Appendix to
From Bible Translator to Agnostic
Ken Daniels
10 May 2003
The following is a collection of thoughts I wrote to a
Christian scholar in 2001 and 2002. As I was unable to secure permission to
publish his response, I am including only what I wrote and eliminating most
specific references to what he wrote. It will appear choppy and impersonal at
points due to the removal of the other side of the dialogue. This appendix
serves as a record of my transition from deism to agnosticism.
We returned a year ago from Cantor[1] where we were involved in the early stages of what was expected to be a career in Bible translation. Up until March of last year, I had never read any skeptical works, but after struggling over many troubling passages in the Old Testament, I searched the internet for some answers from the perspective of evangelical apologists. But the first document my search engine pulled up was an online book by Robert Price in which he quotes and criticizes the apologists I was searching for. If I had read the book before being troubled by the Bible itself, I probably would not have been affected by it, but you might say I was primed to listen to what he had to say because of my prior struggles. If you have the time and would like to dialogue with me, I would recommend that you read it to gain an understanding of the origins of my doubt. It can be found at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/beyond_born_again/. The other book that has influenced my thinking, arguably even more than the first, is the classic "Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine. It can be found in two parts at http://www.magicmartini.com/deism/ageofreason1.htm and http://www.magicmartini.com/deism/ageofreason2.htm.
Since my doubts began, I have read quite a number of books, more from a Christian perspective than not, but I must say that the arguments against Christianity seem more convincing than those for it. I continue to seek God and thank Him for his goodness, and have not strayed morally nor do I intend to. I believe that Christianity, while having many good elements, continues to enjoy a prominent place in the marketplace of world views because of these simple equations that have been effectively conveyed to a well-intentioned public:
Christian = good, God's exclusive plan
un-Christian = bad, depraved, rebellious
With these equations firmly fixed in the minds of believers, it is little wonder that the debate over the truthfulness of Christianity is generally so divisive. I have talked with many believers over the past year, and most are very cordial, but I feel at times that I am being put under the magnifying glass to see where I have gone wrong morally. It would be refreshing if the debate could always be undertaken cordially and openly, with a determination to uncover the truth, not simply to confirm one's pre-existing commitments.
(I also find similar equations to exist in other religions. In Cantor, for example, the word "Islam" replaces the word "Christianity" in the equations above, so Islam is rarely questioned.)
I should say by way of further introduction that I now believe in evolution, but this was not by any means the original source of my doubts. It was only 6 months into my crisis of faith that I came to accept evolution as God's means of creating the world. The scientific evidence for common ancestry is far more compelling than anti-evolutionary apologists ever led me to believe. An overall good place to get a grasp of the issue, from a scientific standpoint (the site tries to remain neutral on religion), is www.talkorigins.org. The contributors are generally calm, focusing more on the evidence than on name-calling, as is too often the case in this debate. Though it's fairly technical at points, the following paper makes a impressive case for common ancestry: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/. You may be able to find some flaws in some of the arguments, but consider the combined weight of the evidences, some of which are stronger than others. Creationists generally give the impression that the evidence is non-existent or flawed, but I believe they are mistaken. Many uninformed Christians make pronouncements on the issue without carefully examining the other side. Perhaps they do not feel that looking at the other side is even necessary, since they already believe that God is on their side and that evolution = badness, rebellion, etc. Because the evidence for evolution seems so compelling to me (and the antiquity of the earth even more so), I must admit that the stance of many apologists who deny evolution or argue for a young earth presents a stumbling block for me to take seriously their arguments on other matters, including those related to the gospel. In other words, if they are unwilling to at least acknowledge the multiple, independent evidences for evolution, then how can I expect them to evaluate the evidences for and against Christianity in an unbiased manner? Many well-respected Christians have accepted evolution, however, including B. B. Warfield and C. S. Lewis, so I cannot use evolution as an argument for rejecting Christianity carte blanche.
I would also recommend the website of Glenn Morton, a former ICR scientist who became a theistic evolutionist while continuing to believe in inerrancy. He describes how he came face-to-face with first-hand evidence for an old earth and evolution and the agony he experienced as he came to reckon with it. See http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/dmd.htm
Rather than rambling on any further, I'll include below a message I wrote to […] a couple months ago. It should give you a better idea of my current thinking. I don't want to assume that you'll have the time to read all the materials above, but I believe it would be best for you to read as much as you can so that you'll either come to reject Christianity or be better prepared to answer skeptics like myself. But whichever way you or I go, I pray that it will be toward the truth. That, I believe, we can agree on. I will take no offense if you do not have the time to engage me as extensively as I have requested; I am currently involved in wrestling over these issues with a couple other well-informed Christians.
In God's love,
Ken Daniels
[Written mostly on May 9; revised on May 17]
Dear […],
I've discussed with Charlene from time to time the nature of my doubts, and though she understands and appreciates my struggles, she says they simply do not affect her and accepts the gospel by faith. In sharing with Charlene, I have generally not tried to push her into seeing things my way, but have simply let her know what issues I'm dealing with. I love her no less that I ever have, and I continue to strive to take care of her to the best of my ability, emotionally and spiritually as well as physically. Certainly I have shortcomings, and I will never be an ideal husband, but I hope to become better at meeting her needs.
At this point (subject to change, of course) I feel fairly convinced that Christianity is not true and that Deism is probably the closest approximation of reality. Deism was the religion of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Paine, and Lincoln, among others. Though there are various flavors of Deism, in a nutshell, it is the belief in a good God who made all things and has given man a free will. To what extent God actively intervenes in the world and whether there is an afterlife are points of debate among Deists. Deism holds that God has revealed himself through nature, conscience, and reason, rather than through revealed texts like the Koran, Vedas, Book of Mormon, or the Bible. We are to serve God by serving our fellow man in love with a clean conscience, depending on God's mercy, which he graciously bestows on all who seek it (and quite likely even on those who don't). I think the analogy of a parent-child relationship has merit in that parents delight in the successes and right choices of their children, are saddened by their failures, and are always willing to forgive with no conditions, hins of wine, red heifers, sin offerings, burnt offerings, temples, priests, intermediaries, doctrinal beliefs, or human sacrifice (such as Christ's). If I believed the Bible were true, it would be improper for me to challenge God's authority in questioning what the Bible says on these matters, but if I have good reason (at least as far as I can honestly discern) to believe that it is the word of man and not the word of God, then I am free in good conscience to make judgments on it, in the same way that I am free to judge the Koran and the Book of Mormon.
I have tried many times to give Christianity a chance, praying earnestly and reading the Bible and Christian apologetic books, but each time I think I'm able to accept the gospel, it's not long before the weight of the cumulative arguments against the Bible take their toll and make it dishonest for me to pretend I believe it, as much as I would like to believe it. I do not know what I stand to gain by rejecting Christianity, other than intellectual honesty and truth. Instead, I risk the suspicion and reproach of all the family and friends I hold dear, not to mention the threat of eternal punishment in the event that (against my best judgment) Christianity turns out to be true after all. But does the threat of eternal punishment make a belief true, and is it right to accept that belief merely because it might somehow be true? Because the Bible is so clear about the consequences of rejecting its message, Christians often assume that anyone who doubts it is morally culpable in some way; otherwise God would not be justified in condemning them. But it rarely occurs to Christians that there may actually be legitimate reasons for rejecting the Bible. If my doubt stems from some moral shortcoming, I am not aware of its source, even though I have asked God repeatedly to search my heart and reveal to me whatever offends him. I do have weaknesses and make wrong decisions like everybody else, but I cannot discern in me a moral reason for rejecting Christianity. I do not feel comfortable with the "world", and I have no intention of joining ranks with revelers, adulterers, etc. I yearn for our whole family to come to the knowledge of the Truth (with a capital T, i.e., what is truly True, rather than what we might wish is true), whether it be Christianity or Deism or something else.
It may seem to you incredibly forward for me to suggest that all that Christians have spent their lives life on, and all that the apostles and martyrs gave their lives for, may have no basis in reality. I remember a world history class in college in which the religion of the Egyptians was discussed. They had trained priests and scholars, and boys would spend years of their childhood studying and being indoctrinated in their religion. Were all these boys bad or just mistaken? Are family-centered, moral Mormons bad or just mistaken? Did the majority of the Egyptian boys entertain the possibility that they were mistaken, that they could have spent the best years of their lives pursuing a phantom? Does Hadiza, our guard's daughter in Nardon, who loved and cared for our kids and who works hard to make an honest living, have any reason to believe that all her family and friends and entire nation are wrong in holding to their Muslim beliefs and traditions while a small group of white foreign missionaries might know better than they? I would suggest that it is as likely for them to see the relevance of Christianity as it is for Christians in America to see the relevance of Islam or Jainism. Yet the Bible implies that the cost of not seeing and accepting the relevance of a foreign religion (Christianity) is eternal damnation. Eternal suffering and separation from God, not for a few years, but for eternity, with no further possibility of redemption. The existence of hell is not compatible with the idea that God has people's best interest at heart, because once a person is in hell, their worst destiny is realized and their best interest can never be served. I guess I've digressed again from the point of this paragraph, which is to say that the sacrifice and devotion of countless saints throughout church history, and our own past or present commitment to the gospel, are not valid reasons for assuming the truth of Christianity, since Christianity does not have a monopoly on devotion or martyrdom.
What if the things we believe are largely inherited through the natural development of ideas throughout the millennia? It seems that what we believe is an outgrowth of our upbringing and environment (skeptics are not immune from this either!). We each find ourselves on a twig that belongs to a branch and a trunk of a long evolutionary development of religious and cultural ideas (evangelicalism and fundamentalism are small branches even within the large tree of Christianity). That is not to say that none of the twigs can't be right, but this realization (and I cannot emphasize this enough) should serve as serious warning that we must submit our beliefs to the most rigorous of scrutiny and criticism before we can assume that the twig we sit on is alone the terminus of truth to which we must draw the whole world. Again, we expect Hadiza in Cantor to evaluate the arguments for the historicity of the gospels and abandon her Muslim religion (which is intimately tied to her culture and family) upon hearing the self-evident truths of Christianity (e.g., the Triune God, Christ's vicarious sacrifice for sin). While Christians would expect her to examine her faith critically, so many Christians fail to apply the scalpel to their own faith. It is difficult for me not to see this as unfair and possibly even immoral. Before going to the ends of the world to proclaim our faith, we need to examine it critically, allowing ourselves to read the other side (e.g., Paine and others). If our faith survives, then so much the better, but we must also be willing to entertain the possibility that it is not true. I know first hand why it is hard to apply the scalpel: the comfort of the community of faith; the notion that God wouldn't allow so many good Christians to suffer and die for their faith throughout history (or give up their lives to be missionaries) if it isn't true (but this argument could validate Mormonism or Islam too); the perceived absence of morality outside the Christian faith (morality does exist in other religions, even in Deism); the authority of Christian leaders (C. S. Lewis, Colson, Falwell, Dobson, Swindoll, Kennedy, Johnson, Carson, McDowell, etc.; my reading of the McDowell-like "A Marvelous Work and a Wonder" in defense of Mormonism revealed to me that any position can be defended with seeming credibility; as long as people want to believe something, there will arise experts to support it with an array of "convincing proofs"); the experience of changed lives and a sense of God's presence (again, well attested by a minority in other religions and sects, including myself during these times of disbelief); the threat of eternal punishment (which exists equally in other faiths); and the catch-all disclaimer that God's ways are not our ways, that the things of God are spiritually discerned, that the cross is foolishness but is part of God's wisdom, etc., which effectively squelches all penetrating inquiry.
I think probably the greatest draw to Christianity among serious Christians is the sense that Christianity is unique in its emphasis on grace and a personal relationship with a loving God. I applaud this emphasis wherever it is made, though I don't believe it is unique to Christianity. It is really only a minority, or the "cream" of the Christians who live according to this emphasis (especially when we think of all the 2 billion "Christians" in the world), so we would expect that only a small minority of adherents of other religions to have similar experiences. Muslims judge Christians by their perception of the Christian masses and fanatics, and Christians do the same to Muslims, forgetting that there is a minority of members of both religions who really do love and seek God. Even among Hindus there are those who seem to have a genuine relationship with God. Consider this prayer of Manikka Vasahar from southern India in the 8th century: "King of heaven, you have revealed your wonder even to someone as vile as me. "You have taken from me the false joy of earthly pleasures, and given me instead the true joy of your heavenly love. You have taken me into your heavenly family, treating me as a beloved child. And I cling to you as a small child clings to its mother. I will never let go; I will always stay in your presence. King of heaven, you have showered your wealth even onto someone as undeserving as me. You have taken from me any desire for the perishable riches of earth, and given me instead only the desire for the imperishable wealth of heaven. You have taken me into your royal court, treating me as the chief steward of your spiritual treasures. I bow before you as a servant bows to his master. I will never cease to adore you; I will always strive to serve you. I do not ask for fame, for a high position in society, for a palace in which to live. I do not ask for the company of clever and witty people. Such ambitions mean nothing to me. I desire only you, Lord of life. Your love makes my heart melt like butter. Your grace gives a taste like honey on my tongue. Your goodness is as soft as silk upon my skin. Your beauty makes my eyes sparkle with you. I want nothing but you." Can we seriously entertain the thought that such a man is darkened and totally depraved due to original sin, incapable of knowing God without Christ, and destined to eternal torment? Or that Christians have a monopoly on a personal relationship with God?
As I apply the scalpel, it hurts dreadfully. I find very little to back up the faith of my youth. I noted in the evangelical commentary set "The Word Biblical Commentary" that Daniel was written in 165 after the events prophesied, that Moses did not write most of the Pentateuch as we have it today, that the ante-deluvian fathers did not live hundreds of years, etc., etc., etc. Evangelicals are conceding points to the liberals today that they refused to budge on decades ago. I am sickened by the portrayal of God's nature in the OT concerning genocide, slavery (see esp. Ex. 21:20-21 and compare it with the Greek philosopher Zeno’s across-the-board condemnation of slavery, centuries before Christ, who by not condemning it, allowed the South to appeal to the OT and NT scriptures condoning slavery as justification for keeping their slaves, contributing to the bloodiest war in American history), treatment of women, polygamy, divorce, and capital punishment for a multitude of offenses. Any preacher who discusses how we can know God’s will always issues a warning that if a given option or idea does not line up with the word of God, then it is to be discarded. But it doesn't bother Christians that Peter's vision of the unclean animals changed the clear teaching of the OT Jewish scriptures. And we wonder why Jews have a problem with Christianity. It's hard to see evidence that God really answers prayer in the manner promised by Jesus. We don't pray for a person's amputated leg to grow back, because we instinctively know the limits of God's willingness to intervene. We do pray for colds to get better, even though down deep we suspect that our recovery rate from our colds will be no different than that experienced by atheists. So many other ancient and modern non-Judeo-Christian traditions report miraculous events similar to the ones found in the Bible. How can we go back and confirm that the biblical miracles were genuine and the other ones were not (or that they were of diabolical origin)? Should we just accept that any and all miracles reported by sincere and godly people happened as reported, simply by virtue of the fact that they were reported by sincere and godly people? How can I decide whether God spoke to Isaiah or Mohammed or neither or both? It seems that if God wanted to reveal himself to us concerning the particulars of redemption, he could have done so to each of us, just as he did to the biblical writers. Otherwise, as Paine suggests, we accept the notion that God spoke to Isaiah and Paul merely by hearsay, taking their (or the Church's) word for it that they actually heard from God. I am more inclined to believe God has revealed himself through nature and the consciences that we all share, and that no further revelation is necessary for knowing the things God wants us to know (that is, nature does not reveal as much as we might want to know, but it does reveal as much as God wants us to know). Otherwise, why did he not reveal himself specially to the American Indians or to the majority of mankind throughout history that has had no meaningful knowledge of the Christian gospel? Thus, God has *amply* shown that he is under no obligation to reveal himself to us outside the channels of creation and conscience. So often I hear that God must reveal himself, and it's obvious that he didn't do it through Mohammed or Buddha or whoever, so he MUST have done so through Christ and the Bible. After all, God wouldn't leave *us* (of all people) without special revelation, even if he chose not to give it to the pre-Colombian Indians!
The quote I sent you by Thomas Paine in my last message [see below] continues to trouble me, as do a lot of other OT passages. I know the argument about God's being lenient due to the hardness of their heart, but that doesn't seem to excuse God's direct commands to do things like killing everybody except the virgin girls (see Num. 21:13ff and Deut. 21:10-14), as if the virgin girls were somehow more virtuous than the boys. If we're honest, we both know the real reason that the Israelites spared the virgin girls. It might be argued that God could not ask them to do better than that because He hadn't yet sent His Spirit to them, but He didn't hesitate to fill Samson with His spirit so Samson could take personal revenge on his enemies for spoiling his marriage to a Philistine girl. I can't see any way around this problem. Whenever I bring up passages like this to Christians, their instinctive response is either to offer an unsatisfactory defense or to say that God's ways are higher than ours. Instead of offering a defense or dodging the issue, why do Christians not instead take a step back and seriously ask whether this is not the culturally conditioned word of man rather than the word of God? If it is not the word of God, He must take great offense at our attributing these directives to Him. "But C.S. Lewis believed it, and my pastor does, and every godly person I know, so there must be a good answer, even if I'm not aware of it. It just can't be wrong. At least, it had better not be wrong. My life would be turned upside down if it were." Which is probably why most people never have the will to draw any other conclusion.
I love you and respect you. Please do not brush off my doubts as a personal struggle with no basis, but consider carefully how well the Bible corresponds to reality. The fact that faith around the world is so culturally conditioned should serve as a reminder that any given faith is guilty until proven innocent, not vice versa, and Christianity is not exempt from this rule. Please read the book I’m sending you by Thomas Paine and consider whether he might actually speak the truth. Hold up the two alternatives by your God-given reason and conscience, and weigh them in humility and prayer.
Below are some quotes from various sources that I consider to be worthy of reflection. I’ve also attached a couple articles by Thomas Paine on OT prophecies in the NT. The latter very effectively discredits the notion that there is any real substance to the Messianic prophecies.
If you are able to read these materials and retain your faith with good reason, I would be very interested in hearing your reasons for your faith. I would love to believe it’s all true, but cannot pretend to believe it when it doesn’t appear true to me.
Love,
Ken
April 30
Dear […],
Hi again! As you may have gathered, I continue to have doubts about the Christian faith. The kinds of doubts I have are probably best laid out in Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. (Thomas Paine, as you probably know, was an American revolutionary and influential writer on government, human rights and democracy.) Since you are well versed in the Scriptures, I felt it would be good for you to know the kinds of things I'm grappling with. Yesterday I ordered a copy of "The Age of Reason" for you, and it should be arriving at your place in a week or so. I hope you will have time to read it thoroughly and be able to respond to some of the important issues in it. Because it's over two centuries old, some of his facts and conclusions are incorrect (e.g., that the NT was probably written in the third century), and some of his arguments now seem irrelevant (e.g., his argument that prophet really means poet in the OT), but most of what he says remains troublesome for a biblical faith (and there are other new arguments that skeptics have come up with since the time of Paine).
Paine is forceful, and he will offend you, but I get the impression that he was simply trying to defend God's honor against what he perceived as a slanderous representation of God's character in the Bible. Here is a case in point:
Besides, the character of Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretence of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation, committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation. Of which I will state only one instance:
When the Jewish army returned from one of their plundering and murdering excursions, the account goes on as follows (Numbers xxxi. 13): "And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp; and Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle; and Moses said unto them, "Have ye saved all the women alive?" behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore, "kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women- children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for Yourselves."
Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world have disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than Moses, if this account be true. Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters.
Let any mother put herself in the situation of those mothers, one child murdered, another destined to violation, and herself in the hands of an executioner: let any daughter put herself in the situation of those daughters, destined as a prey to the murderers of a mother and a brother, and what will be their feelings? It is in vain that we attempt to impose upon nature, for nature will have her course, and the religion that tortures all her social ties is a false religion.
After this detestable order, follows an account of the plunder taken, and the manner of dividing it; and here it is that the profaneness of priestly hypocrisy increases the catalogue of crimes. Verse 37, "And the Lord's tribute of the sheep was six hundred and threescore and fifteen; and the beeves were thirty and six thousand, of which the Lord's tribute was threescore and twelve; and the asses were thirty thousand, of which the Lord's tribute was threescore and one; and the persons were sixteen thousand, of which the Lord's tribute was thirty and two." In short, the matters contained in this chapter, as well as in many other parts of the Bible, are too horrid for humanity to read, or for decency to hear; for it appears, from the 35th verse of this chapter, that the number of women-children consigned to debauchery by the order of Moses was thirty-two thousand.
People in general know not what wickedness there is in this pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take it for granted that the Bible is true, and that it is good; they permit themselves not to doubt of it, and they carry the ideas they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they have been taught to believe was written by his authority. Good heavens! it is quite another thing, it is a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy; for what can be greater blasphemy, than to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty!
I will write more in another message, I for now I just wanted to let you know what's coming. I trust we can have an engaging, honest, humble and fruitful dialogue that will end in our both coming to the Truth. It is my continual desire and prayer to know God and as much of the truth as He desires me to know.
Love,
Ken
The following was taken from the Quaker Universalist Fellowship website:
The evolution of modern liberal Quakerism can also be traced in the experience of some leading figures of the Quaker missionary movement. One such was Henry Hodgkin, the founding Director of Pendle Hill. Hodgkin spent twenty years at the turn of the century as a missionary in China on behalf of London Yearly Meeting. Not long before his death in 1933, Henry Hodgkin wrote to his brother about how his once strongly exclusivist and evangelical convictions had been changed by his engagement with the best of Asian religions. A striking passage from this letter shows where this evolution was headed. It is very apropos of our inquiry, and so affecting that it was incorporated into London's book of Christian Faith and Practice, from which I am citing it (Section 102, 1960 edition). It is worth our time to hear a bit of Hodgkin's testimony:
"I suppose it is almost inevitable that during such a [youthful] period one should be so sure of the genuineness and value of one's own experience as to undervalue other types of experience. It is this which makes people eager missionaries or propagandists and it was as such that I went to China, still very sure of the "greatness of the revelation" and but dimly aware that God, in His many-sided nature and activity, was not one whit less manifest in ways and persons with which or with whom I could have little sympathy. Of course in theory I believed that God used many methods and that all truth was not with me. [But] Down deep I wanted all to be "such as I," because I could not help feeling that, broadly speaking, what meant so much to me must be equally good for others.
"By processes too numerous and diverse even to summarize, I have reached a position which may be stated in a general way somewhat like this: "I believe that God's best for another may be so different from my experience and way of living as to be actually impossible to me. I recognize a change to have taken place in myself, from a certain assumption that mine was really the better way, to a very complete recognition that there is no one better way, and that God needs all kinds of people and ways of living through which to manifest Himself in the world."
I can readily identify with Franklin on religion:
To Joseph Huey, 6 June 1753 (L 4:504-6):
For my own part, when I am employed in serving others, I do not look upon myself as conferring favours, but as paying debts. In my travels and since my settlement I have received much kindness from men, to whom I shall never have any opportunity of making the least direct return. And numberless mercies from God, who is infinitely above being benefited by our services. These kindnesses from men I can therefore only return on their fellow-men; and I can only show my gratitude for those mercies from God, by a readiness to help his other children and my brethren. For I do not think that thanks, and compliments, though repeated weekly, can discharge our real obligations to each other, and much less those to our Creator_
The faith you mention has doubtless its use in the world; I do not desire to see it diminished, nor would I endeavour to lessen it in any man. But I wish it were more productive of good works than I have generally seen it: I mean real good works, works of kindness, charity, mercy, and publick spirit; not holiday-keeping, sermon-reading or hearing, performing church ceremonies, or making long prayers, filled with flatteries or compliments, despised even by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the deity. The worship of God is a duty, the hearing and reading of sermons may be useful; but if men rest in hearing and praying, as too many do, it is as if a tree should value itself on being watered and putting forth leaves, though it never produced any fruit.
Your great Master thought much less of these outward appearances and professions than many of his modern disciples. He preferred the doers of the word to the mere hearers; the son that seemingly refused to obey his Father and yet performed his commands, to him that professed his readiness but neglected the works; the heretical but charitable Samaritan, to the uncharitable though orthodox priest and sanctified Levite; and those who gave food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, raiment to the naked, entertainment to the stranger, and relief to the sick, etc. though they never heard of his name, he declares shall in the last day be accepted, when those who cry Lord, Lord; who value themselves on their faith though great enough to perform miracles but have neglected good works shall be rejected.
To Ezra Stiles, 9 March 1790 (B 12:185-6):
You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your curiosity amiss, and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify it. Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of the universe. That he governs by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequences, as probably it has, of making his doctrines more respected and more observed; especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any peculiar marks of his displeasure.
sources:
B = John Bigelow, ed., The Works of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Putnam's,
1904)
L = Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1961)
Your response struck to the heart of what I have been especially struggling with in the past couple weeks. For several months I had been comfortable with Deism, perhaps not so much because of any merit of its own but because I couldn't think of any alternative. Christianity seemed (and still does seem) untenable, and I could not entertain the thought that God did not exist (how did it all get started?), so Deism sort of won out by default. But I can't say that I was ever fully comfortable with it. It still may be true, but recently I have grown more pessimistic that one can learn much about God through reason, if God even exists. You might say that I am now on the edge between Deism and agnosticism. As I understand it, agnosticism is not a denial of God's existence but a position held by those who do not believe that we can in any significant way grasp the nature of God.
The following quote by Mark Twain (from http://www.2think.org/quotes.html) resonates with me in this time of searching and cautions me against over-confidence:
I have seen several entirely sincere people who thought they were (permanent) Seekers after Truth. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted judgment--until they believed that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. That was the end of the search. The man spent the rest of his life hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather. If he was seeking after political Truth he found it in one or another of the hundred political gospels which govern men in the earth; if he was seeking after the Only True Religion he found it in one or another of the three thousand that are on the market. In any case, when he found the Truth he sought no further; but from that day forth, with his soldering-iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors. (from What is Man?)
When I first read the following quote by Thomas Paine, I was moved by its exaltation of God and was convinced that Paine had hit the nail on the head:
The Word of God is the Creation we behold; and this Word of God revealeth to man all that is necessary for man to know of his Creator. Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of His creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed.
Do we want to contemplate His munificence? We see it in the abundance with which He fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate His mercy? We see it in His not withholding that abundance, even from the unthankful.
Do we want to contemplate His will, so far as it respects man? The goodness He shows to all is a lesson for our conduct to each other.
In fine - do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the Scripture, which any human hand might make, or any imposter invent; but the SCRIPTURE CALLED THE CREATION.
In Paine's era, it was possible to make lofty statements like this because of the perception that nature was generally good. But Darwin put to rest any such pollyannic notions. More than anything else in recent days, it has been a reflection on the implications of evolution that has sent me into a turmoil comparable to that when I first began to question Christianity. For several months now I have accepted the probability that evolution was true, but some articles I have read recently leave no doubt in my mind that evolution is true and that we share common ancestors with the apes. There is a difference between thinking it is probably true and knowing it is true, and it is the knowledge of its truth that has given birth to my recent turmoil. In philosophy and religion, there is always room for faith and unfounded speculation, but in the natural sciences, virtual certainty can exist, particularly when there are multiple, converging lines of evidence, just as it was certain that Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building, even though no one witnessed the act. To those who live by faith, such assertions may seem bold and unfounded, but there is only one truth concerning our origins, and that is the truth that corresponds to what really happened. The article that sealed the question for me was http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/molgen/, which seems to establish common descent as firmly as any unwitnessed but forensically solved crime. It is fairly technical but thorough. Among the many "forensic" genetic evidences for common descent, one easy-to-grasp point is that all mammals, with the exception of guinea pigs and primates, are able to fabricate their own vitamin C. Guinea pigs and jungle-dwelling primates have a diet rich in vitamin C, so the loss of this capability would not have been harmful to them. Humans, too, as primates, lack this capability. That in itself would be food for thought, but even more startling is that we, along with monkeys and apes, possess an inactive gene that corresponds to the gene for vitamin C production in other mammals. To top it off, the stop codons responsible for inactivating that gene are found in the same position in the same gene for both humans and primates. If we were created separately from the other primates, as Hugh Ross believes, then why would God have placed what most definitely appears to be an inactive vitamin-C-producing gene in us, if not to trick us into thinking that evolution happened when it really didn't? There will always be those who distrust findings like these or find some artful way to dodge the logical conclusion, but if they find a way out of this one, there is a forest of evidence for common descent waiting in line behind it. Yes, we can now be certain of some things which in the past we could only speculate on.
It is not only unbelieving scientists who hold these views, but the majority of evangelical scientists as well (not that truth is established by majority vote, but it's interesting to note). I was quite surprised to read in the latest edition of Christianity Today (Aug. 6) an article by Howard J. Van Till entitled "What Good is Stardust?" in which he discusses God's creative design for the cosmos and concludes with a plug for biological macro-evolution. CT has (as far as I can tell) been opposed to evolution up to this point. I'll quote a statement I found on http://www.2think.org/2think.shtml#example : "An example of this from a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint can be found in the August 12, 1996 issue of Christianity Today. On page 64, Charles Colson, writing about what Christians must do to defend their beliefs against evolution, insists that 'Christians must come together, craft a credible apologetic, and then refuse to back down'. The author doesn't ask that the evidence be examined or that the Truth be sought."
I especially appreciated Van Till's closing statement in his recent CT article:
"Some Christians look for evidence that the universe's 'natural' capabilities were inadequate to the task of assembling some new biotic structure or life form in the past. If such 'capability gaps' could be found, then, the argument goes, these gaps must have been bridged by occasional episodes of form-conferring divine intervention (sometimes called acts of 'intelligent design'). But if the universe is a creation, as Christians profess, then its *natural* capabilities are part of its *God-given* nature. That being the case, I am more inclined to look for the Creator's signature in the generosity with which the creation's formational gifts have been conferred. In other words, I think the Creator is better known by what the creation *can* do rather than by what it *cannot*."
Though I'm sure Van Till's article will generate a lot of negative letters to the editor, I believe it signals a watershed in evangelical Christianity, with its flagship periodical entertaining macro-evolution for the first time that I'm aware. I believe Christianity will eventually accept evolution and move on (though not without some internal fights and lost members), just as it accepted a heliocentric solar system in the time of Galileo.
For my part, however, the knowledge that evolution is true introduces some troubling questions not only about the Bible but also about the nature of God, if He exists. What evolution does (as Van Till so capably expressed) is to predispose us against seeking supernatural explanations for what might at first appear to have been miraculous. Once we begin to see things through this lens, we are not so apt to dismiss the biblical research and findings of liberal scholars, archaeologists and historians. According to the principle of Occam's razor, if there is a plausible naturalistic explanation for a purported miraculous event, then we should favor the naturalistic explanation. Apologists like Josh McDowell have been successful at convincing their readers that there can be no possible naturalistic alternative to the resurrection of Christ. But chapter 6 of the Robert Price book I referred you to in my previous message, along with recent parallels in physical appearances of the Virgin Mary to multiple witnesses, leave considerable room for quite plausible alternative scenarios in the case of Christ's resurrection.
Another implication of evolution is that disease, predation, deception, jealousy, self-interest, warfare (as witnessed in chimpanzee groups), competition and death existed millions of years before man evolved, casting into doubt the central Christian doctrine of the Fall and Paul's assertion that "just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned—...For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!" Again, applying the principle of Occam's razor, if we can witness parallel vices in chimpanzees and humans, what need have we to invoke a serpent in a garden or the existence of unseen satanic powers, when the explanation of our evolutionary origins in competition and self-interest fit the bill? And if, as it has been established by linguistic research, languages evolve one from the other, what need do we have of a Tower of Babel? And if, as many Christians suggest, these stories are merely myths designed to convey a spiritual point, where do we draw the line? I have observed a continuum of approaches to these matters, from genuine PhD scientists who affirm (based on passages like the one in the Psalms 16:30, "The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.") that the sun goes around the earth (see http://www.biblicalastronomer.org/index.htm and http://www.fixedearth.com/), to young-earth creationists, to progressive creationists, to theistic evolutionists; from those who believe every story and every miracle reported in the Bible, to those who say that the NT miracles were true but some of the OT ones were fantastic (C. S. Lewis), to those who believe in the physical resurrection of Christ but not the virgin birth (H. Thielicke), to those who believe only in a spiritual resurrection (most liberal Christians), to those who don't believe any of the miracles (rationalists). If I remain a Christian, where am I to position myself along this continuum? At the beginning of it? Certainly not! At the young-earth position? Again, never in a million years! At the theistic evolutionary position? Yes, but what will be my basis for not applying the same naturalistic scrutiny to other passages in the Bible as I have done to Genesis? Having given up the notion that all unbelieving scientists are untrustworthy on the question of evolution, how can I then as a matter of course distrust the integrity and assumptions of liberal and unbelieving scholars and historians whose findings are at odds with traditional biblical interpretations?
To sum it up, if the biblical record does not conform to the truth about our beginnings, how can we trust what it says about our end?
Parenthetically (i.e., if you find this paragraph irrelevant, don't let it detract from the other things I've written :), it seems that the notion of competition and survival of the fittest applies not only to the species but to religion. It has been said that no religion has established worldwide influence by tolerating its rivals. Is it any wonder that the two most widespread religions, Christianity and Islam, prescribe hell for those who do not accept their tenets? I do not wish to be impertinent but intend to make a serious point by including a quote I recently came across: "If you want your children to believe in Santa Claus, tell them they'll go to hell if they don't believe."
I've probably labored too long on the relationship between evolution and the Bible. What I have been struggling with more recently, however, is how evolution relates to the nature of God. I recently saw a documentary showing how some mockingbirds who recently colonized a Pacific island obtain their "fresh" water. There are no pools of fresh water, but gulls and other birds receive all the fresh water they need through the fish they catch. The mockingbirds, who are not fishers, receive much of their nourishment through picking off parasites from the backs of marine iguanas. From time to time, they draw blood from the iguanas and have taken a liking to the blood. They even peck at the sores of other birds, sucking blood in groups from vulnerable birds larger than themselves, eventually turning the bird's feathers into a bloody mess, but not killing the bird. This supplies the fluid they need to survive. You could call them newly evolved vampire mockingbirds. Crickets attract mates by their songs, but often at a price. Some species of moths follow the sound, go to the crickets, and spray their eggs on them. The eggs and their hatchlings feed on the flesh of the live crickets until the crickets die as a result after about two weeks. Countless animals, including sentient chimpanzees, suffer and die from starvation, and though it is difficult to argue that their pain is any less than a human's suffering through starvation, we tend to believe that their must be a divine purpose behind a human's starvation but not that of a chimpanzee, almost as if it didn't matter. We want suffering to matter for us, but are little concerned if it happens to animals in the wild. Nature is chock full of horrors that have existed for millions of years among the animals, seemingly without connection to any moral cause or effect. Yet, if God exists, He set things up this way on purpose: it was through these very horrors, the cutthroat survival of the fittest, that is derived all the beauty, order, and ugliness of life on the planet. Herein is the tidy appeal of young-earth creationism: God, being all-powerful, was not limited in his methods of creation; He created all the flora and fauna in a state of perfection in 6 days, and all the bad things in the world today are a result of man's sin. God is completely off the hook. If only it were true! But it is not. And that is the reality that is driving my current round of reflection on the nature of God. If evolution is true (and for me there is no if), then either God is bad, He doesn't exist, or He is good but I am utterly incapable of comprehending His ways and purposes. It's the old theodicy question, but with an evolutionary twist. Plantinga's solution to evil vindicates God by invoking the free moral agency of man, and I have always respected this approach, but it just doesn't seem to apply to non-humans who suffer like us for no apparent reason. So, while I do not reject God's existence, it seems that my prior optimistic attempts to learn anything significant about Him were like a wild goose chase, and I would be better off admitting my own limitations, taking a "reverently agnostic" approach, to borrow a term from Charles Templeton.
My purpose in dwelling on evolution here is to respond to what I understood to be the general theme of your message, that of the limitations of reason. In relation to discovering God's nature and purposes, I would tend to be more in agreement with you now that reason can uncover very little if anything, just as finitude cannot comprehend infinitude. But in the physical realm, we can indeed use our minds to discover little by little the nature of reality. Scientific knowledge is cumulative, making adjustments along the way to be sure, but there comes a point when enough data have come in to make reasonably founded judgments. No one has seen the earth going around the sun, but it would be foolish to suspend judgment on the matter after it has been corroborated by so many independent lines of evidence and has enjoyed nearly if not completely unanimous acceptance in the scientific world for so long. What I am getting at is that, despite the arrogance and pride of some who used reason to defend heliocentrism against the prevailing view, they were right. I do not wish to justify arrogance (and I apologize for my own if it appears that I am arrogant here), but simply because those who depend on reason are often arrogant does not appear to me to be a valid argument against depending on it to uncover important truths. True, science cannot directly and conclusively address ultimate questions about God and meaning, but few would argue that certain scientific domains, particularly those related to origins, have no bearing on theology or biblical interpretation. During the past year or so, I have come across a number of theological and biblical issues that trouble me personally, but since many of my objections are not empirically rooted, Christians either don't appreciate my concerns or can propose a solution that seems dubious to me but is immune from empirical falsification. The idea that God should require an animal or human/divine sacrifice to appease his wrath against our sin is one example. But though I might explain every angle of my objection to this doctrine (for example, that early man, living in a harsh world where the gods brought all manner of misfortune, felt he had to offer sacrifices of food and perform various other rituals to appease the gods' wrath and solicit their favor, a view that survived in passages like Leviticus 21:21-21, where the sacrifices are the food of the Lord; and the notion that God required sacrifices survived into the Christian era, except that the divine sacrifice satisfied Him once and for all), my objections have no weight for those who believe, since this issue is theological and therefore beyond the realm of objective verification. All I can say is that the doctrine of sacrifices troubles me, and hope that others can take my word for it that that's how I see it, even though it does not seem to trouble them. Or I could point out a hundred passages, mostly in the OT, that run counter to my moral sensibilities or to other biblical teachings, but the moral realm again is beyond empirical scrutiny, and God may have had good reasons for changing standards along the way. Or I could lay out a number of historical or internal contradictions, but there's always a way to get around them, no matter how intractable they might appear on the surface. But where science bears on the Bible, we have a unique opportunity to test biblical claims against empirically based findings. Most conservative evangelicals see evolution and the Christian faith as incompatible, and I would tend to agree with them. With every new finding that corroborates evolution, the anti-evolutionary stance becomes less and less tenable, which in turn raises the objections between biblical theism and evolution that I mentioned above.
In summary, I would say that I differ with you somewhat (though not completely) on the role of reason. Certainly it is flawed in that it can be swayed by personal affections and cultural influences and presuppositions, but when properly used, its benefits outweigh other approaches to the search for truth. I read over half of Plantinga's Warranted Christian Faith, in which he as a Reformed Christian maintains that it is the testimony of the Spirit that bears witness to the truth of the gospel. I respect Plantinga and acknowledge that his intelligence and knowledge far surpass my own, but the question I keep asking myself is how I can know what is the voice of the Spirit and what is a result of cultural and experiential influences that may make the gospel seem attractive to me. To put it another way, how can I know that my conviction of the truth of the gospel is any more valid than the burning-in-the bosom conviction experienced by a Mormon or the unshakable conviction of a typical Muslim? I've heard some Christians say, "I know it's true." But is their conviction any more deep than that of a Muslim? In the end, it seems that reason is the only way we can get out of this deadlock. To borrow a point from Thomas Paine, how can one argue against the usefulness of reason without using reason? And to denigrate reason as "mere human reason" is to suggest somehow that we gave reason to ourselves and to deny the full use of one of the greatest gifts we have as humans. I don't mean to say that you are opposed to reason to that extent, but I simply wish to defend the role of reason against any unwarranted denigration of it.
I agree that major flaws have been exposed in rationalism, and I am less enamored with it than I was earlier. My ideas are in flux, and for the first time in my life I am beginning to examine various world views to uncover their merits and flaws. I suppose that before my doubts began, I had little incentive to explore them, perhaps fearing they might uncover flaws in my own faith, which is in fact what has happened. If eighteenth century Rationalism is indeed flawed, then I am willing to refine my views. As for the privileged collectivity of rationalists, I deplore the use of special knowledge to gain illegitimate power, whether it be on the part of kings, priests, popes, pastors, cult leaders, presidents, rationalists or atheists. It used to be that kings and religious leaders held all the power (even the "good guys", like Moses, Luther and Calvin, were directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of dissenters); now the tables have turned. The abuse of knowledge to gain power seems to be more a function of human nature than of one's philosophy (with the exception of those philosophies that actually encourage the abuse of power). Paine lamented that often groups who are in a position of weakness deplore the crimes of the strong, but when they have a chance to take power, they carry out the same abuses that they denounced when weak. It appears that rationalists too have not escaped this tendency.
My own knowledge of philosophy and religion is woefully shallow compared to the likes of C. S. Lewis, Thomas Morris, Clark Pinnock, Alvin Plantinga, and the average seminary professor. I respect these individuals but am somewhat puzzled at how they have managed to believe despite so many difficulties. It would be wonderful to have a faith like theirs. In a way the whole affair seems to lie outside my own will to choose. If someone shows me a tree and tells me it's blue, but I see pink, I cannot make myself see blue, even if infinite punishments and rewards accompany my decision. All I can do is to continue to pray, read both sides, search my soul and wait for my vision to correct itself or stabilize so I can have confidence that I see the tree in its true color.
On the arrogance of unbelievers: Arrogance is sometimes perceived in another based not solely on the other's true disposition but also on the extent to which the other's position differs from the one making the judgment. Consider this quote from Plantinga, who believes in an old earth but not in evolution, in his "Warranted Christian Belief", p. 217:
In this connection, consider the despised creationists, who believe that the world is only ten thousand years old: they are ignorant, pitifully ignorant about when God created the world. From the point of view of the model, this ignorance pales into utter insignificance compared with that of many of their cultured detractors, who foolishly believe that there is no God and thus (naturally enough) are ignorant of the vastly more important fact that the world was, indeed, created by God.
The first part of this quote is sure to raise the hackles of young-earth creationists and to earn for Plantinga a reputation of arrogance among them. And the second part is likely to earn himself the same reputation among atheists. For those who agree with him, he is not arrogant but simply right. (OK, maybe he could have said it a little more gently, but sometimes it's hard to restrain yourself when you feel you have very good reasons for your position.) Likewise, I expect that my strong insistence on the truth of evolution and my impatience with those who don't accept it will be interpreted by some as arrogance rather than as a strong conviction based on overwhelming evidence.
Not only is arrogance usually easier to detect in the opposing camp than in one's own, but so is self-interest, spin, bias, naiveté, and condescension. Among unbelievers, these vices are often more visible, but believers' conviction that God is on their side can, it seems to me, lead to a form of subtle self-deception that makes them resistant to any attempt to be have their errors exposed or corrected.
On my rejection of the evidence for Christianity: I ask myself why it is that in any philosophy or religion or scientific theory, there are those see "good and sufficient reasons" and those who don't. I grew up reading McDowell and feeling that the arguments for Christianity were bullet proof. Mormons and Muslims grow up reading their apologetic books and feeling the same about their religion. It is safe for believers to pummel the motives of unbelievers for not accepting what appear to them to be good and sufficient reasons for the faith (e.g., the desire to live one's life free from God's control, to live immorally, to assert one's intellect, to foster an elite power structure), but when unbelievers suggest that believers have their own unexpressed motives for their faith (e.g., family ties, cultural influences, prestige in ministry, fear of hell, desire for eternal rewards, the fear of being alone in a sometimes cruel and meaningless world, the desire to see one's departed loved ones, etc.), these suggestions often cannot be tolerated. When a young-earth creationist is presented with good and sufficient reasons for an old earth, he will often come up with an ad hoc defense and assert, 'I STILL don't believe!' If, as Plantinga asserts, intelligent, well-meaning and godly young-earth creationists can be dead wrong about a matter which they hold so dear, then is it not conceivable that old-earth creationists could be wrong about evolution, as unpalatable and counter-intuitive as it may seem? Or that Christians could be wrong about the gospel? But if there are good and sufficient reasons for accepting the gospel, I truly want to take them to heart and re-devote my life to Christ.
On making a decision one way or the other: It is uncomfortable to live in a state of indecision, and I hope to come to a more stable position before long, but I would rather pause for a time at the fork in the road while I'm still somewhat young than to make a quick decision and end up at the end of the wrong road when my life has been spent. If Christianity is not true, then it should make a difference in how I spend my life. In a recent sermon at our church, the speaker compared the world to the Titanic: It is in the process of sinking, and we ought not spend our lives rearranging the deck or hobnobbing with the crew but rather focusing on getting people into the lifeboats. In contrast, I recently saw a car with a Unitarian-Universalist bumper sticker saying "I believe in life BEFORE death." If we take this position, then we may shift our energies away from proselytizing and more toward making this difficult world a better place.
On the inadequacy of rationalism to promote virtue: I do not believe that the carrot of future rewards and punishments is necessary for moral living. C.S. Lewis, in his Surprised by Joy, expresses how he appreciated his year of "simple theism" between his atheist and Christian years, because his disbelief in the afterlife led him to focus on doing what is right for the sake of doing what is right rather than on future rewards. He also felt that the absence of the mention of heaven in the OT (except in the later Daniel) helped nurture a more purely motivated morality than if the afterlife had been revealed to the Jews from the outset. If you observe the state of Christianity in America, where 83% of the population claims to be Christian, it does not follow that belief in the afterlife necessarily fosters decent moral living. In my view, a careful consideration of the natural consequences of our actions is a sufficient basis upon which to build good moral guidelines. For example, generosity fosters reciprocal generosity in our time of need, as Paul reasons in 2 Cor. 8:13-14: "Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality." Altruism also gives a real sense of satisfaction. Should we tell the truth or lie? If we lie, people will no longer trust anything we say. Should we commit adultery? If we do, we do not enjoy the immense pleasure of an intact, loving family. Should we have sex before marriage? If we do, the bond with our future spouse is compromised. My guess is that Josh McDowell's "Why wait?" campaign would not have gone anywhere if the answer to the title of the campaign were "because the Bible says so" or "because God will be unhappy with you if you have sex before marriage." It succeeded to the extent to which teenagers were convinced that it was in their best interest in this life to wait for marriage. So why is it that so many teenagers, believers and unbelievers alike, yield to their passions? Because they can only see today and do not consider the big picture, the intimate relationship reserved for their future spouse. If you offer a child the choice of a candy bar now or $5 in a week, they will take the candy bar now. Another major factor is the lack of trust and intimacy between many teens and their parents. If parents can win the respect of their children through extensive loving interaction during their formative years, the children will be more apt to listen to the arguments for following reasonable moral standards when their passions develop. Unfortunately, parents, believers and unbelievers alike, do not often devote the necessary time to develop a meaningful relationship with their children because of their preoccupation with work and material possessions. A final reason that teenagers yield to their passions is simply because they were designed to function sexually at age 12 or 14, but our society dictates that you wait until your twenties to get married. In traditional societies, the problem is less acute, partly because kids get married when they mature sexually. I don't have a recommendation for our society, but it's something to ponder.
On Deism and Lincoln: If you read Thomas Paine, he does not deny God's intervention in the world and entreats us to thank God for His acts of kindness on our behalf. That does not sound like a Deist as Deism is popularly caricatured, but if Paine was not a Deist, no one was. Lincoln read Paine as a youth and was heavily influenced by him. A good resource on the beliefs of Lincoln is a careful compilation of about 300 pages by John Remsburg in his "Six Historic Americans", written in 1906. See http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/john_remsburg/six_historic_americans/chapter_5.html
"The Bible is not my book and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated statements of Christian dogma." -Abraham Lincoln
I stand by my statement that the sacrifices of Christians do not validate Christianity, but I retract any suggestion that the intellectual superficiality of many Christians invalidates Christianity. I would like to interject, though, that the lack of difference morally between Christians and unbelievers is troubling to me, especially in light of the fact that believers are promised the agency of the Spirit on their behalf. I read in Philip Yancey's latest book that evangelical Christians experience a slightly higher rate of divorce than the general population in the US. It is common to blame the Christians themselves for this breach, thus vindicating the Spirit, but if they can be blamed for their failures, then it seems that those who do avoid failure should be given credit, not necessarily the Spirit. >>
Paine was the champion of human rights in his day ("The Rights of Man"); a pioneer in the fight against slavery (a violent form of which the Bible endorses in Exodus 21:20 and a subject on which Jesus was silent); a critic of the Pauline notion that God placed kings in power and thus should be tolerated, leading him to write "Common Sense" and sparking the American Revolution; and a critic of the violent leaders of the French Revolution, which led to his imprisonment at their hands. His ideas were based on common sense, the well-being of all, a happy and orderly society, and not on mere tradition and the interests of the few. Tradition, even biblical, should not be accepted without scrutiny. Let me know if you object to anything to what Paine taught about government and morality. I accept what Jesus taught concerning morality, but he didn't have anything specific to say about government. The framers of our Constitution were dominated by rationalists, not Christians. You object that rationalists have no basis for their morality. As mentioned earlier, I take a somewhat pragmatic approach to morality. We can learn from the mistakes of history. What works, and what doesn't? We strive as much as possible for the best interest of all, which is the only system that really works in the end. If rationalism is bankrupt, why is it that in this country liberals are more concerned about human rights than Christian conservatives? Why was it the conservative Christians who backed the divine right of kings, and why did it take rationalists to write our Constitution and institute democracy, which is not to be found in the Bible? Why was it the conservative, Bible believing Christians who fought the hardest for slavery while the liberals were more likely to oppose it? Why was it the conservatives who most strongly advocated the doctrine of the Old Testament-based Manifest Destiny to justify their conquest of Indian peoples and lands, while rationalists like Jefferson denounced it? Not all the Christians who have committed atrocities have done so without appeal to biblical teaching. The Bible can be abused, just as can the rationalistic ideals of human rights and the appeal to the good of society as a whole.
On the inadequacy of reason to determine truth: As far as I'm aware, I am not asking for mathematical proof or absolute certainty that the gospel is true. I understand and accept that God does not work that way, since there would be no room for faith. What has moved me away from Christianity is not only the lack of evidence *for* it, but more importantly the evidence *against* it. I do not believe that God would expect us to believe something that goes against reason, let alone condemn us eternally for not accepting it. Thomas Jefferson has the best response to the charge that outside the Bible, we can have no certainty: "He
who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." Likewise, Voltaire: "Doubt
is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
Whereas until recently
I was reluctant even to entertain the possibility that God does not exist, I now feel I ought at least to consider that option, spurred on by the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson:
"Shake off
all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."
--Thomas Jefferson
to Peter Carr, 1787. ME 6:258 Papers 12:15
"I am not myself apt to be alarmed at innovations recommended by reason. That dread belongs to those whose interests or prejudices shrink from the advance of truth and science." --Thomas Jefferson to John Manners, 1814. ME 14:103
"Lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision."
--Thomas Jefferson
to Peter Carr, 1787. ME 6:261
"I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way." --Thomas
Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:85
"It is surely time for men to think for themselves, and to throw off the authority of names so artificially magnified." --Thomas
Jefferson to William Short, 1820. ME 15:258
"Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility,
which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck." --Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, 1822. ME 15:409
"I am for encouraging the progress of science in all its branches, and not for raising a hue and cry against the sacred name of philosophy; for awing the human mind by stories of raw-head and bloody bones to a distrust of its own vision, and to repose implicitly on that of others; to go backwards instead of forwards to look for improvement; to believe that government, religion,
morality and every other science were in the highest perfection in the ages of the darkest ignorance, and that nothing can ever be decided more perfect than what was established by our forefathers." --Thomas
Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1799. ME 10:78
Another writer that
has recently led me to question Deism is Robert Green Ingersoll in Why Am I an Agnostic? (1889):
(from Bank of Wisdom Box 926, Louisville, KY 402015)
Most people, after arriving at the conclusion that Jehovah is not God, that the Bible is not an inspired book, and that the Christian religion, like other religions, is the creation of man, usually say: "There must be a Supreme Being, but Jehovah is not his name, and the Bible is not his word. There must be somewhere an over-ruling Providence or Power."
This position is just as untenable as the other. He who cannot harmonize the cruelties of the Bible with the goodness of Jehovah, cannot harmonize the cruelties of Nature with the goodness and wisdom of a supposed Deity. He will find it impossible to account for pestilence and famine, for earthquake and storm, for slavery, for the triumph of the strong over the weak, for the countless victories of injustice. He will find it impossible to account for martyrs -- for the burning of the good, the noble, the loving, by the ignorant, the malicious, and the infamous.
How can the Deist satisfactorily account for the sufferings of women and children? In what way will he justify religious persecution -- the flame and sword of religious hatred? Why did his God sit idly on his throne and allow his enemies to wet their swords in the blood of his friends? Why did he not answer the prayers of the imprisoned, of the helpless? And when he heard the lash upon the naked back of the slave, why did he not also hear the prayer of the slave? And when children were sold from the breasts of mothers, why was he deaf to the mother's cry?"
It seems to me that the man who knows the limitations of the mind, who gives the proper value to human testimony, is necessarily an Agnostic. He gives up the hope of ascertaining first or final causes, of comprehending the supernatural, or of conceiving of an infinite personality. From out the words Creator, Preserver, and Providence, all meaning falls."
[...]
The universality of a belief does not even tend to prove its truth. A large majority of mankind have believed in what is known as God, and an equally large majority have as implicitly believed in what is known as the Devil. These beings have been inferred from phenomena. They were produced for the most part by ignorance, by fear, and by selfishness. Man in all ages has endeavored to account for the mysteries of life and death, of substance, of force, for the ebb and flow of things, for earth and star. The savage, dwelling in his cave, subsisting on roots and reptiles, or on beasts that could be slain with club and stone, surrounded by countless objects of terror, standing by rivers, so far as he knew, without source or end, by seas with but one shore, the prey of beasts mightier than himself, of diseases strange and fierce, trembling at the voice of thunder, blinded by the lightning, feeling the earth shake beneath him, seeing the sky lurid with the volcano's glare, -- fell prostrate and begged for the protection of the Unknown.
In the long night of savagery, in the midst of pestilence and famine, through the long and dreary winters, crouched in dens of darkness, the seeds of superstition were sown in the brain of man. The savage believed, and thoroughly believed, that everything happened in reference to him; that he by his actions could excite the anger, or by his worship placate the wrath, of the Unseen. He resorted to flattery and prayer. To the best of his ability he put in stone, or rudely carved in wood, his idea of this god. For this idol he built a hut, a hovel, and at last a cathedral. Before these images he bowed, and at these shrines, whereon he lavished his wealth, he sought protection for himself and for the ones he loved. The few took advantage of the ignorant many. They pretended to have received messages from the Unknown. They stood between the helpless multitude and the gods. They were the carriers of flags of truce. At the court of heaven they presented the cause of man, and upon the labor of the deceived they lived.
The Christian of to-day wonders at the savage who bowed before his idol; and yet it must be confessed that the god of stone answered prayer and protected his worshipers precisely as the Christian's God answers prayer and protects his worshipers to-day.
My mind is so that it is forced to the conclusion that substance is eternal; that the universe was without beginning and will be without end; that it is the one eternal existence; that relations are transient and evanescent; that organisms are produced and vanish; that forms change, -- but that the substance of things is from eternity to eternity. It may be that planets are born and die, that constellations will fade from the infinite spaces, that countless suns will be quenched, -- but the substance will remain.
The questions of origin and destiny seem to be beyond the powers of the human mind.
Heredity is on the side of superstition. All our ignorance pleads for the old. In most men there is a feeling that their ancestors were exceedingly good and brave and wise, and that in all things pertaining to religion their conclusions should be followed. They believe that their fathers and mothers were of the best, and that that which satisfied them should satisfy their children. With a feeling of reverence they say that the religion of their mother is good enough and pure enough and reasonable enough for them. In this way the love of parents and the reverence for ancestors have unconsciously bribed the reason and put out, or rendered exceedingly dim, the eyes of the mind.
There is a kind of longing in the heart of the old to live and die where their parents lived and died -- a tendency to go back to the homes of their youth. Around the old oak of manhood grow and cling these vines. Yet it will hardly do to say that the religion of my mother is good enough for me, any more than to say the geology or the astronomy or the philosophy of my mother is good enough for me. Every human being is entitled to the best he can obtain; and if there has been the slightest improvement on the religion of the mother, the son is entitled to that improvement, and he should not deprive himself of that advantage by the mistaken idea that he owes it to his mother to perpetuate, in a reverential way, her ignorant mistakes.
If we are to follow the religion of our fathers and mothers, our fathers and mothers should have followed the religion of theirs. Had this been done, there could have been no improvement in the world of thought. The first religion would have been the last, and the child would have died as ignorant as the mother. Progress would have been impossible, and on the graves of ancestors would have been sacrificed the intelligence of mankind.
We know, too, that there has been the religion of the tribe, of the community, and of the nation, and that there has been a feeling that it was the duty of every member of the tribe or community, and of every citizen of the nation, to insist upon it that the religion of that tribe, of that community, of that nation, was better than that of any other. We know that all the prejudices against other religions, and all the egotism of nation and tribe, were in favor of the local superstition. Each citizen was patriotic enough to denounce the religions of other nations and to stand firmly by his own. And there is this peculiarity about man: he can see the absurdities of other religions while blinded to those of his own. The Christian can see clearly enough that Mohammed was an impostor. He is sure of it, because the people of Mecca who were acquainted with him declared that he was no prophet; and this declaration is received by Christians as a demonstration that Mohammed was not inspired. Yet these same Christians admit that the people of Jerusalem who were acquainted with Christ rejected him; and this rejection they take as proof positive that Christ was the Son of God.
The average man adopts the religion of his country, or, rather, the religion of his country adopts him. He is dominated by the egotism of race, the arrogance of nation, and the prejudice called patriotism. He does not reason -- he feels. He does not investigate -- he believes. To him the religions of other nations are absurd and infamous, and their gods monsters of ignorance and cruelty. In every country this average man is taught, first, that there is a supreme being; second, that he has made known his will; third, that he will reward the true believer; fourth, that he will punish the unbeliever, the scoffer, and the blasphemer; fifth, that certain ceremonies are pleasing to this god; sixth, that he has established a church; and seventh, that priests are his representatives on earth. And the average man has no difficulty in determining that the God of his nation is the true God; that the will of this true God is contained in the sacred scriptures of his nation; that he is one of the true believers, and that the people of other nations -- that is, believing other religions -- are scoffers; that the only true church is the one to which he belongs; and that the priests of his country are the only ones who have had or ever will have the slightest influence with this true God. All these absurdities to the average man seem self-evident propositions; and so he holds all other creeds in scorn, and congratulates himself that he is a favorite of the one true God.
If the average Christian had been born in Turkey, he would have been a Mohammedan; and if the average Mohammedan had been born in New England and educated at Andover, he would have regarded the damnation of the heathen as the "tidings of great joy."
Nations have eccentricities, peculiarities, and hallucinations, and these find expression in their laws, customs, ceremonies, morals, and religions. And these are in great part determined by soil, climate, and the countless circumstances that mould and dominate the lives and habits of insects, individuals, and nations. The average man believes implicitly in the religion of his country, because he knows nothing of any other and has no desire to know. It fits him because he has been deformed to fit it, and he regards this fact of fit as an evidence of its inspired truth.
Has a man the right to examine, to investigate, the religion of his own country -- the religion of his father and mother? Christians admit that the citizens of all countries not Christian have not only this right, but that it is their solemn duty. Thousands of missionaries are sent to heathen countries to persuade the believers in other religions not only to examine their superstitions, but to renounce them, and to adopt those of the missionaries. It is the duty of a heathen to disregard the religion of his country and to hold in contempt the creed of his father and of his mother. If the citizens of heathen nations have the right to examine the foundations of their religion, it would seem that the citizens of Christian nations have the same right. Christians, however, go further than this; they say to the heathen: You must examine your religion, and not only so, but you must reject it; and, unless you do reject it, and, in addition to such rejection, adopt ours, you will be eternally damned. Then these same Christians say to the inhabitants of a Christian country: You must not examine; you must not investigate; but whether you examine or not, you must believe, or you will be eternally damned.
If there be one true religion, how is it possible to ascertain which of all the religions the true one is? There is but one way. We must impartially examine the claims of all. The right to examine involves the necessity to accept or reject. Understand me, not the right to accept or reject, but the necessity. From this conclusion there is no possible escape. If, then, we have the right to examine, we have the right to tell the conclusion reached. Christians have examined other religions somewhat, and they have expressed their opinion with the utmost freedom -- that is to say, they have denounced them all as false and fraudulent; have called their gods idols and myths, and their priests impostors.
The Christian does not deem it worth while to read the Koran. Probably not one Christian in a thousand ever saw a copy of that book. And yet all Christians are perfectly satisfied that the Koran is the work of an impostor. No Presbyterian thinks it is worth his while to examine the religious systems of India; he knows that the Brahmins are mistaken, and that all their miracles are falsehoods. No Methodist cares to read the life of Buddha, and no Baptist will waste his time studying the ethics of Confucius. Christians of every sort and kind take it for granted that there is only one true religion, and that all except Christianity are absolutely without foundation. The Christian world believes that all the prayers of India are unanswered; that all the sacrifices upon the countless altars of Egypt, of Greece, and of Rome were without effect. They believe that all these mighty nations worshiped their gods in vain; that their priests were deceivers or deceived; that their ceremonies were wicked or meaningless; that their temples were built by ignorance and fraud, and that no God heard their songs of praise, their cries of despair, their words of thankfulness; that on account of their religion no pestilence was stayed; that the earthquake and volcano, the flood and storm went on their ways of death -- while the real God looked on and laughed at their calamities and mocked at their fears.
We find now that the prosperity of nations has depended, not upon their religion, not upon the goodness or providence of some god, but on soil and climate and commerce, upon the ingenuity, industry, and courage of the people, upon the development of the mind, on the spread of education, on the liberty of thought and action; and that in this mighty panorama of national life, reason has built and superstition has destroyed.
Being satisfied that all believe precisely as they must, and that religions have been naturally produced, I have neither praise nor blame for any man. Good men have had bad creeds, and bad men have had good ones. Some of the noblest of the human race have fought and died for the wrong. The brain of man has been the trusting-place of contradictions. Passion often masters reason, and "the state of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of an insurrection."
In the discussion of theological or religious questions, we have almost passed the personal phase, and we are now weighing arguments instead of exchanging epithets and curses. They who really seek for truth must be the best of friends. Each knows that his desire can never take the place of fact, and that, next to finding truth, the greatest honor must be won in honest search.
We see that many ships are driven in many ways by the same wind. So men, reading the same book, write many creeds and lay out many roads to heaven. To the best of my ability, I have examined the religions of many countries and the creeds of many sects. They are much alike, and the testimony by which they are substantiated is of such a character that to those who believe is promised an eternal reward. In all the sacred books there are some truths, some rays of light, some words of love and hope. The face of savagery is sometimes softened by a smile -- the human triumphs, and the heart breaks into song. But in these books are also found the words of fear and hate, and from their pages crawl serpents that coil and hiss in all the paths of men.
For my part, I prefer the books that inspiration has not claimed. Such is the nature of my brain that Shakespeare gives me greater joy than all the prophets of the ancient world. There are thoughts that satisfy the hunger of the mind. I am convinced that Humboldt knew more of geology than the author of Genesis; that Darwin was a greater naturalist than he who told the story of the flood; that Laplace was better acquainted with the habits of the sun and moon than Joshua could have been, and that Haeckel, Huxley, and Tyndall know more about the earth and stars, about the history of man, the philosophy of life -- more that is of use, ten thousand times -- than all the writers of the sacred books.
Here is
a copy of a couple pages from Edward T. Babinski's Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists,
taken from notes at the end of Ingersoll's testimony:
1. I submit to interested readers some further quotations that exemplify how “design exists to defeat design” in nature. For instance, in another of his works, Ingersoll argued:
The scientists tell us that there is a microscopic animal,
one who is very particular about his food—-so particular, that he prefers to all other things the optic nerve, and after he has succeeded in destroying that nerve and covering the eye with the mask of blindness, he has intelligence enough to bore his way through the bones of the nose in search of the other nerve. Is it not somewhat difficult to discover “the signature of beauty with which God has stamped” this animal?
Orson Scott Card, the Hugo-award-winning science-fiction
writer, sometimes
preaches “secular
humanist revivals”
at the science fiction conferences he attends. One of the points he raises is given below:
One time when I was preaching a “secular humanist revival” meeting in Huntsville, Alabama,
I ran across a copy of a book called investigating
God’s World [by DeWitt Steele; part 2 by Herman and Nina Schneider; Beka Book Publications, a division of Pensacola Christian
College, Florida,
1977]. It’s a creation science textbook for fifth-graders. This is the kind of book that they want “equal time” for....
“How marvelous is your body,” says this book. “Nothing about its working has been left to chance. Everything works just as planned by God. Only He had the wisdom to design the blood-clotting mechanism.”
(p. 144)
To which I say, “How marvelous is the polio virus. it is perfectly designed to attack healthy children and kill them or leave them crippled for life. Everything works just as planned by God. Only He had the wisdom to design the polio virus.”
Charles Darwin stated he could not imagine that a “benevolent God” instilled within the cat the instinct to torment little woodland creatures for long periods before killing them, nor created wasps that inject their eggs into the bodies of caterpillars, the eggs hatching and the larva eating their host alive. What must such creatures tell us of God’s “character” as “creator”? That any means at all justifies the end?
A. J. Mattill, Jr., in his book The Seven Mighty Blows to Traditional Beliefs
(Gordo, Ala.:
Flatwoods Free
Press, 1986) trotted forth another prime example: “Anyone who has watched a shrike attack and slowly kill a screaming cardinal by pecking its skull open and eating out of it will not find it difficult to understand Charles Darwin’s shift in theology. At least it will be plain why the shrike, so beautiful in appearance, is popularly called the ‘butcher bird’ and ‘brainsucker.’”
Science writer David Quammen discussed a species of bedbug in which the males bugger other males to ensure that the seminal fluid of the buggering male is injected into the female, and not the seminal fluid of the male who is embracing the female [“An Mrican Bedbug Buggers the Proof-by-Design”
in The Flight of the Iguana (Delacorte Press, 1988)]. Quammen concluded that “If the maculin pennis is another instance of God’s wisdom made manifest in the works of creation, I suspect that the sort of god manifested is not the one [that ‘scientific creationists’]
want.”
In a similar vein the author of an article on ticks published in the New Yorker (September 12, 1988), wrote, Ticks are found in incomprehensible numbers
throughout the
world, and man has probably been unpleasantly aware of them since his beginnings. Human detestation of the tick easily surpasses that aroused by snakes and spiders. “Ill-favored ticks,”
Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79) cried out in his Natural History, “the foulest and nastiest creatures that be.”... It is hard to think of the tick, which lives on the blood of other creatures but is itself food for none, as a deliberate creation,
as one of the creatures in Genesis “that creepeth upon the earth,” and to believe that it had a Creator who “saw that it was good.”
Mark Twain held a similar opinion of the fly, and asked his readers to ponder again and again the problems raised by its malefic existence:
Can we imagine a man inventing the fly, and sending him out on his mission, furnished with these orders: “Depart into the uttermost corners of the earth, and diligently do your appointed work. Persecute the sick child; settle upon its eyes, its face, its hands, and gnaw and pester and sting; worry and fret and madden the worn and tired mother who watches by the child, and who humbly prays for mercy and relief with the pathetic faith of the deceived and the unteachable. Settle upon the soldier’s festering wounds in field and hospital and drive him frantic while he also prays, and betweentimes curses, with none to listen but you, Fly, who get all the petting and all the protection, without
even praying for it. Harry and persecute the forlorn and forsaken wretch who is perishing of the plague, and in his terror and despair praying; bite, sting, feed upon his ulcers, dabble your feet in his rotten blood, gum them thick with plague-germs—feet cunningly
designed and perfected for this function ages ago in the beginning—carrying this
freight to a hundred tables, among the just and the unjust, the high and the low, and walk over the food and gaum it with filth and death. Visit all; allow no man peace till he get it in the grave; visit and afflict the hard-worked and unoffending horse, mule, ox, ass, pester the patient cow, and all the kindly animals that labor without fair reward here and perish without hope of it hereafter; spare no creature, wild or tame; but wheresoever you find one, make his life a misery, treat him as the innocent deserve; and so please Me and increase My glory Who made the fly.” (“Thoughts of God,” early 1900s)
We approve all God’s works, we praise all His works, with a fervent enthusiasm—
of words; and in the same moment we kill a fly, which is as much one of His works as any other, and has been included and complimented in our sweeping eulogy. We not only kill the fly, but we do it in a spirit of measureless disapproval—even
a spirit of hatred, exasperation, vindictiveness;
and we regard that creature with disgust and loathing—which is the essence of contempt—and yet we have just been praising it, approving it, glorifying it. We have been praising it to its Maker, and now our act insults its Maker. The praise was dishonest, the act is honest; the one was a wordy hypocrisy, the other is compact candor....
We hunt the fly remorselessly; also
the flea, the rat, the snake, the disease-germ and a thousand other creatures which He pronounced good, and was satisfied with, and which we loudly praise and approve—with our mouths—and then harry and chase and malignantly destroy, by wholesale. (“God,” 1905)
To cite A. J. Mattill, Jr., again (from the unpublished manuscript version of The Seven Mighty Blows to Traditional Beliefs),
“What kind of ‘creator’ would have ‘specially designed’
the kea, a New Zealand parrot, which swoops down on a lone sheep and tears open its flesh at the exact spot to get to the kidney fat, leaving the sheep to die in agony? Or a chacma baboon, which catches a pigeon, denudes it of its feathers, lets it go, recaptures it, pulls out its legs, and then decapitates it? Or a great horned owl, which will decapitate fifteen adult terns but eat only one? Or a mink, which wipes out whole families of muskrats in a senseless killing frenzy? Or the copper-colored fly (Bufolucilla silvarum), which deposits its eggs in the nostrils of toads and frogs, after which the larvae, when they hatch, blind and devour their hosts? Or tapeworms that grow up to eighty feet long in the intestines of human beings—
380 LEAVING THE FOLD
tapeworms with twenty to thirty hooks or suckers to prevent them from being swept away by the passage of food. Or female praying mantises which eat the male during copulation? Or a male lion, which eats the offspring of another male when he gains control of a pride? Or sand sharks and mackeral sharks which produce cannibal fetuses with sharp teeth to devour younger fetuses, until there is only one left to be born?”
And what kind of ‘creator’ would have ‘specially designed’ the following ghoulish plan of procreation: “There
are medical experts who believe that as many as a quarter of all those born as single children began life as twins. What happens, they speculate, is that in the struggle for room, position and food, one twin ‘wins’ and the other is literally overcome, reabsorbed
into the thrumming uterus, or into the body of the stronger twin.
“A friend of mine, during an operation, was found to be carrying the vestigial remains of her own twin in a mass of tissue inside her. They found vertebrae, limbs, fingers” (from “Born Rivais” by Gregg Levoy, Psychology Today [June 1989]:67).
The other day
I heard a segment on NPR concerning a professor in India who wrote a book on the origins of the Hindu ban on eating beef. In his research he found that it was introduced by the Brahmins of the 5th and 6th centuries. The author did not anticipate the uproar that his claim would provoke among the Hindu populace, who believe that the ban on beef is as old as Hinduism itself. It appears that the author will not only lose his job but will be imprisoned for his stand. He says he's a Hindu by birth but an agnostic by choice. A couple months ago I heard another segment on NPR in which an Egyptian journalist suggested
that the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) predated Mohammed and had pagan roots. She was going to be forced to divorce her husband and lose her job. To me, these two individuals are heroes. With reason on their side, they dare to challenge the prevailing opinion, despite the consequences. It's predictable what will happen when cherished beliefs are challenged. I am experiencing it, and it's tough. But if Hindus will not allow their gods to be questioned, and Muslims will not allow their God to be questioned, then I suppose I should not be surprised if I am scolded for questioning the Christian God. It's always reason versus tradition, reason versus revealed religion. Reason suffers temporary setbacks at the hands of the traditionalists
who hold the bludgeons, but it will win in the end. Again, I admit that reason does not provide many answers about the nature of God if He exists, but it can at least help us weed out a lot of things that are NOT true. And it is NOT true that God, if He exists and is good, commanded the Israelites to kill the Midianites--men,
married women
and boys--and
to keep the virgins for themselves, distributing them to the priests as "the Lord's portion" for their sexual needs (Num. 31:13 ff). It is NOT true that God prescribed punishment
for slaveholders
who killed their slaves instantly but not for slaveholders who struck their slaves in such a way that they took a couple days to die (Ex. 21:20-21, KJV). It's cut and dried. I am not judging God, but whoever wrote these books in the name of God. Theirs is the crime, not mine. Our reason revolts against the Hindu idea that we should avoid killing even insects because they could be an incarnation of some pre-existing soul, and we have no qualms about dismissing Hinduism on the basis of reason. Our reason revolts against a Muslim god who prescribes culture-bound
rituals as a condition for receiving his mercy, and we have not qualms about dismissing Islam on the basis of reason. My reason revolts against a long list of teachings and practices in the Bible, so why should I be accused of impiety when I propose to dismiss Christianity on the basis of reason? Should I accept the Bible with all its contradictions simply because
rationalism will never
lead to certainty? As if certainty were the goal, rather than truth or the acknowledgement
that certainty
is unattainable.
"I think it is Montaigne who has said, that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head." --Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Randolph, 1794. ME 9:280
No, doubt and
uncertainty do
not provide a soft pillow for me, but if the pillow of Christianity is not true, I will have to lay my head elsewhere.
Most theists and
atheists alike
reason that if God made the world and the people in it, He must make Himself known to them through some form of communication, whether direct verbal communication
or through a written revelation. It does seem logical. A major objection cited against Deism is
that God would
not have made us without making Himself known. Atheists say God has not revealed himself and use this fact as one proof against His existence; Christians
say He has revealed Himself through the Bible and Jesus. But I maintain that the revelations of the Bible and Jesus do not meet this intuitive demand that God should reveal Himself, because the Christian gospel has only been known by a minority of humanity throughout
history. Thus,
Christianity only
goes partway to meeting the objection that Christians have against Deism. If you happen to be one of the fortunate or chosen ones who is exposed to the revelation, it's fine for you, but if not, you're out of luck. All there is is just cold, hard nature and a guess as to what it all means. [Old-earth creationist] Hugh Ross has recently extended his estimate of man's origins from 40,000 years ago to over 100,000 years (even though earlier he had claimed the Bible couldn't be true if man's origins were much earlier than his previous estimate). How many thousands of generations came and went during which man had no access to divine revelation, but had to guess and invent gods and spirits and attribute spiritual
powers to the celestial bodies, a perfectly logical thing to do if you don't have science or revelation? May the full import of this sink in. If God exists, it appears for whatever reason that He is not bound by our expecation that He reveal Himself to us. It is our reason that forces Him into this box. God may exist. I frankly don't know, and I will freely admit it. Whether He does or doesn't, I still have a family to love and provide for and a job I enjoy. Life goes on. I want to do something significant if I'm able, perhaps like contributing to a cure for malaria, but in the meantime, I take each moment as it comes.
Which has caused
more woes in the history of the world? Certainty or the admission that we just don't know? In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, I've heard and read Christian commentaries comparing
Christianity with
Islam, pointing
out how superior Christianity
is to Islam. Granted, the teachings of Jesus are superior to those of Mohammed concerning peace and forgiveness, but throw Moses and Joshua and Samuel into the mix and the picture become
fuzzier. Just a
few hundred years ago, Christendom was every bit as violent as Islam is today. The population of Germany was reduced from 18 million to 4 million after the 30 years' war, a largely religious war between Protestants and Catholics. What made the difference between then and now? I suggest that it's the tolerance advocated by the Enlightenment. Some quotes from Luther and Calvin will serve to highlight the differences between their thinking and ours, which has been conditioned by Enlightenment thinking.
The same cannot be said for much of the Muslim world. The following is taken from Babinski, Edward T., Leaving the Fold, pp. 46-47:
Even Jesus' teachings in the New Testament leave room for intolerant legislation
to be passed by Christians against all others. For instance, the Bible contains sayings by Jesus that echo the command in the book of Deuteronomy to "kill" your
"brother, son,
daughter, wife,
or best friend" should
they attempt to "entice you away to serve other gods" (13:6-9). Jesus said, "Suppose
ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother. . . . If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 12:51-53 and 14:26, NASB)
As Luther and Calvin pointed out, Jesus' command to "love your enemies" meant to "love your enemies," i.e.,
personal enemies.
It did not mean that you had to "love God's enemies." Did Jesus "love"
the Pharisees
who opposed his preaching? Or consider Jesus' command not to call anyone "raca" (Aramaic
for "empty-head,"
or "good
for nothing").
That command obviously did not apply to God's enemies, whom Jesus denounced in the most inflammatory terms, calling them names that were far worse than "raca."
Luther pointed this out in his commentary on Matt. 5:44, "Love Thy Enemy":
Christ pronounces "Woe!" upon
the Pharisees
[He says, "You blind fools ... you serpents, you brood of vipers, how shall you escape the sentence of hell?" (Matt. 23); "You are of your father the devil" (John 8:44)]. .
Stephen reads a hard and sharp text to the high priests (Acts 7:51-53) . . . Paul says to Elymas: "You son of the devil . . . full of all villainy!"
(Acts 13:10) ... and Paul puts it all on one pile and calls everyone anathema, that is, excommunicated and cursed and sentenced to the abyss of hell, who does not preach the pure teaching about the faith (Gal. 1:8). . .
That is how God's word proceeds . . . denouncing and cursing their whole way of life, something that is not proper for you or me to do as individual Christians except in our office and our teaching position. . .
So far as his neighbor's person is concerned, a Christian will love and bless everyone. But on the other hand, so far as God and His Word are concerned, He will not put up with any transgression. He must give this precedence over everything else and subordinate everything
else to it, irrespective of any person, be he friend or foe; for this cause belongs neither to us nor to our neighbor, but to God, whom it is our duty to obey before anything else (Acts 5:29, 'We must obey God rather than men'). Consequently, I say to my worst enemies: "Where
it is only my own person that is involved, there I am very willing to help you and to do everything good for you, in spite of the fact that all you ever do for me is to harm me. But where it is the Word of God that is involved, there you must not expect any friendship or love that I may have for you to persuade me to do something against that, even if you were my nearest and dearest friend. But since you cannot endure the Word, I will speak this prayer and benediction over you: 'May God dash you to the ground!' I shall willingly serve you, but not in order to help you overthrow the Word of God. For this purpose you will never be able to persuade me to give you a drink of water." In other words, our love and service belong to men. But they belong to God above all; if this is hindered or threatened, love and service are no longer in place. For the command is: "You shall love your enemy and do him good." But to God's enemies I must also be an enemy, lest I join forces with them against God....
Therefore, even though personally they (i.e., Christians who serve as spiritual and secular officials) may be gentle, yet administering justice
and meting out punishment (i.e., to "witches," "heretics,"
"blasphemers," etc.) is their official work; and it has to go on. It would be wrong if their pity moved them to neglect this; for that would be tantamount to helping, strengthening, and encouraging the evil. . . [of] our enemies, the pope, the bishops, the princes, and all the rest, who are persecuting the Gospel and trampling its poor adherents underfoot. . .
--Martin Luther, from his commentary on Matt. 25:44, "Love Your Enemies." Luther's
Works, vol. 21, "The Sermon on the Mount (Sermons) and the Magnificat, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia:
Concordia Publishing
House), pp. 119-24.
From the same
book I found these quotes of Calvin:
Love itself [ought] to abide under purity of faith. If both lay claims, we must not give in to pity.
We should not set human considerations
above God's service. We must forget humanity and spare not kin or blood when the matter is to combat for his glory...
We ought to trample under foot every affection when it is a question of God's honor. The father should not spare the son, the brother the brother, nor the husband his own wife. If he has some friend who is as dear to him as his own life, let him put him to death if he is a heretic or false prophet...
--John Calvin, "A little Book on the duty of Civil Magistrates to Punish Heretics,"
1554. (quoted
in "Leaving
the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists,"
p. 47. Edward T. Babinski, Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 1995.
These are not
just hypothetical
musings; Calvin
and Luther were both responsible for the deaths of many heretics. All this is swept under the rug, and both men have millions of admirers to this day. Now that Christianity has lost is pre-eminence in Western society, it's been cleaned up substantially, but as long as there exists the notion that heresy brings eternal punishment to its perpetrators and its converts, there will always be the inward urge to despise the heretic, to demonize him, to misrepresent his motives, to divide families and friends and in general to promote disunity and intolerance, even if it doesn't end up in bloodshed. And if Christianity is not true, this is all so pointless and unnecessary.
I can't believe
as I look in the mirror that just a year and a half ago I would have considered this person in the mirror to be an enemy of the truth. If I could change this person in the mirror, I would. I never rebelled as a teenager. I never danced or listened to secular music. I maintained a fairly regular and meaningful time of prayer and Bible reading for most of my life from the age of 13. I really believed. I still don't listen to secular music, unless you consider classical music secular. I've never sworn. Pornography has never been a problem for me. I went to the ends of the world for Christ. I strive to be a good father and husband. I've never uttered a profanity that I can remember. I've never been drunk. I've never slept with anyone but my wife. I have no desire for the world. I continue to attend church with my family, both for their sake and for the hope that I will perhaps some day see the truth of Christianity if it's true. I still have enough Protestantism in me to know that none of these things really means anything before God, but I just want you to know that I have always sought to do and believe what is right. I have not changed my behavior, just my outlook. I feel that my questioning is right, even necessary. Either Christianity is true,
and I am directly challenging God, which is a admittedly a serious thing, or
Christianity is untrue, and to discourage me from this path would be to squelch the fragile flower of truth in the bud, just as the Hindus are trying to do to the agnostic author I mentioned. I agree that if Christianity is true, God and the truth cannot be approached solely by reason, nor have I sought God solely by reason. I have prayed and prayed. But if Christianity is not true, then how else but by reason can that be determined?
I have made at least two reversals during my time of struggle
since March of last year, yet both times my renewed confidence in Christianity
was short-lived as I was unable to repress the many arguments against
Christianity that kept coming to the surface. I have thought at times during
the past year that I could maybe make the plunge again, but I have no
confidence that I will be able to survive my inevitable doubts again, no matter
how much I call on God and seek Him to preserve my faith. In my current
position, I see so many flaws in Christianity that I can draw no other
conclusion than that it is a man-made religion, just like every other. To make
the decision to jump back in, while convinced intellectually that it is not
true, would only lead to a life of hypocrisy. I understand Christians may find
this hard to accept, but I hold to my present agnostic stance as a matter of
integrity. Believers may see it rather as a form of rebellion, and this may
well be the case, despite my inability to recognize it, but to me I am simply
following the evidence where it leads, despite the cost. I can wish no better
for my life than to come to the end of it and know that I lived a life of
integrity.
October 24, 1788
Remember me affectionately to good
Dr. Price and to the honest heretic Dr. Priestly. I do not call him honest by
way of distinction; for I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous
men. They have the virtue of fortitude or they would not venture to own their
heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as
that would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not like
orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them. Do not,
however mistake me. It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his
honesty. On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that has brought upon him the
character of heretic. I am ever, my dear friend, yours sincerely,
-- Benjamin Franklin to Benjamin Vaughan at http://www.2think.org/priestly.shtml
"It was, after all, Christianity
itself which tutored the Western mind to believe that it should know the truth
and the truth would make it free. But now that the student has learned to prize
the truth, he has discovered, with pain both to himself and his teacher, that
it can only be gained at the cost of rejecting the one who first instilled in
him the love of it." -- Van A. Harvey at
http://www.2think.org/quotes2.html#rt
I have thought much about the silence of God; His apparent
silence and inactivity in the face of confusion and suffering are the two
primary pillars of atheism. (I still find atheism a stretch, though, because
there is something and not nothing. But I found evolution a stretch in the
past, not able to conceive how such complexity could be generated by impersonal
forces. Yet the more I look into it, the more evidence I find for evolution, however
counter-intuitive it originally seemed to me. Reality is not intuitive, as
witnessed by those who first discovered that the earth is round and is rotating
and revolving in space at unimaginable speeds.)
Job's response to his suffering was to accept it without
knowing its source while acknowledging the wisdom and mystery of God. If we
were to imagine a God to our liking, we would invent one who does not allow
unjust suffering, at least not suffering at the hands of nature. We would also
imagine that God would want to communicate with us and reveal His will in a
tangible record. Despite our desires, God does not prevent all unjust
suffering, as few would deny. If I may be so bold, what I want you to consider
is whether the same may be true of God's silence. In spite of our longing for
God to reveal His plan in a written record (a desire shared not only by
Christians but also by members of most other major religions), can we not
accept that He has not chosen to reveal Himself in such a way? Or is our demand
for His self-revelation so acute that we must search around for what seems to
us to be the best candidate for a written revelation, then declare it to be
God's word, despite its many flaws and internal inconsistencies, and then
proceed to hammer those who do not accept it with threats of God's eternal
retribution? I'm with Paine: I would far rather accept the mystery of God's
silence than the scandal that He ordered or condoned genocide, slavery, rape,
nationalism and the levitical power to decree death by stoning for a multitude
of offenses.
But, it seems to me, all these atrocities combined pale in
comparison with the consignment of even one individual to an eternity in hell.
Please think long and hard about this: no hope, no escape, no mercy, but the never-ending
horror of misery in a tunnel that has no outlet, day after year after
millennium after... At least in the Old Testament there was no hint that such a
fate awaited those who perished without the knowledge of Jehovah, but at most a
shadowy existence in the netherworld of Sheol. Even though no justice was
decreed in the Bible for a slave beaten to death by his master (unless the
slave happened to die immediately), mercifully the slave's misery could end
with his death, absent the fear of judgment in the afterlife. Though a
Midianite virgin should suffer the indignity of living with the men who
slaughtered all her family, she could take comfort in the knowledge that after
she drew her last breath, there would be no more tears, no more pain, no more regrets,
nothing. Even though a man who gathered wood on the Sabbath faced the horror of
a barrage of stones at the hands of the faithful, when the pain ended, it was
over. When parents stoned their own rebellious sons and subsequently lived out
their lives with the guilt of having abrogated the most fundamental law of
parental nature, at least they could lose their remorse forever in the grave.
When 70,000 people died of a plague as a result of David's sin of taking a
census, they were then spared forever the injustices of earthly life. But if
the NT is true, no such mercy awaits the great majority of humankind. The worm
does not die and the fire is not quenched. How, if we are to be inspired by the
goodness of this kind of God, can we be spurred on to love and good deeds? To
absolve God of this horror, we must mentally extend his righteousness and
justice to the point that he cannot (yes, cannot, though omnipotent) forgive
any sin without an infinite divine/human sacrifice, efficacious for only the
minority of his creatures who are chosen to hear of it and believe it. Maybe
the OT isn't so disturbing after all: God is compassionate and gracious, slow
to anger, abounding in love toward those who fear Him, and for those who do
not, His judgments, however harsh, are limited to this life. My words may sound
insolent to you, but please believe me: I am not consciously, let alone
purposefully, defaming the Creator of the universe; I am only trying to cast
doubt on a notion of God formed by men who learned quickly that the threat of
hell was a great impetus for people to accept and persevere in the faith.
On Liberal Tendencies in Evangelical Scholarship: In August 2000, as I was entering a period
of renewed faith, I continued to have troubling questions about the Pentateuch,
so I looked in the SIL library for some books to help me sort out my questions.
I ran across Whybray's book and read part of it, only to be surprised to find
that, though his book was published by Eerdmans (the same publisher of my copy
of your book), he questioned even the existence of Moses! I was dumbfounded,
and began to wonder again why the most educated scholars were most prone to
adopt non-traditional positions. Were they blinded by their intellect and
pride, or were they coming to their conclusions based on the best evidence
available? A couple hundred years ago, no respectable scholar would have
questioned that the earth was made a few thousand years ago, that Moses wrote
all of the Pentateuch (perhaps excepting the final chapter), that the Exodus
happened in the 15th century, that Daniel lived and prophesied in the 6th
century, all in accordance with an inerrant (extant copies included) text. It
would be difficult to find an eminent scholar today who accepts all or even
most of these once-sacred beliefs. Where they have been given up, it has not
been without a fight. Nowadays these issues are not thought to be as important
as they once were. I wonder how many other issues will be lost by traditional
believers, issues that today seem to be matters of life and death? After
running into enough of these disappointments, I was left with a choice: Backing
into a corner and holding traditional/fundamentalist positions despite the
evidence; or going with the progressive evangelicals and hoping we can continue
to adjust traditional beliefs to the relentless onslaught of historical,
literary and scientific findings while pretending these things don't really
matter; or abandoning ship altogether with the realization that a biblical
faith is incompatible with reality. Though it was and has been painful, I have
been driven by these and many more considerations to conclude that it's no use
trying to continue denying and harmonizing. I could do it, perhaps, but I would
only be kidding myself.
On the Israelites’ Unfaithfulness to Yahweh: This quote from McComiskey reminded me of a
plausible explanation for the spiritual experiences of most pre-modern peoples,
including the Hebrews. "It began, perhaps, with something as innocuous as
the placing of an image of Baal in a farmer's field. This is what their
Canaanite neighbors did to increase production. It is what people did in this
land, and it appeared to work." Without knowledge of the laws of nature,
microbes, weather, etc., it was believed that spiritual forces were behind all
good and bad fortune. The Hebrews, like many other peoples, received oracles
from their God promising physical prosperity for adherence to the divine laws
and curses for disobedience (e.g., Deut. 28, or Exodus 23:25-26: "Worship
the LORD your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take
away sickness from among you, and none will miscarry or be barren in your land.
I will give you a full life span.") Was this ever a reality in ancient
cultures? Has it ever been closer than it is now, thanks to technology,
regardless of ideology? Today we expect most or all of our children to grow up
to adulthood and to lead relatively healthy lives, but before modern medicine
and agricultural advances, most children died before adolescence. It was bitter
and desperate. From its beginning, religion in every culture has sought the
favor of the gods in order to avoid disease, famine and conquest. For most
cultures, including the Hebrews (see Lev. 21:8, 16), sacrifices were offered as
food for their gods. But disease, famine and conquest did not stay at bay. So
more and more elaborate rituals were devised to please the gods, because
perhaps the right techniques were not being used to gain the gods' attention.
The people accepted these rituals, even though they didn't always work, because
they appeared to work at least some of the time. This is my point: Physical
trials besought the Israelites, whether they did or did not worship Yahweh. For
some who worshiped Yahweh exclusively and depended on His promises in Deut. 28
or Ex. 23:25-26, there was great disappointment when the promises were not
fulfilled (as was no doubt often the case). If their neighbors, who worshipped
the Baals, were faring better, should the Hebrews, ignorant of the concrete scientific
measures they could take to better their situation, be blamed for reaching out
in desperation and invoking the Baals on behalf of their land?
Of course, the physical hardships often persisted as people
sought after other gods, because the foreign gods were ineffective in
fulfilling their promises. So now the prophets had a ready explanation for the
woes of the nation: The people had been unfaithful to their God. But this
explanation was not without precedent outside Israel:
Another phenomenon of this period is
prophecy. There is for example a prophet called Ipuwer; Neferrohu is the name
of another. A prophet, according to the Egyptian pattern, appears before the
king and gives him sad news. He tells him that because of evil, the land is
going to suffer. An enemy will invade Egypt and inflict upon it all kinds of
misery including the inversion of all social relationships, until a righteous
king will arise as a savior [compare 'Son of David'], drive out the destructive
invader, and institute a godly order. Egyptian prophecy may have had an
influence on Israelite prophecy, thought Israel added further religious and
ethical content. (Gordon, Cyrus H. & Rendsburg, Gary A., 1997. The Bible
and the Ancient Near East, p. 62)
Like the Israelites, I admit I am uncomfortable with
challenges to my integrity. Unlike them, I do not consider myself (at this
point) a respectable Yahwist or Christian. The Hebrews, like many Christians
today, were guilty of saying or believing one thing and acting another, and as
such were truly being unfaithful to what they believed. Prophetic admonitions
concerning their unfaithfulness thus were appropriate: They were acting against
what they presumably knew to be true. A present-day Christian who does not live
out his faith should not be surprised by the admonition of fellow Christians.
But it seems that a person who does not claim to be part of the community
should be treated differently: First convince him to enter the community, then
admonish him if he does not live according to his faith. As for the second
quote, though I have shifted somewhat in direction from deism to agnosticism, I
do not see this as going endlessly from one Baal to another, but rather coming
slowly to the point where I have to admit how little I know, and then accepting
the situation. Again, I see this as a matter of integrity: Having failed to
perceive any substantive revelation from God, I no longer presume that He must
reveal Himself, nor do I continue to try to figure Him out to my satisfaction.
On Anselm’s statement: "You do not yet known what a
heavy burden sin is." Anselm's quote is good food for
thought. He may be right, but at the risk of coming across as impious (a risk I
have taken before), I believe that piety can be taken too far. As Dietrich
Bonhoeffer stated, "The church must stop trying to act as a kind of
'spiritual pharmacist'--working to produce acute guilt, and then in effect
saying: 'We just happen to have the remedy for your guilt here in our
pocket.'" (from Babinski, "Leaving the Fold", p. 99). Think for
a moment about the human condition: We were born into this world, uninvited,
with a propensity to selfishness, without our having had a say in what kind of
nature we would be given. We struggle to make a living, raise a family, battle
disease, toil, endure hardship of all sorts, suffer confusion, etc., and we
inevitably make mistakes along the way (both because of our nature and our
choice), and then we are told that our condition is infinitely abominable to
God. Christians have the right to accept that view of God, but it simply
doesn't make sense to me. I admit I do make many mistakes, and I don't want to
make myself out to be more righteous than I am. I tend toward laziness, and I
don't always pay attention to the needs of others, and I sometimes yell at my
kids and spank them in anger, and I sometimes think of myself more highly than
I ought, and I struggle with pride and self-sufficiency, and I don't always say
kind or reverent things in my messages and conversations, and, most importantly,
I don’t know who God is. I'm guilty, guilty, guilty. But as Paul warns us not
to think of ourselves more highly than we ought, should we not also avoid
thinking of ourselves more lowly than we ought? I understand the motivation to
want to lower ourselves infinitely in the face of an infinitely perfect God,
but after all, if God exists, are we not His handiwork? Is it not an insult to
God to think of ourselves as worms, unable to reason on our own, inherently
deplorable in God's sight? I am not suggesting that we think of ourselves as
greater than God, nor am I advocating overweening pride, but a balanced, honest
assessment of who we are. It seems that even the crimes of Hitler were not
sufficient to merit eternal punishment, having committed evil acts during only
a finite lifetime. To assert that our sin is infinite because it's against an
infinite God does not take into account the above considerations, nor does it
square with the fact that most people are unaware of the alleged infinitude of
their sin as they grope through life.
Recently I was thinking about our children, and a parable
came to mind. Like the parables of Jesus, it has one main point and should not
be pressed for correspondence to reality in all its details. My son David (7)
has a friend named Luke. I go to Luke and tell him some things I want David to
believe and practice. Some of those things seem reasonable, while others are
bizarre and don’t seem to correspond to reality. I tell Luke to communicate
these messages to David, and Luke does so. David isn’t sure the messages
originated from me, so he asks me each day whether I did in fact author them,
but I do not respond. He lives according to the parts of the messages that seem
reasonable, which he would have done even if he hadn’t heard the messages, but
does not believe that the messages as a whole came from me, because much of
their content does not fit with my character, which he believes to be
benevolent, and because I never confirm directly to him that I gave the
messages to Luke. Though David tries to be responsible, he makes mistakes. He
faces hardships, but often there is no direct link between his mistakes and his
hardships. When he does wrong, I do not punish him in such a way that he links
the punishment directly to the offense. All along, I am hurt and angered by his
disregard for the messages I sought to communicate to him through Luke. When he
reaches 20 years of age, I finally open the veil and tell him that I did indeed
try to speak to him through Luke, and that because he refused to listen, I must
banish him forever from my family. “But wait, Dad, I asked you almost every day
if those messages were from you, and you never said a word. How was I supposed
to know?” “How dare you talk back to me, insolent son! Away with you, forever!”
Though the meaning of the parable is plain, I want to
highlight one aspect that is particularly troubling. A good parent does not
save up punishment for a later date; the punishment is meted out as soon as
possible after the infraction occurs in order to prevent further infractions.
The problem with hell is that it is delayed and final. You might say that God
indeed does discipline us as we go along, but often it is impossible to discern
whether a negative experience is the result of our sin, someone else’s sin,
God’s testing, Satan’s obstruction, or simple bad luck. During the past couple
years of doubt, I have experienced some anguish, but it seems to stem more from
the social consequences of disbelief than from a stricken conscience. I’ve
asked God to do something, anything to stop me if I’m headed in the right
direction. Maybe an accident I had in 2000 was the answer, or my recent bout
with pneumonia. These were not tragic, but even if they had been, what does it
all mean? There are no labels to go along with our experiences.
On the trumping of rationalism by postmodernism: I really do need to read some postmodern
thinkers, as much as they don't appeal to me. But whether or not advances have
been made since Jefferson, the point he made still stands: "He who knows
nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and
errors." I think we can all agree
that truth is truth, whether it was said 2,000 years ago, 200 years ago, or 2
days ago. And that's the bone I have to pick with postmodernism, which says
that truth is relative, and if it's true for you, fine. As I see it, for any
given question, there is only one truth, the truth that corresponds to reality.
(I'm aware of the relative nature of language and categories, having read
George Lakoff's "Women, Fire & Dangerous Things", but that's not
what I'm getting at.) I'm not saying we can always grasp reality, but reality
(truth) does exist independently of our ability to understand or express it.
I’m not so sure that postmodernism is going to last. The tension between
scientism and postmodernism pulls to one side and then the other over time.
Here’s a quote from the agnostic Sam Keen’s Hymns to an Unknown God, p.
105:
At the moment, a radical pluralism
traveling under the label “the postmodern mind ”is in fashion in intellectual
circles. The feeling is abroad that nothing adds up, that there is only
randomness. The contemporary style in the arts, in morality, and in politics is
to abandon the traditional search for coherence and settle for making collages.
Life has become MTV—one image, one experience placed alongside another without
any connection. All dots and no connecting lines.
Anyone seeking wisdom is well advised
to be skeptical about the latest styles. In intellectual life as in ladies’
clothes, there are regular swings in fashion. Hemlines go up and down. in one
decade we strive toward synthesis; in the next we deconstruct that synthesis.
First, we make one big picture out of little bits of data; then we smash the
picture and examine the component parts. Currently, empires are disintegrating,
syntheses are coming apart, walls are tumbling down, and diversity, chaos and
the rights of ethnic minorities are the news of the day. Day after tomorrow,
new ordering principles, empires, and unifying stories will emerge.
The trick is to find the right
balance between the two extremes. As the postmodern extreme is currently in
vogue, I’ll say some words in defense of synthesis, but I’m not advocating
going all the way in that direction. Enlightenment thinking may well be dead
among philosophers, but it is very much alive among scientists. What do
philosophers have to stand on? Abstract notions, churned and ruminated upon
until every imaginable possibility is entertained. Science, on the other hand,
is anchored to physical realities, which in turn form the basis for human
thought and culture.
A more scathing critique of postmodernism than E. O. Wilson's
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) would be hard to find.
Wilson, Pullitzer prize-winning author and retired professor of biology at
Harvard, is the world's premier living entomologist. His book deserves a
hearing by anyone who wishes to delve into the relationship between biological
sciences, the social sciences, and postmodernism. He also happens to lean
toward deism, though it seems he doesn't believe in a personal God (a
proposition I confess to be puzzling). I highly recommend that you read it
before continuing to declare that postmodernism has definitively trumped
Enlightenment thinking and empiricism. Biology, with special attention to the
history of evolution, is at the heart of his program for the grounding of all
the social sciences (psychology, sociology, economics, arts, ethics, religion)
in elemental physics. I imagine you're shaking your head already. But he's
serious, and he's not ignorant, and is described by even his critics as a
modest and warm person (though I think he sometimes stretches the limits of
empirical knowledge). Here's the cover blurb on the book:
One of our greatest living scientists
presents us with a work of majestic learning and ambition whose central
argument is at once path-clearing and as old as the Enlightenment. For
biologist Edward O. Wilson believes that all knowledge is intrinsically
unified, and that behind disciplines as diverse as physics and biology,
anthropology and the arts, lies a small number of natural laws, whose
interlocking he calls consilience. Using the natural sciences as his model,
Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the
mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles
underlying works of art from cave drawings to Lolita. Ranging the spectrum of
human knowledge and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is
science in the grand visionary tradition of Newton, Einstein, and Feynman.
Wilson grew up as a devout Southern Baptist but left the
faith as his awareness of the evidence for evolution mounted.
But most of all, Baptist theology
made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most
important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the
thoughts of God?" (p. 6). "Perhaps God did create all organisms,
including human beings, in finished form, in one stroke, and maybe it all
happened several thousand years ago. But if that is true, He also salted the
earth with false evidence in such endless and exquisite detail, and so
thoroughly from pole to pole, as to make us conclude first that life evolved,
and second that the process took billions of years. Surely Scripture tells us
He would not do that. The Prime Mover of the Old and New Testaments is
variously loving, magisterial, denying, thunderously angry, and mysterious, but
never tricky [with the possible exception of the story in which God sent a
lying spirit to the prophets--Ken] (p. 141).
Scientists, awake and held
responsible for what they say while awake, have not found postmodernism useful.
The postmodernist posture toward science in return is one of subversion. There
appears to be a provisional acceptance of gravity, the periodic table,
astrophysics, and similar stanchions of the external world, but in general the
scientific culture is viewed as just another way of knowing, and, moreover,
contrived mostly by European and American white males. It is tempting to
relegate postmodernism to history's curiosity cabinet alongside theosophy and
transcendental idealism, but it has seeped by now into the mainstream of the
social sciences and humanities... (p. 45).
It may be countered that Wilson is merely pursuing human
reason, blinded by his rejection of the God of the Bible. He has locked himself
into a materialist empiricism, willfully disregarding the unseen aspects of our
existence. Yet he is aware of these criticisms:
The unification agenda does not sit
well with a few professional philosophers. The subject I address they consider
their own, to be expressed in their language, their framework of formal
thought. They will draw this indictment: conflation, simplism, ontological
reductionism, scientism, and other sins made official by the hissing suffix. To
which I plead guilty, guilty, guilty. Now let us move on, thus. Philosophy
plays a vital role in intellectual synthesis, and it keeps us alive to the
power and continuity of thought through the centuries. It also peers into the
future to give shape to the unknown--and that has always been its vocation of
choice. One of its most distinguished practitioners, Alexander Rosenberg, has
recently argued that philosophy in fact addresses just two issues: the
questions that the sciences--physical, biological, and social--cannot answer,
and the reasons for that incapacity. 'Now of course," he concludes,
"there may not be any questions that the sciences cannot answer eventually,
in the long run, when all the facts are in, but certainly there are questions
that the sciences cannot answer yet.' This assessment is admirably clear and
honest and convincing. It neglects, however, the obvious fact that scientists
are equally qualified to judge what remains to be discovered, and why. There
has never been a better time for collaboration between scientists and
philosophers, especially where they meet in the borderlands between biology,
the social sciences, and the humanities. We are approaching a new age of
synthesis, when the testing of consiliences is the greatest of all intellectual
challenges. Philosophy, the contemplation of the unknown, is a shrinking
dominion. We have the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible
into science (pp. 11-12).
It has too often been the vocation of the Church to draw the
limits of science.
"To assert that the earth
revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of
a virgin."-- Cardinal Bellarmine (1615, during the trial of Galileo) (http://www.2think.org/quotes2.html).
Luther was of a similar mind. The Church earlier had denied
the sphericity of the earth. The Church has more recently denied the antiquity
of the earth, but is only slowly coming to accept the prediction of its
antiquity made by those who needed it for evolution to have a chance. Has the
Church ever fought mainstream science and been vindicated? Is the Church in any
less need of humility than the scientists? Would that both be humble and
gracious, yet able to come to firm conclusions when the evidence has spoken. Is
the word of nature, which cannot be counterfeited (though admittedly it can be
misinterpreted), any less reliable than the Scriptures, which, having been
written by men, could have been both counterfeited as the Word of God (as many
other texts have been) and subsequently misinterpreted by men? The most
depraved man can be convinced that 2+2=4 and be right. The most depraved man,
or the most humble man, can likewise be convinced by the evidence that
evolution is true. If you wish to assert that a person like Wilson who accepts
evolution or reductionism is blinded (whether by his pride, by Satan or by
God), then how can we be convinced that anything at all that is advanced by
unbelieving scientists, like Einstein, is of any consequence? Is it only when
their findings are at variance with the Bible that they are blinded?
In the following quote, Twain neglects diplomacy and
overstates his case through the use of “every”, but I think his underlying
message is well worth consideration by Christians who oppose mainstream
science:
The Church has opposed every
innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the
use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the
biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology
ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed
us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian
religion was born.
-- Mark Twain, a Biography in
http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/Quotes-sciencevsreligion.htm
I will include a quote from the book Can a Darwinian Be a
Christian? (2001) by philosopher of science Michael Ruse.
So much for the history. We can now
see that traditional Christianity does not demand a literalistic reading of
Genesis, and yet we now know why it is that a movement sprung up insisting on a
literal, anti-Darwinian reading of the sacred text. At one level, given the
scope of the discussion, our work is finished. We are not asking the question,
Is Darwinism true? Rather, having assumed the truth of (some version of)
Darwinism, we asking, Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The answer is very obvious
(with respect to Genesis) that one can be, whether one be a Catholic or a
Protestant. In fact, most Darwinians—and here I speak of all shades, from
ultras like Dawkins through qualifiers like Gould—would argue that the evidence
for evolution and for some significant role for selection sufficiently strong
that Christians ought to be Darwinians. Our powers sense and of reason are
given to us by God—they are crucially involved what it means to say that humans
are made in God’s image—and to turn our back on such firmly established science
is theologically unacceptable.
Not just theologically unacceptable,
of course, but also threatening science, in the sense that if one’s
Christianity is such that one can disregard such strong science, then one’s
religion allows a luxury of interpretation and denial that no scientist
(including the Darwinian) could permit without compromising important
standards. Indeed, it is worrisome
think that—because of a literal
reading of the Bible—we could have the live option of rejecting such
established science as Darwinism. Consider the position of Alvin Plantinga, a
Calvinist and America’s most distinguished living philosopher of religion, who
writes even of the hypothesis that the Earth is very old (something he accepts)
let alone of the hypothesis of evolution (something he does not accept), that
“[a] sensible person might be convinced, after careful and prayerful study of
the Scriptures, that what the Lord teaches there implies that this evidence is
misleading and that as a matter of fact the Earth really is very young. So far
as I can see, there is nothing to rule this out as automatically pathological,
or irrational or irresponsible or stupid” (Plantinga 1991b, 15).
At the risk of sounding intolerant,
any scientist—including any Darwinian—has to insist that there comes a point at
which discussion is closed. No sensible person could or should possibly be
convinced, after no matter how much careful and prayerful study of the
Scriptures, that the Earth is the centre of the universe with the sun going
around it in a circle. Such a belief is irresponsible and stupid, and if one’s
religion allows this, then the scientist (including the Darwinian) has to
reject the religion. It is on a par with native beliefs that the Great Spirit
will protect them from the white man’s bullets. And here is the crunch.
Darwinians today think their theory sufficiently well established that, if
Christianity is a religion which would even allow the reasonable possibility of
Darwinism’s rejection on grounds of conflict with literal readings of Scripture
(not that one would necessarily oneself reject it, but that one would think it
reasonable for someone to reject it), then Christianity itself ought to be
rejected.
Note that this opening of such a
possibility is not sanctioned or approved or endorsed by traditional
Catholicism or Protestantism. It is based on an idiosyncratic,
twentieth-century, American reading of the science/religion relationship. Of
course, Plantinga might reply that Darwinism does not fall into the same
category of well-established scientific theory as Copernicanism. But that is
another point, one not at issue here. The assumption we made at the beginning
of our discussion is that Darwinism in some form is well taken. Our exercise is
the exploring of the implications of that assumption for Christian faith.
Although, particularly given that it is Plantinga against whom I am now
arguing, I must stress again that disagreements between evolutionists, even
between Dawkins and Gould—the two loudest and most visible disputants about the
evolutionary process—pale beside their agreements and their shared appreciation
of the extent to which today we build on Darwin, while at the same time knowing
so much more than Darwin did.
On Philip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement: I’ve read Johnson’s Darwin on
Trial and Subversive Essays on Evolution & Law. He’s intelligent
and articulate, but I don’t agree with him. Neither he nor any other recent
creationist has had an ongoing habit of submitting journal articles for
mainstream scientific peer review, but prefer to reach the public through
books, where they have an eager audience. I’m trying to read through several
other books that Christians have loaned me, but I can’t read them all. I would
be willing to read Johnson’s book, however, if you would agree to let me send
you either E. O. Wilson’s book or Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientists’s Search for Common Ground Between
God and Evolution (1999). The latter might be better to start with, because
the former presumes an acceptance of evolution, whereas the latter makes a case
for evolution. Miller is a Catholic cell biologist at Brown University. A third
possibility would be Robert Price’s online book Beyond Born Again, which is the compelling criticism of
conservative Christianity that originally helped plunge me into doubt. You can
read it at
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/beyond_born_again/
On the reasons for my
indecisiveness and confusion: I was confused because I wanted
God’s revelation to be more complete, but now that I have accepted that I don’t
have to have the answers, I am much more at peace. You’re right in accusing the
Deists of Jefferson’s day of thinking they could know much of anything about
God through reason. I still think the Deists make a lot of good points
concerning the Bible and Christianity that ought to be heeded (e.g., Thomas
Paine’s The Age of Reason), but their
claims to knowledge about God through reason and nature were somewhat
presumptuous.
On God’s atoning and
self-sacrificial love as an answer to the problem of evil and suffering: This very
observation was what led me back to faith in Christ in August 2000 after
returning from Africa due to my doubts. I will not deny that is has a real appeal.
What makes it hard to accept is that, at least in the past, the knowledge of
this self-sacrificing nature of God (i.e., the gospel) has been known only to a
minority of peoples in history. If you accept the chronology of Hugh Ross,
humans have been around for 100,000 years, and the Native Americans were
completely isolated from the rest of the world. Let’s pretend we’re having this
conversation 5,000 years ago (in case you don’t accept the chronology of Hugh
Ross) as Native Americans. Would you say, without the knowledge of the cross,
“In this world, I could not believe in God unless God himself suffered and
found a way to redemption and hope through suffering”? If so, would you
conclude there is no God? If it was so important for humans to know of the self-sacrificing
nature of God, why did He wait 98,000 years to show his nature, and that only
to a few people, and why did He choose such a slow process as human
communication to get the word out? I am not here even bringing in the question
of hell, which is another troublesome matter, but only the knowledge of God’s
self-sacrificing nature, which you have admitted is necessary to believe in
God’s very existence. Why was God willing to permit an atheist-inducing state
of affairs to exist for so long?
On the moral nature of
debates over spiritual matters:
I agree to a point that moral character influences one’s reasoning and
ultimate position. There are many controversial issues that are not moral,
however. As I mentioned above, the Church wanted to make the orbiting of the
earth around the sun into a moral issue. Why? Because questioning the
traditional ideas meant questioning the authority of the Church (and the Bible,
interpreted very literally), and questioning the Church and the Bible was
tantamount to questioning God. In this respect, astronomy became as important
as the virgin birth. Now the Church no longer regards astronomy as a moral
issue (but see http://www.biblicalastronomer.org/index.htm,
hosted by a PhD astronomer who believes the sun goes around the earth,
supporting it biblically and scientifically), but by and large it opposes
evolution as immoral. Much of what traditional cultures believe is old wives’
tales and folk lore, but most Christians don’t believe God will judge Africans
for believing that lunar eclipses are caused by a cat stealing the moon, the
remedy for which is to beat on pans to scare the cat away (a remedy which
always “works”!). I talked with some Africans who said they couldn’t believe
the white man’s ideas about diseases being caused by invisible germs. I didn’t
try to get into a debate with them, knowing it would be futile.
The point is that people believe what they believe not simply
as a result of a moral choice, but because that’s what they’ve been taught, and
it seems right to them. It may happen that if you try to challenge what they
believe, they will make it into a moral issue, the more so because they cannot
support their view with evidence. Our brains are wired in such a way that we
give up long-held beliefs very reluctantly, whether or not the issue is moral.
Our conclusions are also influenced by our cultural milieu, e.g., the racially
influenced opinions on O. J. Simpson’s guilt. If I cannot communicate anything
else in this message, I want to communicate this: If the brain’s tendency to
hold tenaciously to ideas like the earth’s central position in the universe
requires no moral, demonic or spiritual explanation, then, by the principle of
Occam’s razor or parsimony, no moral or supernatural influence is necessary to
explain tenacious religious belief, nor should such explanations be invoked.
What is the difference between an African’s believing his parents’ assertion
that a cat steals the moon and his accepting their teaching that Allah is God
and Mohammed is His prophet? I reject unequivocally the idea that either of
these decisions can be painted in stark moral terms. Actions and attitudes, not
beliefs, reveal one’s moral character. There are good Muslims and bad ones,
good Christians and bad, good atheists and bad. If there is a personal God, I
am inclined to believe He is more pleased with a good atheist than a bad
Christian who believes all the right things. Is God so insecure that He can’t
put up with someone who doubts His existence and fails to praise Him? Is He
like a human who is angered by not getting his rightful due?
If it appears that science contradicts the Bible, and I
reject the Bible for this and other reasons, and the Bible is in reality not
true, then it is not immoral for me to reject the Bible, as indeed I should.
But for committed believers who reject the very possibility of a world in which
the Bible is not true, I must be blinded, which must stem from a moral flaw. No
matter what arguments I might bring to bear, the case is already closed, and I
am guilty. If the evidence for one’s position is not compelling, it’s easier to
paint the issue as a moral one, just as the cardinal did in the time of
Galileo. I have heard a fair amount of the moral/character side of the issue,
and I have sought God and examined my heart, but my heart still does not
believe. How, in very concrete terms, am I now to proceed?
On the necessity of
humbly opening ourselves to believe whatever God tells us is true. I interpret
this injunction as, "humbly opening ourselves to believe what the Bible
tells us is true." But I believe that the Bible, like every other
religious text, is the word of man and not of God. Far be it from me to
disbelieve God purposefully if He exists and has revealed Himself! How can I be
accused of rejecting what God tells me through the Bible if the Bible is not
true? It is men who insist the Bible is
true. Paul was a man, and Moses, and all the other authors of the Bible. Maybe
God did speak to them—verbally. But He hasn't told me that, and if He has, it
certainly hasn't been verbal. My family has told me that, my church and
generations of Christians have told us that. But it's still all man, not God. I
have a choice: will I take man's word for it that the Bible is from God, or
will I take man's word and my reason that it is not God's word? I am not rejecting what He told me, because
He has not told me anything specific about the Bible.
I do hope and pray that God will indeed speak to me if the
gospel is true. I think the main issue that has to be settled is that of
epistemology. For me, duly established scientific realities compel assent,
while words written by men millennia ago do not, at least without first being
subjected to rigorous scrutiny. The issue is not what is appealing, but what is
true. I did not wish into being the subjects of my doubt, but they are
realities. I did not want science and medicine to be more effective than prayer
for healing; I did not make a world which follows natural law without any real
indication of divine intervention, a world where the just suffer and the evil
prosper, and all we hear is silence; I did not want evolution to be true; I did
not want historical and ethical discrepancies to exist in the Bible; I did not
make these things up. It seems to me that an agnostic position is more faithful
to reality than those who deny these truths. I cannot understand how the words
of men written on scrolls long ago can be given more credence than the concrete
realities that surround us. If I receive news that my son has died, I may for a
time deny it, but if time passes and evidence continues to mount that he is
dead, I can no longer kid myself. The news is unpleasant and I do not want to
believe it, but it is true. Consider a quote from Charles Darwin’s
autobiography:
My father used to quote an
unanswerable argument, by which an old lady, a Mrs. Barlow, who suspected him
of unorthodoxy, hoped to convert him: -- ‘Doctor, I know that sugar is sweet in
my mouth, and I know that my redeemer liveth.’ (http://www.update.uu.se/%7Efbendz/library/cd_relig.htm)
On the certitude of
religious truth to the believer: Except for the word ‘objective’, I
agree with Robertson and Plummer's statement that “the certitude of religious
truth to the believer in the gospel is as complete and as 'objective'—equal in
degree, though different in kind—as the certitude of scientific truth to the
scientific mind.” I do not know whether their certitude exceeds that of
committed Muslims, but I do agree that many religious believers are sure of
what they believe. The problem is that certitude, even to the point of
martyrdom, proves nothing. If it did, it would prove every religion.
On the horrors
perpetrated by the French Revolutionists and Russian Marxists: I was being selective in order to
make my point. I was wrong to be one-sided. Though I did not state it
explicitly, I did intend to exclude the overly confident French and Russian
followers of the Enlightenment from my question. Let me repeat my question:
“Which has caused more woes in the history of the world? Certainty or the
admission that we just don't know?” Does not that exclude the above-mentioned
perpetrators of violence? I have no allegiance to them, any more than believers
have to the “Christian” Inquisition. That is perhaps one of the reasons I have
moved more toward an agnostic position. But even the deist Thomas Paine
denounced oppression in all its forms and boasted that he had never hurt a
soul. Though he initially supported the French Revolution, he opposed it when
it got out of hand, for which he was put into prison. Liberal Christians,
deists and rationalists of many stripes have long stood against violence and oppression,
even when conservative have Christians turned a blind eye. And certainly the
reverse has been true. My impression is that, ideologically, most rationalists
are supporters of human rights. I don’t buy the claim that humanistic crime
fulfills the inner logic of rationalism. Rationalism in general is opposed to
crime. Christianity is opposed to crime. We could look to the words of Luther
and Calvin and Moses to show that the inner logic of biblical theism supports
persecution in the name of God. We could look at Stalin and others to show that
the inner logic of rationalism supports persecution in the name of rationalism.
Neither is true. What does the “inner logic” of a worldview mean? Sometimes it
can be whatever the opponents of that worldview want it to mean.
I don’t know whether Hitler’s Germany could be called an
Enlightenment society. Consider these words by Hitler in a speech delivered at Munich,
April 12, 1922; from Norman H. Baynes, ed., The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922-August 1939, Volume
1, Oxford University Press, 1942, pp. 19-20. I don’t accept Hitler’s claim to
be a true Christian, but he at least pressed Christian religion into the
service of tribalism.
My feeling as a Christian points me
to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in
loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what
they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was
greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian
and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last
rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood
of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.
Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more
profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed
his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be
cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice. And as a
man I have the duty to see to it that human society does not suffer the same
catastrophic collapse as did the civilization of the ancient world some two
thousand years ago—a civilization which was driven to its ruin through this
same Jewish people.
That Jesus advocated love toward one’s enemies is
commendable, but how is it any more commendable than what others have said,
such as Gandhi, in their condemnation of violence? Consider these variations on
the Golden Rule, from various traditions
(http://www.interfaithalliance-nc.org/ethical_framework/golden_rule.html):
Hinduism: "This is the sum of duty. Do not unto
others that which would cause you pain if done to you." Mahabharrata
5:1517
Judaism:
(Positive) "You shall love your neighbor as
yourself." Bible, Leviticus 19.18
(Negative) "What is hateful to you, do not do to
others." Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a
Taoism: "Regard your neighbor's gain as your own
gain and your neighbor's loss as your own loss." T'ai Shang Kan Ying P'ien
Buddhism: "Hurt not others in ways that you
yourself would find hurtful." Udana-Varga, 5:18
Zoroastrianism: "That nature alone is good which
refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good for itself."
Dadistan -I-Dinik, 94:5
Confucianism: "Tsekung asked, Is there one word
that can serve as a principal of conduct for life? Confucius replied, It is the
word shu -- reciprocity: Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to
you." Analects 15.23 (ca 500BC)
Christianity: "In everything, do to others as you
would have them do to you." Bible, Matthew 7.12
Islam: "Act with people the way you would like
them to act with you". Al - Malati, Kitab at - Tanbih, Attributed to
Muhamad
Jainism: "One should treat all beings as he
himself would be treated." Agamas, Sutrakritanga 1.10, 1-3
Sikhism: "Treat others as thou wouldst be treated
thyself." Adi Granth
African Traditional: "One going to take a pointed
stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it
hurts." Yoruba proverb (Cantoria)
Native American: "Respect for all life is the
foundation." The Great Law of Peace
Baha'I: "Desire not for anyone the things that ye
would not desire for yourselves." Baha Ullah LXVI
Secular: "Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you"
Secular Modern Variation: "Do unto others as they
would want done unto them." This modern variation recognizes that all
people are different and may not want the same things done to them. Therefore
it requires us to do to people, not what we would want them to do to us, but
what they would want us to do to them, within the boundaries of reason and good
sense.
Evidently humanity is capable of generating high ideals, but
no philosophy has succeeded in holding its adherents to those ideals.
Rationalism has ideals, but unlike Christianity makes few claims about its
ability to hold its followers to those ideals. Christianity says that the Holy
Spirit indwells believers, imparting the fruits of the Spirit, one of which is
peace.
How are we to interpret the ideal “Love your enemy” when it
comes to the likes of bin Ladin? Christianity does not offer any more concrete
answers to these questions than does rationalism. After 9/11 I heard many
Christians calling for extreme counter measures, but the reactions of my few
non-Christian acquaintances were much more measured. So what exactly does “Love
your enemy” mean? The world is more complicated than that, and it appears we
left on our own to sort out the details. The differences of opinion among
sincere Christian pacifists and non-pacifists show that the biblical
prescriptions and the aid of the Spirit do not lend themselves to consensus.
Perhaps we can call this a draw and lay the matter to rest by
considering these observations of E. O. Wilson:
Religious exclusion and bigotry arise
from tribalism, the belief in the innate superiority and special status of the
in-group. Tribalism cannot be blamed on religion [I apologize for doing
so—Ken]. The same causal sequence gave rise to totalitarian ideologies. The
pagan corpus mysticum of Nazism and the class-warfare doctrine of
Marxism-Leninism, both essentially dogmas of religions without God, were put to
the service of tribalism, not the reverse. Neither would have been so fervently
embraced if their devotees had not thought themselves chosen people, virtuous
in their mission, surrounded by wicked enemies, and conquerors by right of
blood and destiny. Mary Wollstonecraft correctly said, of male domination but
extensible to all human behavior, ‘No man chooses evil because it is evil; he
only mistakes it for happiness, which is the good he seeks.” (in Consilience,
pp. 267-68)
On being challenged as
to the reality of Calvin and Luther’s violence: There is a
carefully documented piece at http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ247.HTM
from which I have taken the following excerpts. I stand by my assertion, though
with the qualification that Calvin was directly responsible for the deaths of
heretics (58, including most notoriously Severitus), while Luther was only
indirectly responsible for many thousands of deaths through his invective and
backing of the Peasants’ Revolt. Protestants laud Luther and Calvin as
righteous Spirit-filled reformers, but castigate bin Ladin as evil. Samson, who
may have killed as many people in a pagan temple as bin Ladin killed in New
York, could be considered one of the first suicide terrorists, but he was a
hero to Jews and Christians. How can we say bin Ladin is evil without saying
the same of Samson and many of the reformers? It all depends on who the enemy
is and what the cause is. I, along with most rationalists I’ve read, deplore it
all. (Communism and Fascism too.)
7. Calvin
A. General
"In the preface to the Institutes he admitted the
right of the government to put heretics to death . . . He thought that
Christians should hate the enemies of God . . . Those who defended heretics . .
. should be equally punished." (115:178)
During Calvin's reign in Geneva, between 1542 and
1546, "58 persons were put to death for heresy." (122:473)
"While he did not directly recommend the use of
the death penalty for blasphemy, he defended its use among the Jews."
(123:102)
In defense of stoning false prophets, Calvin observes:
"The father should not spare his son . . . nor
the husband his own wife. If he has some friend who is as dear to him as his
own life, let him put him to death." (123:107/59)
He talks of the execution of Catholics, but, like
Luther, did not readily attempt to act on his rhetoric:
"Persons who persist in the superstitions of the
Roman Antichrist . . . deserve to be repressed by the sword." (123:96/60)
B. James Gruet
In January, 1547 in Calvin's Geneva, one James Gruet,
a kind of free-thinker of dubious morals, was alleged to have posted a note
which implied that Calvin should leave the city:
"He was at once arrested and a house to house
search made for his accomplices. This method failed to reveal anything except
that Gruet had written on one of Calvin's tracts the words 'all rubbish.' The
judges put him to the rack twice a day, morning and evening, for a whole month
. . . He was sentenced to death for blasphemy and beheaded on July 26, 1547 . .
. Evangelical freedom had now arrived at the point where its champions took a
man's life . . . merely for writing a lampoon!" (114:176/61)
Durant gives further detail:
"Half dead, he was tied to a stake, his feet were
nailed to it, and his head was cut off." (122:479)
C. Comparet Brothers
In May 1555, a drunken riot occurred, precipitated by
a group which objected to the excess of foreign refugees in Geneva. Dissidents
of Calvin were termed "Libertines."
"The brothers Comparet, two humble boatmen, were
executed and pieces of their dismembered bodies nailed on the city gates."
(46:192)
"The Comparet brothers, with Calvin's approval,
were tortured . . . Under the rack they said the riot had . . . been
premeditated, but denied this again before their execution. A number, including
Francois Berthelier, were beheaded . . . Several others were banished, and the
wives of the condemned were likewise driven from the city." (123:48)
"All the other leaders of the party took flight
and were sentenced to death in their absence." (46:192)
D. Michael Servetus
The most infamous execution in Geneva was that of
Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician who denied the Trinity, and was a sort of
Gnostic pantheist. He had met Calvin, and the latter declared on February 13,
1547 in a letter to Farel:
"If he comes, provided my authority prevails I
will not suffer him to return home alive." (46:186)
"With Calvin's knowledge and probably at his
instigation, . . . William Trie, of Geneva, denounced Servetus to the Catholic
Inquisition at Vienne and forwarded the material sent by the heretic to
Calvin." (114:177)
Daniel-Rops says of this episode, that
"Protestant historians refer to it with embarrassment." (46:187)
"The fact cannot be dodged that Calvin delivered
Servetus to the Inquisition,and then tried either by a lie or a subterfuge to
cover his part in the matter." (123:42)
"Upon arriving at Geneva on August 13, 1553, he
was detected almost immediately . . . through Calvin's instigation he was
arrested and put in prison. Calvin . . . hoped for his execution."
(123:42)
"On August 20 he wrote to Farel:
" 'I hope that Servetus will be condemned to
death, but I should like him to be spared the worst part of the punishment,'
meaning the fire." (46:190)
This is the most that can be said about Calvin's
"mercy" in this case.
"On October 26, the Council ordered that he be
burned alive on the following day . . . That he desired Servetus' death . . .
is clear." (123:44)
"Calvin's observations on this appalling death
make horrifying reading: . . .
"'He showed the dumb stupidity of a beast . . .
He went on bellowing . . . in the Spanish fashion: "Misericordias!" .
. .'" (46:190-91)
Henry Hallam, the Protestant historian, gave the
following opinion:
"Servetus, in fact, was burned not so much for
his heresies, as for personal offense he had several years before given to
Calvin . . . which seems to have exasperated the great reformer's temper, so as
to make him resolve on what he afterwards executed . . . Thus, in the second
period of the Reformation, those ominous symptoms which had appeared in its
earliest stage, disunion, virulence, bigotry, intolerance, . . . grew more
inveterate and incurable." (62)
" 'Servetus's death, for which Calvin bears much of
the responsibility,' writes Wendel, 'marked the reformer with a bloody stigma
which nothing has been able to efface.'" (46:191)
This stigma, however, is shared by many other
"reformers", who commended this atrocious vendetta:
"Melanchthon, in a letter to Calvin and
Bullinger, gave 'thanks to the Son of God' . . . and called the burning 'a
pious and memorable example to all posterity.' Bucer declared from his pulpit
in Strasbourg that Servetus had deserved to be disemboweled and torn to pieces.
Bullinger, generally humane, agreed that civil magistrates must punish
blasphemy with death." (122:484)
In 1554 Calvin wrote the treatise Against the Errors
of Servetus, in which he tried to justify his cruel action:
"Many people have accused me of such ferocious cruelty
that (they allege) I would like to kill again the man I have destroyed. Not
only am I indifferent to their comments, but I rejoice in the fact that they
spit in my face." (46:191)
This was Calvin's attitude towards the punishment and
execution of heretics. In what way, I submit, is he morally any better than
those who committed atrocities by means of the Inquisition?
1. Luther:
Revolutionary Invective / The Peasants' Revolt
"The Pope and the Cardinals . . . since they are
blasphemers, their tongues ought to be torn out through the back of their
necks, and nailed to the gallows!" (92:94/35)
"It were better that every bishop were murdered .
. . than that one soul should be destroyed . . . If they will not hear God's
Word . . . what do they better deserve than a strong uprising which will sweep
them from the earth? And we would smile did it happen. All who contribute body,
goods . . . that the rule of the bishops may be destroyed are God's dear
children and true Christians." (122:377/36)
Will Durant asserts:
"Luther . . . emitted an angry roar that was
almost a tocsin of revolution" (122:377). These roars were numerous:
"If you understand the Gospel rightly, I beseech
you not to believe that it can be carried on without tumult, scandal, sedition
. . . The word of God is a sword, is war, is ruin, is scandal . . ."
(109:41/37)
"If we punish thieves with the gallows . . . why
do we not still more attack with every kind of weapon . . . these Cardinals,
these Popes, and that whole abomination of the Romish Sodom . . . why do we not
wash our hands in their blood?" (109:41/38)
"If I had all the Franciscan friars in one house,
I would set fire to it . . . To the fire with them!" (51;v.6:247/39)
Jesuit Luther scholar Hartmann Grisar, exercising all
charity and any benefit of the doubt possible in interpreting such statements
as these, writes:
"No one . . . will be so foolish to believe that
it was really his intention to kill the Catholic clergy and monks. His
bloodthirsty demands were but the violent outbursts of his own deep inward
intolerance." (51;v.6:247)
Let's hope Grisar is right, for Luther's sake. On the
other hand, the rhetoric is very explicit and was circulated widely in all of
Germany and elsewhere. At any rate, Luther should have known how people would
react to such wild, reckless statements, and therefore largely bears
responsibility for the Peasants' Revolt that broke out in Germany, not
coincidentally, in 1525. This is frankly admitted by virtually all historians
of the period, including fervent Protestants. Grisar agrees:
"But who was it who was responsible for having
provoked the war? Occasional counsels to . . . self-restraint . . . were indeed
given by Luther from time to time . . . but . . . they are drowned in the din
of his controversial invective . . . If his reforms were rejected then it was
to be wished that monasteries and foundations `were all reduced to one great
heap of ashes' (40). 'A grand destruction of all the monasteries, etc., would
be the best reformation.'" (51;v.6:248/41)
"It is a duty to suppress the Pope by
force." (51;v.6:245/42)
"Some . . . will not treat our gospel rightly;
but have we not gibbets, wheels, swords, and knives? Those who are obdurate can
be brought to reason." (111;v.3:266/43)
"The spiritual powers . . . also the temporal
ones, will have to succumb to the Gospel, either through love or through force,
as is clearly proved by all Biblical history." (111;v.3:267/44)
Luther's friend, the minor "reformer"
Wolfgang Capito, warned Luther on December 4, 1520 about his bone-chilling
invective:
"You are frightening away from you your
supporters by your constant reference to troops and arms. We can easily enough
throw everything into confusion, but it will not be in our power, believe me,
to restore things to peace and order." (111;v.3:136)
Capito was in this instance wise, almost a prophet,
but unsuccessful at persuasion. After the Peasants' Revolt broke out, Luther
advised the princes to kill the peasants in any fashion necessary, en masse,
and the usual estimates are of 100,000 resultant deaths. This episode is widely
acknowledged as a blot on Luther's career. Durant maintains:
"The peasants had a case against
him. He had not only predicted social revolution, he had said he would not be
displeased by it . . . even if men washed their hands in episcopal blood . . .
He had made no protest against the secular appropriation of ecclesiastical
property . . . The peasants felt that the new religion had sanctified their
cause, had aroused them to hope and action, and had deserted them in the hour
of decision . . . Many of them, or their children . . . returned to the
Catholic fold." (122:394-5)
Picking up Where Luther Let us Down (Charles
Henderson) in http://christianity.about.com/library/weekly/aa102900a.htm:
Luther believed that ordinary citizens did not have a
right to overturn their own government, however just the cause. So Luther sided
with the German princes in using force against an uprising of the peasants in
1525. Luther even wrote a tract against what he called, "The Murderous and
Thieving Hordes of Peasants." He urged using unrestrained violence in
putting the peasants down.
If the peasant is in open rebellion,
then he is outside the law of God, for rebellion is not simply murder, but it
is like a great fire which attacks and lays waste a whole land. Thus, rebellion
brings with it a land full of murder and bloodshed, makes widows and orphans,
and turns everything upside down. Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay,
and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous,
hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog.
If you don't strike him, he will strike you. These times are so extraordinary
that a prince can win heaven more easily by bloodshed than by prayer.
Following Luther's words, the princes struck back
unmercifully against the peasants, wiping out tens of thousands of them in a
frenzy of killing.
Even worse than his advice with
respect to the peasants, were Luther's views about the Jews. Luther believed
that the German princes should use their power against the Jewish minority
living in Germany. He urged his German allies to drive Jewish people from their
homes, burn their synagogues and books, and institute total segregation in the
land. [This suggests that Hitler’s campaign against the Jews was not without
precedent, stoking long-held anti-Semitic prejudices held by Christians--Ken]
On being questioned as
to whether I was ever a true believer, having counted on my own righteousness: While I was a believer I never touted my
virtues in the way I did in my last message, and I rarely felt I was
sacrificing to live a godly life (except, perhaps, when I had to explain to my
peers as a senior in high school why I didn’t want to go to the prom!). As a teenager
I was certainly self-righteous in many ways, and perhaps I never completely
grew out of it, but I grew to understand that my decisions to live a “straight”
life had been made easy for me by my upbringing, and my attitude toward
“sinners” gradually changed from one of self-righteousness to understanding and
sympathy. I often thought about children growing up in poverty in inner cities,
untended and destined to join gangs. When I was younger, I would have
considered them to be fully responsible for their choices, but as time went on,
I realized how much privilege I had received and could no longer regard them
with such disdain or myself with such pride.
I confess it was inappropriate to list my “virtues” in my
last message. Looking back, my motivation was somewhat defensive, trying to
combat the notion prevalent among many Christians that the reason people don’t
believe is so they can have control of their own lives. I remember as a young
boy asking an adult why some people don’t believe in God. He gave the answer
I’ve heard from many others since: They don’t believe so they can live in sin.
I accepted that answer at the time. Now that I’m on the other side, I have
become overly defensive, not wanting to be seen in that light. This anecdote at
http://members.aol.com/pointcpt/wp/pcp5.html shows the kind of outlook I want
to dispel as others ponder my unbelief:
Tony Campolo tells the story of a
young man who visited him with questions and concerns that were shaking his
Christian beliefs. Science classes, among other classes he had been taking,
seemed to allow no place for God. "Cut the ____," Campolo
interrupted, "What's your sex life been like?" The student was at
first shocked by Tony's response but eventually he confessed that he was
sleeping with at least two women a week.
Campolo had worked with enough people to believe that usually
the basic reason one rejects one's beliefs is because of moral reasons like
this. If we want to live a certain way and our beliefs say that living this way
is wrong or harmful or that God is displeased or hurt by our doing so, or that
we face judgment for doing so, then very often we will try to get rid of the
belief that makes us feel guilty.
Perhaps not all believers would share Campolo’s views. But
the second paragraph seems incredible to me. What he’s saying is that people know
what the truth is, they know they’ll be punished forever if they deny
it, but they deny it anyway so they can avoid feeling guilty for the things
they do in this short life. If they know it’s true, pretending that it isn’t
true cannot relieve their conscience. Their conscience can only be relieved if
they truly believe it’s not true. I would never have come to this place if I
did not feel, in the deepest part of me, that Christianity is not true. The very
last thing I want is to incur against myself the unquenchable wrath of God.
In any case, this is a lose-lose situation for me. If I go
off and sow my wild oats, I give fodder to those who think like Campolo. If I
attempt to show how I don’t fit this stereotype, I am considered a
never-converted Pharisee. It’s useless to try to justify myself to those who
are convinced that unbelief is a symptom of an underlying moral flaw.
Whether or not I was ever truly saved is a question that can
concern only believers. As for me, I don’t believe in hell, and I’m agnostic
about heaven, so salvation is a moot point. What matters is, how can I live
this life to the full, making wise choices for my family and contributing to
the well-being of others, which in the long run contributes to my own
well-being? I was captivated by a Unitarian-Universalist bumper sticker I saw
last year: “I believe in life before death.” In other words, we are not living
out a dress rehearsal; this is the real show.
But since believers are interested in the question of my
prior salvation, I will attempt to address it here. I believed I was saved, not
on the basis of my own righteousness, but on the basis of Christ’s shed blood,
His righteous atonement for me on the cross. This belief was at the core of my
being. I remember in eighth grade, lying awake in bed at Kent Academy in
Cantoria, pouring my heart out to God, praising Him with all that was in me,
hungering over the Bible, praying for my unsaved friends, confessing my sins,
and sharing my faith with enthusiasm with all those around me as I discovered
the excitement of a relationship with the God who made the universe. I was not
always as fervent in subsequent years, but my relationship with Christ remained
my reason for living. My prayer life, as for all Christians, alternated between
dry spells (expressed so well in Keith Green’s moving song, “My eyes are dry,
my faith is old, my heart is hard, my prayers are cold. Soften it up with oil
and wine. The oil is You, Your Spirit of love, please wash me anew in the wine
of your love.”) and times when I felt that a power greater than that of Niagara
Falls was washing through my soul as I worshiped God. If it helps some maintain
a consistent Calvinistic theology, they’re free to consider that I was never
saved, but where does that leave the doctrine of the assurance of salvation? If
I, who was assured of salvation by grace and not by works, who experienced what
I thought was an intimate relationship with God, and sought to honor Him by
bringing His Word to those who didn’t have it—if I turned out never to have
been a genuine Christian, then what assurance does any believer have that s/he
is truly saved? There must always lurk a fear that, if Ken was not really
saved, then maybe someday I too may show that I am not among the chosen,
however firmly I believe I am saved today. In short, I am not secure.
On the Tower of Babel
as the origin of the diversity of human languages: The principle of Occam’s razor casts this
explanation into doubt. If French, Italian and Spanish can evolve from Latin in
1,000 years, then no supernatural event is needed to explain the evolution of
all languages over a period of at some 100,000 years. If the laws of
gravitation and momentum can explain the steady course of the planets, then we
do not need to posit magnetism or a divine hand that continually fine-tunes
their orbit. Once a good naturalistic explanation is found for a phenomenon, it
only complicates matters to look any further. But for Moses, who did not know
about long-term linguistic evolution, the Babel story was a good explanation.
On Matthew’s account of
those who came out of their graves after Jesus’ crucifixion: Consider the
following ramifications of the story. Add to it Thomas Paine’s query concerning
the fate of those who came out of the graves only to find that their spouse had
married someone else.
Library: Magazines: The Skeptical
Review: 1992: Number One: What Happened to the Resurrected Saints?
What Happened to the Resurrected
Saints?
Ed Babinski
Two short verses in Matthew raise
perhaps the most serious questions that can be put to a literal interpretation
of the resurrection stories. Matthew said that at the moment of Jesus' death
"the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep
were raised; and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered
into the holy city and appeared unto many" (27:52-53). This is an
account of a miracle unsurpassed anywhere else in the gospels. It makes the
postresurrection appearing of Jesus "to above five hundred brethren at
once" (1 Cor. 15:6)
appear tame in comparison.
In this case, many saints were raised and appeared to
many. Unlike the accounts of Jesus raising Lazarus or the synagogue ruler's
daughter or Jesus himself being raised, this depicts saints dead for way over
"three days" being raised. And, from the phrase, "they entered
the holy city and appeared to many," it is possible to infer that these
many raised saints showed themselves to many who were not believers! Yet
Josephus, who wrote a history of Jerusalem both prior to and after her fall,
i.e., forty years after the death of Jesus, knew of Jesus but nothing of this
raising of many and appearing to many. Of this greatest of all miracles, not a
rumor appears in the works of Josephus or of any other ancient author. Surely
at least one of the many raised out of those many emptied tombs was still alive
just prior to Josephus's time, amazing many. Or at least many who had seen
those many saints were still repeating the tale. Although people may have
doubted that Jesus raised a few people while he was still alive and although
"some doubted" Jesus' own resurrection (Matt. 28:17), who could
fail to have been impressed by many risen saints appearing to many? How also
could Peter have neglected to mention them in his Jerusalem speech a mere fifty
days after they "appeared to many in the holy city"? Surely their
appearance must have been foremost on everyone's mind. So why didn't Paul
mention such a thing in his letters, our earliest sources? Why did the women
who visited the "empty tomb" on Sunday morning not take notice that
many other tombs were likewise open? Why didn't the visitors to Jesus' tomb
mention that they had met or seen many raised saints in that vicinity, meeting
them on the way to Jesus' tomb or on the way back to town? Why did the apostles
disbelieve the first reports of Jesus' resurrection when a mass exit from the
tombs had accompanied his resurrection? Why didn't Matthew know how many raised
saints there were? Why couldn't he name a single one or a single person to whom
they had appeared? How did Matthew know that these saints had come out of their
tombs? That would be more than anyone had seen in the case of Jesus'
resurrection.
Let's look at the implications of some of these
questions. According to the literal Greek in Matthew 27:50-53, the
tombs were opened and the saints were "raised" at the instant of
Jesus' death, but they entered the city over a day later! Apparently, neither
Joseph of Arimathea nor Nicodemus, while burying Jesus (Jn. 19:38-40), chanced to
marvel at all the opened graves and the raised saints in them waiting patiently
for Sunday morning. The women in Matthew's account were likewise oblivious to
the many graves lying opened by the earthquake and the saints supposedly just
beginning to leave the cemetery for town the same morning the women were
arriving. And the other gospels were silent on this major miracle involving
many! Paul was silent on this matter in 1 Corinthians 15, where he
discussed the resurrection at great length! Peter was silent on the matter in
his speech recorded in Acts 2,
delivered a mere 50 days after the many saints entered the city and appeared to
many! Surely the "gift of tongues" would pale in miraculous
significance compared to the "raising of the many who appeared to
many." Yet Peter said nothing about the latter. We are not talking about
just the apostles, like Peter, being witnesses to just the resurrection of
Jesus; we are talking about many people who had witnessed many saints being
raised, and some of these "many" witnesses were surely present in the
audience Peter preached to that morning. So why would he have had to speak at
length to convince them that the resurrection of one man had happened? Having
witnessed the resurrection of many, they would have readily accepted the claim
that one man had been resurrected.
And what about the raised saints themselves? Wouldn't
they have made terrific evangelists? But we don't read anything about that;
instead, we have silence. We admit that to argue from silence is not equivalent
to disproof; however, it is not the silence of extrabiblical sources that makes
us doubt this account of multiple resurrections. It is the silence of other
biblical authors that is generating our doubt.
A few extrabiblical sources did expand Matthew's tale
of the many raised saints. These expansions were composed over one hundred
years after Matthew's gospel was written. Remarkably, they even mentioned the
names of some of the "many saints" raised, like Simeon and his sons,
Adam and Eve, the patriarchs and prophets, etc., names that Matthew neglected
to include. Of course, these expansions of the two extraordinary verses in
Matthew and the list of names are found only in apocryphal gospels, which are
full of all sorts of marvelous miracles that even surpass the ones attributed
to Jesus in the four gospels that the church now endorses (like the story of
the talking cross that followed Jesus out of his tomb in the Gospel of Peter).
Perhaps Matthew, like the authors of the apocryphal
gospels, collected tales he had heard from other believers and/or composed
gospel fictions. Perhaps when he composed those two short verses, he was only
giving mythical form to the belief that "the resuscitation of the
righteous was assigned to the first appearance of the Messiah, in accordance
with the Jewish ideas" (D. F. Strauss, The Life of
Jesus Critically Examined). He was also indulging in miracle
enhancement: multiplying signs and wonders said to accompany Jesus' death and
resurrection, i.e., Matthew's unique account of two earthquakes, one that
opened the tombs of the many saints (at Jesus' death) and one that moved the
stone to open Jesus' tomb (Easter morning). The other gospel writers remarkably
neglected to mention that even one earthquake took place. That leaves Matthew's
account on doubly shaky ground. Neither did Matthew use the most precise words
to depict this wonder, because the verses state, literally, that the saints
were raised at the time of Jesus' death and then lay around in their tombs for
a day and a halfbefore entering the city! That absurdity arises from what
appears to be a sloppy interpolation of the phrase "after his
resurrection":
And Jesus cried again with a loud
voice, and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the veil of the temple was rent
in two from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake; and the rocks were
rent; and the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints that had fallen
asleep were raised: and coming forth out of the tombs after his resurrection
they entered into the holy city and appeared unto many (27:50-53).
The verses make more sense without
that phrase than with it. Without it, they would simply state that the raised
saints immediately entered the city upon Jesus' death. But some Christian
copyist, or perhaps the gospel's chief editor, felt obligated to add the phrase
"after his resurrection" to ensure the priority of Jesus'
resurrection, regardless of the literal consequences.
People who believe that many tombs were opened and
that many saints appeared to many will of course have little trouble also
believing that Jesus was resurrected. However, those of us who doubt the story
of the many raised saints see in it a reflection of the kind of blind faith
that made the story of Jesus' resurrection catch on in the first place.
(Ed Babinski's address is 109 Burwood Drive,
Simpsonville, SC 29681-8768.)
Charles Templeton was Billy Graham’s effective evangelistic
partner during the early years of Graham’s public ministry. He later gave up
the ministry and became an agnostic. I leave you with this anecdote from
Babinski’s “Leaving the Fold,” p. 291:
During this period, Templeton spoke
at Yale for a week, meeting afterwards with various students. One was the
outstanding man in the senior class. He was also the captain of the debating
team and an avowed atheist. The two of them debated the truth of Christianity
alone in a borrowed office. At the end neither had convinced the other. The
student conceded, however, that Templeton had made a “hell of a good case.”
Templeton’s first reaction was
elation, but he realized that he too had a concession to make—his arguments no
longer convinced himself. “In the heat of discussion I believed them, but,
alone, I know that I had been role-playing.”