Randal Rauser's Blog, page 74

Adjust Your Expectations

Christian discipleship is made more difficult when people imbibe the notion that God wants us happy, healthy, and wealthy. As a result, when things go awry, as they inevitably do, people often experience a crisis of faith for which they could have been far better prepared if their expectations had been set properly from the beginning.

The Christian view of life in this mortal coil is, frankly, closer to boot camp than summer camp. And the sooner we get that straight, and pursue the rigors of boot-camp formation in our own lives, the better.

While Christianity does not promise a healthy and happy life here and now, it does promise hope, a hope that is memorably summarized by William Barclay:

“It is not part of the Christian hope to look for a life in which a man is saved from all trouble and distress; the Christian hope is that a man in Christ can endure any kind of trouble and distress … and come out to glory on the other side.”

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A street apologist puts me in my place

Here is a video by a self-described street apologist who critiques my critique of William Lane Craig on biblical atrocities. It was just uploaded in the last couple of days. I have viewed the first ten or so minutes to this point, and hope to listen to the rest later. Let me know what you think. In the future, I may get around to critiquing his critique of my critique.

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God and the Tooth Fairy

Two days ago, I posted the following tweet:

“Every time I hear an atheist compare belief in God to belief in the ‘tooth fairy’ I get more evidence for my observation that atheists don’t even understand what they are rejecting.”

The tweet elicited several responses. Predictably, those included responses that defended the analogy by insisting that there is literally no evidence for the existence of God: none at all. For example,

“When theory and observation meet, we call that evidence. The tooth fairy has no theory and no evidence. God has theory but no evidence.”

“Maybe if there was more evidence for God than there was for the Tooth Fairy then we wouldn’t make that comparison.”

I wouldn’t bother to point out statements like these if they were anomalous, but the fact is that they are quite common among atheists. And the ignorance, hubris, and glaring brazenness of such statements should once and for all put the lie to the silly notion that self-described secular atheists are somehow more rational and carefully critical in evaluating evidence than their religious and theistic neighbors.

So here’s how things usually go at this point. A theist will point out that there is an unimaginably vast literature of reasons and arguments that provide evidence for the existence of God.

I pointed out that I’ve written three books — two co-authored with atheists — on just this topic. So of course, I was then insulted for trying to “sell books”. Imagine that, an author who dares make reference to the books he’s written. And even worse, an author who might want to sell those books. The audacity!

And then comes the predictable reply: “Just give me one reason to believe God exists. Give me one argument. Give me one bit of evidence.”

Of course, it’s an utterly silly request. Any person who begins by saying there is no evidence at all is not about to concede anything you present to them. Remember when now-disgraced young earth creationist Kent Hovind promised a $250,000 reward to anybody who could provide any evidence of evolution? It was a fool’s errand, of course, for whatever evidence you might provide, Kent could always insist that he doesn’t accept it as evidence. The same is true in situations like this. “That’s not evidence! That’s been ‘debunked’!” As if one’s personal incredulity toward a reason or argument is sufficient to demonstrate that it constitutes no reason or evidence at all.

I guess the bottom line is this: if people really want to keep comparing God to the tooth fairy, you and I probably ain’t going to be able to change their mind.

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Assuming Christianity is false. There, aren’t we clever?

#unbelievable

Imagine you’re a Christian who wakes up to find that all the churches are gone & every other Christian in the world—including every minister— has forgotten they ever believed. You still have your Bible, & it’s up to you to win them all back. Good luck with that.

— Tim Sledge (@Goodbye_Jesus) July 14, 2019

I replied: “If Christianity is true, you don’t need luck. But thanks for the example of begging the question.”

Tim Sledge then replied: “But Christianity isn’t true so you would need luck, if, as stated in my earlier tweet, you were a Christian who woke up to find all other Christians had forgotten their faith and it was up to you to reenlist them.”

I replied again, “No, Christianity is true, so one wouldn’t need ‘luck’. But hey, I get it, your tweet is back-patting for the in-group. Fair enough.”

And I really do mean that: if you want to engage in some in-group back-patting then have at it. The problem is that often comments like Tim Sledge’s “scenario” also seem to function as means to reinforce the worldview of those who share them. From that perspective, they can become little more than another brick in the wall of in-group indoctrination.

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Four (or more) Steps to Making Sense of Biblical Violence

I was recently asked on Twitter how I deal with the problem of biblical violence, that is, the problem of God appearing to command and commend violent actions that appear to be evil. I responded with four points and while regular readers of this blog will likely recognize all four in my past writing, I thought it might be helpful to summarize them here.

The first point is to follow Augustine’s principle that Scripture must always be read so as to increase one’s love of God and neighbor. As a result, if a particular reading leads a person to dehumanize members of the human population, that’s a good reason to reconsider your reading.

Second, make sure that your hermeneutical lodestar is the Christ revealed in the Gospels, the one who declared, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father,” the one who called us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

Third, recognize that your most deep-seated moral intuitions are an important guide in exegetical, hermeneutical, and theological reflection. Are those intuitions fallible? Yes, of course. But then, all of our reasoning is fallible: we are human, after all. The fact remains, however, that our moral intuitions provide important guides as we weight the viability of particular readings. Thus, the visceral recoil from some hermeneutical and ethical proposals provides us, at the very least, with a prima facie reason to reconsider those proposals.

Finally, remember that while all Scripture is useful for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, not every text achieves that end in the same way. Some texts may do so in a straightforward manner by showing us how to live and be in the world. Other texts may function very differently, by showing us what not to do, by inviting us to learn from the mistakes of others, and by finding their same errant impulses lodged within our own hearts.

One more thing: you should also keep in mind that it is okay not to know what to do with a particular text. Better to be left without a clear resolution of a problem than to adopt a clearly faulty resolution.

Follow those four (plus one) principles and you will be well on your way to making sense of the violence in Scripture in a way that is biblically faithful, theologically orthodox, and true to the ethical formation that should be wrought in each disciple of Jesus.

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Cultic Atheistic Indoctrination in a Meme

Observe carefully, this is what cultic indoctrination looks like: https://t.co/bQZRZ9Vz1w

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 12, 2019

Sometimes, benighted folk say, “You can’t be indoctrinated into an atheistic or secular perspective because atheism is just the absence of theism or religion.”

That self-delusion is the first step toward indoctrination because once you convince yourself you cannot be indoctrinated into a particular perspective, you will no longer be looking for the processes of indoctrination into that perspective.

So, consider this “meme”: We are given two stark categories: “scientific people” and “religious people”. The “scientific person” is critical, open-minded, wise, and smart. The “religious person” is gullible, closeminded, fatuous, and ignorant.

Never mind that the division is borderline meaningless (or that to the extent where it is meaningful it is obviously false), the fact remains: pound those binary options into folks and then assimilate those people into your “scientific” (secular/atheistic/humanistic/non-religious) belief community and you can get them to believe and do all sorts of nonsense.

In a follow-up article, I’ll provide a specific example of the real-world consequences with believing this kind of indoctrinational claptrap.

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On being friends with people who don’t believe Jesus is the messiah

A few weeks ago, Christianity Today published an article by Michael Licona titled, “I Befriended Bart Ehrman by Debating Him.” In the article, Licona recalls how he initially debated Ehrman in 2008 and how a friendly acquaintance grew out of the exchange. Reading about their casual friendship, I am reminded of the rather more famous camaraderie that developed between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew.

Licona models the winsomeness of the truly Christlike apologist in this article. While I don’t know him well, I did interview him for a podcast and he gave a very fine endorsement of my 2013 book God or Godless (with John Loftus). And I can say that Mike is a very kind and genteel person. He also is a black belt at taekwondo, so that could be at least part of the reason that Ehrman has been so friendly. (Ha ha.)

Two things strike me about this article. The first is that Licona’s degree of debate prep is stunning. For example, he writes: “Over the next five months, I dedicated no less than 50 hours a week to preparing.” Frankly, I find it hard to understand how that could be true. For five months, Licona devoted more time to debate prep than a full-time job?

Even if that is hyperbolic, there is no doubt that Licona devoted an inordinate amount of time to prepare for that debate, even to the point of getting a sparring partner in mock debate preps. It’s impressive, indeed!

The second thing that strikes me is how, presumably, a large portion of the Christianity Today audience would find the idea of being friendly with those with whom you disagree to be a surprising or perhaps even subversive notion. Think about it: being friends with people who don’t think Jesus is the Messiah. Sorry to sound like Captain Obvious here but, isn’t that just the kind of friendships that real Christians should be cultivating?

And so, the real lesson of this article might be the sad realization that it needed to be written at all.

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Why They’re Catholic: A Review of Trent Horn, Why We’re Catholic

Trent Horn, Why We’re Catholic: Our Reasons for Faith, Hope, and Love (Catholic Answers, 2017).

In his 2017 book Why We’re Catholic, Catholic apologist Trent Horn aims to provide a clear, concise, and winsome introduction to the Catholic faith. The book consists of twenty-five short and punchy chapters divided into five sections: truth and God, Jesus and the Bible, The Church and the Sacraments, Saints and Sinners, and Morality and Destiny.

I count Trent a friend and a joint laborer in the cause of Christian apologetics. And as I’ve said before, he is in the very top tier of young Christian apologists. At the same time, I am not a Catholic, so you can expect this review to identify some number of disagreements.

Let’s begin with the points of agreement. As I just said, Horn is a top tier apologist and that means he’s a top tier communicator, one who can dispense with errant arguments and misguided reasoning with a quick and memorable rejoinder. Consider, for example, the tired attempt to marginalize Christian belief with the statement “You’re only a Christian because you were born in a Christian country” (or whatever). Horn retorts,

“If I had been born in India, wouldn’t I be writing a book called Why We’re Hindu instead of Why We’re Catholic? Maybe, but if I had been born in ancient China I might have written a book called Why We Believe the Earth Is Flat.” (7)

In other words, if social location marginalizes our beliefs about God, it also marginalizes our beliefs about nature … and everything else. In this way, Horn handily takes down the objector with a reductio ad absurdum.

Horn argues ably for the existence of a creator with brief statements of the kalam cosmological and design arguments for God’s existence. That leads to another common objection: if God created the universe, then what created God? Horn replies that that question is akin to asking, “If the locomotive is pulling the train, then what is pulling the locomotive?” (27) With that simple analogy, he effectively communicates the concept of a necessary concept to the layperson without any need to introduce modal distinctions between contingency, possibility, and necessity. Once again, that’s evidence of an excellent communicator.

Overall, I appreciated Horn’s treatment of the problem of evil which culminates in an account of the heroic witness of Maximilian Kolbe (36-7). However, when Horn condemns genocide and slavery as social evils (35) he invites the skeptic’s question: if genocide and slavery are evil then why did God approve of them in ancient Israel (e.g. Deuteronomy 20:10-20)?

Occasionally, Horn makes statements that I find a little too talismanic for my taste. For example, he opines that the name “Jesus Christ” elicits “tension and discomfort” in people not because of social conditioning but “because the name itself has power.” (46) Would the equivalents Jisu (Fijian) Ieso (Georgian), Yexus (Hmong Daw), or Ecyc (Mongolian) have the same power for an English speaker? If not, is that not evidence that the power perceived is due to social conditioning?

Horn offers an effective defense of the resurrection. I was less persuaded by his defense of the Trinity as in the sleight of hand in this quote: “if the son of a dog is a dog, and the son of man is a man, then the Son of God must be God.” (63) (Ahem, note the omission of the indefinite article.) Horn also has a tendency to retroject later theology into earlier periods as when he suggests that Tertullian was an orthodox trinitarian (65). (He wasn’t.)

As you can imagine, I am less sanguine when it comes to Horn’s critique of Protestants. For example, he supposes that the Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura entails that the Bible teaches all doctrine (75). That’s not correct. After all, in his famous declaration at the Council of Worms, Martin Luther himself invokes “Scripture and plain reason” as well as “conscience” in his stand against the errors of the Catholic Church. Sola Scriptura is about the primacy of Scripture in doctrinal construction and evaluation, not the misbegotten notion that Scripture is the sole source of doctrine.

As is often the case in Catholic apologetics, one begins to suspect after awhile that the Catholic apologist’s primary intra-Christian target is not Protestantism per se but rather some brand of North American bible church fundamentalism. Fair enough, but mainstream Protestantism would share many of the Catholic critiques of that tradition.

Next, Horn offers defenses of the Pope, priests, and Mass. Interestingly, he takes on the cannibalism charge by noting, “Since Jesus did not want us to be cannibals, he gave us his body and blood to consume under the miraculous form of bread and wine.” (112) However, that is a spurious argument: the consumption of flesh is cannibalistic not because it appears to have the appearance and texture of human flesh but rather because it is human flesh. Thus, if the bread and wine truly are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ at consecration, then the consumption of those elements is, by definition, cannibalistic despite the fact that the accidents (i.e. the sensory qualities) remain unchanged.

I was most disappointed by chapter 16, “Why We Believe in Spite of Scandal.” To be sure, Horn makes legitimate points, such as noting that sex abuse is a problem in other churches. But overall, there was a defensiveness in this chapter that does not begin to take the horror of Catholic sexual abuse seriously. For example, Horn writes:

“According to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, about 4 percent of priests who served between 1950 and 2002 have been accused of sexual abuse (note that accusations do not always mean a crime was committed).” (130)

Now let’s pause here for a moment. The gist of this statement, so it would seem, is that 4 percent is not that high, and moreover that it may be lower because “accusations do not always mean a crime was committed.”

Perhaps it is just me, but I find the fact that 4 percent of priests have been accused of raping and molesting children to be shockingly high. That amounts to thousands upon thousands of priests — representatives of Christ — who have targeted vulnerable children by molestation and rape.

What about Horn’s suggestion of possibly false accusations? While that is technically true, of course, the fact remains that sexual abuse crimes against children are severely under-reported. Thus, the likelihood is that the actual percentage of priests who have molested and raped children is significantly higher than 4 percent. That is simply stunning.

But these are not just statistics: they are individual lives. To get a sense of the horror, I would commend to you the Grand Jury Report chronicling the victimization of more than one thousand children in Pennsylvania.

At one point, Horn recalls an exchange he had with a woman who asked: “How can Catholics have the true Church when their priests do such awful things?” (134) Horn replied by asking her, “does the devil hate Christ’s Church?” She replied, “Absolutely!” Then Horn asked,

“Then of all the members of the Church, who is he going to attack the most?”

She thought for a moment and then said, “The priests!” (135)

It would seem that Horn is attempting to ameliorate the scourage of the clerical sexual abuse of children by attributing at least some degree of it to demonic attack. Sorry, but that’s a bit too close to the devil made me do it defense for my liking.

You might think I’m being too hard on Horn. But I think there are times where apologetics must begin in sackcloth and ashes, and this is one of those times.

Having expressed some deep disagreements with Horn, I’m happy to end with some agreement. I agree that “Salvation does not consist of a single moment when we accept Christ.” (140) Salvation is a process as much as it is an event and Protestants increasingly appreciate this fact. (Consider, for example, the New Perspectives on Paul and how they have upended the more punctiliar Lutheran readings of Paul.)

While I don’t agree with Horn that Paul is referring to purgatory in 1 Corinthians 3:13-15, I am happy to agree with Protestant philosopher Jerry Walls that purgatory is fully consistent with Protestantism. Protestants can also learn from Horn’s treatment of prayer to saints (it’s no different, in principle, then me asking you for prayer) and the veneration of Mary (given the profound reality of incarnation, a healthy Christology requires a healthy Mariology).

Protestants can also benefit from Horn’s treatment of issues in ethics (abortion, in particular) and his brief chapters on heaven and hell. (I will restrain myself from taking issue with some of the details here given that my review is already long-in-the-tooth.)

While I clearly have some dissatisfactions with Why We’re Catholic, overall this is an excellent and accessible introduction to apologetics generally and Catholic apologetics in particular. The book is complemented by several sidebars and concluding bullet points for every chapter.

My thanks to Trent Horn for a complimentary copy of Why We’re Catholic.

You can order your own copy of the book here.

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Reasonable Belief, Reasonable Doubt, and the Resurrection of Jesus

Two days ago, I posted two Twitter surveys directed at two different groups and asking a similar question about an event which is purported to have occurred two thousand years ago. One would think it is possible for people reasonably to disagree about a topic this far removed in time and based on documentary evidence from within a few decades of the event.

So it was interesting, if not surprising, to find that approximately 50 percent of Christians believe it is not rational to doubt the resurrection based on the available historical evidence while 50 percent of atheists believe it is not rational to believe it.

The lesson, I would suggest, is that the first hurdle in having a reasonable discussion about the evidence itself, is to overcome entrenched bias on both sides.

Christians, is it possible that a person who considers all the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus would form the *rational belief* that Jesus *did not* rise from the dead?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 6, 2019

Non-Christians, is it possible that a person who considers all the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus would form the *rational belief* that Jesus *did* rise from the dead?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 6, 2019

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Is Christianity falsifiable? Does it matter if it isn’t?

There is this all-too-common assumption among skeptics of religion that Christianity must somehow be “falsifiable” in order to be a legitimate interpretive framework for reality.

The quick (and tempting) response is to say that Christianity is falsifiable: if there is no resurrected Jesus then there is no Christianity.

However, many nominal Christians have continued in the faith even after coming (either implicitly or explicitly) to reject the historical resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, some of them have been leading preachers, theologians, and biblical scholars such as Rudolf Bultmann, Albert Schweitzer, or Marcus Borg.

So if the bones of Jesus were to be recovered, would Christianity be falsified? The proper answer surely is that Christianity of a particular form would be falsified. But it hardly follows that Christianity simpliciter would be falsified.

Thus, the likelihood is that Christianity would continue in another form. Perhaps its numbers would be diminished overall. It might look very different. But I have no doubt that it would continue in some form, perhaps with a theology similar to the moralism of Schweitzer, the ecclesial existentialism of Bultmann, or the mysticism of Borg.

Most likely, all of the above and more.

What’s the point of this? The point is not to suggest that Christ’s resurrection isn’t essential to Christianity. Perhaps the Christianity that confesses a historical resurrection of Jesus is, at the end of the day, the only one worth defending. (Certainly, that’s my view. But if the bones of Jesus were ever to be found, you might want to ask me again then.)

My only point here is that the criterion of falsification is ill-suited to address the cognitive status of a worldview. And so, the proper response to the falsification criterion is not to say that Christianity meets it. Rather, the proper response is to challenge the criterion outright. A worldview doesn’t need to be falsifiable in order to be legitimate or valid or an option worth considering.

Indeed, to think otherwise is to fail to grasp the expansive nature of worldviews as interpretive grids which are, in principle, endlessly adaptable so long as their adherents find the benefits of further adaptation to outweigh the costs.

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