Randal Rauser's Blog, page 73

Flat Earth, Young Earth?

In June, 2019, Answers in Genesis published an article on the irrational machinations of flat-earthers. A critic of young-earth creationism named Jay Johnson copied the article and did a global find/replace on the following word pairs: flat/young, shape/age, “a sphere”/old, “a globe”/old, and astronomy/geology. This produced an article which suddenly hits rather too-close-to-home for many young-earth creationists. (Props to Mr. Johnson for forwarding this to me.)

How Do We Know What We Know?

Young-earthers raise an excellent epistemological question: how do we know what age is the earth? For three decades, I asked this very question of students in the first semester of my introductory geology class. The context of this question was the early history of geology. I would ask my students what age they thought the earth had. All my students would answer that the earth was old… When I asked my students how they knew the earth was old, not one student could give me a good reason…

… if one becomes convinced that the earth is young rather than being old, that is a major change in one’s worldview. If the earth truly is young, then we have been lied to about the earth’s age our entire lives. One must ask how and why this lie was created and perpetuated. Ultimately, this line of thinking leads to the conclusion that there must be a vast conspiracy about the earth’s age that has been going on for a long time. … It seems that the conspiracy to hide the earth’s true age is the motherlode of conspiracies. All other conspiracies easily are subsumed by this one.

… Why is the cosmological conspiracy believed by young-earthers all-encompassing? The answer lies in the fact that the alleged conspiracy is cosmological. Cosmology is foundational to one’s worldview. If we have been lied to about such an important, fundamental issue, then all other conspiracies are relatively small matters in comparison. Once one comes to believe that there is a vast conspiracy about cosmology, it is a relatively easy step to believe in many other sub-conspiracies.

But young-earthers typically are undeterred by such advice. They dismiss it as the mere teaching of a man. They proudly proclaim that they want to stick solely with what the Bible says. They fail to understand the importance of sound teaching taught in the very Bible they profess to uphold. God has ordained the church for several purposes, including instruction in the Scriptures. 1 Timothy 3:2 says that an overseer must be able to teach. But young-earthers frequently dismiss instruction from Godly men, insisting that they know more about what the Bible says than men who have devoted many decades to prayerful study of the Scriptures. It never occurs to young-earthers that they may be wrong in their understanding of the Bible. Nor does it occur to them that they have set themselves up as authorities on the meaning of the Bible, but their approach completely undermines the possibility of such an authority in the first place. … Some young-earthers also fashion themselves to be experts on science and the methodology of science. Consequently, they think of themselves as competent to dictate to scientists, both godly and ungodly, on how science ought to be conducted. But their definitions and practice of science appear to be formulated to make science as generally understood impossible.

Where do these young-earthers get the notion that they are capable of rewriting so many disciplines of study? This is particularly galling when one considers the limited science education that most young-earthers seem to have achieved. Their ready stock answer is that they haven’t been indoctrinated by all those years of study. These young-earthers fail to realize that without all that study, they don’t even understand what they criticize.

It is intellectually lazy for Christians in their fear to insist on a strictly literal approach to all of Scripture. Sadly, young-earthers who demand this hyper-literal approach to the Bible readily abandon it when it suits them. Ultimately, young-earthers place themselves in a position of authority while simultaneously deconstructing the idea that there can’t be any authority other than Scripture. They are blind to the fact that they have equated their understanding of Scripture with what the Bible says.

Another irony is that while young-earthers regularly dismiss any teaching on Scripture that they disagree with as mere teachings of men, they readily embrace the teachings of men with whom they agree.

This raises the question of whether the Christian version of the young-earth movement is a cult. The young-earth movement has some elements of a cult. Young-earthers insist that their understanding of the Bible is the only true meaning of Scripture, dismissing all others as the mere teachings of men at best, and at worst, the work of the devil. This is the major defining characteristic of a cult. On the other hand, a cult often denies one or more cardinal doctrines of Christianity, such as the deity of Jesus Christ. While some individual young-earthers who identify as Christian may stray a bit from orthodoxy, there is no consistent pattern of denying central tenets of Christianity among young-earthers. Furthermore, a cult usually is led by a central figure. As of yet, there is not a single person who seems to be leading the Christian version of the young-earth movement.

I have found that young-earthers readily believe almost anything that a fellow young-earther says. A young-earther comes up with a very lame argument that he posts on the internet; soon, another young-earthers endlessly repeat the poor argument, an argument that is easily refuted and often contains demonstrably false information. Yet it is nearly impossible to convince young-earthers of the folly of the claim. At the same time, young-earthers are highly resistant to any arguments for the conventional cosmology. Consequently, young-earthers have no skepticism for the claims of fellow young-earthers but have nothing but skepticism (or is contempt a better word?) for those critical of young-earth views… When young-earthers finally post the memes outside of the young-earth echo chambers, they often are surprised by the sharp, and well deserved, criticism that they encounter. Yet, the firm believers of a young earth are never deterred by this, because, as I pointed out before, young-earthers have zero skepticism of young-earth claims and impossibly high skepticism for any opposing positions.

In order to escape the delusion of a young earth, believers in such ideology must first realize that they have been duped by some very poor arguments.

So, I continue to battle this threat to biblical Christianity. I’m not interested in debating young-earthers. I don’t even try to convince them. Instead, my target audience is those who are true seekers, not those who think that they’ve already found truth in the falsity of young earth, without doing the proper research. I also provide answers to those who have seen the unfortunate effects of the young-earth movement in people that they know and love.

REMEMBER: The essay was written by a Young-Earth creationist to criticize the notions of Flat-Earth believers. Other than the global search replacements noted above, the words are Dr. Danny Faulkner’s. 

You can read the original article here.

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Is constructive systematic theology a conceptual failure?

I just wrote a series of tweets complaining about the argument in much current constructive systematic theology. Since I thought that analysis might be of some interest to my blog (but non-Twitter) readers, I’ve reproduced those tweets below.

I’ve read a lot of systematic theology over the years. Some of it is very good: clear and rigorously argued. But too often I encounter analyses that are akin to a Rube Goldberg machine and this especially occurs when various obscure models of the Trinity are invoked to account for various explicanda. With a nod to the theology of Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or the Cappadocians, the theologian invokes hopelessly obscure terms like perichoresis, spiration, or divine appropriation, and voila, the explicandum is allegedly accounted for.

But in truth, what often happens is that the obscure theological analysis is on its own doing nothing, a fact somewhat concealed by the obscurantism of the discourse, while whatever insight or resolution is achieved comes from another quarter.

One simple way to test for this is to ask whether the results for the explicandum could still obtain even if trinitarianism is false (and, say, monadic monotheism is true). If so, the entire analysis is a waste of paper, at least relative to the explicandum.

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The magic of staying at a cheap motel when you’re a kid

A few days ago I returned from a long road trip to Colorado. It’s a trip we’ve made many times over the last twenty years visiting family. This time, we stayed at some nice hotels, each with a pool and slide. When my daughter was young, we would drop our bags in the room and immediately go off to check out the pool. Those days are gone. Now as a seventeen-year-old, my daughter’s chief concern is the hotel wifi password.

It got me thinking about my own experiences growing up. In the late 70s-early 80s, we usually stayed at motels. (If you’re not clear on the difference, motels are generally 1 or 2 floors and provide rooms with direct access to the parking lot.)

The motels didn’t have wifi, but they were absolutely magical places to a young kid. I have countless memories of rolling into a parking lot with a buzzing neon “Vacancy” sign around dusk at a town in the Canadian Rockies or deep in the California Redwoods, or out in the desert Southwest. Set against that backdrop, here are my top memories (in no particular order) of staying at a motel as a kid:

Getting a quarter from mom to run the Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed that could turn any tired bed into a temporary amusement park ride.
Begging for more quarters to play video games like Centipede and Pac Man by the pool.
Begging for 2 more quarters to buy a Coke from the glowing vending machine.
Filling up the ice bucket and dropping your Coke into the middle of it (while pretending it’s a bottle of champagne).
Swimming in the sketchy pool with the rickety slide as the sun sets over the horizon while cars roared by on the highway.
Walking with your sibling to the K-Mart next to the motel to scout out their display of toys and tacky tourist stuff. (And if you’re lucky, finding a cool Hot Wheels that you could afford.)
Visiting the motel lobby and loading up on the brochures from the brochure rack advertising local attractions. Attempting to persuade Dad that you just need to visit “Butterfly World” or the “Gold Rush Museum” before hitting the road tomorrow.
Running back to the lobby because mom said you could buy a postcard to mail to your friend in the morning.
Going to Sambo’s for dinner. I loved Sambo’s as a kid, not because of the food (it was standard diner fare) but because of the jungle-themed decor: it was kind of like a Tiki bar for kids. (Unfortunately, I would only learn years later that this decor was exploiting the racism of Little Black Sambo.)
Watching The Dukes of Hazzard on that new color TV before bedding down for the night.

Staying at those motels illustrated the old principle that life is a journey, not a destination. And these modest motels with their glowing neon signs and Googie architecture were an essential part of my childhood journey.

All that magic, and we never even had wifi…

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God can save mid-level sinners like me, but not mega-sinners like Stalin

The other day, I posted a couple of tweets listing bad objections to Christian universalism. Here is the second tweet:

“The second worst objection to Christian universalism: ‘If everybody is ultimately saved by Jesus, then why bother telling anybody?’

“Um, because it’s the best possible news. And God told us to.”

Steve Hays of Triablogue wrote a response to this tweet and here is the point in his article to which I want to respond:

“Universalism is the best possible news for whom? It may be the best possible news for Mao, Stalin, and ISIS (to name a few), but how is it the best possible news for victims of horrific evil that their perps won’t suffer retributive judgment for their vicious heinous crimes?”

I am not surprised that Hays posted a comment like that, but wow is it revealing of his utter inability to understand the Gospel. Hays presumably thinks it is good news that Christ’s atoning work extends to him and his crowd, but he is deeply offended at the notion that it should extend to these other sinners as well, presumably the really bad ones.

So apparently, it isn’t offensive that God should mercifully save medium-sinful Steve Hays but it is beyond the pale that he should save a really bad sinner like Mao, Stalin, or an ISIS soldier.

Steve Hays could learn something from J.I. Packer. Though Packer is a Calvinist who believes that those who die outside Christ suffer eternal conscious torment, he also wrote this:

“No evangelical, I think, need hesitate to admit that in his heart of hearts he would like universalism to be true. Who can take pleasure in the thought of people being eternally lost? If you want to see folk damned, there is something wrong with you!”

Packer is right. Mr. Hays, there’s something wrong with you.

For further reading, check out my articles “The very worst reason to reject universalism” and “If you want to see folk damned, there is something wrong with you!“

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I had a long exchange with a Trump-supporting pastor on Twitter. It went as you would expect

On the weekend, I had a significant exchange online with a pastor and Trump supporter named Marc Hamer. Pastor Hamer describes himself on Twitter as “Servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ … and Pastor of Refuge Calvary Chapel in New Holland, Pa.” The exchange began when Pastor Hamer objected to my description of Trump. So I asked him to choose one of the descriptors to which he objected and I promised to write an explanation and defense.

He chose “racist.” So I replied:

I was challenged by Pastor @marcreedhamer to defend the claim that Trump is racist. To do so, I will summarize a fact pattern which demonstrates over decades evidence of Trump's racial discrimination toward visible minorities.

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 27, 2019

Over the ensuing discussion, Hamer responded to my fact pattern by repeatedly defending Trump: he defended Trump’s birtherism, he defended Trump’s dismissal of African countries as “shitholes” and Trump’s preference for immigrants from Norway, and so on.

What is more, he claimed that Trump can’t be racist because he is demanding the release of an African-American rapper from a Swedish jail, to which I replied: “this comment is racially tone-deaf. It’s like saying that because a man has a Jewish lawyer and listens to Sammy Davis Jr. that he can’t be racist.” (I then linked to this New York Times article.)

In short, I don’t think things were going well for Pastor Hamer. In an apparent attempt to turn the tables, he then posed some questions for me:

1. Do you believe in the exclusivity of Christ?

2. Do you believe in taxpayer funded abortion on demand?

3. Do you believe that homosexuality is a sin?

4. Do you believe in the authority of scripture?

Of course, this list of questions is nothing more than a red herring. As such, I ignored it. In reply, Hamer predictably called me a “coward” and concluded:

“I’ll assume you’re just another false teacher in the same line as Rob Bell, Brian McClaren, Tony Jones, Tony Campolo, Steve Chalke, Matthew Vines and all the other emergents who are trying to redefine the faith.”

And there we have a sad but poignant illustration of far too many American Caucasian evangelicals today: they are vigilant in standing on the ramparts, defending their chosen boundary markers (although how they would actually define and defend each of them is another question). And even as they do so, they open the gates wide to roll in a trojan horse of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and general moral decrepitude.

It would be difficult to find a more succinct illustration than this of how the American evangelical church has fallen into utter disrepute in the eyes of the wider culture.

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Dragging Jesus Through the MAGA-Mud

Yesterday, Sean McDowell posted a tweet about Joshua Harris no longer calling himself a Christian:

Sean McDowell: Joshua Harris apologizes to the LGBTQ community and announces he is no longer a follower of Jesus: (link: https://www.instagram.com/p/B0ZBrNLH2sl/) instagram.com/p/B0ZBrNLH2sl/

This prompted me to reply:

Randal: Let’s be precise, please. I don’t know where he’s at, but he said he’s not a “Christian” by conventional definition. He didn’t say “follower of Jesus”. & he positively referenced Julian (of Norwich?). I want to hear more about his doctrinal stance before drawing final conclusions

Sean: A Christian technically means a “Christ follower” but I see your point about the connotations and cultural attachments to the word as well. Fair enough.

Randal: Yes, as you know many people (e.g. emerging folk) seek to distinguish themselves from the cultural baggage that comes with “Christian” by choosing another denominator.

And that’s where my exchange with McDowell ended and my exchange with a Trump-supporting pastor began.

Marc Hamer: Yes, but unfortunately in doing so they reconstruct a religion to their liking that shares no resemblance to the biblical faith.

Randal: It depends. In many cases, the cultural baggage from which they seek to dissociate is that which shares no resemblance with the faith. Like MAGA supporters, for example. That’s some heavy baggage right there.

Marc: Examples I would give that are well known are Rob Bell, Brian McClaren, and in the UK, Steve Chalke. Sorry but they’ve reinvented the Christian Faith or in other words are idol worshipers. I also think you’re broadbrushung big time about MAGA supporters.

Randal: Are Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham, two unflagging supporters and enablers of an amoral, racist, adulterous, misogynistic, xenophobic, demagogic politician, idol worshippers?

Marc: Looks like you’re drinking the main steam media coolaid. Try doing some primary source research instead of buying into the agenda laced misinformation from the MSM. Don’t be lazy.

Randal: Please be specific, Marc. With what do you take issue?

Marc: Your whole last statement sounds like it could be a quote from Mika Brzezinski on her MSNBC morning show. It’s an inaccurate and unfair characterization of all stated. Classic lazy labeling.

Randal: Sir, I asked you which label you would like to discuss first. Quit deflecting.

Marc: I don’t have all day to go back and forth. I would argue that all of the labels you’ve put forth as unfair characterizations in the context of the here & now. Many of them may have once applied to Trump but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt as we are all a work in progress.

Randal: Marc, you accused me of being lazy in leveling unsubstantiated charges. So I offered to defend each charge in turn. And now you have no time? So who is the lazy one? It’s that kind of hypocrisy that leads many people to dissociate from the term “Christian”.

Marc: I’m not being lazy, I have better things to do but to play along, you could start with the most overused accusation of Trump being a racist. When I have time I’ll respond.

And this brings me to my defense of the racism charge.

Randal: I was challenged by Pastor @marcreedhamer to defend the claim that Trump is racist. To do so, I will summarize a fact pattern which demonstrates over decades evidence of Trump’s racial discrimination toward visible minorities.

First, in 1973 Trump and his father Fred were sued by the federal government for racial discrimination for refusing to rent apartments to black people. They settled out of court.
Second, in 1989 the Central Park 5, all black/Latino teenagers as young as 14, were arrested and tried for the rape of a woman in Central Park. They were all later exonerated and the case was exposed as a massive miscarriage of justice. The government later settled for $41 mill. Back in 1989, Trump published a full-page ad in several New York newspapers calling for the execution of these teenagers. He has never recanted this position. As recently as June 2019 he insists on their guilt even though they’ve been fully exonerated.
Trump has claimed that an American-born judge cannot rule fairly on a legal case because that judge’s ancestry is from Mexico. As Paul Ryan noted at the time, that is the definition of racism.
Trump launched his campaign by stoking racist and xenophobic fears by describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and murders … and then adding “and some, I assume, are good people.” Some? You assume?
Trump stated that there were “good people” within the crowd of white supremacists marching at Charlottesville.
When asked to disavow the support of David Duke, Trump repeatedly declined to do so, demurring that he didn’t know who David Duke was. In fact, he knew Duke well.
Trump called African countries “shitholes” and stated that he would prefer immigrants from Norway over immigrants from shithole African countries.
For years, Trump promoted the birther conspiracy, suggesting, with no evidence, that America’s first black president was actually born in Kenya. He never apologized for promoting this racist theory.
Trump told four non-Caucasian congresswomen to go back where they came from despite the fact that three were born in America and the fourth is a naturalized citizen.
Trump calls Elizabeth Warren “Pochahontas.” He has joked about the Trail of Tears and valorized Andrew Jackson who led a genocidal charge against indigenous peoples. Vox has recently compiled multiple other examples of Trump’s racism.
So as I said at the beginning, the issue is about establishing fact pattern, and this is a pattern extending back at least 46 years, one that repeatedly privileges whiteness and marginalizes non-whiteness. The evidence supports the charge: Trump is racist.

Now the question for every Trump supporter: what are you doing supporting a racist? And that brings me back to Pastor Marc:

Randal: So, @marcreedhamer, to return to our original conversation: some people prefer not to use the label “Christian” to describe themselves because they want to dissociate from self-described “Christians” who support a baldly racist president.

Next, should we talk about Trump’s disgusting misogyny, infidelity, and his multiple credible outstanding charges of sexual assault and rape?

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Young earth creationism destroys the faith of young people. Don’t let it.

It’s that time of year when students gear up for back to school and a new crop of high school grads prepare to ship off to university. It’s also the time when many of those first-year students from conservative Christian backgrounds will find their faith being shaken through the first semesters of university. In some cases, their faith will never recover. And yet, it doesn’t have to be that way. Three years ago, I wrote an article warning parents and youth leaders about this problem and the other day I tweeted out a link to that article:

As a new crop of evangelical kids prepare to go to university, here's a sober warning from my article: "How evangelical kids can get their faith shaken on the first day of university" https://t.co/xrtsSUA4Os

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 24, 2019

I received several tweeted responses from folks who said that the description of the article represented their experience. Today, I retweeted the comments of one of those individuals who concluded like this:

“If what I was taught about christianity was true…why did my parents and churches and youth leaders and so on… Need to defend it with so many lies and misrepresentations?”

Among the points to which he was referring (and which I referred to in the article) was the claim that Christians should be young earth creationists coupled with a claim that there allegedly isn’t good (still less, overwhelming) evidence for the core claims of evolutionary theory: the ancient age of the earth and universe and common descent by way of random mutation, natural selection, and other selective pressures.

This prompted a young earth creationist named Joel to suggest that the real problem is not teaching creationism but rather failing to teach creationism well.

Or, is it the other way around? Is it that churches weren’t prepared to present a robust defense of biblical creationism, and students were caught flat-footed by the confidence of their evolutionist biology professors in high school and college?

— Joel (The Think Podcast) Settecase (@joelsettecase) July 25, 2019

As you can imagine, I could not disagree more. In my view, Joel’s position is akin to a corporate executive circa 2005 arguing that rentals are declining at Blockbuster because of bad advertising: “Launch a new campaign and folks will be streaming back to rent video cassettes and DVDs!”

I suspect somebody did argue like that because 2005 saw the launch of the “No late fees!” advertising campaign at Blockbuster.

And we all know how that went: bankruptcy five years later.

R.I.P. Blockbuster.

I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but at this point, young earth creationism is deader than Blockbuster Video: the universe is not six to ten thousand years old, there was no global flood, and all suffering, predation, carnivory, and death did not begin after the primordial sin of two individuals in a verdant garden somewhere in the fertile crescent.

Of course, this is not news to most Christian academics. Nor is it a shock to mainstream Christian denominations which have since adapted to modern views of science just as they adapted at an earlier time to the theories of Copernicus, Aristotle, and Ptolemy.

But not everyone got the memo: North America continues to see a vocal subculture of young earth creationists who take Joel’s line: the problem, they insist, isn’t young earth creationism, per se; rather, the problem is that we aren’t teaching it well enough.

So let me throw down the gauntlet:

If you persist in cultivating what is, in essence, something akin to a conspiracy position which entails that a fundamentalist high school teacher from Australia and his fundamentalist parachurch organization and other fringe groups like them, know more about biblical interpretation than the world’s leading biblical scholars and that they know more about science than the world’s Nobel laureates in the natural sciences, then you are doing nothing more than setting up kids for an even harder fall when they go to university and discover an entire world of brilliant scholars and powerful arguments and evidence to which they were never exposed.

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Does God call all people to the same church?

Over the last few months, I have defended ecclesial pluralism a couple of times in my interactions with Catholic apologist Trent Horn. I have made my case by way of a straightforward argument that appeals to God’s work in the life of two individuals, Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. In this article, I will unpack that argument more fully.

First, let’s begin with a minimal definition of what I mean by ecclesial pluralism:

Ecclesial Pluralism: the view that God calls particular Christians to fulfill their life of discipleship within distinct Christian ecclesial communions.

Thus, according to ecclesial pluralism, it is false to think that God calls everyone to be Catholic or Baptist, Methodist or Orthodox. Instead, God calls different people to participate in different ecclesial communions.

Note that I am not claiming here that God calls every individual to a specific communion. Ecclesial pluralism is indifferent toward that question. All that ecclesial pluralism claims is that some people (i.e. at least two) are called to pursue their life of Christian discipleship in different communions.

And here’s the argument with respect to two particular individuals:

If two Christians have been called to live out their Christian lives in distinct ecclesial communions then ecclesial pluralism is true.
Billy Graham and Mother Teresa have been called to live out their Christian lives in distinct ecclesial communions.
Therefore, ecclesial pluralism is true.

The argument is valid and the first premise is true. But what about the second premise? Why think that is true? Here’s my underlying reasoning in support of that premise. I believe that when an individual lives a stellar Christian life that impacts millions of others positively, and they do so from within a particular ecclesial community, then all other things being equal, we have good reason to conclude that that individual was called to live out their Christian life from within that ecclesial community. This intuition is strengthened further when we have reason to think that counterfactually an individual would not have had a commensurate impact had they not been a member of that ecclesial community.

Both Billy Graham and Mother Teresa lived stellar Christian lives that impacted millions of others positively and each did so from within a particular ecclesial community (Baptist; Catholic). Consequently, we have good reason to conclude that both Billy Graham and Mother Teresa were called to live out their Christian lives from within those specific communities.

What is more, it seems very implausible that Graham would’ve had the same impact as a Catholic or that Mother Teresa would’ve had the same impact as a Baptist. This provides further support for the intuition that each was called to follow Christ from within their respective ecclesial communions. That, in turn, supports premise 2. Thus, the argument provides a good reason to think that ecclesial pluralism is true.

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Christianity is a religion, not a relationship

This morning, I read the following tweet:

Christianity is not a religion, let alone one religion among many. It is God's good news for the world.

– John Stott
(The Gospel: A Life-Changing Message)

— Bruxy Cavey (@Bruxy) July 20, 2019

 

It’s a common refrain among some Christians. Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship.

Okay, let’s pause for a moment. The concept of religion is not an easy one. It appears to be an essentially contested concept (i.e. a concept for which there is fundamental and irresolvable disagreement as to its application) or it is a fuzzy concept (i.e. a concept the application of which has unclear boundaries). Suffice to say, there is always disagreement as to the precise application of the term. Can humanism or communism be a religion? Does Confucianism qualify? What about juche, the “self-reliance philosophy” of North Korea? It depends whom you ask. And there may be no single right answer.

That said, there certainly are paradigm cases of religion. Included in that list we find Judaism, Islam, Jainism, Buddhism, and … (wait for it!) … Christianity.

So what’s going on here?

The speaker, in this case, is clearly not adhering to a conventional dictionary definition of “religion”. Instead, she is invoking a rhetorical use of the word, one popular among some Christians. It seems to me that it can be defined roughly like this:

religion. n. Those beliefs one holds and actions one undertakes to address the human problem and relate rightly to ultimate reality which are inconsistent with the revealed beliefs and practices commended by God and which seek to redress that human problem primarily through human effort.

This usage was famously invoked by Karl Barth in his much-lauded theological reflection on the book of Romans in which he “translated” Paul’s reference to the Law as “religion”. Thus, in Barth’s calculus, the law/religion are what we do to relate rightly to God while Jesus Christ is what God does to relate rightly to us.

Personally, I think the reality of how God works through the various religions of the world is far more complicated than that simple binary would suggest. Nonetheless, the main problem, as I see it, is that this usage is guilty of equivocation since it uses the term “religion” in a specialized (and frankly, tendentious) specialized sense and the entire gravitas of the statement depends on that equivocation.

So I would prefer if we simply dropped the claim that Christianity is not a religion. To me, such rhetorical indulgences are more trouble than they’re worth.

And while we’re at it, Christianity isn’t a relationship, not literally. That would appear to be an instance of metonymy, the practice of substituting one thing (in this case, the Christian religion) for another thing with which it is closely related (God). So, to be clear, the relationship is not the Christian religion itself. Rather, the relationship is that which obtains between persons (as individuals and groups) and God, and which is uniquely mapped out within the Christian religion.

Just to be clear, metonymy is a perfectly legitimate figure of speech just so long as folks recognize that it is a figure of speech. Sadly, I fear that in many cases there is a deep confusion as to what one is, in fact, doing with the use of such language.

So one more time and for emphasis, Christianity is not a relationship. It’s a religion.

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My Response to the Pinecreek-Doug-Dilemma

In “A street apologist puts me in my place” I provide a link to an extended critique of my critique of Bill Craig, courtesy of Pinecreek Doug. I’m laboring under some work deadlines at the moment so I asked my readers to view Pinecreek Doug’s extended critique and summarize the gist for me. Bilbo wrote the following:

The Theistic apologist’s reply (and I think this would include Randal) to the problem of evil is to say that God could have sufficiently justifiable reasons for allowing evil that we do not know about.

Doug is using that argument against Randal’s position of the Canaanite genocide stories in the Hebrew Scriptures. Doug is asking Randal, couldn’t God have sufficiently justifiable reasons for commanding the Israelites to commit genocide, that we do not know about?

If Randal agrees that God could have such reasons, then why doubt the historical accuracy of those stories?

If Randal thinks that God could not have such reasons, then why think the argument is any good against the problem of evil?

And here’s perhaps the most important part. Pinecreek Doug replied: “Bilbo, you nailed it!”

Okay, here’s a quick response. The question “Couldn’t God have sufficiently justifiable reasons for…” translates to “Is it possible that your putative moral knowledge that-p [e.g. that genocide is always wrong] could be in error? And if so, how do you know it isn’t in error?”

From that perspective, we see that Pinecreek Doug’s dilemma is, in fact, a token example of a general type: how do you know that your fallible beliefs have not failed you in this instance?

That, of course, is a problem that applies to everyone whatever their beliefs. Consider the secular rule utilitarian who insists that raping a child could never be morally justified because such a heinous act could never lead to an increase in the overall good (happiness; pleasure; or whatever) for the most people. But then along comes Pinecreek Doug to ask, how do you know that your fallible beliefs have not failed you in this instance?

The answer is, the mere possibility that one could be wrong in believing that-p is not sufficient to provide an undercutting defeater for that-p. Just as one need not show definitively that solipsism is false to believe it is false (and know it is false if it is, in fact, false) so one need not show definitively that one could not possibly be wrong in believing that rape could never increase the collective good in order to believe (and know) that it could never increase the collective good.

And the same goes with claims that God commanded genocide. The mere claim that one could be wrong in this belief is not, in itself, sufficient to consider that one might indeed be wrong as a live possibility, one which could undercut one’s current belief that one is correct.

Since that mere possibility of fallibility is insufficient to undercut one’s belief/knowledge, what is really required is either a stronger undercutting defeater that provides a good reason to question the reliability of our beliefs in these matters or a substantive rebutting defeater which provides a good reason to believe that our moral convictions in these matters are, in fact, false.

For further discussion of these themes, see my article “Could God command something morally heinous?“

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