Randal Rauser's Blog, page 75

Do I have an anything goes epistemology? A response to my critic

A long-time commenter at my blog, Jeff Kesterson, asked me to take a look at his 2018 article “An Overview of the Problem of Evil | Denying the Problem: Reformed Epistemology.” The article offers a critique of reformed epistemology and specifically Alvin Plantinga and yours truly. I’m not going to recap the argument here — you can read or skim it at the link provided — but I will offer a series of responses.

First, a point of clarification. Jeff writes: “Randal Rauser is an intellectual protégé of Plantinga, even having studied directly under him for a stint.” That description could be misleading, so let’s be specific. I took a graduate level course with Plantinga in 1998 on religious epistemology at which time we studied, among other texts, a draft copy of Warranted Christian Belief. That’s it. I’ve talked with Plantinga a couple of times since 1998 but he wouldn’t know me from Adam.

That said, the course piqued my interest in Plantinga’s work and led to me writing my PhD thesis on a moderate foundationalist epistemology to theological prolegomena as a way to address the justification question that has vexed theologians since the Enlightenment.

“Evidence be damned” Strawman

The gist of Jeff’s charge can be found in a couple of quotes near the start of his essay. As he sees it, views like mine lead to

“a refinement and more careful articulation of the ‘I just know deep down that it’s true, evidence be damned’ kinds of responses which are so often appealed to on behalf of theism.”

“It suffers from the same basic problem as the ‘I just know that it’s true’ epistemology of the layperson. Namely, it boils down to: anything goes.”

 That’s a strawman. I have devoted my career to articulating reasons and arguments for my beliefs and responding to objections  — writing books and essays, participating in public debates and interviews, etc. — and yet my view leads to an attitude of “evidence be damned”? The irony of this charge is thick as the humidity on an August night in the bayou.

Casting the Net or Poisoning the Well

Next observation: Jeff occasionally makes comments about what epistemologists generally believe. For example, he writes: “although many other epistemologists would agree with Rauser that testimony can confer proper basicality, Rauser casts the ‘under the right conditions’ net far more widely than most.” Really? Where is the evidence that my views deviate from a “majority” view in this manner? I will wait for Jeff to provide evidence of the views of most epistemologists. Until he provides that, this is merely a lowgrade attempt to poison the well.

(What is more, keep in mind that most philosophical positions are held by a minority,  not least because the options are not binary. Thus, Jeff’s sideline commentary is borderline meaningless, except as that aforementioned attempt to poison the well.)

Missing Critical Nuance

My first complaint above is that Jeff was strawmanning my position. However, that may not be quite accurate. Strawman is an informal fallacy which is based on the intentional misrepresentation of a person’s views. But Jeff’s misrepresentation might be borne of a simple failure to grasp the nuances of particular positions.

As a case in point, he writes: “there’s no need here to get sidetracked on the endlessly stale debates about various candidate ‘criteria for proper basicality.'” This is a stunning statement because the criteria by which we identify which beliefs are in need of evidential justification and which may be properly held absent defeaters is absolutely core to the entire discussion.

That’s why I base my discussion not in some partisan discussion of the epistemic status of various theological beliefs, which is precisely where critics like Jeff inevitably begin. Rather, I begin with a general discussion of how human beings actually form beliefs and how we generally identify those beliefs as having rational epistemic status and the ability to convey knowledge. That’s why I begin with a discussion of sources of belief like sense perception (which Jeff mentions in passing), testimony (which he addresses but deeply misunderstands, more on which anon), rational intuition, proprioception, aesthetic intuition, moral intuition, memory, and so on.

Once you begin to get a handle on how beliefs are formed generally, you have a solid theoretical basis in which to discuss belief in God. Unfortunately, Jeff sidelines this entire foundational conversation as “endlessly stale”. No wonder he ends up misunderstanding so much.

To wrap up, I’m going to turn to some examples of Jeff misunderstanding regarding testimony, Plantinga’s view of proper basicality, and ultimately the most important one of all, the question of epistemic defeat.

Failing to Understand Testimony as Properly Basic

If a belief is properly basic that means that one can rationally form that belief in an immediate way under the right conditions without deriving that belief evidentially from other beliefs. Hence, it is basic or foundational. Jeff seems to understand the concept as when he references how one would sense perceive a kitten and then, based upon that experience, would form the belief that one is seeing a kitten.

Unfortunately, Jeff bluntly says he cannot understand how this could apply to testimony, i.e. forming a belief by way of another person’s witness. He writes: “It makes no sense to me to speak of properly basic testimonial belief, as that would seem to imply that the simple brute fact of the testimony itself serves to justify the testified-to belief.”

First of all, “brute fact” is a metaphysical ascription, not an epistemological one.

As for Jeff’s claim that this “makes no sense”, perhaps I can be of service. We learn language by way of testimony. As we are sitting, drooling, on the floor, our mother kneels in front of us, holds up a spherical object, points at it, and says “BALL.”

Are we justified in forming the belief that the spherical object is a ball based on that testimony? Or are toddlers obliged only to form those beliefs if they undergo additional evidential reasoning in support of the general reliability of their mother as a testimonial witness?

The latter option is, of course, absurd. We can’t get going in this world unless we cede to our moms (and dads, and siblings and family friends, and kind acquaintances and strangers) the status of their testimony as the basis on which we form beliefs.

Okay, you might think, perhaps properly basic testimony is okay for toddlers, but surely not for adults! But that makes no sense. If it is rational and justified for one to form beliefs based on the immediate testimony of others, and assuming one has no overriding reason to doubt that testimony, then that is true whether one is a toddler or a teenager or a middle-aged professor.

Hopefully, it makes some sense now.

Failing to Understand Properly Basic Theism in Plantinga

My next example of a failure to understand comes with Jeff’s citation of Plantinga on properly basic theistic belief. Let’s begin with the Plantinga quote:

Someone in whom [the sensus divinitatus] was functioning properly would have an intimate, detailed, vivid, and explicit knowledge of God; she would have an intense awareness of his presence, glory, goodness, power, perfection, wonderful attractiveness, and sweetness; and she would be as convinced of God’s existence as of her own.

Jeff then comments:

I would have a fair amount of sympathy for any theist who might find themselves in the sort of ideal circumstances here described by Plantinga, although I’d still contend that it would nonetheless be a mistake to infer theism even under such circumstances.

Here’s the problem. Plantinga isn’t saying that the theist has an experience and infers theism, as Jeff puts it. Rather, the theist has an experience and immediately forms beliefs about God’s acting in his or her life.

Ironically, Jeff’s language is serendipitously appropriate in one sense. The properly basic belief is, first of all, not God exists, but rather God loves me or God is speaking to me or what have you. Compare: human beings don’t begin with that person exists. Rather, they begin with that person is smiling at me. That is the properly basic belief from which the belief “that person exists” may be deduced with this connecting premise: “If a person smiles at me then that person exists.” One could reason to the proposition that God exists evidentially in that way based upon the properly basic belief that God loves me or God is speaking to me. But contrary to what Jeff says, it is most certainly not a mistake to infer theism under such circumstances.

Anything Goes?

Next, let’s return to Jeff’s charge that “anything goes.” We can launch off of the following excerpt:

One more example from Rauser’s work: His one-time coauthor Justin Schieber asserted that “Heaven is a place where free will is preserved yet has no evil. Such a world is possible for God to create from the start. He chose not to.” Rauser replied, “If [Schieber] wants to present an objection to theism he needs to show that God doesn’t have morally sufficient reasons [for choosing not to create “heaven” from the start].”

Jeff doesn’t like that response. Indeed, he thinks I am thereby setting the bar of contrary evidence unreasonably high and in the process sustaining this illegitimate anything-goes approach to epistemology.

But that’s not the case. Imagine that you begin your first day of a five-year apprenticeship under a world-famous master of X. Your first task that day is to clean the toilets of the facility with a toothbrush. After work, we meet up for a beer and you tell me (a guy who knows little of the master or his craft) what you did all day. “Are you kidding?” I sputter. “Cleaning the toilets with a toothbrush? That guy’s a huckster!”

You reply, “If you want to present an objection to the master, you need to show that he doesn’t have sufficient reasons for asking me to clean the toilets with a toothbrush.” Surely that’s a fair point, isn’t it? Two novices are not in a place to question a master on the first day of a five-year apprenticeship. Consequently, the fact that one cannot see how the master’s instructions serve the final goal does not provide a reason to believe the master’s instructions do not serve the final goal.

In my conversation with Schieber, I’m pointing out that he’s acting like the buddy calling out the master as a huckster. If he wants to make the charge, he needs to provide a reason to believe that God could not have morally sufficient reasons for making imperfect human beings with the ability to acquire virtue over time (and experience suffering with it). Until he does that, he doesn’t have a sustainable objection.

Now you might be thinking: Fair enough, but then at what point in the apprenticeship would the apprentice be justified in concluding that the master is, in fact, a huckster? Surely there must be some point, right? Otherwise, anything goes!

True enough, but the reality is that this will likely be a person-relative judgment. If the master takes on 100 apprentices, many may drop out at various points over 5 years, convinced that he is a huckster. They may be rational to do so but others may be rational to stick with it. At the very least, it is most certainly clear that not anything goes.

As for Jeff, he hasn’t provided a good reason for me to think that we are anywhere near that threshold. And complaining, falsely, that my epistemological framework leads to an anything-goes mentality goes no distance toward moving the balance in his favor.

The post Do I have an anything goes epistemology? A response to my critic appeared first on Randal Rauser.

“There is insufficient evidence to warrant belief.” Eh?

This morning, I noticed an exchange between Angry Grasshopper and Ron H. on my blog regarding the nature of evidence for theism. I have excerpted the relevant bits below, but you can read the fuller exchange starting here. After that, I’ll offer my own comments.

Angry Grasshopper: “I don’t reject ‘mere’ theism because it doesn’t have a good narrative. You have it a bit backwards. I reject ‘mere’ theism for the reason I gave: I have never seen evidence or a compelling argument sans well known fallacious reasoning for a god, less so for a personal god needed in mere theism. If you have such evidence I would be glad to see it.”

Ron H: “I think we all know that the ‘There’s no evidence!’ claim is something of a sophomoric point, right? There’s plenty of ‘evidence’ — it’s circumstantial and not at all conclusive, to be sure, but there are vast numbers of incredibly smart people on all sides of the question who are persuaded in one direction or another by the same ‘evidence’.”

Angry Grasshopper: “Even if you uncharitably approximate what I actually said to mean ‘There’s no evidence!’, I have a well established history of explicitly stating a more refined view. Namely that there is insufficient evidence to warrant belief. That’s not the same as ‘No evidence!'”

Comments

I want to focus on AG’s clarification of his position. It’s not that there is “no evidence” for theism, he says. It’s that “there is insufficient evidence to warrant belief.”

Apparently, that’s supposed to be an improvement.

First off, insufficient evidence for whom? For every single person on earth living today? What an extraordinary claim that would be. I’d love to see the evidence for that.

How about we narrow our scope. There is insufficient evidence for everybody who happens to comment at randalrauser.com. Since I comment at randalrauser.com, and since I am a theist, and since I have defended the warrant of Christian belief (let alone mere theism) in several books beginning with Theology in Search of Foundations (Oxford University Press, 2009) as well as in literally dozens of articles and several public debates, I’d also love to see the evidence that I don’t have warrant.

Second, how is warrant defined? Is it equivalent to rationality? Or justification? Or rationality + justification + whatever else must be added to a true belief to make knowledge?

Third, what is AG’s epistemology, anyway? His statement — “there is insufficient evidence to warrant belief” — implies some sort of evidentialist view. But like many Christian epistemologists, I explicitly repudiate that assumption. Most of our beliefs are not formed based on explicit reasoning from evidence. Rather, as Thomas Reid points out, they are properly basic when formed in the right conditions absent any defeaters. If this is true of sense perception, memory, proprioception, rational intuition, testimony, et cetera, why not think that it is equally true of belief in God?

So yeah, when people say “there is insufficient evidence to warrant belief”, I always want to hear more.

The post “There is insufficient evidence to warrant belief.” Eh? appeared first on Randal Rauser.

Off the Rails: Debriefing my Misunderstanding with Paul Franks

I had an interesting exchange with Paul Franks this morning, but alas it eventually ended up going off the rails. I’ve summarized the exchange below by reproducing the text of our tweets following my initial tweet. I’ll then conclude by offering my own diagnosis of how and why it went off the rails. The hope is that there are lessons here for folks discussing contentious topics more generally.

James Dobson says media is not 'truthful' in reporting on migrant detention centers. Conservative Christian family values on display… https://t.co/qrVF0xjkTa

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 1, 2019

Paul Franks: I don’t follow. What in the article calls you to question his conservative Christianity?

Randal Rauser: I’m questioning his family values. Dobson is silent on Trump’s policy of child separation and delaying of refugee claimants and incredibly suggests the government should “just deny these refugees access to this nation. Can’t we just send them back to their places of origin?”

That’s a violation of the UN Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. It’s also a violation of basic humanity and compassion, not to mention the ethic of Jesus (Matthew 25:31-46). Dobson is a propagandist for an administration engaging in unChristian actions.

Paul: I’m not defending Dobson (he’s said some callous things), I just don’t see how his saying the media isn’t being objective in identifying the cause of the problem runs contrary to either conservatism or Christianity.

Randal: As I said, he is showing the deep problems with his conception of family values for the reasons I provided. True family values would denounce the policy instituted by Jeff Sessions to separate children and demoralize parents. Shutting the border to refugees? Unbelievable.

Paul: Okay, you’re just making a different point than your initial post. That’s what caused my confusion. Initially it seemed you were calling into question his conservative Christianity because of his comments about the media.

Different question, are you an open borders guy?

Randal: I wrote “Conservative family values on display…” which is an ironic statement that many of those who most profess family values violate that profession when it involves outsiders. That was my point.

Open borders? Not sure what you mean. Refugee claimants have a right to have their claims heard, and to have them heard in a timely manner. And separating parents from children is a gross violation of the UN rights of the family.

Paul: Is it a gross violation of “UN rights of the family” when parents are separated from their children after being convicted for breaking the law? (Especially in places where facilities aren’t adequate to house parents and children together.)

Randal: Yes, it’s a gross violation. Read the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Article 9.1. Do you *support* Jeff Sessions’ policy of separating parents from their children rather than keeping families together in detention centers pending the review of their cases?

Art. 9.1: “States Parties shall ensure that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will, except when competent authorities subject to judicial review determine, in accordance with applicable law and procedures, that such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child.”

Paul: So if a couple robs a bank, gets caught, convicted, and is sentenced to jail, it’s a gross violation to separate the children from the parents?

Randal: You think that’s a proper analogy to a family that is fleeing violence in El Salvador and is hoping to apply for refugee status? I’m stunned.

Paul: I’m stunned you think so little of me. You seemed to be making an argument that child separation itself is wrong. I was simply testing the limits of that claim. But given your apparent assessment of me, I now see an exchange with you on this subject is not likely to be fruitful.

Summarizing the problem

Okay, so we started off with a seemingly productive conversation and ended up with the two participants mutually stunned: I was stunned that Paul seemed to take a particular position, and Paul was stunned that I thought he was taking that position.

What went wrong?

To begin with, if you read through the conversation, you can see an asymmetry emerging. I am taking a strong ethical stance against Trump’s twin deterrent policies against refugee claimants (i.e. punitive child separation and the delay of refugee claims) as well as Dobson’s suggestion that the US close its border to refugees.

Paul does not take an explicit stance for Trump’s two deterrent policies and Dobson’s proposal to close the border. He does say “I’m not defending Dobson” and he notes that Dobson has said “callous things”. But he doesn’t state his view on Dobson’s call to close the border to refugees. Furthermore, while I asked explicitly whether Paul agrees with the child separation policy, he did not answer.

So we now turn to Paul asking whether I agree, “if a couple robs a bank, gets caught, convicted, and is sentenced to jail, it’s a gross violation to separate the children from the parents?”

In retrospect, I should have said, “No, why?” Instead, I assumed that Paul believed this is “a proper analogy to a family that is fleeing violence in El Salvador and is hoping to apply for refugee status”. Why did I do this?

Implicature refers to the presence of implied meaning beyond the literal sense of a speech act. Given our exchange thus far, I took Paul to be offering what he believed to be a relevant analogy to refugee claimants. By contrast, Paul insists he was simply interested in testing the conceptual limits of the principle that it is wrong to separate children from parents.

And that left us mutually stunned.

What can we learn here?

So there are some lessons here for each of us here. To begin with, I should have recognized that Paul was avoiding taking an explicit stance on particular issues under discussion in favor of Socratic questioning. In addition, Paul should have recognized that his Socratic questioning is liable to interpretation given the topic under debate: sometimes, providing no answer is itself an answer.

With that in mind, I should have asked Paul to clarify his question rather than assuming implicature that he insists was not present. Meanwhile, Paul should have clarified his question in recognition of the fact that such implicature could reasonably be interpreted to accompany the question.

In Conclusion

Hopefully, there are some general lessons for all of us here to heed context and clarify the presence or absence of implicature by way of preemptive clarifications and probing questions.

To answer Paul’s question, convicted bank robbers may legitimately be separated from their children, though of course courts do, where proper, take mitigating stances on punitive judgments for the criminal acts of parents when those can be balanced in favor of the child’s welfare.

Finally, I would still be interested to hear what Paul’s view is on Trump’s twin deterrent policies and Dobson’s suggestion that the US bar the border to refugees.

The post Off the Rails: Debriefing my Misunderstanding with Paul Franks appeared first on Randal Rauser.

If you came to believe that Christianity is false, you would become a…

Here is a survey I posted the other day, with some interesting results…

Christians, please answer this question. If you came to believe that Christianity is false, you would become a…

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) June 27, 2019

Like 42% of respondents, I would remain a mere theist. I also understand those who would become Jews. After all, Christianity is built on Judaism and mere theism, and thus if one came to believe that uniquely Christian claims are false, one would reasonably find oneself backing into either Judaism or mere theism.

What is perhaps most intriguing is the significant minority, 34%, that would move directly to atheism or agnosticism. This would suggest that for many of those people, they do not believe they have reasons to be theists independent of their reasons to be Christians. And that is surprising, indeed.

The post If you came to believe that Christianity is false, you would become a… appeared first on Randal Rauser.

A Meme About Immigrant Children and Humanity Lost

My friend sent me this meme offering a crazy juxtaposition. Before I tweeted it, I wanted to confirm that I was not being a purveyor of fake news. Did Brian Kilmeade of Fox and Friends really say that? And is that a real Dr. Seuss cartoon?

Here is what I found. First off, yes, Kilmeade said that in June 2018. You can read more at The Hill. However, the meme elides one important caveat in which Kilmeade references showing compassion even for non-American kids (gee, how good of you). Here are his words:

“Like it or not, these are not our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like he’s doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country.”

As for the Seuss cartoon, yes, Dr. Seuss did draw anti-fascist America-first cartoons including the one featured in the meme. You can read more at Snopes.

So the meme is mostly right, save that unfortunate elision of Kilmeade’s compassion caveat. Still, disturbing enough, right? Kilmeade’s language is profoundly otherizing. Kids are kids, no matter their nationality. And that includes the 23-month old daughter of Oscar Alberto Martínez who drowned with her father in the Rio Grande on Sunday. By now, you’ve probably seen the photos of father and daughter, face down dead on the banks of the river, so I won’t reproduce it here. Instead, I’ll conclude with an excerpt from The Killers’ new song “Land of the Free”:

Down at the border, they’re gonna put up a wall

Concrete and rebar steel beams

High enough to keep all those filthy hands off of our hopes and our dreams

People who just want the same things we do

In the land of the free

The post A Meme About Immigrant Children and Humanity Lost appeared first on Randal Rauser.

Taking the Bible Seriously (But not Literally) Word for Word

The Bible should be taken seriously word for word.

That does not mean it should be taken literally word for word.

In fact, not only are these two claims different from one another. They are fundamentally inconsistent with one another. In the Bible, we are dealing with a library of ancient texts written in three foreign languages between 2000-3000 years ago in cultures and contexts foreign to the contemporary reader. To approach all those texts (in one’s favorite contemporary English translation) based on the assumption that the “literal” reading is always the default correct position is hopelessly naive. Indeed, it is an abdication of the responsibility of the reader to take the preliminary work of figuring out the meaning of the text in its historical context. That is anything but serious.

Even worse, all-too-often “literal” is not really literal. Rather, it is code for what seems to me to be the plain reading. Once again, this is not a serious treatment of the text. Rather, it exemplifies a facile and misbegotten bastardization of the Reformation principle of the perspicuity of Scripture.

The post Taking the Bible Seriously (But not Literally) Word for Word appeared first on Randal Rauser.

On the ethics of transsexual surgery

Dave suffers from gender dysphoria and, as a result, he identifies as a woman. As a means to align his body with his self-understanding, Dave requests the surgical removal of his male genitals.

Fred suffers from body integrity dysphoria and, as a result, he desires to be disabled. As a means to align his body with his self-understanding, Fred requests the surgical removal of his arms.

Alex suffers from body integrity dysphoria and, as a result, he desires to be disabled. As a means to align his body with his self-understanding, Alex requests the surgical removal of his arms and eyes.

Mortimer suffers from body integrity dysphoria and, as a result, he desires to be disabled. As a means to align his body with his self-understanding, Alex requests the surgical removal of his arms, eyes, and a portion of his colon thereby requiring a colostomy bag.

If surgeons are willing to grant Dave’s request, should they also grant Fred, Alex, and/or Mortimer’s request? And if not, why not?

The post On the ethics of transsexual surgery appeared first on Randal Rauser.

Is Islam more violent than Christianity? Is the Qur’an more violent than the Bible? Who decides?

The other day I tweeted a link to my 2014 review of God’s Not Dead. One fellow responded by saying that I was “nit-picking.” But alas, he then noted that Twitter is not a good medium to explain why. How ironic, I noted, that Twitter is sufficient to make a charge of nit-picking but not sufficient to defend it.

That comment prompted the fellow to offer a more fulsome reply. He then explained that while I had complained about stereotypes in the film, he found the portrayal of Muslims to be generally accurate. He then went on to insist that Islam is a violent religion while Christianity is a peaceful religion.

In reply, I noted examples of peaceful Muslims while also pointing out that denying these are true Muslims commits the no true Scotsman fallacy. On the other side, I pointed out that reference to the peaceful nature of Christianity must be balanced with the long history of Christians from Constantine to the Iraq War behaving violently.

Finally, as regards the Bible, I listed several examples of divinely sanctioned violence in the Bible. By the end of our conversation, I had the fellow endorsing Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Canaan, the genocidal eradication of the Amalekites (though he insisted, without argument, that it was not a genocide), the enslavement of other tribes, the slaughter of the Midianites and enslavement of their virgin daughters for the Israelite soldiers, as well as violent Torah punishments such as hand amputation and child stoning.

That was the point at which the fellow blocked me on Twitter.

But don’t block me, I’m just the messenger. The Bible and the Qur’an both have violent passages and the religious communities formed around both texts have justified many acts of violence in the name of those texts.

The three-fold lesson: don’t throw stones in glass houses, deal with the log in your own eye first, and treat others as you’d like to be treated.

The post Is Islam more violent than Christianity? Is the Qur’an more violent than the Bible? Who decides? appeared first on Randal Rauser.

Transgender identity and transethnic identity

An American Caucasian woman may want to be Korean because of her love of K-pop and Korean culture. And so, she wears Korean clothing, learns K0rean language, colors her hair black, and even has double eyelid surgery and a nose job. But it doesn’t follow that she is Korean. Rather, she remains an American Caucasian who loves Korean culture.

A man identifies as female. The gender-dysphoric condition that leads him to do this is undoubtedly painful and as a result, he should be treated with kindness, compassion, and hospitality. But dressing as a woman, adopting a woman’s name, or even undergoing gender reassignment surgery do not thereby make a man a woman.

The post Transgender identity and transethnic identity appeared first on Randal Rauser.

Why belief in divine inspiration commits the reader to wrestling with Scripture

We begin with a tweet from Brian Zahnd:

“Biblical inerrancy” is an empty signifier. Why? Because an inerrant text still has to be interpreted. Then you run into the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism (to borrow a phrase from Christian Smith). Plenty of people agree on inerrancy and disagree on everything else!”

Next, we have a reply from Derek Rishmawy:

“Not quite for at least 2 reasons 1. It functions as a meaningful statement about God and his speech. 2. And it reinforces our reasons to mutually wrestle with the text together despite our disagreements.”

And here was my tweeted comment on both Zahnd and Rishmawy:

“I think both @BrianZahnd and @DZRishmawy are correct. Inerrancy is not useful as a *boundary marker* but it is useful as a commitment to wrestle through each text, knowing it is all there to teach, rebuke, correct, and train us in righteousness.”

Enter “Cognitive Discopants” who replied to me:

“or it’s an albatross around the neck of its adherents, forcing them to perform hermeneutic gymnastics to salvage problematic texts when the more parsimonious explanation is that the text is just plain wrong.”

So I replied in kind,

“Apparently, you didn’t understand what I said. To say a text is ‘wrong’ is to assume a hermeneutic of that text. Inerrancy commits you to no particular hermeneutic of the text.”

And Cognitive Discopants:

“You miss my point. The hermeneutic is what I’m criticizing. Inerrancy forces interperters [sic] into unjustified and sometimes far-fetched hermeneutics in order to avoid the fact that the text is problematic on the more obvious hermeneutic.”

And, at long last, me again:

“It’s not ‘far-fetched’ and certainly not ‘unjustified’ if you believe God is the divine author/editor of the text. So your comment begs the question.”

So what is the lesson of all this back-and-forth? Or at least, what is my lesson?

It’s simply this: if you believe the Bible is divinely authored/edited, then you will be committed to finding meaning and significance even when the text seems to resist easy explication.

By comparison, imagine that a short film is discovered in a vault. It does not appear, at first viewing, to be especially significant. But then you learn that it was the final work of the great Ingmar Bergman. The belief that Bergman is the director will commit you to another viewing as you look for meaning and significance where you hadn’t seen it before.

And how much more would one be inclined to find meaning and significance when one believes God is the divine author/editor of all Scripture?

The post Why belief in divine inspiration commits the reader to wrestling with Scripture appeared first on Randal Rauser.