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Beware: Possible hint of suggestive imagery. Not sure.

There appears to be a storm spilling out of its teacup and soiling a perfectly good saucer all because of some poorly chosen stock photography. The Democratic Alliance Student Somethingorother have published a poster which has been described by some as ‘shocking’. It features a beefy white guy hugging a non-beefy non-white non-male person who may or may not be indecently dressed. I for one would like the guy to put on a shirt, because really, some of us struggle to put on muscle mass. It’s unkind.

Anyway, the poster is so shocking that I am completely willing to post it on this site, which will automatically email it to my mother (hi mom!).Shocking No, it really isn’t shocking at all.

While some writers have intentionally misunderstood the meaning of the poster for comedic effect (it does invite some ridicule unfortunately), it quite clearly means to communicate that the DASO aims at a non-racial future in which the scene pictured will illicit no surprise. It’s an entirely praiseworthy message, although depending on the context, bumping into people apparently that undressed will hopefully always cause a double-take.

In spite of it not being any more shocking than day-time television, the Christian Democratic Party went to town on it. Theunis Botha, clearly unfamiliar with the extremes, claims that it is ‘distasteful to the extreme’, and that it promotes sexual immorality and promiscuity. He adds:

“In a country with high levels of Aids and an overdose of crime, especially the high incidence of farm murders this year, this poster sends the opposite message to the country than needed.” (Source: Mail & Guardian)

Of course, this is ridiculously far from reality. The couple isn’t doing anything lewd, and who says that what they may or may not be planning won’t be taking place within the bonds of holy matrimony? There is not much immoral or voyeuristic about the image either, because even though it is slightly racier than Jacob Zuma’s last election poster, the couple in view might easily be on the beach; there is nothing more revealing here than is on display onyour average day out with your kids to the seaside. The poster certainly isn’t advocating sex or spreading STDs, and it doesn’t promote promiscuity, unless seeing biceps the size of my thigh sends you into an uncontrollable frenzy. It may encourage farm murders, but I have yet to spot the connection.

As a Christian, I’m extremely disappointed that a Christian party would try to score cheap points against a rival on such flimsy moralistic grounds. Is it really serving any sort of discussion in this country to oppose a message of racial harmony because of an excessive amount of arm skin? Is it really necessary to radicalise your disagreement so that vaguely tittilating imagery must be described as ‘distasteful to the extreme’? In connection with a poster about racism, must you bring up farm murders, the big white-advocacy issue of our day?

I wish Christian parties were rather at the cutting edge of positive change, good ideas for promoting peace and reconciliation, for combatting poverty and so on. Instead we get this. It’s annoying that in response to a poster encouraging unity any Christian politician should be leading the polarising, petty, divisive rhetoric against it. The first step to overcoming our national problems just really isn’t the banning of pictures of hugging.

http://mg.co.za/uploads/2012/01/24/daso.jpg

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Prayer and Politics

Jack Bloom, the Democratic Alliance leader in the Gauteng legislature, recently published an opinion piece encouraging prayer as a means of moral regeneration that perhaps had the power to galvanise people to action in a way that politicians could not. Drawing anecdotally upon prayer-led regenerative movements in history and some of the changes that they had a role in shaping, he rounds off with the suggestion that conservative religious institutions should perhaps return to a position of greater moral and social authority. You can read his piece at http://bit.ly/wKjMmh.

A friend of mine, Jacques Rousseau, took issue with him, pointing out that anecdotal evidence of the sort presented does not actually prove any connection between prayer, religious revivals, and especially the change that has supposedly resulted from them. Any number of factors might have had a far greater role in, say, abolition of slavery, than religious movements. Jacques also gives evidence that secular countries tend to have a better ethical record than religious ones. You can read his riposte at http://bit.ly/yQ4x3E.

[Jack has since responded (http://bit.ly/Ar9BC9) arguing among other things that good secularism is still trading upon religious moral capital. This is a common retort, and one about which we'll have to wait and see, I suppose. I personally doubt it is as simple as that. Anyway, the exchange is interesting and worth following.]

I would like to add a couple of points to the debate, perhaps we’ll call it one for each side.

Firstly, as an endorsement of Jack Bloom’s sentiments, I think that prayer can play an important role. Of course, much depends on addressing the true God and in the right manner, which is by no means a guarantee, but even from a purely pragmatic (virtually secular) perspective, it can be important. The reason for this is that prayer has a good chance of promoting humility. It is perfectly possible in the hands of the worst sort of people for prayer to be one more tool in service of hubris (take for example Jesus’ caricature of that Pharisee who prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men — robbers, evildoers, adulterers…” [Luke 18:11]). Yet prayer is per definition an act of casting oneself upon what one believes to be a higher power. This ought to breed a sense of perspective.

Humility is certainly something that is needed in this country, from the top down. In fact, Jim Collins, a researcher of organisational change, has written identifying hubris as the first of five steps that successful companies take on the road to utter failure. Restoration of humility and renouncing of complacency are the only cure (http://amzn.to/UctDR). If prayer can play a role in growing humility, I say advocate it. If people end up praying earnestly to the right God who then turns out to exist and care, all the better.

Secondly, as a caution to Jack Bloom, in particular concerning his opinion that religions should wield more social and moral clout, I would be concerned that it makes all the difference who those religious are. The good sort are great, but the bad can be really bad. I would hate to be taking cues from the frequently confused type, but taking moral guidance from some of them would be hell on earth. Some confuse Sharia law for morality, or the ‘God inspired’ hatred of gays.

The Greek philosophers rated monarchy as the best system of government, if the king were good and noble, but had the potential to be the worst if the king were wicked (democracy, in their view was the least desirable because it had the least potential for going wrong, or for getting anything worthwhile done — hopefully they would like what we’ve done with it). Handing moral responsibility over to the religious could have good effect if they were wise, benevolent, principled, and selfless. But I don’t fancy the chances.

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Paul (the Apostle)

I’ve been having a discussion with some American pentecostal types in which the issue of apostles has come up. I’ve written before about why I think Apostles like Paul no longer exist, but this time I was asking myself again why Paul isn’t a precedent for there being Apostles beyond the original Twelve (or 14).

The problem is that when Judas dies, the other Apostles insist that the replacement must have been with them from the beginning (from John’s baptism) and he must have been a witness of the resurrection. Clearly no one can any longer fulfil either of these qualifications, and this is one reason why big-A Apostleship is off the cards. And yet Paul also failed to fulfil them, but he clearly was an Apostle of the highest order. Does this mean that those qualifications were not so important after all? Can people these days still be Paul-like Apostles?

Well with respect to the requirement to be a witness of the resurrection, Acts goes to great lengths to show that Paul did fulfil it, albeit via a loophole. Acts recounts three times that he was graced with a special post-resurrection appearance of Jesus (which Paul refers to as his ‘unnatural birth’, ektromati, ‘by miscarriage’ or ‘at an unnatural time’). This was witnessed publicly, but its repetition in Acts emphasises how important (and unusual) it was.

The other qualification is simpler. Paul does not meet it at all. So the question is Why not? God doesn’t do things by accident, so if there was a reason for the two qualifications given in Acts, there must be a reason for a clearly legitimate Apostle not to meet them in Acts. Indeed, the fact that Paul recognised that his Apostleship was ‘abnormally born’ is an acknowledgement that there is both a proper way (the two qualifications) and that he didn’t follow it.

The answer to this problem is, I think, this. Once the Twelve Apostles recognised Paul’s status as one of their order, they nevertheless saw that he had a different role to theirs. They were to serve the Jewish church, and Paul was sent to establish Gentile converts. There was an acknowledged difference in his sending. It is the difference in his sending that seems to me to be the motivation for the difference in his calling. Paul began his career as a famous enemy of the Christian movement, tirelessly working to wipe it out. The Gentiles began the book of Acts occupying their long-standing historical position as unclean enemies of the Jews. By the end of the book of Acts, Jewish and Gentile churches have been established and united, and the Gentiles even prove to be the more willing recipients of the Christian message. What better person to choose to instigate the conversion of enemies to friends than the man who was initially the foremost enemy of the Christian message?

So the choice of Paul to be the Apostle to the Gentiles was reasonable and poetic, and it accounts for why he had to be chosen outside of the normal pattern. His election to Apostleship was picturing the work that he was being called to: enemy Gentiles were going to be made friends (outside the normal Jewish pattern of circumcision and submission to Torah). The surprising nature of Paul’s conversion and calling to Apostleship probably had a preparatory role for his mission.

This might seem to provide a precedent for other ‘abnormally born’ Apostles, but actually it doesn’t. As I’ve said, Paul acknowledges that there is a proper time and pattern for Apostles that even he didn’t fit, and that he is an exception, a miscarriage. Secondly, the exception was made for reasonable purposes: the inauguration of Gentile mission; this was a one-time event, so there is no reason to expect that any more exceptions to the rule in the future. Thirdly, as my other post on apostles argues, Paul himself does not encourage the church to seek the office of Apostle, but only the second order teaching ministry, i.e. prophecy. So, unless Jesus personally appears to you and gives you good reasons why you should be starting some new chapter in redemption history, you should probably not put yourself in the shoes of Paul or the Twelve. Call your office something else.

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Paul Movie (the alien, not the saint)

Paul MovieSimon Pegg and Nick Frost have been responsible for some entertaining stuff. Their breakthrough series, Spaced, was excellent and their movies have been pretty good too. The video store box of Paul promised that this was not only a must-see, but also a must-own. So I took a shot.

My expectations were pretty low, and Frost and Pegg just about managed to live up to them. There were a fair number of laughs (‘No, Boomer, it is forbidden’ was a high point) and it was watchable enough from start to finish. They had also secured a very respectable supporting cast. However the film obviously developed out of a gist of an idea (“What if some sci-fi nerds actually run in to the original Roswell alien and have to help him get home?”) rather than a fully formed story, and so translating it into 90 minutes of film unfortunately led them to cut-and-paste their handful of good ideas into a cliched and predictable format. The humour relies far too often on people saying naughty words or trundling through standard situational set-pieces. If you’ve seen more than one movie in your life, you know how it’s going to end.

What irked the most, however, was the polemic against Christianity. I don’t mind atheist anti-religious commentary per se, and in a film about two good-natured Brits adrift in the American Mid-West (I think?), I suppose religious themes were an obvious choice. It’s just that the way it was done was an insult to intelligence.

The three characters on the poster arrive in a caravan park that happens to be owned by a fanatical right-wing Christian—complete with rifle, pictures of Jesus in his house, and repeated calls to Bible study—and his beautiful-but-one-eyed daughter. Through circumstance, she has to come along with them. Somehow evolution comes up, leading to the daughter babbling about the world being 4,000 years old, etc. etc (I think even the most young-earthiest Christians argue for 50% longer than that). At this point, Paul the alien comes out of hiding, downloads all of his knowledge about the universe into her head, and frees her from her religious ignorance. She discovers with relief that she can now curse (hence the reliance on swearing humour), fornicate and so on. They generously claim that Paul’s existence doesn’t disprove all notions of god, just the Judeo-Christian ideas. Paul also uses his special alien powers to take her eye deformity upon himself and conquer it, healing her and thereby showing that she has received full ‘sight’ (and probably that you, like Paul, can be good without God. Or something).

I appreciate the attempt at padding deepening the storyline with social commentary. But what’s so especially irritating about all of this is that they construct the straw-manniest of Christian opponents and then proceed to knock it over and ridicule it and draw moral conclusions from it on the basis of science-fiction. ‘My alien says your religion is stupid’.

Headscratch

*blink*

There are so many interesting and funny and true things that could be said about religion in the West, or in favour of atheism, or even just in exploration of the consequences of having found aliens. Instead they went lazy and cheap, as they did with rest of the story, and it utterly ruins whatever good ideas provoked them to start writing in the first place.

You made me wish I’d rented Captain America or Harry Potter 8, Pegg and Frost. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

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Possible Worlds

Passing judgement is taboo in many circles these days, with many denying that we have the right or the ability to tell others what they ought to do or think. Two thousand year old wisdom lends some (limited) support to this view, saying ‘Judge not lest you be judged’.

The reason for this perspective is not hard to understand. Someone is only equipped to be a judge if they have sufficient knowledge and experience to know what are the relevant facts, and if they have keen enough insight / foresight to know what is the correct verdict. We allow judges to preside over courtrooms because they know the law better than anyone else, they have served with distinction for a long enough period, and because we don’t have a better alternative. Judgement requires superior knowledge and perspective, and while professional judges may do well enough in their limited field, most people do not possess these qualities about most things. So we rightly give them flak when they presume to try.

It is all the more remarkable to me, therefore, that the same species that produces Jerry Springer and MacDonald’s and automatically flushing toilets feels capable of judging God. I don’t mean that we’re always critical of God—sometimes we pass judgement with the best of intentions—I just mean that we somehow imagine that we have the brain-power to crunch the numbers involved in such a judgement, or the platform from which to gain the proper perspective.

God Should Choose Everyone
For example—and those who don’t know or care about Calvinism can skip ahead here—I was having a discussion with my wife earlier in the week about the age-old complaint that if God is the one who chooses whom He will save (rather than we being the ones who decisively choose Him), then why doesn’t He just save everyone (the implication being that God should save everyone if it’s just up Him).

Romans 9 has some answers to that objection that I’m not going to go into here, but that chapter also includes the following line, which seems at first blush to be the desperate retort of an authoritarian who doesn’t like the way that the conversation is going:

You will say to me then, ‘Why does He still find fault? For who can resist His will?’ But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? (Romans 9:19f)

However, Paul’s response is not a dismissive ‘because I said so’. He’s merely pointing out that the things under discussion require from us a capacity that we can never possess. So consider the objection that God should save everyone if He is able. This requires of us the ability to correctly imagine a world history in which everyone becomes a genuine believer. What are the implications for freedom, faith, discipleship? Would there be adversity? Would testing be experienced as genuine? Would we become the kind of creatures that we should? Would we learn to know the things about God that are most important (‘mercy’ in Romans 9 thinking)? We may guess at the answers to such questions, but we simply cannot construct a world in our minds in which we can fully grasp and correctly judge the effect of changing so crucial a variable. Even time travellers in the stories only find out the effect of their changes on history once they go back to the future; who has the power to predict such things? Who are we to answer back indeed?

Universe-sized Number-crunching
I find this sort of judgement to be especially prevalent in atheist rhetoric. I’ve heard it argued on many occasions that a world presided over by Zeus or Ra or Yahweh would look markedly different from our own. I have no quibble with the idea that ruling powers of different character would produce worlds of different kinds, but I have significant problems with the idea that people are able to imagine these worlds in any sort of helpful way. The idea that anyone is capable of fully capturing in their minds a picture of the ‘world as it is’ and another picture of ‘the world as it would be’ if there were an interventionist God (or whatever) in charge is absurd (not forgetting that these pictures also require a complete comprehension of the deity in question). Satisfying yourself that God doesn’t exist because you know how things would be if He did is a self-deceit that would be best abandoned sooner rather than later.

Show Thyself
If you do insist upon trying to reimagine the universe in this way, turning the ‘god variables’ on and off to see what happens, I would humbly suggest the following for your consideration, as I believe that this is one misunderstanding of how God (if He exists) operates / ought to operate in our world (if He does). People object that if God is there, why does He hide himself? Why not schedule coffee with me next Tuesday, God, and settle this existence thing once and for all? Perhaps make a TV appearance on Jerry Springer? [That show has to be cancelled by now, but I'm not going to check].

Of course there’s a sense in which this is a valid complaint, and must be partially true. If the Bible is in any way historical, then God has made some miraculous shows of power to people in the past, and could do so for the cameras (although would we really believe our eyes?). On the other hand, maybe He’s not so much hidden as we are blind to his presence. Or let me put it another way.

We conceive of the world as ‘natural’ and God as ‘supernatural’. The world gets on with things by itself, and God is somewhere nearby looking in, tinkering now and then, and just generally keeping out of sight to see what we’ll do. We conceive of the ‘natural world’ as an environment in which we (for the sake of argument) demand that God appears. I do not think that this is remotely correct. The world is more like a tool than an environment. The universe is not a stage on which God should appear; theologically, God is the environment in which the universe exists.

What this means practically is that the ordinary, day-to-day operation of the ‘natural world’ is the normal tool that God uses to get His work done; the miraculous is not. Miracles serve a significant purpose of their own, but God gets His work done without them. The book of Esther is dominated by this theme, that ordinary schemes and coincidences produce a remarkable deliverance—God’s bidding is done even though His name, His voice, and His supernature are never once invoked in Esther’s pages.

Likewise, today we call the conversion of an unbeliever to Christianity a ‘miracle’ and it is, but it rarely comes about through means other than ordinary people talking to each other and one of them changing his mind. In my childhood we had many occasions in which we had no food, and our prayers were answered by friends giving us some of theirs. It was an amazing answer to prayer on one hand, but as ordinary as you like on the other.

So perhaps God is disinclined to make a miraculous show of His existence to every skeptic, and His reasons for that are known to Him. But perhaps the search for God is being undertaken by people who are expecting to find Him hidden in the environment, rather than seeing His daily use of the ‘ordinary world’ as a tool. It’s not that He’s hard to see; it’s just that the blind are pretty bad at spotting much of anything.

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Little Grey Man

Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know. — Socrates

People who do maths at university have told me that the stuff that they teach you at school is all wrong. It doesn’t really work like they tell you it does at school, but (presumably) teaching people to work effectively with wrong principles is easier than the truth.

Nicholson

The Truth. You can't handle it.

I had very little idea what wrong maths was on about at school, so who knows whether it was wise to keep the truth from us in that way? Would we even have noticed?

If I may digress for a moment, I wonder why they even bother teaching maths the way that they do at high school? I remember my teacher had a ‘motivational’ wall chart that listed all the professions for which maths was necessary. ‘DJ’ was a stand-out propaganda piece. Very few professions actually require knowledge of trigonometry, least of all a human ‘shuffle’ function for dance albums. I guess once you start lying about how maths works it becomes easier to start lying about all sorts of things. Who would have thought that maths was such a moral grey-area?

Given that many of the students in our degree programme can’t structure an argument and don’t know anything about logic, I can think of some skills that you do regularly use in real life that might be a better use of the teaching time (and could employ maths in a fun way).

All this is by way of illustration of something else that arose in discussion with friends. There was some or other difficult idea about which it was clear that the truth was grey and uncertain. This raised the question: does a minister teach the complicated grey version on Sunday, or is it better to portray a simplified version in tidy black-and-white, in order to inspire more confidence?

Most ministers seem to opt for the latter, but I don’t think we should, certainly not as often as we do. We turn Christians with whom we disagree into heroes or heretics (John Calvin fits into either camp, depending on who you ask). We turn issues of debate and careful reflection into drawn battle-lines. As the illustration about maths teachers was meant to illustrate, perhaps thinking of our listeners as fragile and childlike and in need of protection from the grown-up truth is unnecessary? At least maths teachers are actually teaching children, and their subject gets forgotten before anyone reaches adulthood. But polarising moral and spiritual issues? Of course there are dangers in the grey areas too, and we mustn’t become lost in a sea of relativity and doubt, but I think — with Socrates — we should acknowledge that learning wisdom involves acknowledging what we know with some certainty (what is actually black and actually white), but also what we don’t.

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Bullies

McFly fixes BiffI read a thought-provoking article last night from the ever-interesting but expletive-filled comedy site cracked.com. The article is written by John Cheese and called ‘5 bad ideas for dealing with bullies that you learned from the movies‘. On the basis of his seemingly vast experience of childhood bullies, he explains how inadequate is the advice that TV and movies dispense regarding this problem.

What emerges from the article is primarily that the entertainment industry preaches that fighting back is the solution, and once the bully is humiliated or punched hard enough, he’ll learn that his bullying doesn’t pay and fly right. The reality, as John points out, is that bullies are bullies most frequently because of severe emotional damage caused by abusive homes and the like. Getting the weak, wimpy kid to fight the bully only leads to the bully escalating the violence required to ensure that his ego suffers no further, and having taken beatings from a heated-up adult at home, he’s really not so fussed at being jabbed by a delicate little nerd at school.

In short, Hollywood wants to inspire us to find the strength inside ourselves to vanquish the enemies that stand against us, and as soon as the downtrodden rise up against an oppressor, the shackles are thrown off. In reality, it is dangerous and damaging advice that can only make the problem worse. The social, economic, and moral problems that produce abusive homes and hammer children into bullies are deap-seated, horrific problems without easy solutions. Children who have been beaten and humiliated into monstrous shapes at home and who are taking a swing at some dignity and power at school aren’t going to be beaten into a cure for their damage.

This depressing reminder has been brought to in the interests of pointing out how much we love to tell ourselves that we have the power to conquer the world’s problems with heroic swipes of our metaphorical fists. We’d far rather tell ourselves that the world’s gob-smackingly huge problems can be solved in an afternoon than realise our helplessness (or perhaps start the painful incremental changes needed to turn such juggernauts around).

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‘Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes’: Bit of a Joke

Book coverI bought a book lately called ‘Plato and Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes’ by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein. It’s quite a fun read, although as sympathetic to my evangelical convictions as you’d expect from two Harvard grads from New England. In spite of anticipating some light-hearted hostility, I was nevertheless a little surprised by the ‘Philosophy of Religion’ section. Not because it is surprisingly offensive — it isn’t — but more because it is surprisingly inaccurate.

Pascal’s Wager

The first quibble I had with the book had to do with Pascal’s Wager, about which I have written before (when Dawkins got it wrong). Cathcart and Klein say the following:

‘The seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that deciding whether or not to believe in God is essentially a wager. If we choose to behave as if there is a God and we get to the end and it turns out there isn’t, it’s not such a big deal. Well, maybe we’ve lost the ability to thoroughly enjoy the Seven Deadly Sins, but that’s small potatoes compared to the alternative. If we bet there isn’t a God, and get to the end only to find out there is a God, we’ve lost the Big Enchilada, eternal bliss. Therefore, according to Pascal, it is a better strategy to live as if there is a God. This is known to academics as “Pascal’s Wager.” To the rest of us, it’s known as hedging your bets.’ (Pg 100)

Calling the idea represented above ‘Pascal’s Wager’ is a bit like calling Hamlet a book about whether or not to commit suicide. As I tried to point out in my post about Dawkins’ objection to it, Pascal’s Wager does have to do with betting on belief in God as the best strategy, but Pascal himself immediately warns that it is not possible to fake it, which brings him to the actual content of his wager.

God is not likely to be fooled by bet-hedging faith based entirely on greed. You have to throw in your lot wholeheartedly one way or another, and reason, says Pascal, has no solution to the problem of whether or not God and His promises are true. This is why Pascal’s discourse on the subject rather aims at urging people to experience the Christian life to see whether it is worth committing to. He is actually wagering that living as a Christian (as a sort of a trial period) — though it seems like a terrible life of restriction and sacrifice — will prove it to be the better bet even in the here and now, which removes a significant obstacle to wholehearted conversion. Perhaps the wager is more like trying to convince Cadillac drivers to buy an electric car (which promises to be rubbish but ends up being fantastic to drive, if only you’ll get behind the wheel).

Apples with Apples

My next issue with the book arose out of a Sam Harris quote, which is as follows:

‘Tell a devout Christian his wife is cheating on him, or a frozen yoghurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anybody else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book that he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity that will punish him by fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.’ (Pg 99-100)

Harris has made a living out of publishing clever jibes against religion for a popularist atheist movement, and I suppose (if I’m being generous) this quote is important to the extent that it captures the unfortunate mindlessness exhibited by some Christians. However, I think this quote is actually deeply unfair if applied to Christianity in general, and not on the grounds that some might give, i.e. that other Christian groups have abandoned the Bible’s ‘incredible claims’.

It is unfair because it obscures the fact that different types of belief require different types of evidence. Belief in superpowered dessert treats requires paradigm-shifting empirical evidence. Belief that my wife loves me probably requires some evidence (or at least absence of evidence to the contrary), but some  non-evidential trust. The belief that I love my wife while we’re fighting requires still different ratios of evidence, trust and conviction on my part.

Belief in Jesus is not a matter of swallowing a series of fantastical stories without questioning. Our faith — as we make no end of prostesting — is a matter of relationship. It comes about through being convinced that the Biblical view of the world is true; through being convinced that the historical evidence for the life and resurrection of Jesus is plausible enough; and through no small measure of belief that one has had the subjective experience of being met and called by God Himself. There is no evidence for this latter belief, although it forms the most significant part of conversion. So consider the following as an alternative analogy to frozen yoghurt:

Jane gets to know a family in her neighbourhood whose son is away at war. She learns about the son from his parents, she sees pictures, hears of his past and so on. Eventually Jane decides to write to him. He writes back, and in time they embark on a long-distance relationship. Although there are many risks involved, they decide that they love each other, and get engaged. His letters include remarkable tales of bravery and selflessness, and promises of a happy life together once the war is over. The end.

On the basis of this story, I’d like to ask Samharrisites a few questions:

  • What evidence does Jane have that they have fallen in love other than that she has personal experience of it and assurances from him? What proof should she demand? Is her trust in their relationship a fiction because they’ve never met?
  • Is it OK for her to base her trust in his character on the testimony of his family and his writings? Or is she mindlessly swallowing invisibility yoghurt by doing so?
  • If the news is quiet about the war and no tales of valour are being reported from other sources, should she believe his ‘remarkable tales’ or should she doubt him just because naysayers in her home town haven’t seen anything comparable with their own eyes?
  • If he’s long in coming home and the other boys start asking Jane out, should she break her engagement and settle for something immediate with a person she doesn’t love so well?
  • If he never comes home at all and Jane dies a spinster, in love with some dusty old letters, does she become a tragic figure and a wasted life? Or is her love and lifelong faithfulness a worthy enough existence?

Christianity is much more like the long-distance relationship and not at all like the evidence-demanding frozen yoghurt. We believe on the basis of God’s character, His actions in history and subjective relational experiences — a basis that cannot (like it or not) fruitfully be subjected to much scientific testing.

Jane’s story is not beyond belief. I’m sure people like her have existed in human history. We accept it readily enough without demanding proof, because we can relate it to our own experiences and to a long history of similar events. Yet real-life Janes have only one life. She does not have the luxury of assurances that things will work out or any ‘do-overs’ if they don’t. In the same way, this is our only life and this is the one-and-only human history. We don’t have the luxury of multiple worlds in which we can observe God’s track record or the likelihood of incarnations and resurrections. These things have happened in our history or not. Their uniqueness in history doesn’t make them more or less possible. So we take God at His word and wait patiently. If the naysayers are right and our faith and calling are illusions, then perhaps we’re pityable, but with Jane and with Pascal I’m convinced that even if all we have at the end is a life lived in hope and good character is was not a waste.

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Critical Scholarship Lacks Self-criticism

Some scholarly debates reach a ‘consensus’ because, although unresolved, scholars get bored of discussing them. The majority position is assumed to have won, and no one is allowed to talk about it anymore. One such view is the belief that the Old Testament is comprised of multiple sources and that little bits of the Pentateuch can be pigeon-holed into compartments labelled ‘Jahwist’, ‘Elohist’, ‘Deuteronomist’ or ‘Priestly’ (JEDP). These little bits and pieces are given their own theological motivation and an entirely new chronology. You would hope that people calling themselves ‘critical scholars’ would have some sort of evidence for their slicing up of the text, at least something that distinguishes it from what is popularly called ‘making stuff up’.

A parable:

The text: ‘It was 1920. I was walking past the German butchery on my way to my lodgings when a horse and rider galloped past me down the street. The sound of a car engine and a sudden blast from its horn startled the horse, and the rider fell from its back, injuring his wrist. I decided to get some Bratwurst.’

As an accomplished historian and source critic, I approach the text knowing that travel on foot was characteristic of pre-technological stages of human development, that domestication of horses for transportation purposes was common for three millennia or so, and that motorised transportation became popular in the mid 20th Century. Therefore, it can be noted that the above text has gone through three stages of historical development, where one tradition, which we shall call P (for Pedestrian), represents the earliest story layer dating from an age of prehistoric forms of transportation. The second source, which we shall call E (for Equine), represents a significant development in the life of this story, but an intermediate stage about which little is known for certain. What is much clearer is the work of the final editor, which we shall refer to as M (for Motorised), whose work included the provision of the late date (1920s), as well as the ‘Teutonicising’ of the text in order to turn this centuries-old travel narrative into a post-World-War-I apologia for the German nation. It is of course the character from the P source who shows sympathy by entering the German butchery after the great ‘fall’ that precedes it, and not the expected M source, but this is clearly an attempt by M to edit out the P material. He was not entirely able to do so, as the remnants of P are still discernible.

While the above is clearly ludicrous, you’d be surprised how many doctorates are handed out for work that appears to me to be only slightly better dressed than my parable. Heck, I could possibly get a doctorate simply for coining the term ‘Teutonicising’. A book I’m busy reading by Claus Westermann, purporting to explain what blessing means in the Bible, does just this sort of thing. He approached scripture with a pre-formed historical paradigm (courtesy of the generalisations of the early 20th C ‘history of religions’ school) through which the biblical material is to be assessed. In this case, it is the assumptions that a) ancient Arabic beliefs about magic spells were commonly held in the Ancient Near East, and that b) belief in magic words securing fertility for the family was the ‘original’ belief, followed later by belief that God or a god was responsible for blessing even whole nations, followed later still by the belief that blessing came via religious activities. [Do I need to point out that each of these views is held concurrently today?]

So he sets about hunting for this three-stage development through which religions are supposed to pass, and because it doesnt exist in this way in scripture, he turns to the wonder of source criticism, finding vestiges of the early beliefs ‘under the surface’ and ‘stripping away’ the work of later editors that tried to ‘theologise out’ these previous magic-words beliefs about blessing. In other words, if there’s a detail that can be made to fit with my paradigm, but seven other details that make it impossible, source criticism provides me with an academically acceptable means of ignoring the information that stands in the way of what I believe.

Take for example the story of Balaam, hired to curse the Israelites so that they would be unable to succeed militarily. Here, says Westermann, is an example of the early belief that certain people were in possession of ‘power-laden words’, people who could be hired to send evil upon others by magic. This is one of only two places that later editors were ‘unable’ to fully remove evidence of the ‘early beliefs’, showing that blessing is indeed related to magic words and ‘soul power’.

Unfortunately for Westermann, as CW Mitchell points out, the Balaam story completely opposes this view in every way. Balaam was hired because what he said was reputed always to come true. But he specifically says that he has no innate power to curse, but only to report what the gods determine to do (Numbers 23:8 ‘How can I curse those whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce those whom the LORD has not denounced?’ — this sort of thing is repeated a number of times in the story). He doesn’t attempt to curse Israel only to find his power removed or overcome. He refuses to curse Israel, because the One with the power to curse is determined to bless.

Westermann then uses this ‘evidence’ of the supposedly ‘early’ view to revise the way that the earlier texts should be understood. According to his fictional paradigm of history, magical views of blessing precede God’s promises of blessing, as so any divine promises to Abraham has to be the work of later theologians, who really ought to have known better than to buck Westermann’s system that he just made up.

If one is critical of the critics’ paradigms and divination of the seams between sources, and if one rather looks at the way that the blessing words are used in scripture (and even in non-Israelite literature from the region), it emerges that all the uses of the word actually share the same things in common: blessing is to do with receiving a good thing from God, or wishing a good thing from God upon another, or living in a state of goodness from God, all on account of a relationship between God and man. It has nothing at all to do with magical incantations from Arabia.

Imagine. Biblical scholarship that uses the Bible instead of foreign interpretive paradigms and an over-eager scalpel. A man can dream. For now I have to read the rest of Westermann.