At the time of this writing, the most comprehensive analysis of C. S. Lewis’s Christian apologetics from a philosophical perspective is John Beversluis’s C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Since this book came out 20 years ago, in many ways I find this to be rather unfortunate. Even my own book, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, is primarily concerned with one of Lewis’s arguments and does not attempt an overall evaluation of Lewis’s apologetics, though in the first chapter I do touch on a few other matters.
Published by William B. Eerdmans’ press, it was touted as the first truly critical study of Lewis’s philosophical theology. This statement implies that what people had written about Lewis until that time had been largely uncritical. In addition, I think there would be some justice in that understanding of the Lewis literature until that time. People who like C. S. Lewis and write about him have a tendency when writing to write for people who already like Lewis, and what they say often fails to imagine what someone who think Lewis just has things wrong must be thinking. I remember many conversations with my good friend and atheist philosopher Keith Parsons when I was a seminary student and he was a beginning philosophy graduate student. I would point to aspect of Lewis’s thought that he I thought he would find appealing, and he took my remarks seriously for awhile, only to find out a few days later that he had read some things in Lewis which seemed to him to be argumentatively very weak and guilty of superficial thinking. The Lewis I portrayed to him always sounded like a serious Christian thinker, the Lewis he read always sounded to him like someone who stood in need of a good intellectual pounding.
A good deal of the secondary C. S. Lewis literature is often very appealing to people who like what he has to say, but has little to say to people who inclined to be skeptical. I do not exactly fault secondary writers for exhibiting too much enthusiasm. What I fault them for is a failure to get inside the minds of people who really think that Lewis is wrongheaded and superficial. To read some Lewis fans, we should expect every unbeliever who reads Lewis to slap their heads and say, “I never thought of that. Gosh, I should be a Christian.” (And if they do not, of course they are wicked.) Further, secondary writers have a tendency not to advance the discussion any further than it was after Lewis wrote.
Anyone who wants to see how C. S. Lewis sounds to people who find his apologetics woefully inadequate should read C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. I say this as someone who believes that Christianity is credible for approximately the reasons that C. S. Lewis said that it was credible. I disagree with just about everything in the book, and sometimes I cannot see how he can possibly make the statements he does about Lewis. But a thinker’s ideas are best developed in a dialectical atmosphere, in which proponents of a thinker’s thoughts face a loyal opposition, an opposition that finds his ideas interesting enough to discuss but thinks them mistaken. So far, the closest thing to the “loyal opposition” that Lewis has had (if you discount the one-issue criticism of Anscombe) has been John Beversluis.
We can expect book critical of a well-known apologist to follow one of two patterns. One pattern we might call the Debunking Job. The apologist is, on this view, simply an intellectual fraud; deserving of as complete a demolition as anyone can imagine. We see this is the kind of books some years written by defenders of the theory of evolution against scientific creationism. A similar tone seems to emerge in most books written by evolutionists in response to the Intelligent Design movement. The target deserves no respect, and the goal is not merely to criticize, but to discredit. The critic perceives the apologist’s project to be wrongheaded from start to finish, and it is the duty of the Debunker to expose the apologist as a complete failure whose reputation is undeserved.
Another type of book that a critic can write in response to Lewis would be what I would call the Constructive Criticism. This is what we find in Thomas V. Morris’s critique of Francis Schaeffer’s apologetics, written in 1976. For Morris, it is not that Schaeffer’s attempt to defend Christianity is simply misguided; the problem is that his overly simplistic arguments are thought to prove a good deal more than they really do. A more modest, more philosophically adequate, Christian apologetics is recommended in place of the overblown and simplistic apologetics advocated by Schaeffer.
Beversluis’s book was published, as I indicated earlier, by Wm. B. Eerdmans press, a Christian publishing house that had published some of Lewis’s writings, and had cove recommendations from Christian philosophers William Alston and Alan Donagan. For this reason, someone who picked it up might very well expect that it would be a treatment of Lewis similar to the treatment Morris gave Schaeffer. Most people who read the book thought of it as a Debunking Job. The arguments found in Lewis’s apologetics are portrayed as abject failures, and Beversluis does not offer the Christian apologist an alternative. Lewis’s arguments, on Beversluis’s account, frequently commit egregious fallacies which freshmen students are taught to avoid in introductory logic classes.
Further, at one point, Beversluis impugns Lewis’s intellectual honesty, suggesting that the unbeliever needs more desperately to accept the conclusions of his apologetic arguments than he needs to understand those arguments. What he seems to be implying is that Lewis is prepared to make his case appear stronger than it really is because people need to accept Christianity more than they need to honestly reflect on the legitimacy of his arguments. I don’t know what this can be except a charge of intellectual dishonesty.
However, if Beversluis or anyone else were to prove that C. S. Lewis was a petty hack, and a less than honest one at that, what would follow from it? Not much, I take it, about the believability of Christianity, except, of course, that many people who thought they had good grounds from Lewis to believe it actually lack those grounds. But surely Beversluis knows that there are Christian philosophers who are highly regarded even by non-believers, and the lesson from a debunking of C. S. Lewis would have to be that apologetics is something best left the pros like Alvin Plantinga, a product of Beversluis’s alma mater, Calvin College, or Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne.
Therefore, the argument that Lewis failed as a Christian apologist is one theme of the book, but it is not the primary theme. There is, for Beversluis, something fundamentally amiss with the very enterprise of Christian apologetics itself, and Lewis, as opposed to others, was perceptive enough to see the problem, even though he was unable to find an adequate solution to it. The problem is as old as Socrates’ Euthyphro. If, as Lewis had throughout his apologetic career insisted that it must, “good” must mean approximately the same thing when we apply it to God as what it means when we apply it to human beings, then the fact of suffering provides a clear empirical refutation of the existence of a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good. If one the other hand, we are prepared to give up the idea that “Good” in reference to God means anything like what it means when we refer to humans as good, then the problem of evil can be sidestepped, but any hope of a rational defense of Christianity goes by the boards.
This perception comes in the throes of his experience of grieving for his wife, in his book A Grief Observed. It was a great surprise to me, but perhaps it should not have been, that when A. N. Wilson published a scurrilous, tendentious biography of Lewis essentially psychoanalyzing away Lewis’s Christian commitments, Beversluis, the one-time bad boy of Lewis studies, would have none of it. In fact, he dismisses as “pure fiction” the claim he mentioned favorably in his book; that Lewis abandoned the rational defense of Christianity after his encounter with Elizabeth Anscombe.
However, this is going to pose a dilemma for Beversluis. How could C. S. Lewis have been both a petty hack as an apologist, and a dishonest one at that, but also be the hero of A Grief Observed? The grieving hero of A Grief Observed is a man of great intellectual perceptiveness and intellectual honesty, even though he was not successful as a Christian apologist, and though, in the final analysis, he avoids facing the logical implications of his own position on God and suffering. If Beversluis just sticks to demolition, of course, he avoids this problem. If, on the other hand, Beversluis’s approach to Lewis is that of the loyal opposition, then Lewis has to come across as a plausible and interesting thinker who, nevertheless, got it wrong (here’s why).
Although I think he originally intended the book to reflect the view of the Loyal Opposition, its tone for much of the way is that of a Debunking Job. I believe that the complimentary images of Lewis that Beversluis intended to convey were lost on most of his readers, both supporters and critics. That is not surprising, given the book's overall tone. Given the tone of his criticisms throughout much of the book, it is hard to believe that this same C. S. Lewis could be hero of A Grief Observed, who wrestles mightily and unsuccessfully with the problem of human suffering.
This is unfortunate, for reasons explained in Thomas V. Morris’s review:
It is Beversluis’s aim to put his readers into a position where they can see Lewis's failures. In representative passages, he characterizes Lewis's 'irresponsible writing' as exhibiting a persistent tendency toward carelessness, inaccuracy, and oversimplification whenever he discusses opposing views," and blasts Lewis's own positive positions as "confused," wrongheaded," shipwrecked," "disgraced," "considerably worse than fuzzy," "tendentious" and "desperate". Colorful passages in Lewis are labeled as "bellicose outbursts," and we find that Lewis doesn't just state his positions, he "gives vent to them." The overall tone should be evident.
One of the big problems I have with much of the book is that Beversluis finds bones to pick with what Lewis says, and then declares his argument hopeless. No attempt is made to see the insight behind what Lewis has written, no attempt to develop the argument and produce the strongest version of the argument possible before saying that it fails. If Beversluis had given a more adequate treatment of Lewis’s apologetics and then concluded that the arguments were unsuccessful, this would have made \his account of Lewis’s grief experience more believable. As it stands, I myself was inclined to consider Beversluis’s favorable comments about Lewis to be somewhat disingenuous, until I read his review of A. N Wilson.
Again, consider these comments by Morris:
My main philosophical criticism of this book is that Beversluis seldom comes anywhere near digging deep enough to really appreciate a line of thought suggested by Lewis. All too often he gives a facile, fairly superficial reconstruction of a line of argument, and after subjecting it to some critical questioning, declares it bankrupt and moves on. What is so disappointing to the reader who is trained in philosophy is that in most such instances a few minutes of reflective thought suffice to see that there are very interesting considerations to be marshalled in the direction Lewis was heading, considerations altogether neglected by [Beversluis].
It is a mistake to expect Lewis to have arguments sufficiently polished to pass muster in present-day philosophical journals. Lewis, of course, simplifies them for general consumption. The real question is whether they provide legitimate insights that can be developed into good philosophical arguments. If someone is tempted to think that Lewis can do all of our thinking for us, then it is worthwhile to be reminded that there are things the skeptic can say back. However, this is hardly sufficient to establish a verdict of philosophical failure against C. S. Lewis, but that is what Beversluis does.
Consider, for example, Beversluis’s treatment of the argument from reason. Beversluis’s discussion is marred by two red herrings. First, because Lewis uses the term “the validity of reasoning,” Beversluis gratuitously assumes that Lewis thinks that the only kind of reasoning is deductive. However, of course, the term “validity” can be used in a broader sense to mean legitimacy. If everything except what comes from a “valid” cause is irrational, then, as Beversluis points out, we will have nothing to reason about. When Lewis says naturalism is incompatible with the validity of reasoning, he means by the phrase “the validity of reasoning” the reliability of reasoning as a means to truth, and does not have the formal deductive concept in mind. This requires intentionality, mental causation, and all the other things that AFR defenders find mysterious from the point of view of naturalism.
Second, because Lewis says that all possible knowledge depends on the validity of reasoning, Beversluis presumes that the argument depends crucially on the claim that we infer even perceptual knowledge from sense data. If this is the case, then Lewis’s position depends on a philosophy of perception that is rejected by most philosophers and is a vulnerable point in his argument. However, Lewis does not say we draw inferences when we perceive physical objects, he says that we will have to be able to make some inferences if someone challenges our perceptual beliefs. Second, even if we grant that perceptual knowledge is non-inferential, the conclusion that there are no rational inferences is epistemically disastrous for the naturalist. This is because the naturalism depends for its credibility on the natural sciences (which in turn relies heavily on mathematics), and philosophical argumentation.
These are, of course, not the only criticisms Beversluis makes against Lewis’s argument from reason; he does use a version of Anscombe’s argument from different explanation types against Lewis’s revised argument. I would refer the interested reader to my published discussions of that. But my point here is not to respond to his critique of Lewis’s argument, but to show that he very often reads Lewis in a tendentious manner, and that he treats as decisive objections that could be overcome with fairly simple improvements. Of course, Beversluis could have treated Lewis in a fairer way and still found his apologetic arguments wanting, and this would have made for a stronger and more effective critique.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Monday, January 30, 2006
A radio discussion of the argument from reason
Kenneth Samples presents and defends the Argument from Reason on this Reasons to believe broadcast. Go under 1-17 and click on the link to "What is the Argument from Reason" and you can listen to it on a Realplayer.
Loftus and the fallacy of chronological snobbery
This post, from John Loftus. seems to me to commit the fallacy of chronological snobbery, as described by C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy. Here Lewis is talking about his discussions with Owen Barfield:
In the first place he (barfield) made short work of what I have called my "chronological snobbery," the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.
In the first place he (barfield) made short work of what I have called my "chronological snobbery," the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
The Argument from Desire
This is Peter Kreeft's defense of the Argument from Desire. This post received a belated comment from Steve Lovell, so I am redating it for people to react to.
Mere Christianity Book III Chapter 4
Mere Christianity
Book III Chapter 4
Morality and Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is the psychological technique invented by Sigmund Freud
When Freud talks about how to cure neurotics he is talking as a pro
When he speaks as a philosopher he is an amateur
Two things involved in a choice
One of them is the act of choosing
The other is the psychological raw material that affects the choice.
The psychological raw material can be either normal or abnormal.
Psychoanalysis seeks to remove the abnormal feelings, to give people better raw material to help make choices
Someone may go to war with abnormal feelings and fears. If they are cured of their fears they may choose to be brave, or may choose to be cowardly
“When a neurotic who has a pathological fear of cats picks up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have in winning the V. C.”
Nice people may have done so little with their good upbringing that they are really worse than fiends. What would we have done if we had had the psychological makeup of, say, Himmler?
That is why we are told not to judge. God does not judge the raw material, God judges the choices made. And when he does so there may be surprises.
Every person is either slowly turning themselves into a heavenly thing or a hellish thing.
Christian writers seem very loose at one point (everything is forgivable) and at other times very strict (very severe even about thoughts). But the important thing is not the actions but the choices of the inner self. Some people just look funny when they give in to anger, others can get hundreds of people killed when they are angry. But every temptation given in to, regardless of its effects, will result in a person finding it harder to repent of the evil the next time and perform the right action.
Book III Chapter 4
Morality and Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is the psychological technique invented by Sigmund Freud
When Freud talks about how to cure neurotics he is talking as a pro
When he speaks as a philosopher he is an amateur
Two things involved in a choice
One of them is the act of choosing
The other is the psychological raw material that affects the choice.
The psychological raw material can be either normal or abnormal.
Psychoanalysis seeks to remove the abnormal feelings, to give people better raw material to help make choices
Someone may go to war with abnormal feelings and fears. If they are cured of their fears they may choose to be brave, or may choose to be cowardly
“When a neurotic who has a pathological fear of cats picks up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have in winning the V. C.”
Nice people may have done so little with their good upbringing that they are really worse than fiends. What would we have done if we had had the psychological makeup of, say, Himmler?
That is why we are told not to judge. God does not judge the raw material, God judges the choices made. And when he does so there may be surprises.
Every person is either slowly turning themselves into a heavenly thing or a hellish thing.
Christian writers seem very loose at one point (everything is forgivable) and at other times very strict (very severe even about thoughts). But the important thing is not the actions but the choices of the inner self. Some people just look funny when they give in to anger, others can get hundreds of people killed when they are angry. But every temptation given in to, regardless of its effects, will result in a person finding it harder to repent of the evil the next time and perform the right action.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
A Reply to John Loftus
Loftus comments can be found here:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/01/what-motivates-atheist-to-be-good.html
John: I'd very much like to see your response to this paper, by Steve Lovell, on the Euthyphro dilemma.
If there are objective moral values then we have a situation in which there are two sets of facts; facts about the way things are, which are describable, perhaps, by science in naturalistic terms, and facts about how things ought to be, which, at least on the face of things, defy scientific description. At least if Hume was right in saying you can't get an ought from an is.
There seems, on the face of things, to be a profound tension between moral success, on the one hand, on most understandings of morality, and Darwinian success, which is measure in terms of the extent to which a person passes on his genes. Consider the case I mentioned earlier on this blog of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who managed to pass on his genes anywhere from 50 to 75 times. This is the ultimate in Darwinian success, but I don't think it comes close to being a moral success, by anyone's standards.
Contrast this with the view of human beings as the product of a loving God, whose in which case fulfillment of human nature and doing the will of God can be identified. Simply having an intended purpose by a designer does nothing by itself to provide underpinnings for morality, since we could be being raised for food by aliens, in which case our good and the good of those who made us would be at odds. But if God has created us in such a way that our intrinsic good, what fulfils our nature, and the purpose intended for us by the one who made us, are the same, then it is hard to argue that, yeah, that's what God wants for us, but why should we do it?
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/01/what-motivates-atheist-to-be-good.html
John: I'd very much like to see your response to this paper, by Steve Lovell, on the Euthyphro dilemma.
If there are objective moral values then we have a situation in which there are two sets of facts; facts about the way things are, which are describable, perhaps, by science in naturalistic terms, and facts about how things ought to be, which, at least on the face of things, defy scientific description. At least if Hume was right in saying you can't get an ought from an is.
There seems, on the face of things, to be a profound tension between moral success, on the one hand, on most understandings of morality, and Darwinian success, which is measure in terms of the extent to which a person passes on his genes. Consider the case I mentioned earlier on this blog of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who managed to pass on his genes anywhere from 50 to 75 times. This is the ultimate in Darwinian success, but I don't think it comes close to being a moral success, by anyone's standards.
Contrast this with the view of human beings as the product of a loving God, whose in which case fulfillment of human nature and doing the will of God can be identified. Simply having an intended purpose by a designer does nothing by itself to provide underpinnings for morality, since we could be being raised for food by aliens, in which case our good and the good of those who made us would be at odds. But if God has created us in such a way that our intrinsic good, what fulfils our nature, and the purpose intended for us by the one who made us, are the same, then it is hard to argue that, yeah, that's what God wants for us, but why should we do it?
Mattill on Jesus and Jonah
The following is from A. J. Mattill's critique of Lewis's Modern Theology and Biblical Criticisms. My replies are below.
I. Distrusting the Divines as Literary Critics
A. Jonah, John, and Jesus
To defend orthodoxy, Lewis challenges the authority of New Testament experts, “the authority in deference to whom we are asked to give up a huge mass” of age-old beliefs (153) Lewis is “sceptical about this authority” because specialists in New Testament lack “literary judgment”(154). They fail to reconstruct convincingly the genesis of biblical tests: “what vanished documents each author used, when and where he wrote, with what purposes, under what influences”(158).
An example of their poor judgment is their classification of the Fourth Gospel as a “spiritual romance,” as “a poem not a history” (154).
Lewis may well be correct in claiming that most, if not all, New Testament scholars are more or less incompetent as literary critics, since they spend their time in detailed study of the New Testament and lack “a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general” (154). Lewis, however, in criticizing the literary acumen of Johannine students, ensnares himself. He accuses them of “crass insensitivity” in judging the Fourth Gospel by the same canons as the book of Jonah, for any competent literary critic could recognize that the former is a history whereas the latter is “a tale with as few even pretended historical attachments as Job, grotesque in incident” (154).
Lewis here is repeating his earlier assessment of Jonah, when he placed Jonah at the opposite end of a scale of historical writings from the memoirs of David’s court (2 Samuel 9-20, 1 Kings 1-2), Mark, or Acts.[2]
What Lewis fails to note is that Jesus himself regarded Jonah as a historical book, factual and authentic. Jonah was a sign to Jesus’ generation. The men of Nineveh repented at his preaching, and ‘‘as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the big fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:38-42; 16:1-4, Luke 11:29-32).
If Lewis is correct about the non-historical nature of the book of Jonah, then Jesus lacked literary judgment. And if Jesus cannot be trusted even as a literary critic, how can he be trusted in spiritual matters as Lord and Savior? Lewis can hardly shore up Christian orthodoxy by undercutting Jesus’ authority.
It is, of course, possible that Matthew and Luke err in their reporting of Jesus’ attitude toward Jonah. If so, Matthew and Luke are not the dependable historians Lewis would like them to be. Or it may be that Jonah is a historical book and Jesus, Matthew, and Luke are reliable literary authorities after all. But that would call into question Lewis’s competence as a critic and his distrust of New Testament scholarship.
VR: I don’t see that using Jonah as a type of himself entails a commitment to the historicity of Jonah. I could say “Just as Aslan died for the sins of Edmund, so Christ died for your sins” without committing myself to the real existence of Aslan.
Even if Jesus thought Jonah historical, a kenotic Christology that sees Christ as emptying himself of divine attributes to be human would, of course, limit Christ’s knowledge of literary scholarship. Jesus told fictional stories many times. Does that make him a liar?
Mattill says that if we can’t trust Christ in matters of literary scholarship, we can’t trust him in matters of salvation. Why? Was Jesus’ mission to introduce adequate techniques of literary scholarship? Or did He have better things to do with his time?
It's worthwhile to point out that Blomberg, in the interview that I linked to a few posts back, said that while he was prepared to defend the historical accuracy of John, his belief in the inspired status of John does not require complete historicity and historical accuracy.
And the argument that God does not lie may have problems with it. Jesus always does the right thing. Suppose Jesus were sheltering Jews from the Nazis. If the Nazis came and asked "Are there any Jews here," I believe Jesus would have said no.
I. Distrusting the Divines as Literary Critics
A. Jonah, John, and Jesus
To defend orthodoxy, Lewis challenges the authority of New Testament experts, “the authority in deference to whom we are asked to give up a huge mass” of age-old beliefs (153) Lewis is “sceptical about this authority” because specialists in New Testament lack “literary judgment”(154). They fail to reconstruct convincingly the genesis of biblical tests: “what vanished documents each author used, when and where he wrote, with what purposes, under what influences”(158).
An example of their poor judgment is their classification of the Fourth Gospel as a “spiritual romance,” as “a poem not a history” (154).
Lewis may well be correct in claiming that most, if not all, New Testament scholars are more or less incompetent as literary critics, since they spend their time in detailed study of the New Testament and lack “a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general” (154). Lewis, however, in criticizing the literary acumen of Johannine students, ensnares himself. He accuses them of “crass insensitivity” in judging the Fourth Gospel by the same canons as the book of Jonah, for any competent literary critic could recognize that the former is a history whereas the latter is “a tale with as few even pretended historical attachments as Job, grotesque in incident” (154).
Lewis here is repeating his earlier assessment of Jonah, when he placed Jonah at the opposite end of a scale of historical writings from the memoirs of David’s court (2 Samuel 9-20, 1 Kings 1-2), Mark, or Acts.[2]
What Lewis fails to note is that Jesus himself regarded Jonah as a historical book, factual and authentic. Jonah was a sign to Jesus’ generation. The men of Nineveh repented at his preaching, and ‘‘as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the big fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:38-42; 16:1-4, Luke 11:29-32).
If Lewis is correct about the non-historical nature of the book of Jonah, then Jesus lacked literary judgment. And if Jesus cannot be trusted even as a literary critic, how can he be trusted in spiritual matters as Lord and Savior? Lewis can hardly shore up Christian orthodoxy by undercutting Jesus’ authority.
It is, of course, possible that Matthew and Luke err in their reporting of Jesus’ attitude toward Jonah. If so, Matthew and Luke are not the dependable historians Lewis would like them to be. Or it may be that Jonah is a historical book and Jesus, Matthew, and Luke are reliable literary authorities after all. But that would call into question Lewis’s competence as a critic and his distrust of New Testament scholarship.
VR: I don’t see that using Jonah as a type of himself entails a commitment to the historicity of Jonah. I could say “Just as Aslan died for the sins of Edmund, so Christ died for your sins” without committing myself to the real existence of Aslan.
Even if Jesus thought Jonah historical, a kenotic Christology that sees Christ as emptying himself of divine attributes to be human would, of course, limit Christ’s knowledge of literary scholarship. Jesus told fictional stories many times. Does that make him a liar?
Mattill says that if we can’t trust Christ in matters of literary scholarship, we can’t trust him in matters of salvation. Why? Was Jesus’ mission to introduce adequate techniques of literary scholarship? Or did He have better things to do with his time?
It's worthwhile to point out that Blomberg, in the interview that I linked to a few posts back, said that while he was prepared to defend the historical accuracy of John, his belief in the inspired status of John does not require complete historicity and historical accuracy.
And the argument that God does not lie may have problems with it. Jesus always does the right thing. Suppose Jesus were sheltering Jews from the Nazis. If the Nazis came and asked "Are there any Jews here," I believe Jesus would have said no.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Calvani responds to the comments
I had asked David Calvani what he thought of the comments on the entry that I had posted from him concerning the establishment clause.
Victor,
I just looked at the responses to my original note at
http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/01/david-calvani-on-establishment-cla
use.html#comments.
I find it very interesting that there are 5 comments and only two
commentators.
The anonymous comment that labeled you a theocrat is what one should expect
form anonymous commentary: an assertion made without the slightest
justification. It is this sort of comment that would incline me not to allow
comments if I had a web log. There was nothing in my note to indicate that I
want a theocratic state (which I do not).
As for Jim Lippard of http://lippard.blogspot.com/ I find it most amusing
that he goes on criticizing me for 3 posts but then has to admit that the
article he linked to in comment #4 "appears compatible with" my view!
Mr. Lippard errs from the very first. He says, "The 14th amendment
incorporates all of the protections of the Bill of Rights as limitations
against federal power into limitations against state power." This is wrong.
The judiciary tried to incorporate all of the Bill of Rights into 14th
amendment jurisprudence, but soon abandoned this approach as unworkable. (Of
course, if the 14th amendment's privileges and immunities clause really
authorized this total incorporation, the amendment would not repeat the 5th
amendments due process requirement as a new obligation of the states.)
After rejecting the total incorporation doctrine, the courts invented their
'fundamental constitutional rights' doctrine, saying that only the
'fundamental' rights granted by the Constitution were incorporated. But the
Constitution makes no distinction between 'fundamental' and
'non-fundamental' rights! The courts should stick with the actual language
of the 14th amendment: the privileges and immunities of a citizen of the
United States.
Jim Lippards second assertion is even more absurd. He wrote, "It's pretty
clear that an official state religion would violate the First Amendment
rights of citizens of the state who are not members of that religion." How
so? Does the United Kingdom lack freedom of religion because of the
established Church of England? If the tyrants of China ever leave Tibet,
will Tibet be without freedom of religion because the head of Tibetan
Buddhism and the King of Tibet are the same person, the Dalai Lama?
The first amendment treats non-establishment of religion and freedom of
religion in two separate clauses. As far as the U.S. Constitution is
concerned, they are distinct and separate matters.
Why Jim conflates the two is seen on his own blog when he states "A loving
God? The unmitigated level of sheer evil in the world belies this claim ..."
The Constitution does not share Jim's fear and hatred of religious thought.
David Calvani
VR: David sent me a note telling me he now realizes that the comment on the Lippard blog was actually from Einzige and not from Jim. But he thinks Jim probably concurs.
Victor,
I just looked at the responses to my original note at
http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/01/david-calvani-on-establishment-cla
use.html#comments.
I find it very interesting that there are 5 comments and only two
commentators.
The anonymous comment that labeled you a theocrat is what one should expect
form anonymous commentary: an assertion made without the slightest
justification. It is this sort of comment that would incline me not to allow
comments if I had a web log. There was nothing in my note to indicate that I
want a theocratic state (which I do not).
As for Jim Lippard of http://lippard.blogspot.com/ I find it most amusing
that he goes on criticizing me for 3 posts but then has to admit that the
article he linked to in comment #4 "appears compatible with" my view!
Mr. Lippard errs from the very first. He says, "The 14th amendment
incorporates all of the protections of the Bill of Rights as limitations
against federal power into limitations against state power." This is wrong.
The judiciary tried to incorporate all of the Bill of Rights into 14th
amendment jurisprudence, but soon abandoned this approach as unworkable. (Of
course, if the 14th amendment's privileges and immunities clause really
authorized this total incorporation, the amendment would not repeat the 5th
amendments due process requirement as a new obligation of the states.)
After rejecting the total incorporation doctrine, the courts invented their
'fundamental constitutional rights' doctrine, saying that only the
'fundamental' rights granted by the Constitution were incorporated. But the
Constitution makes no distinction between 'fundamental' and
'non-fundamental' rights! The courts should stick with the actual language
of the 14th amendment: the privileges and immunities of a citizen of the
United States.
Jim Lippards second assertion is even more absurd. He wrote, "It's pretty
clear that an official state religion would violate the First Amendment
rights of citizens of the state who are not members of that religion." How
so? Does the United Kingdom lack freedom of religion because of the
established Church of England? If the tyrants of China ever leave Tibet,
will Tibet be without freedom of religion because the head of Tibetan
Buddhism and the King of Tibet are the same person, the Dalai Lama?
The first amendment treats non-establishment of religion and freedom of
religion in two separate clauses. As far as the U.S. Constitution is
concerned, they are distinct and separate matters.
Why Jim conflates the two is seen on his own blog when he states "A loving
God? The unmitigated level of sheer evil in the world belies this claim ..."
The Constitution does not share Jim's fear and hatred of religious thought.
David Calvani
VR: David sent me a note telling me he now realizes that the comment on the Lippard blog was actually from Einzige and not from Jim. But he thinks Jim probably concurs.
Phil Steiger on ID and explanation
This is an interesting discussion of the claim that design is explanatorily empty.
Monday, January 23, 2006
A question from Joe Markus on Michael Martin
Hello Professor Reppert,
I recently came across some posts involving the notions of necessity and possibility on William Vallicella's blog and it reminded me of a debate I had years ago with someone on the SecularWeb. I'm hoping that you can offer your impression of the topic.
As I'm sure you're aware, in Chapter 2 of his Atheism:a philosophical justification, Michael Martin argues that theological assertions are neither true nor false. He offers a modest defense of a variation of a verificationist style criterion of factual meaningfulness.
It has been claimed by some critics that Martin's overall position in Atheism is inconsistent. They claim that despite arguing that theological assertions are neither true nor false he does however proceed to offer arguments for the falsity of theism. Specifically, he argues that there is no good reasons to believe theism is true and that there are quite a few good reasons to believe theism is false. The critics seem to be saying that he cannot argue BOTH that theism is neither true nor false and then make arguments regarding its truth value.
Martin has defended himself here:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/meaningless.html
Martin claims that his critics are confused about the structure of his argument. He thinks his critics attribute to him the follow argument structure:
(a) p is neither true nor false.
(b) p is true.
However, he goes on to state that the actual structure of his argument is:
(a) p is neither true nor false.
(b) if p is either true or false, then p is true.
He goes on to summarize his argument ---"God exists" is probably factually meaningless. But if it's meaningful then it's false.
In my discussion on the SecularWeb, I argued that if Martin believes that theism is likely neither true nor false then he must believe that it is POSSIBLY true or false. My reasoning was that if you believe p is likely then you must believe its denial is possible. (It may be possible to deny that.) And if you believe something is possibly true or false then you must believe that it is possible that p is true.
If p is "God does not exist." and p is possibly true or false then "God does not exist" is possibly true. In other words, Martin must presuppose that theism is factually meaningful in order to even formulate his "fall back position" argument.
Anyway, I was hoping that you could make some comments or offer some suggestions about the issue. Is my reasoning completely bogus?
I appreciate your time. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Joe Markus
I'd want to make sure we have a clear distinction between epistemic and metaphysical possibility. Martin thinks that theism is probably meaningless but holds out the epistemic possibility that it is meaningful (in which case he says it is certainly false). He might be saying something like this: According to every theory of meaning that I know and think likely to be true, theism comes out meaningless. But just in case those theories turn out not to be true, then I suppose it might be meaningful, but if it is it is almost surely false. So I don't know if he can be tagged with an incoherence here, on the face of things. However, I think the charge of meaninglessness against theism has been refuted time and again, and people should have realized the jig was up when ardent atheist J. L. Mackie, in The Mirace of Theism, maintained that Swinburne had effectively refuted the charge of meaninglessness.
I recently came across some posts involving the notions of necessity and possibility on William Vallicella's blog and it reminded me of a debate I had years ago with someone on the SecularWeb. I'm hoping that you can offer your impression of the topic.
As I'm sure you're aware, in Chapter 2 of his Atheism:a philosophical justification, Michael Martin argues that theological assertions are neither true nor false. He offers a modest defense of a variation of a verificationist style criterion of factual meaningfulness.
It has been claimed by some critics that Martin's overall position in Atheism is inconsistent. They claim that despite arguing that theological assertions are neither true nor false he does however proceed to offer arguments for the falsity of theism. Specifically, he argues that there is no good reasons to believe theism is true and that there are quite a few good reasons to believe theism is false. The critics seem to be saying that he cannot argue BOTH that theism is neither true nor false and then make arguments regarding its truth value.
Martin has defended himself here:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/meaningless.html
Martin claims that his critics are confused about the structure of his argument. He thinks his critics attribute to him the follow argument structure:
(a) p is neither true nor false.
(b) p is true.
However, he goes on to state that the actual structure of his argument is:
(a) p is neither true nor false.
(b) if p is either true or false, then p is true.
He goes on to summarize his argument ---"God exists" is probably factually meaningless. But if it's meaningful then it's false.
In my discussion on the SecularWeb, I argued that if Martin believes that theism is likely neither true nor false then he must believe that it is POSSIBLY true or false. My reasoning was that if you believe p is likely then you must believe its denial is possible. (It may be possible to deny that.) And if you believe something is possibly true or false then you must believe that it is possible that p is true.
If p is "God does not exist." and p is possibly true or false then "God does not exist" is possibly true. In other words, Martin must presuppose that theism is factually meaningful in order to even formulate his "fall back position" argument.
Anyway, I was hoping that you could make some comments or offer some suggestions about the issue. Is my reasoning completely bogus?
I appreciate your time. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Joe Markus
I'd want to make sure we have a clear distinction between epistemic and metaphysical possibility. Martin thinks that theism is probably meaningless but holds out the epistemic possibility that it is meaningful (in which case he says it is certainly false). He might be saying something like this: According to every theory of meaning that I know and think likely to be true, theism comes out meaningless. But just in case those theories turn out not to be true, then I suppose it might be meaningful, but if it is it is almost surely false. So I don't know if he can be tagged with an incoherence here, on the face of things. However, I think the charge of meaninglessness against theism has been refuted time and again, and people should have realized the jig was up when ardent atheist J. L. Mackie, in The Mirace of Theism, maintained that Swinburne had effectively refuted the charge of meaninglessness.
Does Neuroscience solve all the problems in the philosophy of mind?
Apparently not, according to Jaegwon Kim, in an interview for ephilosopher. Hat tip: Joe Markus.
"Jaegwon Kim: Some philosophers come to philosophy of mind from the psychology side, from an initial interest in cognitive science, computer science, neurobiology, and the like. And some come from the metaphysics side, and I am of course one of the latter. At first, the mind-body problem, to me, was nothing more than just another metaphysical problem. When I began working on the problem of mental causation in the early 1980's, though, things began to change. I thought I was involved in a problem that meant something to me personally. I felt the problem concerned an aspect of myself as a person, as a human being, that I thought I needed to understand.
Ephilosopher: How would you describe the burden sharing between philosophy of mind, as you pursue it, and more empirical approaches to the topic (such as cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, etc.)?
Jaegwon Kim: Not much. At the level of abstraction at which I usually work, empirical results are not really relevant. Certain theoretical and empirical findings that I sometimes read or hear about are interesting and may prompt philosophical thoughts, but I don't think there is a real connection between the kind of work I do in philosophy of mind and the results of the systematic sciences of cognition and consciousness. "
"Jaegwon Kim: Some philosophers come to philosophy of mind from the psychology side, from an initial interest in cognitive science, computer science, neurobiology, and the like. And some come from the metaphysics side, and I am of course one of the latter. At first, the mind-body problem, to me, was nothing more than just another metaphysical problem. When I began working on the problem of mental causation in the early 1980's, though, things began to change. I thought I was involved in a problem that meant something to me personally. I felt the problem concerned an aspect of myself as a person, as a human being, that I thought I needed to understand.
Ephilosopher: How would you describe the burden sharing between philosophy of mind, as you pursue it, and more empirical approaches to the topic (such as cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, etc.)?
Jaegwon Kim: Not much. At the level of abstraction at which I usually work, empirical results are not really relevant. Certain theoretical and empirical findings that I sometimes read or hear about are interesting and may prompt philosophical thoughts, but I don't think there is a real connection between the kind of work I do in philosophy of mind and the results of the systematic sciences of cognition and consciousness. "
On the fawning C. S. Lewis fan club
Ed Babinski: Though I do disagree with you and others who appear sometimes to be fawning at C. S. Lewis's feet over his ability to argue his way past all the toughest problems in philosophy and religion, and imagine he has solved all questions concerning the unseen world and afterlife and history, all solved in favor of his particular orthodox faith and holy book, and solved via the use of picturesque analogies.
VR: This is a typical way of responding to people who think well of C. S. Lewis. If they agree with him on many issues, they just be "fawning" followers.
We could just as easily say that you are a "fawning" follower of Robert Price. You think Price has a lot of things right, you admire his work, so you must be a fawning follower. What could be more obvious?
I have various disagreements with Lewis; for example you will have noticed that neither in my book nor on this site have I given a full endorsement of the trilemma argument.
If I thought Lewis had solved all problems, it wouldn't be necessary for me to write anything myself.
This procedure can potentially turn into dirty pool. You tell some negative story about Lewis, and impugn his arguments. I point out that Lewis can be defended on the point at issue, and you respond by saying that of course, as a devoted Lewis fan, I would say that. So any negative claim about C. S. Lewis gets a free pass, using this kind of argument.
VR: This is a typical way of responding to people who think well of C. S. Lewis. If they agree with him on many issues, they just be "fawning" followers.
We could just as easily say that you are a "fawning" follower of Robert Price. You think Price has a lot of things right, you admire his work, so you must be a fawning follower. What could be more obvious?
I have various disagreements with Lewis; for example you will have noticed that neither in my book nor on this site have I given a full endorsement of the trilemma argument.
If I thought Lewis had solved all problems, it wouldn't be necessary for me to write anything myself.
This procedure can potentially turn into dirty pool. You tell some negative story about Lewis, and impugn his arguments. I point out that Lewis can be defended on the point at issue, and you respond by saying that of course, as a devoted Lewis fan, I would say that. So any negative claim about C. S. Lewis gets a free pass, using this kind of argument.
An article by Matt Kaufman on Arrogance (and immaturity) in academia
The Darwinist's Blinders
by Matt Kaufman
"This will be a nice slap in their big fat face."
The words sound like something you'd hear on a grade-school
playground, but they actually come from someone a little higher up
the educational chain: one Paul Mirecki, chairman of the University
of Kansas religious-studies department. And just which faces does he
delight in slapping? Why, the faces of Christians — and not just
because he wants to see if they'll turn the other cheek.
Mirecki, you see, is a faculty adviser to something called the
Society of Open-Minded Atheists and Agnostics. A few weeks back he e-
mailed members of that group telling them he'd be teaching a class
titled Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationisms
[sic] and Other Religious Mythologies." Note that last word, because
Mirecki stresses it. "The fundies [fundamentalists] want it all
taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big
fat face by teaching it in a religious studies class under the
category mythology," he smirked.
You may be wondering whether this is the sort of attitude befitting a
man who claims to be "open-minded," much less one who's overseeing a
whole department of religious studies. But it turns out to be par for
the course for the good Dr. Mirecki: He likes to address e-mails to
this group to "my fellow damned," and to close with "Doing my part to
____ off the religious right, Evil Dr. P."
For the complete article, go to:
http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001201.cfm
by Matt Kaufman
"This will be a nice slap in their big fat face."
The words sound like something you'd hear on a grade-school
playground, but they actually come from someone a little higher up
the educational chain: one Paul Mirecki, chairman of the University
of Kansas religious-studies department. And just which faces does he
delight in slapping? Why, the faces of Christians — and not just
because he wants to see if they'll turn the other cheek.
Mirecki, you see, is a faculty adviser to something called the
Society of Open-Minded Atheists and Agnostics. A few weeks back he e-
mailed members of that group telling them he'd be teaching a class
titled Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationisms
[sic] and Other Religious Mythologies." Note that last word, because
Mirecki stresses it. "The fundies [fundamentalists] want it all
taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big
fat face by teaching it in a religious studies class under the
category mythology," he smirked.
You may be wondering whether this is the sort of attitude befitting a
man who claims to be "open-minded," much less one who's overseeing a
whole department of religious studies. But it turns out to be par for
the course for the good Dr. Mirecki: He likes to address e-mails to
this group to "my fellow damned," and to close with "Doing my part to
____ off the religious right, Evil Dr. P."
For the complete article, go to:
http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001201.cfm
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Mere Christianity Book III Chapter 2-3
Mere Christianity
Book II Chapter 2
The “Cardinal” Virtues
Traditional Christian moral philosophy taught that there were seven virtues: the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues.
From my essay “The Green Witch and the Great Debate: Freeing Narnia from the Spell of the Lewis-Anscombe Legend” in The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy: The Lion, the Witch and the Worldview (Chicago: Open Court, 2005) pp. 268-269.
Lewis, following an old Christian tradition, identifies the Four Cardinal Virtues as Prudence (sometimes called Wisdom), Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice, to which he adds the Three Holy Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love. He defines Prudence as “practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what it likely to come of it,” and reminds us that Christ taught us to be not only “as harmless as doves” but also “as wise as serpents.” He continues:
He wants a child’s heart but a grown-up’s head. . . . The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. . . . It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a second-rate brain. He has room for people with little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. . . . God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.
I continued: Like many passages in Lewis, this one has tremendous contemporary relevance. Many people in the Christian community (and outside of it) have been slack in their intellectual responsibilities, and the results have been disastrous. The mass suicides in Guyana and the suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California are grim reminders of what happens when religious people give up on thinking critically and simply follow what a leader says. Or to take less dramatic examples, but ones closer to home, think about how millions of Christians get caught up in spiritual fads like the recent “prayer of Jabez” phenomenon or the sensational eschatology of the Left Behind series. How many people have given money they can hardly afford to television evangelists, only to find out that the money went for air-conditioned dog houses and visits to sleazy motel rooms? The Christian community suffers greatly whenever it is intellectually lazy and careless.
Lewis does not consider the exercise of faith, properly understood, to conflict with this requirement to be rational. “I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him the weight of the evidence is against it.”
Temperance is controlling the impulse for pleasure. Temperance does not mean teetotalism. He says that Islam (He calls it Mohammedanism, but don’t say that in front of a Muslim unless you can run really fast. They don’t worship Muhammad, he’s just a messenger) is the teetotal religion. Jesus turned water into Welch’s grape juice, right? “One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give a thing up himself without wanting everyone else to give it up.” But you can be intemperate about a lot of things: golf, cards, the Internet---oops, he didn’t mention that one, for some reason.
Justice is fairness in general, not just what is understood in the law courts: honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, etc.
Fortitude is a) willingness to face danger and b) “sticking it” under pain. You can’t practice any of the other virtues unless you practice this one.
Lewis places the emphasis on what type of person you are, not what acts you perform. Of course these go hand in hand, but traits of character are the right place to focus. There is a difference between doing a good act and having a good character. Even a bad tennis player gets a good shot in now and again.
1) Not only should you do the right thing, but it matters why you did it.
2) “We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas he wants people of a particular sort."
3) Virtues aren’t just necessary in this life. ”There may be no need for brave acts in heaven, but there will be every occasion for being the sort of people that we can become only as a result of doing such acts here.” Not that God won’t let you into heaven if you lack certain virtues; but rather you won’t be the kind of person who will enjoy God’s presence forever if you lack these traits of character.
Book 3, Chapter 3
Social Morality
1) Christ did not preach a brand new morality. Johnson: “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.:
2) Christianity has no political program for applying “Do as you would be done by” to a particular society at a particular moment.
People say, “The Church ought to give us a lead.” But the people who know best how to represent Christ in the political sphere are not clergy, but laypeople who try to apply their faith to the political sphere. (Pat Robertson, James Dobson, please take note).
NT gives us an idea of what a Christian society would be like.
1) No passengers and parasites. If you don’t work you don’t eat.
2) Nothing spent on silly luxuries and sillier advertisements to get people to buy them.
3) No putting on airs—in this sense he says it’s Leftist.
4) It practices obedience from all to appointed magistrates, from children to parents, (this won’t be popular) wives to husband. (He knew this was unpopular some 25 years before the rise of “Women’s Lib.”
5) It is a cheerful society, it is courteous, and free of busybodies.
Some people will like parts of this more than others and will fight to get it.
The Ancient Greeks, the Jews of the Old Testament, and the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages all taught that it was wrong to lend money at interest. This was called “usury.” In fact, in Scripture, lending money at interest is sometimes found on a list of sins alongside homosexuality. In Dante’s Inferno, the homosexuals and the usurers are in the same circle of hell. Lewis doesn’t say that we should get rid of lending (which would be very tough to do in our culture), but he does take note of the problems that these three groups of people have had with the practice. (Some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.)
Giving: Lewis does not say we have to give 10%. (I’d just note that 10% of $20,000 annual income is a pretty demanding chunk; 10% of $2,000,000 is chump change, even though it is a larger amount of money. However, he says that if our charitable giving does cause us to reduce our amusements, we can be sure that we are not giving enough.
A Christian society will never arrive until we really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. Although Lewis does not say so, it’s clear he would oppose the attempt to make society Christian through legislation.
Book II Chapter 2
The “Cardinal” Virtues
Traditional Christian moral philosophy taught that there were seven virtues: the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues.
From my essay “The Green Witch and the Great Debate: Freeing Narnia from the Spell of the Lewis-Anscombe Legend” in The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy: The Lion, the Witch and the Worldview (Chicago: Open Court, 2005) pp. 268-269.
Lewis, following an old Christian tradition, identifies the Four Cardinal Virtues as Prudence (sometimes called Wisdom), Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice, to which he adds the Three Holy Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love. He defines Prudence as “practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what it likely to come of it,” and reminds us that Christ taught us to be not only “as harmless as doves” but also “as wise as serpents.” He continues:
He wants a child’s heart but a grown-up’s head. . . . The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. . . . It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a second-rate brain. He has room for people with little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. . . . God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.
I continued: Like many passages in Lewis, this one has tremendous contemporary relevance. Many people in the Christian community (and outside of it) have been slack in their intellectual responsibilities, and the results have been disastrous. The mass suicides in Guyana and the suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California are grim reminders of what happens when religious people give up on thinking critically and simply follow what a leader says. Or to take less dramatic examples, but ones closer to home, think about how millions of Christians get caught up in spiritual fads like the recent “prayer of Jabez” phenomenon or the sensational eschatology of the Left Behind series. How many people have given money they can hardly afford to television evangelists, only to find out that the money went for air-conditioned dog houses and visits to sleazy motel rooms? The Christian community suffers greatly whenever it is intellectually lazy and careless.
Lewis does not consider the exercise of faith, properly understood, to conflict with this requirement to be rational. “I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him the weight of the evidence is against it.”
Temperance is controlling the impulse for pleasure. Temperance does not mean teetotalism. He says that Islam (He calls it Mohammedanism, but don’t say that in front of a Muslim unless you can run really fast. They don’t worship Muhammad, he’s just a messenger) is the teetotal religion. Jesus turned water into Welch’s grape juice, right? “One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give a thing up himself without wanting everyone else to give it up.” But you can be intemperate about a lot of things: golf, cards, the Internet---oops, he didn’t mention that one, for some reason.
Justice is fairness in general, not just what is understood in the law courts: honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, etc.
Fortitude is a) willingness to face danger and b) “sticking it” under pain. You can’t practice any of the other virtues unless you practice this one.
Lewis places the emphasis on what type of person you are, not what acts you perform. Of course these go hand in hand, but traits of character are the right place to focus. There is a difference between doing a good act and having a good character. Even a bad tennis player gets a good shot in now and again.
1) Not only should you do the right thing, but it matters why you did it.
2) “We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas he wants people of a particular sort."
3) Virtues aren’t just necessary in this life. ”There may be no need for brave acts in heaven, but there will be every occasion for being the sort of people that we can become only as a result of doing such acts here.” Not that God won’t let you into heaven if you lack certain virtues; but rather you won’t be the kind of person who will enjoy God’s presence forever if you lack these traits of character.
Book 3, Chapter 3
Social Morality
1) Christ did not preach a brand new morality. Johnson: “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.:
2) Christianity has no political program for applying “Do as you would be done by” to a particular society at a particular moment.
People say, “The Church ought to give us a lead.” But the people who know best how to represent Christ in the political sphere are not clergy, but laypeople who try to apply their faith to the political sphere. (Pat Robertson, James Dobson, please take note).
NT gives us an idea of what a Christian society would be like.
1) No passengers and parasites. If you don’t work you don’t eat.
2) Nothing spent on silly luxuries and sillier advertisements to get people to buy them.
3) No putting on airs—in this sense he says it’s Leftist.
4) It practices obedience from all to appointed magistrates, from children to parents, (this won’t be popular) wives to husband. (He knew this was unpopular some 25 years before the rise of “Women’s Lib.”
5) It is a cheerful society, it is courteous, and free of busybodies.
Some people will like parts of this more than others and will fight to get it.
The Ancient Greeks, the Jews of the Old Testament, and the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages all taught that it was wrong to lend money at interest. This was called “usury.” In fact, in Scripture, lending money at interest is sometimes found on a list of sins alongside homosexuality. In Dante’s Inferno, the homosexuals and the usurers are in the same circle of hell. Lewis doesn’t say that we should get rid of lending (which would be very tough to do in our culture), but he does take note of the problems that these three groups of people have had with the practice. (Some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.)
Giving: Lewis does not say we have to give 10%. (I’d just note that 10% of $20,000 annual income is a pretty demanding chunk; 10% of $2,000,000 is chump change, even though it is a larger amount of money. However, he says that if our charitable giving does cause us to reduce our amusements, we can be sure that we are not giving enough.
A Christian society will never arrive until we really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. Although Lewis does not say so, it’s clear he would oppose the attempt to make society Christian through legislation.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Gore's speech
This is the text of Gore's speech. If you disagree with it, please don't use Alberto Gonzales' tu quoque argument that the Clinton administration did something just wrong as well. That's a logical fallacy we teach freshman students to avoid.
John Loftus' new blog
John Loftus wrote: I just started a blog and I was wondering if you would mind if I
placed your blog as one of my links? I don't suppose I have to ask, but
I was also wondering if you'd dialogue with me, especially when it comes
to what I call the illusion of Christian moral superiority.
Check it out:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/
Then let me know, or post a comment.
John: I would be happy to be linked to, of course, and I will put an entry on my site about your blog. I'm not feeling too morally superior as a Christian these days, however, because of what our President and his minions are doing in the name of Christ. With Christians like that, who needs skeptics.
placed your blog as one of my links? I don't suppose I have to ask, but
I was also wondering if you'd dialogue with me, especially when it comes
to what I call the illusion of Christian moral superiority.
Check it out:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/
Then let me know, or post a comment.
John: I would be happy to be linked to, of course, and I will put an entry on my site about your blog. I'm not feeling too morally superior as a Christian these days, however, because of what our President and his minions are doing in the name of Christ. With Christians like that, who needs skeptics.
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