuits were filed in nine different Indiana counties by Zoeller and his team of deputy attorneys general serving in the Homeowner Protection Unit. The coordinated filing was done in an effort to raise awareness of the pitfalls of hiring for-profit foreclosure rescue companies.

So even the 'good guys' are the bad guys. The only good guys in it are the victims who lose their houses. No one is there to help them and even the laws are against them. The mortgage company, which is just a better organized gang of thieves, those are the one's the laws protect. The media is complicit too. look at the huge discrepancy when they talk about causes. Everyone is afraid to call it like it is. PBS attributes the crisis to lowering prices.

PBS source above

Part of the financial crisis, however, is that the value of homes has dropped sharply. Therefore, many homeowners who pay their mortgage on time still owe more than their home is worth. For example, if you bought a house for $300,000 in 2007, your house might be worth $150,000 today. Owing more than the house is worth is called being "under water."

why are home prices low? The falling prices didn't start until 2007 when the crisis was well underway. There were forsale signs all over the place before I even lost my house in 2006. Why were the prices falling? Because suddenly all the get rich quickers knew the bubble had burst. The golden goose was dead and they wanted out of the housing market. The only people still in the housing market were people who actually wanted to live in the houses. By that time the prices were falling. Mortgage companies blame scape goat lends of subprogram loans, and of cousre the evil victims willing to take the loans.

foreclosure data online since 2001
mortgage company propaganda

Much of the easy credit in the
Cleveland area came in the form of subprime loans. Over 30,000 high risk loans were given to the residents of this region in 2006 resulting in subprime loans making up almost 30 percent of the total loans handed out in Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage and Summit counties.

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association the number of foreclosure in
Ohio on subprime loans are up to two to three times higher than the statewide foreclosure rate on prime loans. Furthermore, mortgage disclosure information and court records reveal that areas with the heaviest concentration of foreclosures have been the most prevalent in subprime lending.

Of cousre they are not willing to mention foreclosure mills, we have no idea how that long has been going no but it's obviously longer than the crisis has been viral.

What has Obama done to help?

HomeOwnership.org
non profit organization

The MHA plan essentially comprises two mortgage relief programs to help troubled homeowners - a loan modification program and a refinance program.
Federal Mortgage Relief - Loan Modifications

This page contains a breif description of the loan modification program. For a complete description of the qualifications and how to apply go to the Loan Modification Programs: How to Qualify and Apply page.

The purpose of a mortgage modification is to get your monthly payment to a more affordable level. An "affordable" mortgage payment is typically defined as 31% of the borrower's monthly gross income. This is achieved by modifying one or more components of your mortgage:

Lowering the interest rate
Extendeding the life of the loan
Lowering the loan principle

Eligibility

There are a lot of factors that contribute to a borrower qualifying for the loan modification. Use the online qualifier provided on this website to determine how likely you are to qualify for a loan modification:

Online Loan Modification Qualifier

How to apply

If youre ready to begin negotiating for a loan modification, get some free advice before contacting your lender. Consider talking to a HUD-approved, nonprofit housing consultant and find out how likely you are to qualify for a loan modification based on your individual mortgage and financial situation.

What if you don't qualify or have been denied?

If you don't qualify for a loan mod or if you've been denied one in the past, there are two private programs available to you.

The HAFA Program - Government assistance for a short sale or deed-in-lieu of foreclosure
Safe Haven Program - For people with too much debt and monthly expenses
Soft Landing Program - Guidance for a smooth transition out of the home

This is not nearly enough. It essentially doesn't help anyone who is really poor, on the brind of losing the house, or with a long term problem. It's much more than Bush did. The only thing Bush did was to call the victims "lazy." He did nothing. What did the American voter do in the last elections (this month)? They put the people who caused the problem back in power. How many republicans in Congress do you supposes sell real estate, have wives or husbands who do, or bet friends who do? Republicans and real estate go together like rain and tornadoes, or poison and death. How do you supposes the laws got slanted to help the mortgage company and not the homeowner? While we are on the subject consider the timing of last months action by attorney's general? Right before the mid elections. Worked for the Texas Attorney General. The grils, Phoebe and Kat got two weeks off on worry and Kat voted all republican raving about how Greg Abbott has helped her so. he helped her so much she's packing to leave now!

Nothing the Dems have done comes close to helping. If republicans caused it, the dems haven't cleaned it up. I'm not talking about being loyal to a party. I'm talking about chaining attitudes toward people and the system.

Don't forget the cartoon