This post was written by Patrick Rist on February 11, 2008
Last week, a number of tornadoes tore through Tennessee, where I live. Many homes were destroyed, and dozens of lives were lost. Near our home, friends of ours lost their church in the storm. It was obliterated.
Natural disasters often raise questions concerning God’s providence and sovereignty. Why, if God is both all-powerful and loving, do these things happen? Does he allow them? Are they the work of Satan? Are such things simply beyond his control?
Questions such as these are, of course, categorized under the heading, “The Problem of Evil.” More specifically, the technical term for these questions and the arguments that seek to answer them is theodicy: the defense of God’s righteousness and omnipotence in the face of evil and suffering. At your next cocktail party, try to use the word theodicy in conversation – it’s a real showstopper.
There is a long and ever-lengthening history of theodicy in Christian thought, which is evidence of how desperately we want to understand this issue. It is also probably evidence of how far we are from resolving it. It seems to me that theodicies come in two categories: (1) the fairly helpful, and (2) the awful.
Under the fairly helpful category, one might place work that Alvin Plantinga has done. To simplify almost to the point of slander, Plantinga’s argument is that it is perfectly reasonable to state that if there is evil in the world, and if there is an all-powerful, all-righteous God, then there must be a perfectly good reason for God to allow the evil.
This is not a particularly comforting counsel to share with someone who’s grieving the loss of a home or a loved one. Plantinga’s main project was to demonstrate that it was not a logical contradiction to hold that evil and the biblical God could both exist. And remarkably, many of Plantinga’s philosophical adversaries acknowledged that he’d done so.
We may find Plantinga’s arguments pretty thin stuff. But at least he is not trying to get God “off the hook,” even at the cost of ignoring the biblical data, which is what many of the most awful theodicies seem to be attempting.
“Open theism” seems (to me) to spring from an unwillingness to allow the Bible to say what it says, and to take us where we would probably rather not go. Among other things, some of its advocates hold that while God knows everything that is knowable, he can’t know the future because it hasn’t happened yet. Thus, I suppose I could share with my friends who lost their church: “Take comfort! God’s just as surprised by this as you are!”
The Bible clearly teaches that God knows the end from the beginning; further, it is replete with sobering statements concerning his foreknowledge and foreordination of events, indicating a supervision and orchestration of history that I believe is beyond our ability to understand.
This is why I used the phrase, “fairly helpful” in describing the best theodicies. I do not believe that we can ultimately know the answer to the “why?” questions that natural disasters raise. We can and should try to understand all we can, but in the end we are left with mystery.
I have colleagues who think that I play the “mystery card” too readily. But we see Job getting an answer directly from God, and it is not an answer that causes Job to slap his forehead and exclaim, “Oh, of course! Now I get it! Thanks, God!” Instead, Job’s forehead is slapped by the ground as it rushes up to meet him.
Is appealing to and accepting mystery un-academic? Probably. But for the Christian, even the Christian scholar, there are worse things to be. For while there are many things we cannot know about this issue, there is one thing we can know, and it is the most important thing to know: The God who is sometimes pleased to allow hard and painful things into our lives is the same God who was pleased to crush his Son for our iniquities.
This post was written by Mark Hansard on February 4, 2008
In a fascinating op-ed piece for the New York Times a few months ago, physicist Paul Davies ruminates on the “faith” that scientists have regarding the logical order and mathematical elegance of what makes the universe tick. He observes that scientists, in going about their research, assume that the universe is ordered and intelligible in the first place, yet they refuse to ask “Why?” Why is the universe as ordered and intelligible as it is? One reason scientists won’t ask that question, according to Davies, is that “it’s not a scientific question.”
I certainly think they are right: it is not a scientific question, but a philosophical one. It is a question that scientists used to be comfortable asking because they did not separate philosophy from science, but recognized that both were intertwined. Science cannot be performed without making a whole set of philosophical assumptions, about reality, about the universe, and this was common knowledge a hundred years ago. And yet in the academy today there is so much emphasis on keeping science separate from any other discipline that the philosophical underpinnings of science are largely forgotten.
Davies is to be commended for bringing our attention to the fact that science is intertwined with philosophical, even religious, questions. Interestingly, he admits that Christian theological assumptions were behind the beginnings of modern science. To my knowledge, Davies is not a Christian, or even a theist. Unfortunately, at the end of the article he falls prey to the same old, tired refrain: that if there isn’t a scientific answer to these questions, there is no answer at all.
This post was written by Patrick Rist on December 6, 2007
The word for today is “kitsch,” meaning something created to appeal to sentimental, popular or undiscriminating tastes. It is often an elitist word, used as a weapon to discredit that which is disliked.
But it is just as often used accurately. Certainly the art world is in confusion, and manifests a substantial amount of moral corruption, but unless we want to jettison all critical judgments, it should still be possible to distinguish between good art, not-so-good art, and kitsch. However, those distinctions and how to make them go far beyond what I want to discuss here.
Ask the average churchgoer to name a Christian artist, and sad to say, you will probably hear the name Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade’s work is (dare I say this?) the epitome of kitsch. While technically quite competent, his pictures present fantasy world of light, pastels, and imaginary settings that have nothing to do with our lived lives. In this sense, Kinkade’s work is akin to pornography. It tells lies for emotional effect.
Perhaps that’s a bit harsh. Pornography is evil for multiple reasons. I would not say that what Kinkade is doing is evil. But it is misguided, and when one sees the level of promotion that sustains Kinkade’s empire, one suspects that he is painting to please a market rather than his Creator. And the two are not the same, even if the market is mainly evangelicals.
The question that interests me, though, is that even if we believe (as I do) that Kinkade’s work lies, what does our enthusiasm for the lies tell us about our desires? Are those desires legitimate? Could it be that Kinkade’s popularity tells us something about our souls, or at least about our vision for the Good Life?
Kinkade presents a life like this:
But in reality, most of us live like this:
The fantasy and the reality are so far apart, Kinkade could just as well include a Pegasus grazing in the front yard of his cottages.
But would not most of us rather live in the Kinkade picture, even if we wouldn’t hang it on our wall? Why is that? What does it say about how we want our lives and homes to be?
My suspicion is that Kinkade’s popularity contains clues to deep-seated longings shared by many, if not most Americans. The challenge is draw out these longings into the open. There they can be discussed, and compared to the decisions that we make as a people that condemn us to kitschy fantasy rather than a better reality.
This post was written by Patrick Rist on November 29, 2007
Marxism was supposed to produce the “New Man.” He’s a little late, but the New Man may be emerging in communist China.
A recent Reuters story (found here) describes the younger generation of twenty-somethings found in the wealthier districts of China. Almost all of them were raised as an “only child,” and evidently display many of the narcissistic, self-centered personality traits long associated with children without siblings – at least in popular lore. (I should probably add here that some of my best friends are only children.)
The article specifically focuses on the widespread (and quite casual) failure of marriages among this group. With the Chinese economy booming, and personal options and choices expanding exponentially, many Chinese simply can’t be bothered by the necessary give-and-take involved in sustaining a marriage. Considering the needs of another person is, after all, something with which they have had no previous experience. Divorce has become completely un-stigmatized in this echelon of society and marriages sometimes last only a few weeks.
Cohabitation is on the rise, and even extra-marital sex (quaintly called “cheating” by some in American society) is becoming accepted. All of these changes are an enormous departure from the Confucian ideals that have guided Chinese society for centuries.
To give the Marxists their due, I don’t think this is what they had in mind when they predicted the New Man. But is it possible that what is happening in China represents something actually new? A non-Western, and hence, non-Christian society passing from traditional mores to a post-modern, self-centered ethic – essentially within the span of one lifetime; other examples of this would be hard to find.
This cultural change presents something of a challenge to those of us who maintain that the way of living described here is contrary to human flourishing, and damages our souls. While perhaps true, convincing the young affluent Chinese would be a hard sell. They have no residual common moral ground in which such claims would make sense, even less than young affluent Americans.
Most of us Christians want to believe in natural law. We all take great comfort from Lewis’ arguments for a universal moral code in Mere Christianity. Yet a new generation of essentially amoral Chinese, living intently focused on material and sexual desire, would seem to present a great challenge to these notions. Perhaps we need less theory and more real life, hard case examples of seeing natural law apologetics in action.
Almost all of us know Chinese here in the US, either graduate students visiting, or professors. Perhaps this Reuters article could be a way to start a discussion of mores and morals. Of course, one should avoid an opener like, “What a selfish, immoral lot you Chinese are!”
Rather, one could ask:
– Have you seen examples of what the article describes? Do you think it is accurate?
– What are the implications of these trends for China’s future?
– Does it matter? Are some ways of living better than others? How does one decide that?
This post was written by Mark Hansard on November 26, 2007
AI staff member Mark Hansard sat down with J.P. Moreland recently to interview him about his new book, Kingdom Triangle (Zondervan, 2007). Moreland is distinguished professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology. He is the author and co-editor of numerous works including Scaling The Secular City (Baker, 1987), Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (IVP, 2003), Does God Exist? (Promethius, 1993), Body and Soul (IVP, 2000), and Christianity and the Nature of Science (Baker, 1989), among others. Excerpts:
In Kingdom Triangle, you talk about a thin worldview. What is a thin worldview, and how is it promulgated in the academy?
A thin worldview is a worldview that doesn’t have the resources to make sense out of meaning to life and objective value. It is a world without purpose to life. Naturalism is exactly a thin worldview. It says the material world is all there is. Postmodernism says whatever values your culture invents are true for you. On this view, the difference between abortion and choosing life is no more meaningful than choosing McDonalds over Burger king.
How does a thin worldview multiply “empty selves?” What is an empty self?
An empty self is someone who is a self-absorbed narcissist for whom everything is about him. If there is no ultimate purpose in life, some big picture, the only thing to live for is me.
If you were a professor in the secular academy today, what would you be doing to foster a “thick worldview?”
Just as Marxist professors and feminist professors teach their discipline from their point of view, Christians ought to do the same thing. They ought to integrate their worldview into their teaching. You don’t have to explicitly appeal to the Bible to do this. You could show that there are objective moral values without appealing to the Bible, for example.
Practically speaking, how can a Christian professor in a secular setting do this, without ‘relativising’ their position? If they say, “I’m coming from a Christian perspective” in the classroom, are they merely saying theirs is one more perspective among many?
Well, such a professor could say, “I’m coming from a Christian perspective here that I believe is actually true.” Or you could find reasons in your discipline that don’t presuppose Christianity to teach something. In history, for example, you could show that there are objective facts that can be known, without appealing to Christianity.
How, in your view, can the recovery of non-empirical knowledge be brought about? Why must non-empirical knowledge be brought back, and how can it be done?
The first step is to try to get clear on what knowledge is. I do that in the book. Secondly, gaining knowledge about what knowledge is, is not empirical. You can’t solve that issue by any empirical test. Third, when you come to understand what knowledge is, you learn two things: you can learn something without knowing how you know it, and you can know something without being 100% sure that you’re right. So that opens up the fact that people do know that kindness is a virtue without knowing how they know that. And I suggest other things in the book.
How is spiritual formation related to solving the problem of a thin worldview?
One of the three causes of depression and anxiety is moral relativism, according to secular psychological studies. The other two causes are a breakdown in community, and the rapid pace of life in modern culture. Why moral relativism? There is a right and wrong way to function. If you think everything is relative, you can justify any behavior and you will harm the way you were actually made to function. There must be knowledge of wise functioning to give people guidance out of their fears. If everything’s relative, there is no such knowledge. Robust spiritual formation is a way of producing flourishing human beings that know how to live life according to truth and knowledge. The proof’s in the pudding.
What, in your opinion, do evangelicals not know, that they ought to know, about restoring the Spirit’s power?
They ought to know that God is performing miracles with healing and demonic deliverance, and He is speaking to people through dreams, visions and impressions all over the world. We tend to think that happened in biblical times and it’s not for today. We’re way behind other parts of the world. To put it differently, Christianity is a lot more supernatural than people realize.
This post was written by Patrick Rist on November 8, 2007
“Agency” is one of those words (like “hegemony”) that tend to identify one as either an academic or an intellectual wannabe. Here I mean it to be the ability to act, or perhaps the origin of action. It often refers to personal decision as the origin of one’s actions.
Agency has been under attack in academic circles for much of the late modern age. These attacks have come from both the “nature” and “nurture” camps. “Nurture” was the first to take a stab. Thirty or forty years ago the public first became aware of the debate concerning whether one’s upbringing exerted such an influence upon one’s behavior that personal responsibility was questionable. Skinner’s behaviorism was both an originator and the terminal point of such speculation.
More recently, “nature” has made the strongest arguments against agency. With the advent of neuroscience, the mapping of the human genome, and the rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, hardly a week goes by that another impetus for human action is not supposedly found “in the genes,” or located in a part of the brain.
What has driven this impulse to debunk agency and its sibling, free will? It is difficult to ascribe merely scientific curiosity, particularly when one sees the highly reductionistic explanations for behavior, and the equally irresponsible speculations about the social implications of some “findings.”
It is curious that a society so obsessed with personal autonomy and expressive individualism would embrace explanations that essentially negate both choice and achievement. One suspects that our fellow citizens would only accept such opinions from those in lab coats, the vestments of our new priests.
How are Christians to view agency? Here are some ideas that may be worth contemplation:
1. The biblical picture of the person simply assumes that agency is real. We are personally responsible for our decisions; we are culpable for our sins. Calvinists and conservative Arminians find common ground here.
2. At the same time, though, we do not sacrifice agency and responsibility by acknowledging that environmental factors play a part in our choices, or that biological factors in the brain and our genes influence behavior.
3. The crucial point that must be maintained, however, is that ultimately neither nature nor nurture fully explain (or excuse) human moral choices.
I’ll have a few more thoughts along these lines in my next entry.
This post was written by Mark Hansard on August 30, 2007
In a recent op-ed piece for Discover magazine called Peace Through God, computer scientist Jaron Lanier reflects on religion, pluralism, mysteries beyond scientific adjudication, and the meaning of it all. While he does not appear particularly religious himself, he proffers a number of recommendations about how people ought to be religious in our violence-strewn world. Since his thinking has much in common with the secular academy at large, I would like to comment on two points in his essay.
His first point is that we should celebrate and encourage a diversity of complex religious beliefs because this would constitute a “violence-avoiding arrangement,” healthy in a pluralistic democracy in which we would prefer to avoid violence. He thinks that often, traditional religions are “clannish” in the sense that there is concern about who is “in” and who is “outside” the group, and this can cause violence (although to his credit, he does not claim that all religions are this way, and he chastises Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett for claiming that all religious belief is harmful). As expected, Lanier mentions the Hebrew God as an example of a “clannish” one.
He then goes on to say that we should encourage religious belief, even when it appears silly, if it breaks up the “clannishness” of traditional religion(s), because this would be the best way to avoid violence. His example is an apparently new religion in which the worshippers pray by chanting in binary language (zeroes and ones, the language of computers). Why should we be against such belief, he says, as long as it makes God complex enough not to interfere in the real world, and not to interfere with scientific discovery? (Only a small-minded person would believe that God actually interferes in the space-time universe, or that believing in him might have scientific implications).
Note again that we run up against the question of what knowledge is, whether it is possible to have religious knowledge. By recommending that we create our own religious beliefs in order to avoid violence, Lanier assumes there is no such thing as religious knowledge; we only have beliefs which we can create and follow for ourselves. But why should we assume that? Like many scientists, he believes science can step in and tell a religious person where she has erred, but he does not give such a person equal opportunity to critique scientific beliefs. Lanier’s view is an insult to the informed Christian who knows that Christian theology makes claims about knowledge—that it at least claims to describe reality in some way.
Curiously, Lanier goes on to recommend religious beliefs that “are concerned only with things too big to be framed by science.” He explains that mystery in the universe provokes “wonder,” and that certain questions may never be answered by science(!) His examples: consciousness, the source of mathematical truth, and what happened before the Big Bang. His admission here is significant in that it limits science to answering only the questions that science is designed to answer.
But Lanier goes on to define spirituality as “one’s emotional relationship with unanswerable questions.” How can one have an emotional relationship with a question? His attitude reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos musings about the “wonder” and “awe” which the universe inspires because it is vast and mysterious. The problem with this view is that once we revel and glory in “unanswerable questions,” we are delving into a relationship, not with the questions themselves, but with the fact that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s not the questions, it’s the implications of the questions which are intriguing. After all, what did happen before the Big Bang? Why is the universe so huge and we are so small? We don’t have emotional relationships with such questions, but with their implications which lead us—dare I say?—to worship (if not God, then the universe itself). The problem with Lanier is he embraces such questions while studiously avoiding their implications.
This post was written by Matt Bazemore on May 3, 2007
In my last post, I described how Moral Irrealism is rooted in the scientific worldview, and why it makes actual moral truth impossible. Thus, what is the Moral Realist’s response to Moral Irrealism and the absolute conception?
Moral Realism maintains that ‘appearance’ qualities are real for two main reasons. First, the absolute conception is a theory selected upon subjective criteria. The criteria for the absolute conception are dependent upon the human perspective and our preferences for organizing data. Thus, the absolute conception is ultimately subjective.
Second, the absolute conception explains away most of our experience. Qualities such as color, smell and beauty are nothing more than illusions. Before moving on, think about everything that is included in that last statement. This means the majority of our experience is illusory, i.e. in the realm of appearance. This seems to be too high a price to pay for holding to the absolute conception.
Moral Realism provides the following account for our perception of qualities dependent upon a particular perspective: our mode of perception does not produce qualities but enables us to discern them in reality. The range of modes of perception is limited by one’s capacities. If one lacks the capacity to smell, then that mode of perception is unavailable. The absolute conception does not provide an account explaining why experienced ‘appearance’ qualities, which we understand to be in reality, are unreal. Thus, there are good reasons to maintain that our common experience of light, color, smell and beauty is of a mind-independent reality.
Therefore, the tragedy at Virginia Tech is evil in a mind-independent sense. When call the events “evil,” we are using “evil” in a descriptive sense, not an evaluative sense that is dependent upon the perspective of the speaker.
I would like to say that my heart aches for the community surrounding Virginia Tech in the recent killings. It is clear that what happened was truly wrong and atrocious, and I hope the relevance of this discussion is clearly seen in light of these recent events.
Part 1 Part 2
This post was written by Matt Bazemore on April 30, 2007
In my previous entry we were left with two major positions concerning ethics: Moral Realism and Moral Irrealism. Today we will examine how Moral Irrealism analyzes the meaning of moral statements.
Moral Irrealism makes a distinction between descriptive and evaluative meaning that is found in every statement of value, such as “That is cruel.? Descriptive meaning refers to the meaning that is not dependent upon any particular perspective. In other words, multiple people could agree with its meaning, because something external to the speaker is being described.
Evaluative meaning is dependent upon a particular perspective, i.e. multiple people would have differences about the same thing, such as the taste of a particular dish. This distinction of meaning is grounded in what is called the absolute conception of the world. When Christians hear the word, “absolute? in relation to ethics, their usual response is gladness. Celebrations would be premature in this case, as will soon become evident.
The absolute conception seeks a description of reality not dependent upon any particular perspective. This is related to scientific methodology. Science seeks to provide us with a picture of the world that is independent of any particular perspective. As scientists study the world they do not find qualities such as “goodness? and so conclude that values are of appearance and not reality. Thus, the absolute conception places objective qualities in reality, and subjective qualities in appearance.
The Moral Irrealist can affirm as actually existing in reality only those qualities that science deems descriptive, and not evaluative. Evaluative qualities, while perhaps containing or causing a high level of emotive content, do not really refer to anything outside of the person who is making an observation. They can’t – “good? and “bad? aren’t really “there?.
The success and prevalence of the scientific worldview adds much weight to the Moral Irrealist position. But if Moral Irrealism is true, then moral truth is impossible. This implies that those who find the recent shootings at Virginia Tech horrifying are feeling an affective response to an opinion and not the truth of the situation. Despite this rather damning implication however, the Moral Realist still needs to provide a response to the absolute conception.
Part 1 Part 3
This post was written by Matt Bazemore on April 27, 2007
I recently read Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics (Blackwell Publishing, 1988) by David McNaughton. This work not only introduces ethics, but it’s richly satisfying food for the soul.
Moral Vision begins with the question Where are properties of value located? Properties, or qualities, of value refer to things such as beauty, ugliness, right and wrong. How we answer this question is profoundly important, as I will seek to demonstrate over the next couple of entries.
To begin, let’s say Sam observes two children attempting to light a gasoline-soaked cat on fire. Sam states, “That is cruel,? and acts to stop the children. Sam’s action may be analyzed two ways. The first takes the statement “That is cruel? as referring to the children’s action. Sam discerns the quality of cruelty and a belief is formed. To discern means the ability to select a quality and refer to it by stating a belief. The belief is true if and only if it corresponds to reality, the mind-independent world. In discerning a moral fact, Sam’s action is justified to bring about a different state of affairs, such as preventing the children from further harming the cat. This analysis that places the locus of value (both moral and non-moral) in reality is called Moral Realism. The Moral Realist position in which Sam’s belief alone is sufficient for motivating one to action is called Cognitivism. Moral Realism provides a basis for our experience of moral truth, moral justification and moral observation in reality.
The second position analyzes Sam’s discernment as referring to himself. Sam’s statement has two kinds of meaning: the factual or descriptive meaning that refers to the observation, and the evaluative meaning that refers to an emotive state in Sam. This would be called Moral Irrealism, the analysis of moral statements that places qualities of value in the subject. Moral Irrealism would include “Sam felt a strong disfavor? to explain why he acted. This position in which the emotive quality, which does not have a truth value, is a necessary constituent to explain Sam’s action is called Non-Cognitivism. Thus, moral truth is not possible.
This second view is a serious position, and is one way to ground properties of value on a scientific and physicalist (or atheistic) worldview. In my next post, I will explain how the modern scientific perspective undergirds Non-Cognitivism, and why it is not a robust view to hold.
Part 2 Part 3
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