[Industrialblog,
March 2, 2004]
Keeping it simple
The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were coincidental with the rise of blogging. One thing that occurred is that libertarians got out in front of the blogging movement, at least on the hawkish side of things. Conservatives joined in, and have many very successful blogs. But libertarians ended up with a bigger voice on the right than perhaps they've had in the past. Very successful bloggers such as Steve Den Beste, Rachel Lucas, Bill Quick and Glen Reynolds are libertarian and tend toward agnosticism or atheism.
The post-Sept. 11 War on Terror formed a coalition between conservatives and libertarians ... but the alliance really isn't natural. Libertarians, I've found, are almost always atheists or agnostics, or have a vague gushy religion. I've found a lot of hostility to Christian belief or even belief in God in general — as if belief is irrational. Where there isn't hostility or contempt, there is an epistemological certainty that simply doesn't exist in the real world. Steve Den Beste pretty much said the non-existence of the Christian God is a sure thing, though he later tempered his remarks after getting a proper slap-down from Donald Sensing. (One issue with M. den Beste, whom I admire greatly, is he's an engineer; I know engineers: The flaw in their thinking is many of them tend to apply their engineering methodologies to all situations and to discount anything else as "not real thinking." Some lawyers also fall into this trap. Doctors don't — when doctors fail to think clearly, it's almost always an ego thing, hubris, Greek tragedy.)
Anyway, I'm a professional writer. This encompasses a big category of professions and a bigger category of failings. In general, one of the biggest problems in our culture is the journalist mentality. Most journalists, I've found, have one major problem: They lack imagination. Many of them cannot imagine putting themselves in the shoes of an opponent, or someone with whom they disagree. Because of deadline pressures and laziness, they tend toward "template" thinking, rather than real analysis.
But the worst thing is this is they seem endless fascinated and shocked that:
* Politicians do things for political reasons
* Business people do things for business reasons, and
* Religious people do things for religions reasons.
Go ahead, you try.
And when they do come to realize these kinds of things, they lapse into a premature and pseudo-worldly cynicism.
But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about faith. People who argue for or against the Bible sometimes argue as if it does not contain some pretty counter-intuitive things in it. For one thing, a man is born of a virgin, performs miracles, runs afoul of the local authorities, is crucified, entombed, resurrected, and then goes floating off in a cloud, leaving his followers to convert the world. All this is presented as fact, not allegory.
Now, to an empiricist, end of story. The dead do not come back to life, they do not float away into the clouds, and if they did, where do they go — the moon? To a politician, this is an unhelpful story — how can we cut a deal when the dealmakers are the bad guys. The business people can try to make a profit, but selling the religion is condemned, too.
And, frankly, many religious people are just "good boys" and "good girls" in the hierarchy of morality. That is, born into a Confucian world, they'd be good Confucians. Born into Islam, they'd be Muslims. Born as Catholics, they're Catholics.
The Protestant reformation has, in varying degrees, focused on the importance of adult conversion, of adult decision-making, and of adult recommitments to a faith that easily runs off the rails.
But this is all background to this idea: Why do we believe?
1. Are we at heart just good boys and good girls seeking to please our parents or other authority figures? Or are we bad boys and girls desperately seeking to appease our punishing consciences for our misbehavior? Are we a little of both?
2. Or do we have a supernatural experience of God that is a gift and is maintained by grace?
It seems to me that I waiver between two and one. Most of my life I spend in one. Then, occasionally, moments of grace (especially in the sacraments).
Still, that's not good enough. It doesn't explain why we believe in a story that is by all accounts preposterous. And to many of our libertarian friends, allies on the war on terror but not on the cultural war, we seem about as rational as Linus Van Pelt's insistence on staying all night in pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin.
So why do we believe? Well, the Bible tells us two things:
1. Belief comes from hearing the Word of God. This means people respond to preaching either with anger and contempt (as a form of rejection) but on willing and humble hearts, with belief. This will seem extremely tautological to some folks; it's actually mystical. And by that I mean it must be experienced to be believe. Basically, God has placed knowledge of the truth on your heart; you hear the word of God, and you believe the truth you've always known. If you don't, you have a personal (not philosophical) reason for not believing. That personal reason is your stumbling block: intellectual pride, fear of confessing wrongdoing, refusal to submit to authority, fear of responsibility, things of this nature.
Ah! But that's not good enough. Because the above is NOT an argument, philosophically. Because that collection of assertions is nothing more than a hypothesis. Let's continue. The Bible teaches that hearing the Word of God leads to belief.
2. Belief is either stolen by Satan at the time of hearing, strangled through cares of the world, fails to take root, or is encouraged and strengthened through obedience to the commandments of God, fellowship with believers, reading the Bible, evangelization, prayer, praise and worship.
This starts to make more sense to me for this reason: I can do these things and see if they work. I can test this. But don't confuse this with science. Still, it has an empirical element. We are judging experience.
Still, this isn't good enough. Human nature is too self-deceiving for this to be a proof. It's not. Fellowship can be for its own sakes; smells and bells just a pleasant experience; evangelization just our desire to impose our will on others, praise mere sucking up to the Deity.
To me, the proof in the New Testament is not the crucifixion and resurrection. These things cannot be tested and are based on points one and two above: Epistemologically, we cannot know, unless someone finds a clearly marked grave of Jesus, whether these things are true. We can have faith anyway in them, and these may be powerful experiences, but they may say just as much about the power of faith. And I've tried, you can't have faith in faith, you need to have faith in something. And if you're in the least intellectually honest, you want the thing you have faith in to be true. I confess that I have contempt for people who argue that what you have faith in isn't important, just as long as you have faith. This is the kind of fat-headed middle class complacency that has driven honest people to the left for centuries now.
So where's the strongest evidence?
3. Pentecost. Pentecost is the experience of the apostles that we can have, too. The Holy Spirit must come upon you and you must be baptized in it. And when you act as a Christian, you must act from this Spirit. Otherwise, it's carnality and control and a form of idolatry. Baptism in the Holy Spirit means manifestations of the Holy Spirit, things that can be seen and heard and experienced. And that's the really scary part. Because the experience of Pentecost takes away to a large degree the uncertainty. If you have laid hands on the sick, even the temporarily ill, and they have gotten better, you have a confirmation. If you have spoken in tongues, you have a confirmation. If you have seen people turn in an instant from their unbelief through the power of the Holy Spirit, which you can feel, you have a confirmation. And that takes away the complacency of uncertainty: It means we can no longer hide behind the epistemological and linguistic difficulties in perceiving reality and communicating it. It leads us to a deeper understanding of the Bible, deeper prayer, and signs and wonders of the kind that led Christ to spread His gospel across the world. But it also takes us out of our own comfort zones. Often, it takes us into the wilderness.
Thus, faith in Christ is a three-step process:
1. Initial belief from hearing the word of God, a process where the Gospel is preached and the Holy Spirit acts through grace on the hearer in order to generate belief.
2. Strengthened faith through fellowship, reading the Bible, prayer and the sacraments.
3. Confirmation through baptism in the Holy Spirit.
4. Continuing to live a life in Christ.
See, after all that, it's fairly simple in the end. Faith is a mystical experience, confirmed by the teaching authority of the Church and the Scriptures, that manifests itself in the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
The post-Sept. 11 War on Terror formed a coalition between conservatives and libertarians ... but the alliance really isn't natural. Libertarians, I've found, are almost always atheists or agnostics, or have a vague gushy religion. I've found a lot of hostility to Christian belief or even belief in God in general — as if belief is irrational. Where there isn't hostility or contempt, there is an epistemological certainty that simply doesn't exist in the real world. Steve Den Beste pretty much said the non-existence of the Christian God is a sure thing, though he later tempered his remarks after getting a proper slap-down from Donald Sensing. (One issue with M. den Beste, whom I admire greatly, is he's an engineer; I know engineers: The flaw in their thinking is many of them tend to apply their engineering methodologies to all situations and to discount anything else as "not real thinking." Some lawyers also fall into this trap. Doctors don't — when doctors fail to think clearly, it's almost always an ego thing, hubris, Greek tragedy.)
Anyway, I'm a professional writer. This encompasses a big category of professions and a bigger category of failings. In general, one of the biggest problems in our culture is the journalist mentality. Most journalists, I've found, have one major problem: They lack imagination. Many of them cannot imagine putting themselves in the shoes of an opponent, or someone with whom they disagree. Because of deadline pressures and laziness, they tend toward "template" thinking, rather than real analysis.
But the worst thing is this is they seem endless fascinated and shocked that:
* Politicians do things for political reasons
* Business people do things for business reasons, and
* Religious people do things for religions reasons.
Go ahead, you try.
And when they do come to realize these kinds of things, they lapse into a premature and pseudo-worldly cynicism.
But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about faith. People who argue for or against the Bible sometimes argue as if it does not contain some pretty counter-intuitive things in it. For one thing, a man is born of a virgin, performs miracles, runs afoul of the local authorities, is crucified, entombed, resurrected, and then goes floating off in a cloud, leaving his followers to convert the world. All this is presented as fact, not allegory.
Now, to an empiricist, end of story. The dead do not come back to life, they do not float away into the clouds, and if they did, where do they go — the moon? To a politician, this is an unhelpful story — how can we cut a deal when the dealmakers are the bad guys. The business people can try to make a profit, but selling the religion is condemned, too.
And, frankly, many religious people are just "good boys" and "good girls" in the hierarchy of morality. That is, born into a Confucian world, they'd be good Confucians. Born into Islam, they'd be Muslims. Born as Catholics, they're Catholics.
The Protestant reformation has, in varying degrees, focused on the importance of adult conversion, of adult decision-making, and of adult recommitments to a faith that easily runs off the rails.
But this is all background to this idea: Why do we believe?
1. Are we at heart just good boys and good girls seeking to please our parents or other authority figures? Or are we bad boys and girls desperately seeking to appease our punishing consciences for our misbehavior? Are we a little of both?
2. Or do we have a supernatural experience of God that is a gift and is maintained by grace?
It seems to me that I waiver between two and one. Most of my life I spend in one. Then, occasionally, moments of grace (especially in the sacraments).
Still, that's not good enough. It doesn't explain why we believe in a story that is by all accounts preposterous. And to many of our libertarian friends, allies on the war on terror but not on the cultural war, we seem about as rational as Linus Van Pelt's insistence on staying all night in pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin.
So why do we believe? Well, the Bible tells us two things:
1. Belief comes from hearing the Word of God. This means people respond to preaching either with anger and contempt (as a form of rejection) but on willing and humble hearts, with belief. This will seem extremely tautological to some folks; it's actually mystical. And by that I mean it must be experienced to be believe. Basically, God has placed knowledge of the truth on your heart; you hear the word of God, and you believe the truth you've always known. If you don't, you have a personal (not philosophical) reason for not believing. That personal reason is your stumbling block: intellectual pride, fear of confessing wrongdoing, refusal to submit to authority, fear of responsibility, things of this nature.
Ah! But that's not good enough. Because the above is NOT an argument, philosophically. Because that collection of assertions is nothing more than a hypothesis. Let's continue. The Bible teaches that hearing the Word of God leads to belief.
2. Belief is either stolen by Satan at the time of hearing, strangled through cares of the world, fails to take root, or is encouraged and strengthened through obedience to the commandments of God, fellowship with believers, reading the Bible, evangelization, prayer, praise and worship.
This starts to make more sense to me for this reason: I can do these things and see if they work. I can test this. But don't confuse this with science. Still, it has an empirical element. We are judging experience.
Still, this isn't good enough. Human nature is too self-deceiving for this to be a proof. It's not. Fellowship can be for its own sakes; smells and bells just a pleasant experience; evangelization just our desire to impose our will on others, praise mere sucking up to the Deity.
To me, the proof in the New Testament is not the crucifixion and resurrection. These things cannot be tested and are based on points one and two above: Epistemologically, we cannot know, unless someone finds a clearly marked grave of Jesus, whether these things are true. We can have faith anyway in them, and these may be powerful experiences, but they may say just as much about the power of faith. And I've tried, you can't have faith in faith, you need to have faith in something. And if you're in the least intellectually honest, you want the thing you have faith in to be true. I confess that I have contempt for people who argue that what you have faith in isn't important, just as long as you have faith. This is the kind of fat-headed middle class complacency that has driven honest people to the left for centuries now.
So where's the strongest evidence?
3. Pentecost. Pentecost is the experience of the apostles that we can have, too. The Holy Spirit must come upon you and you must be baptized in it. And when you act as a Christian, you must act from this Spirit. Otherwise, it's carnality and control and a form of idolatry. Baptism in the Holy Spirit means manifestations of the Holy Spirit, things that can be seen and heard and experienced. And that's the really scary part. Because the experience of Pentecost takes away to a large degree the uncertainty. If you have laid hands on the sick, even the temporarily ill, and they have gotten better, you have a confirmation. If you have spoken in tongues, you have a confirmation. If you have seen people turn in an instant from their unbelief through the power of the Holy Spirit, which you can feel, you have a confirmation. And that takes away the complacency of uncertainty: It means we can no longer hide behind the epistemological and linguistic difficulties in perceiving reality and communicating it. It leads us to a deeper understanding of the Bible, deeper prayer, and signs and wonders of the kind that led Christ to spread His gospel across the world. But it also takes us out of our own comfort zones. Often, it takes us into the wilderness.
Thus, faith in Christ is a three-step process:
1. Initial belief from hearing the word of God, a process where the Gospel is preached and the Holy Spirit acts through grace on the hearer in order to generate belief.
2. Strengthened faith through fellowship, reading the Bible, prayer and the sacraments.
3. Confirmation through baptism in the Holy Spirit.
4. Continuing to live a life in Christ.
See, after all that, it's fairly simple in the end. Faith is a mystical experience, confirmed by the teaching authority of the Church and the Scriptures, that manifests itself in the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
It therefore does not diminish the role of God's grace in any way to get to him by our reason as well as our experience (clearly we need both, since reason needs some object to think about), much in the same way that it doesn't diminish God's grace in the sacrament of communion that we pick it up with our hands and eat it with our mouths.
Only a fool would claim that either was somehow independent of the being which created and is maintaining our existence, merely because they involved an act of the will whose very existence we owe to God's continued gift to us.
I wouldn't discount the use of reason in coming to faith, for faith is fundamentally reasonable. Faith is merely reason applied to incomplete knowledge; it is the act of extending a line that we can only see part of to its logical conclusion.
God is good, God is great. God loves us. It therefore follows that he did what he did for a reason, even if we can't see what that reason is.
Have you done apologetics much, Bill?
I've done some apologetics with friends. Why? Does it seem like the first time :)
:-)
I come from a greek background; my first intellectual love was Socratic philosophy. Consequently, it's ingrained in me that all men have experience of the good merely by being men — by being God's creatures they cannot escape knowing what he is like simply because their very nature comes from Him and is thus a reflection of some part of Him.
In essence, all people have experience of God before they know consciousness merely by having the nature which he gave them.
I asked about the apologetics because one of the first things that is often addressed in apologetics is the very nature of faith and how it is fundamentally reasonable.
<point style="said with smile">I've never quite understood the way you mystics always go talking as if somehow the reasonable position is to conclude that we know God doesn't exist and only mystical experience will teach you the error of the flesh (which reason is somehow bound up to). Hasn't it occurred to you that if someone produces an argument (e.g. the liar, lunatic, lord trichotomy and shows how the first two are nonsense), that the mere act of having ears is a gift from God, and the mere ability to understand it and conclude that Christ is risen from it was also a gift from God? And that they're no less gifts from God than is direct experience, since we directly receive them all from God?</point>
Oh, that's why I asked about apologetical experience. You write as if somehow christianity is less reasonable than materialism, yet this is merely to fall into exactly the error that a man makes when he constantly speeds and never gets caught, and so expects that he will never get caught in the future. It might be summed up thusly: life is unreasonable, and christianity no more so than any other wild tale, such as trees and bees and neighbors. Or perhaps, there is no default metaphysical position.
Going from ears to God is teleological thinking. You can't argue from effect to cause like that. It's evidence ... of something. It's just an observation.
But you've corrected stated the mystical position, at least.
Christianity isn't necessarily less reasonable than materialism -- but it certainly isn't more reasonable.
You, I, and each individual has an epistemological problem: How can we know? The skeptics won that argument a long time ago ... and they were clergymen like David Hume.
I missed your speeding analogy. Connect the dots for me.
Because you haven't seen anyone rise from the dead lately, that doesn't mean that they won't. It means that you shouldn't expect it to happen, but it says exactly nothing about its possibility. It doesn't even say anything about its probability, because without understanding the underlying system, you have no way of knowing whether the sample you have is a random sample or a skewed sample.
I'm talking about grace. If I argue a person into believing in God and Christ (not that it's happened, but suppose), in what way was this less a matter of them believing through grace than if God appeared to them in a dream? That they could hear me was grace from God. That they could understand what I said (i.e. that they had logical faculties) is grace from God. That they continued existing in time in order to do it is grace from God.
In what was is being argued into faith less of receiving faith through grace than just up and believing one day because you heard the divine grace out of the sky?
Did not Jesus say, "you have believed because you have seen. Blessed are those who believe without seeing"? I.e. that those who come to faith through reason rather than direct experience are blessed?
I've never understood the reading of the passage which usually reverses the moral. Why, exactly, is seeing Jesus with the holes in his hands somehow less a matter of believing because you saw because he was somewhat translucent and shimmering?
The real answer to "how can we know" is "we can't". What you have to do is throw out the definition of "know" which is generally used (since it is utterly useless) and come up with a new one.
Had the skeptics won, we'd be in better shape. The problem is that they achieved a partial victory, and people are left being half christian and half skeptic. And the worst place to be is in pieces. It's better by far to be a christian or a skeptic or a pagan than to be some garish mixture.
In the second comment, we are using different definitions of grace. You're using a more expansive definition than I am. I was referring to God's acting on the mind of the believer during preaching. You're expanding the definition of grace to include reason: But how do you reason your way to faith and remain honest about the world we live in?
(1) They're typically inconsistent, which makes them dishonest, and this dishonesty often spreads like a disease until a person simply refuses to think about their beliefs because the cognitive dissonance is too painful.
(2) By not actually believing what they believe, they don't get faced with the unpleasant consequences of it (e.g. suttee for hindus, meaninglessness for materialists), and so they can reap some of the benefits of christian belief without the actual belief. It tends to keep people from wanting to think because they're in a comfortable position that they will likely lose if they have to discard something.
We're actually not, but this is a subtle point.
So was I. I was just referring to God's acting on the mind of the believer during argument. I deny that they're so separate. In both cases, there is experience and what one thinks as a result. In both cases reason is employed to understand experience, and in both cases grace is responsible for all of it.
Consider mystical experience which convinces someone of the truth of Christianity (loosely summarized in the apostle's creed). Their reason is still employed to understand their experience. Moreover, these experiences are virtually never in the form of God coming down and reciting the apostle's creed and saying "and this is all true"; it's some experience of God which then must be interpreted into the world and integrated with one's understanding. One may experience the divine love more directly in some particular moment, but actually coming to the conclusion that what's written in the bible is true, and then figuring out what is written in the bible all occur by reason. Even if one were to have a vision like Paul's where Christ appears to you directly, your reason is involved in understanding what he says and then drawing conclusions from it, e.g. that you should follow what Jesus said when he walked among us.
The experience may be a bit more direct, but all people by loving share in some way in the love of God. People are images of God, merely by being ourselves we get some hint of him. By using our reason to go from this to the love of God, we're not doing something dissimilar from going from a more direct experience of the love of God to beliefs.
This can be summed up fairly easily: all experiences are mystical experiences. Some just happen to be more direct than others.
Much the same way that you reason your way to anything else. C.S. Lewis once pointed out that faith in God is not dissimilar from faith in men. When you know a friend (who is a man of his word), and he says that he's going to do something, you don't need to see him do it to know that he does it. His word is enough. Indeed, allow me a quote:
The centurion certainly seemed to reason his way into faith, and he did so by his experience of faith in men.
A little more formally, faith is just the process of extrapolating information from what you know. Faith in God is no different from faith in man; in both cases you take what you know about each and guess at what they will do. In both cases faith consists of believing what you know to be true in spite of the fears that you harbor. It is not reasonable to expect that a friend who you know to be reliable will let you down. It is not reasonable to know what one does about God and deny His love. Of course, that is predicated on knowledge. (More on this in a moment)
The first thing that we need to do is start from a position of pure skepticism. (Agnosticism is the better word for it, but we live in an age where calling things by their right names is out of fashion.) We then look at the world.
The first thing that we notice is that we have no idea why things act the way that they do, with all of their weird repetitions. If you ask around, no one else knows why it behaves the way that it does. Some people know a good deal about how it behaves, but their explanations always just push things a step back. Eventually they end up saying that the flying carpet was woven out of the hair of flying horses, and that's as far as we can figure. Once you grant the flying horse hair, the flying carpet makes sense, but it doesn't tell you anything more about why the system works. It doesn't tell you any more about why the universe behaves the way it does than observing the comings and goings of people during the work week tells you about week ends and holidays. Repetition can be from necessity or choice, and there's no way to tell the difference by just looking at the results.
So when one looks at the universe and concludes that the best explanation for it all (including the self and the apparent perception of free will, conscious thought, love, etc) is the Christian explanation, there's no contradiction. Yes, the world often behaves in a regular fashion. For all that, most people do, too. Most people never go to Haiti. I've certainly never met anyone whose been to Haiti. That doesn't tell me anything at all about whether or not a person could go to Haiti.
We know a great deal less about this world than most people give us credit for. Faith is not a contradiction to knowledge, though I will grant that it is often a contradiction to a great deal of groundless supposition.
Let's say that I were to offer you a bet: I will give you $50 if the world is not destroyed by an asteroid on January 7th, 2007. You will give me $50 if the world is destroyed by an asteroid on that date. Would you take me up on the bet?
Of course you would. If you're right, you get $50. If you're wrong, you won't have to pay because we'll all be dead. You've got nothing to lose.
If materialism is true, then no one is capable of thinking otherwise than they did anyway. Thus if one is believes in christianity without reason and materialism is true, they couldn't have helped it anyway and they're not being dishonest; they believed what they had to. Put more simply, if materialism is true, then there is no such thing as morality and it's irrelevant that the believer was intellectualy dishonest. If materialism is true, then you're dead and don't have to pay. If Christianity is true, then you get the benefit of having been correct.
It's like flipping a coin when you don't know the way to the hospital: if you're wrong, you're dead so nothing worse can happen to you. If you were right, then it doesn't matter that you didn't know why the path you took was the correct one, you were correct.
And on the plus side, it works with any of salvation by faith + works, salvation by faith alone, or even salvation by belief alone. Well, unless salvation by faith alone is defined along the lines of having a deep emotional experience at some point that convinces you of the truth of the gospel, but that basically just gets back to calvanism if a person can't make any choice which will influence whether or not this happens.
Absent choice, it's impossible to make bad choices. Since materialism necessitates strict causality (or at least denies uncaused causes), it denies free will. Without free will, there is no such thing as morality because morality is entirely a question of choice. We don't talk about the morality of a hammer because a hammer can't make choices; if materialism is true in a fairly literal sense we're all just lumps of clay.
Now, I don't mean that materialism removes the ability to have a legal system with crimes and punishments. Obviously if morality is gone all things are permitted, including making things forbidden. The beauty of materialism is that while it's impossible to actually be intellectually consistent with it, it also doesn't matter (if materialism is true) whether you are intellectually consistent with it. You could never have done other than you did, so whatever you did, you had to do it.
Put more simply, if a materialist is intellectually inconsistent, with what charge can we reproach him? He is, after all, only a collection of atoms knocking around in a way that he — to the degree the concept of 'he' is meaningful, which may well be not at all — can't control. We can no more fault him for how his atoms knocked around than we can praise a chair for not walking away when we try to sit on it.
Am I wrong?
In the materialistic view, there is no such thing as choice. Nothing which happened could have happened any differently; it all operates by fixed laws moving matter around inexorably. In the materialist view, our brains have exactly as many choices as do the balls on a billiards table.
That is why in the materialist view, humans are not moral agents. They do not have free will, so they cannot exercise it for good or evil. They simply do what the laws of physics say that they must. Bear in mind, materialism and determinism go hand in hand.
What am I missing?