Randal Rauser's Blog, page 71

A Child Shall Lead Them: Why Greta Thunberg is no laughing matter

The Babylon Bee has only been around for three years, but during that time it has expanded its fan base rapidly with a brand of newsy satire purportedly aimed at conservative evangelicals. However, rather than critique that audience, The Bee often plays to their ignorance and tribal prejudices.

Consider, for example, the case of teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. This week, Thunberg provided an extraordinary, passionate, and visionary indictment of global political inaction on climate change at the United Nations. So how do you suppose The Bee used their bully pulpit? In the article “Marionette Strings Clearly Visible During Greta Thunberg Testimony,” Thunberg is described as a hapless puppet controlled by shadowy interests — Al Gore is referenced.

But to what end? What’s the point supposed to be? That environmentalists are part of a shadowy cabal aimed at global domination? Frankly, the only point I can see here is the mockery of a teenager who is speaking in defense of the environment (or what Christians call environmental stewardship). And that, in turn, encourages climate change skepticism and a tacit moral affirmation for the unsustainable status quo.

At the same time, the main satirical news site, The Onion, published their own satirical news article on Thunberg: “Nation Perplexed By 16-Year-Old Who Doesn’t Want World To End”. Notably, the focus of this article is completely different as it highlights the incredulity of a general population toward a teenager who, rather than complaining about the world, has dedicated her life to save it:

“Instead of going around the world and giving speeches in which she urges people to save the planet, shouldn’t she be commiserating with her friends about how pointless life is and how we’d all be better off dead? I just don’t get it.”

In this short article, The Onion critiques political leaders and a general public that are not especially moved by the climate crisis while enobling one brave, driven young Swedish prophet and the generation from which she comes. The problem, it is clear, is not the idealism and prophetic fury of Ms. Thunberg and other idealists of her generation, but the cynicism and inaction of the adults that are trading away the future of the planet for filthy lucre (and economic prosperity bought on the backs of future generations is indeed filthy lucre).

Satire is driven by values as it uses incisive humor and absurd situations to unmask the present and prompt us toward a better future. The contrast between the values that drive The Babylon Bee and The Onion could not be greater. The former is a grotesque and mean-spirited cynicism that pawns off environmental responsibility with a conspiratorial wink. By contrast, the latter constitutes an invitation to set aside that cynicism and join Thunberg in envisioning a world of climate justice and true environmental stewardship.

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Advice for Young-Earth Creationists

In light of Ken’s Ham-fisted performance on “Unbelievable,” here are a few tips for young-earth creationists:

Your literal interpretation of Genesis 1 is — wait for it — an interpretation.
Your literal interpretation is one of many interpretations in church history.
The Gospel does not depend — AT ALL — on your literal interpretation of Gen 1.
Christians who disagree with you aren’t thereby capitulating to “naturalism”.
Science currently provides an overwhelming body of evidence that the universe is (much!) older than 6000 years.
When you present your views as the only legitimate Christian view of Genesis 1, you discredit Christianity and foment unnecessary crises of faith in Christians.
Your attacks on evolution echo misguided 17th-century geocentrist attacks on heliocentrism (and we know who won that debate).
When it comes to animal suffering and natural evil, your interpretation of Genesis 1 offers no advantage over old earth creationist and theistic evolutionary views.
The fact that Genesis 1 refers to “day” and “night” does not entail that the reader should interpret those as literal 24 hour periods.
A Christian can consistently believe that Genesis 1 is non-literal and that Jesus literally rose from the dead.

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On Ham-Fisted Young Earth Creationism

Today, I started listening to a new debate on Unbelievable between young-earth creationist Ken Ham and old-earth creationist Jeff Zweerink. Before listening, I tweeted that I was not sure it was still worthwhile to debate the young-earth creationist position. I should have qualified that a bit: if you are going to debate young-earth creationism, at least invite an articulate and learned defender such as John Mark Reynolds. Ken Ham may be popular, but if there was ever an illustration of the principle that popularity does not equal quality, this is it.

Forty minutes in, I decided I needed to take a break and vent. So now, without further ado, here are some of my complaints about Ham’s presentation.

First, Ham kept repeating the point that the Hebrew word for day (yom) is intended in Genesis 1 to refer to a literal day. Zweerink’s response was frustratingly vague and uncertain: the most he could do is defer to Hebrew scholars who disagree with Ham’s interpretation.

But the real issue is that Ham’s comment misses the point completely. To illustrate, imagine if somebody pointed out that the word “plums” in William Carlos Williams’ poem “This Is Just to Say,” refers to that fruit of the genus Prunus, and then they concluded that it thereby follows that this is all that is meant by the word. Of course, this would be an absurd piece of reasoning since the word can have various literary functions within a text.

Yet, Ham’s reasoning about yom is exactly this, ahem, ham-fisted. The fact that the word yom is translated as a day tells us nothing about whether or not we should, for example, interpret it only as a straightforward day or alternately as a literary framing device in a cosmogonic creation narrative. And it was frustrating indeed that Zweerink was unable to respond directly to such an incompetent treatment of the text.

Next, Ham said he preferred to be called a biblical creationist rather than a young earth creationist because in his view he’s just reading what the Bible plainly says. Well, of course, he thinks that. But by that logic, we should all abandon specific qualifiers because every Christian thinks they’re being “biblical” in the sense of being true to the meaning and proper function of the text such as they understand it.

This is probably the single biggest problem with Ham: he is wholly unable to recognize that he has an interpretation of Scripture. Instead, he conflates his ham-fisted interpretation with the text itself, a fatal error that inures him from any possible critique.

And so, when Justin Brierley points out that light is hitting the earth every moment which has been traveling for millions (or billions) of years, Ham’s reply is that we don’t know everything about light. Well, of course, we don’t. Indeed, we likely never shall, and that means that Ham has just conveniently placed his interpretation beyond any critical refutation, ever. Now that’s the very embodiment of cultic and indoctrinational thinking.

Not surprisingly, at one point Ham invoked Trump’s mantra — “Fake News” — to marginalize and dismiss any media that is critical of his Ark Encounter theme park. Disgusting, but perfectly in character. Whether or not he uses the term, his entire mentality is to write off dissenting positions as fake news.

Ham also defends a truly ham-fisted naive empiricism which prides observation with the five senses over historical reconstruction. Since we weren’t there to observe the origin of the universe but God was (yes, Ham is also crudely anthropomorphizing God as a physical observer), we should take God’s word for it (which, of course, actually amounts to taking Ham’s word about God’s word).

However, that naive empiricist principle is absurd and manifestly false. We don’t prioritize purported observation above all other evidence. That’s why, for example, eye witness testimony can be overturned with DNA evidence.

At one point, Brierley asks Ham whether we can agree to disagree about this topic. Ham’s ham-fisted response is to reply: “Does it matter if we take God at his word?” The implication is: yes, it matters. But by that logic, any disagreement about anything in the Bible at all would constitute a hill to die on because it all involves a matter of “taking God at his word.” Sorry to be blunt, but this is just plain stupid. Not every interpretive hill is one to die on.

Ham also laments the decline of church attendance in North America and Europe and actually links it to the decline of young-earth creationism. This is clearly another example of ham-fisted analysis. I can’t count the number of people I’ve met who were raised on young-earth creationism and left the church because they came to recognize that it is false and absurd. And they tossed Christianity in the process.

Once they learn that young-earth creationism is, in fact, a minority backwater in the history of Christianity, the response is typically along these lines: “Well, anyway, that ship has sailed.” Yes, tragically, it has, thanks in no small part to people like Ken Ham who inoculates people against Christianity by presenting it in an anti-intellectual and indoctrinational fashion that rejects evidence and demonizes dissenting opinion.

People like Ken Ham have done enough damage already. They don’t need another opportunity to do more. And that’s why I don’t think people like this deserve a platform in the public square, including on programs like Unbelievable.

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On Throwing the First Stone: Thoughts on Trudeau and Blackface

I am not a fan of Justin Trudeau. But it wasn’t always so. While I voted for the NDP during the last federal election, I viewed Trudeau and the Liberals as a welcome break from a decade of Stephen Harper and the Conservatives.

Four years have changed my opinion once again, and in this fall election, I now plan to vote for the Conservatives as a welcome break from Trudeau and the Liberals.

What changed? Put simply, scandals like SNC-Lavalin have shown Trudeau to be just another corrupt politician. And debacles like his India trip have consolidated the impression that he is trite and unfit for the world stage. To top it off, while virtue-signaling is irritating at the best of times, Trudeau’s virtue-signaling is regularly marred by gross hypocrisy.

Trudeau has fashioned himself a champion of women and visible minorities. And yet, that image has been called into question, notably with the charge that Trudeau sexually groped a reporter in the year 2000 (though he says he remembers the encounter differently). And now, the revelation that Trudeau seems to have colored his skin to echo visible minorities on at least three occasions (a fact that falsifies his initial claim that he only did it twice).

That final point brings me to the topic of this article. I am not inclined to have sympathy for Trudeau. I think he is lacking in depth and character. And I am in agreement with Andrew Coyne’s assessment of Trudeau as a “sanctimonious fraud.”

Having said that, I can’t help but point out that many of Trudeau’s harshest critics today likely would not have batted an eye about blackface/brownface twenty years ago. I remember attending a university variety show in about 1995. One of the acts consisted of five Caucasian students dressed up with blackface and wigs and performing the Jackson Five. I am quite sure that today, they all would rather forget that moment. But in 1995, they brought the house down.

Similar examples of widespread racism and sexism from an earlier time are easy to identify. In the late 1980s, my high school friends and I referred to cheap Tuesday at the movie theater as “Jewsday”. I burn with shame today to think that we never drew the obvious connection with the demonic history of anti-Semitism.

Perhaps even worse, I occasionally hung out with a guy in high school who was out-and-out racist. Every year in art class he would make a grossly offensive clay caricature of a black person which he called his “Jigaboo.” I remember being uncomfortable about it, but I still hung out with him, and the art teacher let him do it. I finally cut ties with him in 1991/92 after I, at last, came to terms with the depth of his racism. But I freely admit that that was too little, too late. (Incredibly, I looked him up online last year and discovered that he is now married to a Latina and runs a bed and breakfast in Mexico! I suspect he has done his own moral growth in thirty years.)

The Kavanaugh Hearings last year provided a painfully bright light onto misogyny and rape culture. (I wrote about it here.) That painful episode leaves one to wonder how many men in public life today have skeletons in their closet of sexual harassment, assault, even rape.

And with that, I circle back to Justin Trudeau. Though I may share Andrew Coyne’s judgment that he is a sanctimonious fraud, I do not make that judgment with any sense of self-superiority. Instead, I am driven back to reflect on my own moral development over the last thirty or forty years. And as I reflect on how far I have come, I also have an emerging sense of how far I still have to go.

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What’s Christianity’s biggest weakness? Evidence? Or Poor Diplomats?

This afternoon, I posted the following survey on Twitter:

Most skeptics of Christianity are not skeptics primarily because of the poor quality of apologetic evidence but rather because of the poor quality of Christian disciples.

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) September 15, 2019

Feel free to vote there. But I’d also like to hear your voice here. What do you think? Is the biggest problem for Christianity one of poor evidence? Or is it Christians who are failing to be Christians?

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Bill Maher and the Hypocrisy of Fat-Shaming

Last Friday, Bill Maher’s show Real Time with Bill Maher featured a segment in which he pointed out that being overweight carries many health risks and he offered as a solution a return to publicly shaming people:

I watched the segment. And as is often the case on his show, Maher included some decent bits of wisdom and straight talk mixed in with a stew of ignorance and cruelty.

So I was delighted to see James Corden offer a response to Maher on his show. Corden’s monologue was filled with zingers:

“I found it so surprising that he — or anybody — thinks that fat-shaming needs to make a comeback because fat-shaming never went anywhere. I mean, ask literally any fat person: we are reminded of it all of the time…”

“We’re not all as lucky as Bill Maher; we don’t all have a sense of superiority that burns 35,000 calories a day.”

But most importantly, Corden pointed out that shaming people doesn’t encourage prosocial or healthy behavior in them. On the contrary, it does one thing: make them ashamed. And that, in turn, leads to self-loathing and self-destructive behavior. As Corden succinctly put it, “fat-shaming is just bullying and bullying only makes the problem worse.”

Maher is right: being overweight is unhealthy. But that’s about the only thing he got right. Corden, by contrast, hit it out of the park. Don’t we have enough meanness in society? Do we really need people like Mr. Maher to offer his own twisted moral justification for it? I think not.

The thing that angers me the most is that Maher’s commentary exhibits such rank hypocrisy. For example, Maher is a marijuana smoker (a fact to which he makes periodic reference). This is also unhealthy behavior. Should we lead a new charge to shame marijuana users like Maher?

And (big surprise), there is also good evidence that an increase in sexual partners is positively correlated with an increase in sexually transmitted diseases. Would Maher advise us to begin shaming those who have more than one sexual partner?

And why stop at individual health? Why not also shame people for unhealthy behavior for the society or, indeed, the planet? For example, what about people who are not carbon neutral, people like Maher himself? Should they be shamed for unsustainable patterns of material consumption?

But Maher has no interest in shaming any of these individuals or their behaviors. In his view, fat people are (if you’ll pardon the lame pun), a soft target. It’s easy to shame people for the speck in their eye, more difficult to come to terms with the shameful plank in your own.

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The success of science is paid for by a limitation of its ambitions

The title of this article is a quote from Dutch philosopher of science Willem Drees. It’s a great quote and it communicates a profound truth. Science offers a systematic and ordered investigation into the structure and processes that govern the natural world. And when it is liberated to pursue that ambition, it is a gloriously powerful tool.

The problems come when people want to press that powerful tool into ideological service for other ends from defending an inept president who spread false information about a hurricane’s trajectory to providing ammunition for one or another life philosophy, worldview, or religion.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with interpreting scientific data in accord with one’s philosophy, worldview, or religion. Doing so may yield a surprising consilience between the scientist’s data and the interpretive framework. But that is very different from the ideological attempt to press science into vindicating one’s beliefs.

We must always keep in mind that science itself has those limited ambitions. Science does not address concepts beyond its domain such as free will, moral value, or the existence of a non-physical substance that interacts with the physical.

To be sure, it can provide data that can be interpreted in various ways as the interpreter seeks consilience with his or her philosophy, worldview, or religion. But the interpretation itself always remains one step removed from the science proper.

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Does the Existence of Several Biblical Canons Lead to One Big Problem?

Christians do not agree on the list of books that comprise the biblical canon. To be sure, they do agree on most of them. But nonetheless, there are several distinct biblical canons that disagree on the inclusion of so-called Deuterocanonical or Apocryphal books, as well as the proper form of books like Daniel and the Psalms.

With that in mind, the other day I tweeted the following argument and invited folks to respond:

If the Bible were God’s inspired revelation, God would ensure the church would form a consensus on the canon.
God did not ensure the church formed a consensus on the canon.
Therefore, the Bible is not God’s inspired revelation.

Why think (1) is true? To answer, consider the following parallel argument:

If the instructions for becoming inoculated against a deadly disease were issued by a maximally competent government authority, then that authority would ensure that all government health clinics received the same instructions.
That authority did not ensure that all government health clinics received the same instruction.
Therefore, the instructions for becoming inoculated against a deadly disease were not issued by a maximally competent government authority.

This second argument seems to be very plausibly true. That is, it seems likely that a maximally competent government authority would indeed ensure that all government health clinics received the same instructions for being inoculated against a deadly disease.

If that is, indeed, the case, then the next question is whether the canon functions as something parallel to an inoculation against a deadly disease. If so, the argument may have some legs. If not, then perhaps it doesn’t.

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Apologetics Curricula for Churches

If you want to introduce your church to apologetics, where do you start? What sort of curricula are available? I was asked this question recently, and since I’m sadly not up on such matters, I posed the question to my friend, Tawa Anderson. He provided a list of options that I’ve included below.

Sean McDowell, “GodQuest” – 6-week series
Greg Koukl, “Tactics” – 6 video sessions – our student-led apologetics club walked through these last semester, they were pretty good
Lee Strobel, “The Case for Christ” – 6 videos – ditto “The Case for Faith” – getting a bit dated, but really engaging and pretty well-produced
Frank Turek’s “Why I Still Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist”
William Lane Craig, “On Guard” – 8 videos – we used this series at my home church here in Oklahoma – not perfect, but it’s a solid set

Then there’s two series built out from books I’ve read in the past year; I’ve not seen either set of lectures, but the books were good:

Josh Chartraw & Mark Allen, “Apologetics At the Cross”
Paul Gould, “Cultural Apologetics”

Footnote: I just discovered that J. Warner Wallace has his own curriculum which looks very promising:

Forensic Faith Curriculum Kit: A Homicide Detective Makes the Case for a More Reasonable, Evidential Christian Faith

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Jesus and the Devil’s Music

When I was a kid back in the 1980s, I had a somewhat conflicted relationship with “secular” music. Two of the first albums/cassettes in my collection (c. 1981-2) were “secular”: The Who, Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy and Journey, Escape. And truth be known, they both blew away Petra, Never Say Die despite my mom’s attempt to sell me on Christian rock. That initiated a rather tumultuous period, the low point of which came a few years later when I smashed my Beach Boys cassette. Looking back, Ozzy Osbourne I could at least understand, but the Beach Boys? (That sorry episode is recounted in What’s So Confusing About Grace?)

At that time, I read a lot of anti-rock music literature (aka propaganda) written by folk like Dan and Steve Peters and Bob Larson. This literature piled up “evidence” to hammer home the point that secular rock music, and perhaps the very genre of rock itself, were tools of the devil.

The problem was only made worse by my youth pastor who barred me even from doing a Christian rap song at a talent show. His reason? Rap music is of the devil. But why? “It just is, Brother Rauser.”

I thought of all that the other day when I read this article in which Alice Cooper describes the time back in the 1980s when he decided he needed to get his life in order. So he went to see his pastor and said, “I think I’ve gotta quit being Alice Cooper now.” His pastor replied with a very different view: “Look where he put you. What if you’re Alice Cooper, but what if you’re now following Christ? … You’re a rock star, but you don’t live the rock star life. Your lifestyle is now your testimony.”

If I’d had that pastor, I could have spared myself the expense of having to buy another copy of Beach Boys, Endless Summer to make up for my misbegotten search for piety. More seriously,  I would have recognized that the Christian witness is far more powerful when it is pursued from within a wider non-Christian culture rather than retreating behind the high walls of a sanctified ghetto.

 

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