Recently in Apologetics Category

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.

Scientists keep discovering the number 10^122 occurring in mathematical relationships in the natural world [hat tip: GeekPress]. The last time this happened, it was when 10^4 kept appearing in both electromagnetic and strong/weak nuclear contexts, and it turns out that it signaled a common relationship between the two. So scientists are concluding that the best explanation is some common, underlying factor that explains why the same ratio keeps coming up.

Now here's what I'm wondering. If we're just one universe among a huge number, and the constants in each universe are different, then we just happen to be the universe with these constants. So why assume some common explanation for why the constants are the ones we've got? Doesn't the multiple universe explanation make the search for a common explanation otiose? At least that's what you'll hear if you try to make an inference to the best explanation when the constants happen to be in the narrow range that allow for the development of life. So what's different about this inference to the best explanation when both arguments involve what cosmological constants we happen to find ourselves with?

[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