Now to refute what religious people "can't refute"

Religious person at worship?



On the atheist blogDebuncking Christianity, Valerie Tarico at 11/02/2007 posts an article with the interesting title "What Religionists Can't Refute." So you Know I have to refute it.

A recent article and book by Mr. Dinesh D’Souza argue that atheists can’t refute the possibility of God. From there, Mr. D'Souza goes on to argue for an affirmative belief in his god: the god of orthodox Christians. It seems like Mr. D’Souza misunderstands atheism and because of this inadvertently supports the argument of the atheists: Whether God is real or not is a separate argument from what we can know. Religionists claim to know that a god exists and typically which god it is. Atheists simply say there is insufficient evidence to call this knowledge.

But D'Souza said atheists can't refute the possibility of God. You can't. you can't prove God is impossible. that's what he's saying. Now Tarico confuses that with saying we can prove there a God, or so it seems. The existent to which "Religionists" claim to "know" God exists, is not in a demonstrable objective sense but is existential sort of knowing; deep conviction based upon some form of personal experience of insight. It's a subjective sort of knowing. Again Tarico falls into the mistake so many atheists think of believing that there is a distinction between Gods. God compete for existence in the mind of the atheist. But that's because they don't get the notion of necessity. They don't understand that God can only be one thing,a nd one thing only, eternal necessary being. Any disputes identity of God are disputes about religion tradition, communication, cultural constructs or knowing wht God wants, not disputes about "which God." The goes goes on to demonstrate a misunderstanding about the nature of knowledge.

Might there be realities that we finite humans can’t perceive? Of course! The claim that there could be gods or a god that we can’t perceive is valid. But to call this knowledge, and then to engage in the slight of hand that takes one from this ambiguous opening to religious assertion is absurd.

Why do they think that only empirical "facts" can be called "knowledge?" knowledge is what we know, while it may be only fictional, the idea that Tom Sawyer is Becky Thacher's boy friend is knowledge, it doesn't matter it is literal historical knowledge or not. But this tendency to take only the empirically demonstrable as knowledge demonstrates that theism is much more than merely the lack of a belief. Clearly atheism is not knowledge,t he lack of a belief cannot be knowledge. Tarico fails to come to terms with any sort of distinction between one kind of knowledge or another.

There might be fairies we can’t perceive. There might be djinns we can’t perceive. The world might rest on the back of an imperceptible turtle. There might be an invisible warrior waiting to whack my head off outside my front door. I can’t say there isn’t because if he’s there, he’s invisible. And if I survive when I go out to feed the chickens, maybe it will be just because he moved on to my neighbor’s house. And if I survive tomorrow, perhaps it’s because he only appears once in 2000 years. Neither I nor you can rule him out.

You can see where this leads—to a paralyzing lot of mental clutter.

The mental clutter I see is the ever present arrogance of the empiricist who thinks because he/she has an idea that idea must be universal and only his/her concept of reality can ever be taken seriously. I see the tired familiar begging of the question, obligatory for membership in the atheist fan club, and once again, the famous atheist stereotype of religious views, refusing to think seriously about any religious persons ideas. After one atheist has demonstrated the ability to appreciate sophisticated Theological concepts, although she had to desacralize it and turn it into something other an God concept, now we are back to lumping in all religious ideas with the most superstitious and with concept s totally unlike any modern ideas of God. Note: these are all contingent concepts from folklore, none of them count as eternal necessary being. Yet there is the old atheist straw man, all religious concepts must be reduced to silliness. They are really afraid to take on the real religious ideas.

In order to function, humans generally limit themselves to making claims about things that they can perceive using logic and evidence.

No in fact this is not the case at all. What we do is to rely upon our senses and extrapolation from our sense data, but we extrapolate using criteria or regularity, consistency, and shared confirmation. We take for granted many aspects of reality that are not derived from either evidence or logic. But before I give examples I must point out that the major


And, in fact, this is exactly what religionists do. Believers say that their beliefs rest on faith, when in reality what they rest on is frail and faulty evidence—the same kinds of evidence that have always been used to support the existence of magical creatures: anecdote, emotion, testimonial, folklore, and inexplicable sensations of transcendence, otherness, or transformation. Religionists don’t see that this kind of low-grade evidence fails to differentiate among the many magical gods and creatures that have populated human history, and, therefore, a position of integrity would require that one argue for the existence of them all.

The reason we don’t hear this argument is because each supernaturalist is actually believer of a specific sort. Each has been infected with a specific viral ideology that creates an emotional inclination, a desire to believe in a certain kind of magical being or a fear of not believing in this being. This emotional valence in turn protects that single set of supernatural beliefs from the ravages of reason.

This is the kind of special pleading that makes my blood boil. It's special pleading by default because the implication is everyone else has a "viral infection of an ideology" (whatever the hell that means) except of course, my view is the really true truth! It's so obviously special pleading. Of course the author would argue around this by saying atheism is the lack of a belief (which is itself a mistake and propaganda line) thus can't be an infection. Its all so campy and clever by half. Atheism is clearly just as much an ideology as religion or communism or any other belief. The absence of a religious belief becomes the presence of a materialist belief, Derrida couldn't have invented the Hegelian irony any more effectively. Like deconstruction, Like the transcendental signifier, being absent it is presence, absence becomes presence. The claim fostered by the idiot Dawkins that religion is a disease, that ideas are diseases, is nothing short of Nazi.

The fomenting of propangandistic device is truly Herr Dawkins triumph of the will, if you catch my meaning. He's found a final solution to his problems with religious people. If ideas offend you declare them "diseases." What do we do with diseases? We eradicate them along with the "germs" that spread them.

To make matters worse, if the resonant beliefs are tried-and-true handed-down religions, they fit the structure of human information processing the way that heroin fits receptors in the brain—damn near perfectly, even though that isn’t what the receptors were made for. All of the rational argumentation about whether god could exist is just window dressing, people making abstract arguments for an abstract deity because they want to believe in a personal deity, the image of which has been virally implanted in their brains through social contagion.

Holy assumption not in evidence batman! These atheists are really trying to create their own er zots science. This one is trying to do brain/mind functionalism without any data. Likening religious belief to heroin is argument from analogy. that's a fallacy.that's real actual informal fallacy. The assertions of social contagion what has no support. There is no data to back that up. This is entire unfounded assertion stems from drawing an analogy between disease and drug addiction and belief. It is nothing more than an analogy.Here we see the familiar attempt to privilege the atheist position. We must always start from the base assumption that atheism is true without ever having to establish any truth value to the constituent building blocks that make it up, such philosophical reductionism, materialism, positivism and the like. Argument from analogy cannot demonstrate a causal relationship because it is the unfounded assumption that like cases are always perfectly parallel in all respects. But heroin is not an apt analogy for religious belief to any degree.

Heroin is an addiction because one who is hooked cannot live without it. It is debilitating and the need for it is not a natural endowment, such as the need for food. The only similarity is that heroin makes you feel good, but it fosters a false sense of well being because it is breaking down your system as long as you use it, and the withdrawal pains are so great you can't give it up.These assertions fly in the face of the major work in the field of brain/mind study of the God parts of the brain. A voluminous body of work exists which tears asunder this foolish assertion. The major researcher in the field which studies God parts of the brain,
Andrew Newberg, says nothing about religious experience being like heroin. In fact Newberg sees religious experience as valid and healthy. The title to his book says it all; why God wont go away. The idea of God, he finds, far from being like heroin or the misuse of receptors, is natural and hard wired. We are endowed (by Nature?, or "someone"?) with this idea, a ready formed innate idea! There is even a more voluminous body of work which shows that religious experience is far better for the experience than any other form of experince. To liken it to heroin is crazy. You are comparing regenerative addictions to the most positive experince of life which is progressively more positive over time. Religious belief is more analogous to food. It is nourishing, good for you, has good effects (although food can be bad for you, and one can get improper nutrition. one must be careful to get a balanced diet).

Mountains of evidence doesn't affect the beliefs of true believers. Why? Because, the rationality of believers is in fact a false rationality.

Of course that is drawing an illogical conclusion form sign. Why would false rationality lead one to cling to an experince if they didn't get something out of it? Obviously the more plausible reason is that the believers experiences or a nature such that the believer has deep seated conviction of the truth of such beliefs. to dispute this is to claim a knowledge of others experiences. Strange, I would swear materialists can't believe in being clairvoyant. This interpretation is backed up by hundreds of studies. Moreover one would think that fallacious reasoning such argument from analogy wold go hand in hand with false rationality. Why wouldn't false rationality be just as likely to lead one to conclusions drawn from informal fallacies?

To some extent this is true of all of this; most of the time we use reasoning simply to support our emotional preferences.

Hmm you don't say! You mean like if we are really hurt by religious people and we want to get even with God so we lash out at all of religion and try to prove through bogus conclusions about science that religion is not good? Then we would use fallacious reasoning like argument from sign and argument from analogy as a bait and switch in lieu actual scientific data! like that?

In the case of religionists, supernatural beliefs are not bound to follow logic and evidence to their rational conclusions. Argumentation may appear to seek truth, but it does not.

Of course this is a statement turns upon the modern misunderstanding of the concept of sueprnature. supernatural beliefs do follow logical rules. I suggest it's more like the author knows very little about such things because, because like most atheists. she doesn't read theology. I have demonstrated on this blog on more than one occasion that the modern understanding of supernatural is not the true concept of the Christian faith but a watered down and bastardized left over from the enlightenment. The arguments turn on the myth of "rationality" that fostered atheism since the days of Laplace. The idea that atheism is rational and scientific and is needed to free humanity form some dark days of superstitious has been long exploded by modern scientific (and atheist) thinkers such as Maslow. Perpetuating that myth is one of the ggreatest disservices modern atheism is doing. They are simple unaware of or ignoring a vast body of works in philosophy, psychology, historical studies, social critique of the new left, the brunt of Western culture, to perpetuate a myth tauted by a small band of holdovers from ninteeth century positivism and the 1939 world's fair.

It seeks to maintain the status quo. That is why arguing with true believers is so maddening. Even the most lucid arguments put forward against specific magical creatures ultimately are a waste of breath. They may change the minds of a few people who are more compelled by evidence than their peers. (Ironically these may be people who have an emotional aversion to not following the evidence where it leads.) But this has always been and always will be a small minority.

What she's really voicing here is a level of frustration born of her own inability to comprehend arguments from traditional Western thought stretching back to Plato, and the refusal to grant the value of diversity in outlook. If we do not buy into the myths of reductionism, positivism, and naturalism then we are being obtuse and uncooperative and using bad logic. Of course she's already demonstrated that her main argument is based upon an informal fallacy. But we have the bad logic. I think one thing that creates the frustration level is when atheists really don't understand the rules of logic, they think theists are merely being stubborn to keep insisting that necessity is a valid concept and that argument from sign doesn't proven anything.

If this were not the case, our devout friends would be subject to rational argumentation.

you mean like not begging the question? Not arguing from analogy? What purpose does this sort of statement serve? It's merely a question begging generalization that aplys as much to her as to anyone.

We now have excellent reason to posit that the gods humans believe in (Yaweh, Shiva, Allah, Zeus, and company) are modeled on the human psyche. Evidence abounds that they are the products of human culture and evolutionary biology. Increasingly, we can describe where they come from, both in prior religions and in the structure of our brains.

It's always so amusing when they discover something obvious that liberal theology has been saying for centuries, then act like its some big damaging insight that destroys the truth of religion. Of course individual characters used to portray gods in various sacred literatures are modeled after the human psyche. What else would they be modeled after. That's like saying 'ah ha! all those old sermons use words to convey their meaning, we have them now! They can't refute that!" If God is beyond our understanding, as the bible says "he" is, then of course we can't understand God. We have to relate god to something we do understand, don't we? Relating God to humanity is a way of trying to relate to God. We can only think in cultural constructs. WE cannot think beyond them because that is the fabric of the symbolic universe from which we derive language. We think in language,we do not think in nameless feelings. The reality of God is beyond our understand then it is beyond our cultural constructs. But it is not beyond nameless feelings, yet we can only filter it through cultural constructs if we wish talk about it. That's ok because God is an expirential reality. We have to experience God. We cannot capture the truth of God exhaustively on paper. The image of the big man on the throne is a metaphor, place holder for the experience.

In addition, as knowledgeable former Christians and ex-Muslims have demonstrated over and over again, the claims of traditional monotheistic dogma are refutable because they are internally contradictory and they are empirically contradictory. They violate morality, evidence, and logic.

That is a totally groundless generalization. All that is demonstrated is that a lot of people don't understand their own faith, or the religion tradition to which they claim connection. It's a question begging tactic that reveals more bad logic on the part of an atheist who likes to use small groups to represent the whole. This nothing more than a form of guilty by association. Well there are ex Christians who fell away so that proves Christianity is wrong. But they that same logic, the fact that I was an atheist and became a Christian should prove that atheism is false and Christianity is true. Those who think this rarely happens think again. There are more former atheists who became Christians than there are former Christians who became atheists. Atheism is still just 2 of the world population. Atheists who try to write off the main body of Christian thinking by chalking it up to bad logic have try to claim elite status when faced with the possibility that 90% of humanity is just stupid.We can make that argument on any side. Any minority view can say "we are the special smart people everyone else is stupid." She just doesn't get it, its' really dyslexics who are the smart elite.

Mr. D’Souza makes his abstract arguments in the service of his religion, orthodox Christianity. But we shouldn’t waste our time arguing with him about either philosophy or specific orthodox doctrines.

Don't confuse me with the facts, If I don't know it ant worth knowing. This is a way of dismissing the vast ancient tradition of western civilization because tis' against atheism. They do not have anything close to a lion's share of the thinkers. So they have to dismiss the entire western tradition and start from a position that says real knowledge was invented last Thursday and we are the only one's that have it.

Perhaps the best argument against the time-worn understanding of Christianity is that it is vile. It is selfish, materialist, and morally repugnant.

Nothing like cold dispassionate logic is there? Not in her thinking. I'm glad she hasn't stooped to name calling!

The heart of orthodox theology is a god who demands human sacrifice. The Bible gives sacred status to some of the ugliest impulses of the human heart: tribalism, sexism, vengeance, rape, genocide, and a host of other brutish self-indulgences. Ironically, it corrupts the deepest values of Christianity itself, the love of Love and the love of Truth. It promises an afterlife in which the saved will be as rich as Paris Hilton (not just gold jewelry, streets of gold; not just gem studded purses and high heels, gem studded walls; not just good make-up but eternal youth) and as blissfully indifferent to the exquisite suffering of their brethren as, well, Paris Hilton (partying it up with their riches and friends including the Jesus friend-- while Baghdad or Southern California or Hell--burns). It isn’t just misguided. It’s disgusting.

What can one say when confronted with a huge pile of generalizations and bad stereotypes demonstrating that one knows little about the subject which one is dealing. Perhaps if this person really understood Christianity when she was a Christian she would still be one. The greatest disservice the fundies are doing is to cut us off from our cultural and intellectual heritage in the Christian faith. Even the first generation of Pentecostals knew more about Christian history than do the current generation. They were known to be less literate than their modern decedents. These atheists, not all of course, but the vocally crusading ones, are people who have been hurt by religious people and they can't distinguish between those who hurt them and the tradition with which those people are connected. I think we have the fundamentalists to blame for this. This kind of crusading atheist, and the author here is no exception. Consistently demonstrate a lack of understanding not only of the depth of Christian theology but of the Western philosophical tradition as a whole. Happily there are exceptions on both sides. There are critical thinking atheists, as well as Evangelicals, who understand the Western tradition in letters. I wish these people would have more of an effect upon their respective camps.



Here are some quick links to pages that might help fix the misconceived ideas about the nature of Christian theology:

Hug a Dyslexic Today

Dyslexia is not the result of low intelligence. An unexpected gap exists between learning aptitude and achievement in school. The problem is not behavioral, psychological, motivational, or social. People with dyslexia also do not “see backwards.”

Neartheast Tarrent country Dyslexia Council

People are odd. They are always confusing emotional reason with logical ones. One poster sends in a comment, which I did not publish because I will not publish comments that are attacks on personalities. This all knowing commentator deems to know that event hough I'm Dyslexic I still "just being lazy," when bad spellings appear in this blog. Let me clue you in on something, a person who does not have to look up every word he uses has no right to speak of Lazy to dyslexic. No dyslexic could get as far as I got in school and be lazy, because to get that far without spell check means I did a hell of a lot of looking up. I did not have a computer until I was in doctoral work. that means I got my Masters degree while typing on a typewriter and looking up ever word in the dictionary or paying someone to proof the papers.

This poster wasn't there in class with me as a child in the 1960s when no one knew what dyslexia was, and when teachers humiliated me for being lazy. I got my little butt whacked with a board because I was lazy. I was lazy because I looked at the words on the paper I could not see the same thing thing the teacher saw. Just imagine you are wearing special glasses that scramble the words you look at. you can't take them off they are somehow attacked to you. So what good would it do to look up words when the definition will have mistakes in it? This commentator, the all knowing one, was not there when the teacher would call on me to read and I was in a six grade class and only read on a second grade level. Why is she calling on me anyway? Then making some snide comment about "this is how not to be." Everyone was laughing their little heads off. But I'm lazy. I'm just so lazy I just love to be humiliated in class. Hearing classmates whispering "he must be really stupid." It was so fun being hauled down to the principle's office and told i was bad, and I lazy I was no good and then having my butt whacked with a big board for some reason I could not phathum.

This was before anyone got any special treatment for being "challenged." No one with a problem was "challenged" in those days, they did not have that concept. If you could not walk you were crippled. If you had a problem they did not understand you weren't trying hard enough. This all knowing commentator who deems to decide that I am lazy was not there when a fine loving mother driven to despair because her two little twin boys has some strange problem no one could understand, would jump up an down literally thrashing the table with her belt (she never hit us with it) and banging her head on the fridge cried "maybe you are lazy!." I would think, as the horror that he one person who still believed in me didn't anymore, and I would whine "I'm sorry I'm bad mommy!" But the all knowing one knows all about this I"m sure. He must know because I didn't. I had no idea what they were talking about because when I looked at the words they didn't say the same things. "Saw" was "was" and Elise was Elsie, and 29 was 92 and so on.The authorities of the school board had a talk with my parents. They already had it worked out, either we were restarted or we were lazy. they sent us to a testing place, certain that the test would show our IQ's were lower than average. The testing people had a nice little chat with us. I remember they were really friendly and I liked what we were talking about. So I got into it and chatted amiably. My mother would keep saying "I they are smart. I know they are."

They kept dragging other researchers in and saying things like "tell him what you think about Daniel Boone," or "explain to Dr. so and so why oil floats on water." I knew the answer because my father told me. My Dad was a tool design engineer in air craft. He loved to give long winded technical explanations. My eyes would glaze over and I would think "I'm sorry I asked." But tried really hard to remember what he said. The funny testing people said we were "geniuses." They said there was no way we could be restarted. They told my mother our IQ's but she wouldn't tell us at first. They were real high. Then the people back at the school decided to work on plan B. If we weren't stupid we had to be lazy. My parents worked really hard in all kinds of wasy to get us to learn. They thought lazy meant we needed to be spanked, but they also tried more intellectual activities. When nothing worked they became frustrated and started beating the table as though we would feel the pain through the table and shape up. I know it caused them a great deal an anguish. I made me feel that I must be just bad because they said I was bad (lazy = bad right?).

I remember we first heard of dyslexia because our family doctor had it. He had stories of how hard he had to struggle in the 30's to become a doctor when he could not spell. Through him I guess we found Scottish Rite Children's Hospital in Dallas their "language lab." Back then I think it was called "Hospital for Crippled children" But they can't use that word today. Going to a hospital to have my spelling worked on made me feel that I must be crippled in my head. I was marked out as a special wounded freak from early childhood. I will never forget Luke Waites. He was the great guy. He discovered dyslexia. He wore a while lab coat and ran the "language lab" (which today is named after him). He was my friend he worked at treating every kid in the program like his friend.In those days that was the only program in the country, and it just happened to be where we lived or we would not have gotten to go. When I went to college he wrote a letter to my professors saying I was smart but couldn't spell and that there were scientific reasons why I could not spell. They didn't meet with the Scottish Rite guys once, the had a million meetings. Those guys had to deprogram them of years and years of having it pounded into their heads that something was wrong with us we must be stupid or bad. It was the major thing in my life for a long time in childhood.

I will never forget how happy and relieved my parents were to learn about dyslexia. I will always hear my mother's voice telling everyone she knew over and over "there aren't lazy, they aren't stupid, there's a reason why they can't learn to spell." Even though it was like finding a miracle cure (although one cannot ever get over dyslexia--the language lab just taught us tricks like phonetic spelling)it still made me feel like a wounded special helpless freak. But my parents were so relived. Then began a life long journey of looking up words. This all knowing poster, who must know all of this, even though he was not there, has the nerve to tell me I'm lazy. The one word I would use for that part of my childhood is "anguish."

The little brown shirt atheist thugs on message boards quickly discovered that spelling is a weapon to use against me. "your spelling is horrible." After a 25 post thread in which I've batted down all their arguments, here comes the stuff about spelling, like clock work. That's all they have to say so they use that like a weapon. Even after I got firefox they still say it even when there are no mistakes. I know mistakes get through but clearly its' better. But they still feel called upon to point it out. I even put up a thread saying "isn't my spelling better?" they all agreed they could tell a difference. btw I used to hypothesize when I was a child that someday they would invent a technological device like spell check that would spell for you. I was elated when I first heard of spell check.

When I first got saved I prayed that I would see Mrs. Messenger, my old Scottish Rite Language Lab teacher, so I could tell her "thanks." I'll be damned if I didn't see her in an air port just a few weeks latter! What are the odds? She lived in another part of the country by then, the odds are I would never see her again. I did thank her and told her about the prayer thing. She was really happy.

So this is why I will not post comments telling me "your spelling is horrible."


Here is a link to the best dyslexia site I've found. The NTDC If you think your child might have learning problem I urge you to read this site.

Page by Scottish Rite

Get the best possible rate on your mortgage

An Atheist Discovers "The God Beyond God"

I came across an interesting article by Marlene Winellon the atheist blog "Debunking Christianity. This person is a therapist of some kind. Her profile says that she offers therapy to those traumatized by religion. What I find interesting about this that her statement about the alternative to religious belief that she has found for her own personal world view is none other than Paul Tillich's notion of The ground of being! this is in fact my very understanding of God!

Winell indicates some basic misunderstanding about theology. In her statement she tries to attack religion. Although, this is not meant to be an attack. I can see some value in her attempts to help traumatized ex fundie s move forward in their lives. I do think religion can be very debilitating if it is not done right. Half truth is a very powerful weapon. But in making these theolgoical mistakes Winell is contributing to the half truth. The half truth of which I spoke is that of the fundamentalists, the way they distort the Gospel. Windell says:

Thursday, November 01, 2007

I keep getting asked, So Do You Believe in God?

So do you believe in God?

As a therapist working to help people recover from the damage of religion, I get this frequently. So I’ve decided to make a better effort to reply. To be honest, I don’t like the question because it presumes we know what those words mean. Here are some responses, touching on more or less serious aspects of the topic.

Yes I think I know what the words mean. She further demontrates lack of understanding in the nature of God in terms of necessity and contingency.

1. Which god? Do you mean Zeus, Baal, Athena, Shiva, Allah, Jehovah, or some other? If you mean one of those, then no. I am not a theist. I don’t believe in an individual being that created and now controls the world.

When people say things like this, which ;God, as though they are all so much alike, I see a read flag. It usually means a lack of theological sophistication. The similarity is in the metaphor suggested by ancient concepts of suzerain authority, the big man on a throne,t he ruler the potentate. That's a literary metaphor and that's where the similarity ends. The God of the Bible is totally different from these other little human figures because they are contingent.
They had parents. Zeus was the son of Saturn (Chronos in Greek set up). Athena was the daughter of Zeus and sprang from his head fully grown. Allah is the same God as the God of the Bible the Muslims just think he wants different things. that's not an argument about how he is, except they literaize the metaphor and just make him the real guy in the sky. Of course Jahova is the corrupted name of the God of the Bible. So clearly she doesn't understand the Christian concept of God. Like so many atheists they just take the literal version as the whole thing. This means basically that atheists are fundamentalists. Then she does something staggering. I really can't understand this, she denies that belief itself is an intelligible concept.

2. What is belief? Is it a cognitive conclusion that I have reached basic on logical consideration of evidence? That would assume I have access to all the information, and I do not. Is it an emotional feeling for something beyond myself? Well, my emotions vary, and some days are hopeful, other days are dark. Emotions are a rocky basis for “belief.” Do I make a leap of faith, not knowing anything really, but simply wanting to “believe,” and putting stock in a “scripture” to give it support? This is also difficult because knowing about the origins of “scripture,” I know the complexity; they were not simply dictated. Also, the strength of my blind faith can also vary and I’m not sure how completely I am supposed to convince myself in order to say I “believe.”

Here we see the typical atheist conception of faith; just blind leap into the darkness with no evidence. We really need to talk about this some time. These people have have just got to start looking thing up. The proper source to use would be Westminster Dictionary of Christian theology. You would not use a refrigeration manuel to define automotive standards or weighs and measures for agriculture, so you would not use a popular dictionary to understand theology. You would use the dictionary made by theologians to explain the way theologians use their specialized terms. See my recent blog piece on Faith is not belief without reason.

After questioning the concept of belief as a coherent concept she then speaks of what passes for belief, and for God, in her world view.

4. If I must use the concept at all, I would equate it with the “nature of being.” This is close to “ground of being,” a phrase coined by John Robinson many years ago in Honest to God. For me it involves a perception of existence grounded in the profound science of modern physics. Most ordinary people do not know much about this. Yet, we now know from findings in both relativity theory and quantum physics, that the universe is much more strange and incredible than we ever realized. It calls for massive humility because there are things no one understands, yet we now have good reason to question all of our basic assumptions about “reality.” The difference is bigger than finding out the world is not flat. We have evidence for questioning our ideas about matter, linear time, cause and effect, and more. String theorists agree there are eleven dimensions. Yet the general population operates all day every day assuming things that are completely out of date. The knowledge has not reached the masses. This is akin to having everyone act as if the earth is still flat. The issues are intensely profound, with implications for everything we do. The big words for me are “mystery” and “possibility.” Feelings are humility, awe, and excitement. There is no religious description of “god” that matches the grandeur of the universe as it is – elusive, ever-changing, impossibly mind-boggling. And this includes us. We are part of the fabric; there is no separation. If this is believing in god, then by all means, a hundred times YES! But I’m still not drawn to the language.

First of all, John Robinson did not coin the term "Being itself." It is found as far back as the intertestamental translating of Exodus by the Rabbis who produced the LXX. In Exodus 3, 11-21 they translate the phrase often rendered "I am that i am" in English bibles, as "I am the being." Since the definite article (ego o' ami) carries a sense of quality when used in this way, "I am being " or I am being itself is the best translation. By the way John 1:1 should be translated "the word was deity" not "the word was the God." The concept is picked up by John of Damascus in the eighth century AD. Robinson got it from Tillich, it is also used by Ware in The Orthodox church to describe Eastern Orthodox beliefs about God, and John MacQuerry uses it extensively.

Secondly her tak about knowing beyond langauge is just coming out of Christian mysticism. People are seeking God like it or not. She is a believe in Gdo even though she doesn't know God, ust as Paul said of the Athenians in Acts 17: 11-21.

She quotes a couple of notables to back up her view:

A couple of quotes that I find consistent with this:

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”`
-Carl Sagan

The actual fact is that atheists have stunted their spiritual growth. they tend not to understand Christian views at the higher level of sophistication. Of course its hardly their fault. liberal theology gets almost no air play, one never sees clearly references to it and even on PBS they give it short shrift. There are concepts by Christian thinkers which dwarf anything short of Einstein Process theology certainly is as sophisticated s anything Sagan ever thought about. Greater scientists than him have been Christians, even in the modern age.

“I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
-Albert Einstein

He was wrong about the uncertantainty princple too.

We need to be careful that in our attempts to move beyond the traumatizing aspects of our lives that we don't miss the valuable things. I was traumatized by my fundamentalist environment as a child. I think it caused no end of problems for me. I think the "sucky" parts of my personality can be traced to that era of my life. I and my brother used to stand up in church and lead singing, or help. we really weren't we were jut waving our arms, people thought it was cute and encouraged us. They would go "good job leading sining today." One day I thought "I think I'll preach the sermon today." I stood up, faced the guy sitting right behind me, (I was about five or four) looked him in the eye and shouted "You are going to hell!" He was horrified and didn't know what to thin.. I will never forget the look on that guy's face. As "luck" or "fate" or god whatever would have it, he was a visitor so he didn't know about the two little twins leading sining and how everyone encouraged us. What's interesting about that is that acting out my idea of what a sermon was I immediately went right ot the condemnation and threats of hell. Now no preacher had actually done that in our church. How did I know to do it? I probably saw something on tv, but it fit the mentality of the church.

My point is I can understand the problem with religion. I have more air curling stories than that that I could tell. One thumbnail example, I once dreamed that I was at one of the old churches we went to when I was in high school int he dream it was a center of satan worship. In another dream of the same era the little religious private school I attended in eighth and ninth grades was ran by a secret cult of vampires where sucking the kids blood. That might give an idea of ho these places affected me. Yet, I found healing when I found Jesus. My solution to the bad religious experince was to have good religious experiences.

Not only does Winell throw the babby out she watns to kill the whole concept of God.

5. Dispensing with the “god” word, it makes a little more sense for me to address “spirituality,” although this word has often meant a focus on other-worldly things. I prefer to describe spirituality as a way of living which is here-and-now. These are attributes rather than a definition. They involve feelings and perceptions and experiences which depend on openness. This openness can be chosen and developed. Rather than escaping into a different realm, I think of spirituality in terms of how we live our lives – the choices, the consciousness, the texture of daily life. There are several aspects of this:

I don't totally disagree there. But the interesting thing is she wants to do away with the term "God" and yet her alternative to it is the more sophisticated concept of God that is less known, but no less Christian. The idea that the reality of God is beyond words and must be explored experimentally is hardly new in Christian thought, ti is the stuff of which Christian mysticism is made. The idea that the reality of God is something beyond our cultural constructs of God is explored by Tillich in his book The Courage to Be, in the chapter "The God beyond God." I highly recomend it.

A God by any other name...?

Loftus responds to responses to comments all still coming from the comment box. But I think this one needs answering in an extended format.

Joe said...why do we need propositional? Its' phenomenological and existential.

Isn't that a propositional statement about the content of your revelational beliefs?

Yes, bu that doesn't establish that the content of revelation has to be propositional, at least not always. Just because you make propositional statements about existential statements doesn't make the existential statements propositional. Anything can be a proposition. That doesn't mean the upshot of revelation must always be so.

Joe said...I challenge you to debate on them. I wanted to lead off with pro God arguments anyway.

Well, as I said, get in line. But if you'd like to debate me then do so on this proposition: "The Christian faith should be rejected by modern civilized scientifically literate people." I have already made my opening statement in my book! Take it on chapter by chapter and I'll respond.

Clearly you cannot pull off that proposition. To do do so you must show that Christianity is somehow opposed to modern scientific knowledge. Since Christianity is not a scientific proposition ipso facto it cannot be scientifically false. The extent on one's scientific literacy is a matter of the individual's choice of learning and has nothing to do with religion,.of course he's ignoring all the noble prize winning Christians.




Nobel Prize Winning Scientific Christians

Fritz Shafer, nominated for Nobel Prize in Chemistry, University of Georgia, himself a Christian:	"it is very rare that a physical scientists is truly an atheist."
Martin Rees at Cambridge:	"The possibility of life as we know it depends upon a few basic values which are constants. And it is in some aspect remarkably sensitive to their heir numerical values. Nature does exhibit remarkable coincidences."
Arthur Schewhow, Nobel prize winner from Stanford, identifies himself as a Christian.	"We are fortunate to have the Bible which tells us so much about God in widely accessible terms."
Charlie Towns Nobel prize winner:	"The question of science seems to be unanswered if we explore from science alone. Thus I believe there is a need for some metaphysical or religious explanation. I believe in the concept of God an in his existence."
John Pokingham, theoretical physicist at Cambridge, left physics to become a minister.	"I believe that God exists and has made himself known in Jesus Christ."
Allan Sandage, The world's greatest observational cosmologist , Caregie observatories won a prize given by Swedish parliament equivalent to Nobel prize (there is no Nobel prize for cosmology) became a Christian after being a scientist,	"The nature of God is not found in any part of science, for that we must turn to the scriptures."

who is more qualified to judge the scientific compatibility of Christianity, noble prize winning scientist who is a Christian, or an atheist who naive enough to think that science is a straight forward proposition rather than a cultural construct. Atheists are so naive when it comes to this sort of thing. They've never read Chomsky, just close down the understanding of cultural and adopt a strict naivety of what you see is what you get. But Loftus seems to make no attempt to aim for the sophisticated versions of the faith. It's all the fundies but he never qualifies his statements to reflect this. Here's a real born burner.

I'm not interested in merely debating the existence of God, since what you must defend is the existence of YOUR Christian God.

Loftus is well read certain aspects of philosophy. He's clearly pretty bright. But he's clearly just bought a bill of goods, as do so many ship jumpers. He doesn't seem to remember what the higher level of Christian really entails. Suddenly it's all creation vs evolution and the big sky Daddy vs science. He expects all Christians to be uncle Jed in the Sunday school with the God of Samuel Beckett, who for reasons unknown loves us dearly and send us to hell, qua qua qua qua....

The page he links to is worth looking at because this illustrates so clearly what I'm fighting on both sides, and it gives me a chance to jump on a favorite hobby horse.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Theism Without a Revelation is Deism

Theism is used as a springboard for defending Christian theism, for if theism is true then Christianity isn't far behind. I disagree.

Theism without an adherence to a particular branch of theism reduces to deism, for the three main branches of theism (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) all depend upon embracing a particular revelation from their God, along with the "correct" interpretation of that revelation.

Here he's pulled a very clever bait and switch. He has substituted his own straw man Christianity for the real thing on pretense that unless the real fits his version then it collapses to something else. But if you buy his straw version it collapses anyway. This is what gets me. Loftus seems like a bright guy and he seems to have taken a lot of graduate level stuff, studied with Craig, while Craig was totally unknown to anyone Perkins, he's big stuff in the Evangelical end of things, academically speaking.. Yet this grad student of Craig's doesn't seem to remember the nature of Christian thought outside the insular world of biblical literalism and sure you would think he would. I mean do you really think Nicholas of Cuza, of whom Tillich said "this is one of the most sophisticated concepts of God in human history" really just collapses into deims if it isn't a big sky daddy on a throne? Of course Cuza is just one idea. We could bring in any number of great Christian philosophers. But Loftus' straw man is predicated upon a big fallacy. He doesn't say the term "sky daddy" and he doesn't specify but we know that's what he's talking about. He's talking about the so called "God of the bible." But he can't read between the lines where God tells Moses "I am being itself." Or where it says God is beyond anything we can conceive of. Like so many as soon as you say "God is beyond anything we can conceived of" then immediately they have to try to conceive of it. If they can't they either revert to a very simplistic metaphor or just proclaim it a hazy concept not worth thinking about. What is the atheist fascination with the sky daddy? one would think if Freud was right about religious people and the super ego, surely atheists are living out their adolescent desire to kill the father.



"Without a revelation from God theism collapses into deism,"

No that is absolutely wrong. The difference in Christianity, theism and deism is specific concepts about what God want,s not the nature of God himself. The two very different things. They make a huge difference. To assume God wants all sinners to be saved one need not assume God is the big sky daddy on a throne. Concepts about what God wants are totally different from concepts about what God is. All concepts of God must orient around necessity as opposssed to contingency. The basic permaiters for any view of god are necessity, eternality, and relation to being. God is eternal necessary being. Any concept that posits eternal necessary being as the basis of reality is talking about God. The difference then is merely one of understanding what God wants. If Loftus view is right than process theology is deism. He certainly should know better than that. That is an ultra simplistic formula for dismissing theology.

Where I will agree with him on the statement that Christianity requires revelation is that this is what makes the specific difference, not God concepts per se but our ideas of what God has done to community. But Loftus concept of revelation is far too conditioned by the fundies. The true revelation is not an inerrant Bible but Christ himself. To that existent it is not propositional but experiential.

which is basically equivalent to the philosopher's god, since deism is not a set of beliefs;

Here he does the bait and switch. Unless you are willing to settle for the cartoon God, the angry sky daddy, then you are deist. Unless you have the literalistic God of the bible, translate big mean sky daddy, then you ant got no God at all. That is the most unsophisticated approach to theology I've ever seen. Carly this guy is hanging at the secular web too much. He should just know better than this.

it is a method whereby a particular theological viewpoint is adopted based upon reason. Anything not supported by reason is to be rejected by the deist.

what he's really saying between the the lines is that the kind faith that uses reason i the based kind tha is opposed to Christianity; ergo Christianity is unreasoning and opposed to reason.

And moving from deism to Christian theism is like flying a plane to the moon. [Deism went through four stages which traveled from continent to continent and flourished in the 16th-18th centuries, although people still maintain it today.

Of course that's only because your straw faith says the do. You label anything not the fundie sky daddy as "deism" so then it flourishes. and you have dismissed the major theological movements of the 20th century so you only have to deal with the five year old who are easy to beat up.




Next I'll give the reader a break and pick on another atheist. But I'll get back to Loftus with some God arguments next week. I'm determined to make him debate sooner or latter. Without reading his book. but I do want to thank him. It makes it so much more interesting to dialog with an intelligent person who does not assume one is a fool. I may not ever go back to CARM. Loftus is so much more fair and reasonable and intelligent than most atheist their. I forgot what it was like to deal a real dialog partner.

The atheist turn of mind

Nothing can ever count as evidence for God or against atheism in the mind of the atheist. I established this last time I was posting here. The skeptical mind forces itself into a corner which eventually, through constant use in a skeptical mode, tricks the user into thinking he/she is making some big gain of insight but he/she is actually closing off the ability to take the necessary risks to step beyond that which is proven and extrapolate to a position of belief.

I am not saying all atheists always think this way. I'm just saying these tendencies that are brought by the skeptical habit of mind.

(1) the mentality to dobut as long as possible.

If any kind of doubt is possible, however slight the probability, the atheist must take it.



(2) Unless something is totally proven it cannot be given any kind of presumption no matter how rationally warranted or how strongly evidenced.


If God is not 100% proven God is 0% proven and though one may consider God 99% proven if it is not 100% then its nothing.


(3) The "no evidence" circle.

this is a form of question begging/circular reasoning that works like this


*there is no evidence for the existence of God because God is not absoltuely proven.

*Since there is no evidence there can be no evidence

*since there can be no evidence than anything presented as evidence must be wrong.



these are all just a large circle of reasoning based upon the false premise in no 1. There are probably corresponding problems that the faith habit of mind produces. But what this mens is that atheism is unverifiable/falsifiable. It's not an analytical position because it's not open proof or disproof.


This applies especially to atheist on message boards. I think atheist seek to gain preferences for their view. the dictum about extraordinary evidence proves this. why should religious experience be deemed "extraordinary?" when it includes 90% of the people in the world.? the assumption is that their assumptions should be the "default." That's why they are always trying to claim mass populations they are not intitleed to, like Buddhism or all new born babies.


The better paradigm would be:

(1) doubt as long as you have real doubts and be willing to assign prima facie to good arguments.

(2) rational warrant.

rational warrant is about all any world view can offer. belief in God is a world view. there is no reason to islaote it form other views or set the bar any higher for it than for any of them.


This is only to rich. I put this put on CARM atheist board. And this atheist is going to show me what's wrong with it. here are his responses:

Fixed:
*there is no evidence for the existence of God because we've for naturalistic explanations for almost everything we've ever studied.

*If the God hypothesis were correct, we'd have found evidence for it by now.

*Since there is no evidence yet, we can feel comfortable in assuming tentatively that there is no God. Taking this assumption will put us in a position where atheism may disproved by contradiction.

Is it possible to saything that would more clearly illustrate the points I just made?

Exchange with Loftus

.....
Lofuts,,,, ,,,,,,,,,vs,,,, ,,,,,Meta





John W. Loftus said...

Joe, I'll probably have several comments to make here, but let me first say that while it's true that anything that happens does so in human history, there is a difference between considering the past as evidence and present day experience. I've suggested several ways for God to reveal himself better than merely doing so in the past.

Meta:
(1) That's presumptuous. We have the evidence we have. History is what happened to the people of the past. IF God did reveal himself now people 2000 years from now would be making your argument.

(2) my point was that revelation hasn't stopped. God is always making it all the time.





10/26/2007 09:39:00 PM
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John W. Loftus said...

Joe said...It would seem part of the definition of "free thinking" is that everyone must think the same thing. Not so!

Meta:
then stop harping on differences between Christians.



10/26/2007 09:43:00 PM
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John W. Loftus said...

Joe said...This is yet another version of the age old strategy "ancient people are stupid and modern progress is anti-God." Again, not so. One of the biggest chapters in my book is where I argue that ancient people weren't stupid, just superstitious.

Meta:
if religious people were superstitious that does not prove that religion is superstition. Modern people are superstitious. argument from sign.




10/26/2007 09:46:00 PM
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John W. Loftus said...

From my book:

History is written from the perspective of the historian, and it’s unavoidable to do otherwise. The question here is whether or not the perspective of the people in the past is preferable to the perspective of the present day historian. This is where the historian’s values unavoidably enter into the picture.

Meta
No that is not the question, to any degree. you are assuming that the persecutive of the author is the point of the text. That is an assumption not in evidence. Understanding the view point of the author helps us to understand the meaning of the text, but it is not necessarily the point of revelation within the text. The revelation is in the catharsis the text evokes, or it can be in the character change of the author. Not all the views of an author are necessarily the point of revleation. Your argument is based upon the "memo from the boss" model of revelation.


Loftus:

D.W. Bebbington (Ph.D., Cambridge) describes the problem of the historian: “The historian’s history is molded by his values, his outlook, and his world-view. It is never the evidence alone that dictates what is written. The attitudes that a historian brings to the evidence form an equally important element in the creation of history. The bias of a historian enters his history. The historian himself is part of the historical process, powerfully influenced by his time and place. The problem of the historian himself nevertheless dictates that two historians presented with the same evidence are likely to reach different conclusions. This is true of people living in the same period; it is more true of people living in different periods. That is why each age writes history that reflects its own concerns.”

Meta:
Yes but he does not lionize that process. I think you are doing that. you ae assuming that history belongs to the historian. That's like the modernism says the text belongs to the writer. But post modernism tells us the ext belongs to the reader. The historian's inability to grow beyond his own time is not necessarily justification for chronocentrism.



Loftus:

According to E. Schillebeeckx, “Historical objectivity is not a reconstruction of the past in its unrepeatable factuality, it is the truth of the past in the light of the present.”

Meta:
but that has nothing to do with your position.If it does I don't see it. In my view, revelation is not static, it is not given once and for all in the bible. God is constantly working in all culture and with all people. the gospel is constantly being upgraded, not that it's truths are changing but in application to the context in which it is lived. The Gospel is not words on paper. the bible is not the revelation. The bible is merley a medium, one medium, that gives us the revelation, which is Chrit.



Loftus

Albert Nolan has argued this point with regard to Jesus: “To imagine that one can have historical objectivity without a perspective is an illusion. One perspective, however, can be better than another, [but] the only perspective open to us is the one given to us by the historical situation in which we find ourselves. If we cannot achieve an unobstructed view of Jesus from the vantage point of our present circumstances, then we cannot achieve an unobstructed view of him at all.”

Meta:
I agree with him, I can't understand why you think that statement is critical of the truth claims of Christianity. that statement does not negate any truth claims of the faith. All it says that is we can't have truly objective understanding of Jesus in his context. That's hardly a problem since we can't have a truly objective understanding of us in our context.


Loftus

According to Bebbington, “Our knowledge of the earlier middle ages depends on a tiny number of written sources that can be eked out by such supplementary material as place-names and coinage.” Furthermore, the evidence is not always reliable. According to Bebbington, “forgeries and misrepresentations, whether from good or bad motives, litter the world’s archives. The historian, therefore, develops a skeptical turn of mind. Original documents may themselves mislead; and what books about the past claim is much more likely to be wrong. History demands a critical frame of mind.” Because of these problems Bebbington states the obvious: “Written history cannot correspond precisely with the actual past.” “To write a value-free account of the past is beyond the historian’s power.

Meta
you are just multiplying examples. you need to face the fact that historical revelations is not our only clue. Your argument is really geared to fudnies. It doesn't really apply to my view of the faith.



Lofuts

One school of thought headed up by Leopold Von Ranke actually sought to do this. Their goal was to write history “free from prejudices,” and in so doing write the events of the past “as they actually happened.” But most all modern historians think this is impossible to do.

Meta:

Right, yes I've read Ranke.that whole nineteenth century posativistic thing started by Compte.



Lofuts

Some thinkers like Carl Becker have gone so far as to deny that we can know the past with any objectivity at all—that historical facts only exist in the mind, and they advocate a historical relativism with regard to the events of the past.

Meta:
In my view there is no objectivity. Objectivity is a pretense. But something happened in the past and in some sense part of it i can have meaning for us now.


10/26/2007 09:51:00 PM
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John W. Loftus said...

Joe said...Like most of the NA's that I find Loftus is doing battle with the fundies, while ignoring the direction of Christian theology over the last 500 years.

Caleb Wimble recently at DC described why we have chosen to debunk evangelical Christianity in these words:

Not only is fundamentalist Christianity the greatest threat in the United States to science, tolerance, and social progress, but it is also the most prevalent form of Protestant Christianity to be found in our nation, whether you like it or not. It is the fundamentalist religious right that holds the reigns of the Republican party (which currently controls the nation, in case you didn't realize), and it is this same fundamentalist religious right that lobbies for the teaching of lies in public school and fights against funding for embryonic research that could potentially save the lives of millions.

Meta:

It suits me fine if you just attack the fundies. But you should qualify your statements instead of habitually speaking as though they are the only Christians. Otherwise your argument just boils down to "we only want the easy targets." Not only are you missing the real direction of Christianity in the modern world, but you are also limiting yourself to the group that is easiest to pick on.



Loftus

Whether you like it or not, it is this flavor of Christianity that makes the loudest, most obnoxious, most dangerous impact on the world today, giving us plenty of good reason to direct the brunt of our attacks in its vicinity.

Meta:
that's like saying "I only fight five year olds because they are the loudest and most obnoxious members of the enemy camp"



10/26/2007 10:05:00 PM
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John W. Loftus said...

One last thing for now, I am not a New Atheist. Again, I am not a New Atheist. The only thing new about my atheism is that I have adopted that viewpoint about three years ago, prior to the New atheist books.

Meta:

I see. how do you distinguish what's "old" about your view from the new?


10/26/2007 10:20:00 PM
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John W. Loftus said...

As far as C.T. McIntire and Van Harvey's books go, I have read them through and even used them for my M.A. thesis when discussing Barth's distinction between Urgeschichte and Geschichte. But both of these authors are doing theology, not apologetics. That is, from the standpoint of faith here is how to view history. What they do is not unlike what Ronald A. Wells, does in History Through The Eyes of Faith, and what David Bebbington does in Patterns of History.

Meta:
apologetics, the good kind, should be nothing more than theology pressed into defense of the faith. This stuff is the bedrock of modern Christian thought, or at least some of it. So it has to be dealt with. Sure the fives year olds don't know about it. You go fight the five year olds and I'll fight the men (lol)



Loftus

The question I raise is why should a person adopt the Christian view of history in the first place. I argue that doing so is circular. For in order to see the Bible as historical one must first adopt a Christian set of assumptions to do so. Where do these assumptions come from except from the Bible itself?

Meta:
what Christian view of history? You can see from the McIntire book they are all different. The things you say, all the arguments you make are loaded with assumptions about what Christians think and they are assumptions of just one camp. You are begging the question when speak of "fist adopt a Christian set of assumptions..." which Christian set of assumptions?

where do Christian assumptions come from accept the bible? come on now! They come from a modern living tradition. that's what a religious tradition is for, it's a conversation that's been going on over time. The conversation is still going. That's why we pay theologians and why we have seminaries.

The phrase "seeing the Bible as historical" is loaded and your assumptions about that limited to a very prescribed view. We need to discuss that as a topic of its own. do we see the bible as historical? all of it? in what sense? is part of it not historical? what does it mean to be "historical?" If you would like a clue as to what I might say on some of these issues, please see my page on Biblical revelation.

10/26/2007 10:43:00 PM

History is now, Revelation is Now

Hegel


I find one thing that is sadly lacking in the New Atheists, while they are bright and engaged and eager to take on the world, they seem a bit myopic.An illustration of what I mean is seen in the works of John Loftus, atheist author and commenter on our blog, is fond of making the statement:
God Chose A Very Poor Medium To Reveal Himself!

By this he means History as the medium. As a would be historian, and history of ideas man at that, I feel moved to comment. Loftus, a former student of Willian Lane Craig, certainly has a good deal of knowledge in the world letters. Loftus is anythhing but an ignorant man. yet he seems to have left out an understanding of the liberal revisionary tradition of Christian theology, which is what I mean by "myopic."

In a previous blog entry, here, I asked why so many professed Christians disagree with each other when interpreting the Bible.

As a former Christian I had difficulty with why there were so many different ways that professed Christians interpreted the Bible. I could never answer that question. I just put it on the backburner of things I didn't know, and I proceeded to try to come up with what I considered the correct interpretations, because that's all I could do.

It will always puzzle me how these guys can be so anti-diverse. One would think an atheist would understand about diversity and why it's a strength and not a weakness. But these guys seen truly threatened by the fact that there are many views in the church. This is odd because it would antithetical to the definition of "free thinking" that everyone must think the same thing. He goes on:

What I now believe is that history is not a reliable "point of contact" for God to speak with man, assuming God exists.

My first reaction here is what choice do we have? If God declared himself in central park on world wide television tomorrow he would being doing it in history. Anything God does in the temporal realm is done in history, if humans exist at the time. God did not create history, people did. History is a cultural construct. It is not history its time we call it history because we segment it into periods, the time before us the time after us, and us! Whenever God choses to deal with us, he's dealing in history and it needs must be. Ah but there's a method to Loftus' madness. He's going to try and juxtaposed modern understanding of historicism to ancient world understanding of the divine. This is yet another version of the age old strategy "ancient people are stupid and modern progress is anti-God." It is not surprising to me that he would take this tact because the whole of the new atheist movement, so far as I can see, is rooted firmly in the nineteenth century. they try to pass themselves off as cutting edge, but their way of thinking about religion, life, truth, progress, science, the world belongs with the 1939 world's fair. He's going to make is sound more sophisticated but in a sense he's just saying "God should reveal himself now so he can use computers and ware a white lab coat, then I would respect him."

Anyone who studies the philosophy of history knows that history (and historical writings) should be interpreted in light of the historian's present perspective.

Do we know that indeed? I would like to know where John got his idea? All the historians I ever worked with were trying to, or saw themselves as trying to understand the way people who lived in their formers times thought. To do that they had to put themselves in their perspectives. One of the fundamental lessons I learned as a historian is not to expert ancient people to hold the same values that I hold. It's an absurd mistake to assume that people in 700BC should have learned better at Woodstock. I am telling you from experince, that sort of concern is far more in the minds of historians than any abstract notion about understand our perspective.

When it comes time to make the point he waxes obtuse:

Why? Because that's all we can do...we cannot do otherwise. So women gain rights in Christian countries and Biblical historians (theologians?) interpret the Bible to say what they have come to believe on other grounds, and so forth, hell being another doctrine.

hu? Why is he jumping from women's rights to the doctrine of hell? We have to use our own perspective because that's all we can do, so we give women rights (I guess he means in spite of the Bible) and who cares what the bible says? then suddenly, bam! here's hell! So? what's it doing there? Why can we only think about history form our perspective? Why can't we seek to understand the perspectives of the past? It seems to me that's job of a cultural historian at least.

Besides, practically any event in history can be rationally denied, even if that event actually occurred! And this goes for non-miraculous history, so how much more does it apply to purported miraculous claims in history? If God chose to reveal himself in history, then he chose a very poor medium to do so.

So what he seems to be arguing. if I get him, is that we should ditch the bible because it's old fashioned, we are modern and we don't dig old fashioned? But there is no period in which he could manifest himself without this problem. Because anything in time is in history. But the real problem with this argument is its chronocentrism. He's just assuming that our time must be special because it's modern. Modern is good and ancient is bad. Any historian worth his salt would laugh himself silly with this stuff. Shades of Hegel! Forget Hegel, shades of Fukuyama! I remember back in the 80's when capitalism was the end of history, now it's the New Atheism. This is the kind of historical romanticism that most historians have worked since Namier to forget. Serioulsy, this guy is falying in the face of the whole historical acadmey since the advent of the 20th century.

This is not new atheism, this is the sort of old nineteenth century stuff we outgrew with the whigs. I am not surprised Loftus resorts to this, most new atheists I've seen are stuck firmly in the nineteenth century. This is jut another reason why atheism is outmoded. This is really the cherished myth of the whole atheist truth regime: the evil clerics with their cruel tyrannical regimes kept poor defenseless scientists burning because they weighed the same as a duck. Along came the noble liberators, D'Holbach! They freed humanity from evil superstition. Everything modern is good and old is bad. It's pretty clear Loftus is not aware of the flow modern historicism or historiography.

Another major problem I find with this view point is the lack of knowledge he displays concern modern theologians. How can anyone talk about God's relationship to history without discussing books like C.T. McIntire's God, History and Historians? (Oxford, 77). The theology of Wolfheart Pannenberg Revelation as History. (1968. coauthored with Rolf Rendtorff, Trutz Rendtorff, and Ulrich Wilkens. New York: Macmillan. Trans. David Granskow of Offenbarung als Geschichte. G` ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1963).Or, let us think of Jurgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope? So much as been done on theological historicism, the big meaning of history in relation to theology and we don't seem to get a clue that Loftus has even heard of it even though history is the major theme of an argument he makes constantly. Surely in trying to understand history as a medium of revelation it would behoove us to think about God's revelation in history in relation to a theory of the meaning of history?

That leads to the major problem, the New atheist understanding of revelation, as exemplified by Loftus. OF course the major argument is going to be that we can't trust anything historical which comes from the age before science and historiography.On this misunderstands just about everything that pertains to it.since atheism is to Christianity as anti-communism is to communism, the Dawkinsians can't think of anything but the fundies, the flip side of them, the heads to their tails.

(1) His argument applies to views such as verbal plenary inspiration and completely misses all the ferment of views like Models of Revelation by Avery Dulles.

(2) they assume that revelation is static. It's given one historical period adn that's it. This forces the concept of chronocentrism because it lures them into the argument that surely if God was real he would favor our time.

(3) they see revelation in the memo from the boss model.

All of this forms the underpinning and ground of assumptions for teh major upshot of the argument, if God was going to reveal himself why would he do it back then int he time of superstition when we today (since we are the truly important people) can't trust the historicity of the revelation because its formed in the old bad superstition time. OF course this assumes all of the bad assumptions above, the most important of which is the antiquated model of verbal plenary which even the likes of Carl Henry did not support.

Revelation is not a static thing that was given once from on high and goes int the pages of a book. Like time itself, history is fluid and moving, revelation cannot help but be in history since we are in history. Its' not as though God had a choice to have time bound corporeal creatures and not reveal to them in history. Moreover, revelation is not so much the word from on high as it is the encounter between human and divine. The bible is a collection of wittings that were made without knowledge that they would someday be in the bible. These are of many different kinds, different genres and they speak to us in different ways. What they tell is not the memo from the boss, or the "owner's manual" but they speak of how people encountered God and what happened. God uses narrative because it speaks to people. WE need to know about these encounters so that when we have our own we can have some idea of what to expect. The idea that we are going to prove that some literal event really happened in history because the document in which it is recorded can be trusted as actual history is purely secondary.

Like most of the NA's that I find Loftus is doing battle with the fundies, while ignoring the direction of Christian theology over the last 500 years. For example what he says about historicity and miracles, quoting Lessing:

“

Miracles, which I see with my own eyes, and which I have opportunity to verify for myself, are one thing; miracles, of which I know only from history that others say they have seen them and verified them, are another.” “But…I live in the 18th century, in which miracles no longer happen. The problem is that reports of miracles are not miracles…[they] have to work through a medium which takes away all their force.” “Or is it invariably the case, that what I read in reputable historians is just as certain for me as what I myself experience?”

But Moltmann in Theology of deals with the problem of the supernatural and the historiographical. He argues that the unique nature of the revelation (resurrection) argues for a rules change. The resurrection is not historical, but history making. By the same token Lessing is wrong. Miracles are not static. They are not merely in the past. We can experince the divine today, now. I have done so. If miracles happen now they could happen then. The argument, while I sympathize with and the admire the philosohpical attempts that went into it, is based upon a too limited understanding of both history and theology.

Rites of passage: Faith, Reason and Coming of Age

Me, 1999. I'm not this fat now
but I don't have digital camera




Ok listen up deadbeats,


Sunday, October 07, 2007On the Debunking Christianity Blog Caleb Wimble posted an article: "The Greatest Enemy". This is basically an anti-testimony. The atheist community began using this tactic several years ago. I always thought it was a sign that they were intimidated by the dramatic "born again" testimony. The dramatic testimony is the major reason the Jesus and Charismatic movements of the early 70's grew to such great proportions. This article is really a coming of age myth. It's the story of how Wimble grew to manhood and somewhere along the way decided to re think the Christianity he had been raised in, eventually rejecting it. The ultimate "moral" of the tale seems to be the lesson learned, that Christianity is counter to reason. Wimble's seems to have been an initiation into the world of thinking for oneself and thus religion was something that had to be left behind.

By way of introduction to this theme, Wimble quotes Martin Luther:

“Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but - more frequently than not - struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."

He then adds

Martin Luther could scarcely have worded it better. For the greater part of my life, I held a faith that I believed was unified with reason. I was a devout Christian in every sense of the word, living a life for Christ and striving to place him (or at least my perception of him) at the center of all my endeavors. I was a regular Apostle Paul in regards to my fiery defense of the Word, taking every opportunity to engage in debate with the skeptic and show him the error of his ways.

Of course I need to bitch at this guy about this. He takes the Luther quote out of context. Luther said that from the stand point of a real thinker who was clearly involved in questioning his tradition and his faith.Anyone who would think that Luther did not question is sadly ignorant. Anyone who thinks that Christianity itself is devoid of reason, knowns nothing about the Western tradition in letters. The lions share of great thinkers in the west have been Christians and only trickle have been atheists.

But he goes on:

Through all this, however, I committed the same crime of reason that nearly all believers are guilty of committing throughout the whole of their walk: I never truly questioned my faith. However deeply I thought through the issues, however strongly I researched and defended my beliefs, the possibility of being wrong was never more than unnoticeable abstract, hidden somewhere within the recesses of my subconscious.
And when the day came that I finally accepted that possibility, my world was rocked to its core.

This is the part I want to talk to you about. He assumes that Christians never question. I quoted my faith at the same age that he did, and with the same result. I became an atheist. I was an atheist for a few years. I was a good atheist a "real" gung ho atheist. I hatred religion and religious people and I took every opportunity to deride and degrade them and to show how much more intelligent I am than they are, like any good little atheist knows he should do. But I went a step further. I began to really seek truth, which of course no atheist will. Through this I began to see that yes it is a coming of age initiation to question your faith. It's independent and intellectually mature to reject the faith of your youth, but it' more intellectual and more responsible to go through that and come out the other side realizing that the fault lay not in God belief but in the proventialism of the fundamentalist camp.

Once I found a theologian who was brilliant and profound, and yet held to the true faith sincerely and in a moving way, I was stunned. That theologian was Burnett Hillman Streeter. The book was The Privative Church (1924). I was researching to disprove the bible. I was going to write a rebuttal to Josh McDowell. This was the late 70s I was a sophomore in college. At first I loved the book because I thought he was the tearing the bible to shreds. I was so ignorant of the liberal theological tradition that I thought his talk about the Q source and so were arguments against the truth of the New Testament. Then I came across a statement where he expressed his actual faith in a deep and moving way. I was stunned. There was a lot more to it than that. This was not my conversion, but tit was a necessary first step. I think it's important here because that "counter testimony" of Wimble's trades upon an old and cherished truism, one that meant a lot to me during my atheist years. That is the myth of intellectual freedom. Of course one who has never experienced intellectual freedom doesn't know what it really is. One who had not delved deeply into the world of thought is easily led astray with the first few amazing outings into the rearified air. It's take familiarity with the world of letters to realize just how deeply indebted is the modern world of thought to Christianity and Christian thinkers. I suspect that many of those on the DC blog are not aware of this because they are, as I was, sequestered into the closed subculture of the fundamentalist. As I learned, there is a whole world of liberal theology out there and once you become aware of it and draw the circle of Christianity bigger the whole complexion of faith changes.

I have a dramatic testimony. Apparently atheists seem to either find them intimidating or they know the power of them them. They seek to counter the technique with their own stories of the loss of faith. I find their "deconversion stories" to be pale imitations. I'm not saying they are not true, but I don't find them moving or exciting I find them a please imitation. It's like they are saying "I can tell stories too." but their stories are not exciting, they don't end in the subject finding great joy that lasts a life time and so forth. Of course they claim they are exciting and that they find joy that lasts a life time. At the same time of course they disparage experiences and live in horror of the dreaded "subjective." With me they have a problem. I experienced the alleged great joy of finding the world of books as an escape hatch from the dreaded religious world. Now I have to admit the have a point. If the religious world from which one is emerging is very oppressive, then discovery of thinking for oneself, and the world of books, is quite joy making. Of course the world of books is a wonderful thing in its own right, but to claim that one cannot discover that and remain a Christian is, of course, silly. The problem is I have experienced this. While I do not claim that my experiences are exactly like all other atheists, I do know what its like to emerge from an oppressive religious environment through the discovery of letters. It was great, it was joyful, but it does not compare to the joy that came with finding Jesus, not to any degree. Moreover, the person who led me to the Lord, a friend of my sister named "Judy" who was an award winning journalist* showed me early on that there is nothing anti-Christian or anti-faith about an intellectual life. Nothing meant more to be than the intellectual life. That was basically my religion. It became even more important to them after finding God, because I found that there is a connection, God is on the other end of all the things I find in art that give me transcendence and prompt me to continue seeking perfection through art.

It seems odd to me that atheists are always so intent upon imposing upon their reality their own experiences as though they think they are so universal. They find faith and reason a burden, they shirk any word from a real person of faith who is also a thinker, as though we, the religious minded thinking people, can' possibly know our own experinces, and ony they, who shirk faith, can understand how impossible it is to have both faith and reason. There are times when those two things have to be reconciled. There are thorny issues that must be resolved, yet I rarely see the issues that seem to baffle atheists and cause them to stumble as anything like a problem. For example, John Loftus seems to think that free will in heaven is a really big deal. I think think its a pseudo problem. It's more like the bread and butter that keeps theologians employed is just really too much for them, but just up our alley. Perhaps that's why we have faith and they don't, and perhaps that's why they should leave the theologizing to us.

I think two things precipitate this problem:

(1) They define faith as "believing things when one has to reason or evidence upon which to place belief." That's the polite way of saying it. I suspect they really define faith as "being stupid."

(2) They insist upon a totally unrealistic version of inerrancy. The atheist notion of inerrancy is more legalistic and unyielding than the most hardshell baptist.Atheists oten make the guys in white button down shirts and crew cuts standing on the corner wailing about hell look like Paul Tillich.

Faith is a complex concept. In the Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology there's over a page of definition there. When boiled down it amounts to a kind of faithfulness like being faithful to someone, and placing confidence in an hypothesis. Hebrews tells us faith "the evidence of things not seen." Faith is a from of evidence in itself own right. It is not believing something without any evidence it is evidence itself. If you recall my blog pieces about the "co-determinate" you can see what I mean.

Something about the skeptical mind that drags one into a abyss of circular reasoning, begging the question and special pleading. Skeptical minds feed off of themselves. The logical end of atheism should be solipsism but for the contradictions inherent in the natural way people build their castles of the air. The skeptical mind is anything but reasonable. It is actually based upon the dictum if there is the slightest room for doubt then I must doubt." OF course no atheist lives up to this or the would go nuts because we can doubt even our own existences. But the natural ability to people to reason inconstantly saves them from this fate by allowing them to manufacture a truth regime and an ideology that glosses over the inconstancies in their own views while dogmatically refusing to ever recognize anything that could count as evidence for faith. This is why it's so totally meaningless for them to disparage faith; because their views is not reason, it's question begging. Nothing can ever count for faith. If religion isn't proven 100% then its' totally false and that makes it irrational, but of course they don't require that that their own or the positions they do hold be 100% proven.

The whole problem can be summed up in saying it's fine to break out of a closed universe and discover the limitless world of the intellect. But there is a danger of creating another closed world and being trapped by one's own pretensions if one doesn't' keep moving intellectually. It's not enough for a basis of a world view to just doubt other people's world views and not seek anything beyond that. When you predetermine that nothing beyond that could possibly be true and that no evidence can ever count for it, then you just seal yourself up again in another limited world.








*she won two national press awards, one for a photo and one for a print story.