Randal Rauser's Blog, page 176

12 Minutes with the 59 Second Apologist

I started the 59 Second Apologist Podcast just over one year ago. What better way to celebrate than to offer all 12 episodes from the first year, back to back, in one hyper-compressed breathless monologue of expository apologetic goodness?

Episodes are arranged topically rather than chronologically so as to provide a single, seamless apologetics education in the same time it takes to boil an egg.

Randal talks atheism on “The Ride Home with John and Kathy”

On July 17th I appeared on “The Ride Home with John and Kathy“, a popular drive-time radio show in Pittsburgh. The topic, as you might have guessed, was my new book Is the Atheist My Neighbor. It’s a well-paced interview which covers a lot of ground in a comparatively brief 12 minutes.

How not to advise a wannabe activist

In his recent article “How To Deal With Unwanted Hotel Bibles? Don’t Read Them” Ed Brayton interacts with an article recently published at “Friendly Atheist” (and originally published in the magazine “American Atheist”). In the article the author (Steve Lowe) advises that when atheists are in a hotel room they should take the Bible down to the front desk and politely confront the hotel staff on how offended they are at having a Bible in the nightstand drawer.

Seriously?

As Brayton points out, this is childish behavior which is deeply counterproductive to the goal of providing atheism with a respected place in the public square.

Can you imagine if everybody took Lowe’s advice?

How about an animal rights activist who walks into a hotel room and finds a picture of a rodeo hanging on the wall? Should they take the picture off the wall and march down to the front desk to confront the clerk because they believe rodeos are inhumane? Would that kind of behavior raise the profile of animal rights in a positive way?

And maybe the nutritionist should badger the hotel clerk to complain that there is a pop machine full of sugary drinks on level three.

And the Christian conservative should definitely march down to the front desk to complain that HBO shouldn’t be available in rooms with children.

And the environmentalist could complain about the excessive number of fresh towels that are made available to hotel guests.

I’ll tell you this much: if everybody took Lowe’s advice then it would make the front desk job a lot more interesting.

 

A day after Pluto, a look back at the Pale Blue Dot

The other day I picked up Carl Sagan’s classic 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space at a used bookstore. (“Used bookstore” is my euphemism for the bookshelf at the back of our neighborhood Goodwill.) It’s been a great read, both for Sagan’s mellifluous prose and the time-stamped nature of a science book.

To note one example of that time-stamped nature, at one point Sagan opines that in the coming years many planets will be discovered in our galaxy. Of course, that’s been proven in spades since the 2009 launch of Kepler, an observatory devoted to the discovery of earth-like planets. At this point, you should set aside an hour to watch this fascinating 2015 Nova program “Alien Planets Revealed”:

Sagan talks a lot in the book about the Voyager 1 and 2 exploratory probes. Check out this NASA website which charts in real time the distance of these two probes (launched when ABBA was playing in disco clubs from Seattle to Stockholm). Sagan says in the book that the Voyagers could keep running on their nuclear batteries until 2015. Current projections have shifted to 2020-25. At present Voyager 2 is still on the edge of the heliosphere (the border between the sun’s dominant solar wind and the point where the matter from other stars becomes dominant). But Voyager 1 has already passed into interstellar space.

The eminently-quotable Sagan gives any reader a bevy of material on which to draw. For this day, the following sentence seems appropriate: “In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe.” (p. 52) He’s right. The universe is grander and more extraordinary than we ever imagined. Science delivers awe in spades.

But as a modest rejoinder one should add that for the religious mind, it is a religious awe. (For further discussion see my article “Does the size of the universe support atheism or Christianity?“)

The first Amazon.com review for Is the Atheist My Neighbor?

You can read it here.

Is the Bible Reliable? The Sermon

This summer I was asked to preach on the following question at Steele Heights Baptist Church in Edmonton: “Is the Bible reliable?” This is a HUGE topic. It also could quickly go sideways if handled improperly.

Growing up, were I asked about the reliability of the Bible, I would have interpreted the question as follows: Is the Bible accurate in all its factual assertions? There are three main problems with this approach to the question.

First, it assumes that reliability consists simply in relaying propositional information. Yes, the Bible does that. But is that all it does? Is that primarily what it does? (And is that what our translations — e.g. NIV, KJV, ESV, etc. — do?)

Second, this approach makes no distinction between the relative importance of various propositions. Thus, for example, on this account reliability is seen to extend to the account of an iron axhead floating (2 Kings 6:6) as surely as the confession “Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead.” (Romans 10:9)

Third, this assumption that propositional statements are intended simply to relay factual information is not a neutral one. Rather, it already assumes a particular hermeneutic — a one size fits all hermeneutic — which does great violence to the diversity of biblical genres. To see how absurd this is, imagine future non-English readers from two or three millennia in the future who are poring over a collection of English texts — narrative, poetry, essay, etc. — collected from our time in history and translated into their future language. If they assumed that all the propositions in this diverse collection of writings were to be interpreted literally, how often do you think they might stumble over hyperbole, sarcasm, irony, and countless other idiomata?

These were the challenges I was facing when contemplating preaching a forty minute sermon on “Is the Bible reliable?” In response to the challenge, I opted for a three step approach. I began with an illustration highlighting the great diversity of the biblical texts. Next, I argued that the Bible’s reliability should be construed as ethical/formational, i.e. as purposed to form the reader into a particular kind of person. Finally, I argued that when it comes to historical-factual information, we should privilege that which attests to who Jesus is and what he did.

Is the Atheist My Neighbor? gets a mention on “Catholic Answers Live”

Last week, apologist Trent Horn mentioned Is the Atheist My Neighbor? while he was a guest on the popular radio show “Catholic Answers Live“. The excerpt that I included below begins with Horn reflecting on the fact that Christians sometimes make poor allies in rational discussion. This leads to an exchange between Horn and the host Patrick Coffin on one of the Duck Dynasty long-beards who recently claimed that atheists really do believe in God. And that in turn led to Horn giving my book a mention. It’s an interesting and irenic exchange and you can listen to it below.

Thanks to Matt Fradd for making me aware of the exchange.

The Commie Bible, and other ideological influences on Bible translation

Bible translation can be a risky business. Just ask Zondervan who (working jointly with IBS) launched the TNIV back in 2005 as an NIV with updated gender language (hence “Today’s NIV”). The fundamentalist response was the equivalent of a military blockade against Zondervan: the NIV with its limp-wristed linguistic choices was now out, and by 2007 the ESV was in. After initially defending the TNIV, Zondervan eventually back-pedalled and dropped the Tainted NIV while rushing yet another updated NIV, one that could satisfy the vocal conservatives, to market.

Growing up in the eighties the RSV (and its 1989 reworking) was considered the liberal Bible. We’ll put it this way: carrying the RSV around church would attract unwanted attention.

The NIV was permissible but the NKJV (or KJV) was the safest choice. The NASB was also sound for its “word for word” translation philosophy.

So what was wrong with the RSV? To note the most contentious issue, the RSV courted all sorts of controversy for choosing to translate Isaiah 7:14 as a “young woman shall conceive” rather than the traditional “virgin”. It didn’t matter that this was a sound translation choice, the conservatives interpreted it as a direct assault on the virgin birth.

While reading Harvey Cox’s The Future of Faith, I got some of the backstory on the RSV. He writes:

“as soon as the ‘new Bible’ rolled off the presses, outrage erupted among fundamentalists. They viewed the RSV as blasphemy. Some, noting it had been published in a red cover instead of in the usual black imitation leather (or white imitation leather for brides to carry at weddings), began to brand it as the ‘red Bible.’ Since the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was raging at the time, the hint that there was something both sinister and subversive about the new Bible was not subtle. This translation was part of a Communist plot.” (157-58)

Such conspiracy theories are not uncommon among Christian conservatives. Remember that I said the NKJV was a safer choice growing up than the NIV? This suspicion was based on the notion that the NIV was a pro-gay Bible due to the alleged influence of a homosexual (Virginia Mollenkott) on the translation committee. (For an example of this conspiracy see here. See also this audio track on YouTube.)

Conservatives are thus often fearful that some other ideology — e.g. feminism, communism, gay rights, etc. — will influence the translation of the Bible. Alas, they rarely stop to consider the extent to which fear of a conservative ideological backlash might itself be unduly influencing Bible translation.

My Conversation on Heaven with Paul Arthur

Paul Arthur, host of “Insight”

A few months ago I was on the television program “Insight” with Paul Arthur to discuss my book What on Earth Do We Know About Heaven?

I’ve included an audio track of the one hour program below. Apart from my smiling visage you don’t lose too much by being limited to the audio (although I agree that being deprived of my smiling visage is not an insignificant loss).

For more on “Insight” you can visit their website.

Randal on Atheism: The Bob Dutko Interview

The other day I recorded an interview on atheism with Bob Dutko, a conservative Christian radio host in Detroit. This magazine cover thematically captures Bob’s style with the boxing gloves and his tagline, “Fearlessly defending the faith”. I’ve been on Bob’s show several times now beginning back in 2009 when my book Finding God in the Shack came out, and the exchanges are always interesting. This time out was no exception.

Unfortunately, we had a technical glitch midway through the interview and I got cut off. By the time I was on the line again only a few minutes were left. Paranoid that I might be cut off again, I kept all further answers relatively short and clipped. That’s the nature of radio.

To cap things off, my recording software cut off early so l lost the last minute of the interview.

The most interesting part of the interview came when Bob recalled a friendship he’d had with a past cohost in radio who was an outspoken atheist. Those are the sparks of recognition of the other that I’d like to fan into a flame.