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Matt Flanagan's Inerrancy and Biblical Authority discussed Glenn Peoples' Inerrantly Assuming Inerrancy in History. There are so many things I disagree with in the latter post that it was very hard to pull myself away from my desire to write a detailed response, but I didn't have the time.

I actually agree with much of what Matt says, if you frame it as a hypothetical, which he does: If Peoples is right that inerrancy as currently held by contemporary interrantists is not the historical doctrine of scripture throughout church history, then it's still possible to claim that the Bible is true in all God intended it to teach us. I think you lose much of what God actually did intend the Bible to teach us, but you can hold a view that God intended it to teach us less than that and still think the Bible teaches all those things.

I've written before about historical figures' attitudes toward scripture, including the biblical authors' own attitudes, and I've concluded that the mainstream Christian attitude toward scripture throughout church history has not been mere inerrancy but the stronger claim that scripture is infallible. [There are those historical revisionists today who claim that they hold to infallibility but not inerrancy, but that's logically impossible without contradiction given what these terms have historically meant. What such people are calling infallibility is not infallibility of scripture but infallibility of certain claims of scripture and not others. Inerrantists hold to the infallibility of all scripture, which entails the inerrancy of all scripture on all matters that it speaks of.]

As I was looking through the text file I keep of things to blog about, I came across a link the Bart Barber's An Errant Bible: The Gateway Heresy (ht: Russell Moore), which I never got around to posting about, but I'm using Matt's recent post as an occasion to do so. Barber's piece is excellent for a number of reasons, but one thing that struck me especially was his response to the first argument he presents from Jim Denison. Denison thinks inerrantists, in responding to objections, have brought inerrancy to the point of death by a thousand qualifications, where the view is so thin that it means hardly anything anymore. In response, Barber says the following:

Actually, Denison's argument works against him, not for him. Yes, many different people have defined "inerrancy" in different ways. And yes, several inerrantists have offered a number of qualifications of the term "inerrancy" in order to forestall misunderstanding regarding the meaning of the term. Denison has suitably demonstrated that people with an impressive array of varied beliefs about the precise nature of the Bible can all claim to be an "inerrantist" in some fashion or another. Denison's suggestion is that this complex state of affairs makes it not very meaningful for one to affirm that he is an inerrantist.

Yet even if this fact makes it mean less when someone affirms that he is an inerrantist, then it necessarily makes it mean more when someone cannot affirm that he is an inerrantist. The denial of inerrancy then means that, out of all the various definitions of inerrancy and with all of the various reasonable qualifications of inerrancy applied, a person still cannot find a way with all of that flexibility to affirm the word in any sense.

Stargate: The Ark of Truth introduces a very old artifact into Stargate mythology. The Ark of Truth was designed to give knowledge of the truth to those who look into it. In particular, it was designed by those who were resisting the Ori, advanced beings masquerading as gods in order to gain power from those who worshiped them. Somehow (we're not told anything more than this of how), those who look into the Ark of Truth suddenly know that the Ori are not really gods and are not really good at all, that they've been lying to their followers about rewarding them upon their death, and that their primary purpose is to gain enough power to be victorious over their similarly-advanced fellow ascended beings who had departed from their galaxy into ours.

So what is it exactly that the Ark of Truth is supposed to do? It's presented as giving this knowledge somehow to those who look into it. I'm not so much interested in the process of how it accomplishes this as I am in the result. What does this knowledge consist of? It doesn't seem to involve being given any actual evidence in terms of beliefs that then support a further belief. It must involve their somehow seeing what is wrong with their previous beliefs, somehow simply being given the ability to know something that they didn't have enough information to know beforehand. It seems almost like a miraculous ability to know something. One reason for thinking this is that they explicitly say in the movie that the Ark of Truth can't be reprogrammed to convince those who look into it of some falsehood, so it could never be abused if it fell into the wrong hands. It could only be used to give knowledge of the truth. So somehow its mechanism leads to genuine knowledge and doesn't just operate in a way that convinces someone that something is true without being connected to its actual truth. Whatever it does is somehow tied to the thing's actually being true.

I've seen the movie several times now, but it wasn't until the most recent time a week or so ago maybe that this even occurred to me, and it reminded me of a suggestion John Hawthorne offers in his "Arguments for Atheism" chapter of Reason for the Hope Within. He calls it the Gift of Faith. He's responding to the no-evidence argument for atheism, i.e. the claim that we should believe what we don't have enough evidence for and that there isn't enough evidence to believe in God, so we should be atheists.

The Gift of Faith is a possibility Hawthorne proposes for why it might be perfectly fine to believe in God without any evidence at all. He says that, for all we know, some people might be given this ability simply to know that God exists. This ability might just be something God gives to some people. Faith here is nothing like the notion of a leap of faith, where you believe despite having no good reason to believe. Faith here is a kind of knowledge, an ability given by an omnipotent being to allow someone to know of the existence of that being and enough of the nature of that being to know that it's worth following that being. Hawthorne argues, then, that since atheists can't rule out this possibility, they can't go on to argue that the lack of evidence makes theists irrational. Perhaps they have this ability to know God's existence that the atheists making the argument against theism don't have. They can't rule out that possibility, so their skepticism about God by the very skeptical standard they propose (not believing in something without enough evidence) has to falter (because they don't have any evidence for the claim that no one has the Gift of Faith).

The Ark of Truth, then, seems like a nice science fiction device that captures some of what Hawthorne had in mind with his Gift of Faith. The Gift of Faith seems to be very much the same sort as what the Stargate writers (particularly Robert Cooper, in this case) were thinking the Ark of Truth would do. A lot of people I've discussed this with have found the notion of the Gift of Faith hard to make sense of, but Robert Cooper at least found something very similar comprehensible enough to base an entire Stargate movie on.

Stephen Meyer is a the leading proponent of intelligent design arguments. I was surprised when a friend directed me toward Thomas Nagel's brief review of Meyer's new book, and Nagel had only positive comments.

Here's his review in full:

Stephen C. Meyer's Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter - something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.

It's especially notable that a pretty mainstream philosopher not known for any work in philosophy of religion would give such a positive review of a book on intelligent design. I've long thought the origin of life issue had a lot more going for it than the complexity of life arguments that most people think of when they hear the expression "intelligent design". I've also long thought of this as a clear example of how intelligent design isn't about the evolution issue at all. It's about whether there are good philosophical arguments for accepting intelligence behind the natural world, completely independent of whatever natural processes were involved in bringing about the way things are now. Since evolution (i.e. natural selection, as Nagel puts it) isn't at issue with the first living cell (evolution can only occur after that), this is about another issue entirely. It's about whether we can infer purpose from the unlikelihood of natural causes producing a living cell, not about whether natural causes could happen to produce a cell.

Darrell Bock reviews Bart Ehrman's book Jesus, Interrupted. I especially liked this paragraph, which captures very well my own concern about what I've read by Ehrman:

I think what is most bothersome in this book is the way it sets up discussions. It pursues a topic for several pages, often noting in one or two quick and embedded sentences that the point is not as devastating as the impression given by the rhetoric of the whole section. Such qualification involves a quick almost aside that qualifies things so the author has cover. But it becomes a faint cry in light of the more skeptical thrust of the whole work. The result is to launch a discussion in a direction that implies more than the evidence really gives, leaving a greater impression about what is said than the author claims in the qualification. More than that, by excluding other key factors, the discussion leaves the impression of making a point clear that actually is not as cut and dried as the presentation suggests.

Ken Miller gave a talk tonight at Le Moyne College, where I teach. I'll probably put together the thoughts I recorded as I listened to him in a separate post later, but I wanted to comment on one issue that I've written about before. I think I was wrong about him here (which I repeated here). He gave an criticism of intelligent design arguments that ID requires believing in a God who is actually a bad designer. From the way he gave that argument, it seemed to me that he couldn't really endorse what he was saying unless he thought there was no sense in which God is a designer. Basically he'd have to hold the view that God didn't design the evolutionary process with all its dead-ends but that it came about through a long evolutionary process that God didn't oversee in any way, because then that would make God responsible for the bits that are failures.

But apparently that's not his view. I still need to continue my conversation with him over email, because I'm not sure of some of the details of his view on divine providence, but he was very clear in rejecting the view I was assuming he held. 

At the very end of his talk, he gave his stance on God's role in creation. While it wasn't in-depth enough to satisfy me, and I'm not sure yet that he's answered about every question I'd like to nail him down on to understand what the above argument is saying, I think my conclusions about him from his argument on Stephen Colbert were wrong. I'm not sure yet that I was being unreasonable in drawing that inference given what he said, and I'm not satisfied yet that I understand the details of his view, but the view I thought he must hold turns out not to be his view.

He quoted the current pope as accepting the following two claims (and he said he agreed):

1. Evolution as a radically contingent materialistic process.
2. True contingency in the created order is not incompatible with God's providential plan for creation.

If he means contingency the way Aquinas or a modern compatibilist might, then I'd agree. But I'm not sure if Miller agrees with that. How does God's design through evolution work? Is it by building it into the laws of nature? But if it's radically contingent, the laws of nature couldn't assure any outcome, right? The only way it can be contingent in a way that can ensure the outcome is if it's compatibilist contingency, where God really does control all the details of what happens at least by deliberate allowance, and I don't think that's what he was saying.

Miller insists that he's not a deist. He says God is active in the world and in our lives but not in what he calls empirical way. God does it in a way that doesn't interfere with our free will. If God intervened constantly, it would undermine human freedom. We'd cease to rely on moral  choice, so God has to withdraw to allow us to be ourselves. The Holocaust is humanity's work. God allows us to do the most horrible things to each other but also to do wonderful things, including sacrificing to resist evil. Deism is about the personality of God as a creator, and he doesn't accept that approach. Miller believes God answers prayers and believes in actual miracles around him in his life. There might be a perfectly natural explanation for any miracle, but that doesn't rule out God's role.

I talked to him afterward about his problem of waste argument. I was able to get him to agree that the argument didn't apply to every ID position that there might be (although he thinks it does apply to Behe, but I'm not as sure it does even for the reasons he gave, but that occurred to me only later). I wasn't able to get all of the details that I think I need to know to be sure what his view of providence really is. Some of how this argument works depends on that, so I'll hold off on concluding anything further about the argument itself. But he clearly does not hold the view that there is no sense in which God designed the world. The evolutionary process is part of God's design, and the parts of that process that led to evolutionary dead-ends are part of the process God used, which includes death and dead-end species, because it's a process that uses natural causes, which will do that.

I want to pursue this with him over email, because we didn't have time to finish the conversation, and I think I need to know more before I take a definitive stance on his argument. But I wanted to record my re-classification of his views. In my classifications <a href="I want to pursue this with him over email, because when">in this post</a>, I have to revise my judgment that he would hold to 1 and 6 and not 2 and 8. He might hold 1 if that just means that the best scientific arguments assume no God. But he would accept 2, and he told me that he's even open to 3, as long as it's clear that he doesn't think we have any scientific evidence of 3. It might nonetheless be true.

He would deny 6. I'm not sure if he would accept 7, although it's probably the closest in the second list to his view. He does think the evolutionary process is a more glorious process for God to have used than special creation would have been, and that might be an indication that he does think the natural world has marks of design, but he's clear that he doesn't think the best scientific conclusion from such things is that there's a designer. I don't think he accepts 8, but I haven't seen him comment on that specifically. He certainly denies 9 and below.

We've been listening to C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles on CD. I read them when I was about ten years old, and I never got around to re-reading them, so some of it is almost as if I'm experiencing them for the first time. When I got to the following scene from the Silver Chair, it struck me as a strange argument, sort of like Pascal's Wager, but something rubbed me the wrong way about it. The main characters were in the Green Witch's underground domain and had fallen under her influence, which was causing them to lose their belief in the above-ground world. Puddleglum the marsh-wiggle then gives the following speech:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say.

What rubbed me the wrong way was that it sounded as if he didn't care whether the world was real. He was going to believe in it anyway, because it's more pleasant to believe in it. How can the upper world be so much better than the underground world that its mere finite value of being better would be worth believing in a lie if it's not true?

When I raised this issue with a friend, he said, "But it's Pascal's Wager!" I said, "No, it's not!" He insisted that the upper world is Aslan's world, which I'd been thinking of as the place at the end of the world that they went to in the previous book, and the upper world was just Narnia, which is the analogue of Earth. But we were interrupted and never managed to finish the conversation.

I realized later, when teaching Pascal's Wager, what Lewis must have been up to, and it's actually a neat trick. If he was seeing Narnia as a placeholder for the eternal reward of Pascal's Wager and the underworld as a placeholder for this life, then you have an interesting argument that isn't quite Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager concedes for the sake of argument that life in this world is more pleasant if you don't believe in God but then argues that the chance of eternal reward in heaven compensates for that in terms of rational decision theory. You shouldn't even need 50% likelihood of God's existence for the wager to be worth it given that the reward is infinite and the cost merely finite if you bet wrong. But Lewis' Wager is different in exactly one way: it doesn't make the concession. It takes the finite value of life in this world to be better if you believe in God than if you don't. So life is finitely better if you believe in God, and the afterlife is infinitely better if it turns out there is one. Therefore, it's a no-brainer. You might as well believe in God. If it turns out you lose the bet (i.e. God doesn't exist), you still end up finitely better off, and if you win (i.e. God does exist) then you get an infinitely better result.

One interesting result of Puddleglum's Wager is that it easily avoids the problem Mike Almeida raises against Pascal's Wager. Mike's problem (which I'm not taking a stand on at this point) relies on its being better in this life not to believe.

[cross-posted at Prosblogion]

Every once in a while I run into someone criticizing the Bible because it contains some depiction of someone doing something immoral, usually when the text never endorses that act or even if it's clear from the general context that the narrator considers the act downright evil. For example, Richard Dawkins objects to the story of Jephthah's rash vow, that if God gives him victory he'd sacrifice the first thing coming through his gates to greet him as he returns home, only to be greeted by his daughter, so he sacrifices her. His reason for objecting? Well, Jephthah did something obviously wrong. So the Bible must not be a good guide to immorality.

As has been said many a time, Dawkins would fail an introductory philosophy or religion course if he submitted materials from his book or similar quality work for such classes. This idea that the mere inclusion of an immoral act in a narrative somehow makes that narrative immoral is downright crazy. No one really believes that. Murder mysteries would suddenly because evil, for instance, because a murder does take place in them. You couldn't have crime-fighting stories of any sort, because those would contain evil acts to be fought against.

Nevertheless, despite this idea being absolutely ridiculous, it apparently comes up in contexts that have nothing to do with the Bible. There's been a campaign against the forthcoming Stargate Universe, the third (and I think what may well be the best) series in the Stargate franchise. Darren Sumner of Gateworld has an excellent discussion of what these objections are and why they fail completely.

Aside from the fact that it's pretty dumb to criticize a show you haven't even bothered to wait to see when you have at best partial information, the argument itself seems silly. It's been rumored that there will be some temporary body-switching, with the consciousness of one person controlling the body of someone else in a different galaxy (which the Stargate franchise has done several times before), only this time the controlling parties will have sexual encounters using other people's bodies. That raises obvious moral questions, in particular if the owner of the body in question didn't consent to have their body used this way. But merely depicting them something doesn't imply endorsement, and it's almost certainly true (given what I know from the Stargate writers) that they will want us to question whether this is ok, again assuming no consent (and we haven't been told if there will be consent to use each other's bodies this way by mutual agreement, which for all I know will be part of the arrangement).

The claim (see the comments) is that it's rape, and they shouldn't be depicting it. Well, we don't know if they'll be depicting it. But they do depict rape on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or at least they sometimes come close enough. They did depict rape on Battlestar Galactica. There were people who objected to the latter, but I never understood why the mere depiction of rape, especially when it's absolutely clear that the people doing it are being downright evil, is somehow wrong. It was, in that case, an easy way to show the morally degenerate state of the Pegasus crew under Admiral Cain's command. The Galactica crew were certainly not perfect, but the Pegasus crew had gone well over the edge to true evil. That scene made that abundantly clear, and it was good storytelling.

The difference here, as some commenters in that thread point out, is that main characters carry this out. But main characters can be morally flawed in a good story. They can even be pretty evil. Why is it immoral for a storyteller to have a main character do something as bad as raping someone? I see no argument for this claim anywhere in any of these discussions.

But comparing these two kinds of fallacious criticisms at least helps me understand that such shoddy thinking isn't present just among those seeking to have any argument, no matter how bad, against the Bible. Those who want to have any argument, no matter how bad, against a forthcoming TV show will resort to the same tactics. So maybe this isn't a problem just among those who want to attack Christianity, the Bible, or religion. It occurs much more generally than that.

In the opening verses of Judges 3, there's an apparent contradiction:

1 Now these are the nations that the Lord left, to test Israel by them, that is, all in Israel who had not experienced all the wars in Canaan. 2 It was only in order that the generations of the people of Israel might know war, to teach war to those who had not known it before. 3 These are the nations: the five lords of the Philistines and all the Canaanites and the Sidonians and the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon, from Mount Baal-hermon as far as Lebo-hamath. 4 They were for the testing of Israel, to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of the Lord, which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses. 5 So the people of Israel lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 6 And their daughters they took to themselves for wives, and their own daughters they gave to their sons, and they served their gods. [Judges 3:1-5, ESV]

Verse 2 seems to say that the only reason God allowed some Canaanites to remain in the land and not be destroyed is so that future generations of Israelites who weren't part of the conquest would learn warfare. Verse 4 seems to say that God allowed the nations to remain in the land as a test for Israel of whether they would follow the Torah or revert to the Canaanites' ways.

There are those who conclude that these two verses must have been written by two different authors who had conflicting agendas, and somehow and for unfathomable reasons they got combined by some idiot who couldn't tell they flat-out contradicted each other. If you thought ancient writers or editors were either stupid or unconcerned with telling a coherent narrative, then you might be attracted to such a theory, but most decent literary interpretation tries to make sense of the text rather than trying to read it in the least charitable way possible. So it would be nice to find an explanation that doesn't make the author or final compiler look like a complete dunce.

I think the apparent inconsistency disappears if you think of learning warfare not as learning how to fight (which doesn't seem to be the sort of thing God ever emphasizes in the Bible anyway and wouldn't matter if there were no enemies anyway) but rather as knowing the experience of being at war. Why would God want them to have the experience of war? Verse 4 explains that. If this is right, then verses 2 and 4 aren't providing contrary explanations but are emphasizing different aspects of the same explanation. It may not be the most natural interpretation of verse 2 if that verse were taken in isolation, but these other factors should count for something.

Jerome Walsh's commentary on I Kings is probably the best thing out there on narrative issues in I Kings. I've heard good reports on it from several commentary reviews, and two people who have used it in their sermon preparation for our current sermon series in Kings have found it very helpful. It's fairly rare that he says anything that evangelicals would find problematic with regard to the nature of scripture, but I did identify one thing when reading his commentary on I Kings 11, and I don't think he can consistently maintain it given other things he says.

When discussing Solomon's failures as a king, Walsh says the following about the narrator's perspective underlying the critical account (from p.136):

Yahweh is described as "the God of Israel" to contrast with the other national deities named in verses 5 and 7. The concept here is very different from our own. The narrator presumes a polytheistic worldview: other gods besides Yahweh existed, and each deity had its own national sphere. The text does not understand Solomon's apostasy as turning away from the only true God to worship false gods. Solomon's evil is that he supported in Israel, Yahweh's own nation, the worship of Yahweh's rivals.

First of all, Walsh uses the wrong term. The view that there are other gods that you shouldn't worship and only one you should worship is not polytheism, which is the worship of many gods. It's called henotheism. There's evidence within the Bible itself that some people in ancient Israel were henotheists. There's actually more evidence that many were polytheists, including Solomon himself according to this passage. But the consistent message of the biblical narrators and prophets is not of henotheism but monotheism. The book of Kings is actually a pretty clear case of this. Solomon's speeches and prayers at the temple dedication are pretty clear that there is just one God who is sovereign over all the earth.

In fact, even four pages later Walsh seems to recognize this. In his discussion of the rebellions Solomon faced from two subjugated peoples (Edom and Aram) and one internal rebellion (Jeroboam), he emphasizes the narrator's theological perspective of Yahweh's sovereignty over the doings of those in other nations (p.140):

The effect of this heaping up of parallels is to recall that both Moses' and David's careers were divinely directed, and thereby to intensify considerably the impact of the claim that "God raised up" Hadad and Rezon. The same Yahweh who raised up Moses as Israel's savior, the same God who raised up David to be Israel's ideal king, now raises up adversaries to oppose Solomon. The punishment of Solomon and the impending disintegration of his empire become part of the sacred history of Yahweh's dealings with Israel, on part in importance with the Exodus and the covenant with David.

Such a view of Yahweh's role with respect to other nations doesn't necessarily require thinking the other gods don't exist. They might just be fairly impotent beings in comparison with Yahweh's sovereign might. But it's hard to see it as consistent with the view that the only reason to worship Yahweh is because he's the god who happens to be Israel's god, whereas other nations have real gods who happen to be their gods. It's very hard to put Walsh's own view of the narrative position of Kings together with his statement that Solomon's sin is disloyalty to the god who happens to be Israel's god. The text itself commands the view that Yahweh is sovereign over other nations in a way that there's no reason to consider worshiping them even if they do exist. In fact, any acknowledgement of their existence is consistent with thinking of them as something like demonic beings whose existence and actions are all subject to divine sovereignty in the same way the human figures in these accounts are.

Now I'm well aware of the view in scholarship that takes some of these accounts to have been written from different theological perspectives. The idea is that earlier materials assume many gods, and later authors added stuff that assumes one sovereign God. Walsh indicates agreement with this elsewhere (e.g. in note 9 on p.112). But Walsh is a narrative commentator, committing to dealing with the final form of the text. Surely if the final compilers agreed with the orthodox view that there is just one sovereign God, they would not have meant the discussion of Solomon's sin to reflect henotheistic concerns but monotheistic concerns. Anyone who could endorse the understanding of Yahweh's sovereignty over foreign kings could not think of those kings as properly worshiping their own gods over Yahweh, since Yahweh is the supreme God. Such a compiler/narrator would therefore not accept the view Walsh attributes to the narrator, and this is true even if many in Israel did hold such a henotheistic view at the time these events are describing. (Since many actually held full-out polytheism, which is what the text is criticizing, it's not a major concession to think many were henotheists as well.)

So I think Walsh's contention is extremely hard to reconcile with what he himself recognizes about the narrator's theology, and that's even conceding for the sake of argument that the original narrator of some passages was a henotheist (which I don't think is true to begin with).

Darrell Bock has responded to Bart Ehrman's latest book. One of the issues he tackles is one of the few things in Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus that I encountered for the first time when reading Ehrman, his odd claim that Luke's theology of Jesus' being in control during the passion doesn't allow for Jesus experiencing pain. I was happy to find someone dealing with that claim head-on, since the one recent book that I've seen that has any response to Ehrman left that issue out.

I've recently discovered that an argument I've often seen and sometimes used is based on something untrue. Christians pacifists (and pacifists intending to win over Christians) often make the claim that, since one of the ten commandments says "do not kill", it must always be immoral to kill. I've also seen the sixth commandment come up in lists of supposed Bible contradictions. Most such lists are filled with mainly easily-resolved surface-language differences with the occasional serious difficulty that takes some real work to resolve (although I know of no such difficulties that don't have at least one possible solution, thus showing that it's not actually a contradiction).

One (among several) responses to both of these claims is that the word used for murder in the sixth commandment in fact does not mean killing but simply means murder, so the only kinds of killing that it could be talking about are those that are wrong, leaving it open that there are kinds of killing that are not wrong. It turns out that this isn't true. There are several words for killing in biblical Hebrew, and this term isn't the most common one. It's usually reserved for contexts of killing within the covenant community, usually used in cases where the killing is especially divisive, often with inter-tribal conflicts in mind.

Its most frequent occurrences are all in one chapter, though, and that chapter is Numbers 25, which provides the details of the city of refuge provision of the Mosaic law. The ancient near eastern method of bringing murders to justice was to have an appointed avenger within each extended family or clan unit, who would hunt down and kill anyone who killed one of their own. The city of refuge provision took several of the Levitical cities and made them safe havens from avengers until a trial could take place, thus ensuring justice could be pursued more carefully as long as the accused was willing to flee to one of those cities. If the person was not found guilty of deliberate murder, they could live in the Levitical city until the death of the current high priest atoned for their sin of negligence, but otherwise they could be put to death once convicted.

I don't remember all the details now, but after looking over this with someone who knows Hebrew I discovered that most or all of the occurrences of deliberate murder used the same word as in the sixth commandment, but the term also occurs two or three times of the killing by the avenger, which as far as I can determine is legally sanctioned killing. It's not used of outright death penalties for specific crimes in the Torah, but it is used of the avenger's killing of duly convicted criminals. So what was probably the easiest response to the difficulties I mentioned above doesn't seem to be correct. The pacifist may not be able to claim that what the commandment says not to do can cover every kind of killing, but they can claim that the word can be used for legalized killing. Also, you can't get out of the supposed contradiction simply by saying the word doesn't mean "kill" but means "murder", since the Torah seems to allow instances of killing that use this very word. But I don't think this puts a stop to the kind of view I would defend. It just makes one of the easier and quicker responses no longer as easy and quick as I would have liked.

I've been wanting to post some thoughts on a recent piece by Richard Gray in The Telegraph on a new book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore that details Charles Darwin's anti-slavery motivations. I've been putting it off, but I decided it would be fitting to write it up on the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. Gray points to some journals from Darwin's voyages on the Beagle and letters of family members that reveal his disgust at the practice of enslaving fellow humans and involvement in the abolitionist movement. This is so contrary to the false portrayal of him in some circles that applies later Social-Darwinist ideas to Darwin himself, something he never endorsed and would not have tolerated.

This wasn't all that surprising to me, even though I didn't know of his outright abolitionist views. After all, Darwin was such a strong supporter of the common descent of all humans in explicit opposition to views that had different ancestries of different races without a single common ancestor population for humans. Such views were around in his day and had been put to use in support of slavery. In this way Darwin was closer than some of his contemporaries to the view found among many Christians that three races had arisen from Noah's three sons, with further divergence later on at the tower of Babel.

There were alternative Christian (or, I would argue, sub-Christian) views at the time as well, most notably the outright racist idea borrowed from Islam that the curse on Ham's son Canaan was really a curse on all of Ham's descendants (or more precisely the darker-skinned ones, in contrast to Canaan's middle-eastern descendants in what became Israel, who were the actual group referred to in the Genesis curse). This view involved a number of curse elements not in the Genesis text that mentions Noah's curse on Canaan, including intellectual and moral inferiority to other races among the darker-skinned Hamites from Africa and the moral justification of slavery (rather than the text's simple report that Canaan would serve Shem and Japheth without saying whether it would be morally ok for those who enslaved them). So not all support for slavery came from the view that humans arose in different and unrelated races in different parts of the world completely independently. But it's easy to see how Darwin's opposition to that view was part of his motivation for providing an account of human origins that resisted such a view.

Two things have occurred to me while reflecting on this and reading some people's responses to it. One is that it's a clear case of being motivated to adopt a thesis based on ideology. It's true that Darwin's support for the view ultimately is supported by his actual reasons presented in his work. He does in fact give arguments for his view, and he expects people to accept his view based on those arguments rather than because of his ideological motivation. It's probably true that he accepted it at least in part based on those arguments and not because it happened to fit with his preferred social view. At least he believed the arguments supported the view. But he did have an ideological motivation.

The irony is that his intellectual descendants refuse to allow an exactly parallel situation with supporters of intelligent design, who present arguments for their view that don't rely on ideological assumptions, expect people to accept the view based on such arguments, and probably believe the view at least in part because of those arguments. At least they see those arguments supporting the view. Yet opponents of intelligent design regularly deride intelligent design proponents for having ideological motivations to want to find arguments for their theistic view. I haven't yet seen anyone of that ilk deriding Darwin for his parallel motivation. Perhaps that's merely because they happen to agree with Darwin's motivation but don't agree with theism. If so, then it's an unfair double-standard, because it can't be in principle intellectually dishonest to believe something you have arguments for but also have ideological reason to want to be true unless that's true of every case of believing something you have arguments for and ideological reason to want to be true. But it's common among those who are anti-ID to confuse the motivation for an argument with its theoretical basis, as I've pointed out before.

A couple weeks ago, I finished Bart Ehrman's bestselling Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. I'm not going to do a full review of the book at this point, but I wanted to record some thoughts on what I see as Ehrman's master argument.

The bulk of the book is just standard textual criticism. Ehrman tends to be more radical on a few points than the average textual critics, but most of the book simply presents consensus views on the history of the discipline and gives examples that mainly do illustrate the points he wants to make. He's often criticized for the suggestion that the examples he picks are only the most extreme and thus give the impression that the textual changes are more common and more extreme than they really are. He responds that he does say that most changes are extremely minor and that the cases he's presenting are unusual. But what his response ignores is that his own master argument makes an explicit case for the point that his critics are only accusing him of suggesting, and he takes offense even at that accusation.

His master argument is presented in the introductory chapter and then again in his conclusion. The argument is basically as follows:

1. We know that there are textual changes in manuscript transmission.
2. Some of these are ideologically-motivated.
3. The earlier manuscripts have more diversity due to less-careful copying practices.
4. It's possible that there were changes in ideology from the original manuscripts that we no longer thus have any evidence of.
5. Therefore, we can't have much confidence about what the original New Testament manuscripts said. All we can do is give arguments for which of several existing readings were the earliest.

I think he overstates the ideological changes, although there indisputably are some. I didn't find myself agreeing with all his cases, several of which were extremely controversial among scholars (e.g. I Cor 14:34-35, which a few but only very few notable scholars think is an addition to the original text). I think the fact that there are more readings in earlier manuscripts makes it more likely that the original reading is among the surviving manuscripts in any given case, even if it also raises the possibility that we can't know if the original survives. So that same fact provides some support for opposite views.

But the main issue is really epistemological. Ehrman holds to a skeptical standard when it comes to being sure of original manuscript readings that would lead to hopeless conclusions about ordinary knowledge. Hardly anyone in epistemology accepts this kind of standard anymore, even if it has had firm support in the history of philosophy (perhaps most famously with Rene Descartes). The chance that any particular well-attested reading among the NT manuscripts is really the product of an ideological change from the original manuscript is extremely low.

Every once in a while I run into a theologian or biblical scholar discussing a philosopher, and I think it's nice the philosopher is getting the cross-disciplinary attention, but then I read what they have to say about the philosopher, and I wonder how they could possibly have gotten the philosopher so wrong. Alvin Plantinga seems to be on the receiving end of such treatment far too often. I've previously discussed D.A. Carson's criticisms of Plantinga that seem to attack a view nothing like Plantinga's. I've been reading through the second edition of Craig Blomberg's The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, and he seems to me to make some similar mistakes about Plantinga. I don't mean any of the following as a criticism of Blomberg's book in general. Most of the book so far is very good. But I don't think he has an even passable grasp of Plantinga's philosophical views.

Here is how he describes Plantinga's view:

Traditionally, believers have argued for God's existence by means of various philosophical 'proofs', but many today, theologians included, believe that all such arguments have been shown to be faulty. Some feel that to try to prove that God exists is to deny faith its proper place as the foundation of religion, though it is not obvious why someone should continue to believe a given doctrine if all the evidence contradicted it. (p.107)

After the words "foundation of religion", Blomberg gives the following footnote:

See esp. Plantinga, 'Is Belief in God "Properly Basic"?', pp.189-202. Plantinga believes that certain propositions about God are 'basic' (givens that cannot be demonstrated) but not 'groundless' (without warrant).

That last sentence is entirely true. Plantinga does indeed believe that certain propositions about God are not in need of a philosophical argument. We can know them without any such argument. However, it's simply false that Plantinga can count as an example of the view that trying to prove God's existence denies faith its proper place. It's also wrong to think of him as someone who thinks the traditional arguments for God are faulty. Consider what he says in his online lecture notes called Two Dozen (or So) Theistic Arguments:

I've been arguing that theistic belief does not (in general) need argument either for deontological justification, or for positive epistemic status, (or for Foley rationality or Alstonian justification)); belief in God is properly basic. But doesn't follow, of course that there aren't any good arguments. Are there some? At least a couple of dozen or so.

I'm not going to dignify this enough to give it a further link beyond all the attention it's getting, but I can't resist commenting on the idea of desecrating the Eucharist in an internet stunt. In case you haven't heard of the events this is about, there are two posts about it in the latest Christian Carnival. You'll have to follow the links there.

This is one of the lamest things I've ever heard of, and the fact that people are insulted is extremely unfortunate, because they shouldn't be.

Consider the Catholic view. According to transsubstantiation, this action takes something that isn't a piece of bread but is literally Jesus, the same Jesus who was pierced by swords, spears, and rusty nails on the cross. So someone pierces Jesus with a rusty nail and attaching some pages from the Qur'an and Richard Dawkins' diatribe against theism. I'm not sure what the fuss is. He didn't do anything that hasn't already been done, if to the Catholic view is correct. In fact, the person performing this act (along with the rest of humanity) was already the cause of Jesus' death, and thus he'd already done the thing that he so proudly did. He'd already killed Jesus, never mind poked a hole in him with a rusty nail.

Of course, if the Catholic view is wrong, then this action is of little significance except as the immoral act of deliberately trying to cause offense to a large group of people, most of whom are very peace-loving. That's nothing at all to proud of, but why should I as a Protestant be offended that someone seeks to offend Christians? Isn't that what Jesus said to expect? Didn't he announce that lots of idiots will come along and say all sorts of nasty things about his followers? So someone from an anti-theist site decides to offend Christians, and he does so publicly. It's ok to recognize the immorality of his motivations, but I don't understand why people are up in arms about this.

Last Monday, while driving back from Pennsylvania, we were listening to a previously-recorded Diane Rehm Show episode with James Carse, an NYU professor emeritus of religion. You can listen to the show here.

Carse seemed to advocate a religion-without-God approach, or at least he didn't think we should be confident about the existence of God. This was the first time I've ever found Diane Rehm extending complete incredulity toward someone who was left of her on an issue, but she really gave the guy a hard time with some of his outlandish biblical interpretation and eventually his admission that he'd rather die ignorant than arrive at any knowledge about ultimate realities. After a while, he got frustrated with her and her callers continuing to call him on his pick-and-choose out-of-context methods of interpretation, and he decided to try a new tactic. He decided to call into question the idea of correct biblical interpretation to begin with, with the following argument.

He cited that at one point there were 15,000 members of the Society for Biblical Literature and claimed that they all have to have a Ph.D. and thus have to have argued for some new interpretation, because no one can get a Ph.D. in biblical studies without a novel interpretation. Such a large number of experts continue to produce novel interpretations, and so there's no reason to be confident of any interpretation (or perhaps he was suggesting something stronger, that there's no right interpretation to begin with; I'm not sure which, so I'll take the weaker claim as the more charitable one, since the argument is much more fallacious if it's the stronger one). He calls it very willful ignorance to claim that you understand something in the scriptures.

There are several problems with this argument:

1. The argument actually undermines itself, because it ignores the very fact it relies on. There's tremendous pressure in academia to come up with novel interpretations in order to have a career. So the multiplicity of interpretations tells you less about the subject matter than about the culture that produces those interpretations.

I haven't seen Expelled, and I probably won't, but I've read some reviews of it across the spectrum of thought about design arguments and the particular species of them that people are calling Intelligent Design. It's been a nice occasion for everyone to say pretty much the same old things, with virtually all opponents of ID misrepresenting it pretty drastically amidst a few legitimate complaints and many supporters overstating their case, confusing some of the same basic distinctions ID opponents regularly confuse, and setting up science against religion rather than what the argument itself is supposed to suggest, which is that science and religion are in fact compatible.

So this film has drawn out much of the same nonsense that usually gets thrown around. Yet occasionally some real gem pops up that strikes me as insightful and helpful, and this time around I see that in Mollie Hemingway's wonderful critique of the media coverage surrounding this film. Several interesting points stand out:

1. She notices that the mainstream media have largely ignored this. That seems right from what I've seen. She only cites two examples, one that she doesn't think got the film quite right and the other that even I can see gets it completely wrong.
2. She compares it in style and tone to the strident, ideologically-colored, often fact-challenged documentaries of Al Gore and Michael Moore. Since I've seen none of the above, I can't comment, but it's an interesting suggestion.
3. She points out that Moore and Gore have garnered far more mainstream media coverage, not just of their documentaries, but of the issues their documentaries are about.
4. She also takes note of opinion media's much more substantial treatment of the film, and I think that's even much more obviously true when you take into account blogs (which she doesn't mention).

She doesn't really draw the conclusion that's just begging to be drawn and that I think she's suggesting. Whether a strident, ideological, fact-questioned documentary garners media attention and brings about a significant discussion of a certain issue seems to depend on what it's about or what ideology is behind it. It's unclear which it is in this case, which may be why she doesn't draw the conclusion explicitly. Is it because it's an ideology that's associated with conservatism and in particular religious conservatism? Or is it because of the issue rather than the viewpoint? Would a documentary by Michael Moore on the idiocy of intelligent design have the same no-impact result as this film has had in the major media? Would a conservative documentary starring Ben Stein but on health care or the Iraq war have the same attention Moore got with his films on those subjects?

My suspicion is that the answer is no in both cases, which if true means it's the ideology and not the topic that has made the difference. That doesn't demonstrate the point the documentary aims to make (which is about academic freedom), but it does demonstrate a similar point about which views are considered kosher by the establishment media.

I've heard it said that the Levitical requirement for priests to marry virgins is a sign of an assumption that virgins are more pure, which implies that sex is in itself impure. Here is the relevant passage:

And he shall take a wife in her virginity. A widow, or a divorced woman, or a woman who has been defiled, or a prostitute, these he shall not marry. But he shall take as his wife a virgin of his own people, that he may not profane his offspring among his people, for I am the Lord who sanctifies him." (Leviticus 21:13-15, ESV)

There are several things wrong with this argument. One is that the priest is supposed to be pure after marriage too, and if sex is impure then how is he going to remain pure if he has sex with his wife? Another is that there's a reason give, one that doesn't have to do with the purity of the bride but with the offspring. I suppose it's possible to take that as assuming the offspring will be polluted because the mother is polluted, but I don't think that's what's going on here. One of the priestly requirements during Ezekiel's vision of a renewed temple in the last chapters of his prophecy sheds some light on this issue:

They shall not marry a widow or a divorced woman, but only virgins of the offspring of the house of Israel, or a widow who is the widow of a priest. (Ezekiel 44:22, ESV)

If the issue were some animus against people who had had sex, then why would a widow of a priest be ok? Presumably if pollution from sex itself transferred pollution to any offspring, then wouldn't the widow of a priest be just as problematic as the widow of anyone else? This suggests some other reason why priests needed to marry virgins in Leviticus, a reason that must be consistent with marrying widows of priests in Ezekiel. It's unlikely that there's different reasoning involved in the two cases, even if you don't accept divine inspiration behind the two passages.

A much more likely explanation is that the issue with offspring is that virgins raise no problem for offspring having been fathered by someone else prior to the marriage. If a priest marries a virgin, any child she gives birth to will be of the priestly line. If he marries someone who is not a virgin, there is always the possibility that any offspring might have been fathered by someone who is not a priest. At least that's true if her previous sexual activity was with someone who was not a priest. If she was married to a priest, her offspring would still be assumed to be of priestly descent. So this interpretation makes sense of the second allowable condition in Ezekiel, in keeping with the spirit of the Leviticus passage.

Those who begin with the assumption that the Bible is anti-sex like to come up with these implausible claims, and someone who doesn't think carefully about the biblical passages in context can easily come away with the conclusion that these charges have some foundation. Biblical passages certainly do assume a sexual morality that differs from popular views today, but it doesn't follow that the assumptions behind that sexual ethic are anti-sex. Even ignoring the celebration of sex in the Song of Songs and Paul's insistence in I Corinthians 7 that sex should be a normal and regular part of marriage, you still can't easily get the conclusion that sex itself is impure unless you ignore much of the ancient context and often even the literary context of biblical statements.

I've long wondered what idiot first came up with the idea that a curse on Canaan in Genesis 9 someone was supposed to justify mistreatment of black Africans, who have little association with Canaan anywhere in the Bible. Most scholars today don't see Genesis 10's table of nations as showing geneaological connections to begin with, given how such language is often used in ancient near eastern cultures for political and cultural connections of vassalship without geneaological connections (and most of the names are place names and ethnic groups without the usual indications that appear with proper names). However, even if you do take it the way it sounds if you take what's in the English translations literally, the curse is on Ham's son Canaan, not on Ham himself. Black Africans are connected with other sons of Ham, not the one who was cursed. The view is completely at odds with what the text actually says.

So I've long wondered who first came up with the view this curse on Canaan justified enslaving the descendants of Canaan's brothers, Ham's other sons. I'm wondering no longer. It turns out that it wasn't a Jewish or Christian interpreter at all, and the view is actually a lot older than I thought. I figured it appeared at the earliest in the late medieval period. It actually doesn't appear in Europe until the slave trade was well under way, so I was partly right. Medieval Europe (Spain and other Muslim-influenced parts aside) was actually opposed to slavery for the most part (at least if you don't count serfdom as slavery; I do, but I also consider modern employment a kind of slavery, and that's not the kind of slavery this view was trying to justify).

The people who first came up with this justification for slavery of Africans were very early Muslims, and that view was dominant within the Islamic world (but not outside it) for 100 years until it spread to Europeans via contact with the Spanish and their treatment of Moors. Then Europeans and eventually colonial Americans began to adopt it. So it wasn't even initially a misreading of the Bible. The relevant parts of the Qur'an don't mention Ham at all, so it's not even a misreading of the Qur'an. It's simply a fabrication in order to justify the kind of slavery Muslims had been imposing on black Africans.

It was an early Muslims who first (as far as we know) developed the idea that Ham was cursed. I found a quote in Edwin Yamauchi's Africa and the Bible from a Muslim who wrote in the late 7th to early 8th centuries, and the whole view is right there. Noah cursed Ham (not Canaan) by imposing slavery on Africans whenever the descendants of Shem would come across them. It attributes their hair type to the curse as well (but not, interestingly, their skin color, though it does mention their skin color). A 9th century Muslim does bring in a change of skin color because of the curse, and Yamauchi mentions other sources attributing natural slavery to black Africans because of this curse, a view that I'm pretty sure doesn't become entrenched in Europe or the Americas until the slave trade was well under way.

Its first appearance in the colonies isn't long after the British occupied American territory and started importing slaves, but it had been in Europe before that. Various versions of it appear even before the Reformation, as early as the mid-15th century, but that was in formerly-Muslim Portugal regarding the now-enslaved Moors. European theologians generally resisted the idea, and it probably didn't take serious hold until the modern concept of race came into existence through the work of Immanuel Kant and his contemporaries who sought to explain differences in physical features by means of biological essences of different races.

So Muslims, a very dominant form of which has an awful lot of problems with human rights even today, seem to be the initial impetus behind one of the key justifications of European and American slavery of blacks. This doesn't excuse the Europeans and Americans who did it, but Muslim writers were originally responsible for the idea, and it came to the colonies and Europeans via the cotton trade. I think it's time to stop blaming this on Christianity even if there were plenty of Christians who have held this view that originated in Islamic slavery. It's silly enough to blame Christianity for a view that hasn't held sway for most of Christian history but only appeared late and lasted only a couple hundred years before going the way of the dodo except in offshoot groups like Mormons. But if the view originally came from another religion entirely and has been dominant in the members of that religion's justification of slavery, while Christians steadfastly resisted it for centuries before falling sway to it for a few hundred years, I think it's justifiable to claim that those who blame this on Christianity are relying on historical ignorance.

[cross-posted at Prosblogion]

I've often heard the charge that theists have a harder time responding to the problem of evil if they hold to a deontological ethical view. Deontology recognizes duties that can't easily be overridden by consequences the way consequentialism allows. Consequentialists say the right thing to do is to do whatever leads to the best consequences. If God does this, then God can do things that lead to bad consequences as long as the good consequences that also happen are better enough to outweigh the bad. So it's easier to deal with the problem of evil if all it takes to justify God's allowance of evil is that it leads to a slightly better outcome overall, even if it's worse with respect to the evil itself. Deontologists, on the other hand, might just say that the duty not to harm or not even to allow harm can't so easily be outweighed by the overall good. Some things are just wrong, and God shouldn't therefore do them. Allowing very great evils seems to be a pretty good candidate for that category of action. It's thus harder to respond to the problem of evil with a deontological view than it is with a consequentialist view.

I used to be a little disturbed at this problem, wondering whether a "higher goods" type of defense that I favor requires a consequentialist view, a view I'm not otherwise attracted to. But it's occurred to me recently that the problem assumes a kind of deontology that I don't agree with. It assumes the absolutism of Immanuel Kant's deontology, not a more moderated kind of deontology such as that of W.D. Ross, which I favor. On Ross's view, we have prima facie duties, none of which are absolute the way duties for Kant are. Duties can often conflict for Ross, and when they conflict only one will turn out to be an actual duty, whichever one is morally more important. In a case of lying to save a life, the life is more important than the normal duty not to lie, but in a case of lying to protect your reputation it's still going to be wrong to lie, even if the consequences are better from lying. So this is not consequentialism, but it's not absolutism either.

Now apply this to the problem of evil. There will be potential cases when God would not do something wrong, because even though the consequences are better it would be wrong to do it. But it leaves open that some goods are so important that God might allow pretty serious harm in order to achieve them. This means that the moderate deontologist can have consequence-based responses to the problem of evil that an absolutist deontologist can't have. This may have been all I was worried about losing by adopting a deontological ethical view, even if consequentialists might have yet more to say to defend a divinity from being immoral for allowing evil.

In a discussion of atheism and ethics at Puritas, I noticed among the comments two very similar arguments about different subjects that commit the same fallacy. We had it drilled into us in William Alston's epistemology class, so I'm trained to notice it whenever it appears, but I notice a tone-deafness to this kind of distinction among people of certain types of views.

The fallacy consists of confusing metaphysics and epistemology. For non-philosophers, metaphysics is philosophy issues about reality, and epistemology is philosophical examination of knowledge. Here are some examples of arguments that confuse the two.

1. According to reliabilism in epistemology, you can know something (roughly) just by having a reliable belief-forming process that reliably leads to true beliefs.
2. But you can't know that the belief-forming process is reliable, because maybe it makes mistakes along the way, and you'd be in the dark about such mistakes.
3. Therefore, reliabilism must be false.

The metaphysical account of knowledge is statement 1. It explains what must be true for something to be knowledge. Statement 2 comes along and asks a further question about how you might know that it's knowledge. But that's a separate question. What makes it knowledge and how you know it's knowledge are separate questions. The first is metaphysics, and the second is epistemology.

Andrew's post offered an argument about how we might know moral truths. He argued against the likelihood that we would know about morality if atheism is true. Whatever else you might say about this argument, it's simply a change in subject to object by presenting problems with Divine Command Theory, which is a view about what makes moral truths true. Whatever problems Divine Command Theory faces and whatever problems Andrew's epistemological view might have, they aren't the same view. They aren't even about the same subject.

It struck me as noteworthy that the same confusion arose in the same conversation about a completely different issue. Andrew was pointing to divine revelation as one source of knowledge about morality, which led to some objections I often see against Protestant views of scripture. One complaint about Protestant views of scripture is that without tradition as an authoritative source you can't have an independent verification of scripture as infallible. On one level is the same sort of argument I discussed above. Someone claims scripture to be infallible. An objector comes along and acts as if our inability to prove that it's infallible undermines its infallibility. It can do no such thing. It may raise questions about how someone can claim to know of its infallibility, but not knowing its infallibility (and certainly not showing its infallibility) is irrelevant to whether it is infallible. The objection confuses our epistemic status about the revelation with a feature of the revelation itself.

In the midst of a song Moses has Israel sing on the eve of their entrance to the land, there's a speech by God about how Israel deserves judgment. In it, God gives an explanation why that judgment isn't as complete as it could have been:

I would have said, “I will cut them to pieces;
I will wipe them from human memory,”
had I not feared provocation by the enemy,
lest their adversaries should misunderstand,
lest they should say, “Our hand is triumphant,
it was not the LORD who did all this.”’ [Deuteronomy 32:26-27, ESV]

If I just had to take this at face value, I would read it as saying that the only reason God doesn't spare them is because that would lead other nations into thinking that they were victors over these people in their own strength. There's nothing here about Israel deserving being spared, because that's the whole point. When judgment is deserved, mercy is not. But if you took this as the only reason God spared them, it's hard to see how God's doing this is supposed to fit into a plan for what would happen perhaps 1500 years or so later.

Now it's easy to see this as not saying exactly that. It's easy to see it as a kind of shorthand for saying that God's reasons didn't have to do with their deserving mercy, giving one example. Other examples related to Israel's enemies abound, including in passages relating to these very events. In the mouth of Moses, we have a larger statement of what Israel's enemies would think of God after freeing his people from Egypt only to abandon them in the wilderness, not keeping his promises to them. So I wouldn't say that this is giving a smaller justification than elsewhere, just giving one instance of the larger reasoning, none of which has anything to do with their deserving it.

Now imagine you're working on a document during the twilight of the Davidic kings, with an aim to capture what you see as true righteous living, seeking to indicate that what's gone on since the time of Solomon has been a rejection of the kind of living the Mosaic law requires. You want to give some hope for those who will still follow God truly, but you want judgment represented in the document as well for those who don't. This is pretty much what the majority view in Deuteronomy scholarship thinks about the book. It's thought by many to have been written as an apology for Josiah's temple reform movement and only pretended to have been discovered in the temple as a long-lost final speech by Moses.

If you were doing this, would you write a song like this, or would you even leave it as is if you adopted an already-existing song? Or would you build a lot more into the explanation for why God spared them, all the while not saying they deserved it? Wouldn't you be insistent on explaining that God had a plan for a continuing Israel, that they would become a great nation, and his promise to make them that nation, while dependent on their continued behavior upon entering the land, nonetheless is a promise that God will bring them to be able to fulfill? I'd expect at least something other than what the nationsare going to think of God, even if that could easily be part of it.

So I'm not sure I'd call this a compelling argument, but it does seem to be at least some evidence, for thinking that Deuteronomy comes from a time when there wasn't this long history of kings who end up with this somewhat messianic figure Josiah leading a reform movement. It actually fits better with the original situation when they didn't know what would happen upon entering the land except that God said they'd be blessed if they follow him and cursed if they don't. At least it strikes me as the kind of thing that would more likely come from someone at such a time than at such a time near Josiah's revival.

A few years ago I wrote about the rare occasions when it's legitimate to represent your opponents unfairly, using a passage from Isaiah as an illustration. I thought of a similar issue yesterday in reading the first chapter of Deuteronomy. In the early chapters of Deuteronomy, Moses recounts the events of Exodus through Numbers once again to the Israelites on the eve of their entrance into the promised land. But there are differences, just as there are with the different reports of Jesus' life in the four gospels, the different accounts of the history of the kings of Israel and Judah in Samuel-Kings and Chronicles (as weel as the occasional narratives in the prophets), and the three different accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts.

It's one thing to reorder the events so they aren't chronological but thematic. The order of contact with the nations east of the promised land is different. In the latter chapters of Numbers it looks chronological, and in Deuteronomy 2-3 the nations Israel actually fought end up at the end to be treated together, whereas they probably weren't encountered in that order. But you might argue that anyone aware of the geography would know that this wasn't ordered chronologically or geographically.

But what about the spy report in Deuteronomy 1? It leaves out some important information that Numbers is very up-front about. It's the sort of thing that we might call selective reporting in our day. If you just read Deuteronomy, you'd get the sense that the spies came back with an entirely positive report. All it says is that the spies reported the land to be good and full of good fruit. There's nothing in the report about their being scared of giants or unwilling to go into the land. The only mention of that comes later, when Moses recounts the people's opposition.

Now I think there are some good reasons (which would take too long to list here) for thinking that Deuteronomy's narrative assumes the background knowledge someone who has read Numbers would know. So I'm not inclined to accept that it's all that plausible that a contrary ideology is behind Deuteronomy. Besides, there isn't a huge theological difference between recognizing a bad spy report (representing the majority of the tribes with one person per tribe) and recognizing a bad response from the people as a whole. So I don't accept a source-critical solution to this problem (which I'm not sure would be a solution anyway).

Here's what I propose is going on. I do think there's a theological reason for Moses' reporting things differently in Deuteronomy 1. In Numbers, the concern is largely getting down what happened in order. But in Deuteronomy, Moses is giving a speech to the people on the eve of their entrance to the land. Moses' overall point is that the good report is all they needed, and the false report (not given here as a report by the spies but given in Numbers as exactly that) is irrelevant. Moses' leaving it out in this speech would be glaringly obvious to the Israelites, who had just spent 40 years wandering around because their parents and grandparents had heeded that report.

I mentioned in this post the one place I've found something in D.A. Carson's writings that I disagree with, and I wanted to explain in detail what that is and why I disagree with him. I've summarized Alvin Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology in this post, so I refer you to that for the basics of the view. Carson discusses the view in Letters Along the Way, pp.151-156 and in The Gagging of God pp.186, 188. In the first book, some of his critique is from what he (or possibly Woodbridge) thinks Plantinga gets wrong about Calvin. I have little to say about that, since I haven't read Calvin on the issue and am not interested in what he said for the sake of getting him right, at least not with respect to this issue. I do think Carson (and Woodbridge) ought to get Plantinga right if they're going to critique him in print, and I don't think that actually happened in this case.

In Letters Along the Way, Plantinga comes off as if he denies the possibility of establishing the existence of God with evidence, as if he doesn't think there is any evidence whatsoever to support Christian belief. Nothing could be further from the truth. Plantinga thinks several arguments for the existence of God are convincing. He thinks there is good evidence to support belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I'm not sure where this understanding of Plantinga is coming from, but it doesn't fit with Plantinga's actual beliefs or his discussion in the piece Carson and Woodbridge cite ("Reason and Belief in God", in Faith and Rationality, ed. Plantinga and Wolterstorff).

What Plantinga does say is that evidentialism is false as a requirement on knowledge. Evidentialism takes knowledge to be impossible without either evidence or self-evident truths. He allows that people disagree on the value of the evidence, and so he doesn't think evidential arguments will be convincing enough to those with highly skeptical standards. I don't know of anywhere where he simply denies the possibility of gaining support for Christian beliefs with evidence, however. He just doesn't think you need evidence to have knowledge of God. Plantinga does recognize (rightly) that there are no standards agreed on by all sides that we can use as the basis of rational arguments for God. The atheist can just deny any premise necessary to get out of the argument. That's how philosophical arguments work, no matter what the conclusion is. But that's a far cry from thinking such arguments are inconclusive or unsound. To make that jump would require making it in every area of philosophy, making no argument successful or sound. This is simply not Plantinga.

The discussion continues with a number of claims that I find it hard to see as responsible Plantinga exegesis. Woodbridge and Carson compare Plantinga with Barth, with whom I see no comparison. Barth rejects the kind of natural theology that Plantinga has spent a good deal of time defending, even if he's recognized that atheists can deny a premise to any valid argument to get out of accepting the conclusion. Plantinga does discuss the objections he sees to natural theology in the works of Bavinck, Calvin, and Barth. But he does so in order to show that his rejection of evidentialism is in the general Reformed tradition, not to agree with everything in those thinkers' rejection of natural theology. He in fact says that the natural theologian can respond to some of their complaints, and he gives a defense of natural theology before going on to continue his critique of evidentialism and response to the no-evidence argument.

Richard Dawkins is often accused of being a fundamentalist atheist. He dismisses theism almost without argument. The arguments he gives are often straw men or miss the point in some other way. He shows little familiarity with the best philosophical representatives of theism, and since his work on atheism is actually philosophy he's really dropped the ball in backing up his views. It ends up looking like mere dogmatism without much allowance for dialogue with the other side, i.e. fundamentalism.

Dawkins' response:

The answer to the familiar accusation of atheist fundamentalism is plain enough. The onus is not on the atheist to demonstrate the non-existence of the invisible unicorn in the room, and we cannot be accused of undue confidence in our disbelief. The devout churchgoer recites the Nicene Creed weekly, enumerating a detailed and precise list of things he positively believes, with no more evidence than supports the unicorn. Now that’s overconfidence. By contrast, the atheist says the humble thing: of all the millions of possible entities that one might imagine, I believe only in those for which there is evidence – trombones, pelicans and electrons, say, but not unicorns or leprechauns, not Thor with his hammer, not Ganesh the elephant god, not the Holy Ghost. 

Macht at Prosthesis offers a reply, and I think he's right. What atheists are rejecting when they reject theism is not mere theism. They reject a whole set of beliefs and values, a way of life, a kind of community, a view on the meaning and purpose of life, and so on. They reject the fundamental conception of how most people in the world today and throughout history have seen the significance of their lives and how they live. That does seem to me to be disanalogous with merely not believing in an invisible unicorn that someone else tells you is in the room.

When I first saw this video, I was wondering what Andrew Sullivan was getting at by calling it The Christianity of War. He obviously finds it problematic but says nothing about what is so problematic. But then I followed the link to the original location and read some of the comments, and I think I know what's wrong with it. The problem is that the makers of the video produced something for the evangelical community that anyone remotely biblically literate would understand as a call to spiritual action, cognizant of the reality of Satan and the necessity of bearing up the weapons of Christian warfare as listed in Ephesians 6:10-20 and referred to in II Corinthians 6:7; 10:4; Hebrews 4:12 (among other places). These weapons are things like faith, righteousness, the good news message about Jesus Christ, the word of God in general, and salvation. Most of them are defenses against spiritual attacks from Satan and his minions.

But it seems to me that in a biblically-illiterate culture, it's setting yourself up for misunderstanding to post something on the internet if many will not understand the biblical context of the metaphor you're using. This is especially true given those vocal anti-evangelicals who adamantly misinterpret everything evangelicals do in order to further the completely ridiculous thesis that evangelicals are all about political agendas and that evangelical missions groups have nothing to do with spreading the gospel but seek to fight human enemies (not the spiritual enemies discussed in the verses I just referred to that the video was actually about) with human weapons (not the spiritual enemies in the verses I just referred to that the video was actually about).

I am not going to absolve the pretty ridiculous commenters on the video from doing their homework. Anyone who thinks that video was about political fighting against the political opponents of the religious right is morally at fault. There's plenty of publicly-available information that should easily make it plain that that's not the case, and it is indeed immoral to make base charges, that are so obviously false, against such a large movement when it's so utterly obvious that you know so little about that movement.

But I think evangelicals have a calling to make the message of the good news plain and clear in a way that videos like this are not going to get in the way of that. This was obviously not intended to do anything but motivate Christians to pray, study the Bible, hold each other up in times of spiritual trial, and seek to live a godly life. Its creators therefore didn't expect this to be viewed by those who know very little about evangelicals besides the popular misconception based on how evangelicals are treated in the media. But they put it on the internet, and they failed to take into account the small but vocal miscreants who find anything they can about evangelicals in order to take it out of context and put evangelicals in as bad a political light as possible, and that's what's happened here. Those who would produce such videos ought to take that into account and not just leave metaphors like this hanging unexplained to be taken to be about whatever the viewer happens to want it to be about.

Update: I write this post, and then I check up on what's been going on at the Volokh Conspiracy in the last couple days while I haven't had the chance to check in there, and I find this post, which has statistics showing that the demographic group that is most disproportionately Christian fundamentalist in the U.S. is African-American women, and more fundamentalists are Democrats than Republicans. Neither of these is all that surprising to me once I think about it a bit, but it certainly goes against the sort of thing I was trying to confront in this post.

A while back, Stephen Colbert had biologist Ken Miller, who teaches at my alma mater (although I never took a class with him), on his show to talk about evolution and intelligent design. Miller is known for being a devout Catholic who supports the scientific consensus of contemporary evolutionary theory. It's a a strange interview. One of Miller's main points is that people who deny evolution can't explain why we need flu shots every year, since the flu virus evolves to the point that old vaccines won't cut it. This is, of course, a terrible straw man argument, because even the most vehement critics of evolution don't deny evolution within a species, what they call microevolution.

But one argument struck me as particularly strange. Miller seems to think waste is a problem for intelligent design, since God designed things that went extinct. Oops! Fossils show God's mistakes. Miller thinks he has a higher view. God set in motion a process that gave rise to everything on this planet, and it shows God's greatness that he used evolutionary processes. So he has a theological reason for favoring the non-ID model.

But wait a minute. Doesn't the theistic evolution model have the same problem? Aren't there all these things that resulted from the process that God initiated that got left behind? If God set in motion the processes that lead to evolution of more complex species, you still get species that result from that process that die out. You get waste. Did God intend that result? If so, then the same problem arises for Miller. Something God designed died out. If not, then we seem to have a denial of God's purposes in creation. Is this the idea common in deism that God sort of set things up but didn't concern himself with the details of how it turned out? That's not very Catholic of Miller, who claims to be a pious, orthodox Catholic. But those seem to be his only options. Either there are forms that were designed by God that no longer exist, or those forms were not designed by God and do not fall under his plan of providence.

So it turns out that this is really an argument against theism and a doctrine of providence, not an argument against intelligent design. This is just puzzling. I don't know Miller's views on providence, but it seems to me that his argument is misdirected either way it turns out, and it should apply as well to any theistic evolutionary view that holds to the theological positions of the Roman Catholic Church. It's really just a particular case of the problem of evil, and I don't really know his views on that issue either. But whatever else is true, this isn't a problem for ID any more than it is for theistic evolution.

Update: Check out the excellent comments on Ted Poston's Prosblogion post on this subject. I'm in full agreement with almost all of the comments to this point (7:42 EST Aug 1, 2007), and some of them are making some of the points I wanted to make in this post but in a much better way. There are also some considerations there that hadn't occurred to me at all but seem right.

[Cross-posted at Prosblogion]

At Prosblogion, Trent Dougherty links to an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Michael Ruse called Creationism. The SEP is usually very good, and I have to say that Ruse is much more reasonable on these issues than many in the anti-ID movement. He understands the positions he's criticizing a little more accurately and usually represents them a little more fairly. Any philosopher knows a lot more philosophy than Richard Dawkins, but Ruse stands out as someone willing to discuss the philosophical issues as philosophy, while many in the debate are dismissing them as other things (usually as religion or as bad science).

But this piece reveals that in some ways he does display a number of symptoms that I find throughout the anti-ID movement. Trent calls the article deplorable, and I do wonder how this got published in the SEP. It's not as bad as anything you'd find in Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins, but it's actually worse in some ways than the Wikipedia entries on these issues, which I don't have a very high opinion of.

Devin Carpenter asks in a comment why Trent finds the piece deplorable, and I decided to type up my reasons, which quickly got long enough that I didn't want to leave it as a comment. So here are some of why I consider this to be a fairly bad Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry. This is only after a quick skim and then once through with a closer read, so I may have misunderstood him in some places (although a couple times I think he may be at fault if I did). But I'd be very surprised to have gotten him that wrong on all these issues. Some of these are more minor and may well just be pet peeves of mine, but I think a number are much more serious. I'm listing them in the order they occurred to me as I was reading through the article more carefully.

1. He claims that six-day creationists are enthusiastic about Intelligent Design, which is simply false if he's referring to the arguments of Dembski, Behe, and Johnson (which his later section on ID makes likely). Most creationists in the narrow sense do not support ID arguments of that sort, since they think such arguments concede too much to evolutionist and to old-earth creationism. The ID leaders want to include six-day creationists, but they've had a hard time winning them over.

I received a very interesting question via email from Patrick Chan:

According to the theory of evolution, why couldn't future man be materially different from present day or modern man, such that he is no longer distinguishable from modern man (by "materially," I include genetic and biochemical differences which may or may not manifest themselves physically)?  As far as I can tell, it's possible according to evolution.

And perhaps as a result of such differences, why couldn't future man differ markedly from modern man in other ways?  Maybe future man will have a different psychological makeup and emotional life, for instance, and thus be subject to and experience different temptations, sufferings, etc. than what modern man experiences.

What I'm getting at is that it's possible Christ himself might not share with future man what he shares with modern man.  It's possible Christ would no longer be "one of us" in the sense that he would no longer be able to share in future man's "humanity," assuming future man can at least still be considered part of the mammalian species homo sapien.  (Of course, if future man is so different that he can no longer be classified as a homo sapien, then that raises other questions.)  This would undercut Scripture (e.g. Heb. 2:14-18; 4:15-16).

In other words, if it's possible for man to evolve into something different than he is today -- whether it's only a slight difference or whether it's as jarringly dissimilar as depicted in a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey (in which man is a different species) -- then what would that make Christ in his incarnation as a man?  On the evolutionary tree of life, modern man, and therefore Christ himself since he came as a modern man, could very well be to future man what an ape-man might be to us.  Evolutionarily speaking, Christ in his incarnation would be a different being than future man.  I'll not mince words: as far as I can tell, it's possible that the evolutionary equivalent of an ape-man might have died for your sins.

My response (addressed to him, since I first wrote it in an email response to him):

As I've discussed before, Sam Brownback recently penned an editorial that The New York Times ran, clarifying his views on faith and reason, particularly with regard to evolution. I've seen several people discussing this response by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, but nothing I've seen details just how far off the mark the Coyne piece is.

It contains several philosophical mistakes and demonstrates serious ignorance about the subject matter under discussion, which happens to be philosophy (not science), as I hope will become clear shortly. But, most disturbingly, it drastically misrepresents Brownback's view. This post consists of an almost-fisking of the piece. I do not quote the entire piece, but I've selected out quite a number of important excerpts. My not discussing something doesn't mean I agree with it. I'm simply focusing on what I do know, and I don't really know any biology, which though it's not the main subject does occupy an important part of his argument. I'm thus sticking to what I do have some expertise in, something I think Coyne ought to do in the future rather than doing bad philosophy while calling it science.

I'll start with one bit toward the end of the piece, because it illustrates the biggest misunderstanding Coyne relies on, and then I'll work through the piece in order.

According to Brownback, we should reject scientific findings if they conflict with our faith, but accept them if they're compatible. But the scientific evidence says that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago. Are we supposed to reject this as "atheistic theology" (an oxymoron if there ever was one)?

This is a clear fallacy:

1. Brownback says we should reject scientific findings if they conflict with our faith
2. the scientific evidence says that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago
3. Therefore, Brownback says we should reject the claim that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago

I'm missing the crucial premise that it conflicts with the faith to hold that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago. Since Brownback doesn't assert that claim, the argument doesn't apply. He does say that he believes microevolution is true, and he does say that he doesn't think macroevolution could be true in a way that requires a materialistic, deterministic metaphysic. What he doesn't say is that macroevolution without a materialistic, deterministic metaphysic is false or incompatible with his faith. He is perfectly silent on that issue. Only if he did say that would Coyne's argument even get going.

Jonathan Adler is belittling Sam Brownback's relatively nuanced (for a politician) position on evolution. The comment thread is getting pretty heated, almost entirely in a direction that seems to me to miss the most important factor in interpreting his position. I would go so far as to say that most of the commenters are immorally taking Brownback's position in the least charitable way possible.

Roughly speaking, the problem seems to be that Senator Brownback is using language that leaves the issue wide open, where what he says is consistent with anything from theistic evolution to six-day creationism. The charge is that he is using coded language that's supposed to tell six-day creationists he's with them, while also using coded language to tell theistic evolutionists that he's with them, or something like that anyway. The assumption is that he couldn't be genuinely conflicted on this issue in a way that's consistent with rationality. I want to suggest that the most plausible interpretation of his comments is not the political coded language one but that he really is conflicted in such a way and that it even results from rational conflictedness.

Given that many people do think the most reasonable interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis is that the world was really created in six days 10,000 years ago (note: I don't think this is the most reasonable interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2:3, given its poetic elements, but I can understand how an intelligent, rational person might think it is), I can understand why he might genuinely feel conflicted, resulting in the following views:

1. Whatever the Bible teaches is true.
2. The Bible's teaching can be interpreted in a way that's consistent with the consensus among contemporary scientists, but some interpretations are more reasonable than others.
3. Science isn't infallible and has often been very wrong, even when scientists are correct at the time to think their best information leads them to that view. Most of the time these are minor variations, but sometimes they are major overthrows.
4. The most plausible interpretation of the Bible conflicts with the contemporary consensus.

I can easily see why an intelligent, informed person who knows all the science and understands why the consensus holds what it does might still refrain from holding any belief whatsoever on whether speciation occurred in the way the consensus says it did. The key is to insist both that (a) our interpretation of the scripture might be wrong and (b) our science has at least some chance of being wrong, while insisting that (c) whatever the Bible does say is true (whether our interpretation is correct or not) and (d) whatever a perfect scientific study would result it will almost certainly be correct.

Only if you assume from the outset that divine revelation about such matters is impossible could you end up concluding that such a person is irrational.

[cross-posted at Prosblogion] Elliot Sober has a new paper, "Intelligent Design Theory and the Supernatural: The 'God or Extra-Terrestrials' Reply", in the latest issue of Faith and Philosophy (January 2007). I received my copy today, and I was amazed that this paper could get past the reviewers of a top philosophy of religion journal without serious modification, even from such an important philosopher of science as Sober.

Sober makes the following argument. Defenders of intelligent design often point out that ID arguments are not religion, and one support for this (a relatively less important one, in my view) is that the conclusion of ID arguments is silent on what the designer is like other than that the designer is intelligent and must have worked purposes into nature somehow. Sober's paper is a response to that argument, and his response is extremely strange. He argues that supernatural assumptions are implicit in the ID argument, and thus the ID defender is committed to a conclusion that there is some supernatural being.

Suppose that's all true. I'm not invested very seriously in whether that part of his argument is correct, since I happen to believe there is a supernatural being. I don't even care whether ID defenders are committed to the existence of a supernatural being, since I know no one who accepts ID who doesn't also accept a supernatural being. So I'll assume for the sake of argument that Sober is correct, and ID arguments do involve a commitment to the existence of some supernatural being. My question is how this helps Sober. His point in the paper is to show that ID arguments involve a religious conclusion. The only way he should be able to conclude that is if he thinks being implicitly committed to the existence of a supernatural being is somehow itself religious. Yet it isn't.

Lots of people think moral evaluation commits you to the existence of a supernatural being. They don't necessarily think that calling an action wrong is a religious practice. So it doesn't seem that being implicitly committed to the existence of a supernatural being is the same as practicing a religion. What's worse is that plenty of people accept theistic arguments on philosophical grounds without being religious practitioners. I personally know several people myself who do exactly that. Their theism is merely a philosophical view. It is not religious in any sense. It doesn't even affect their life. They are areligious. So how can implicitly being committed to the existence of a supernatural being amount to religion when even being explicitly committed to theism doesn't count as religion?

D.A. Carson has reviewed N.T. Wright's new book on evil and God's justice. You can read the review here. Carson has authored what is hands-down my favorite book on evil from a biblical (as opposed to philosophical) perspective. I'm currently reading through the second edition of that book, but you can read my review of the first edition here. I have read his review of Wright, and it's definitely worth reading whether you've looked at Wright on this issue or not. Beware that it's ten pages long, so reserve some time for it.

For more discussion of Wright, who has been getting some play in the Christian blogosphere lately, see

• Jollyblogger's post on the penal substitution discussion in the UK (where it's clear that Wright affirms penal substitution and denounces some who are denying it, from Wright's quotes in this article).
• Adrian Warnock's discussion of Wright's critique of both sides in the UK debate
  
• Justin Taylor's post on the Carson review
• Jollyblogger's followup on Wright and penal substitution
• Justin Taylor's discussion of Wright's defense of Steve Chalke, whom he amazingly doesn't think denies penal substitution
• But perhaps the best thing to do is to read what Wright has to say about the penal substitution debate and then to examine the other posts in the light of Wright's own carefully prepared thoughts.
• Update: Justin Taylor has some choice quotes from Wright very clearly defending something that most people would count as penal substitution (and that Wright himself clearly does count as penal substitution, given some of his above-mentioned quotes against those he does believe to deny it). Perhaps Wink would quibble here on whether Wright's view is truly substitutionary. I suspect Wright would accept substitution and union on that issue. But it's very clearly penal, and that's the main issue under debate here.
• Update 2: Alastair Roberts has some helpful distinctions between different models of the atonement. One position worth considering is that none of them is wrong, but what would be wrong would be denying any of them. (Or perhaps most of them are correct, and it would be wrong to deny any of those number.) Heresy, of course, is another matter. Being wrong does not always line up with being heretical, and I'm not sure I've thought about this long enough to have a sure view on that.

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy has some interesting observations about interracial dating. It turns out that there's more resistance to interracial dating even when it comes to online dating, which means it doesn't just have to do with who you associate with in daily life within your local community (although that's got to be a factor, because groups who tend to live in areas where they are the majority are less likely to take part in interracial dating than groups that typically find themselves in the majority wherever they live).

One factor that he includes that I hadn't connected with this is that people with higher or more specific standards in non-racial ways might be more open to interracial dating simply because their pool is already much smaller than other people's. He includes religious standards such as refusal to date someone of another religion. This may well be one explanation why, in my own observation, evangelical Christians (at least in the circles I run in) are far more open to interracial dating than most any other group I can think of. It may well be partly because evangelicals have a smaller pool to pick from because many evangelicals will date only other evangelicals, and being open to interracial dating helps widen the pool from what it would be if they looked only at people within their own racial group.

Nonetheless, I don't think such an explanation undermines what I've long thought to be the explanation for evangelicals' greater openness to interracial dating. I've generally taken it to be because evangelicals have a heightened sense of the oneness of all genuine followers of Jesus, who evangelicals typically see as including mainly those who have put their allegiance to Christ above all other allegiances. Identity in Christ is primary, and other sources of identity are at best secondary. Thus when I think about who I'm most closely aligned with, I'm going to think of black evangelicals as much closer to the heart of my identity than I will white non-believers.

This isn't just not in conflict with Somin's point, as if they are two compatible explanations. It's actually the same fact under two different descriptions. On the one hand, evangelicals who have this restriction do indeed have a smaller pool to pick from, and they are thus more likely to be willing to include others in the pool than just those of their own race. But the philosophical justification for restricting the pool to like-minded believers is the same justification for expanding it to include like-minded believers regardless of race. After all, it's the sense of closer identity with fellow believers that leads both to the restriction to only believers and to openness to believers of other races.

Joe Carter has a (perhaps unintentionally, I'm not sure) rather hilarious post about God, vampires, and the anthropic principle. Somehow Joe managed to find an academic paper on this: "Ghosts, Vampires and Zombies: Cinema Fiction vs Physics Reality" by Costas J. Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi. 

If these physicists are right, we can reasonably infer from the feeding habits of vampires in vampire literature, together with the continuing population of non-vampire human beings, that there are at most 512 vampires in the world, assuming there are vampire-slayers. Without vampire-slayers, it seems there just couldn't be vampires at all, according to these numbers.

Now I'm not going to examine the connection with the anthropic principle that Joe is emphasizing, other than to observe that both just seem to be simple cases of inferences to the best explanation, but I do have one philosophical point to make. The argument against vampires leaves out a crucial step. One scenario ought to be considered more carefully before ruling out the possibility of vampires given our evidence. The argument takes the continuing population of humans as a piece of starting evidence. But should we be so sure that the population really is continuing in the way that we think it is? Isn't it possible that the population is just a growing numbers of vampires, and only relatively few of the people who remain are still real humans, with a huge vampire conspiracy going on pretending that humans are still around in large numbers? If the vampires have enough technology to clone humans to provide "offspring" for the vampires masquerading as human couples and a continued food source, then I can't see how this assumption can be ruled out as easily as is being done.

The paper makes some funny points about ghosts and zombies also, but I thought this was just a good example of physicists trying to pass philosophical arguments off as science, which is usually complained about when it's intelligent design but apparently just good science when it's skeptical. Well, it turns out a philosopher might have been able to point out how they're not being skeptical enough. A good skeptic wouldn't rule out the skeptical scenario I proposed without some more careful argumentation.

It's become fairly commonplace that someone will claim that the concept of inerrancy is a relatively recent development in the history of Christianity. Some trace it back to the 19th century and then claim that anyone beforehand held some weaker view of the authority of scripture. I'm not sure how this got started, but it's been popularized by people who are otherwise good scholars, such as George Marsden. I've had it on the backburner for at least several months now to put together a post on this issue, but I haven't managed to get the impetus to do it until a commenter on this post threw this canard at me. So here is what I consider to be absolutely clear statements from some historical figures long before the 19th century holding to views that seem to me to be pretty much the same view as the inerrancy of the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy, which has become a standard account of contemporary evangelicals mean by the term.

Now I've always thought the biblical authors would be shocked at any suggestion that there were errors in any genuinely divinely-inspired scripture. I think there are reasons for thinking this in the various parts of the canon. But Jesus and the authors of the epistles very clearly saw the psalms as authoritative in a way that they would base arguments on particular words. Clearly they took the psalms seriously.

I find it extremely hard to take Psalm 119 seriously without concluding that its author held (at least what at the time was considered) God’s word to be absolutely infallible. It doesn’t take reading very far into the psalm to see that. Verse 13 says that all the laws come from God (which the Torah itself repeatedly stresses). Throughout the psalm there are statements about how trustworthy God’s word and law are, e.g. v.86 “all your commands are trustworthy”, and v.139 says they are fully trustworthy. V.89 says it’s eternal and in the heavens as if some might have thought that it was a merely humanly authored set of documents that are temporary or not fully what God would want expressed, and v.91 explains the continuance of the laws in terms of everything serving God, including the laws, which were authored under his sovereign decree. In v.118, straying in any way from God’s decrees deserves God’s rejection, which amounts to saying that God rejects any deviation from them, i.e. seeing any of them as in error. According to v.151, all of them are true, and v.172 says all of them are righteous, with v.142 tying them together: “your righteousness is everlasting and your law is true”, which in Hebrew parallelism connects the truth of the laws to the righteousness of God. The contrast of v.163 between hating falsehood but loving God’s law amounts to saying that none of the laws are false. I don't know how to accept all of that while denying inerrancy.

I'm not sure how I missed this, but it's one of the most intelligent (not to mention one of the funniest) parodies I've ever seen of anything.

The commentary on the irresponsible documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus continues after its airing. See here for links to some of the pre-game discussion. Mark Goodacre liveblogged the Discovery Channel special, and Jim West also treats the documentary segment by segment.

Ben Witherington has a nice summary of the problems with it. Andreas Kostenberger has a similar evaluation, including a Q&A format about the documentary based on questions he'd asked ahead of time about what they'd be willing to include that might count against their case. Craig Evans responds , and Bruce Chilton comments here and here. Chris Weimer has a very clear presentation of difficulties in the argument and presentation of issues in the film.

Matt Jones gives a seminary student's perspective on the documentary and the Ted Koppel debate afterward. Other responses to the Koppel aftershow include Mark Goodacre's and Kevin Wilson's.

For more links, see Tyler Williams' roundup.

A lot of hay is being made about the forthcoming documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus. Apparently a tomb has been found that has some names from the family of Jesus, and some people are making some pretty strong claims about how improbable it could be that it's any other family. Oh, and Jesus' bones are supposed to be present, which (if true) means not only that Jesus not only died and wasn't resurrected (or at least that after his resurrection he died and didn't ascend) but that we now have access to his DNA! See the links from Sam's post for more on the popular-level discussion of this.

There's a lot being said by people who actually have some biblical scholarship and first-century Palestinian history credentials. Tyler Williams has a good roundup of what different people are saying. I'm particularly recommending what Darrell Bock has to say, since he was involved with the documentary, and he's not very impressed with their evidence. Ben Witherington has a more detailed response. Andreas Kostenberger's is also probably worth looking at. I love Kostenberger's first sentence. Michael Pahl has further thoughts, including on what relevance the James ossuary might have to this (basically none that helps their case and perhaps some that hurts it if the ossuary is authentic.

My first impression is that this is an old story that is finding new life because a big name (James Cameron) is associated with it, and it's a story that scholars have already looked into carefully and dismissed as not really showing very much. There are all sorts of assumptions being made for the probability claim that this is resting on, a number of which are probably unlikely assumptions (that we should expect Jesus' parents to be buried in Jerusalem to begin with, never mind in a location that very clearly is not where Jesus was buried after the crucifixion, that we should expect to find a tomb of Jesus' family with only one of the three brothers of his mentioned in the gospels but some other male we know nothing of named Matthew).

Update: Several more excellent responses have appeared. Richard Bauckham's is probably the best I've seen so far, and it covers some of the most important issues that some of the others have only really gestured at. For problems related to the DNA issue, see Chris Heard and Mark Goodacre. Mark also looks at the statistical claim. I was a little disappointed at some of the earlier discussions of this, including Ben Witherington's, which I thought had argued too much in several places, but Mark's post is much better and doesn't try to claim as much while still making the statistical claim look unwarranted because of its reliance on a number of possible but perhaps unlikely assumptions, which would then lower the probability considerably. The paragraph beginning "perhaps this is labouring the point" is actually one of the most helpful for seeing one of his main points in brief.

Gnu at Wildebeest's Wardrobe reflects on the relationship between philosophy and faith in the scriptures in Philosophy and Canon.

I don't agree with his take on Ecclesiastes, because I see the positive elements throughout the book and the narrator simply framing it and putting it all in perspective, without there being anything really false about the statements of Solomon within the main text.

I'd also change his (3) to "The OT explains how authentic divine predestination is compatible with authentic moral responsibility." That's what it doesn't do. I think it does implicitly affirm that the two are compatible by affirming them both, even in the same breath in some instances (e.g. in Isaiah 10).

But those are minor quibbles. His overall point is worth considering, particularly the way that an intelligent reading of the Bible leads to seeing the Christian's approach to the scriptures as challenging the views of the reader in the same kind of thoughtful way that philosophy at its best will do.

This is the the thirty-sixth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I continued a series within the series on philosophical theology, looking at the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. This post moves on to questions about divine goodness and revelation.

The final discussion from Ganssle’s book (see the first of the philosophical theology posts in this series) has to do with God’s goodness, but it is less a puzzle and more an argument for a thesis. Ganssle’s claim is that if God exists in anything like the traditional monotheistic view, i.e. the view that most of the philosophical arguments for and against God assume, then we might expect such a being to have communicated with us in a particular kind of way.

I've seen several reviews of Richard Dawkins' latest infantile rant book The God Delusion, most of them by his fellow atheists. Some of them have tried to say something positive but have gone on to distance themselves from some of his rhetoric, some of his arguments, and some of his views. Others have been more critical. Most of what I've seen hasn't been overwhelmingly positive. Even some of the more favorable ones register what seem to me the kind of criticism I find myself writing on first-year philosophy papers, not the sort of thing you should expect of a serious academic, even one so far outside his field as Dawkins is when it comes to religion.

For examples, see reviews by Jim Holt in the New York Times, philosopher Thomas Nagel in The New Republic (unfortunately subscription only), Marilynne Robinson in Harper's Magazine, Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books, Kenan Malik in the Telegraph, and Gregg Easterbrook at Beliefnet. While I'm at it, there's also my post in response to one of his points and Brandon's post criticizing him on several other issues.

Add to those a new one from Shannon Love, which I very much enjoyed reading, enough to want to post several excerpts that I thought were very much worth highlighting. [hat tip: Mark Olson]

This is the the thirty-second post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I looked at a vagueness problem that comes up in some of the questions people might ask as part of the evidential problem of evil. In this last post of the problem of evil, I respond to the last of five questions I originally asked in presenting the evidential problem of evil.

E. Even if these questions can all be answered somewhat satisfactorily, we do not have a complete explanation of evil. Isn’t that still evidence against God, if we can’t come up with a complete explanation of the amount of evil, the kinds of evil, the distribution of evil, the depths of evil, the length of time evil occurs, and so on? Explaining some evil helps resist seeing that evil as evidence against God, since it explains why God would allow that evil. But how can that remove all the evidence that the total sum of evil presents against God?

The case William Rowe presents is a deer who suffers and then dies in a forest fire, and no one ever even finds out about it. This seems to be completely meaningless. It does not help the deer. It does not help anyone else. Could God have a reason for such suffering?

This is the the thirty-first post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I continued looking at responses to a set of questions about particular kinds of evil or ways of evil that come up in the evidential problem of evil. This post contains a detour on one general problem with questions of this sort, before we return to the final question in the next post (which I had originally intended to treat here as well, but I thought each discussion was long enough to deserve separate posts).

Several of the questions I've been looking at have problems with vagueness. I don't mean that the questions are not stated clearly. I mean that they are talking about phenomena that admit of degrees, and the nature of vagueness in our ability to speak about such phenomena precisely will sometimes lead to problems when we ask moral questions about these matters. It will help to restate the general sort of problem, and then I'll identify where the difficulty can sometimes lie.

So it might well be that God has a plan for dealing with evil, and that plan requires things to take a form much more like what we have than would be the case with a shorter period of evil in the world, with much less evil, manifesting itself in much less serious ways. If so, then we have a potential explanation for something more like the kinds of evil in the ways that it does appear. But could God have achieved these purposes without allowing it to be quite so bad? Could the lessons of the Holocaust have been learned without so many people dying or suffering? Could the world have learned what it needs to learn with one fewer instance of genocide? Could the recent tsunami in Asia have achieved whatever good it was supposed to have achieved without quite so many people?

This is the the twenty-ninth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. The last post presented the evidential problem of evil, including five questions that deal with specific kinds or manifestations of evil thought by some to be evidence against the existence of God. This post begins a series of responses looking at answers to those five questions, starting with the first two.

A. The primary response to the logical problem of evil involves free actions of human beings. What about kinds of evil that aren’t the result of the free actions of human beings?

Two things have been suggested about what is sometimes called natural evil (i.e. evil not caused by human beings). Natural disasters, suffering in nature, and so on may not be the result of free human actions, but it’s possible that they are all the result of free beings. Alvin Plantinga has suggested that perhaps non-human, even non-physical, beings are responsible for all the evil that does not result from human choices. Some people might call these beings fallen angels or demons. Even if we do not consider that possibility likely, it remains a possibility that we cannot absolutely rule out. Should we believe that all such evil is caused by such beings? Probably not, but it remains enough of a possibility for theists that it means there is at least a possible explanation. If there is a possible alternative explanation for the existence of a kind of evil, then the claim that a good God would never be able to allow it seems wrong. There is at least one possible way that a good being would allow such things, and that is if other free creatures do it in a way that it would be wrong for God to stop them (thus mirroring the free human beings response to the logical problem of evil discussed in a previous post).

This is the the twenty-eighth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. The last post looked at responses to the logical problem of evil. This post moves on to the evidential problem of evil.

Most philosophers have conceded that the logical problem of evil does not disprove theism. That does not stop them from offering a different version of the problem of evil against the existence of God. William Rowe is probably the most prominent philosopher defending the problem of evil today. He calls this version of the argument the evidential problem of evil.

The evidential problem of evil begins with the existence of evil, but it takes a different strategy. It does not seek to disprove the existence of God by finding a contradiction between the existence of evil and the existence of God. It simply seeks to show that the existence of God is unlikely given the kinds of evil, the amount of evil, how long evil has gone on, and so on. The facts about evil are that it is a lot more than just human free choices. Even if human free will explains some evil, some evil seems not to be explained so easily that way. Even if there are good reasons for God to allow some evil, is all evil explained so easily? What about cases where a little less evil would have accomplished the same purposes? Do we need to have all the kinds of evil? Did it need to go on this long? Does it need to be as widespread as it is? Do the individual cases of evil need to be as bad as they are?

This is the the twenty-seventh post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. The last post looked at the logical problem of evil, which seeks to show a contradiction between the existence of God and the existence of evil. This post now moves to responses to that argument.

The logical problem of evil makes one assumption that theists might not want to give up on so easily. A perfectly good being would in general want to oppose evil, and couldn't an omnipotent and omniscient being could do anything to stop such evil? Actually, the answer isn't so clear. An omnipotent and omniscient being could do anything possible. There are limits to omnipotence. They are not physical limits. They are logical limits. An omnipotent being could not make contradictions true or make square circles. Those are not actions that could be done, and thus a being that can do anything possible could not do them. This is not a real limitation, since there is no such action to be done, and thus God could still be able to do any coherent action.

(One reason why it makes little sense to say that God can do anything is that God would then be able to make true contradictions. If so, then the contradiction between God and evil would not be a problem. God can make contradictions, and thus that contradiction would not be a difficulty for theism. So it is not in the best interests of the person presenting the problem of evil to require that sort of thing of an omnipotent being. For more on this issue, see here and the discussions also at the two cross-posted locations of the same post at Prosblogion and Philosophy et cetera.)

Now it may be true that you can put a coherent description to the following action: God stops the existence of all evil. But that is coherent only if you grant a few things. One way to stop the existence of all evil is not to create. Presumably creating other beings is a good thing, however. Is the world better off with created beings than it is without them? Is it a good action on God's part to create? Most people tend to say yes. But it also seems coherent to describe God as creating in such a way that no one ever does anything wrong. If God could create beings, and those beings could turn out to be perfectly moral beings 100% of the time, then there would be no evil (it would seem). Could an omnipotent being make such a situation the case?

This is the the twenty-sixth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. My last post finished up a three-post sub-series on the moral argument for the existence of God. I expect to look at the problem of evil for the next six posts. As one of the most common philosophical reasons not to believe in God (the other being no-evidence arguments), I think the problem of evil deserves twice as much time in class than any of the theistic arguments, and since these posts come from my class notes there's going to be a little more detail in these next posts than there was in some of the last few issues in the series.

[Note: The next several posts on the problem of evil are derived in part from discussions in (1) Gregory E. Ganssle, Thinking About God (2004) InterVarsity Press, (2) Daniel Howard-Snyder, "God, Evil, and Suffering" from Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray (1999) William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., pp.76-115, and (3) Peter van Inwagen, "The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil: A Theodicy" (1988) in God, Knowledge, and Mystery (1995) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ch.4, pp. 96-115.]

The problem of evil takes two forms, the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil. This post starts the Logical Problem of Evil. In a couple posts, we'll move on to the evidential problem.

The logical problem of evil begins with three traditional features most theists believe are true of God. The logical problem then proceeds with an argument that such a being would never allow any evil. Given that there is evil, there must be no such being. [The most important presentation of the logical problem of evil is J.L. Mackie's "Evil and Omnipotence", which was published in the journal Mind in 1955.]

Traditionally, God is held to be omnipotent (or all-powerful), omniscient (or all-knowing), and perfectly good. Since there are no limits to what an all-powerful and all-knowing being could do, such a being could prevent evil. Additionally, a perfectly good being would prevent evil as much as possible. Therefore, a being who has all three characteristics would prevent all evil. But there is evil. Therefore, there must be no such being.The logical problem of evil thus takes the existence of God and the existence of evil to lead to a contradiction. There is no way both could be true, according to the argument.

This is the the twenty-fifth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I looked at why some people think theism serves as the best non-naturalistic foundation for ethics. This post now looks at an objection to seeing God as the basis of morality.

In Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, he has the character of Socrates raise an objection to the idea that morality has something to do with the gods. If something is good just because the gods view it as good, the gods could command anything, and it would automatically be right. You don't have to be a polytheist for that consequence. How could God's mere choice be the basis of morality? Are good things good because God says they're good, or does God just declare them good based on seeing their goodness? If they are already good, then doesn't that mean God's choice didn't make them good?

This is the the twenty-fourth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I looked at why naturalistic foundations of ethics seem unsatisfying to many people. In this post we'll now turn to what non-naturalistic accounts of ethics can do and why some take theism to be the best account of the foundations of morality.

How does this become an argument for God? What can someone say about morality if moral truths go beyond the natural world? It doesn't immediate show that theism is true. A few possible accounts of morality remain:

A) Moral truths are beyond nature but have no explanation.
B) Moral truths are beyond nature but necessary. Their explanation lies within themselves.
C) God's nature explains moral truths.

Moral truths have no explanation:

The first view is that moral truths go beyond the natural order. Science can't tell us anything about them. However, this view doesn't have anything additional beyond nature to ground these truths. They're true on their own as abstract principles, part of the very fabric of the universe, but there isn't anything that makes them true. They're just true, although they didn't have to be true. Some see this view as having an advantage over theism because it's simpler and admits to fewer entities.

This is the the twenty-third post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I finished discussing the design arguments for the existence of God, and this post begins looking at moral arguments for God's existence.

[Note: These posts on the moral argument are derived in part from discussions in Gregory E. Ganssle, Thinking About God and C. Stephen Evans, "Moral Arguments" in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro.]

According to naturalism, the natural world is all there is. There are subatomic particles, waves, fields, etc. There's no room for God, souls, magical forces, angels, demons, a world-spirit that orders all creation, or anything like that. The natural world known to us through physics (and disciplines building on physics, e.g. chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, history, etc.) is all there is, and we shouldn't postulate the existence of anything else.

How can a naturalist account for morality? Consider what you learn from science. You won't find moral truths. It's not as if there are moral facts out there in the physical world together with facts about brain chemistry or nuclear physics. It's hard to find a place to fit morality in. Many theists think an account of morality that seeks to rely only on the natural world will be inadequate, superficial, or illusory. The deep kind of morality most of us believe in requires denying naturalism in some way.

Consider some particular naturalistic accounts of morality.

Greg Ganssle has produced the most fun and readable introduction to philosophy of religion I have ever encountered. His target audience runs from high school seniors to introductory college students, and I can say that I have enjoyed teaching an introductory philosophy course using this book. He presents the issues in a clear-headed way while drawing readers in with fun examples and humor.

After arguing for the value of thinking through philosophical questions in a reasonable way, Ganssle argues for open-mindedness in the sense of not being so sure of your views that you are not open to reason, but he also dismisses the idea that we must be neutral or that we must not make exclusive truth claims. Open-mindedness does not require having no views in those ways. I especially like seeing this in a book designed for younger students unfamiliar enough with philosophy to need some kind of way of heading off the simplistic kind of relativism that many students of philosophy find themselves stumbling over.

The main body of the work considers philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God. His presentation of the cosmological argument is the clearest I have ever seen, avoiding technical terminology when it is not needed but making the concepts as clear as can be done without such terms. His treatment of the design argument focuses on the fine-tuning argument after showing why very few are today convinced of biological design arguments, a choice perhaps reflecting a desire to stay out of intelligent design controversies in the political realm but nonetheless reflecting the philosophical consensus among believing philosophers today. His moral argument discussion helpfully begins by showing the difficulties in naturalistic accounts of morality, thus showing reasons why someone would turn to God as an explanation. I wish he had treated some naturalistic accounts of morality that are not relativist or eliminativist, and I really wished for a discussion of Euthyphro objections, but I do think his treatment of this argument is among the best I have read at this level.

This is the the twenty-second post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I looked at the fine-tuning design argument for the existence of God, along with an initial look at the many-worlds conjecture as a response to the argument. This post will spend some more time comparing that conjecture with the designer explanation for the fine-tuning of constants in physics.

Is this objection decisive? It's an alternative explanation, and we need just one alternative explanation to show that the argument original designer explanation isn't the only one. So we have two explanations to consider. Which should we prefer? Which is more reasonable, theism or all these myriads of cosmoi? Both explanations do seem to explain the surprising fact about the constants of physics, and they seem to account for this fact equally well, but how do you weigh the simplicity of each theory? It's not as if both agree on the core that everyone agrees on, and then one goes beyond that to postulate all this excess baggage. Both scenarios contain something that in their theory about ultimate reality beyond what a naturalist might want to say.

Theism, even the minimal sort necessary if you accept this argument, involves a designer or creator, which certainly goes beyond naturalism. Simplicity might nudge us to discount theism in favor of the many-worlds conjecture, since those worlds all seem to be additional parts of nature -- the kind of thing a naturalist already believes in. There are just lots more of them than the one we originally believed in. However, the many-worlds conjecture may require going beyond naturalism as well. Why do all the possible cosmoi (i.e. all the possible sets of constants) get generated? Is there some mechanism that generates these different universes, maybe all at once in different universes or maybe one after the other? What would this mechanism be? It's certainly not something you can just read off physics. There's no explanation offered why there would be such a mechanism. So it's not clear if this response really fits the naturalistic picture either. The many universes would be more of what we already believe in (though many, many more things), but the mechanism to get many universes is beyond the core theory. Yet theism involves a wholly different kind of thing, a designer, though just one thing and not very, very many. A theory can be simpler in terms of how many things it requires, and a theory could be simpler in terms of what kinds of things it requires. We have two theories. Each one is more complex than the other but in a different way.

This is the the twenty-first post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I presented two versions of the design argument for the existence of God, along with some standard responses. This post focuses in on a third version, the fine-tuning design argument.

The laws of physics contain some constants that govern how things in the universe behave. Physicists have no idea why these constants have the values they do, but they know that if they had been just slightly different then we couldn't exist. Stars couldn't form, never mind rational life. (Some might argue that rational life vastly different from anything we've seen might still be possible. That is hard to speculate about, but perhaps it's worth considering.)

Physicists all accept this fact about the laws, which leaves philosophers to figure out what to say. Some argue that, since the chances are so low of getting these exact constants, it's too much of a coincidence that the constants we happen to have are the ones that allow the possibility of rational life. This leads some to conclude that the universe must have been designed with the purpose of leading to at least the possibility of rational life.

This is the the twentieth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I finished discussing the cosmological argument for the existence of God. In this post, I'm moving on to the design argument for the existence of God.

[note: These design argument posts are based largely on discussions by Peter van Inwagen in his Metaphysics, 2nd ed. (2002) Westview Press and Gregory E. Ganssle, Thinking About God (2004) InterVarsity Press.]

The main idea behind the design argument is that something about nature is unexplainable unless a creator designed the universe for a specific purpose. Nature is hard to explain otherwise. As with finding a watch on a beach, it seems hard to conclude that it just occurred naturally on its own. It seems to be put together in such a way that calls out for an explanation.

Sometimes the argument is based on of the beauty of the world or the universe, and sometimes it picks out a specific fact. Can the fact that we find music beautiful be explained by science? Why do we happen to enjoy patterns of sound that just happen to be mathematically interesting? Some have looked at beauty in the world and wondered how anything can explain such wonder without appealing to a designer who wanted it to be beautiful. Others have questioned such arguments by saying the only reason we find it beautiful is because our preferences happen to match what's there.

The issue turns on what beauty is, what it is we perceive when we see beauty, if scientific theories can explain the nature of beauty, and many other issues. I'll focus on one particular fact that has led some to believe in a designer, but let's first look at the history of this general argument type when based on aother kinds of facts.

I've been reading through Isaiah, and I've just started the second half of the book (chs.40-66). Contemporary scholarship generally assumes these chapters are not written by the 8th century prophet Isaiah, despite the book's seeming attribution of the book to him. The main reason is that they seem to be about a time much later, the return from exile in the 6th century. Stylistic considerations are also cited, but this turns out to be a bit of ad hoc special pleading, since the same stylistic features are present throughout the first half of the book, and these scholars then pull themselves up on their own bootstraps by insisting that those earlier chapters must also be later additions. At some points this gets even as ridiculous as to minimize the contributions of Isaiah to only a very small component of the overall material even of chapters 1-35. It's taken rather to be the additions of this great school Isaiah must have founded, and thus it gets attached to his book because it's in the Isaianic prophetic school. All this makes me wonder what was so great about Isaiah to have merited this great school attributing all these great prophecies to him if what he actually did was only this tiny amount of material, none of it resembling in content most of the stuff that somehow ended up getting attributed to him.

Suffice it to say that I'm not even close to convinced that Isaiah did not write these chapters. He may not have delivered them as addresses, as he did the earlier chapters in the book, but the argument that he couldn't have written the second half of the book doesn't leave me very convinced, which leaves me taking the text's claim as the most important evidence available, and all the text does is introduce the book as the prophecy of Isaiah, with no new introduction of a new unit with other author information once you hit this second major section.

As I was reading chapter 42 this morning, something occurred to me that I hadn't thought of before.

I've been teaching an introductory philosophy course this semester with a new text for my God unit, Thinking About God by Greg Ganssle. It's designed to be usable for high school or introductory college/university courses, and it's just about the lowest level of detail that I would want to use for this course. I'm supplementing it some with other readings also, but it's nice to spend a lot of time just in one book after using lots of scattered readings in past versions of the course.

One thing that I found really interesting was in the section on the logical problem of evil. The logical problem of evil presents three traditional attributes of God (omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness) and then seeks to derive a contradiction if you admit to the existence of evil (which pretty much all traditional theists will do, and thus it's a problem even if the person presenting the problem doesn't happen to believe in evil, because the theist does, and it's supposed to be a contradiction for theism). Now it so happens that hardly any philosopher today accepts the logical problem of evil as a good argument, for several reasons, but in the process of explaining why Ganssle hits on an interesting issue that I hadn't thought of before. One way some people have resisted theists' attempts to respond to the problem of evil might actually help the theist in surprising ways.

About a month ago, I was going to blog about Ben Witherington's Justification by Doubt, but I got distracted, forgot, and it got off the first screen of my blogging file. I remembered it last night as I was going to bed and thought I should post a link to it before I forget again. Witherington points out a very strange standard in mainstream biblical scholarship. It's as if the word 'critical' has become a synonym for the word 'scholarly', when calling something critical actually amounts to speaking of a person or work's willingness to doubt positive claims. Somehow it's become a virtue not to believe anything you see but to think that some more complex conspiracy theory about the text underlies it rather than what might be seen as a more straightforward reading of the only information we have, which is what the text itself says.

Then this skeptical approach is called objective, as if it's less biased to assume from the outset that someone is misreporting the information but without any evidence that there's any deception. I have to agree that much of biblical scholarship is like this, and I cannot see how this constitutes critical thinking in the way that philosophers encourage us to submit our views and arguments to careful scrutiny. It seems to me that the push toward doubt is at least an attitude and plausibly a view, and there ought to be an argument for doing so if it means moving away from what the key evidence we have (the text itself) actually says. Such arguments should themselves be submitted to careful scrutiny, i.e. critical thinking, and they should not simply be presumed. Maybe there are good arguments, and if so maybe we should accept them, but this equation of doubt and skepticism with critical thinking and careful scrutiny seems to me to be a thoroughly uncritical acceptance of a bias.

One of the bigger difficulties of an old-earth view of the early chapters of Genesis is how to deal with what seems to to be the biblical teaching that death came into the world through sin, since old-earth views usually involve lots of animals dying, eating each other, and even extinction of species long before humans even existed, never mind sinned. David Heddle has some very interesting thoughts on what old-earthers can say about death, some of them entirely new to me.

The most important suggestion is perhaps that death was already around before the human fall because of the earlier angelic fall, but this was not death for humans. That's what made Eden special. What separates Eden from the rest of the world on the young-earth view? If there's no good answer to that (and there are some answers in the comments, but nothing as huge as death), then this problem, originally against old-earth views, one of the few that I consider serious enough to worry about) actually favors old-earth views on one score rather than undermining them.

Henry Imler posts some arguments from N.T. Wright in favor of the historicity of the virgin birth accounts. I don't think I've seen these arguments before. He lists three. The first is more an argument against arguments against the virginal conception. The other two actually support the historicity of the virgin birth passages in Matthew and Luke, and those are what caught my interest:

2. Isaiah 7 was never part of any pre-Christian Jewish view of the Messiah being born of someone who was still a virgin by the time of the conception. Everyone who read the passage took it in the way that an ordinary person would. It says that a virgin would engage in sexual relations, conceive, and then give birth. In its immediate context about the children whose names are mentioned in that very passage, it had to mean exactly that. So no one thought of this as a messianic passage about someone who would conceive and then give birth, all while remaining a virgin. But what that means is that it's extremely unlikely that someone would concoct this legend about Jesus being born of a virgin to fit a prophecy that no one interpreted that way. When people invent circumstances to fit a prophecy, they don't usually recast an already existing prophecy in a way that no one interpreted it. It would be one thing to look back on Isaiah 7 if a virginal conception happened. It would be quite another thing to interpret it anew without any such an event. Why insist on taking a passage in a way no one had before if it's not to explain an event that makes much more sense with the newfangled interpretation?

2. Matthew and Luke record two very different sets of traditions about the birth of Jesus. If they were importing a pagan myth because of some theological value, it would be surprising to find no theological hay made of it in either of the two very different literary traditions. But yet that's what we have. Even if the authors of the two accounts didn't think it was a pagan importation but believed it, it would be strange that this was done earlier for theological purposes and yet neither account would actually include such reasons or any sign that there ever were any. What would be more likely is that they didn't believe it because of its theological significance but believed it simply because it had its basis in actual events.

This is part three of what I was expecting to be a four-part review of Mary Kassian's The Feminist Mistake. I have decided to post what I've written of part three and then not continue, primarily because I have not been reading any more of this book for quite some time, and I need to limit my reading list down to something much more manageable given that I would like to finish my dissertation by the end of next summer. So I've decided not to finish this book in the foreseeable future. Here, then, is the last part of my series of reviews on this book, covering a few chapters into the third section.

Uncertainty about what the original autographs said is no argument against inerrantism about what the original autographs said, not just because whether the original has errors is independent of whether we know what the original said. Kenny Pearce offers some Bayesian probabilistic reasons for concluding that a doctrine of inerrancy might still make a difference epistemically about particularly propositions despite uncertainty about whether the original autographs teach those propositions. He applies this to doctrinal issues that inerrantists who accept some principle of sola scriptura might nevertheless dispute, and then he applies it to science and evolution. I don't really know any Bayesian probability, so I can't really evaluate this in those terms, but what he's saying seems right to me in general.

I've cross-posted this at Prosblogion, so you might want to check the comments there to see if it generates a good, higher-end philosophical discussion.

A friend of mine works as the Baptist Campus Minister at my university. He occasionally takes part in interfaith dialogues, and he tells me about his interactions from time to time. One such instance struck me as being apologetically significant and worth blogging about (with his permission). The conversation started out with what the Qur'an says about Jesus, and it ended up moving to what the Bible says about Muhammad. You might be wondering what the Bible could possibly say about Muhammad, since he was around long afterward, but you can't rule something like that out if you're open to predictive prophecy. Why couldn't a divine revelation have something to say about someone who hasn't come around yet? Christians believe the Hebrews scriptures point to Jesus, after all. It doesn't do to insist on that when you like it and then rule it out when you don't like it.

But the particular example many Muslims give of Jesus in the Bible makes no sense. They say that Deuteronomy 18's future prophet like Moses is Muhammad. Many Christians take this prophet to be Jesus. The first-century Christians certainly did, including the book of Acts. But there's one reason even within Deuteronomy that makes it very unlikely that this passage could be referring to Muhammad. Deuteronomy 18 speaks of this prophet as "one of your brothers". That means the prophet like Moses will be Jewish.

Muslim apologists take "one of your brothers" to mean that the prophet will come out of an ethnic group that is a brother group to the people of Israel. Since they take Arabs to be descended from Ishmael, they can happily say that Muhammad is thus one of the brothers of Israel. There's only one problem with this. My friend noticed this immediately, because the day before he'd just been reading the previous chapter, Deuteronomy 17. That chapter uses the same Hebrew expression for "one of your brothers" in its requirements for kingship. It isn't saying that the king ought to come not from Israel itself but from one of its brother peoples. The requirement simply restricts the kingship to Israelites. So why should we think the exact same expression one chapter later would mean something very different? The prophet would come out of Israel, not some related people group.

Rebecca Stark looks at the expression 'author of sin', finding that many who use it don't really have a clear idea what they mean, and once they clarify it what they're saying may not follow. I think she's expressing thoughts I've had for a long time but haven't really been able to express well. One line struck me:

Somehow, for those who argue that it's the purposeful nature of God's permission of sin that makes him the author of sin, a supreme being who permits sin for no reason is better than one who permits it for a reason. When it comes to the permission of sin, in their view, arbitrary is better than purposeful.

This is something that has always seemed strange to me about certain Arminian/libertarian responses to the problem of evil (especially in their open theistic form but sometimes even in more standard libertarian views that don't necessarily imply open theism, e.g. some of Peter van Inwagen's work). I can't understand how having no reason for something is supposed to be better than having a really good reason for doing or allowing it. But this is commonly trotted out as a better defense of how God would allow evil than the traditional view that God really does have good reasons for allowing evil

Joe Carter seems to have gotten a little weary of people who constantly accuse ID defenders of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy every time they try to point out a straw man argument. So he turns it against some of the ID opposition.

I do think this gets to a real inconsistency of labeling among a certain kind of ID opponent. It's the No True Scotsman fallacy when ID proponents want to call an anti-ID argument a straw man. That's supposed to stop debate about what most ID arguments actually involve and therefore allow the dysphemistic labeling the anti-ID crowd wants to use. But then it's not the No True Scotsman fallacy when someone offers a parochial and positivistic account of what can fall under the heading of scientific reasoning, tailor-made to rule out anything remotely like ID.

It's noteworthy that such definitions also rule out any other kinds of scientific reasoning that only logical positivism would count as not science (because it's metaphysics, a dirty word for positivists) but most scientists would easily call science. See here and here for more on that. I think that's an inconsistency in science about what counts as scientific reasoning. But the more poignant issue here is that those who insist that there's no true Christianity becaue of different conceptions of Christianity and no true intelligent design argument because there are different versions of ID will then insist that there are those who occupy the scientific profession but aren't true scientists. That's an inconsistency on the popular level of those who criticize ID proponents' defenses for doing something they themselves regularly do. That hadn't occurred to me until I read Joe's post, but I think he's right.

Some people argue that contemporary science can't be right about how old the earth or the universe is, because an omnipotent being wouldn't need to take that long to make a universe. Thus the young earth must be true. Others argue from the opposite end that intelligent design arguments are inconsistent with an omnipotent being, because they involve God inputting information over a long process. (See, for example, SteveF's July 25 comment at 5:47 pm in this comment thread on this post.) I don't think this sort of argument works in either case.

If the designer is God, then God should be able to do something over a longer time or a shorter time. Young earth creationists are right that God could have created everything instantly. But the argument undermines the young earth view as much as any other, unless the young earth view holds God to have created everything instantly. It doesn't hold that but takes the period of creation to be six days. Why would God need six whole days to create everything? God could have created instantly. If it's implausible for God to do something over thousands or millions of years (because God could do it in a shorter time), then it's implausible for God to do it in six days (because God could do it in a shorter time). The mere possibility that God could have done it over a shorter time does not mean that God would have done so. A divine being with omnipotence could choose to work over a very long time or a very short time, and neither should seem more or less likely without an understanding of the purposes such a being might have for working over a longer or shorter time.

The hypothesis that there is a designer, particularly if one of the possibilities is that the designer is omnipotent, does not make it more or less likely that the designer worked over a long or short time. The length of time is not evidence against God. What's interesting is that the reverse is not true. Length of time issues may count as evidence against naturalistic explanations, precisely because they do not involve beings who can do anything (and thus can work instantly or over a longer time).

Mark Roberts gives an argument that hadn't occurred to me. Some people doubt the traditional authorship of the gospels. One thing that's strange about that view is that we have no explanation of why someone would choose the minor characters of John Mark and Luke, even if they did have some connection with Peter and Paul. Wouldn't it make more sense to choose someone who had actually met Jesus to serve as the invented author of gospels that are pretty much accounts of Jesus' life? If you're going to be inventing the authorship of the book we now call Mark, and you're going to say that the author who wrote it was Mark, who got his information from Peter, why not just say that it came from Peter? There was no Gospel of Peter at the time, so it wasn't as if the name was taken? Even if it made sense to choose a companion of someone who knew Jesus, it would be silly to choose a companion of someone who as far as we know didn't. That makes the choice of Luke extremely strange.

What Mark then goes on to argue is that this makes it far more likely than otherwise that the attributions to Matthew and John are accurate. Even if it seems really silly to question the tradition on Mark and Luke, it doesn't automatically follow that the tradition on Matthew and John is inaccurate. But it is the same tradition. These listings appear together generally, all around the same time, and we shouldn't expect it to be right on two of the four gospels but drastically wrong on the other two. That does increase the plausibility factor for Matthew and John a little.

Now I don't think much stands of falls on this issue. The only gospel of the four that makes any claim relevant to its authorship is John, and that's not exactly unambiguous (though I do think the most plausible expanation is that John is its author). But if we found out for sure that all four gospels were written by people we've never heard of, it wouldn't threaten conservative views on scripture's authority. It's just that this is a real difficulty for those who want to suspect that the tradition is unreliable. This is at least one reason for thinking of it as more reliable than many scholars, even some evangelicals, are willing to admit.

David Heddle has a brief post that nonetheless deals with a variety of issues related to the possibility of life on Mars and how a Christian should think about that. I really like David's general approach to this sort of thing.

In the Torah, Aaron is the first high priest of the Levitical order of priests. He had four sons: Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar. The first two died in Leviticus 10, leaving Eleazar as the eldest inheritor of the high priestly line. We see in Joshua that Eleazar's son Phinehas had become the high priest by the time of the conquering of the land. Then we lose any record of what was going on with tabernacle worship until we get to Samuel, where there seems to be a fixed temple structure built up around the tabernacle implements of worship from the end of Exodus. Perhaps the most surprising feature of the priestly situation at the beginning of the book of Samuel is that the high priest Eli was not descended from Eleazar but his younger brother Ithamar. Where are the descendants of Eleazar, then? What happened after Phinehas?

This surprising fact in the Samuel history has led a number of scholars to propose a skeptical reconstruction of what really happened. On this view, the high priestly family has always been descended from Ithamar, and Eli's family in Samuel was the original high priestly family. With David we get the insertion of a priest named Zadok alongside the final remaining Elide priest Abiathar/Ahimilech. I Chronicles 24 tells us that Zadok is the head of the the Eleazar clan of priests, which Ahimelech (perhaps the same man called Abiathar in Samuel, perhaps his son) was head of the Ithamar clan of priests. The revisionist theory takes Zadok to be a complete outsider from the conquered Jebusite city of Jerusalem. David allowed him to continue his priestly duties, casting him as a priest under the order of Melchizedek, the original priest-king of Salem (which became Jerusalem) from Genesis 14. This allowed David to assert his legitimacy to be king in the Jebusite city, and then Chronicles and the other places that list him as a descendant of Eleazar are just reworking the tradition to make him fit the Israelite origin story, casting Zadok as a son of an older brother of the ancestor of the Elide priests. Thus no sign was left of the Jebusite origin of Zadok.

Great D.A. Carson quote:

When I was a boy of about nine or ten, my father called me over to listen to him reading an editorial or a letter to the editor (I cannot remember which) in The Montreal Star, one of the leading papers in eastern Canada at the time. The writer was inveighing against all those stupid Christians who believe the Bible is the Word of God, when it speaks so ignorantly of the sun "rising" in the east: any schoolboy knows that the sun does not rise, but that the earth rotates on its axis. My father asked me what I thought of the argument. I looked at him rather nonplused. He grinned, and calmly turned to the front page of the paper, and drew my attention to the line, "Sunrise: 6:36 am."

[The formatting and spelling may be affected by the process of scanning the article, as is often the case at this site, so I wouldn't assume he really misspelled 'nonplussed' or that he didn't italicize the name of the newspaper.]

The book review this comes from starts here. It's very long. The particular location of this quote is on this page.

I can't count the number of times I've heard that Pascal quote about there being a God-shaped vacuum in our hearts. A friend once asked me where Pascal said it, and I said I didn't know. I'd never really spent any time reading Pascal. He assured that it was somewhere in the Pensees, but he wanted to know exactly where. I couldn't really help him. The problem is that no one could help him. Pascal never said any such thing. Douglas Groothuis provides a quote that does say something in the remote ballpark:

What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself. [Pascal, Pensees #425]

Whenever anyone gives you a quote without providing a reference, assume the quote has been misattributed. If the reference includes a book but nothing more specific, always assume the quote has been misattributed before spreading on what might be completely false. People who can't cite page numbers (or section locations for older works) probably shouldn't be trusted. It's likely that, as in this case, the reality is much better than the legend. What Pascal really said is much more eloquent than what the urban legend says he said.

I've got one more post coming out of the conversation at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

One common complaint I hear about design arguments that involve laws at the outset of the universe being designed is that they simultaneously make two things true. Design arguments generally take some surprising fact in nature, and then they appeal to a designer to explain why the surprising fact makes more sense than it would otherwise. The fine-tuning argument, for instance, takes the extremely small range of cosmological constants that would allow rational life as a reason for thinking there must have been a designer who intended rational life to be possibile and formed the laws accordingly.

The objection then comes in. The anti-ID move is to say that there's a contradiction between two things. (1) The natural laws are such that the origin of rational life is unlikely (otherwise there would be no reason to appeal to a designer). (2) The natural laws are such that the origin of rational life is highly likely (otherwise there designer hypothesis has done no work, and we're right back where we started).

This argument is a classic equivocation. It says something that is true when you use your terms in one sense, and then it considers something else alongside it that is true if you use your terms in a different sense. When it puts them together, it gets a false conclusion because it doesn't account for the fact that these two things are not true in the same sense and thus can't combine in this way. A classic example of equivocation is saying (1) you put your money in the bank and (2) that the flooding in the river is overflowing all the banks, concluding (3) you better take your money out of the bank for fear that it will get waterlogged. It isn't the financial institutions that are being covered with water, and that's where your money is.

Chris Tessone has a nice post examining and evaluating the content of the Gospel of Judas. He isn't just pointing out where this book differs from orthodox Christian belief. He focuses in on several ethical issues where the Gospel of Judas is clearly inferior to the canonical gospels. His conclusion: like other gnostic writings, it's misogynistic, anti-body, exclusionary, and arrogant, not to mention anti-semitic. In some ways it's much worse than the more moderately gnostic Gospel of Thomas (though that one does have Jesus telling women that they should seek to become men). I asked some pointed questions of some top bibliobloggers to this kind of analysis, and no one probed to this level, so I was glad to see this.

In response to the claim that ID is just creationism (a slippery enough term as it is that can range from mere theism all the way to those who think Genesis 1 is a science textbook), I've been saying that ID is perfectly consistent with a closed universe of evolution, as long as the natural causes involved are not merely natural causes but are purposive, intelligent causes, and as long as those causes are detectable as intelligent causes. Most theistic evolutionists do not say that and therefore do not accept ID arguments. But someone who does should be welcome under the ID umbrella.

I looked at William Dembski's statements on this in my last post on the subject. I now turn to Phillip Johnson. Since this interview is one common place anti-ID folk have pointed to in order to argue that Johnson holds the opposite view, I've decided to use that as my source. Here is the first major quote relevant to this issue:

Theistic evolution is the same thing as atheistic evolution with a certain amount of God-talk. They don’t see any merit whatsoever in alleging that God left us some fingerprints on the evidence.

I think what's often going on is that ID opponents see him distancing himself from theistic evolution, and they then wrongly conclude that he's ruling out the sort of view with theistic evolution and signs of intelligent design together. But look closely about what he says about theistic evolution. He's not complaining about the view that everything was designed in such a way that evolution would happen but would reveal the signs of intelligent design. He's talking about the view that everything happened the way atheistic evolutionists say it did, i.e. God's fingerprints aren't on creation in order to have something to base an ID argument on. So he's not disagreeing with theistic evolution per se. He's disagreeing with theistic evolution as it's normally held. The usual theistic evolutionist does have a view that contradicts ID. The theistic evolutionist who insists that God left fingerprints that we can detect and then use as a basis for an ID argument is, of course, not inconsistent with ID, because it's the presence of those footprints that's all that the ID argument insists on.

Ed Brayton at Dispatches From the Culture Wars has been claiming that intelligent design is incompatible with the following sort of view:

God created the universe, having designed it from the outset to produce the kind of particular results God wanted, and there are signs of that creation, but it didn't involve intervention at a later time. Instead, it resulted from the natural laws God set up at the beginning that directed the universe toward the sort of thing that ID arguments are now concluding to be signs of God's design.

This was in response to my claim that ID arguments are consistent with this sort of view. The main thrust of his argument has been to affirm my claim that design arguments can result in such a view but to deny that the people who came up with the term 'intelligent design' wouldn't tolerate this. He says they consistently and repeatedly disallow this sort of view, saying that it wouldn't allow the kind of intelligent design arguments that they are giving. He says Howard Van Till holds exactly the view I was sketching, and they don't count Van Till among the ID people because of his holding this view. I think their statements about him are easily explained in terms of other things they disagree with him about, and Macht has done a good job explaining why in the comments on the post. But I think a positive case can be made that they deliberately do include the sort of view that Ed says Van Till holds. I decided to get out Mere Creation to see what William Dembski, one of the founders of the ID movement, had to say in his introduction to intelligent design arguments. What follows is an adaptation of a comment in the aforementioned discussion.

One of the most common arguments against intelligent design seems to me to confuse motivation with theoretical basis. In defense of the charge that ID is religious creationism, many opponents of ID point out that most people who support ID believe in a creator God for religious reasons. This happens to be true. Actually, they usually say that all who support ID believe in a creator God for religious reasons, and that's false. Antony Flew supports cosmological ID, and he isn't religious at all. There's a whole blog of ID proponents who are not advocating theism (I believe it's Telic Thoughts, but I couldn't find their statement on this if so). But it is true that most ID supporters are religious theists of some sort.

Here is the important distinction that those who give this argument cannot, or in some cases simply refuse to, see. Members of the Discovery Institute offer arguments for the existence of God. These are classic philosophical arguments that go back at least as far as Plato, who had no contact with Christian (Christianity didn't exist) or Jewish (no Jews were anywhere near him) monotheism. These arguments conclude that it seems likely that there must have been some designer for whatever particular phenomenon the argument is concerned with, e.g. the origin of the cell, the origin of some particular organ, the cosmological constants of the universe, etc. The Discovery Institute also happens to believe the designer that the argument's conclusion speaks of is the Christian God. They even admit that they have religious motives for wanting people to accept the argument. But the fallacy anti-ID people regularly engage in is to take that motivation to be the basis of the argument. It's simply not, and that kind of confusion would lead an introductory philosophy student to fail a critical thinking assignment.

Ben Witherington now has two more Judas posts. He discusses yesterday's NPR discussion of the Gospel of Judas, which I missed and now will have to try to listen to from their website when I get the chance. Several issues come up in the post. I think the two most notable points are his further discussion of whether this Coptic text had a Greek antecedent and his claim about the moral content of this work. He particularly frowns on its portrayal of Jews. I left a comment wondering what he meant. Is the Gospel of Judas is anti-semitic in a way that the canonical gospels are not? I doubt he accepts the claims of many scholars that the internal criticism of Jesus and his followers of their fellow Jews counts as anti-semitism. Is just a further development in the direction that isn't really anti-semitism but that scholars have pretended is anti-semitism, or is it really anti-semitic in a way that the canonical gospels aren't? I'd be reluctant to consider it anti-semitic simply because it says some things that Jews didn't agree with, but that's all he mentions. If it can be established that the motivation was hatred of Jews, then I could see it, but simply having a different cosmology from the Hebrew one doesn't seem to me in itself to be anti-semitic. I'm still awaiting his response on this.

Witherington also has a discussion of what the canonical gospels say about Judas. I'm a little more confident that Judas never repented than he is (I think the suicide is a pretty good sign that he didn't), but he doesn't think we have any reason to think Judas did repent. What he does think is clear is that Judas did wrong in betraying Jesus and that this was really just a continuation of his character all along.

Andreas Kostenberger also posts on this. I don't think he's saying much that wasn't in any of the other various things I've linked to except one point that I partially disagree with. The Gospel of Judas is bad for several reasons, one of which is that viewpoint it expresses. Gnosticism treats the body as unimportant and thus devalues one aspect of how God created us. It's not really a gospel, because it's message isn't good news but in fact bad news. I agree. But he adds one further thing that makes me hesitate. He says the Gospel of Judas is morally dangerous because it promotes betrayal as good. I don't think it's exactly fair to say that the Gospel of Judas portrays betrayal as virtuous. What it does is say that Judas didn't betray Jesus but was carrying out his instructions. In effect, it exonerates someone who in reality was a traitor by saying something false about what he did. But it doesn't take the moral stance that betrayal is virtuous. I think the author would have agreed that Judas would have been doing wrong if he had betrayed Jesus. But the book doesn't portray Judas as having done that.

I've been watching National Geographic's special on the Gospel of Judas (see here for my first post with links to all sorts of information on this work). I'm trying to catalogue all the unscholarly things they've been saying. I think I missed at least one, but there's plenty here to criticize.

First of all, they selected mostly scholars known for Gnostic sympathies or more radical reconstructions of the history of the development of Christianity. Many of these were not mainstream scholars but fringe elements like Bart Ehrman (see the links here for evaluation of his latest popular work) or Elaine Pagels (best known for minority views about Gnosticism that most scholars reject). Craig Evans was the one voice of reason in the whole production, and it felt to me as if they were excerpting him most of the time to fit with what they wanted to get across, putting his rejection of any historical value in this work regarding the actual Judas immediately before a fallacious argument of Elaine Pagels that ignores much historical information about the differences between what we know about the gospels and what we know about this work (see 6 below). My conclusion is that the people who put this together absolutely failed in terms of their journalistic integrity. But what else is new? That usually happens in these specials. There was much that I found enjoyable and interesting in this special, but I'm disgusted enough with the negatives that I'll have to refer you to Mark Goodacre for the positive elements.

On to the specific criticisms:

I wish I had the time to comment on the media failure about the Gospel of Judas, but enough people have already done so that I can just link to them.

David Kopel at The Volokh Conspiracy has The Judas Gospel, which mainly refutes the ridiculous sorts of claims being made by most of the major media outlets who have been suggesting that anything in the Gospel of Judas has some bearing on scholarship on the historical Judas and will force everyone to reevaluate this man.

Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping has Judas Gospel a Yawner at Winds of Change (he also has it at his personal blog, but he's got comments and trackbacks at Winds of Change), which fills in more details on the apostolic origins of the NT canon and the rejection of non-apostolic works like the Gospel of Judas.

Ben Witherington has The Gospel of Judas et. al. -- Part One, which has some inside information about the process that has led to the publication of this new English translation of the Coptic translation that scholars we have had for years but has been unreadable by most NT scholars who know no Coptic (and the original Greek, if there ever was one, has not been found). He says he intends to follow up on this more.

Mark Roberts focuses more on the actual content of the Gospel of Judas in Excursus: The Gospel of Judas -- A Special Report, in an extended aside in the midst of a series evaluating the claims made by characters in The Da Vinci Code. It's not wholly off-topic, since both works raise issues related to Gnosticism, but this post is a stand-alone treatment of the Judas "gospel".

Joe Carter delineates several interpretations of "God of the gaps" and sorts through which one are legitimate interpretations of ID claims, which ones are theologically tolerable for Christian theists, and which ones are scientifically acceptable. It turns out to be more complicated than people usually take it to be. I have nothing to add. This is the kind of post I like to write myself.

I've been thinking through the ethics of deceit with respect to April Fools jokes and other kinds of false statements that may or may not be considered lying. The Jill Carroll case has raised an important further sort of case that I hadn't been thinking about. What about when someone says something they don't believe to be true under duress? For background on the details of her case and her deliberate statements (under threat) of things she didn't agree with, see the Moderate Voice's excellent roundup. There seem to me to be at least three issues that may have a moral bearing on how we should evaluate such false statements, and I think the end result is much more messy than we would generally like moral issues to be.

In a discussion I was in recently, someone made the common claim that it would be morally abominable for God to have the ability to save all people but only in fact save some. If God has a plan of providence, as Christianity traditionally has said, and that plan includes exactly what will happen down to the level of what sparrows will eat on any given day (as Jesus seems to me to state in the sermon on the mount), what evil kings will do in their pride in order to punish God's people (as the prophets seem to me to state), and which people will be counted among those who believe (as the book of Acts seems to me to state), then if it also includes which people won't believe Christian thinks God is morally abominable, whether that leads to an eternal hell or just annihilation. The claim is something like that, anyway.

There's a lot that could be said about this claim, and I don't have the time to treat it comprehensively, but I find the move to be interesting given another common philosophical claim that I've seen made against the most common Christian view historically on the atonement, i.e. penal substitution. The claim is often made that it would be wrong for God to use Jesus, an innocent, to take the sins of humanity, because then we're not really being atoned for. It's true that someone is dying for our sins, but it's not justice according to this objection, because no one is getting what they deserve. Jesus is wrongly killed, and we're unjustly not getting what we deserve. How could a just God allow that?

What's interesting about these two objections to what I consider to be standard Christian views is that they can't both be right. If it's wrong to allow Jesus to die for people and thus have the people not get what they deserve, then it can't be wrong to allow people to go to hell when they could be saved. If it's wrong to allow people to go to hell when they can be saved, then it can't be wrong to allow Jesus to die in the place of sinners who would otherwise deserve to suffer eternally in hell. Those who find themselves attracted to both objections face a serious inconsistency. I can't even imagine how the same motivational structure could produce both objections unless they stem just from the motivation just to undermine Christianity at whatever cost, even if it's the cost of inconsistency.

Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus : The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why has become quite a publishing success since it came out in November. Those who know biblical studies will recognize it as mostly a good popularization of standard textual criticism (comparing the various manuscripts of biblical books to try to reconstruct with the text originally said). Those who don't know the subject will take it as a strong argument against the integrity of the Bible, but any familiarity with text criticism will demolish that impression rather quickly. Ehrman's conclusions on such matter simply don't follow from his arguments. I've not looked too much at the book itself, but I've read several reviews over the last few weeks:

Craig Blomberg in Denver Journal
Daniel Wallace at bible.org
Ben Witherington at his blog (which includes Wallace's comments with his own thoughts surrounding it)

All three scholars conclude that Ehrman's presentation of the actual data is excellent as an introduction at the popular level to a difficult field but that he paints his conclusions to suggest something way beyond what the data show. For instance, he handpicks the very worst cases of textual corruption and then acts as if those are fairly representative, when in reality hardly anything is on that level. I could go on, but I'd rather you just read what the biblical scholars say.

My fellow Prosblogion contributor Patrick Taylor has posted some worthwhile thoughts on the California school that canceled a philosophy class on intelligent design. He's worried that this sort of reasoning would prevent good philosophy from being done. I've thought of the parallel here too. This is the sort of thing that regularly gets taught in philosophy classes, and the kind of philosophy that this includes should be a regular part of high school curricula. I think it's immoral that high schools can graduate students who have never heard of Plato, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, or Descartes, never mind engaged with some of their arguments. It ranks up there with not even giving Latin as an option to students and actually requiring them to take an actively-spoken foreign language (my main reason for boycotting my local high school, even if it meant not being able to run track, which I had really wanted to do, but tolerating immorality was worse than not running track). High school students ought to be required to take ethics and critical thinking, with an option to take a more comprehensive history of philosophy or topics in philosophy course. I don't expect this ever to happen, but this is a fallen world after all. People do immoral things.

Meanwhile, David Heddle points out a Derbyshire post that somehow is actually friendly to ID. What I found especially interesting in David's post is his response to a common objection against the fine-tuning ID argument. The objection is that the cosmological constants appear fine-tuned, but that's because some simply theory that unifies all physics explains those constants, a theory of the aesthetically pleasing sort that many scientists have been hoping will eventually be shown true. David points out that such a theory would actually support ID. It's true that a universe like that would explain why the cosmological constants are what they are, but it just pushes the question back. Why would the universe be such that an amazingly pretty physical theory is correct? It's a good thing I still haven't done my post on fine-tuning arguments in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series, because now I can include that response.

I'm not sure I've ever blogged about the so-called Emergent Church, mostly because I think the whole movement is so radically confused that I never wanted to bother to figure out where to start in pointing out all the philosophical and historical errors that serve as its foundation. But Gnu at Wildebeest's Wardrobe has done that work now in a way that I'm in complete agreement with. His post on this, to my mind, is the defininitive analysis of the Emergent Church. What I'm going to say here doesn't add anything to Gnu's post, but I think I can say the main points more succinctly and without as much technical jargon.

For those unfamiliar with this movement, the Emergent Church (a term some of them have used, but sometimes they prefer the Emergent Conversation) is a movement that had its origins within evangelicalism and has rejected key features of what it sees as modernism within evangelicalism, seeing itself as an emerging generation of those who have accepted that we're now in a postmodern generation and have to conceive of the mission and methods of the church differently in order to capture the good of this overwhelming change in cultural perspective. If you take some of their language seriously, it sounds as if they've left the church and formed something else, something thoroughly postmodernist, rejecting truth or at least any possibility of knowing the truth. If you pay more attention to those who moderate their rhetoric, it sounds as if their claims aren't nearly as strong. So there are these two ways of reading them, and the question is open (as far as I'm concerned) which of them is correct. What I think Gnu has valuably accomplished is figuring out how to categorize these two possibilities and being able to distinguish what follows if each is true.

This is the the nineteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. In the last post, I presented the cosmological argument for the existence of God. In this post, I'll address what I consider the two best objections to the argument before offering some concluding thoughts.

First, we might think that the universe itself is self-existent. Then the conclusion of the argument is true, but it doesn't give us anything like the traditional theistic God. Suppose that is right. This commits us to a certain view about the universe, namely that it is the sort of thing that couldn't fail to exist. It means it is false to say that there might not have been a universe. This is certainly not a conclusive argument, but many philosophers want to avoid this conclusion.

Suppose you are comfortable with that conclusion. Do we really have an explanation for why there are any dependent things at all? Being self-existent simply because your parts are all explained still doesn't give an explanation of why there are any such parts. The traditional conception of God explains it more fully. It's God's nature to exist. God is the sort of thing that has to exist, but God is also viewed as a creator. Would we see the universe as a creator in the same way? It's hard to see how, which might leave us thinking that the universe as a whole doesn't serve as the kind of explanation that God does. In short, theism as a view explains why God would be self-existent, but I know of no explanation of why the universe would be self-existent. I don't think of this response as a disproof of the objection, but I do think of it as a good reason to prefer the theistic account.

The second objection I have in mind is William Rowe's (see the reference in the previous post in the series). His strategy is to deny PSR altogether. He says there could be a third kind of answer to explanation questions. Something's nature could explain something about it. Something else could explain something about it. But if you deny PSR, you can also simply have facts without any explanation. Philosophers call these brute facts. If PSR is true, there are no brute facts. Every fact is explained. But Rowe wonders why there couldn't simply be one brute fact -- the existence of dependent beings. Then there's no reason why any dependent things exist. Some will think the question is meaningless (like the question of where the universe is or when the timeline is). I get the impression that Rowe doesn't think it's meaningless, but he just thinks there's no answer to it. Either way, this response takes PSR to be right about individual things but not about the kind of explanation this argument calls for.

This is the the eighteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. I've posted an earlier version of this a while ago, but the comments degenerated into a discussion of things completely unrelated to the post. That time, it was a version of my notes on this that hadn't been altered since 2001. I've decided to expand it a bit based on further study of the subject, even though I haven't taught all these issues in the course that this series is based on. I should also say that my presentation depends heavily on William Rowe's work, most importantly the short article he wrote for introductory courses that appears in Reason and Responsibility, ed. Feinberg and Shafer-Landau, with one reference to one other text I have used in that course, Jan Cover and Rudy Garns's Theories of Knowledge and Reality (abbreviated TKR).

The cosmological argument for the existence of God is one of a number of classic arguments sometimes used in conjunction with each other to establish the existence of a being with some of the characteristics generally taken to be true of God. I'm going to look at three such arguments, each contributing something different to the overall picture The cosmological argument in particular occupies a very small role in any overall picture of how some have offered argumentation in support of theism.

In my last post on Intelligent Design, I argued that ID arguments are consistent with the standard evolutionary picture that most scientists accept, even if a number of its supporters disagree with that picture in terms of common descent. I wondered at the end why opponents of ID consistently misrepresent the ID argument, saying that I would leave that for a further post. I want to take that issue up now. There are two general possibilities. They understand what ID says and deliberately misrepresent it, or they simply don't understand that it's not saying what they present it as saying.

The principle of charity requires me to presume the second option. But why would smart scientists fail to see what seems to me to be so obvious? I have to think the main reason is that scientists aren't well-schooled in the metaphysical distinctions they assume regularly for their scientific work. I wonder how much of this is just ignorance of the metaphysical assumptions of science and the possible metaphysical positions consistent with our best science. I've certainly run across people who are profoundly ignorant on such matters, including some scientists whose work is widely respected. Some even assert that ID can't be science because it's philosophy, which is far closer to the truth than the ridiculous assertion that it's religion. But it's still at best misleading to make such a claim, because so much of science simply is philosophy, particularly metaphysics and epistemology. I think that's exactly the point that scientists don't seem to see.

I don't agree with all of Thomas Kuhn's conclusions, but one thing he demonstrated fairly clearly is that our metaphysical assumptions are part of our scientific theories, and the same is true of evolutionary theory. We arrived at much of our best science via philosophy, and much of our best science simply assumes metaphysical views that scientists tend to share. Some research that takes place in physics departments is almost pure philosophy, even though it usually takes its starting point from some empirical data, and many of these claims simply cannot be empirically verified or falsified. Consider:

Click on the picture for the full-size version. They've got Robby Steinhardt's photo above the Phil Ehart blurb, but otherwise this is pretty funny. One of the people on the discussion list where I found this spoke of Phil looking more and more like Robby every day!

What's funniest to me about this isn't intentional. It's that the members who would be most likely to favor ID aren't even in the current lineup, which is the group the picture shows. What follows close behind is that Kansas actually does have lyrics that deal with intelligent design. Then there's the fact that Kerry Livgren now thinks of Dust in the Wind as expressing the main theme of Ecclesiastes. It's not as if that song is contrary to Christian teaching, except in a couple of details ("nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky?" as if either would last forever anyway).

What's a little disappointing is the insinuation that intelligent design is about religion and the suggestion that it has anything to do with opposition to gay marriage. I'd guess that Kerry Livgren does oppose gay marriage, and I know he encourages all to become Christians, but this isn't about Livgren's current views and how he'd adjust the song in light of them. It's about how Dust in the Wind could be adjusted to sound like the ID proponents. Those would have been more important to put in the last box with those who prefer Foreigner to progressive rock. It's also a little unfortunate that ID is being held up against evolution, given what I argued in my last post on the topic. Good humor is good humor, but it still needs to be evaluated for its philosophical presuppositions.

It's occurred to me that a common complaint against intelligent design is a huge mistake. In particular, it misrepresents the ID movement. That's no surprise to regular readers of this blog, who should have been explose to numerous misrepresentations of the ID position by now. This one isn't a stupid mistake, though. I can understand why people might make this mistake, but it's a mistake nonetheless and a philosophical one.

I've seen ID opponents make the complaint that ID requires special creation even if the people making ID arguments claim otherwise. By special creation here, I don't mean the creation of the universe to begin with. Any theist will believe in special creation in that sense. Special creation here means miraculous intervention to create certain biological elements that we don't have explanations for at this point. Immediately, I already see one problem with this. Intelligent design requires no such thing, because some intelligent design arguments have nothing to do with biology. Some are about fine-tuning of the cosmological constants. But even leaving that issue aside, I think this misunderstands those who endorse the biological ID arguments, including most notably Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Philip Johnson.

Those who opposed invading Iraq in 2003 have often been accused of not being patriotic. I think it's a slimy complaint. Some of them surely are not patriotic. Some have demonstrated by their actions and statements that they prefer al Qaeda to succeed if that's what it takes for Bush to fail. I'm convinced that such a view is much more mainstream than some people think. But many people opposed the war because they considered it immoral and didn't want their country doing immoral things. That's patriotism. This is all old news, though. Why am I talking about it now?

Well, it occurred to me recently that this is the same general phenomenon that I've also talked about a number of times on this blog with respect to accusations of anti-semitism in the gospels (and in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ). I've elsewhere argued that the gospels are Jewish works engaging in self-criticism of their own culture, much as the Hebrew prophets were. Jesus was particularly hard on his own people, but that didn't make him anti-semitic, and it doesn't make the recordings of his life and sayings in the gospels anti-semitic. They do indeed record harsh statements against the Jewish leaders, and John even directs these statements to what he calls the Jews (which careful scholars realize amounts to exactly the same thing). What was funny to me was realizing that those who are so inflamed at those who claim anti-war demonstrators to be undemocratic might well be exactly the same people accusing the gospels or Mel Gibson's use of them (which amounted pretty much to direct quotes of them) as being anti-semitic. It's the same error in reasoning in both cases. (Incidentally, it occurred to me after writing this post that this probably also applies to those who say someone is self-hating for criticizing the behavior of a contingent of their own ethnic or racial group, e.g. Bill Cosby.)

If you can be patriotic while engaging in self-criticism of your own culture, then it isn't anti-semitic to engage in self-criticism of your own culture if you're Jewish. But that's exactly what the gospels do when making the sorts of claims about the Jews of the time that the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and a few more liberal contemporary gospel scholars declare to be anti-semitic. People on the left make this sort of blunder as easily as people on the right do.

Blogs4God has President George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789.

More Ethan pictures: Sam took him outside to play with the fallen leaves.

Proto-Kaw (the band Kerry Livgren of Kansas has reformed based on an earlier incarnation of Kansas that never released anything until this decade) has a new album coming out in February, called The Wait of Glory. We had the pleasure of seeing them and meeting them all this summer, and it was one of the highlights of the last decade for me. The lyrics for the Wait of Glory are up now. I can't wait to hear it. Everything I've heard is that it's even better than their last album Before Became After, which was one of Livgren's best works.

For some really perverse fun, see A Night at the Roddenberry. [Hat tip: The Gnu]

Speaking of the Gnu, he has a response to a few of Scott Adams's comments on Intelligent Design (see Abednego's post). I think his point about Crick and Watson is particularly interesting.

Christian Carnival XCV is at Eternal Revolution.

Mark Roberts has finished his 30-part series Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable? I mentioned it before, when he started it. I haven't gotten through the whole thing yet, but what I've read so far has been excellent. I highly recommend it.

Here's an interesting study on the differences between men and women's responses to humor. Not at all what I would have expected. [Hat tip: Orin Kerr]

Eugene Volokh takes on the suggestion that Judge Alito thinks private ownership of machine guns should be legal. The best part is where the same line of reasoning makes Justice O'Connor out to favor violence against women.

Finally, Sam's put up a host of pictures since the last time I pointed any out. There's the salamander in the driveway. Sophia meets spaghetti. It's been warm, so we've still got some excellent fall foliage. Isaiah's still dodging cameras. Ethan enjoys the weather. Finally, Sophia's beginning to look a lot like Ethan did at her age.

Christian Carnival XCIV is at Wittenberg Gate. Dory is in need of future hosts, so if you're interested follow her link at the top of the post. The Bible Archive is doing a series on Genesis. I especially want to direct your attention to his nice post on what Genesis 1 does say. All the debates about how to interpret the days and whether it's consistent with evolution easily distract from what the passage is about to begin with, and Rey brings our attention back to that. If you want to see his summary on those other issues, it's here, but why is our focus so often not what the focus of the text is? Walter Snyder has a good explanation of how it is that Bible publishers can justify charging royalties for the use of what is God's word (and thus should be free). [Hat tip: ESV Bible Blog] Belgium declares names and titles to be no longer capitalized. Well, I guess it's just politically incorrect names and titles. Actually, they've just singled out 'christ' and 'jew'* just to show how arbitrary they can be. Or is this arbitrary? [Hat tip: Sam] *Well, for 'Jew' it's only when the reference is religious rather than ethnic; if ethnic, it's still capitalized.

This is the the seventeenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

Value differences, our standards for beliefs in general about other matters, and how someone might go about getting as much evidence as possible will play a role in my final evaluation of this sort of argument.

As with some of the other no-evidence argument posts in this series, some of my presentation is influenced by Peter van Inwagen's "It Is Wrong Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone to Believe Anything on Insufficient Evidence" and "Quam Dilecta" (part 1; part 2), which are two different presentations of the same core paper, expanded upon differently for different audiences (I assume). Also, William Alston's "Religious Beliefs and Values" in Faith and Philosophy 18 (2001), 36-49 strongly influenced some of my thoughts on how value differences affect the status of religious beliefs and the denial of religious beliefs.

Gnu at Wildebeest's Wardrobe has an excellent discussion of the problems with presuppositionalism. He doesn't explain all his terms as clearly as I would, because he's cutting this from a discussion that involves people who would know the terms. I think all his points are spot on, though.

This is the the sixteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

As with the other no-evidence argument posts in this series, some of my presentation is influenced by the chapter by John Hawthorne called "Arguments for Atheism" in Michael Murray, Reason for the Hope Within. This post in particular also takes a good deal from Peter van Inwagen's "It Is Wrong Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone to Believe Anything on Insufficient Evidence" and "Quam Dilecta"), which are two different presentations of the same core paper, expanded upon differently for different audiences (I assume).

In previous posts I've tried to make the strongest case for arguing that we shouldn't believe in God, on the grounds that there isn't enough evidence. There are a number of points that I'd like to make in response. This post will look at how standard responses to skepticism of any sort can enter into this debate, given that the no-evidence argument is very much like the arguments for skepticism (see the end of the last post). I have a few other points to make after considering the responses to skepticism as applied here, and those will follow in the next post.

Lots of people have written criticisms of the Jesus Seminar, but one of the best short ones I've seen is the series Mark Roberts just finished on his blog, entitled Unmasking the Jesus Seminar. I know some of these issues pretty well, and I learned a few things in just about every post, so it's not just a rehash of some of the things I've seen before. Mark is typically one of the fairest and most congenial bloggers when it comes to engaging with those he disagrees with, but this time he's not really pulling his punches. The Jesus Seminar is an embarassment to some of the genuine scholars who were part of it, and Mark is pretty clear about why, giving a few examples that stand for wider tendencies. He's about to launch into a more thoroughgoing defense of the historicity of the gospels in a new series, so stay tuned for that.

This is the the fifteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear. As with the other no-evidence argument posts in this series, some of my presentation is influenced by the chapter by John Hawthorne called "Arguments for Atheism" in Michael Murray, Reason for the Hope Within. This post in particular also takes a good deal from Peter van Inwagen's "It Is Wrong Everywhere, Always, and for Anyone to Believe Anything on Insufficient Evidence" and "Quam Dilecta" (part 1; part 2), which are two different presentations of the same core paper, expanded upon differently for different audiences (I assume).

I also want to issue a reminder that this series' material was largely written over a few years of teaching the course that these are lecture notes for, but I haven't organized them into blog posts except as I'm going. I've been forecasting how many posts are left on certain issues, and with each post in the No-Evidence Arguments section I've thought that I had one or two posts left. Then I've had to subdivide some of the posts as I've expanded some thoughts that I discuss in class but didn't have in my handouts. That's why the numbers of the posts I've predicted hasn't always matched up with how many posts I've gone on to produce.

So far I've presented the no-evidence argument in one popular form and looked at whether there is sufficient evidence for God, with some evaluation of how atheists and naturalists would view the evidence presented in favor of God. I'm now moving into the issue of what we should say if we decide that the evidence is inconclusive. Should we accept the skeptical argument against believing in God? This post focuses on the explanatory adequacy that naturalism claims for itself and the use of the principle Ockham's Razor to favor atheism rather than just agnosticism. In the next post, I plan to work through how various responses to skepticism will apply to skepticism about God. Then I expect to conclude this portion of the series with a few final thoughts. After that, I'll move on to arguments for theism that might better be thought of as arguments against naturalism, and then I'll look at the problem of evil, the second major argument against belief in God. That will wrap up the first half of the material for the course these posts are taken from, which has been on knowledge/skepticism and God, and the second half will cover free will, the nature of the mind, and personal identity.

This is the the fourteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

In the last post I looked at an argument for atheism that requires a higher standard than will easily convince many people (one I happen to think is incredibly implausible). There is a weaker argument available to an agnostic or atheist against believing in God, given in its most famous form by W.K. Clifford. Some philosophers call this the no-evidence argument:

1. It is wrong to believe something without sufficient evidence.
2. We don't have (and shouldn't expect ever to have) enough evidence for belief in God.
3. Therefore, we should not believe in God.

As with any philosophical argument whose premises really do guarantee its conclusion (as seems true of this argument), the key work in defending the argument will be supporting each premise, and the efforts of those who criticize the argument will focus on questioning either premise (or both). In this post, I'll focus on the second premise, whether there is enough evidence. In the next post, I'll assume there is not enough evidence and see what follows.

As with the last post in this series, some of my presentation is influenced by the chapter by John Hawthorne called "Arguments for Atheism" in Michael Murray, Reason for the Hope Within. This post isn't as close to what Hawthorne focuses on as the last one was or the next one will be, but the general framework I'm working with in these posts is from him, and this post falls within that framework.

There's almost nothing in the gospels about circumcision. Jesus was circumcised. There's one appearance besides that, I believe, and it's almost a side issue to a much more specific discussion about something else. Jesus didn't seem very interested in it. That's interesting for a number of reasons, but I want to suggest one thing that we should conclude that may not be as obvious.

A number of modern scholars seek to explain most of the material in the gospels, particular Matthew, Luke, and especially John, as later developments in Christian thought that don't trace back to Jesus, with the evangelists placing these words in Jesus' mouth in order to give them more authority. In Matthew in particular, they frequently will find something Jesus is saying as being more about the situations Christians were facing with Pharisees in the post-70 Jewish world without a sacrificial system. The key distinctive of Jews without the sacrificial system was a distinctive beforehand, but it became even more significant after the temple was destroyed. That distinctive is circumcision.

Why do the gospels contain so little about circumcision? If this view of modern scholars is correct, and the gospels are primarily about what Christians and non-Christian Jews were fighting over post-70, then wouldn't circumcision play a great role in the gospels? Or is it rather that the gospels more accurately reflect Jesus' own concerns in his own time, and he just wasn't all that concerned with circumcision? There are many other reasons to reject (or at least be skeptical about) the view that the gospels are really about concerns that came much later, but I think this one alone is almost decisive against it.

This is the the thirteenth post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. Follow the link for more on the series and for links to other entries as they appear.

So far I've discussed more expansive skepticisms, including skepticism about knowledge from the senses, and I've looked at particular problem raised against knowing about scientific laws. The one other particular problem I'll work through is skepticism about knowledge of religious matters, in particular knowledge of God. As I see it, there are two main types of arguments against the existence of God. The first kind is the no-evidence variety, and the second is the attempt to find a contradiction in what people say about God. The only serious one of the latter type that I know of is the problem of evil, and I'll come to that in due time, after considering three arguments for the existence of God. Before I do any of that, I'll look at the other type of argument against the existence of God, the no-evidence kind of argument. I know of two general kinds of no-evidence arguments. The one with a much stronger conclusion is sometimes called the divine silence argument, and it seeks to show that there cannot be any being like the one Christians and many other theists believe in and call God. One with a weaker conclusion simply relates to there not being enough evidence to justify believing in such a being, but that argument doesn't attempt to show that there can't be such a being. I'll spend the two posts after this one looking at the more general kinds of no-evidence arguments. In this one I'll look at divine silence.

Here is one version of the divine silence argument offered by the atheist [note: my presentation of this follows very closely the chapter by John Hawthorne called "Arguments for Atheism" in Michael Murray, Reason for the Hope Within]:

1. If a being with roughly the features of what people mean when they talk about the Judeo-Christian God exists, then such a being would make this absolutely clear to us.
2. We don't have such palpable evidence.
3. Therefore, there must not be such a God.

Sam has a nice post in response to someone who asked her why God would give us two autistic children. I should first note that we have no idea why Isaiah is just beginning to talk as he approaches age three. Most of what we understand is largely repetitive but indistinctly enunciated. Most of it sounds like gibberish, but he might be saying things, and he might not be just repeating things but simply can't say them in a way we can understand. It may just be that the ones that sound like repetition are the only ones we can understand because they occur in a context when we've just heard the thing he's repeating. It might be autism-related, and given Ethan's diagnosis of autism it's more likely that than any one other explanation, but we have no idea. He might just be delayed in speaking with problems enunciating. He doesn't have any other indications of autism besides some signs that there might be sensory issues, and those may explain the delay in speech on their own.

She asks a few questions that people don't tend to think about, and I want to reiterate some of them but also introduce some elements that seem to me to make it a much more complicated issue. We tend to wonder why people might have bad things happen to them, but we don't wonder why good things happen. When this comes from a sense of deserving the good things, it explains why people do one and not the other. Sam says:

How often do you hear someone speculate about why God allowed them to wake up in the morning? Or why God gave them a roof over their head? Or provided them with good health and daily sustenance? Just about never. Why? Because we consider these things to be our due. If we were a little less self centered I think we'd realise that we don't deserve any of the good in our lives.

She goes on to point out that it's radical patience on God's part to spare us at all and allow things to go on long enough for people to repent and for more people to come into existence who will repent.

Gnu at Wildebeest's Wardrobe reflects on the Declaration of Independence as a model of a cumulative case argument. As a result, he thinks it's also a model of what an overall Christian apologetic will look like. If you want to see some real fun, look at his philosophy disguised as fantasy role-playing post, and if you have any idea what he might be getting at please comment. These posts usually have some significant point, but I'm still trying to figure this one out.

Patrick Taylor posts at Prosblogion regarding a new paper by Jeff Jordan on the problem of evil. Some philosophers have claimed that any suffering God allows will ultimately be in the best interest of the person suffering. I'm not sure I can agree with this claim, but I also can't agree with what Jordan thinks follows from it. He thinks that if you believe something like this you'll have to accept that it's never wrong to cause someone to suffer, because if you cause them to suffer and God allows it, it's really in their best interest. Similarly, it shouldn't ever be ok to reduce anyone's suffering, because that would be reducing what God has set for them in terms of their best interest. I have to say that I can't see how Jordan's conclusions would follow from that view, and his confusion seems to be a fundamental sort of confusion that I don't normally see except in introductory philosophy classes. This is basically the fallacious argument that some have called the Lazy Sophism, though I'm not going to address it in those terms. The rest of this post is adapted from my comment on Patrick's post.

Joe Carter hosted a project I call Jesus' Reasoning a little while ago, and I never managed to put together a post with links to all the entries I contributed. Here is that post. Joe explains the project here, and the entries are all here.

In Jesus the Logician? I express why I don't like Joe's name and insist on calling it Jesus' Reasoning. Since Joe organizes the posts by passage, I'll put them in the order I wrote them:

1. John 9:1-3
2. Mark 7:1-23
3. Matthew 10:40-42
4. Luke 21:1-4
5. Mark 11:27-33; Matt 21:23-27; Luke 20:1-8
6. Matthew 21:28-32
7. Mark 12:18-27; Matt 22:23-34; Luke 20:27-40

David Velleman has a nice, balanced post up about ID and schools. I don't quite agree with everything, but he's close to being right on everything. My first comment makes my views clear enough, as if my post here didn't already do so. There is a little more in that comment than I said in the post, though, and this is more succinct, so I'm reproducing that comment here for posterity along with a second comment clarifying some elements of evolutionary theory that are philosophical arguments:

Prosthesis has put into words what I've been trying unsuccessfully to say for quite a while now. Intelligent Design is technically philosophy and not science, but it's no as simple as that. It's the most recent form of the teleological argument for the existence of God, in the tradition that began at least as far back as Aristotle, something like 2500 years ago. For him, of course, it was natural philosophy, which has become the science of today, so it's not as if it's outside the realm of what we now call science, but that argument has remained in philosophy as most other subject matters of Aristotle's natural philosophy have become known as science.

Intelligent Design is certainly not religion. That's evidenced by the people who support it who do not believe in any religion. Antony Flew is just the latest and most famous proponent of ID not to accept any religion as a result of it (or even many of the traditional attributes of God). Michael Denton was saying similar things in the 1980s. He's an atheist, and he thinks some sort of argument along the lines ID people give is correct against the standard neo-Darwinian picture (though he accepts large parts of it, as do most IDers). It's true that most ID people are Christians, but that doesn't mean it's religion, either in principle or even for those Christians who accept it. It's a philosophical argument that many Christians accept, and they accept it because they think it's a good argument, not because it occurs in the Bible.

The tenth Vox Apologia (apologetics carnival) is up at RazorsKiss. Unlike most carnivals, this one has a theme or topic each week, and this week's was Presuppositional Apologetics: Target Audience. Presuppositional Apologetics presupposes the existence of God. Who is this style of apologetics best suited for, and why? Who is it NOT suited for?

With such a specific topic, you might expect a small carnival, but I didn't expect it to be this small. There are only two entries. My Presuppositional Apologetics argues against the idea of presuppositional apologetics, at least as it's normally construed. The other entry is Counter-cult Apologetics' Presuppositional Apologetics. I agree with much of what Jeff gives as the basis for presuppositionalism, but I don't think that genuinely leads to what he concludes. I also disagree with a number of his statements along the way.

Allthings2all has put together The Science and Christianity Showcase, an excellent collection of posts from Christian bloggers about the relation between science and Christianity, excluding anything on creation and evolution at least partly because a recent Apologetics Carnival dealt with that subject (but I get the sense it's also because all these other issues tend to get sidelined by creation/evolution whenever the topic of Christianity and science comes up). Since there was no expectation that submissions should be recent posts, I submitted my All Creation Groans from almost a year ago. Three posts struck me as worth highlighting:

Sun and Shield has a nice overview of the main themes throughout scripture on the use of our abilities to make things and to explore and learn about God's cration, thus providing a basic biblical theology of science and technology. As with anything good, people can use it as an instrumental bad, and he spends some time listing some ways that can happen, with examples of each from the biblical record.

Blogotional develops some of the same themes, focusing in on the value of science for the Christian as a way to explore what God has done.

A Physicist's Perspective also covers some of the same ground. One intriguing argument in his post is that what we do in science is something God commanded Adam to do before the fall. He also emphasizes the rationality of the world and the God who made it, which encourages us to use science as a rational means of understanding it.

wacky search of the day: ralph nader preterist

ridiculously exaggerated search of the day: 1000 reasons why premarital sex is bad

Both of those were actually yesterday, but that's when I put most of this post together.

Dory at Wittenberg Gate takes on old-earthers in one of the best presentations of the difficulties with old earth interpretations of Genesis that I've ever seen. I respect Dory greatly, and I think she's got one of the best Christian blogs out there. I have to disagree extremely strongly with her on this issue, though. It seems to me that her normally careful argumentation just isn't present in this post. She argues that the Bible seems to present death as a consequence of the fall, and the old-earth view seems to require death before the fall. I'm not 100% sure of either of those claims, but it's the hardest argument for the old-earth view to deal with. She also presents problems with two of the common views of making Genesis 1:1-2:3 fit a long time frame, but those two views don't seem to me to be the primary views Genesis scholars have. They view those strategies to be just as out of touch with the literary structure of the passage as the 24-hour day view is. Finally, she says an old-earth view threatens the foundations of the gospel, and it's here that I'm really worried about what she's saying, though it's consistent with what she says that she isn't accusing anyone of denying the gospel.

This is my second post in dialogue with Back of the Envelope's two posts on slavery and Christianity. The first argued that slavery is a matter of degree from absolute autonomy to being under someone's complete control. No one is ever at either extreme, though some have been closer to the extreme on the higher-slavery end of the spectrum. We're all slaves to one degree or another, to our employers and our government if to no one else. This post is now going to consider what the Bible says about slavery. [update: I've continued in this series enough to collect the links to each post all in one post]

In a comment on my treatment of universalism and Romans 10, Dave said the following:

Also, what about the spirits that Christ preached to who were disobedient in the time of Noah? They were to be judged according to the flesh, but live according to the spirit.(I Peter 3:18-20a and 4:6).

I don't think either I Peter passage teaches universalism. As I started to explain why in a comment, I decided I might as well make it a post, so here it is.

This is part IV in a series on meta-ethics begun here. See that post for more details. So far I've looked at a simplistic version of subjectivism, one that thinks ethical statements are about our own attitudes but are still the sort of statement that can be true or false. That view is hard to square with how we use moral language. A more sophisticated subjectivist view simply denies that our moral statements are the sort of thing that can be true or false. They don't have any cognitive content. The view is thus called non-cognitivism.

The most basic version of non-cognitivism is emotivism. As with any form of non-cognitivism, it says moral statements aren't really statements at all. There aren't really moral truths, but moral statements aren't false either. They're not the sort of thing that can be true or false in the same way that it isn't true or false that chocolate ice cream is better than black raspberry. Some people prefer one or the other and thus have different attitudes, but there's no truth or falsity of either one.

This is my seventh post for Joe Carter's collaborative project Jesus the Logician (which would better be described as Jesus' Reasoning).

During the week Jesus spent in Jerusalem before his crucifixion, he spent much of his time in the temple disputing with various groups of religious leaders. Much of what we have recorded in the gospels from those discussions is with the Pharisees and scribes. We have only one recorded discussion with the Sadducees, though it appears in all three of the synoptic gospels (Mark 12:18-27, Matthew 22:23-34, and Luke 20:27-40).

Today is the tentative deadline Joe Carter gave for submissions for his collaborative project Jesus the Logician, which would better be described as (Jesus' Reasoning). I have no idea if Joe intends to stick with this as a deadline, but it might be a good idea to finish up any submissions you want to do if you still want to contribute to this (or if you want to contribute any more posts; I have at least one more I'm working on right now on Jesus' interactions with the Sadducees as recorded in Mark 12:18-27, Matthew 22:23-33, and Luke 20:27-40, and I hope to do yet another beyond that if I have time). The list of current entries so far is here.

Update: Joe's tentativeness of the deadline apparently was completely serious. He isn't closing it off just yet. He wants some more entries first, so let's get cracking. Now I have to figure out what I'm going to do for my eighth.

This is part II in a series on meta-ethics begun here. See that post for more details.

I was going to treat emotivism next (and possibly some of the other non-cognitivist views if I get a chance to write more than what I covered in the class handout I wrote on meta-ethics that is serving as the basis of this series), but I just finished an email to someone who had made a claim that I see frequently from Christian apologists that just seems to me to be a mistake. In this case, it was about subjectivist views about religion. At least that's what I think is the most likely interpretation of it. The point I want to make applies to that and to subjectivism about ethics, so it's relevant to what I've been talking about. Before I move on to non-cognitivist ethics in my next post, it would be good to point out why I think this objection doesn't succeed against the subjectivist view I covered in my last post. It fails to grasp what the view is really saying and thus is refuting a straw man.

Archeologists have confirmed the presence of an Edomite nation at the time the biblical accounts say there was an Edomite nation. A number of scholars have tended to doubt that there were any nations in that part of the world in the eleventh to tenth centuries, when David and Solomon reigned in Israel. According to that view, David and Solomon were chieftans of a small group of Hebrews, and Edom didn't exist as more than a small tribe until the Assyrian period in the eighth to seventh centuries. That whole view is threatened by this find.

There's been a real reversal in scholarship on issues like this. About 50 years ago the general attitude was to doubt anything in the Bible that didn't have specific evidence (besides the record in the text) confirming it. Over the last 20-30 years, the general trend in biblical scholarship is to focus more on the final text and less on whether the historical elements are genuine, but interestingly, while they're doing that, we keep finding more and more that confirms the general picture that the evidence available 50 years ago didn't support (but didn't disconfirm either). This is just one among many such finds that are showing with ordinary standards of historical research that the general picture of the historical shape of things presented in the Bible is accurate, and a number of historical views that were once considered fundamentalist reactionism are now fairly mainstream among biblical scholars. Since that thesis was considered irrational 50 years ago (even though there was no evidence against it), this is a major redirection in the tendency of scholarly opinion.

I was toying whether to say something about the evolution stickers fiasco. I didn't get around to completing my decision on whether I would. Sam has now beaten me to it, and I think she says everything I wanted to say (and a little more).

I know it's bad blogging practice not to link to the background to what I've just mentioned. I'm too burned out dealing with someone who turns out to be a semi-troll and a lot more people than I expected who have completely misinterpreted my words and actions with regard to the World post.

Therefore, I'm not going to comment further on the evolution stuff or seek out the links to the background on that or link to the posts I've just referenced on my own blog (which won't take too much work to locate if you really care and don't already know). Sam links to the background on the evolution stuff, anyway, so when you read her post, which was the point of all this, you can get the background from there.

Razorskiss has a new carnival, the Apologetics Carnival. I missed the first one because I was apparently behind in reading the sites that I read that linked to it. Judging by the topic, I would have had virtually nothing to say anyway, since it was all meta-apologetics, and all the posts I glanced at were such wide-open, big picture, paint-with-a-broad-brush, forest-over-the-trees sort of thing that I'd be just out of my realm even trying to say something about it.

The second one is coming up quickly, and it's still meta-apologetics rather than doing apologetics, but the way it's not well-defined leaves an opening for some of what I do well partly because it's so undefined, if I can pull it off. The topic is Digital Salt, whatever that means. The goal is to see what people come up with when there's no further explication. See Razorskiss for more. There doesn't seem to be any submissions information, though, so perhaps those in charge could come up with some soon, since the deadline is less than 40 hours away.

Mark Goodacre or NT Gateway (which I highly recommend as a great New Testament studies blog) has some insights into what now seems to have been the James Ossuary hoax. For anyone unfamiliar with the story here, someone had found what was apparently an ossuary containing the remains of someone who had a good chance, given the information recorded on the box, of being James, the half-brother of Jesus, the author of the epistle of James, and the most prominent elder in the congregation at Jerusalem during the time much of the New Testament was being written. It turned out that the part of the inscription that most supported such an identification had too many suspicious elements, and most scholars now think it a fraud.

Goodacre's thoughts on this were interesting. Two of his points had occurred to me before. The ossuary didn't really add to our knowledge in any substantial way. I wasn't even sure why people were making a big deal about it. Also, there wasn't an incredibly strong argument that it was even James's ossuary to begin with. As I recall, Ben Witherington, the scholar who had defended its authenticity the most after the suspicious elements were made clear, thought that there were probably at least three men in that general area who could have fit the characteristics described by the inscription. That's not exactly a conclusive connection, even if the inscription was authentic. So why was this making all the headlines as if it established something important?

Stuart Buck says it's irrational to bring out the problem of evil after the tsunami as if this somehow changes anything. I think he's absolutely right.

If people were already prepared to maintain religious faith in the face of a 100% death rate (and all the lesser evils that already exist in the world), it is irrational to act as if the problem of evil has suddenly arisen simply because a minute percentage of the world's population faced death in one incident.

Not to minimize how bad it is for those involved, this is really only .000025% of the world's current population who have died all at once. Compare that to the history of the world, and it's not a huge change. People die in much worse ways than this. They just don't often do it in such large numbers at once. This isn't really any more of a problem for theodicists than any other natural deaths that are more spread out.

Here's another one I wanted to make an extended comment on, but it's been almost two weeks now, and I haven't had the opportunity, so I wanted to say something. Christian victiomologists are at it again. As I've explained before in more detail, victimology is focusing on victimhood when it's only barely present (if at all), not to seek solutions to any genuine problems but merely to contribute toward one's own sense of alienation and a group solidarity based on resentment toward the group that has, whether rightly or wrongly, been perceived to be victimizing one's own group. In my more detailed post (linked above), I gave a few examples of the phenomenon, some having to do with race or ethnicity, some having to do with religion or lack thereof. Christians, particularly the more extreme elements of the religious right, are no strangers to victimology, and that's what's going on in this case.

This is my fourth post for Joe Carter's collaborative project Jesus the Logician (which would better be described as Jesus's Reasoning).

In Luke 21:1-4, Jesus caps off his diatribe against the rich scribes who dress majestically, love popularity, and receive much honor from human beings but who are merely showy without real piety and in fact devour widows' houses. As he looks up while saying this, he sees rich people depositing their gifts to the temple, while a poor widow put in just two coins. He says, "this poor widow has put in more than the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on." (Luke 21:1-4, NIV)

Here's my third posting for Joe Carter's collaborative project called Jesus the Logician (I don't agree with the name).

In Matthew 10:40-42, Jesus uses what's called a hypothetical syllogism. The logical form of the argument is:

1. If A then B.
2. B then C.
3. Therefore, if A then C.

Here is another entry in Joe Carter's collaborative project of what's being called Jesus the Logician (though I oppose that name).

Mark 7:1-23 has a lot in it that I could talk about, and I hope to get around to it at some point in my Mark Tidbits series, which I have not abandoned. I have a partially-written fourth post in that series that I keep moving forward because I haven't had the time to finish it when I haven't had something else higher on my priority list at the time.

I've been putting off contributing to Joe Carter's collaborative project of what's being misnamed Jesus the Logician, but here we go finally. Here's an instance of Jesus' reasoning strategy with his disciples that I think fits what Joe is looking for. John 9:1-3 contains a good example of a false dilemma. Jesus' disciples give him this dilemma, and he responds with the common philosophical practice of going through the horns of the dilemma by denying either of the options presented to him and saying they simply haven't listed all the options. A more exhaustive dilemma would have contained at least a third option, and that third option isn't as problematic as the two they mention.

Joe Carter has begun what he's calling the 'Jesus the Logician' Project. The goal is to show how Jesus used sound reasoning, and different bloggers are contributing through discussing particular examples of Jesus' reasoning. Doug Groothius' paper "Jesus: Philosopher and Apologist" is a good example of the sort of thing Joe is up to here.

I think the name is off. A logician is not someone who uses good reasoning but someone who studies the nature of reasoning itself. The content of the logician's study is good reasoning. As Joe acknowledges, Jesus didn't do that kind of extremely abstract study (at least in any public records we have). Jesus used logic, but he didn't talk about logic itself. Then what's going on here is that Jesus isn't being shown to have been a logician but simply that he used good reasoning. Even though the name is a misnomer, I'm still going to contribute. My first post (of at least one) will follow shortly.

I want to recommend another series by Mark Roberts, this time on the birth narratives of Jesus, particularly dealing with their historicity. I like to wait until Mark is done with a series before I read it, so I can get the whole thing at once. He usually sends an email to his mailing list announcing when a series is done, and he hasn't sent that with this series, but it looks like it might be done. If not, it's at a good enough stopping point that reading it now will feel complete enough. Mark does a lot of stuff well, but this is the kind of thing he's best at. He interacts with much of modern scholarship, both at the academic level and in popular publications like the recent Time and Newsweek pieces. I'm looking forward to reading it more thoroughly when I finish this volley of grading, which needs to be done by noon tomorrow. Maybe I'll update this post if I have any further thoughts after reading it.

N.T. Wright's latest book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which I have but haven't had a chance to look at much, has been getting great reviews (see Craig Blomberg's for one example). I heard him present an early version of some of this along with his more general work on the authenticity of the synoptic accounts of Jesus' life a few years ago, and I'd never heard anything like it. As much as I disagree with him in a few places theologically, I'm impressed by his apologetical work. He's apparently worked the most fundamental arguments of the book into a series of three talks entitle Christian Origins and the Resurrection of Jesus, which are now all online. They are: The Resurrection of Jesus as a Historical Problem, Early Traditions and the Origins of Christianity, and The Resurrection and the Postmodern Dilemma. Thanks to NT Gateway for the links.

Ray Pritchard links to some fairly extensive lists of Christian books online, a few of which I'm very glad to recommend. You can browse through yourself to see the comprehensiveness of what's now online.

F.F. Bruce's The Historical Reliability of the New Testament is the first comparison I know of between the New Testament documents and other literature at the same time, concluding that the standards classicists use for determining authenticity make the New Testament come out as the most likely to be authentic of any ancient documents (where authenticity isn't about the proof of all its content but the reliability of its transmission and the origin in the general time period and setting it claims to be from and therefore its value as a source about early Christianity).

Two works by Jonathan Edwards come with my strongest recommendations. On the Freedom of the Will played a large part in my early thinking on the issue (though my views as they stand are much more informed by contemporary philosophical debate and D.A. Carson's Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility, the best treatment of the Bible (and intertestamental literature) on this issue that I've seen, and R.C. Sproul's Chosen By God was the first work besides the Bible that got me thinking explicitly along these lines).

The other work by Edwards that I recommend highly is A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections, which came out of his reflections on the Great Awakening and all the spurious conversions amist the genuine ones. His distinction between the two relies on what he calls religious affections, which you might think of as somewhere between what we nowadays call the mind and the heart and include the fruit of the Spirit. A genuine conversion involves a transformation of these religious affections. This is the classic work on that sort of issue.

John Calvin's Institutes on the Christian Religion is a masterpiece of systematic theology, and he doesn't even really get to the doctrines that eventually became labeled Calvinism until the end. Also, all of Calvin's commentaries are online now.

Finally, I'll link to John Piper and Wayne Grudem's Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, though it's with some hesitation. I'm not happy with most of what's been published on this subject, and the stuff I like a lot is mostly at the academic level and not very readable to the average Christian. I've got mixed feelings about this book. The exegetical and theological section is very good, at least most of the chapters (each is by someone different). The introductory stuff is sometimes good but at a number of points makes me cringe, since it doesn't represent very well the position that I think is biblical. I haven't looked at most of the second half of the book, but I suspect some of it is good and some not. My favorite book on the subject is out-of-print, and the contributions by Craig Blomberg and Thomas Shreiner to this book are also very good. Craig Keener and Linda Bellville also have chapters in that book, and they're top-notch biblical scholars who probably best represent the view I disagree with. Anything else I would recommend is either only in scholarly journals or in a technical enough anthology that I wouldn't recommend it to most readers of this blog. I do plan to post on this subject soon, so I'll probably say some more specific things about the literature on the topic then.

Richard Hess reviews Philip Johnston's Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament. This is interesting to me because of Johnston's defense of a few traditional claims that recent scholarship has attempted to undermine, particularly in Hebrew belief in different destinations for the godly and the ungodly, an Old Testament doctrine of resurrection, and belief in biblical authority (and, I presume, inerrancy) but also development of doctrine on issues of the afterlife. He also argues that use in the OT of surrounding cultures' mythologies doesn't amount to endorsing the reality of the imagery anymore than an atheist's comment that life is hell requires believing in hell. I have only a basic familiarity with some of the issues he discusses, but I'm really intrigued by what he's doing with the ones I mentioned, though this review only awakens my interest and doesn't give me any sense of how convincing his arguments will turn out to be.

Due to my work on tomorrow's Christian Carnival, I haven't had time to post anything today. Here's a book review I wrote on Amazon in November 2002. This book is currently out-of-print, but these academic books go in and out of print every few years, and I imagine used copies are much more available over the internet than it used to be. A good library with interlibrary loan connections with academic libraries should be able to get ahold of it fairly easily also.

Peter van Inwagen, God, Knowledge, and Mystery: Essays in Philosophical Theology

Peter van Inwagen is a first-class philosopher, widely respected as one of the best metaphysicians of our day. This book collects previously-published work in philosophy of religion. He is a sincere Christian thinker who began his philosophical career as a nonbeliever. The value, difficulty, and strengths and weaknesses in this book vary from paper to paper.

To clean out my favorite posts list in the sidebar, I'm removing five apologetics posts and then adding this post. Two of these are in my top 15 list, so I don't think entries shunted to being linked from posts that are themselves in the list of favorite posts are necessarily not as good as the ones in the sidebar list directly. It reflects more which of the older posts can easily be grouped.

So here are six of my favorite posts on apologetics.

To continue my ongoing effort to keep my favorite posts menu short, I'm collecting my posts that I probably wouldn't have had the motivation to write if it were not for Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ that I never got around to seeing.

Joe Carter gives the real story of Galileo. Compare that to the textbooks. The morals of the story are quite interesting. Back of the Envelope has dealt with this before but not with as much detail.

For you non-philosophers out there, an epistemic obligation is just an obligation related to what you should believe. Evangelical Oupost has been blogging about Pascal's Wager. I posted some comments there, but I wanted to expand on them here. I think Pascal's argument that we should seek to believe in God is a good one.

The objections that I think are most serious are that you can't just choose what to believe and that it would be wrong to believe for purely selfish reasons. Pascal deals with the first objection by saying he's not trying to argue people into belief, since that has to come on its own. (Try to believe that there's a blue elephant sitting right next to you right now, or that the car approaching you really fast isn't there, if you really think belief is voluntary. It isn't.) Still, we can do things that bring us to be able to accept something more or less easily. Pascal is just giving practical reasons to pursue the kinds of practices that will allow belief in God to come on its own. What I'm trying to do in this post is to suggest more of what's behind Pascal's suggestion and to respond to some objections. [Some of this is adapted from a class handout on religious knowledge and arguments against believing in God based on the lack of evidence.]

Tim Challies raises some uncommon but uncommonly sane questions about raising hands in worship. As you might conclude from my comment, I don't agree with everything he seems to be suggesting, but these questions are worth thinking about. We usually don't think along these lines about this sort of thing.

Jollyblogger has a new post in his series on studying the Bible. I'd never gone back and read the early ones in this series. Good stuff.

The Limitless links to I seem to have lost where I found this, but here's a paper on a participatory model of the atonement. Since this is one of the things Wink has been working on, I figured I'd mention it.

A little while ago I read a review of Kenneth Kitchen's latest book on the reliability of the Old Testament. I had wanted to blog about it, so I was holding off, but I don't think I'm going to get around to it. It looks like an excellent book, though, so I really want to get it.

I've got too many things to blog about again, so here we go.

Jonathan Ichikawa has a nice post at Fake Barn Country about obesity and determinism. I think I agree with everything he says. (It's also at his own blog, but there aren't any comments there yet. If you're interested in looking at all possible comments, it's worth checking both.)

Tiger! Tiger! has a great post on arguments for atheism. The author is an atheist but is acknowleding the insufficiency of the best arguments for atheism. I think I agree with every word up to a certain point. At the end, there's an appeal to a hermeneutic of suspicion as a final method of arguing for atheism, but I wonder if again this is at best at argument for agnosticism, since of course you can apply a hermeneutic of suspicion to the atheistic framework as well (and the atheistic explanations of evidence and experiences pointing to theism) by explaining the atheistic worldview in terms of Romans 1 and the fall of humanity.

Saddam's doctor gives some inside dirt. (via The Limitless)

Stuart Buck puts Brian Leiter in his place with a careful examination of a new poll that shows the overall increasing mistrust of the media from both political parties. Leiter was trying to use it to show that Republicans are stupid for not trusting C-SPAN and that Republicans are simply mad at the press for questioning Bush and no longer groveling to him (as if they ever did). Stuart points out that the poll shows that Democrats are growing distrustful of all the media sources, that the Wall Street Journal is the biggest drop in trustworthiness according to Republicans, that Democrats and Republicans trust both Fox News at nearly statistically equivalent rates to each other, and Democrats are distrusting enough of C-SPAN that they fall prey to his charge of stupidity if Republicans do (not that the charge applies anyway if you understand what they are distrusting, on which see his argument).

Eugene Volokh, as far as I can tell, is a standard pro-choice libertarian, but he's willing to acknowledge that, even though both sides of the abortion debate are guilty of euphemistic and dysphemistic language, the mainstream media really do show a bias toward the euphemisms and dysphemisms of the pro-choice side of the debate.

Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping notices how Bush's order in 'women and men' sends a strong signal to Muslim practices that marginalize women. It's little things like this that show that Bush really isn't like a lot of Republicans of the past (or at least of the era since the 60s when Republicans were the civil rights party). The Bush Administration consciously thinks about things like this.

Joanne Jacobs connects talking to kids (including to babies), grades/test scores, class, and the racial achievement gap. I don't think everything she says follows from the data, but it's fascinating stuff. My comment there is sufficient to show where I disagree.

Jollyblogger has an excellent post on metaphor and whether Harry Potter can be morally redeeming for a Christian who believes the occult is evil. It's one of the best defenses of popular fiction with elements hyper-fundamentalists would reject that I've seen in a long time, using the examples of Hosea's marriage to a practicing prostitute and Isaiah's walking around "naked" (both commands from God) for an interesting point. He didn't say what I thought was the most obvious thing to say, which is that magic in Harry Potter isn't what's condemned in the Bible, since it's a natural ability of the characters in that fictional world rather than a supernatural ability not of one's own but sought out through practices involving demonic beings.

My list of favorite posts is getting fairly long, and I've decided to remove some of the earlier ones. I still want to have a link to them, so I'm linking to them in this post, and then I'll put this post in the list of favorite posts. That way the list will be shorter, but I'll be able to find them fairly easily without having to search the whole site.

New low for racist left looks at a poster making fun of National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice that I believe to be racist. I explain why in the post, and somehow some slack-jawed yokels found the post, completely ignored my reasoning and everything about me that a quick look around my site would reveal, and proceeded to call me a racist. It was probably the most commented-on entry in the history of my blog, and the comments are quite characteristic of the average response to the kind of point I was making, which is simply to ignore it and change the subject, to charge me with things I never said and don't believe, and to take everything I said in the most uncharitable way possible.

Pacifism links to my fairly comprehensive teaching notes on arguments for and against pacifism, including both philosophical and biblical arguments.

Personhood and Abortion summarizes some of my views on abortion, in response to some statements by Senator Sam Brownback (R, KS). Careful-thinking people realize that personhood is the central issue in the debate (not life or humanity), but personhood by itself itself doesn't decide the issue one way or the other, giving pro-life and pro-choice reasons for thinking that. I offer two considerations that should also come into play, one having to do with violence and the other from the fact that we view very early miscarriages as unfortunate but not as bad as losing a child at a later developmental stage.

Update: I've removed some of the posts originally in this entry and put them into a topical one on apologetics, because they belong there. This one's a little haphazard themewise.

Update 2: I've moved more into Christian Ethics Posts. This post is getting smaller and smaller.

While I was in New York City for the weekend I was able to do a little writing for posting when I went online with an incredibly slow connection, but I couldn't do much that involved looking around at other blogs and blogging about them, so it's time for another roundup.

Stuart Buck has a helpful post about cable companies and bundling packages. A number of conservatives and libertarians have been arguing that cable companies should charge by the channel, and then people would only pay for what they watch. As much as I'd like not to have to pay for ESPN or any other sports channel, since those will never be watched in my household unless my dad or Sam's dad is around, this sort of proposal doesn't make much sense once you learn a little more about how cable companies work.

Stuart also has a good quote from philosopher C. Stephen Layman that I think shows two things. First, a lot more arguments beg the question than most philosophers will admit. Second, begging the question isn't always all that bad. Many good arguments are question-begging. See my comment on Stuart's post for a little more on why I think this, if you can't see the reasons from Layman's quote.

At Digitus, Finger & Co. we have a striking diversity of feminist responses to Abu Ghraib.

I've got eight windows open now full of other things to read more carefully before deciding if they deserve linkage, but I'm too exhausted now to do more. We've been up late every night, partly from kids not sleeping due to the unfamiliar location, and I have to tutor football players at 8am, so I need sleep. To be continued...

Here's another oldie from before the blog that I'm finally getting around to transferring here. The original discussion was from February 3, 2003 (with some minor modifications a few days later), and the addendum is from August 27, 2003, just before I opened up the first location of Parablemania.

Some people say something like the following:

“You can't quote the Bible to prove the Bible because it's circular reasoning.”

There's something about what they're saying that's right. The following is a bad argument:

1. The Bible says it's the word of God.
2. I can trust what it says, since it's the word of God.
3. Therefore, I can trust it when it says it's the word of God, so I should believe that it's the word of God.

However, that’s not the only thing someone can mean when saying that the Bible can count as evidence for Christianity. I have in mind a very different kind of argument. What Christians call the Old Testament (and what scholars today call the Hebrew Bible) could have taken something like 1500 years to produce, perhaps shorter but certainly well over 1000 years even by liberal estimates (though how much of it one says is early depends on one’s presuppositions). Adding in the New Testament (or Greek Bible, if you prefer that name) brings it to 1500-2000 years. Think about what's happened in the last 2000 years.

Two related arguments come to mind. One has to do with prophecy. The other is from the unity of the Bible.

Donald Crankshaw at Back of the Envelope has a couple posts on the harmony of the four resurrection accounts in the four gospels. Good stuff.

There's a debate within those who believe in some sort of rational defense of Christianity about how it should be done. The main lines of the debate are between what I call the classical apologetics view and the presuppositional view. I've never understood the presuppositionalist position, and all the arguments I've ever seen in favor of it seem so bad to me that I have to think there's something to the view beyond what people seem to me to be saying, but I've still seen no evidence that anyone has a better statement of the view and its claims than the bad ones I've so far seen. I've finally gotten around to putting together my thoughts on why I think presuppositionalism is fundamentally mistaken.

I probably haven't done justice to explaining the view, so here are a few links to the top Google searches for presuppositional apologetics, all right from the horses' mouths.

In my Old Testament and New Testament courses in college, I was led to believe that the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees is largely thought to be from later Christians reading their own disputes back into the time of Jesus by writing the gospels in a way reflecting current concerns in their own communities. I know that some people have thought this (e.g. as diverse scholars as E.P. Sanders and Jacob Neusner, usually on opposite sides when it comes to the history of rabbinic thought), and I never myself thought there was evidence for this, but it surprised me to encounter a discussion of this this morning that shows the scholarly consensus on the matter to be moving in exactly the opposite direction. Here are some of the reasons they're moving back toward a traditional view on this.

I have a few posts I want to do that will take a good deal more work than I'm willing to do right now, so I'm resorting to the old "repost something written a while ago" trick. I have lots of stuff from my old website that I'd eventually like to get transferred over here, so I might be doing this again the next time I feel the urge not to come up with anything new. I originally wrote the basis of this post for a listserv discussion whose context I don't remember, and I sent the message on 23 April 2001. I revised it on 20 January, 2003 and posted it to my website. I haven't changed any of the substance this time around, though I have reformatted it a bit and added links to the scriptures referenced. [I'm struck by how different my writing sounds after three years, not just in terms of readability (which I think has improved a lot) but even vocabulary. Remember this phenomenon for when I talk about Pauline authorship of the later letters attributed to him, often declared to be in a style incompatible with being his work.]

Some people claim that the gospel of John is a much later retelling of the story of Jesus’ life that is only loosely connected to the actual life of Jesus of Nazareth. The arguments for this view often beg the question, but I’m less concerned in this writing with refuting the reasons for thinking this (negative reasons against the arguments) and more with positive reasons to resist this view. This gospel seems to assume the other gospels at many points, and that explains much of the differences, which fits quite well with the view that John was written to expand and explain much of what just appears in the other gospels. This often involves leaving out details that the reader would already be familiar with, and it usually also involves fuller accounts of the meaning and explanation behind some basic themes about Jesus’ identity and mission. This fits nicely with the traditional authorship of the apostle John, writing significantly later than the other gospels to expand on them regarding things they don’t cover or explain fully or things whose theological punch they don’t develop. This is so obvious to someone open to the traditional view that one must wonder how anyone can ignore this point without ignoring much of the gospel of John.

I've commented before on issues related to this, but I hadn't addressed this question directly because I think many have done so adequately throughout the blogosphere, and I didn't have anything special to offer beyond what was already being said. What I would have said was that there are many different questions involved in that question, and people might mean different things by it. Who did the actual deed? Who else was causally responsible for the deed? Who was morally responsible for the deed (which may involve different degrees or even levels of moral responsibility)? Most importantly, if you accept a divine purpose for it, then you have the question of who is the Aristotelian final cause of it (i.e. whose purposes were being fulfilled in it?).

Then Sunday, in the midst of a sermon on John 6:60-71, the head teaching elder of my congregation presented a simple biblical argument for exactly the sort of complicated picture that I thought would have had to trace out all the complex issues involved in all those questions. It's much easier than that. One expression occurs throughout the New Testament. Jesus was delivered up to be killed. It's worth looking at the specific statements about his being delivered up. Since the sermon was in a continuing series on John, the list begins there and eventually expands outward.

John 6:71 says that Judas was going to deliver him up. (Not every translation puts it that way, but that's the expression in the Greek, and the rest of the examples I give are also the same expression.) John 18:30 says that the high priestly leadership delivered him up. John 19:6 says that Pilate, against his own judgment, delivered him up (representing the Gentiles), which the gospels record alongside a fake ceremony of handwashing. Romans 4:25 says that our sins delivered him up (well, he was delivered up for our sins, but that amounts to the same thing when assigning responsibility). More strikingly, Romans 8:32 says that God delivered him up for us all. Finally, Galatians 2:20 has Paul describing the life he now lives by faith in the Son of God who "delivered himself up for me".

So who killed Jesus? The Bible teaches quite explictly that Judas of Iscariot, the Jewish leaders of the time (representing their people and the crowds calling for his death), Pilate (representing the chief Gentile authority of the time and the rule of Gentiles over Jews), every sinner, God the Father, and Jesus himself are all responsible (albeit in different ways). Those who deny that the Jews as a people are responsible for his death are denying the Christian scriptures, but that has to be taken in context with all the rest of this. It was part of God's plan, something Jesus himself willingly submitted to, because he wanted it to happen (as much as he dreaded it). As Mel Gibson realizes and expressed by having his hands do the nailing of Jim Caviezel to the cross in the film, every sinner is morally responsible for the killing of the Son of God.

This doesn't minimize the level of responsibility the Bible does assign to the Jewish people of the time (who had a communal sense of a people's responsibility for the moral failings of that people, as the prayers of Ezra and Daniel, in the ninth chapters of their respective books, reveal). Yet the perspective provided by the variety of ways the Bible talks of his being delivered up counterbalances any of that when it comes to how any Christian today should view Jewish people. Paul's heart crying out to his Jewish brethren in Romans 9 should make that obvious.

By reader request, I have some comments on some arguments against Sola Scriptura, as presented by Daniel Silliman. Here are the arguments:

1. Neither the creed-like phrase nor the doctrine of sola scriptura are found within scripture and thus must be rejected by the doctrine itself. Sola scriptra is internally unsustainable.

7. No heresy has ever been stopped by sola scriptura. Legions have been started by it.

I'll work my way through all the arguments but in a different order, starting with the most glaring errors and then seeing how thinking more carefully about those will help with the more subtle problems.

I've been in a discussion with someone about the Gospel of John and whether his use of 'the Jews' in a largely negative way is anti-Semitic. See Hyleninja's post on Mel Gibson's upcoming film for a good discussion from someone with absolutely nothing at stake about why it's pretty silly to say the Synoptic gospels are anti-Semitic. [For some reason I can't get the link to work to go to the post itself. If this happens to you, scroll down to the post directly above Feb 13. Oh, and Mark at Hyleninja is not the same person I've been discussing John with, though he was at least less willing to defend John on this matter and may have similar views.]

Here's my response to the charge against the Fourth Gospel, with specific reference to the comments of the person I'm responding to:

C.S. Lewis famously presents a Lord-Liar-Lunatic trilemma in Mere Christianity. I've long been familiar with some of the responses to that argument, and I've given my own version of it that deals with at least some of those problems (among the other things I deal with in that piece). What I didn't know is that Lewis himself had a more sophisticated development of the argument that includes some responses to the most common reasons I've heard from people who think his argument is fallacious. It's even in God in the Dock, which I have on my shelf but never got around to looking at very carefully due to being thoroughly unimpressed with his arguments in Mere Christianity and one view he made clear at the end of The Last Battle.

Well, a friend of mine was looking for his essay "What Are We to Make of Jesus?", and I found it for her, figuring it might be worth reading. I was actually fairly impressed. Check it out.

By tying the argument that Jesus claimed divinity to a wider range of sayings and actions in the gospels (though not wide enough, given what he could do), he makes a stronger argument that Jesus really did claim to be God, which some people have tried to undermine to get out of the argument. He also makes clearer what issue is at stake -- if Jesus really said these things and meant them, and it wasn't true, he was nuts, but that doesn't seem very likely given how insightful his moral teachings were about the human condition. That means either he made it up, which is also unlikely for someone with such great moral sensitivity, or he had good reasons for thinking it's true, which is hard to fathom unless it is true. I don't think all those steps were filled in in the Mere Christianity version of the argument.

I've been recruited to talk about God and Morality at a Christian conference for college students this weekend. I've consolidate and updated some of my previous class notes on this issue on Moral Arguments for God's Existence for an introductory course dealing in part with God's existence and then a more ethics-focused discussion of issues about God as a Basis for Morality in an introductory ethics class. So here are my newly organized, though largely not new, notes consolidating the two, sometimes simplifying and sometimes expanding.

I've often heard young-earth creationists complain to old-earthers that their view doesn't fit with the biblical chronology of sin and death. After all, death came as a result of sin in Genesis. Yet the old-earth view that our best science teaches says that animals were around and dying before there were any humans. Rusty Lopez and New Covenant addresses these concerns in an even-handed way that seems to me to be faithful to the scripture.

Romans 5 talks about human death as a result of human sin. It talks about the death that comes from sin entering the world through, of all things, sin. It doesn't necessarily mean that death for anything other than humans came that way. Death spread to all humans because all sinned. The topic is sin and justification. Then he turns to Romans 8, where Paul says that all creation was subjected to futility by God. It doesn't say this was an effect of sin after sin occurred. It just says that God did this and that the hope of the gospel is looking forward to a time when that is over. Given God's foreknowledge of sin and sovereign plan to restore all things at the end, the futility implied by the laws of physics could very well have been in place even before human sin.

So it seems the theological objection from animal death before human sin does little to outweigh the clear scientific reasons to believe the earth is much older than young-earthers want to admit.

It's nice to see someone expressing my thoughts so well. David Heddle has a good post on why the insistence on what too many people in Reformed circles call "literal six days" is just silly. (Side note: for why I think this phrase is inappropriate, see my comments on David's blog. There's more on that in the extended entry below, but I suppose an explanation of my choice of words is important here if you just want to see a briefer picture and then continue reading.)

Quick summary (from the post, the comments, and the follow-up post):
1. Reformed thought generally frowns on what is often called over-literalness (though I would question that term) in other places.
2. Some of these people take it so far that they would have to exclude revered church fathers and Francis Shaeffer from being deacons.
3. It's a "misguided attempt to combat evolution" but not necessary and relatively modern as a plank of legalism.
4. Old-earth views don't necessarily (or even usually) deny inerrantism but are too often treated as if they do.
5. "Regarding the literality of Genesis: Perhaps the most important verse in Genesis is the first Messianic prophecy of Gen. 3:15. That critical verse, as we all know, was not fulfilled literally. Christ defeated Satan on the cross, but He did not literally crush Satan's head nor did Satan strike His heel." (Though, again, I would say that within the account of the prophecy the terms are being used literally -- i.e. it really is a picture of one person crushing someone else's head, but the prophecy itself isn't trying to describe physical events but spiritual realities.)
6. Then he gives some reasons not to bother wasting your time with the so-called creation science sites, which I won't bother wasting my own time (and yours if you, like me, don't need further reason to distrust them) by repeating here. If you're interested in his reasons, read his post.

I'm largely in agreement with all that. I do want to give some more depth (than my above-linked comments gave) to my big pet peeve with virtually everyone who comments on this issue.

This email discussion is continuing. I got a response back, I've sent off a response to that, and I've gotten another one back already. It's venturing into broader issues of interpretation and inerrancy. I've included it in the original file and in the Arguments About Sex and Sexuality collection.

Update: Now that I've got an extended entry feature, the second part of the file linked to above is here. The first part is in the previous post.

I received an email from someone who I assume would prefer to remain anonymous, in response to some of what I've said about homosexuality. His basic thrust was that he couldn't understand how I could take passages about homosexuality literally to conclude that there's something bad about homosexuality despite all the evidence against that view, especially when I wouldn't take other passages literally, e.g. Joshua with the sun standing still in the sky and Genesis 9 with its once-common interpretation that the curse on Canaan justified slavery of all blacks. There are so many things with this argument that I find mistaken that it wasn't easy to work through it step-by-step, but here's my response.

Update: I've added the response into the extended entry now that I'm on Movable Type and can do such things.

Scientists have discovered that feelings of eeriness and religious experiences can correlate with very sounds lower than we can hear. According to NPR today, a man working on a house alone saw what looked like a ghost. The next day he discovered an electric tool buzzing on its own. He investigated and found a fan operating at a very low frequency. When he turned it off, the tool stopped. Apparently this was also the reason for his ghost sighting. British scientists have investigated the effects of infrasound at musical performances. Parts of the music with infrasound notes correlated with experiences of "sorrow, coldness, anxiety and shivers down the spine". The NPR story described a different experiment. There was a strong correlation between those in an audience who near infrasound projectors and those who reported strange or spiritual sensations during the performance.

What do we conclude? Those who are quick to dismiss any reality to spiritual claims say: According to The Guardian's story, "natural sources of infrasound - wind, air conditioning systems and traffic for example - could possibly explain why there were persistent reports of hauntings in some buildings." That doesn't bother me. At atheists.about.com, however, we find a stronger stance. "It disproves that old idea that there are some things that science cannot and will not ever be able to explain, one of which is often the strange sensations people have in some circumstances. Religious feelings are not immune to careful, scientific investigation - we just need the right sorts of things to look for, first."

This is doubly fallacious. First off, you can't disprove the idea that there are some things science can't explain by showing that one such thing is now explained. There still may be lots of other things science can't explain, for all this argument has shown. Second, as one of the people interviewed on the NPR spot this afternoon pointed out, all this shows is a correlation. This gives us one occasion for religious experiences. It doesn't show that it's the cause. I can think of a number of possible scenarios for this. He suggested that maybe we're always unconsciously having religious experiences, and this just brings it into our conscious awareness. Another explanation would be that these infrasound effects bring us into a connection with spiritual realities that we're otherwise not aware of. A third possibility is that this is an effect that leads to a similar sensation to those caused by spiritual realities. One way or the other, the conclusion doesn't follow. It's a possible explanation for some religious experiences, as the Guardian story said, but it's a bit beyond the evidence to say much else for sure.

Here's an excellent review of Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code by Craig Blomberg, one of the most responsible of contemporary evangelical biblical scholars. It challenges a number of the claims made in the book that even the most liberal biblical scholars would agree are simply invented by Brown. If you're going to read the book, read this review first (and probably again when you're done, perhaps even referring to it as you go). In the process, Blomberg gives some useful information about the current state of historical work on Jesus and gives some worthwhile corrections to numerous falsehoods that are commonly repeated but aren't supported by serious research. It's worth reading even if you don't intend to read the novel.

Almost a year ago, Michael Crichton gave a heated condemnation of the scientific community for beefing up low-standard research with rhetoric, computer models based on equations whose variables we can't even guess at in an educated way, and conducting heresy trials against those who challenged the research. The targets? Carl Sagan's claims about the certainty of extraterrestrial life, the probability of serious nuclear winter in the event of a nuclear war, and now global warming.

What amazed me throughout the whole thing is how much he sounded like Philip Johnson or Michael Behe in their criticisms of neo-Darwinism. I doubt he'd allow the comparison, but his language is about the same, saying that consensus is a ploy when there's no argument, that those who question the consensus are belittled and called unscientific (note: I have seen Daniel Dennett do both these things), etc. To those who know anything about philosophy of science: How well does this comparison hold up? Are there crucial differences, or has Crichton given the intelligent design movement more ammunition?

Last Wednesday, I posted a link to a fascinating discussion of how many ancestors the average American of European descent would have had in the Middle Ages. The answer was all of them who have living descendants today. Those who missed it should read it. It's fun.

What I've been thinking about it what this means for the common claim that Matthew and Luke's genealogies of Jesus are contradictory. I guess the assumption of that claim is that there's only one genealogical path between and two people who have the ancestor/descendant relation. Given the common Hebrew practice of including certain ancestors in a list and not others, sometimes for theological purposes (e.g. 14 generations as a multiple of 7, the desire to show legitimate kingship, or emphasis on Gentiles and sinners in the ancestry), these two facts alone could explain why there could be two genealogies that are so different. The common responses by evangelicals to this issue deal with some specific issues (e.g. Levirate marriage with a biological father and a legal father), but I've always thought that they missed this obvious general point.

It's always struck me as strange that Matthew, who spends so much time explaining old covenant fulfillment in Jesus as Messiah, would make up a genealogy, or anything for that matter. Similar, it would be a little odd that Luke, who made such a great effort to investigate matters (Luke 1:1-4), would have made it up. If the traditional authorship is right, Luke would have had access to Jesus' brother Judas and could have checked on some of it, and Matthew would have known Mary even. I'm aware that many modern scholars reject the only reliable witness we have to who put these gospels together, so they dodge this point, but that's just poor historical method.

Those interested in Christian apologetics and theology can check out my sites on those topics:

http://web.syr.edu/~jrpierce/apologetics.htm
http://web.syr.edu/~jrpierce/theology.htm

There's probably enough there to offend almost anyone.

Having taught this semester on feminist ethical theory for the first time, I've been thinking about the various kinds and motivations for feminisms. My recent venture into Ken Wilber's world of color-terms for waves of value change over time has given me some categories for thinking about these (see my Dec 5 posting on Wilber for more on the color terms).

Pre-Gilligan feminisms were generally motivated by orange concerns. Orange involves such Enlightenment ideas as equality, progress, and achievement. This led to treating men and women as if there's no real difference, expecting women to do everything men do and encouraging women to break out of traditional roles. Ifeminism is a good example of the only really consistent feminism based on pure orange principles. It insists on equality for women but not to the point of being unfair to men (and thus, interestingly, opposes affirmative action for women). If you're going to stick with pure orange motivations, the ifeminists (who also call themselves libertarian feminists) are the way to go. I've found many worthwhile commentaries and insightful perceptions coming from this crowd.

Finally, green allows real sensitivity to women's values, lives, ways of developing knowledge, ways of arriving at moral choices, etc. Green is the multicultural, pluralistic value of seeking and accepting the other. This allowed people like Carol Gilligan to say that women don't need to be forced into male molds but should be allowed to be women.

What interests me most about the green motivation is that it allows back in some traditional (i.e. blue) views about gender roles but from a green motivation, which according to Wilber is two colors more mature than blue. Unfortunately, it also allows some really dangerous attitudes when combined with red (egocentric and power-motivated values). When the red values lead to a reaction against those who wrongly or ignorantly mistreat women, anger results and fuels a reaction against such people. The green values led to the original perception, but the red fuels the reaction, and men or some group in power is seen as the enemy. This actually leads to abandoning the general green outlook, since now we have a group that isn't welcomed into the pluralistic,