Wednesday, February 14, 2007

the Bible is not a science textbook

Read the title again if you aren't sure that you read it right. I know that I'm in disagreement with some others about this, but as the blog charter says, I'm not spreading a message that's official or authoritative with any of these blog entries. I'm inserting my voice into the dialog between contemporary (U.S.) culture and Christianity as I understand it.

After reiterating that my opinions only speak for me, I should elaborate some more on what the opinion under consideration precisely is. My opinion is that the Bible is true. My opinion is that the Bible is more reflective of God than the human writers God directed. My opinion is that the Bible remains applicable. In short, the Bible is reliable, but it is not a science textbook.

Some compelling reasons or factors that led to my conclusion:
  • The Bible was not written by scientists. Luke, as a physician and arguably a historian, may be the closest (note his Greek & Roman influences). But science, or should I say systematic science, simply was not around when most of the Bible was written. Without algebra, they may not have had the necessary tools to organize their thoughts, although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they had some astronomy. They didn't have the materials or know-how to construct the necessary instruments, either. Anyway, the point is that people who had no experience with the scientific mindset can hardly be expected to write hard, quantifiable science into any document.
  • The Bible is not about how nature works. The Bible is full of stories, sermons, laws, proverbs, visions, prophecies, songs, letters, and so forth. It doesn't stop to explain physics, chemistry, anatomy, biology, or other topics an educated person might expect to see. Such explanations would be out of place in the Bible. The Bible is about God and humanity. Nature is worth exploring, of course, but the findings would go in a different book.
  • The Bible is written in several styles other than plain prose. The mixture of writing styles in the Bible supports the idea that not all of it can be taken literally. Moreover, the passages that describe God's act of creation, and the first generations of people, can't have been written by eyewitnesses, because there weren't any. Additional curious qualities of the text are the day-by-day transitions (why did God pause during the night?), descriptions of God's own thoughts and words, "special" trees, and a talking serpent. An allegorical interpretation seems to be what the words are screaming for.
  • Ultimate truth about nature may not be a reasonable demand. If the Bible was God's science textbook, then it would contain everything, because the Author knows it all. How long would it be? Who could read it? Who could have the education and brainpower to attempt a read-through? Judging by the proportion of people who know and comprehend the Standard Model, for instance, probably not many. Then again, speculating about what the Bible would have been like isn't much of an argument. The Bible is what it is, not a science textbook.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is definitely one of the most referenced accusations against Christianity, and far from original. It has taken on even greater life as the advance of technology continues to make long-range communication to the masses more feasible and commonplace. Without publicity, scandals just wouldn't be as scandalous. (Better communication has also enabled opportunities for Christianity, too, so as with many things it's not inherently bad.) Hypocrisy is a sure way to raise someone's ire.

And it should! Christians don't like hypocrisy, either. No person with a shred or two of conscience enjoys being deceived. Jesus tossed the word "hypocrites" around all the time, often at the religious elite. As I have done thus far, I'm not going to try to prove that the attack under consideration is completely without merit. Instead, I'm going to add some perspective so that people can understand why hypocrisy does not prevent Christianity itself from being true and workable.

The most purely logical defense against hypocrisy is that failures, committed by people who claim a belief system, do not invalidate a belief system. Framed more classically, an ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy. Statements by pathological liars cannot be counted on to always be false, for example. Failures by people do not make Christianity false.

Sharp readers may have read the last sentence and immediately thought, "Moral failures do make Christianity false if one of the tenets of Christianity is that Christians (should) sin rarely if at all". To some degree, that is a valid criticism, but it is incomplete and inaccurate. Like any morality, Christianity has an Ideal which people are prone to fall short of. Indeed, moral failure seems to one of the prerequisites of being human (Christians identify this fact as congenital depravity). Other moral codes than Christianity's--whether more onerous, like religions that prescribe what clothes to wear, or less onerous, like the traffic code--are broken with disturbing regularity. Moral failure is not specific to Christianity, and Christians will make mistakes while living in the flesh, in this world. A Christian who can say, with a straight face, that he or she never commits wrongdoing, is a filthy hypocrite or deluded. The description "chief of sinners" was applied to one of the major apostles by himself.

Abstractly speaking, allowance and forgiveness for mistakes is part of Christianity, so those mistakes do not prove that someone is a hypocrite rather than a "real" Christian. Going beyond the abstract, this explanation can be unsatisfactory. When a "Holy Harry" or a "Godly Gloria" goes to church every Sunday, serves the community, participates in the neighborhood watch, refuses to let their kids play with other kids, and so on, but then has a juicy secret sin exposed, the hypocrite label can hardly be avoided. I have a few ways of interpreting the case in which an infamous misdeed has been performed by someone who clearly falls into the "Christian" category, at least outwardly.
  1. One unlikely possibility is that the perpetrator simply was an amoral chameleon who indifferently adopted a Christian persona for selfish ends. Cult leaders, whose motivations are power and money, may be of this type.
  2. A less insidious explanation is that the perpetrator believed in Christianity, but was not willing to undergo the "full treatment". Relax, conspiracy theorists, relax. All I mean by "full treatment" is the entirety of Christian teaching and practice. Like weight loss, holiness is not impossible. It merely requires stern dedication, willingness to obey directions or mull over advice, goal-driven desire, and other means as needed. The serious Christian should also be supported by and supporting of other Christians, and cultivating the habit of communicating with God in prayer and scripture and worship. Christians who don't demonstrate this level of commitment can't expect to "have it work". A half-Christian or one-hour-per-week Christian will probably yield to temptations that an earnest disciple of Christ would either shrug off or actively flee from.
  3. The most distressing possibility (for Christians) is that the perpetrator had committed most facets of his or her life to God, perhaps even making numerous sacrifices, but purposefully kept a few unrepentant parts back, private from others and God and even the perpetrator's own conscience. Self-deception, in which one is a hypocrite to oneself, is surprisingly resilient. Someone can manage to keep the bad stuff separate for a long time. However, this is the realm of (sin) addiction, though the addiction may be emotional rather than physical, and an addiction tends to grow. The stress of both feeding it and keeping it dormant the rest of the time can wreck a person's moral center. Over time, the well-fed addiction may finally become public: the hypocritical inner self has escaped its cage. The wise don't need to go through this process to know how it works. They must keep in mind how necessary it is to stop it at the earliest stage.
The moral status of hypocrisy has another twist, one overlooked by many. In the simplest call of hypocrisy, there are two individuals: one is the accused, and the other is the accuser. The accuser would like other observers to believe that the accusation happens out of righteous anger, that is, a sense of justice. But I don't think that's true, or not in most cases I've experienced. A wrong action could be called out as wrong regardless of who performed it. A more specific call of hypocrisy isn't directed at the action, but at the hypocrite. The delicious satisfaction enjoyed by the accuser indicates that he or she feels rewarded by the hypocrite's action, in some way. By making the call of hypocrisy, the status of the accused drops, and the accuser's relative status increases. Someone who relishes making a call of hypocrisy is someone who cares more about his own status than about the fact that his fellow man failed. A happy muckraker is a person consumed by pride, with a craving for status. Hypocrisy is a serious matter. A call of hypocrisy should be a constructive rebuke to the hypocrite or a sorrowful warning to onlookers.

A suggested exercise: read the lyrics to the song Brother's Keeper by Rich Mullins.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

"Christians aren't smart"

Christians aren't smart. This is more of a broad generalization than an argument, but I think it's still effective, particularly on people who have been part of Christianity the social institution and not a part of Christianity the lifestyle--in other words, people who have participated for other reasons than actual faith. When they meet people who are both highly intelligent and antagonistic to religion, at one of the nation's fine universities or colleges for example, "Christians aren't smart" even seems to be factual.

Since this is a broad generalization, some counterexamples would prove it wrong, and there is no shortage of counterexamples; many famous geniuses have been Christian. Christianity was the prevailing belief system for years in the West, so it's only natural that the smart were Christian too. Considering the religious origins of many schools, Christianity may even have been more influential among the academically gifted than among those without the same talents and opportunities.

"Christians aren't smart" may not be stated openly because of its flimsy evidence and lack of political correctness, but nevertheless it can be implicit in the anti-Christian attitude and stance. In this form, the statement is an emotional appeal better expressed as "believe in Christianity, and you're a fool". The emotional appeal can be approached in a few ways, because it can mean several things.

First, the justification may be that Christianity has inherent logical flaws like self-contradictions. Since illogical flaws make statements meaningless, the only people who can find meaning in Christianity must be people without the capability to see or reject logical flaws, i.e., the stupid. The defense here is individual to each "flaw", but the defenses exist. Christians have been finding and reconciling apparent problems for a long time, even among themselves. Some "flaws" like God being three-and-one are special cases of being beyond human understanding/comprehension, but those cases can't be helped because reality can't be helped. If Christianity was purely a human invention, those "flaws" would have been excised or replaced.

Second, the justification may be that Christians rely on faith for some of their knowledge, so they must not be smart or honest enough to apply the scientific method to all domains. The problem is that science is not enough. Some things defy objective measurement. For even those that admit such measurement, science is not an exact science and not all experiments or studies support the same conclusions. Its strength and weakness is that its theories are never absolutely finished. It can explain many things, but those explanations are still not sufficient to answer some essential questions of the human condition. "What is my purpose?" "Where did the universe come from?" "If nothing has ultimate meaning in the end, why should I bother?" "What is right and wrong, and why am I unable to ignore that question?" A related statement is the ol' "fairy tale" comparison, which implies that any narrative with supernatural elements automatically is fictional. And I don't see much of a counterargument for that. If nothing supernatural can be real, then there's no basis for further dialogue. If one can't even allow that maybe there just might be the remote possibility of supernatural existence, then discussing the plausibility of Christianity is ridiculous. Of course, there is the point that the historical events in the Bible happen to be recorded and corroborated by other sources (which do not contain supernatural elements), and last I checked that wasn't true for any fairy tales I've read.

Third, the justification may be that Christianity is too simple, that it's tailor-made for dumb simpletons: "Dumb people can believe in Christianity, and many dumb people currently do, so if you believe in Christianity, you're probably dumb too". Part of this is a misunderstanding that's inevitable from not looking too deeply inside. While the core of Christianity, the Gospel, is simple enough to communicate in a variety of languages and to a variety of societies, it is also profound and deep. The Bible is large, after all, and it only contains a well-vetted canon of texts. Theologians and scholars study for years. Christianity is simple and complicated. A different way to counter the emotional appeal of "Christianity's so simple it's believed by dummies" is with an emotional appeal to democracy and unity. Proclaiming that dumb people believe in Christianity only shames someone who refuses to value dumb people. If a belief system is accessible to all, shouldn't that be a good thing, an egalitarian thing? If "all have sinned", then Christianity is not for elitist snobs. Christians have a responsibility to teach and correct one another in love, as well as serve as role-models, but there is no caste system. Christianity is "for dummies" because it is for all.

Monday, February 5, 2007

the Crusades

There is an oft-quoted piece of Internet lore known as "Godwin's Law", which more or less states that the longer an online discussion continues, the greater the chance there will be a statement related to Nazis or Hitler. I think a similar rule holds: the longer an online discussion about Christianity continues, the greater the chance there will be a statement related to the Crusades.

I'm certainly not going to try to defend the Crusades; that's the rhetorical counterpart of a Mission Impossible. It's not my place, either, to defend or ask forgiveness for actions which I had nothing whatsoever to do with. However, I will try to put this dark period of history in proper context.

First, no action performed by a nominal Christian implicates Christianity itself. If Norman claims to be a bicycle repairman but then fails to repair a bike properly, that wouldn't mean that bicycle repair is a lot of hooey or that all bicycle repairmen are crooks. Norman may have been lying when he said he was a bicycle repairman. He may have been a bicycle repairman, but a bad one. He may have been a good repairman, but had an off day. I realize that comparing bicycle repair to the Crusades is ludicrous, but I'm only trying to illustrate the faultiness of the argument by reapplying it to a different situation. Moreover, I will go a step further. I assert that someone who participates in a bloody Crusade is not a Christian or follower of Jesus. Or, to put it another way, someone who has interpreted Christianity to allow for a Crusade has twisted it beyond recognition. A Crusade is not a Christian action.

Second, the Crusades happened during one of the times in history when church and state were all tangled up into a gnarled mess. Read some of the history of the Middle Ages; it's a sordid tale. Kings claiming to be God's Gift to Man, church officials running various pieces of government (remember cardinal Richelieu from the Three Musketeers?), etc. Jesus lived during the time of the Romans, yet He didn't overthrow the government and place the disciples in charge. In fact, I've heard it argued that the disciples were often confused why He didn't do so. Jesus' mode of operation was not force, and there's an excellent reason for this: forced conversions are not conversions. One can't force people to be good, at least not in the way that Jesus kept describing: from the inside out (showing the condition of the heart by the attitudes that naturally flow out--the "fruit"), rather than from the outside in (keeping stringent laws but not having inner devotion--the Pharisees' "white-washed tombs"). The Crusades were carried out by governments that had usurped the true Christian community. To return to the increasingly-strained bicycle repairman analogy, this would be like the town mayor declaring that the holy cause of bicycle repair justifies ordering the police department to demolish all motorized vehicles. Again, Christians did not wage the Crusades; unchecked governments that paid lip service to Christian virtue and humility waged the Crusades. As I've heard, "the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman". By the way, from what I can tell, government entanglement in other religions hasn't done them any favors, either, in endearing them to unbelievers.

Third, if one insists on tallying the good and bad that have come from Christianity over the course of its existence, I think it's more than a little disingenuous to bring up the Crusades but neglect to mention the sacrificial giving performed under the same banner in countless times and places. It's impossible to state, for example, how many servings of soup or how much education outweigh one killing. Ultimately, I think the Crusades are the exception, not the rule. At the very least people must admit that those who have carried Christianity's legacy through the years have done a mixed job of it.

Sunday, February 4, 2007

blog charter

Has anyone else noticed how Christianity has been increasingly marginalized in contemporary (Western) culture? Its followers, morality, basic doctrine, organizations have all become objects of consistent ridicule, and not reasonable ridicule, but the same half-baked arguments that have been around for centuries. This blog's purpose is to expose the emptiness of the maliciousness against Christianity. The top technique for "debunking" Christianity is the Straw Man, which means substituting an easily-refuted idea for the real one. Real Christianity has withstood many attacks. It is, in actuality, no Straw Man. This blog will attempt to demonstrate that in specific cases.

What this blog is not:
  • Authoritative. I'm the only one writing, although I will apply ideas from many sources. I would also add that I have no credentials of any kind. I have never published anything in any journal. I do not hold any religious post, either.
  • Official. I don't represent any organization. I can't even claim to speak for Christianity as a whole, because it's huge and varied. I speak for the Christianity that I practice, as I understand it.
  • Forum to discuss differences within Christianity. I plan to stick to the more common elements. Deep doctrinal questions should arise naturally when believers ask them; forcing those questions seems to usually be unappreciated.
  • Unbiased. I am biased. You are too. Reader beware.
  • Internationally-minded. Realistically, I'm only qualified to comment on contemporary U.S. culture, and even then, only on the parts I'm exposed to. Still, culture tends to ooze everywhere, mix together, and generally mutate, so anything I say may apply elsewhere if only minimally.
  • Totally inoffensive to anyone who ever reads it. My purpose is not to offend people, but inevitably someone will take offense at something. The price of free expression is people freely disliking whatever is expressed.
  • Infallible. I'm not about to claim that I have all the answers, or that I have all the answers at least half-right. I claim to have some answers that make sense to me.
  • Written for a general audience. Anyone who has Web access may read, of course. Nevertheless, the primary audience is other Christians who, like me, routinely encounter arguments against Christianity. In particular, the primary audience is really not (and probably won't be) the people who advance those arguments.