My Journey, Part 7.5: Excursus on Oversystematization

This is part 7 .5of my rebooted series on my journey from Evangelicalism to Eastern Orthodoxy. The full series can be found here:

1	Back to the beginning
2	Cracks appear
3	Questions multiply
4	Questioning the "gospel"
5	The big question
6	A better hermeneutic
7	Explorations in epistemology
7.5	Excursus on oversystematization
8	Back to the gospel
9	The new direction
10	Ecclesiological foundations
11.1	Sola scriptura
11.2	The insufficiency of Scripture
11.25	Addenda on sola scriptura
11.3	Holy Tradition
12	Bridging the cracks
13.1	Orthodoxy and Genesis 1–3
13.2	A Better Atonement (Against Penal Substitution)
13.3	Faith Alone?
13.4	The Colour and the Shape of the Gospel
14	Worshipping with the Church
15	Mary, Saints, Baptism, and Other Odds/Ends
16	Looking Back, Coming Home

Sadly, this interlude isn't for as high a purpose as the interlude of my series on God's providence two years ago, which marked a major turning point in my struggles with doubts about God's goodness (already related in post 3 of this series). This is just some extra material that was supposed to go in post 7, but which required enough explaining, unpacking, and digressing from the main trajectory of my story that it seemed best to split it off. (This way you can skip it if it puts you to sleep)

Somewhat relatedly to my thinking about epistemology, I kept wrestling with a theological habit that I've noticed for years, but have had a lot of trouble clearly defining. I call it "spiritual object" thinking. I saw it in a lot of the theological "big important words" that form the building blocks of evangelical theology.

Pinning it down

After a good deal of reflection, I think I can take a stab at defining it. I think that at the root of spiritual object thinking is the assumption that our theological terminology corresponds to clearly-definable theological concepts on a one-to-one basis—a simple form of the view that truth is "that which corresponds to reality". These term/concept unities are what I call "spiritual objects". They are assumed to have some kind of substantial existence or "life-of-one's-own" as opposed to being human constructs, somewhat like Plato's forms, and so are kept conceptually separate from one another with careful definitions. (For example, "righteousness" and "justice", which are translated from the same word in biblical Greek, dikaiosyne, though krisis, "judgment", is a different word and can sometimes translate to "justice" as well)

From there, the way these concepts/terms are used goes in two different directions. First, we specify a large amount of meaning for them, so that concepts like "salvation", "gospel", "the glory of God", etc. become very rich and deep. But at the same time, we try to pin down and establish these meanings very precisely. Normally, words can take on a range of possible meanings, determined by their usage and context, centered around what we would consider their definition. For example, the verb "plan" takes on different connotations when it is used to describe a shopping excursion vs. a military operation; the two meanings coincide at a certain level of abstraction. Words can also be used in more concrete or more metaphorical/analogical ways, like "concrete". Normally rich, deep words like "love" have a very wide range of possible uses on multiple levels; it's part of what makes them so rich.

But theological concepts that we treat as spiritual objects are different. While we specify lots of meaning for them, we do so in a narrow way. Their "conceptual space" (to borrow a term from Douglas Hofstadter) is small or nonexistent; they mean basically the exact same thing regardless of context, like technical terms or symbols in formulas. Their meaning is self-contained; the only context they require to be fully meant is other abstract spiritual objects. When we encounter the "regular", more concrete versions of these concepts, we don't treat them independently but subsume them under the spiritual object version, which is seen as more important or simply more real, again something like Plato's forms.

Some examples:

• When we think about (say) sin in a spiritual object manner, we can do so without reference to a particular sin committed (which could be anything) or the one doing the sinning (who could be anyone); the one sinned against is always the same. We refer to an abstracted concept of sin, apart from particulars, as the human condition of alienation from God and an inability to do good on our own, inherited from Adam.When we do get to talking about particulars, we still use our self-contained, context-free understanding of sin. Rather than focusing on our particular sins, we mostly see this spiritual object of sin that has to be dealt with by the spiritual object of justification so that we can receive the spiritual object of salvation, etc... After being saved, though we still commit sins, our "sin" has been taken away by Jesus, which is considered the important part but which shows the difference between the definitions.
• When we talk about "salvation", we mean the very specific process where our "sin" (see above) is exchanged for Christ's righteousness via imputation. Again, we can do so without reference to the person being saved; the one doing the saving and what he/she is saved from are always the same. We see it as a spiritual object that God gives us in exchange for "saving faith", and can (or definitely can't, depending on your tradition) be "lost". The theological concept of salvation is quite consciously held distinct from lesser salvations (individual instances of deliverance or rescue from something). For example, we make clear that though an important sacrament, the act of baptism is not salvific in itself; it is merely a signifier of the true act of salvation which happens by faith alone. Similarly lesser biblical salvations (like the Israelites from Egypt and Babylon, or Noah from the flood) are seen as "foreshadows" of the true salvation that comes from Christ.
• "Inspiration" is a spiritual object that the books of the (Protestant) biblical canon are believed to have which automatically makes them (or our interpretation of them) "authoritative" over any other source of truth. We can talk about it without reference to what, specifically, it means for a certain book of the Bible to be inspired; it just is, what what we may say about specific books is subsumed under it. It is intentionally differentiated from lesser instances of brilliance (literary or otherwise) that we might call "inspired" in other contexts. Either a book is inspired, or it merely human words.

This way of conceptualizing theological truth is more prescriptive than descriptive; the realities we talk about are established abstractly and then used as a pre-formed mold into which we expect our own situation to fit. It is more universal and propositional than particular and personal. It tends to view concepts more as nouns than verbs, even ones like "salvation" or "inspiration" that start as verbs. Because they are thought to be based on God's infinite nature, they are thought of as absolute, all-or-nothing, totally present or totally absent. The practice of typology is not dependent on spiritual object thinking, but with its casting of biblical people and events as "shadows" of the life and work of Jesus, it lends itself easily enough.

I stress that these are tendencies, not certainties and certainly not hard-and-fast rules that theologians are taught to follow. But that doesn't mean they aren't real. I think this kind of "spiritual object" thinking describes a fair deal of how evangelical Christians process and handle the gospel, at least at the lay/semi-academic level. I think it boils down to the bad habits of oversystematization and overabstraction in academic theology. It is what happens when the systematic descriptions of theological truths become our definitions for them. It can induce us to read the Bible as a systematic theology textbook rather than the diverse, often-messy, always-surprising collection of inspired books that it is.

Words break

The problem (besides the fact that we're digesting Christian theology into a form that bears little resemblence to anything in the Bible) is that language (certainly theological language) doesn't work the same way as mathematics. You can't expect to encapsulate theological concepts into self-contained definitions that simply interact like variables in a formula. Trying to pack so much meaning into isolated words risks making them meaningless and largely disconnected from experience—at least for me. I'm reminded of a poem that N.T. Wright cited to illustrate the weight that gets placed on on the word "justification".

                    Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still.
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, I.v)

In one journal entry, I objected to the "spiritual objectification" of the "glory of God", which I frequently heard thrown around as little more than the generic justification for God to do anything. Is this really the place the glory of God should occupy in our theology?

'The glory of God'—three simple words behind (or within) which much can be hidden. It's as if a breathtaking mountain landscape could be packed into a suitcase and carried off, bought and sold, changing hands dozens of times while its handlers remain blind to its contents. (2013-9-9)

If I wrote this entry today, I might have the suitcase be full of dynamite instead. In another entry, I was becoming suspicious of how oversystematization tends to make us read concepts like "gospel" as technical terms, always referring to the same thing. I observed the potential for misreadings of Scripture this could cause:

Galatians 3:8 reminded me of how much we have turned 'the gospel' into a technical term, a bit of Christian jargon. But Paul seems to be using it to simply mean 'told good news' here. Our technical definition forces us to read all kinds of meaning into simple passages so 'the gospel' as we define it can be found there. (2013-11-27)

I also observed how it sets us up to see "tensions" where there need not be any. By trying to nail down clear, context-free definitions of things, it can unnaturally separate things that come together in the Christian gospel.

Spiritual object thinking tends to miss how the various parts of our salvation and new life can paradoxically combine—God's grace and our effort/works, the divine inspiration and humanity of Scripture, the divinity/humanity of Jesus...it puts these concepts in airtight compartments. We can talk about how they interact as from a distance, but this doesn't go far enough, as a relational model does, which views them as dynamic parts of a relationship. It [spiritual object thinking] also leaves the question of how to apply things like 'life by grace' rather open to hidden tradition. Relational theology sees these things as their own application. (2014-1-5)

Such important parts of the Christian message, viewed as spiritual objects, seemed to be always held at arm's length; you had to authentically understand and believe them, then somehow apply them to your own life. I longed for a more immediate theology where definitions did not abstractify and isolate from our experience, where the simplistic model of belief -> application was shaken up, if not done away with entirely. I nebulously termed this ideal "relational theology", but I had trouble specifically describing it, much less envisioning it.

A better way?

I'll get to how I went about finding a way past this kind of oversystematic thinking later. But for now, in light of how I've defined it, some suggestions present themselves.

First, we can realize that even though we have the Bible, we are still only human. We have no God's-eye perspective on spiritual realities; there is much beyond our purview, and our terminology doesn't necessarily map directly to tidy, noun-like concepts, even if it is from Scripture. The limitations of our knowledge don't just mean that we can't always find answers to our questions—the questions themselves, and the categories/patterns of thought that underlie them, may need correcting.

We should strive to be descriptive rather than prescriptive in our theology, realizing the fine distinction between understanding something and controlling it, if only in our minds. We should be open to redefining and expanding our theological concepts, even radically, and not exclusively holding onto the definitions we've built as "the way things are". Realizing that our terms and definitions will never fully encompass the things of God frees us from expecting them to pull so much weight and from using them as technical terms. We are able to use them in smaller (but still important) ways, like calling the manifestations of grace by which God delivers us from sin "salvific" without detracting from Christ's "finished" work of redemption by doing so.

In light of Jesus' identity as the ultimate Truth God reveals to us (Jhn 14:6, Hbr 1:1), we do well to pay attention to the personal, experiential side of truth as well as the propositional, even though it can be much messier. This doesn't replace the propositional aspect of Christian belief—there are plenty of definite things about Him to proclaim—but it puts doctrine in its proper place and makes our theology dynamic not static; personal not mathematical. We can never define a human person completely with propositions; how much less God Himself! Persons can always surprise us—though we can trust that, being perfect, Jesus will only do so positively. Trusting God to be Himself even on admittedly imperfect knowledge is a crucial part of what faith is. What we say and believe about Jesus avails us nothing if it isn't informed by our knowing and being known by Him.

On reading Kierkegaard: Information vs. Transformation

I've been reading Kierkegaard's Works of Love for the last few weeks. It's a slow read, but only because it is incredibly dense in the best possible way--a great book to bring on a backpacking expedition and read before sunrise by a mountain lake (speaking from experience). The blurb on the back says it is "the kind of book that will change your life", and so far I agree. Kierkegaard's meditations on the Biblical teaching about love and the distinctness of Christian love are equal parts beautiful, enlightening, and convicting. Dozens of quotes I've underlined could spark their own subsequent posts. Maybe they will.

What most impresses me about Kierkegaard is how he is able to take a short Bible passage--like Jesus' command to love your neighbor--and expound on it for dozens of pages, examining it from every angle and laying out its manifold meanings in a way that prevents any possibility of escape. It's a vivid proof-by-demonstration of how the word of God is "living and active" (Hebrews 4:12), its meaning and applicability never confined to a few terse words on a page.

I think I'm unhealthily obsessed on this blog with thinking things that no one has thought before, or saying things that no one has ever said before. I take X common question or Y discussion in the Christian blogosphere and try to take a step or two back from everyone else, trying to nail that one crucial insight that no one thought of so the conversation will be transformed and everyone will fall silent and think I'm brilliant (or something like that). I'm never content to just "pick a side" on virtually anything, not without at least tweaking it first. At best this response-oriented approach is interesting and eye-opening; at worst, it is smug, denigrating, and utterly lacking in Christian love.

But Kierkegaard has been a poignant reminder that we really need is not new information at all, but inward transformation through the 2000-year-old message of Christianity. The words of the Bible don't help us if we keep them confined to neat theological systems out of a need for control via certainty and complete understanding; they must take root in us and grow into fruit we bear in our lives (Galatians 5:22-23). Kierkegaard's meditations are like watching this growing process in action as he takes the simple words of Jesus and Paul pertaining to love and powerfully demonstrates how they are to pervade every corner of our lives. Excessively focusing on Christian truths merely as information can lead us to forget that they are supposed to be arrows that pierce our very souls. When that happens, I'm thankful for authors like Kierkegaard to remind me of the truth.

The God-Haunted World

I've been reading a fascinating book in the last few days, The Dancing Universe by Marcelo Gleiser. It's an engaging account of the history of scientific thinking and its association with religion through history. It's gotten my gears spinning about another one of my perennial writing topics, the nature of the relationship between science and religion.

From creation myths to the Enlightenment

In the beginning, writes Gleiser, there was no explicit relationship between science and religion because no distinction was made between the two. What we now know as science (the attempt to understand and explain the workings of the universe) was handled entirely by religion, initially by the writing of elaborate creation myths that answered, in a distinctly premodern way, the fundamental question, "Where did everything come from?". Gleiser divides these myths into creation myths and no-creation myths (ones that describe the universe as eternal or cyclic in nature), and the creation myths further as being precipitated by a god, a spontaneous emergence of order from chaos, or simply something from nothing.

In the next few chapters he covers Greek philosophy, which was surprisingly varied in its applications to nature. Various philosophers saw water, air, or fire as the primary substance of the cosmos; some believed the universe was constantly changing while others considered all change to be a mere illusion; the Pythagoreans saw all through their lens of number mysticism whole the later atomists proposed, in a mix of unintentional fact and misconception, the constitution of the universe as indivisible atoms. The only limit to the breadth of these theories seemed to be the human imagination. These philosophers were the first known thinkers to look for an explanation of the nature of the world in the world itself rather than in their conception of the divine.

Then came the two philosophers whose ideas would shape the discourse for millenia to come. Plato espoused the "world of forms", which was the highest and most fundamental reality and consisted of the true essences of things in the world, which were merely the shadows cast by them. This realm of pristine truth, he said, was to be the pursuit of all philosophers rather than the subordinate world in which we live. His student Aristotle disagreed, emphasizing the instantiation of forms in physical things and incorporating induction from the study of the world to the discovery of "universals. It was a prefigurement of the scientific method, which he saw as little different from the rest of his "natural philosophy".

Subsequent philosophers concerned themselves more with observational astronomy, taking up Plato's challenge to "save the phenomena", or find rational explanations of their observations of the cosmos that described the motions of the heavenly bodies in circles, inhabitants of the abstract world of forms. From the lack of (observable) stellar parallax, they concluded that the earth was stationary at the center of the universe and came up with increasingly complex models to explain astronomical observations, culminating in Ptolemy's model which would be the standard in Europe until the Renaissance.

While the Greeks continued to be taught for centuries after, with the Christianization and collapse of the Roman empire and the loss of the works of Aristotle to the west, what we would call "scientific progress" slowed down considerably. The only acceptable wisdom was considered to be theological, and the contemplation of information gained through the flesh (i.e. the senses) was shoved aside as a sure route to depravity and irrelevant to the path to eternal salvation. Augustine, who played a significant role in introducing neoplatonic dualism to Christian thinking, wrote:

At this point I mention another form of temptation more various and dangerous. For over and above that lust of the flesh which lies in the delight of all our senses and pleasures...there can also be in the mind itself, through those same bodily senses, a certain vain desire and curiosity, not of taking delights in the body, but of making experiments with the body's aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge... Thus men proceed to investigate the phenomena of nature--the part of nature external to us--though the knowledge is of no value to them: for they wish to know simply for the sake of knowing. Certainly the theaters no longer attract me, nor do I care to know the course of the stars.

Once the works of Aristotle were rediscovered by the west, his view of the cosmos was adopted dogmatically by the church after being somewhat "Christianized". The medieval view of the cosmos was more concerned with meanings than with actual reality; the universe was supposed to be laid out according to the mind of God and to be a moral allegory, thus rendering the exploration of nature subordinate to the more important matter of eternal salvation. So a model of the universe with the central earth surrounded by ethereal spheres; God was situated with the stars in the outermost sphere, while the other planets occupied inner spheres with the spherical earth in the middle and Satan in Hell the center of the earth (so the medieval universe was actually "diablocentric"). So traveling or directing your thoughts "up", toward God and away from Satan and this fallen earth, was assumed to be an unqualified good; the protagonist in Dante's Inferno traverses the circles of Hell and the heavenly spheres in the order prescribed by Aristotle.

After the Catholic church's spiritual authority was challenged by the Reformation, its scientific authority was challenged by the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution. Johannes Kepler marveled at the discovery of a stella nova, "new star", in the sky, actually a supernova. Using his telescope, Galileo detected smaller "stars" in motion around Jupiter, mountains and other earthlike features on the moon, and spots on the sun, which had previously been thought to be transits of Mercury. These all constituted evidence against the Aristotelian view of the heavenly bodies as unchanging, made of a totally different element than the four present on earth, and all revolving around the earth. Battle lines between astronomy and the church were drawn; I have already written about the conflict that followed and how Galileo was forced to bitterly recant his discoveries.

Finally, in the late seventeenth century, Isaac Newton published Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), laying out his mathematical laws of motion. This exploded the perceived distinction between the "heavens" and the "earth" by showing that both operated by the same laws; the same force that makes an apple fall to the ground also holds the planets in their orbits around the sun. Newton's discovery, based on reason and observed data and (relatively) insulated from theological concerns, helped spark what would become the Enlightenment, which through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century applied what would become the "scientific method" to more and more problems, until by the dawn of the twentieth century scientists believed that had solved every major problem in physics. That's as much as I've read so far.

The (In)compatibility of Science and Religion

As someone with an appreciation for the explanatory ability of science and a passion for correct (as in Christ-like) interpretation and use of the Bible, it was hard for me to read about the church's suppression of any thought or discovery that "contradicted the Holy Scriptures". It was almost as hard for me to read about how eagerly God was shoved aside by the rush of scientific progress in the Enlightenment, first into the impotence of the deistic god and then into total irrelevance. All a part of the perennial "conflict" between science and religion.

This conflict is based on a relatively simple assumption that I will refer to as "scientific incompatibilism": A scientific explanation for something necessarily excludes a theistic one. In other words, scientific and theological explanations are incompatible with each other. It is evident how this has played out in the history of science; once Newton's laws become common knowledge, God's role as the "unmoved mover" of the planets was forgotten and He was instead seen as the "master watchmaker" who wound up the clockwork universe and then let it proceed on its own. Once the Big Bang theory gained acceptance, even this role for God become unnecessary and atheism became an intellectually credible belief (or nonbelief) system. As we explain more and more where we previously invoked God, reason and empiricism become effective God replacements. When asked why he didn't invoke the Creator in his book Celestial Mechanics, the French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace responded, "I have no need for that hypothesis." As the Kamelot song says (through the voice of Ariel, a philosopher whose sole ambition is the search for universal truth): "How can we believe in heaven? Human reason counters all."

Meanwhile, this same scientific incompatibilism reverberates through religion. The case of Galileo was more a matter of his observations' implicit challenge to the church's claim to the authority to interpret scripture, but it's hard to believe it wasn't also clinging to the Aristotelian model because (ironic, given its non-Christian origin) of its reflection of the truths of God in the cosmos. Inconvenient facts couldn't be allowed to challenge the very principles by which God ordered the universe, could they? And, of course, in the past century we've seen the perennial Christian debate over the status of evolution. Many Christians see Darwin's theory as an assault on the role of God as creator simply by virtue of its offering an explanation for the development of life that doesn't directly invoke God as the one who "did" it . Critics of young-earth creationism point out their "God of the gaps" methodology that construes questions unanswered by science as evidence for God and is another example of scientific incompatibilism.

You presumably know where I stand on the matter from my previous writing on evolution. I reject the dualistic assumption that scientific and theological explanations of the same phenomenon (e.g. human origins) are incompatible, i.e. that "either God does something or it happens naturally", on the grounds that science and theology are meant to answer totally different classes of questions, as well as the fact that God created nature in the first place so the whole dichotomy is bunk. What I am more concerned with now is the question: how did we get here? How did religion and inquiry about natural phenomena proceed hand-in-hand for millenia before so suddenly and violently bifurcating?

I propose an explanation: confusion between two different kinds of (ironically) "explaining". Also ironically, this confusion arises from a lesson not learned from Aristotle, whose ideas were the focal point of so much contention. Aristotle proposed four different kinds of "causes":

1. The material cause, or the physical constitution of an object.
2. The formal (or "form-al") cause, or the abstract form represented by a change or "becoming". This is the most obtuse, but for example the abstract form of a sphere might be the formal cause for the shape of a ball.
3. The efficient cause, which we normally think of in the modern sense of "causation" as that which "causes" something else to occur. So the efficient cause of a table is a carpenter; the efficient cause of water boiling is applied heat, and so on.
4. The final cause, or its teleological aim or purpose.

Up until the Renaissance religion and philosophy, such as that of Aristotle himself, freely investigated any and all of these kinds of causes and were indeed thought of as the only real way to do it. The various kinds of causes were often conflated, as we see in the concept of celestial spheres: the sphere, being the simplest of forms, was the formal cause of their shape; they were thought to be made of the celestial material aether (material cause); they were arranged and moved by God (efficient cause) to teach us a moral lesson pertaining to our eternal salvation (final cause).

What I think happened in the scientific revolution was that the new generation of natural philosophers saw science as having dethroned religion's role in explaining these causes. They traded theology and authority for reason and empirical observation as sources for knowledge of the four causes (the transition from premodernism to modernism in its infancy). But while science is clearly much better-equipped than religion for knowledge of the material and efficient (and, to some extent, the formal) causes of things, it is completely useless for explaining their final causes. But this is easily forgotten when you're drunk on your newfound power to lay bare the secrets of the universe, to peer into the very mind of God! (See how easy it is) I think that scientific incompatibilism arises when both science and religion each lay claim to all four of these causes as lying within their "territory", as it were, so that a scientific perspective leaves nothing left for a religious one to speak to and vice versa.

The God-Haunted World

What then? Are we to adopt Stephen Jay Gould's view that science and faith occupy "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA), leaving questions of nature and technology to one and questions of morals and meaning to the other? This is what I might have advocated in the past, but (of course) I don't think it's so simple. NOMA does not offer a way to move past scientific incompatibilism, but rather gives into it by essentially saying: "Yes, the claims of science and religion really are mutually exclusive, so the realms of knowledge in which they operate should also be mutually exclusive".

The biggest problem with this admission is that I don't think it is true. Life is not so easily compartmentalized. I don't think the ancients' total conflation of what would later become natural philosophy and science with notions of the divine or transcendent was merely a regrettable consequence of their ignorance that we have grown out of. If anything, our insistence on dividing the "natural" from the "supernatural" so completely is what needs to be grown out of. Question of final causes and meaning refuse to confine themselves to the abstract realm of armchair theology and ivory-tower ethics, and the ramifications of scientific inquiry refuse to confine themselves to questions answerable by science. As we have known from prehistory, the starry heavens overawe and confound us, as if crying out, "Explain me!" (And not just with physics, cosmology, chemistry, astrophysics, relativity, etc.) So similarly with the problem of suffering, which no amount of medicine, psychology, or social science can fully heal. So also with the mysterious nature of the mind, or why there is something rather than nothing, or the meta-question of why we are so driven to seek meaning in everything in the first place.

Where science is either silent on these questions or (more extremely) actively denies that they have any significance beyond what is empirically verifiable, faith speaks loudly and clearly to them. So Psalm 19 (written from that premodern viewpoint) begins,

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.

This understanding of the heavens has not been rendered obsolete by our knowledge of the true nature of stars; it may even be enhanced by it, if we could just get over the misconception that explaining something scientifically is enough to understand it. What I am getting at is what I think the Bible assumes when it speaks of something as being done both by humans and by God. Among many possible examples, Philippians 2:12-13 expresses this compactly: "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." This seems at best a paradox and at worst an absurdity to our modern sensibilities, but I don't think it presented any such difficulties for Paul's audience. It is tremendously helpful to think about how this can be true.

This sets the pattern for how we, as Christians, are to hold a faith that is not purely abstract, that has practical implications for "real life" without leading us to believe we can brush aside scientific discoveries by quoting Bible verses. We tend to assume that God's actions are overtly miraculous and thus distinctly separable from our own. But the main way in which they are distinguished is not by their means, but by their meaning. The bare fact of God "doing" something must never be separated from its teleological significance, even if He "does" it through the mundane. "He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him." (Isaiah 53:2) I have a strong conviction that God never just "does" anything for no reason. It's always part of the story He's writing, even if we can't see how and shouldn't even try to. The acts of God are best understood, I think, in terms of their (to use Aristotle's terminology again) final rather than efficient cause. This is a way of learning to "see" God in the midst of an understanding of the world that has been deeply shaped by science and modernism, which fits over and above our mechanistic understanding of the world rather than colliding with it.

Though we can't simply go back to the premodern world of mystery where God is responsible for every change of seasons and starry night, these things aren't necessarily drained of the meaning they had to the ancients because we know the laws governing them. Understanding something scientifically in terms of composition or causation is not understanding it teleologically, as part of a larger meaningful narrative; the two complement each other rather than conflicting. The teleological understanding arranges facts into something more than just senseless, meaningless phenomena, and in turn a better understanding of "how things work" can increase the impression they make on us. This is very subjective,  but I would say that the mechanism of evolution and the incredible vastness of space both help me to appreciate God as Creator more, not less.

I would argue further that the teleological understanding is more fundamental than the scientific one. This is why the default for most of human history has been for philosophico-religious explanations of things to "lead" their mechanistic explanations while a method for rigorously explaining something scientifically had to be developed, rather than the other way around. And even now, for all our "progress" we haven't lessened our dependence on story to "make sense" of life in a way that science never could, we have merely pushed it out of the forefront of our attention. (Possibly by making the god of progress and human achievement our story) I believe (and this may shock any postmoderns reading this blog) that not all of these stories are equally true. For all our experimentation, calculation, and theorization to purge the mystery from our midst, we can't seem to escape living in a God-haunted world.

So apparently I'm postmodern (and why labels aren't everything)

If you've been following my blog in pretty much any capacity of late, you know that I just won't shut up about the nature of truth, the role of doctrine, the evolution of my perspective on the Bible as the word of God and Jesus as the Word of God, et cetera. Lately my suspicions have been confirmed--what I have been advocating so strongly for is a distinctly postmodern view of Christianity and truth. Myron Bradley Penner, in the introduction to his book The End of Apologetics, gives a good definition; he sees

postmodernity as a kind of self-reflexive condition that emerges as modernity becomes conscious or aware of itself as modernity...it makes little sense to think of the postmodern ethos as characterized by a set of theses or adherence to philosophical doctrines and positions. Postmodernity is a condition, or a set of attitudes, dispositions, and practices, that is aware of itself as modern and aware that modernity's claims to rational superiority are deeply problematic.

The massive post I just finished a few days ago is all about moving from a strictly propositional, heavy, doctrine-oriented definition of "faith" to one rooted in the heart, or (using Greek to escape the overly emotional connotations) the καρδια. It questions whether truth itself is primarily propositional and natively suited to expression by words and rational discourse and pushes a role of scripture that is more about finding Jesus the Truth than finding inerrant "Biblical" truth about God.

Compare that with this article by Scot McKnight about the postmodernism of the emerging church movement, which says:

The third kind of emerging postmodernity attracts all the attention. Some have chosen to minister as postmoderns. That is, they embrace the idea that we cannot know absolute truth, or, at least, that we cannot know truth absolutely. They speak of the end of metanarratives and the importance of social location in shaping one's view of truth. They frequently express nervousness about propositional truth. LeRon Shults, formerly a professor of theology at Bethel Theological Seminary, writes:

From a theological perspective, this fixation with propositions can easily lead to the attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that transcends and embraces all finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry.

Though I would probably try to express it in less dense language, I pretty much agree with these sentiments, in the sense that we should rejoice that it's a testament to the grandness and majesty of the Truth that we can't know Him absolutely as we can know a doctrinal system. The comments on language are also echoed by posts I've written recently on language and how, though it is the best tool we have for communication, it is an imperfect one at best whose limitations become evident when speaking of God.

What really amuses me is that I cited that same Christianity Today article in one of my very first posts over three years ago when I didn't know who Scot McKnight is, only I was critiquing the emerging church and especially postmodernism. Normally I intensely dislike line-by-line rebuttals of peoples' writing (as if they're never allowed to be the slightest bit right), but my twenty-year-old self is in no position to defend himself and I'm quite willing to be hard on him. Let's do this.

Several things of this description of the emerging church distinctly worry me. Foremost is the movement's embracing of postmodernism, a pervasive system of thought whose central message is (correct me if I'm wrong) that scientific, rational attempts to figure the universe out have failed and that there is no one objective reality or truth, only everyone's own perception of it.

Sure, I'll correct you. Of course scientific-esque, rationalistic attempts to fully, objectively describe "the universe" or some part of the nature of God have failed. This is because what they tend to come down to is an attempt to place yourself, epistemologically, in the position of God as the one who has perfect knowledge, which amounts to a denial of your finite creature-ness.  Jesus really was God and was uniquely entitled to use truth in this way (that is, tell everyone, "Your theology is wrong and I'll tell you why because I know the truth" and be totally correct), but by and large He didn't because He Himself was the Truth He was communicating to people (John 14:6). As I recently put it, this kind of beating people over the head with truth entails "assuming that we ourselves are infallible because we possess an infallible gospel", or are in communion with an infallible source.

Postmodernists put everything under skepticism (even, hopefully, postmodernism itself) and are leery of any truths that claim to be objective, or universal.

Well, yes. I've changed the title of my blog a few times since writing that and it now incorporates the seeming contradiction "faithful skeptic", reflecting my willingness to question anything, including my own epistemology. The conflict over "absolute truth" is probably the biggest point of friction between postmodern types and evangelicals, who see it as an attempt to undermine the very validity of the "gospel". Of course I believe absolute truth exists, most especially in the person of Jesus Christ. And it's fine to try to communicate this truth (even in propositional form) or to claim to know it. But if Jesus is the Truth, then truth is not essentially propositional (that is, directly expressible through words and graspable through logic) in nature. You could say these things aren't truth's "native language". And while our words can describe truth to a high degree of accuracy, they always (except in technical fields) involve simplification, like projecting a three-dimensional scene onto a two-dimensional screen.

An example might help show what I mean. The (to understate) ongoing conversation between Calvinists and Arminians is a tense one because each "camp" has, beneath its respective five points about how predestination and salvation work, a very different position on his God works in and through His people. To the Calvinist, people are so fallen and tainted by sin that they are incapable in themselves of doing or willing any good, so their salvation and sanctification are wholly the gracious work of the God who chose them before the foundation of the world through faith alone (which is itself a gift from God by the regeneration of the Holy Spirit). The Calvinist embraces verses like Ephesians 2:1-10, which reads, in part:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

 (The Calvinist is sure to point out that Paul is saying that faith itself is a gift from God, so that we have absolutely nothing in our walk with God that we can boastfully claim as "our own") To the Arminian, people are not passive spectators but, again by God's grace, active participants in God's work in them who are (by prevenient grace) able to freely respond to and "go along with" Him even as His Spirit does the real work. They point to Philippians 2:12-13:

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

To the Arminian, Calvinism makes God out to be an all-controlling dictator and ignores the role we are assigned in our spiritual life; to the Calvinist, Arminianism portrays God as an ineffectual softie whose plans are easily thwarted by human will and makes humans out to be their own functional saviors by the power of their own choices. To all of this, I respond that even before I try to draw any conclusions of my own about God's providence (which I have done very extensively), I question whether the two camps are as diametrically opposed as they seem. Could it be that the Calvinist and the Arminian both have the same intuitive, nonverbal sense of "what is really going on" when God works in us (which is independent of their perception of it), but then interpret or describe it in sharply different ways according to their chosen theological systems, both of which fail to fully describe the reality? Is this view--that something has a life and truth of its own apart from what we can say about it--more or less "objective" than the absolutist paradigm under which theology is usually pursued?

At least to me, there seems to be a bit of a problem with attempting to combine postmodernism and Christianity. While postmodernism denies that we can know any truly universal truth, Christianity emphatically declares that we can know the truth--and not just that we can intellectually grasp the truth, but that we can truly know the Truth, the Way, and the Life. The person of God--father, spirit, and son-- is the ultimate foundation of Christianity from which our beliefs and actions should descend. If, as postmodernists, we begin questioning and tampering with this essential truth, can the results really be called Christianity?

You fool! You are just starting to "get" that there is more to the truth than intellectual facts, and you think that postmodernism is opposed to that? No, no, keep going! But remember that since it's possible to "know" a friend without having them completely pinned down and figured out (so you could, for instance, make all their decisions for them), how much less can we expect to ever know God the way He knows us? And that's a good thing!

This has been a nice reminder for me of why I don't like to use labels: because they can easily go from descriptions to reductionistic definitions, whether you're applying them to yourself or to someone else. I made the first mistake in my thinking about MBTI types, as I was prevented from seeing myself as an INFJ because I "knew" that I was a "thinker". For an example of the second way, consider Matthew 9:11, when the Pharisees ask about Jesus, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" To which He responds, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.' For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners." Those people the Pharisees thought they could write off and stuff into the dismissive label "sinners"--they are the ones Jesus came to call, the ones who get to be part of what He is doing; "the first will be last and the last will be first." (Of course, we can easily make the same mistake when thinking about the Pharisees themselves, allowing us to become much more like them than like Jesus and never notice)

Don't fear labels. (This is actually a direct application of words not being the "native language" of truth) If your walk with God takes you through territory demarcated as "postmodernist", "emergent", or anywhere else you've been taught angels fear to tread, keep walking.

Addendum

In keeping with Penner's description of postmodernism as a condition by which modernism becomes aware of its own assumptions and limitations, I think it's a fallacy to divide moderns and postmoderns into two separate "camps" and pit one against the other. Postmodernism doesn't deny modernism, it seeks to move past its naivete and take a look below the surface of its assumptions. I would then expect to see degrees of this growing awareness in people, and thus a smooth spectrum between pure "modernism" (which no one truly lives by) and fully self-aware (postmodern) modernism.

Linguistic Ambiguity and Paradox

Have twenty minutes? Read this essay by Margaret Wertheim; it's the most interesting this I've read in weeks. Don't have time? Stay up twenty minutes later or something. It's worth it.

Summary (for those who didn't read it)

Wertheim has extensive experience in both the sciences and in the arts and brings both fields to bear. She describes the Platonist assumptions that underlie much of modern physics: that physics is a way of objectively describing "the way things are". During the Scientific Revolution nature was thought of as a "book" written by God in the language of mathematics which we, by the discovery of scientific "laws", are able to know. Though the explicit linkage between physics and theology has since dried up, the metaphor of delving into the "mind of God" continues. Current tensions in physics like the wave-particle duality--the tendency of photons, electrons, etc. to behave like waves and particles simultaneously--or the seeming incompatibility between the branches of physics pertaining to very large scales (general relativity) and very small ones (quantum mechanics) are seen as thorns in the side of the quest for an all-encompassing "theory of everything", tantamount to Galileo's "cosmic book", and many religious physicists continue to see a strong linkage between their faith and their work.

Wertheim contrasts her experiences serving on two panels: one with a cosmologist who saw physics in this way, as "a progression towards an ever more accurate and encompassing Truth", and another with a Lewis Carroll scholar who viewed mathematics as playful storytelling and mythmaking with little connection to reality. She here highlights a divide in academics' thinking about mathematics: scientists tend to see the correspondence between equation and reality as so reliable that the mathematics is allowed to proceed ahead of experience and intuition as our tool for finding "the way things are", leading us to counterintuitive (and impossible-to-test) theories to make sense of the math like the many-worlds hypothesis. She says, "what is so epistemologically daring here is that the equations are taken to be the fundamental reality. The fact that the mathematics allows for gazillions of variations is seen to be evidence for gazillions of actual worlds." Meanwhile, humanities scholars see this thinking as naive and disconnected from what is truly "real".

Duck or rabbit?

She ties this in intriguingly with a book called Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas, which ends with some theory about language, noting that all languages parse the world into discrete categories. For example, we categorize animals between categories like "mammals", "reptiles", "birds", "arthropods", and so on. But then we run into animals that refuse to follow these categories, like the pangolin, echidna, or platypus. Or consider the above optical illusion: is it a duck or a rabbit? Our brains flip between categorizing the same image in two different ways, trying to resolve the ambiguity because it's easier to just pick one than not categorize the image at all.

Wertheim notes the parallels between these linguistic paradoxes and issues in physics like the wave-particle duality:

As Douglas sees it, cultures themselves can be categorised in terms of how well they deal with linguistic ambiguity. Some cultures accept the limits of their own language, and of language itself, by understanding that there will always be things that cannot be cleanly parsed. Others become obsessed with ever-finer levels of categorisation as they try to rid their system of every pangolin-like ‘duck-rabbit’ anomaly. For such societies, Douglas argues, a kind of neurosis ensues, as the project of categorisation takes ever more energy and mental effort. If we take this analysis seriously, then, in Douglas’ terms, might it be that particle-waves are our pangolins? Perhaps what we are encountering here is not so much the edge of reality, but the limits of the physicists’ category system.

She is suggesting another possible approach to paradoxes in physics: rather than attempting to resolve the apparent contradiction between quantum mechanics and relativity, or between light being a wave or a particle, Wertheim wonders if the categories dictated by the language of physics we have, combined with the rejection of contradiction as unacceptable in the "mind of God", might be leading us to ask the wrong questions. Perhaps by trying to cram photons into the wave-particle spectrum we are missing something. "To put this into Douglas’s terms, the powers that have been attributed to physicists’ structure of ideas have been overreaching. ‘Attempts to force experience into logical categories of non-contradiction’ have, she would say, inevitably failed. From the contemplation of wave-particle pangolins we have been led to the limits of the linguistic system of physicists."

Commentary

The comments on the Reddit thread by which I found this essay criticize it for being overly dismissive and pessimistic about scientific progress. I agree in that Wertheim doesn't really try to offer a constructive solution, but simply thinks scientific inquiry has reached a barrier: "Will we accept, at some point, that there are limits to the quantification project, just as there are to all taxonomic schemes?" What Wertheim misses is that this ambiguity is an artifact only of our language, not of our minds, which are not bound to the symbol-concept mapping of any one language or even, necessarily, by the need to fit everything into a single clear-cut category. If our current classification scheme is inadequate, we can find a better one. The conclusion I would tentatively draw from the wave-particle duality is not that it is an ambiguity impossible to resolve conclusively, but that our categories of "wave" and "particle" themselves may need to be rethought into something stranger. (I'll leave how to do this and keep the results meaningful and applicable to the physicists)

Of course, I can't help but try to relate this subject to theology. Like with physicists, theologians' thinking can easily become caught on simplistic dualities, categories, and spectra that don't fully describe the more complex "way things are". These things can be useful mental stepping stones for trying to wrap our brains around a complex subject (and there is no more complex subject than God), but allowing them to define theological reality to our thinking leads to dead ends, endless debates, and wondering why-can't-they-just-see-it-my-way. I'm sure you can provide your own examples of this, but a few that readily come to my mind would be Calvinism and Arminianism, asking whether salvation is by faith or by works (usually before affirming that it's by faith alone), and asking whether it's a sin to do ____. I call this allowing of one perspective to crowd out others that aren't necessarily incompatible "totalization".

Because theology is the study of an infinite, transcendent Subject, it will always be incomplete. I think this is why I find it so much more exciting than my field of undergraduate study, which being a manmade subject has relatively little in the way of unanswered, weighty questions besides ones that intersect with mathematics like whether P equals NP. This continual incompleteness means recognizing that no theory of atonement, of salvation, of Trinity, etc. can ever totally describe these weighty subjects or definitively box up our discussion of them (and that's a good thing!). Let that be a reminder to keep your mind open to truth and always learning.

The Limits of Doubt: Higher and Lower Knowledge and Adventures in Epistemology

Epistemology: A branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods,and limits of human knowledge.

A few weeks ago in my post on Dan Barker's book Godless I mentioned a theory that atheism and Christianity (or theism in general) were based on two different epistemologies (perspectives on truth), one human-centric and one God-centric. Through reading, study, and conversations with atheists and skeptics I have refined this theory considerably to the point where it has begun making surprising amounts of sense as an explanation.

I just retook the Strengths Finder test last week for the first time in over two years. My number-one strength is now apparently "Input", new since last time, which means I love collecting and mentally organizing information. In keeping with this, I have been in several online conversations with skeptics, trying to get a fuller, more coherent picture of how they approach epistemology. You have to understand something before you can critique it. (Which is why I feel much more confident critiquing Christianity)

Scientific Inquiry and Materialistic Epistemology

The atheists I talked to espoused the method referred to as "scientific inquiry" or "skeptical inquiry" as our only reliable way of gaining objective knowledge about the universe. (Not ruling out ways of subjectively gaining knowledge, but those can't be shared with others or serve as a sound basis for action) This method entails the systematic gathering of evidence, then building knowledge out of this evidence using the scientific method and valid logical reasoning. As such, scientific tests of truth are applied to all truth, such as:

Occam's Razor: The simplest possible theory that explains the evidence should be chosen over more complex ones.

Falsifiability: A theory is worthless if there is no conceivable way it could be conclusively disproven.

This process is also somewhat analogous to what goes on in a courtroom. One poster in an online discussion wrote (emphasis added):

To put it another way: If someone has a way of explaining something that allows me to understand the universe. Something observable, understandable, repeatable, demonstrable (We call that the scientific method); It would be vastly dishonest and silly of me to then go off of something I cannot confirm, cannot show to be demonstrable, to not be understandable, to not be observable. In other words, I would need to throw away my logical thinking and skeptical way of looking at things to adopt a lot of bullcrap.
In the court of law we have a system that allows us to determine whether or not an eye witness is a credible witness to something. If the person cannot be correctly placed there as a witness (confirmed or as no way to confirm), has personal bias or gain in the matter or knowingly misrepresents data they can be disqualified. Now here's the fun part, in the court of law a witness can be make or bust in a case. They are responsible for an eye witness account for something, something crucial.
Many times people get thrown out as a credible witness if it's found they have a bias, or if they cannot be placed at the scene, or if the witness is strictly hearsay.
So if we will toss people out of the court of law for something as simple as a bias, or personal gain, or even hearsay evidence... WHY would a person base their ENTIRE LIFE on a book that is full of hearsay accounts, anonymous authors, biased accounts and data that cannot be accounted for nor confirmed. In other words, random people, no credibility, hearsay evidence and tons of bias to gain from it.

From this analogy we get some criteria for allowable evidence:

• Empirically observable
• Understandable/meaningful/coherent
• Repeatable/demonstrable (presumably not necessary, as in the case of evolution)

And for a valid witness:

• Correctly placed as a witness
• Unbiased
• Doesn't color or misrepresent the data

If this is the method by which all truth is to be gained and agreed upon, it is obvious that there is no room for anything Christians would call "faith", and no one is more aware of this than atheists and skeptics. In this system, faith is the drawing of unwarranted, arbitrary, unnecessarily complex conclusions from insufficient, highly subjective, and biased evidence.

Arguments Against Faith and God

In fact, atheists seem to see "blind faith" as the antithesis to sound knowledge of actual truth; if you try to use it to know what is true, you have strayed outside the bounds of rationality and can simply believe anything you want with no justification. In his scathing review of Francis Collins' book The Language of God, Sam Harris says, "If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then anything can mean anything." Similarly, Dan Barker's refrain when he is arguing for reason instead of faith is, "With faith, anything goes." If you listen to faith instead of evidence and reason, you're believing whatever nonsense you want.

Christians often try to play this game and bring evidence or logical arguments for God's existence to bear, but this evidence either doesn't point to God, is counterbalanced by evidence against God, or ignores simpler, more likely explanations than God. An example of this first argument is the "argument from design", which may have worked hundreds of years ago when we had no idea where the complexity of the universe came from, but now evolution has conclusively shown us how order and apparent design can come from chaos by very simple rules. The best example of the second argument is the existence of pain and suffering in the world: what kind of God, especially one supposedly worthy of "love" and "worship", would create that? The third argument contradicts, for example, the cosmological argument, which makes an enormous leap to God as the explanation of the beginning of the universe as well as logical mistakes like forgetting that, by the same logic, a dynamic being such as God also had to have had a beginning.

Back to falsifiability: atheists accuse Christians of ad hoc arguments or special pleading to explain how evidence like the existence of suffering or God not providing concrete evidence for His existence (a simple "Hi! Here I am, worship Me!" would suffice) doesn't really weigh against their beliefs. Christians' constant qualifications of God ("He works in mysterious ways", "He wants us to have faith") to account for this evidence only add more complexity to the God hypothesis, making it an even less tenable explanation. With all this explaining away of evidence, atheists ask what, if any, evidence would actually cause Christians to stop believing in God. They suspect that nothing would fit the bill; that is, the God hypothesis is nonfalsifiable and therefore meaningless.

Some examples of this are Russell's teapot and, more recently, the parodic Flying Spaghetti Monster, an invisible, undetectable, noodly deity said to have created the universe. Like God, neither of these entites' existences can be falsified, but of course it would be absurd to go around arguing for their existence and teaching others to believe likewise. This demonstrates how the burden of proof rests on people making arbitrary claims that can't be verified or falsified by empirical methods, not on those arguing against them who are making their case from common sense and visible data that we can all agree on.

Similarly, historical claims like "Jesus actually rose from the dead" are unfounded because of the extreme improbability of miracles, according to what we know of the regularity of nature, compared to other, more plausible explanations like Jesus' disciples stealing His body and starting a cult saying He rose from the dead, or the whole Jesus thing simply being a premodern myth.

One last way atheists love to poke holes in theism (especially Christianity) is by challenging the possibility of having a coherent definition of God in the first place. Dan Barker, in his book, goes through God's various "omni-" attributes and explains why they are logically contradictory and impossible. For example, an omniscient being, perfectly knowing all things, would have to perfectly know itself, which would mean having a complete mental image of itself, which would also include a nested copy of this image, and so on to infinity--a contradiction. Or the very definition of God has a "supernatural, spiritual" being has never really been explained or nailed down in a satisfactory sense and until it has, there's no point arguing over it.

Two Levels of Knowledge

That was a distilled, more neutral form of the arguments I have been processing over the last few weeks. It's what I've been wrestling with for the last few weeks, both to understand and to answer. Here is a somewhat parodic summary of how I had been trying to answer it:

You're getting the burden of proof wrong. The starting point is not the nonexistence of God, it's ignorance of the existence or nonexistence of God. From there, the evidence for the existence of God (any god, at least) greatly outweighs the evidence against. Faith that looks arbitrary to you is not arbitrary to us Christians, it's a relationship with a higher being. You're creating a mental image of what you want or expect God to be like, then disbelieving in Him because He doesn't fit that image--that box you've put Him in. How do you know, scientifically, that science is the only source of truth?

If I wrote all of that well enough, you might be worried that I've become an atheist, or am well on my way. This has never been farther from the truth. The more I've made sense of these arguments, the less persuasive they have become. Here is the epistemology I arrived at. (And where it starts getting highly speculative)

The empirical kind of knowledge that is gained by skeptical inquiry and knowledge that comes by faith are of two different kinds. I refer to them as "bottom-up" and "top-down" knowledge, or the terms I will use, "lower" and "higher" knowledge. (These should not be taken as value judgments) Let me explain.

Lower knowledge is basically what I just described as the object of this "materialistic epistemology". It is gained through empirical observation and reasoning, the scientific method being the best modern example of this. Simple, atomic facts are gathered and theories are formed, refined, and tested to explain them. This process is hardly limited to scientific knowledge, though; it is generally the process of starting from oneself and building a body of knowledge outward from what is immediately observable. Descartes' one-liner, "I think, therefore I am" is a pithy statement of the most basic empirically observable truth: the existence of oneself.

Higher knowledge is different. I call it that because it is not built out from ourselves but places itself over and above us, relating what we know and who we are to some external point of reference outside ourselves. Higher knowledge isn't proved by evidence but transforms and determines how we view and interpret the evidence, subordinating it to some higher, teleological (purposeful) value or goal. It isn't uncovered by endlessly dividing and analyzing but unites the facts under something of greater importance to us. It answers the question of "why", not "what" or "how". This method of assigning significance to pieces of lower knowledge by their relation to your system of higher knowledge, I will call "meaning".

I argue that the human need for meaning is universal. No one, no one, is content to live a "purposeless" life. We need to "matter" to someone or something outside ourselves. With our western individualism and existentialism we might find the idea of being the "captain of your own destiny" appealing, but if we are free to decide what is of ultimate importance in life, unstable and fallible creatures that we are, that decision is worthless. In his Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer goes so far as to write, "But, rightly understood, the deification of man is the proclamation of nihilism. With the destruction of the biblical faith in God and of all divine commands and ordinances, man destroys himself." In fact, the universality of "man's search for meaning" would indicate that people are truly incapable of manufacturing meaning for themselves; they must search for it outside themselves. If you deny this fact, it only means you are blind to the specifics of your own system of higher knowledge. There is apparently something lacking in each of us that needs filling; Christians might call it the "God-shaped hole".

A Higher Apologetic

Higher knowledge also answers questions that lower knowledge can', questions that science can't answer--not the facts, but what those facts mean. "What is the meaning of life?", the perennial question goes. I wonder, why does everyone want to know? Why are we such a race of philosophers? Higher knowledge is prepared to answer questions such as:

• The existence of anything: "Why does the universe exist?"
• The ordered nature of nature/correspondence with mathematical thinking: "Why does nature appear to be so regular and predictable by mathematics in a way that aligns with our thinking?"
• All the striking coincidences that led to our existence (cosmic "fine-tuning", abiogenesis): "Were we 'meant' to exist?"
• The existence of external moral law and internal conscience/need for meaning: "Why do I exist?"
• Human consciousness: "Why and how do I (as a "self") exist?"
• The problem of pain: "Why is there suffering? What is the point? Is there a point?"
• Or the meta-question: "Why do humans have this insatiable need for meaning?"

When the above questions are used in the context of apologetics, atheists will often get defensive and deny that these questions reasonably point to God, without answering them for themselves--effectively denying that they need answers. Jumping outside what we can empirically sense and agree on is unjustified, arbitrary, and foolish when materialism has already made sense of these questions for us. But the only answer it can give is the impenetrable randomness and purposelessness of the universe according to science. So our sense of morality, desire for meaning, and "consciousness" are naturally selected, arising by chance, merely chemical phenomena in our brains, and we are free to do with them what we will. In doing so, it elevates science from a system of lower knowledge to a comprehensive system, a task for which science was never meant and at which it performs miserably. Elsewhere in Ethics, Bonhoeffer writes (not from his own position):

All knowledge is now based on self-knowledge. Instead of the original comprehension of God and of men and of things there is now a taking in vain of God and of men and of things. Everything is now drawn into the process of disunion. Knowledge now means the establishment of the relationship to oneself; it means the recognition in all things of oneself and of oneself in all things.

But it gets worse. The claim implicit here is that no system of higher knowledge needs to (or should) be assumed because you can empirically, objectively arrive at the "correct" one by observation and rational thinking, i.e. the generalized scientific method. But in fact, in the scientific method you are already using a system of higher knowledge (assuming that nature really is regular, predictable, and follows mathematical/logical laws) to interpret the data "scientifically". The usefulness of the scientific method as a system for gaining lower knowledge already depends on presumptions in your higher knowledge. The materialistic attempt to arrive at a system of higher knowledge from nothing has failed; it couldn't avoid assuming one first. Everyone has a system of higher knowledge--aware or unaware, simple or complex. Without one, life is meaningless.

Back to my comments on Dan Barker's use of the burden of proof. He asserted that the burden of proof is on anyone making a claim to truth that is not "obvious" or empirically falsifiable. But this is confusing the epistemology of lower knowledge with that of higher knowledge. Everyone assumes some system of higher knowledge without rigorously proving it, even if they may apply the laws of rationality to refine and extend it later. At the very least, in questions of higher knowledge the burden of proof lies on all parties involved to explain why their system makes better sense of questions of meaning and purpose like those above. In fact, considering how "normal" and "obvious" belief in the supernatural has been for most of human history, it could even be argued that the burden of proof lies on the relatively recent thinkers who rule out supernatural explanations in favor of materialistic ones--or, at least, that the definition of "obvious" is not obvious.

So, if higher knowledge can't be empirically derived, ask skeptics, isn't whatever system of higher knowledge we choose just arbitrary, at least as much a product of our origins and wishful thinking as of whether or not it's true? What's to stop people from just believing in whatever they want--God, Buddha, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.? Nothing. But I think people will choose the system of higher knowledge that they feel effectively answers their questions of meaning. C.S. Lewis calls this the "fitness" of a belief system--fitness for making sense of our existence. If the system they grew up in fails at this task, they will look elsewhere. No one sincerely believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster because the Flying Spaghetti Monster, besides being consciously made-up, makes little or no coherent, satisfactory sense of "life, the universe, and everything" and raises far more questions than it answers.

In contrast, through Christian theology I get the sense that I'm exploring something that really is "other" than myself, even "other" than humanity in general, just as much as I did as a math major. The very fact that God doesn't make immediate sense to me and isn't perfectly explainable, yet makes sense in a deeper way that I explore rather than invent in a process that forces me to grow as a person in His image, in love, joy, and wisdom, gives me an unshakable assurance that my faith is well-placed. Skeptics, of course, will demand detailed explanations for things that Christians are happy to accept as mysteries and use their unexplainability prima facie as proof that it's all nonsense. Theoretical physicists truly believe they are exploring a system of truths and rules that objectively exists "out there" and so take mysteries like the bizarreness of quantum mechanics or relativity as invitations to dig deeper, not as excuses to write the whole thing off. I think something similar, but deeper and more fulfilling, is going on between a Christian and his Christ.

Again, higher knowledge is not "proven" in the scientific sense; it makes no sense to apply probability to it and you can't be led to it purely by evidence because your higher knowledge controls how you view and interpret the evidence. This is why the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus is the Son of God to Francis Collins, but not to Sam Harris. This is also why, in rationalistic parlance, Christianity is "nonfalsifiable": no evidence can disprove a Christian's faith (or so we hope) because the Christian's faith makes sense of that evidence in a different way than the skeptic is hoping. In order to move outside your own paradigm and begin to understand a different one, you have to want to understand, to stop writing it off as nonsense and open yourself up to it.

One qualification for Christian readers: I am well aware that I seem to be putting Christianity on the same level as other world religions, even making it seem like nothing more than a more fulfilling way of looking at life, doing nothing that couldn't be done by taking a yoga class or improving your diet. Of course I believe it is far more than this. I believe that Christianity is based on important realities both historical and spiritual--namely the death and resurrection of Christ--and that the point of the higher knowledge it teaches it to shift the focus of our lives outside ourselves to God--the importance of this change can't be overstated. I am only treating Christianity and other faiths as a coherent bloc by what they have in common, namely their claim to offer revelatory answers to metaphysical questions like the ones I voiced above, in contrast to materialism, which asserts that these questions either don't matter, don't have meaningful answers, or can be answered empirically. I am arguing that skeptics really do carry a priori higher-knowledge assumptions just like the religious; we see this every time they make a moral or value judgment. They are just unaware of these assumptions because they categorically deny their validity.

The Dark Room

An analogy is in order. Imagine you are inspecting a room with a fellow detective. There are no windows or light sources, but the room is inexplicably, uniformly lit somehow; nonetheless, it is quite dim. You are walking around looking the whole room over; your partner is crawling on his hands and knees, closely poring over every object and floorboard with a magnifying glass. You comment, "This room is dark". Your partner responds, "No it isn't. I can see everything in it just fine. Every object, every detail, I've come across, I've been able to resolve just fine with my magnifying glass. Do you mean that the ceiling is dark? I may not be able to inspect it yet, but I will be able to once I get a stepladder. Point to your evidence that the room is actually dark." How would you respond, if not by taking away the magnifying glass and imploring him to look at the room as you do? What specific object could you possibly point to as proof that the room is dark on his terms? Would not your partner, dependent on the magnifying glass as he seems to be, respond to your efforts to persuade him to lay it aside as invitations to become blind and despair of any effort to make sense of the room?

I know it's a bit of a contrived example. The magnifying glass is scientific inquiry and the darkness of the room is the existence of God. No specific bit of evidence "proves" that the room is dark, but from your perspective the claim "the room is dark" has great explanatory power for the difficulty in seeing anything clearly. By trying to fit your claim into his system of discovering and evaluating truth, your partner makes it unintelligible and unbelievable to himself. Different belief (or nonbelief) systems change how you view the evidence. Every worldview looks consistent and sensible to itself while the others look unfounded and false; if you refuse to look outside your own, you will never consider or understand others.

Dan Barker asserts that while Christianity, with its claims of higher knowledge not based on any specific evidence, is unfalsifiable, while atheism is exquisitely falsifiable. He says that he would believe in God if, say, someone predicted to him the exact time of impact, trajectory, and composition of a meteorite. Would you, Dan? Or would you believe in radically powerful telescopes and computer simulations, or that time travel will be invented someday? Aren't those more likely than the existence of God? Jesus said that if someone won't listen to the scriptures, even someone rising from the dead wouldn't be enough to convince them (Luke 16:31). And He was right! (Matthew 28:15 and all the present-day atheological explanations for the resurrection)

For fairness' sake, there are also abundant examples today of the opposite error, subjugating the realm of lower knowledge to the higher. Consider the dichotomy often thrown around in more conservative Christian circles along the lines of: "What do you believe: your experience or the Word of God?" As if you had to deny one for the other! As I've argued, the Bible should shape how we interpret our experience, not simply contradict it; the one is constructive and leads to growth, the other is destructive and leads to frustration. This assumption is one of the foundations for the submerged anti-intellectualism that exists in much of popular Christianity. One of the characters in Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash aptly explains the frustration critical thinkers have with this: "Ninety-nine percent of what goes on in most Christian churches has nothing to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all realize this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in peoples' minds."

Applications for Conversation

In light of all this, I have some modest proposals for how conversations between believers and skeptics in the modern, western world can be improved. First, for Christians, because I feel more comfortable critiquing my own faith:

1. Apologists, keep in mind the limitations of logical "proofs" and arguments for the existence of God. As I stated above, your system of higher knowledge--your explanatory "worldview" determines what you make of things like the Big Bang, abiogenesis, "fine-tuning", and other such pieces of evidence. If there really were an airtight, universally understandable proof for God, everyone would believe by now. And seriously, the ontological argument is pretty ridiculous.
2. More generally, realize that apologetics is about more than logic, reason, evidence, and argument. It seems from these emphases like we have largely allowed skeptics to set the terms and format for how the dialogue between us and them plays out. At the core of it, I think apologetics is really about conversation, relationship, and showing nonbelievers the character of Christ--to attract people to Jesus, not to argue them to Him. If I really respect and admire someone's character, I am highly inclined to listen to and consider what they have to say, even if we don't always agree. For people to understand the gospel, they have to first want to understand it. This was true for Jesus and certainly true for us.
3. Don't assume things about nonbelievers' reasons for their views, and don't claim to know "the truth" about what's going on. Dan Barker was rather indignant about this. People would tell him that he just didn't want to believe, needed to have more faith, ask the reason he stopped believing (as if there was just one), said God was testing him, etc. When you know Someone who professes to be "the Truth" and meet someone who doesn't, it's easy to let it go to your head. Paul's speech in Acts 17 is an excellent (albeit culturally contextualized) example of what it looks like to address nonbelievers from "where they're at", not where you're at.
4. Make every effort to understand nonbelievers and build relationships. Realize that atheists aren't God-hating, baby-eating, child-corrupting monsters from out east; by and large, they are intelligent, thoughtful people quite capable of living (by "Christian" standards) upright lives. They aren't amoral, they don't just refuse to believe, and they may not consciously dislike Jesus. Humanism doesn't just mean believing whatever you want, and throwing Romans 1:21 or Colossians 2:8 out there is not a good way to refute it.
5. This is a big one: do not minimize or dismiss honest questions and doubts people are having about God. (Distinguishing honest doubts from theological potshots takes wisdom) Countless ex-Christians became so because their questions about God, the Bible, or the church were met by "You just have to have faith", "Don't question God", or "God works in mysterious ways" instead of by honest answers. We are failing these people and it burdens me. Once you get those relationships and dialogues with skeptics going, you can start actually listening to their questions and doubts and addressing them. God doesn't need us to protect the truth, He wants us to question and investigate it for ourselves, and skeptics can teach us a thing or two about this process if we will listen.

And for skeptics:

1. Realize that your epistemological approach of subjecting everything to rational inquiry and demands for evidence is not the "obvious", "sensible", "logical", or "default" approach that everyone else needs to conform to. Something can be true without being fully explainable or provable empirically. (Consider looking for examples of things you believe without proof)
2. Logical fallacies can be helpful guides to truth, but they can also be tools for short-circuiting debates and "winning" them without convincing anyone but yourself. Their application is subjective: what looks to a Christian like you are arguing against a straw representation of their beliefs might look to you like a "no true Christian" fallacy or ad hoc sophistry on their part. If a belief isn't explainable in your system of truth, could true attempts to explain it look to you like logical fallacies?
3. Realize that there are options in between believing only what can be empirically/rationally proven and making up whatever garbage you want. I've found that perceived dichotomies between my position and the "wrong" one like this can indicate that I'm thinking in too few dimensions. Some Christians hold a similar view, only with basing all knowledge on the Bible.
4. If you must insist that witnesses for truth be rational and unbiased, practice what you preach. Stop caricaturing the beliefs you are arguing against, using dismissive language, and in general acting just as much like you have a monopoly on truth as Christian fundamentalists. Having my intelligence insulted and my faith called a "cult" offhand does not make me more disposed to take you seriously. When you say, "God/Christianity is incoherent and meaningless", I get that you aren't inclined to look into what Christians really believe and how it is coherent to them.
5. Be willing to take seriously the fact that many professing Christians are highly educated, even in the same fields (biology, philosophy, physics, Biblical criticism, history...) you are using to argue against Christianity, and that most Christians don't feel a need to read up on all the evidence on these things because they trust the word of these experts. For example, some atheists I've talked to act like there is no debate at all on the "fact" that the gospels are embellished second-century forgeries, even though I am inclined to side with Biblical scholars like Bruce Metzger who argue convincingly and substantively to the contrary. If the experts don't all agree, why do we need to? If I said that because Einstein, one of the most brilliant physicists ever to live, believed the theory of relativity, it was true, you would rightly point of that I was making an appeal to authority. But most people do believe the theory of relativity is true because of the expert witness of scientists like Einstein rather than by consulting the evidence and reading the papers themselves, and no one really questions it. There is a difference between justified belief and objective truth.

The Limits of Doubt

I used to be afraid to read books or talk to people that were critical of or hostile towards Christianity, as many of you may be. I was afraid they would lead me to doubt or even walk away from my faith--but after I'd already struggled so much with my own doubt, they ended up having the opposite effect. Mainly by presenting me with what appeared to be the logical conclusion of doubting and questioning, and compelling me to figure out why I yet disagreed with it. And, as a counterbalancing force to my doubt, came a deeper satisfaction in what and Who I believe and the admission that He has all the answers, not me. So, on top of everything else, I started questioning my doubts. I realized that sometimes to answer questions, it's myself, not just my understanding, that needs to change. As I hope I've shown in this post, that questioning has led to a richer, more encompassing, more intellectually satisfied faith.

Responses to "Godless" by Dan Barker

I've been reading a book that I doubt many Christians have read. That book is Godless, by Dan Barker, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

I first heard of Dan Barker in college (my sophomore year, I think) when Cru and CASH (Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists) co-hosted a debate between him and Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza. At the time, the very existence of people like Barker who went from being believers "just like me" to staunch atheists genuinely frightened me. Copies of this book were on sale after the debate, but I stayed well away. I think it's an indicator of growth that I've now not only bought bought the book but find it fascinating, if challenging and troubling. Unlike most of the books I post about, I wouldn't recommend it to every Christian.

Barker divides the book into four sections: his personal "testimony" of de-conversion, his reasons for not believing in God and refutations of lots of apologetic arguments, his arguments against Christianity, and his life as part of the "new atheism" movement. It's a tough read because there are nuggets of truth that Christians need to hear in the midst of seas of statements and arguments I disagree with. I've learned a lot from reading it, though (as is often the case) not what the author was trying to teach.

I mostly bought the book for the first part, which takes up surprisingly little of its length. I was interested in the similarities and differences (for clearly there had to be some) between "deconversion stories" and my own struggles with doubt. Clearly our stories had to diverge at some point, but where?

Early Life

In the first part, it soon became clear that Dan Barker as a Christian, was never "just like me". He grew up in a highly charismatic, fundamentalist branch of evangelicalism that focused on spiritual experiences and gifts and believed that since Jesus was coming back in the next decade or two, now was the time not to make any preparations for the future but to win souls. He decided to start preaching at the age of 15--because "I didn't think the world would last long enough for me to go to college or get married or raise a family". Trusting in God to come through despite his youth and lack of experience, he would go on frequent soul-winning expeditions in southern California and Mexico, trying to convert the unchurched and Catholics, bringing the Truth to poor, lost souls. He used his talent for music in church, revivals, and faith healing sessions, as well as writing Christian songs and musicals. He was "the kind of guy you would not want to sit next to on a bus."

Eventually he did get married and, rather than settle down and focus on providing for his family, stayed on the road, working with her as "musical evangelists" from church to church while supplementing their living writing and producing Christian music. He describes one particular incident that summed up his "life by faith". While driving he heard a voice saying "turn right". So he turned right, into some farmland. He kept following these directions by faith, excited to see what God had in store for him at the end, until he arrived at a dead end in a cornfield. When nothing came of this, he realized God had merely been testing his faithfulness and obedience!

Deconversion

Barker is clear that his apostasy was a gradual process; he didn't suddenly realize that God didn't exist. He seems to view fundamentalism at one end of a spectrum that he gradually slid down via a series of concessions, through moderate and liberal Christianity to agnosticism and atheism. The first step came when he decided to maintain fellowship with some Christians who didn't believe Adam and Eve were historical people, despite thinking they were "lukewarm" (Revelation 3:15-16) in their liberal beliefs. For the first time, at around 30 years old, he started asking questions (not having doubts) about Christianity, feeding an intellectual hunger he'd been ignoring for years in his fundamentalism and evangelizing. He started reading philosophy, science publications, psychology, and the newspaper(!), seeking an intellectual dimension to his faith that had been missing. At each little step, he thought his faith was being strengthened or maturing, "when it was actually my knowledge that was being strengthened." This perception is troublingly like what I've been doing lately. (I don't consider this ominous, but it raises the question of whether my story is just his at an intermediate stage)

He also began studying what Christians of other traditions and denominations believed and realized that  "there is no single Christianity--there are thousands of Christianities", each with their own, "correct" theology and interpretation of the Bible. This denominational pluralism clashed with how he knew that "God is not the author of confusion" (1 Corinthians 14:33). How could they all be right? To me, this seems like the result of a very simplistic view on hermeneutics that views the Bible as existing primarily to define a single, precise body of doctrine--if this precision and univocality are absent, as they seem to be, then clearly the Bible and (God, its heavenly author) has failed at its purpose.

Anyway, Barker began to swing across the theological spectrum from fundamentalism to liberal theology. One day, while driving and arguing with God and himself about emotion and reason, he had one thought that seemed to come from the voice of honesty, not God: "Something is wrong. Admit it." It was then that he committed to "follow reason and evidence wherever they might lead, even if it meant taking me away from my cherished beliefs".

He started thinking of different denominations as being distinguished by where they drew the line between essential and nonessential doctrines. He was drawing this line higher and higher, "discarding many lesser doctrines as either nonessential or untrue." (I'm not sure how considering a doctrine nonessential equates to discarding it) He came to respect the more liberal theologians he was reading rather than seeing them as evil heretics, even while not agreeing with them fully.

He began questioning not just his beliefs, but his inner spiritual experiences. Interestingly, he claims to be able to duplicate those feelings and experiences today, which of course raised doubts as to their authenticity. If so many people of other faiths could be wrong about these experiences, why not him as well? He started having doubts that a personal God really existed at all. He describes the process of reason taking the place of faith and the Bible in his life as being like a fossil slowly turning to stone. Here his perceived dichotomy between faith and reason is clear. "Where did we get the idea that words on a page speak truth? Shouldn't truth be the result of investigation and analysis?" To look at the issue from all sides, he began reading books by non-Christian authors with "facts that discredited Christianity", which he tried to ignored because they didn't fit with his religious worldview. "Faith and reason began a war within me". He kept crying out to God for answers to these questions--just as I have done--but none came. This is one of the hardest parts of the book to read as a believer. Why me and not him? I don't think I am qualified to answer.

The only answer he saw from Christianity was "faith", which became to him like a "cop-out, a defeat--an admission that the truths of religion are unknowable through evidence and reason. It is only indemonstrable assertions that require the suspension of reason, and weak ideas that require faith." It seems like he saw faith and reason at this point as diametrically opposed, and saw an undeniable need to make a choice between them. He makes it clear that this choice was not easy--"It was like tearing my whole frame of reality to pieces, ripping to shreds the fabric of meaning and hope, betraying the values of existence. It hurt badly." All the connections and the career he had built on his faith made it harder. and choose he did. "I did not lose my faith--I gave it up purposely. ... I lost faith in faith."

In answer to my original question of how our stories differ, I think the answer starts with relationship we see between faith and reason. His search for truth seemed to be based almost from the beginning on the belief that faith (which sounds a lot like my definition of blind faith) and reason were fundamentally opposed to each other (see below). My questioning has been guided from the start by the assumption that faith and reason are inextricably linked as two ways of apprehending the same truth, and must either stand together or fall together. My experience has served to reinforce and affirm this assumption, just as it did Barker's. Am I only self-deluded in this? His conclusion that thousands of denominations meant "thousands of Christianities" is also a point of departure; he thought it meant God was divided or confused, I think it means people are divided and confused.

He expressed resentment over a lot of the responses to his apostasy that assumed that he somehow wasn't a "real Christian" or he would never have turned away. And, indeed, no one can no whether his faith was real except God and Dan Barker. But, though he does mention how hard the process was, the fact that it happened and then was over, and that the unpleasantness seemed largely due to the difficulty of completely reorienting one's worldview, seems like a clue. There isn't the kind of bottomless loss or grief I would expect from someone who really believed the gospel, the real gospel, but lost that belief. If I stopped believing Christianity, I would mourn for the rest of my life that a worldview as fundamental and wonderful turned out not to be true. The promise of building a peaceful, rational society of liberty, equality, and prosperity utterly pales in comparison to the glorious, eternal hope Christians hold to.

Atheism and Agnosticism

I'm not going to cover the whole book in that much detail. Parts 2 and 3, which take up most of its length, are persuasive, not narrative, and I'm going to be selective about what I respond to in no particular order. For a while he argues more philosophically about his reasons for atheism and against Christian apologetic arguments. One interesting  thing is the difference he draws between agnosticism and atheism, which conflates them more closely than I would. He says "agnosticism addresses knowledge; atheism addresses belief." (I would not draw so sharp a line between knowledge and belief) So, to Barker, being an agnostic means you don't know with reasonable certainty that God exists, and atheism means you don't believe he exists.

He further defines agnosticism as "the refusal to take as a fact any statement for which there is insufficient evidence"--which is much closer to my definition of skepticism. In my view, agnosticism is simply the lack of knowledge of (or belief in) something for whatever reason--the statement, "I don't know." (Which seems closer to the Greek root of agnosticism, a-, meaning "without", and gnosis, meaning "knowledge", but anyway) Atheism, then, is not knowledge or a religion but simply a lack of belief. He distinguishes between the soft, "small-a" atheism he holds and the hard, "capital-A" atheism that positively denies the existence of a God. (Of course, in all the rest of his rhetoric Barker assumes the nonexistence of God, so he doesn't seem very on-the-fence about the question)

The Burden of Proof

Anyway, this contrasts interestingly with my argument that moving either way from the purely agnostic position of claiming no knowledge about the existence or nonexistence of God requires a reason (the "burden of proof"), and I know of no reasons to move towards belief in the nonexistence of God. He would say that everyone agrees without argument that the natural universe exists, but that anything beyond this is not obvious and needs to be proven. "We should start with nature. We should start with the nonexistence of God and then the believer should argue for God's existence, not demands that atheists argue against it. The burden of proof in any argument is on the shoulders of the one who makes the affirmative claim, not the one who doubts it." This is a clever, almost undetectable bit of philosophical sleight-of-hand. Barker conflates the agnostic, "I don't know whether God exists or not" view with the negative, "I don't know that God exists, so prove it" view. Since the existence of God and the supernatural are not obvious, the reasoning goes, we should assume they don't exist and work from there. While claiming to be correcting Christians who were misusing the "burden of proof" argument, Barker misuses it himself.

Cosmological "Kalamity"

The Kalām cosmological argument for the existence of God is the reason I know I will never be an atheist (at worst, a deist), so I was interested enough to see what Barker had to say about it than I read ahead to that chapter. I can't say I was disappointed that his argument against it wasn't very convincing. The basic thrust of the argument can be summed up with the question, "Where did the universe come from?" In more logical terms, as apologist and philosopher William Lane Craig puts it:

1. Everything that begins to exist had a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.

Barker argues that Kalam begs the question (presupposes the existence of God) with some set-theoretical smoke and mirrors. He says it implies that the first step of the argument assumes that reality can be divided into two sets: things than began to exist (BE), and an implied set of things that didn't. (NBE) For the argument to work, he says, NBE must not be empty and must accommodate (conceivable contain) more than one item (God). If NBE only accommodates God, it is effectively synonymous with God and so Kalam implicitly begs the question, assuming that God exists in its formulation.

Notice how Barker has to transform the argument to get to this point. First, he assumes it is making a statement in set theory, even though the original, Islamic argument greatly predates set theory and the argument can just as easily be stated with propositional logic without sets.

1. If something began to exist, it had a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.

The only thing this version says about NBE is the contrapositive of the first statement: "If something did not have a cause, then it did not begin to exist." Then he begins to reason "behind the scenes" of the set theory version of Kalam and base his whole argument about a purely implicit set (NBE) that the argument itself says nothing about. It's hard for me to believe that Kalam "begs the question" if if can conceivably be transformed into a form that does so, no matter how much work it takes to get there. It's also debatable in the first version whether NBE should also include things that did not begin to exist and don't exist, like dragons, in which case it certainly accommodates things more than one item. As well, even if all his set theory logic is correct and the argument does assume an implicit set NBE that only accommodates God, it does not "beg the question" of God's existence; it only assumes the existence of a concept of a beginningless first cause (who himself may or may not exist) that is coherent enough to be reasoned about. Reasoning about God is not the same as assuming his existence. If Barker really thinks existence is a property that God has, maybe he'll be convinced by the ontological argument?

He then gets at more of the argument's premises. He argues that Kalam is self-refuting or internally inconsistent, based solely on a materialistic understanding of the cosmos and reality. "If an actual infinity cannot be a part of reality, then God, if he is actually infinite, cannot exist." If we use words like "decided" and "create" differently than how they are used to describe human actions, he says, they are meaningless and worthless. So if something is incomprehensible to us (or to Dan Barker), it is meaningless and can't be true; apparently the presence of mystery in Christianity is enough to condemn it. He argues that the impossibility of traversing an infinite amount of time also applies to God's non-temporal existence, so God had to begin to exist. He says that existing "outside of time" is impossible: "To say that God does not exist within space-time is to say that God does not exist." (How is this not begging the question of metaphysical naturalism?) None of these arguments should be convincing in the least to Christians.

Lastly, again restricting Kalam to being defined in set-theoretical terms, he says that the universe is not a "thing" and is the "set of all things", so it is not part of "everything that began to exist" and applying the first statement to it is like comparing apples and oranges. I'm really not sure why the universe must be a set and not a "thing", and I have no problems with treating it as such. As well, there are versions of the cosmological argument that only refer to objects within the universe rather than to the universe as a whole; Barker pays them no attention. Throughout the chapter, he either misses or refuses to address the real force of the question: "How did space, time, and everything begin to exist?" or simply "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and its implications.

Faith vs. Reason?

It seems that the wedge of evidence that led Barker away from faith was driven into the dichotomy he saw (and still sees) between faith and reason, or belief and knowledge. He views reason as the gaining of truth from empirical evidence and logical reasoning. Faith, then, is just the opposite, believing claims without this sufficient evidence. He claims this willingness to believe without evidence is not only foolish, but even dangerous: "Without faith, anything goes" is a phrase he repeats several times. If you believe without having sufficient evidence, the thinking goes, you can believe anything you want and no one can disprove you! "With faith, everybody is right." (This is a slippery slope fallacy)

Unfortunately, many Christians (like Barker as a Christian) also perceive this false dichotomy between faith and reason. I randomly stumbled upon a blog post that expresses it from a Christian perspective: "Truth doesn’t need credentials, it just needs to be believed."

Attacking Biblical morality

Much of the third part (arguments against Christianity) contains Barker's issues with the view of morality presented in the Bible. Bizarre rules with disportionate penalties (Numbers 15:32-36), lots of smiting (in the KJV), God-sanctioned violence, and seeming disregard for human rights--it's easy to see how a modern, skeptical reader would find these things detestable. Barker contrasts this with the humanistic view of morality, which "comes from within humanity" and "implies avoiding or minimizing harm". Later he says it is "simply acting with the intention to minimize harm". He resents the common apologetic jab leveled against atheists that without God, there is no way to hold to any system of morality. The humanistic system of morality Barker presents is simple and, I think, inernally consistent.

But I think this question still has significance. Yes, humanists like Barker are able to develop and hold a nice-sounding, coherent definition of morality. But, unless they already agree, why should anyone listen? What makes this picture of morality, centered around the value of minimizing harm to living beings, any more "right" than any other that could conceivably be proposed? Consider ancient Near East cultures, where the highest "moral" values were legitimation of the reign of the king and giving honor to the gods. What gives humanists any right to judge this morality as any better or worse than their own? Because it contradicts theirs? (But the ANE cultures could say the same thing) Could the humanistic valuing of prevention of harm above all else be just as culturally conditioned as ANE cultures' devotion to gods and king? For this reason among others, his constant comparing of the moral values seen in the Bible with humanism or common sense fall rather flat. If you claim reason has a monopoly on morality, your claim is at least as arbitrary as Christians who claim that God does. (Of course from within the humanistic worldview this questioning of ancient morality is quite justified, but the same could be said of judging humanism from a Christian perspective)

Barker also shows that he doesn't seem to understand how Christian ethics actually work. To him, Christian morality is based entirely on blind, unquestioning obedience to absolute, timeless commands issued by ultimate authority. Christian love is not authentic; it is "because God said so". He asks Christians in debates, "If God told you to kill me, would you do it?" and points to the ultimate answer of "Yes" by some of his opponents as evidence of Christianity's depravity. If God told me to kill someone, I would seriously question whether it was actually God speaking to me, or check myself into a mental hospital!

Bible Contradictions

I won't go over his chapter on Bible contradictions (most of which I was already aware of) in too much detail. It was a mixture of uncovering real tensions in the Bible (which he says immediately undermine its credibility) and blatant misreadings that are often based on the specific wording of the KJV (which he uses exclusively). e.g. Saying that John 8:14 ("Though I bear record of myself, [yet] my record is true") contradicts John 5:31 ("If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true."), even though in 5:31 Jesus is stating an untrue hypothetical ("I" is implied to mean "I alone") and He is in fact making the same argument in both passages. These misreadings were somewhat surprising as he does demonstrate some hermeneutical ability, including Hebrew and Greek word studies, elsewhere.

Denying Christ

He also argues that Jesus probably did not actually exist, and even if He did the accounts of His resurrection are myths. (Taking the fourth option, "legend", in C.S. Lewis' "lord, liar, or lunatic" trilemma) I'm not sure Barker is aware, but Lewis actually does address this possibility in his essay, "What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?"

What are we do to about reconciling the two contradictory phenomena [Jesus' moral teaching and claims to be God]? One attempt consists in saying that the Man did not really say these things, but that His followers exaggerated the story, and so the legend grew up that He had said them. this is difficult because His followers were all Jews; that is, they belonged to that Nation which of all others was most convinced that there was only one God--that there could not possibly be another. It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake. On the contrary we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.

Another point is that on that view you would have to regard the accounts of the Man as being legends. Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence. In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.

Barker also argues that the existence of miracles make the gospels unhistorical; that is, because miracles have not been credibly observed, they can be assumed to be extremely rare, if nonexistent, so accounts with miracles in them are more likely to be myths or fabrications than true. "History is limited; it can only confirm events that conform to natural regularity." He quotes David Hume: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless that testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." And Hume elsewhere in his essay On Miracles writes:

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as could possibly be imagined.

I would recommend that Barker read more of Lewis, who in his book Miracles also directly addresses this argument:

Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely "uniform experience" against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.

He goes on to argue, in more words, that the naturalistic assumption that nature is uniform ("natural regularity") which Hume assumes cannot be known except by circular reasoning: "Experience therefore cannot prove uniformity, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything." And, "No study of probabilities inside a given frame can ever tell us how probable it is that the frame itself can be violated."

One other thing of mention is that, while going over possible naturalistic explanations for the resurrection, Barker brings up the "swoon theory". This is the theory that after the ordeal of being starved, severely flogged, crucified, and impaled by professional executioners, after lying in a tomb with no food, water, or medical attention for over 24 hours, Jesus somehow started feeling well enough to escape and convince people He had "miraculously" risen from the dead. This is absurd. Barker calls out Christians for applying "healthy" skepticism to other religions but not their own, but here shows himself to be similarly selective.

Materialistic Epistemology

Though he never explicitly explains it, I think I arrived at a decent understanding of the worldview Barker is writing from. Since all we can directly see evidence for is the natural world and evidence for the supernatural is sparse and explained more easily by naturalistic explanations, it is unjustifiable to assume that anything beyond the material world exists. Since science and reason have proven to be by far the most useful tool we have in understanding the natural world (i.e. the universe), they are the best possible yardstick by which to measure all claims of truth. Religions fails miserably at meeting the criteria for a good explanation of phenomena like being falsifiable, simple, and internally coherent, so it should be discarded. Morality should be defined in terms of measurable, even quantifiable effects, with the goal being to minimize harm to living beings like humans.

I think many "endless debates" are endless because what is always discussed is not the underlying assumptions by which the disparate positions differ, but the implications and results from reasoning by those assumptions. So with Calvinism and Arminianism, where (I have found) the real difference lies in underlying philosophies of free will, determinism, and God's sovereignty, but what it usually debated and contrasted are the five points. And so with the theism-atheism conversation. I think the deepest difference between the above way of thinking and Christianity (I won't speak for other worldviews) is one of epistemology--the study of knowledge and how we come by it.

Atheism enthrones human rationality, human senses, human understanding as the ultimate standard of truth. The only valid conclusions are those that can be based on empirical evidence that is developed via sound, tried-and-true reasoning. The body of truth and knowledge begins with our senses and expands outward from us via reason. The scope of truth is that which can, potentially, be observed or induced from evidence. Logical devices like Occam's Razor are assumed to be universally applicable and binding. The supernatural, by definition that which is not part of nature and cannot be directly sensed, can safely be assumed not to exist because we can't directly sense it. So religion, which makes claims that can't easily (or at all) be supported by evidence seems absurd.

Christianity, on the other hand, believes that the human intellect and senses are not perfect and that the nexus of truth is located outside (and is larger than) ourselves, though it is still possible to interact with it (and the natural world) via reason. The empirical-rational epistemology of atheism is not wrong, but incomplete, and the mistake is in making it the scope of what can be considered true. I'm especially confused as to how atheists can claim to know so much about what is true while believing that their "knowledge" is a series of biochemical reactions in the brain that has evolved to be able to parallel situations in the material universe. In this view, why should these chemical reactions be able to "work" when dealing in abstractions or things not directly sensed? 

Conclusions

The above was not meant as a comprehensive refutation of Godless, just as an intellectually honest response to the book as I read it and an encouragement to Christians who may be afraid of reading the views of atheists. But I am a bit nervous about including it because what I ultimately got out of this book is rather opposed to it. Which is simply this: the basis for Christianity's relationship with atheists cannot, cannot, cannot simply be debates and conversion attempts. Christian apologetical arguments, which are presented as valuable tools to correct the falsehoods believed by atheists and bring them to the truth, are revealed, by actually reading the thoughts of an atheist, to largely be tired, smart-sounding,  slogans being thrown around in an echo chamber, unaware that many of them as stated are completely unpersuasive to actual skeptics.

Godless begins with a rather off-putting, acerbic foreword by Richard Dawkins who, in the most condescending terms possible, expresses the need to actually understand Christians in order to reason with them. And Dawkins is right. Relationships between these two disparate worldviews can't be built on canned arguments and intellectual potshots aimed more at readers within the writer's own community than at the other one. Real dialogue and mutual understanding are necessary. Simply confronting the naturalistic worldview from the perspective of our own is not sufficient. For example, atheists like Barker don't see themselves as hopelessly lost, rebels, depraved sinners, etc., so addressing them as such is at best counterproductive, at most hurtful, even if we think we're being loving by presenting the truth to them.

In a sense, there is a difference between belief and knowledge, as Barker argues. If we dialogue with atheists while "knowing" we Christians are right, that we alone have the truth and anyone who disagrees is wrong, end of story, so therefore atheists must be proved wrong on every point...well, you can see how this "dialogue" would be a sham. Atheists, with their exaltation of reason and disregard for superstition, are guilty of this as well, even in this book, which is happy to evaluate Christianity almost entirely according to humanistic morals and naturalistic reasoning. By allowing "orthodoxy" to dictate that Christians must be right and atheists wrong, we lose the ability to learn from them. I think the very existence of a "Freedom from Religion Foundation" is not simply an occasion to cite Matthew 5:11 and consider ourselves blessed, but a sobering indication that something may be wrong with Christianity in America. Barker's synonymous usage of the terms "freethinker" and "atheist" should be an indication that our way of reading John 8:32 as emphasizing the need to believe the right things may need to be rethought. Critiques of the church are not automatically sin or persecution, no matter where they come from. If Barker allowed some credibility to the Bible, he might have closed as I am about to, by citing James 3:17: "But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere."