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Apologetics, Christianity, Philosophy

Pursuing God Intellectually: Make friends with Christians of old

June 29, 2017

(This is part 3 of a multipart series: Part 1, Part 2)

I’ve suggested that we understand our call to love God with our minds (Matt. 22:37) as a call to pursue God intellectually. This pursuit, I say, is analogous to (though importantly different from) the way in which we pursue any person we love. In other words, we should be interested in deep and difficult questions precisely because we love God and want to know him better.

But what does this look like?

For anyone who is intellectually pursuing God, it seems one cannot neglect being acquainted with the Christians of old.

Now I know this is not all easy and fun times. I also say this as someone who does not naturally gravitate to reading old books. Now don’t tell my Dean (since I teach in a Great Books program at SWBTS), but if I’m reading for personal enrichment, I’m naturally reluctant to reach for Plato, Aristotle, Augustine or Aquinas. I’m even reluctant to reach for C.S. Lewis!! Now also don’t tell that to Christian philosophers/apologists everywhere or I’ll lose friends and reputation!

Let me be clear, I don’t naturally gravitate to reading the books of old, but I know that I neglect these at my own peril. I’ve had to force myself to become friends with these ancient saints and allow them to speak wisdom, and the wisdom they speak is incredible. So though this can be a battle, you need to know the extraordinary value there is in reading old books (I hope my Dean is still reading to this point). I’m even going to quote C.S. Lewis (I hope my colleagues are still reading at this point). But, seriously, this is important. Lewis says:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook — even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united— united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books (C.S. Lewis “On Reading Old Books”)

The point here is old books come at issues with a different set of assumptions and force us to question ours. Whereas contemporary books, even books arguing for an opposing worldview, probably share many of the same and perhaps faulty assumptions. Perhaps this is why we are sometimes reluctant to read the old books. We may get confronted with our own wicked assumptions!

But here’s the thing. Many Christians read only popular level books, if they read at all. As a Christian, you stand in a long and rich intellectual tradition and to neglect the old books is to neglect a rich repository of truth and wisdom. In fact, it is often the case that the most difficult objections to Christianity were raised by Christians who were deeply grappling with their faith. You should check out the gold in Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Dante, Duns Scotus, John Locke, the reformers, Jonathan Edwards, Chesterton, Lewis, and many, many more.

One last thing. You should also read those thinkers who will likely be read for centuries to come. There’s no doubt that Alvin Plantinga will be read as long as western civilization exists. William Lane Craig is another thinker that has made massive contributions to apologetics and philosophy. I don’t share a number of views with these thinkers (among other things, I’m not a reformed epistemologist, contra Plantinga, and I lean Platonist, contra Craig) but there is definitely more agreement than disagreement. I also really appreciate their views even where I disagree. These thinkers are more difficult than the popular guys, but they can be faithful guides as you love God with your minds.

When doubts come, they can sometimes make us feel isolated. We feel like we have stumbled on something that no one has ever thought before. The tragedy is that is almost certainly not true. Truly, nothing is new under the sun and, often times, these ancient thinkers have provided a robust answer to the objection. Whenever you have a question, one of the first things to do is to find out who in the history of Christianity has confronted this (or similar) questions. They will be your guide.

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Apologetics, Christianity

Pursuing God intellectually: Being honest about our questions

June 27, 2017

In my last post, I gave an invitation to pursue God intellectually.

Jesus identified the greatest commandment as loving God with our all of who we are, and Jesus specifically included loving God with our minds. But what does this mean? I suggested that we understand this as pursuing God intellectually in a way that is consonant with other relational pursuits. When we love someone, we want to know things. We are intellectually curious about what makes them tick.

Now this was only intended as an analogy and all analogies break down somewhere. When it comes to God, we are not simply in the sort of love relationship as we are in, say, a marriage. Pursuing God intellectually has its own shape, its own approach.

What does this approach look like?

The first thing I want to suggest is that we be honest about where we are at intellectually on matters of faith. What I mean by this is that, we tend to act as if we have perfect confidence in all matters. Suppose you were asked, “when it comes to faith, what questions do you have?’ If there are not a ready handful of things that you are thinking about, then I want to suggest you are not intellectually pursuing God.

There are a lot of things about God, the gospel, Scripture and Jesus that are really straightforward. However, beyond these things, there seems to be no end to interesting and knotty issues that are worth thinking about. Again, they are not necessary for a basic understanding of Christian, but the pursuit of them makes for a mature faith.

Now this doesn’t have to mean that everyone is always deeply struggling with some aspect of faith. You may be a person who has found Christianity to be completely reasonable and deeply satisfying as a worldview. There may not be deep seated doubt that is causing existential angst. But you too should be exploring deep and difficult questions that you have about your faith, if for no other reason, because you love God and are pursuing him with intellectual curiosity. It may just be wondering about some aspect of theology or an interpretation of some text. Or it may be wondering about the historical evidence for events in the Bible.

I very definitely have found Christianity to be reasonable and deeply satisfying as a worldview. Though I have had times of deep struggle, I don’t typically *deeply struggle* with doubts anymore. But there are some doubts I think about quite a lot.  These are things about which I don’t know the answer and it bothers me a bit from time to time.

For example, I do not know why God is not more obvious than he is. It seems to me that there are people who would be open to God’s showing up. Don’t get me wrong. Many people who say they are open to God making himself obvious are not genuinely open to it. And many people who say they are not hostile to the idea of Christianity or angry at God, seem to have a whole lot of emotion that fills their responses. But there seem to be some people for whom this would make a great difference in their life.

Now I can work this all out philosophically to my satisfaction such that the challenge doesn’t in anyway defeat my Christian beliefs. Like I said, I don’t deeply struggle with whether I should believe in the existence of God given his so-called hiddenness. I’m satisfied by the idea that it is God’s prerogative to be as obvious as he deems appropriate to his plans and his purposes (see here for a discussion). I believe that and find that this blocks the objection from hiddenness. I don’t think he has to be more obvious than he is. I just wonder why he’s not.

In addition to this, I wonder about the right reading of Genesis 1 and 2. To what degree is it metaphor and to what degree is it literal history (everyone in my context admits some anthropomorphisms, such as God’s walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and literal history, such as a literal Adam and Eve)? I wonder why God worked through a single nation for a couple of millennia setting the stage for the coming Messiah. Why, for example, didn’t Jesus come in the days of King David? I’m unsure why the Synoptics don’t include the story of Lazarus’s being raised from the dead. Why is it only John that includes that account? I wonder how to understand the dual natures of Jesus. Does Jesus, for example, lack knowledge in his humanity? Is there some sort of separation in his cognition where his human cognition is non-identical from his divine cognition in being fully God and fully man? I have the same sort thing when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity. I also have A LOT about eschatology about which I’m unsure, including why eschatology is so divisive despite specific views being so underdetermined by the biblical evidence (i.e., why don’t we hold these a bit more tentatively given how much interpretation has to happen?).

These are just a few off the top of my head. There’s certainly more. I should add, I’m not without answers for many of these. I’m also convinced of orthodoxy and traditional understandings of these things. But I guess I’m just not completely settled on some of the finer nuances in these discussions.The point is that it is in this wrestling that I come to a better knowledge of God in my pursuit of him.

What questions do you wrestle with?

 

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Apologetics, Christian Faith

An invitation to the intellectual pursuit of God

June 24, 2017

“Love the Lord your God with…all your mind” ~Jesus

The Command to Love

Jesus commands us to love God with all of who we are—our hearts, souls and minds (Matt. 22:37). One might find this as a command problematic since love isn’t the sort of thing we can turn on or off. When something is lovely, we experience loving feelings and affections toward that thing. And when it is not, we don’t.

But this of course assumes that all Jesus had in mind was the mere feeling of love. What seems more plausible in light of the context is that Jesus was not dictating certain feelings we ought to have, but dictating a certain approach. He was telling us that we ought to turn our pursuits, with the deepest part of us, including our minds, toward relationally knowing God.

I think we have at least a grasp of what it means to pursue God with our hearts and affections. Most Christians regularly pursue God in an impassioned way each week in a worship service. It’s perhaps less clear, but I think we have an idea of what’s involved with pursuing God with our souls. But I don’t think we have the first clue what it means to love God with our minds.

Pursuing God Intellectually

I want to suggest that loving God with our minds is to pursue God intellectually.

Okay, but what does it mean to pursue God intellectually? The picture here is one where we bring our deep and difficult questions, our doubts, and our intellectual struggles into our pursuit of God. We need to think of this as a normal part of discipleship.

Unfortunately, we are not often encouraged to pursue God in this way. It is as if once we come to Christ, we thereby have it all figured out. But none of us have it all figured out. No one! We have questions, or we just don’t grasp something and sometimes don’t even know what questions to ask. But then we struggle and we are not afforded the space to genuinely struggle with deep and difficult questions.

Skepticism?

I’m not recommending that we become hopeless skeptics of the sort that always ask “why?” no matter what is said. The sort of skeptic I have in mind is one that isn’t, at the end of the day, genuinely pursuing truth.

Extreme skepticism then isn’t the proper posture. The proper posture is more like two people in love. When we fall in love with someone we tend to be intensely curious about that person. We want to know EVERYTHING! In fact, from the outside, this intense puppy-love curiosity is downright sickening. The two lovers will stare into each other’s eyes and want to know everything. This intensity has a tendency to wear off (just a bit, sweetie!) but a marriage is in big trouble, in my view, if the spouses have lost all interest and no longer wonder about the other. This is where two married people can live in the same house, do life together, and yet find themselves suddenly not knowing the other.

Perhaps an even better analogy is children. In fact as Christians, we are called to be like children (Matt. 18:3). People often picture a so-called “child-like faith” as an unquestioning and blind faith. But I think people who think this must not spend much time with children. Children are constantly questioning, constantly wondering! But again, children are not typically skeptical. They naturally wonder at the world and are filled with curiosities about how things work. Adults often get stuck in the grind and allow life to go mundane. We have wondrously amazing things all around us and we yawn as if they are familiar.

Not so with kids. Kids are curious. They ask questions. But when my kids ask me these crazy awesome questions about life, I never get the sense that they are trying to trip me up or usurp my authority. In fact, they are coming to me precisely because I am an authority in their lives and because of their love for me. They (for some reason) think I might be able to shed light on their curiosity.

This, it seems to me, is a beautiful picture of the way in which we should approach God intellectually. We pursue God with the deep and difficult questions precisely because we want to know God better. It is precisely because of our intense love for God that we wonder at various aspects of life.

It Ain’t Easy

Now, as adults, sometimes our questions are of a very serious nature and they may be very much a painful struggle. We want to know whether some terrible tragedy provides compelling reason to think an all good and all powerful God does not exist. We want to know why God feels absent when we want or even need him to be present. We may struggle with certain moral constraints that impinge on what we perceive as our happiness. None of this is easy, but none of this is outside pursuing God or the discipleship to which we are called.

In one sense, when we consider the fact that we are attempting to know God very God, the transcendent ground of all reality, it seems that it absolutely should be difficult. We should find ourselves running up to the limits of human cognition all the time. Anyone who hand-waves the problem of evil as easy (either for or against God) simply has not wrestled with this issue. Anyone who thinks that Scripture is straightforward on all matters (either for or against Christianity) has simply not wrestled deeply with the text.

Personally, I find myself time and time again far more satisfied by the answers Christianity provides with the deep and difficult questions of life. But I’m on that journey as we speak. Won’t you join me?

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Christianity

Want to reach youth? Build a beautiful building!

June 22, 2017

A recent Telegraph article reported a significant uptick of youth identifying as Christian in Britain.  According to the article:

The figures, show that more than one in five (21 per cent) people between the ages of 11 and 18 describe themselves as active followers of Jesus, and 13 per cent say they are practising Christians who attend church.[1]

This is significant, in part, because older studies put it at around between 5% and 6%. This has been so surprising that the data has been doubted, retested and reconfirmed. So I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on here, but the data is solid.

However, even more interesting than this increase in Christian youth in Britain is one significant piece of why they are identifying as Christians: the church buildings and cathedrals. Man I love millennials!!

What’s so interesting about this is that we live in a day and age where beautifying a church building is often seen as wasteful, at best, and contrary to the communication of the gospel, at worst.

But this is out of step with the history of the church. Some of the greatest buildings in the world are places originally designed for encountering God. Many times a particular congregation lacked the means to build beautifully, but they still structured their places of worship not merely for function but to foster a certain kind of experience.

Merely emphasizing function for communicating truth also seems simply out of step with how humans approach the world, in what we come to place our faith and affections. Reason and evidence are important and they are important for everyone (even ironically for those who decry reason and evidence). However, we also have deep longings. Mere truth doesn’t satisfy. Truth is, by definition, dispassionate. We may assent intellectually to something because it is true, but we don’t typically give our life for those things that are merely true.  We give our lives to things that are true, beautiful and good.

What’s in a building?

We build church buildings today almost exclusively for function. Function is of course not unimportant. If there’s no door to get into the building, then this is a problem. But we seem almost completely unconcerned about the kind of experience a building will give. There are some incredibly beautiful doors out there!

Does it sound strange to talk about beauty affecting our experience?

Consider what it would be like to read a book (even a really good book) sitting in a single chair with bright fluorescent lights in a high school gymnasium. Then consider what it would be like to read the same book here.

Or in a great coffee shop or out in nature.

The point is that the experiences depend in part on our environment. Being surrounded by beauty importantly changes and greatly enhances the experience. When we are surrounded by beauty, it more fully engages our souls. We are not just rationally engaged, but we are engaged in deep parts of our souls.

If this is right, then why wouldn’t we include beautiful aspects in our worship environments? When the experience is only rote and rational, then we have not presented the full picture of who God is.

Now I’m not saying that having a really beautiful building would thereby show the beauty of God. It has to be more than just this. But the general point is that we should surround our worship activities with beauty as a way to point to and reflect our brilliant and beautiful God.

God as the ground of objective beauty

The reality is that we have lost all sense of beauty in our current culture (both inside and outside of the church). When I have taught in secular settings, many students come into my classroom believing that truth, goodness and beauty are merely subjective opinion. This is not the case in my current Christian context. Almost all of my students come in thinking that truth is objective. Slightly less (but still in the majority) will think that moral goodness is also objective. But when it comes to beauty, this flips. Almost all of my students come in believing that beauty is simply in the eye of the beholder. It’s almost beyond comprehension to think that beauty is an objective value, that someone can be wrong about what one thinks is beautiful.

The reason people struggle with this, it seems, is because there is such a diversity of opinion when it comes to music, art, styles, interior design, etc. But notice we’ll be careful to say that a diversity of opinion about truth doesn’t make it such that there is no objective fact of the matter. People disagree about the shape of the earth, but this doesn’t make it the case that there’s no fact of the matter. It’s simply that some (maybe many) people are wrong in their opinions. We’ll also say that from the fact that there’s a diversity of opinion about moral values, it doesn’t follow that morality is subjective. It seems to me that the same exact thing should go for aesthetic values.

What also helps is getting clear on the difference of something’s being objectively beautiful and someone having a taste for something (i.e., being enjoyed or liked). I can like 80’s death metal (I don’t) or Funyuns (I REALLY don’t), but it doesn’t follow that these are objectively beautiful. Can we at least agree that Funyuns are lacking in the aesthetic value category?!

So if we can make sense of that, then I think it makes sense to ask what grounds the existence of this value (just as it does for other values like morality and logic). My own view is that beauty and aesthetic values make most sense on a theistic worldview. Just like moral values, God is the very source of objective beauty.

So though we are surprised that young people in Britain are converting, at least in part, due to the beauty of a building, we shouldn’t be. People can find the God of beauty in the beauty exemplified in the world and we would do well to make this part of the case we make.

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[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/17/one-six-young-people-christian-visits-church-buildings-inspire/

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Apologetics, Christianity

8 sure ways to shut down a dialogue

June 16, 2017

I love to dialogue. I especially love dialoging with folks who believe differently from me. I’m a Christian and I genuinely love to sit down and talk with those who are not. I love to hear their story and how that story shapes the way they think about life.

But not every dialogue goes well. In fact, some “dialogues” are really just monologues masquerading as dialogues. Dialogue is interesting because, in order for it to be a dialogue, it really takes both dialogue partners genuinely listening and caring what the other has to say. Often enough, one dialogue partner shuts the dialogue down.

Here are 8 ways sure to shut a dialogue down.

  1. Act like your dialogue partner is helplessly biased and that you are completely free of bias.

We are all biased. Our biases color our evaluation of the facts. Christians are biased. Atheists/freethinkers/humanists are biased. No one is free of theory-laden observation. This is simply a fact of the human condition. But I don’t actually think we are helplessly trapped by our biases. I think we can reasonably conclude when we believe something on the basis of bias. Want to know the best antidote to for your biases? Dialogue. But acting like you are completely unbiased is a sure way to shut down dialogue with someone.

  1. Use a meme in lieu of an actual argument.

Memes can be funny. Memes can even be powerful. However, they are toxic for a dialogue. I always wonder who takes the time to craft these things that then gets shared a million times. If that’s you, come on out of the basement and consider discussing the issue with some thoughtful person. If that’s not you, then you should really consider refraining from posting that next meme you think will score you some points in a dialogue. All it’s going to do is shut the dialogue down.

  1. Be vicious towards the person you are talking to.

Don’t be vicious. It’s not nice.

  1. Be easily offended by the person you are talking to.

It’s a strange world out there these days. Way too often a discussion either turns vicious or someone plays the victim. Why is the space between these extremes so narrow? You should consider it a total blessing for someone to fairly criticize your ideas. In fact, it is a huge compliment. They have taken time out of their day to consider what you’ve said and to offer critical feedback. This is a gift. Now the exchange may get passionate and it may get lively, but don’t be so easily offended. You may even have to admit you were wrong, and that’s great because you are doing so on the basis of reasons. But if you play the victim, the dialogue is over.

  1. Caricature someone’s view so that it is easily dismissed.

I always find it interesting when someone tells me what my view is and there is about a half a kernel of truth to what they say. I mean it may sort of be in the same or at least neighboring ballpark, but it is not a view I or anyone I know would be interested in defending. This shuts down the dialogue because the rest of the discussion will likely involve attempting to simply clarify what my view even is much less getting around to discussing it.

  1. Compare their view to some loony fringe group with which no one would want to be associated.

There’s a lot of guilt by association in faith discussions. Apparently, I have to defend the nutcases and the radically uninformed because I believe 1 out of 100 beliefs in common with them?! Well I shouldn’t have to. My view should be considered for its merit all on its own. And so should yours.

Here are a few for Christians:

  1. For a Christian, when the argument gets tough, to just say, “Good objection, but it really just comes down to faith.”

Faith, as a notion, is really misunderstood. This is, in part, due to the way Christians talk about faith being some extra magic sauce that makes up for evidence and reason. So when evidence and reason run out, Christians often appeal to an almost mystical element of faith in lieu of a thoughtful consideration. This short-circuits the discussion. I’ll also note that a number of atheists have locked on this way of thinking of faith and act like this is necessarily what every believer means by faith. Besides being exceedingly unfair, this also shuts down a dialogue.

  1. For a Christian to say to the atheist, “I know deep down you really believe in God.”

Now I know that Romans 1:20-23 says some things that sound sort of like every person really deep down believes in God. Even if this is the right understanding of the passage, telling an atheist this still does not seem like a fruitful strategy.  Moreover, the passage really doesn’t say this. My own view of the Romans 1 passage is that God is present for all. This means that all people may be aware of God, but this doesn’t mean that all people believe and thus know (in a propositional sense) there is a God. We can be aware of things even while denying their existence. I think that all people are aware of a moral law, but there are plenty of people who deny the existence of any moral law. Likewise, though I believe that God is everywhere present, I take an atheist at his or her word that he or she does not believe in God. Given this, we can begin a dialogue.

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Apologetics, Philosophy, Scholarship

Why scholars aren’t getting the gigs

June 12, 2017

In a recent Inside Higher Ed article, the authors outlined reasons why scholars are often unable to reach wide audiences. They insightfully say:

There’s a yawning gap between academic writing and popular, hot-take journalism. Scholars fancy that they cover important, current topics, but they do so in styles and venues that reach only narrow audiences. And yet there has never been a better time for academics to reach the public directly, and in ways that are compatible with their professional contexts and goals.

They go on:

Scholars have insights, experience and research that can help the public navigate the contemporary world, but scholarly work all too often goes unseen. Sometimes it gets sequestered behind exorbitant paywalls or prohibitively steep book prices. Other times it gets lost in the pages of esoteric journals. Other times yet, it’s easy to access but hard to understand due to jargon and doublespeak. And often it doesn’t reach a substantial audience, dooming its aspirations to impact public life.

The article is talking about disciplines of all sorts. But I think this is extremely relevant to Christian apologetics and philosophy (and theology, Bible studies, etc.).

Scholars have left the planet

Most scholars have spent a better part of a decade in school immersed in some discipline absorbing the subtle minutia and nuances crucial to understanding the cutting edge of that field. They have become specialists and they speak and write to extend the discipline.

But something happens during that process. There’s a tendency for these scholars to travel to the planet of specialization and are unable to ever return to the real world. They speak a new language and can’t seem to remember how to get back to the real world.

Now scholars write A LOT. But it tends to be the case that only other scholars in that specific field are reading these works. It’s not uncommon for a scholar to spend a few hard months on an article (or even years on a book), and it is only read (especially in its entirety) by less than 100 people. Now this is not as tragic as it sounds. The primary goal of academic writing, it seems to me, is not necessarily a large readership. Rather the goal is to extend research and reflection on interesting areas in a discipline, and the impact is not always reflected in the amount of people who read it.

But still, there’s a concern. The concern, as I see it, is this stratification of scholarly material causes a fracture between those who know what they are talking about and those who are speaking to wide audiences.

This can be quite dangerous if this gap gets too wide.

How to get expertise to the people

One way to close this gap is to have, what I call, translators. Translators are not scholars, but they take the scholarship and make it more accessible and relatable. An example of translator in the world of science would be Bill Nye (formerly known as The Science Guy). Nye has no advanced degrees in science, but he has had a tremendous impact in science education and he is routinely called upon to speak as an authority in science . But since he’s not himself a scholar, his science chops are not exactly always on point.

In the world of Christian apologetics, we have translators as well. And we have some terrific ones. These are ones who take complex issues in science, philosophy, history, etc. that bear on the truth of Christianity and make them understandable and relatable for a wider audience. But, let’s be honest, just like Bill Nye, there are some who just simply don’t fully understand the issue they are speaking or writing about.

Now don’t get me wrong. This is not to minimize the importance of a translator in apologetics. There is an important space and a huge need for popular level apologists. My concern in this post is that there seems to be a lack of scholars who are getting (at least some of) their material out there in accessible ways. Right now in the world of Christian Apologetics, we have a growing number of popular level apologists that are doing really well, and God bless them for the work that they do. But it seems there’s a lack of scholars getting called upon to speak to popular audiences. And this is because scholars have very often done a terrible job at speaking and writing on a level that nonspecialists can understand.

Why are scholars typically bad at the popular level?

Here are some of the more salient challenges cited by the article that scholars face in writing to wide audiences and some of my thoughts about these challenges.

  • “Scholars often cannot answer the question ‘So what?’ about their own work”
  • “Scholars don’t know how to pitch.”

It’s often the case that the problems that scholars are writing about are only problems that academics have (the Problem of Evil literature can tend to be this way). So it is not that there isn’t a “so what?”, it’s that the “so what?” is only for someone who speaks the scholarly language. But there are many things that have been said in the scholarly literature about, say, the Problem of Evil that could be really helpful for a wider audience. But those connections are often not made. Until they make these connections, the scholar can’t pitch the relevance of their content.

  • “Scholars don’t write well enough to reach people outside the culture of scholarly writing.”
  • “Passion and generosity are missing from scholarship.”

The thought here is that scholars don’t typically write with their readers in mind when they write scholarly material. It’s really just the research and the argument that matters. Consequently, the writing isn’t compelling (writing with passion) and it is not helpful for the uninitiated reader to understand the material (writing with generosity). So something can be written academically well, but it may not be written well for an actual real-life reader.

  • “Academics can be jerks.”

Yes. Yes, they (we) can. I’ve actually found that many academics (though certainly not all) are overall humble people. What happens is that they use an authoritative voice, when talking as a scholar, and this can easily come across as jerkish. In academic writing, there is a need for this authoritative voice. However, when it comes to popular writing, there’s a need for intellectual humility to come across as well.

  • “This isn’t for everyone.”

I know some academics that I’m not sure are able to get back to earth. And that’s okay. We need these scholars to do what they do. But I tend to think these are the exceptions and not the rule. I think many scholars just aren’t good at this because they haven’t worked at speaking and writing this way. But they could do it if they try. And we need this.

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Apologetics, Philosophy

2 problems with Craig’s distinction of knowing and showing

June 9, 2017

In one of the best books on Christian apologetics in the last 50 years, Reasonable Faith, William Lane Craig says something rather provocative. He thinks that the proper basis for knowing that Christianity is true is not the evidence for Christianity. This might strike one as more than a bit odd given that Craig is the one of the world’s foremost Christian apologists. Craig certainly has a high view of the evidence for Christianity’s truth given the fact that he routinely takes on Christianity’s most difficult critics in formal debates on the evidence for Christianity.

So what’s going on?

Knowing and Showing

In the book, Craig makes a distinction between knowing and showing. He says:

…the way we know Christianity to be true is by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; that such experience does not function in this case as a premise in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as “God exists,” “I am condemned by God,” “I am reconciled to God,” “Christ lives in me,” and so forth.[1]

Craig’s idea is the inner experience of the Spirit of God Himself—where He testifies to His existence and the truths of the gospel—is the primary way in which people come to the knowledge of Christianity. His idea seems to be that the best way to know something is to have direct experience of that thing. Though we can know in this way, we cannot share things known by inner experience. This is simply a fact about our inner experiences. We might say to another, “I feel your pain,” but we don’t mean it literally. What we mean by this empathetic claim is that we understand that one is feeling pain, and we have had what we take to be a similar feeling of pain. But mere testimony of an inner experience is not a good way to convey (i.e., provide evidence of) what the pain is like.

We can, likewise, tell people about inner religious experiences, but unless one has a similar experience, then this testimony seems too weak, in terms of evidence, to constitute knowledge.

So, for Craig, the best way (perhaps the only way) for us to convince another person of the truth of Christianity is to show that Christianity is true with arguments and evidence, which is what Craig offers in his debates, his books, and his interactions with students across the globe. Craig seems to think that this evidence, though it can move one along in their journey towards Christ, it never results in genuine knowledge unless and until God makes himself known to that individual. And it is not necessary for knowledge. The person completely uneducated in the arguments of Christian apologetics can be perfectly rational on the basis of his or her direct experience of God. Thus arguments and evidence play, at most, a ministerial or subsidiary role on the way to knowledge.

I think Craig’s distinction is problematic for two reasons.

Inner experience as evidence

First, though I certainly agree that religious inner experience is important for coming to a genuine and full knowledge of Christianity’s truth, it seems to me that it should be understood as part of one’s overall evidence set. That is, I deny that there is a substantive distinction between evidence, on one hand, and the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit, on the other. The direct experience of God just is evidence—indeed, great evidence—for the truth of Christianity. This is described as testimony and experiences, after all, and we typically think of testimony and experience as evidence.[2]

This is best seen within the broader discussion of evidentialism in epistemology. In this discussion, it seems to me that inner experiences such as this would just count as evidence. Again, direct experience of some fact is typically thought to be the best sort of evidence (such as one’s acquaintance with what’s immediately before them). The debate in epistemology is whether we can be rationally justified by facts without our being aware of these facts (e.g., Plantinga thinks that we can have, what he calls, warrant for our beliefs in virtue of their being produced by properly functioning faculties even if we are not aware that our faculties’ proper function[3]). The evidentialist thinks there must there be something of which we are aware that points to the truth of our belief (call this evidence) in order for one to be rational. The point is that what Craig identifies as the proper basis of religious knowledge seems to fall within this category of evidence since these are facts of which we are aware that point to the truth of our beliefs.

 Experience needs interpretation

But this is mostly a terminological issue. The more pressing issue with this distinction is that inner experience, all by itself, doesn’t seem to provide a good basis for knowing Christianity is true. The inner experiences that we have seem crucially to need interpretation. The typical religious experience does not seem to have enough content to serve as the primary basis of our knowledge.

For example, let’s say one is in an evangelistic service and experiences an overwhelming sense of awe. Is this sufficient all by itself to rationally believe that the claims being made in the service are true? It seems not. Many Christians would agree that this is inadequate if it was, say, a Mormon evangelistic service. But why should this experience justify the belief in the Christian gospel?

Craig is quite aware of this objection and says that the counterfeit experience of, say, the Mormon does nothing to take away from his veridical experience.[4] But one seems to need reason for thinking that the experience is in fact veridical. If merely being veridical was sufficient, then all skeptical concerns could similarly be dismissed. When the skeptic asks how one knows that one is not in the Matrix given it would be qualitatively indistinguishable experience, it simply doesn’t address her concern to assert that one’s experience is veridical. She’s likely to ask again, “but how do you know it’s veridical?”

Now Craig might not think that the Christian and Mormon experiences are qualitatively indistinguishable, but this seems impossible to verify. If they are qualitatively indistinguishable, then the rest of one’s evidences will need to play more than a subsidiary role. It will have to be this inner experience of God along with the Christian evidences that rationally justifies one’s belief.

Do Christians have evidence?

One motivation for Craig’s view is the fact that many Christians have never considered the apologetic evidence for Christianity, and yet they certainly seem to believe Christianity in a rational way. Craig thinks that one need not have familiarity with apologetics to know that Christianity is true. And I agree! But, I’ll end with a provocative statement: I think that the typical Christian has evidence for the truth of Christianity (including the inner and outer experiences of God, but also the natural signs seen in the world,[5] etc.) even if he or she does not know any formal apologetic arguments. There’s no doubt most Christians can greatly improve their evidence and rational basis by considering the rich tradition of Christian apologetics. But to think that most Christians do not have any evidence is just to have an unnecessarily narrowed concept of ‘evidence.’

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Notes:

[1] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith:  Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3d ed. (Wheaton, Il: Crossway, 2008), 43.

[2] There are some approaches to Christian apologetics that understand “evidence” as only formal arguments and “evidentialism” as the view that formal apologetic arguments are necessary for faith. This is a much derided view. The only problem is that I know of no one who actually holds this view. The discussion of evidentialism in epistemology is far more precise (than the one in Christian apologetics).

[3] See Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief (Eerdmans, 2015).

[4] Craig, Reasonable Faith, 49.

[5] See C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (New York: OUP, 2010).

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How to NOT shelter your kids from ideas: Make a case for Christianity’s truth, goodness, and beauty

June 7, 2017

 

(Note: this is part 3 in a 3 part series. Part 1, Part 2)

Three strategies

In this series of posts, I’ve argued that we should not shelter our kids from ideas. Now I’m a big fan of sheltering our kids in a variety of ways (including literally with a roof), but I think we should, in age-appropriate ways, expose them to ideas while they are in our care. Or you can just shelter them and hope for the best…but I don’t recommend it!

There are three strategies offered here to appropriately expose our kids to ideas. The first is to teach our kids how to think and not just what to think. The second is to present alternative ideas fairly and charitably. I recommend presenting these alternative ideas first without evaluation so that your child accurately understands them. Only then do we earn the right to evaluate these alternative views and evaluate we should.

3rd Strategy: Make a case for Christianity’s truth, goodness, beauty

The third strategy is to make a case for Christianity. It always catches me off guard how many people grow up in the church and have no clue about the rich case for Christianity. I often hear people say (often, in this moment, as caught off guard as I am) that they have never been given or challenged with the reasons to believe. They genuinely believed, but they have nothing to say about why they believe, at least nothing that a nonchristian will find compelling.

So I think we need to make the case for Christianity to our kids. However, I’d like to suggest we make a mistake if we only present the case for the truth of Christianity. We ought to also show the goodness and beauty of the Christian worldview.

To be clear, we do have to present the case for the truth of Christianity. This is not at the end of the day just a good story. But the case for the truth of Christianity can sometimes be met with a yawn or even repugnance if it is not also shown to be desirable.

Take, for example, the common objection of the injustices of the church. This sort of objection, I think, is best seen not as evidence against the truth of Christianity, but as evidence against its goodness. It is typically showing how bad Christians have been at times and there is nothing morally superior about this religious approach. But notice that it doesn’t follow from this that Christianity is, therefore, false.

As I sit here today, it is definitely not just the case for the truth of Christianity that compels me to believe. Don’t get me wrong. I think the case is very good. I find the cumulative evidence, including the arguments for God’s existence, reasons to think that Scripture is reliable, and that Jesus said and did what the New Testament claims he did (and etc.), to be quite good. I also find no objection that defeats the justification for my belief. There are good and interesting objections (such as the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and certain textual issues), but there are what I find to be satisfying Christian responses. But this isn’t where it ends for me. I also think that Christianity has and does produce large amounts of good in the world. I also think it is the ultimate love story, the ultimate rescue mission, the ultimate self-sacrificing hero story all wrapped up into one. In short, it’s beautiful.

Now given the bigness of the claim here, I’m only going to be able to hint at what would be involved in a full explication of these ideas (also I have talked about the goodness of Christianity here).

Darwinism as ugly

Let’s first consider a view I do not think is beautiful or good. When it comes to biological life, a naturalist version of Darwinian evolution may be true. I don’t think it is true. I find the thesis that there is a God who has creatively worked to bring about a radically diverse cosmos (including biological life) superior. But let’s imagine Darwinist naturalism is true. If it is true, it seems it is neither beautiful nor good. The diversity of life including all human life is mere accident. We are merely, in the words of Bertrand Russell, the “accidental collocation of atoms.” Life has no grandness or purpose. There is no enchantment. We live, we die, and that’s it. Most of us try to be good and yet we fall so very short. We can try harder, but we’ll still fail. And that’s it. That’s the end of the story. We don’t find in this narrative anything but no news or bad news for our lives. We are also set in a world where survival would be the highest virtue, except there is no such thing as genuine virtue in this world. We may do well at surviving for a time, but then we die. And that’s it.

This notion, it seems to me and with all due respect, is ugly. Again, it may be true, but we should all be rather depressed if it is. It also seems difficult to see how this idea is good. It’s difficult to see how anything like love and the desire to be good follows from this view. In fact, love and moral goodness are often denied as actual objective things on this view. There’s no doubt one can live lovingly and doing good, but it doesn’t follow from the worldview. It seems one has equal justification to steal and oppress.

A beautiful and good Christ

Now if Christianity is true, then there is a God who will bring judgment on evil doers. He will right ALL wrongs! There is, on this view, great hope. There is purpose for one’s life. Our fallenness and our brokenness are not the end of our story. We may be redeemed! We may be made new. In fact, the whole cosmos will be made new. We will know God as we are fully known. There is a distinct beauty to these ideas.

To be sure, there are beautiful ideas that are nevertheless false. And I’m not saying that Christianity’s beauty straightaway defeats Darwinian naturalism. We of course need to weigh the evidence. But where I am deeply compelled to believe is that, in addition to the intellectual case, I find the Christian thesis so very attractive.

So as we make a case for Christianity to our kids, I think they need to know that it is the greatest story ever told. And the story of Christianity provides us with a story and a purpose. It should also profoundly motivate us to live as Jesus lived, full of grace and truth. He loved the unlovely and the humble, but called out arrogance and religiosity.

I want my children think well. I also want them to understand genuine versions of alternative worldviews. But I’m also desperate for them to see this rich, full-bodied view of Christianity. I want my children to see a view that is intellectually robust, but also beautiful and good.

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