Monday, March 21, 2022

Part III: A clash of ideas: books summaries from a period of searching

Faith, Doubt and Anti-Metanoia series, part III

For context, start at the introduction.


The post includes my personal summaries of four books and an essay that I read while I was searching for the truth of Christianity:

  • “On Miracles,” by David Hume (the essay)
  • “Mere Christianity,” by C. S. Lewis
  • “The Meaning of Human Existence,” by E. O. Wilson
  • “Jesus: The Human Face of God,” by Jay Parini
  • “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” by Stephen Greenblatt


Painting of David Hume by Allan Ramsay (public domain) and photography of C. S. Lewis by Arthur Strong (fair use of non-free media). 


My selection intentionally aims to juxtapose these books as glimpses into a grand clash of ideas, but this collection is more an accident of my own history of reading than a representative sample of the best thought on this subject. I think all these works are interesting and useful to the person who searches for the truth of Christianity.


For a Christian, to read Hume’s “On Miracles” is to invite Doubt into your heart, then to offer Doubt a coffee and a comfortable chair. Such an exercise could be considered an application of Venkatesh Roa’s idea of “Accelerating into a Crash,” where the “crash” is the destruction of one’s own faith.


“Mere Christianity” follows second, in the spirit of abject contrast and the celebration of contradiction. The counsel of C. S. Lewis does what it can to cause the reverse kind of “crash” — a gain of saving faith — for the modern or early post-modern person. Lewis’ ideas have been highly influential in the kind of churches that I attended. 


The pendulum swings back to atheism with the work of the celebrated biologist E. O. Wilson, “The Meaning of Human Existence.” Can any work deliver on such a grandiose title? Notice that my summary (written in 2015) reeks of "Eternalist" thinking, when I demand more from "the meaning of life" than Wilson offers. "Eternalism," in this sense, is considering that meanings are fixed and well-defined. For example, an Eternalist would consider that "the meaning of life" is a particular thing that could be summarized in a single sentence. (The Westminster Catechism does this in its first question-answer pair.) This blog series will talk a lot more about Eternalism in Part VI, “On Meaningness,” and Parts VII through X.


As if to proffer a compromise, “Jesus: The Human Face of God” by Jay Parini sets aside questions of whether or not the Bible is factually accurate and deliberately focuses on restoring a degree of myth to our understanding of Jesus and appreciating the mythical aspects. 


It almost doesn’t fit in with the other books, but “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” by Stephen Greenblatt is a great book and it earns its place by contrasting a hypocritical 15th century Christianity with both Epicurean philosophy from the 1st century BC and the modern world. This book also inspired the title of my album “Electrons and Void.”


After absorbing all these works, what’s the conclusion? Which idea wins in your mind? I already revealed my eventual siding with the atheists since late 2016, but I think it’s useful to enter into the details. Not every battle in the war goes the same way, and many considerably more interesting questions are raise beyond the binary “Does god exist?” 


On Miracles

By David Hume

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Miracles

Full text available at https://davidhume.org/texts/e/10 

Summary written around 2016


Hume argues that we should not accept reports of miracles, when a "miracle" is defined as a transgression of the laws of nature. He considers that the balance of probabilities is always in favor of a report of miracles being false because the evidence in favor of the natural laws always holding is so strong. Furthermore, because the reporting of miracles is fun, people may be less critical of their observations. 


One way of approaching a potential miracle is to ask a question based on probability. To use Jesus' resurrection as an example: "Which is MORE miraculous: Jesus rising from the dead, or finding the New Testament, the church and the minor byproducts of Jesus' life as they are, supposing that he did not rise?"


In one view, Hume's argument seems circular: each reported instance of miracles must be wrong, because the natural laws are so well established that we can say with confidence that, in general, miracles don't happen. Maybe we can refine Hume's argument as: our prior belief for miracles is so low, that the evidence required for us to accept one as being true is enormous. And that evidence comes as human testimony from a few witnesses which is weaker than the human testimony of many witnesses and from one's direct experience. But the Black Swan idea is at play here, that we shouldn't act based solely on probabilities because the consequences are enormous in the case of Jesus' resurrection. 


Some parts of Hume's argument are not convincing, for example, he seems to think that people wouldn't accept miracles if they were better informed; the experiment of common internet access has invalidated this premise. 


Given Hume's eloquence in this work, I find it ironic that he should dismiss those who promulgate miracles with eloquent words:  “Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding.”


Mere Christianity

By C. S. Lewis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_Christianity 

Full text available at http://samizdat.qc.ca/vc/pdfs/MereChristianity_CSL.pdf 

Summary written around 2015


Lewis describes his opinion of the minimal and essential Christianity, explicitly leaving out aspects that distinguish one denomination from another. He begins by presenting a ground-up philosophy and apologetic case for the truth of Christianity. Essentially, he argues that objective morality leads us to belief in a god (unconvincingly) and that the gospels leave us with compelling evidence that Jesus is one of a liar, a lunatic, or, most likely, Lord. He explains Christian moral fundamentals, highlighting what he considers to be the cardinal virtues and vices. Finally, Lewis develops a philosophical justification for belief in the Trinity including a description of how God is outside of time. I admire this book for its ground-up approach to developing a complete worldview (however brief), and for its analysis of why we can’t evaluate Christianity by measuring how much nicer (or not) Christians than non-Christians (in Book 4, Chapter 10). I had encountered many of Lewis’ ideas in my journey through different Christian cultures.


The Meaning of Human Existence

By E. O. Wilson

https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Human-Existence-Edward-Wilson/dp/1631491148 

Summary written in 2015


Wilson vastly under-delivers on his promise to expound on the meaning of human existence. He is a biologist but no philosopher. His idea of group evolutionary selection is compelling and his description of co-operative behaviour on ants is vivid and interesting. He presupposes the non-existence of god. Wilson offers an alternative and weaker definition of 'meaning' for the titular phrase such that a description of human evolution and of humanity's place in universal biology suffices.


Jesus - The Human Face of God 

By Jay Parini

https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Human-Face-God-Icons/dp/054402589X

https://archive.org/details/jesushumanfaceof0000pari 

Summary written in 2015


Parini “remythologizes" Jesus by interpreting the Biblical and extra-Biblical accounts of Jesus’ life with an emphasis on the mysterious and internally spiritual aspects, while being deliberately less concerned with the exact factual accuracy of those accounts. I found "Jesus - The Human Face of God” to be occasionally informative, occasionally insightful and consistently theologically ‘liberal.’ Parini leans toward an understanding of the kingdom of God as an inclusive, gradual process, where God brings people into his kingdom by transforming their minds, in contrast to one being ‘saved’ if and only if he or she asserts a particular set of beliefs. Parini devotes a chapter to each part of Jesus’ life: including: 1) the historical context of first century Palestine, 2) his birth & childhood, 3) the beginning of his ministry, 4) his actions as a healer and teacher, 5) his entrance to Jerusalem, 6) the passion, 7) the resurrection, and 8) a highly compressed synopsis of secular & liberal Christian thought on the life of Jesus. 


Despite feeling familiar with the canonical gospel accounts, I found “Jesus - The Human Face of God” to be thought provoking. For example: Parini considers that Jesus developed as a person and a prophet such that he came to realize his divinely appointed role only gradually. Parini definitely emphasized Jesus’ humanity, while I (as a reader more versed in conservative Christian thought) wondered as I read if Parini thought that Jesus was also divine. Actually, this is similar to what happens in the gospel accounts where the apostles consider Jesus to be a rabbi when they meet him, and then come to wonder if he is something more, and finally Peter recognizes Jesus as the Christ. Another example of how the book was thought provoking: Parini emphasizes how no one immediately recognised Jesus after his resurrection; that Jesus had an other-world quality. The resurrected Jesus ate -- and this was noteworthy! Parini considers that “Jesus did not, like Lazarus, simply get up and walk out from the burial crypt and resume life in ordinary time. The Resurrection was not the Resuscitation” (p. 125). This explicit distinction is not one that I had heard before.


The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

By Stephen Greenblatt 

https://www.amazon.com/Swerve-How-World-Became-Modern/dp/0393343405 

Summary written in 2019


Greenblatt describes the Renaissance rediscovery of a Latin poem called "On The Nature of Things" by Lucretius (c. 99 BC – c. 55 BC). Lucretius was a follower of the Epicurean school of philosophy, which espouses the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and the belief that the gods don't care about the activities of people (ergo no reason to consider any afterlife). Mostly the book follows the life and times of the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolin who found a copy of the poem in January 1417. Greenblatt contends that the poem was a catalyst for modernity, and that the poem contains numerous ideas that presumably belong to Greenblatt's 'modern' world view, such as atomism. Greenblatt does acknowledge that the poem is not atheist (which he considers to be a modern worldview trait) but rather deist. However, Greenblatt seems to make some incredible claims about the poem's contents, that, for example, the poet knew about evolution and exoplanets. The author praises Lucretius for his naturalist view of the world and his fun-centric philosophy, by contrast to the warped, hypocritical and unthinking Christian worldview that was common in Europe in Poggio Bracciolin’s times. 

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Part II: Against evangelicalism

Faith, Doubt and Anti-Metanoia series, part II

The Great Isaiah Scroll. (This image is in the public domain.) Do you think the contents of this manuscript are the final authority on all matters that it addresses?

I wrote this in late 2012 / early 2013, while I was still a Christian. For context about this blog post series, please see the introductory post.

Introduction

I present an evangelical Christian position on the truth and authority of the Bible in order to demonstrate how that evangelical position is inconsistent with my own philosophical assumptions of minimal prejudice, skepticism, and equal treatment of all truths regardless of how I came to believe those truths. I present an alternative view of the truth of the Bible and logically justify this view from my ground assumptions. Furthermore, I critique this alternative view and highlight some of the new problems that this view presents. I present my summary of "'Fundamentalism' and the Word of God" by J. I. Packer in an appendix.

2 Notation

I use some mathematical notation, as shown in Table 1.


Table 1: Some mathematical notation from logic and set theory.



Symbol Meaning


a A a is an element of the set A
¬A The statement ‘not A’ (If A is true, then ¬A is false and vice versa)
AB The statement ‘A and B
A B Statement A implies statement B
AB Statement A is true if, and only if, B is true



3 An Evangelical Position

Let D represent the statement ‘Jesus is divine,’ let R represent the statement ‘Jesus’ words are reliable,’ let C be the set of claims made by the Bible, and let B represent the statement ‘For all c C, c is true in a way that accords with the literary style of c’s context.’ Eve, the evangelical Christian, argues like this:

We have a circular argument for the divinity and reliability of Jesus and the truth of the Bible:

D ⇒ R ⇒ B ⇒ D ∩ R
In order to gain saving faith, we must believe the claims of the Bible, so we must enter this circle somehow. For example, we could enter the circle by reading the gospel account of Jesus’ life and accepting it as historically accurate. Once we have accepted the Bible as true, we dogmatically assert B. After all, ‘faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see’ (Hebrews 11:1 NIV).

Anyone who claims to be a Christian but rejects this reasoning is abusing the name; let him or her be anathema.

When someone asserts that a Biblical claim is untrue, for example ‘Methuselah could not have lived for 969 years,’ Eve responds: ‘Since we know that Jesus is divine and that his words are true, dogmatically B, therefore that person is in error.’

Some problems that Eve faces are:

  • What claims does the Bible make? What exactly is C?
  • How do we decipher the context and literary style of each part of the Bible to know exactly what B claims to be true? For example, Jev Doorknocker, the Jehovah’s Witness, finds that the Bible says Jesus is not divine, B¬D.
  • Does the truth of the 66 Protestant books of the Bible really follow from Jesus’ reliability, does RB? What books of the Bible does Jesus quote from? When can quoting a part imply endorsement of the whole? What works did Jesus mean to include what he mentioned the ‘Scriptures’ or the ‘Law and the Prophets’? What about the Deuterocanonicals? (What about Jude’s quote from the Book of Enoch?)
  • How did the canon come about? On what authority do we accept the Biblical table of contents? What about the gnostic gospels? What if someone unearthed a previously unknown document purporting to be divinely inspired?
  • How do we know that the Bible really contains Jesus’ words?

(Actually, Jesus could be divine and parts of the Bible could be false. By lumping all of the Bible’s claims into B, we lose some expressive power, but this simplification is useful here.)

4 A Counter-Evangelical Position

Logo, the logician argues against Eve:

We start by outlining our underlying assumptions. For economy of space, we do not argue from the most basic possible axioms, but we make the barefaced assertion that these axioms are indeed theorems in the logical system that one should build from the most basic axioms. (One of the most basic axioms could be ‘I generally trust my senses.’) We base our worldview on the following axioms:

  1. Minimal prejudice: We should presuppose a minimal set of axioms and logical tools then construct a worldview, rather than presupposing something to expedite our search for truth toward a desired conclusion. We cannot have no prejudice, because we must be prejudiced in the positive toward this espousal of minimal prejudice.
  2. Skepticism: Due to the abundance of error, we must qualify every statement with our degree of confidence in its veracity. Our statement of belief in skepticism itself must be qualified: we cannot be absolutely sure that skepticism is the right philosophical mode for our discussion. However, we should not be paralysed by caution, so we must proceed with using skepticism as a tool. We apply skepticism and humbly acknowledge that anything we deduce is tainted by whatever lack of confidence we have with our skepticism. For example, if we have 99% confidence in our skeptical method and if we know that XY with 95% confidence and we know X with 95% confidence, then we can infer Y, but only with 89% confidence (0.95 × 0.95 × 0.99 = 0.893475).
  3. Equal treatment of all truths, regardless of how we know them to be true: Truth revealed by God is just as true as truth discovered by man under God’s common grace. However, by the axiom of skepticism, we can have sources of truth that are more certain than others.

Logo finds that Eve’s ‘circular argument’ is better stated as an if-and-only-if:

Since DR, Eve’s claim is better stated as ‘the claims of the Bible are true, if and only if, Jesus is divine and trustworthy:’

B ⇔ D ∩ R
This way, no circular reasoning is implied or is necessary.

While dogmatically accepting the Bible has some appeal, we cannot dogmatically accept something without an indisputable argument. The Bible’s claim to be the words of the divine is not sufficient evidence to show that the Bible is true. If a benevolent, truthful God were to reveal things to us, then we could reasonably expect that one of the things God would reveal would be the fact that God authored that revelation. But notice that we can apply the same logic to the Quran, or the book of Mormon, by making the substitutions shown in Table 2.


Table 2: The if-and-only-if logic of DRBD R can apply to several different worldviews.





Label Christianity Islam Mormonism




D Jesus is divine Mohammed was the ProphetJoseph Smith was a prophet
R Jesus is reliable Mohammed was reliable Joseph Smith was reliable
B The Bible is true The Quran is true The book of Mormon is true





To reduce our prejudice toward Christianity, Islam and Mormonism, we have to look at the balance of evidence for and against each, as packaged worldviews. We cannot let a claim that some work is the divine word dominate our judgement about the truth of that work.

Since the divinity and reliability of Jesus are directly related to the truth of the Bible, we can examine whether or not we think the Bible is true in order to determine whether or not we should believe that Jesus is divine and reliable. Some of the claims of the Bible are unfalsifiable. For example, we cannot decide if Jesus was divine or not, except by divine revelation in the Bible. Other claims of the Bible may be falsifiable. For example, could someone live 969 years? Maybe we can develop some level of confidence about whether or not we think Methuselah could live to be 969. The Bible says that Jesus was killed by Pontius Pilate; this is corroborated by extra-biblical sources. If the Bible turns out to be true on the things we can falsify, then we have a more reasonable basis for accepting those parts of the Bible that we cannot falsify. If c = ‘A real man named Jesus lived in the 1st century AD’ and c C, then Bc. If we have overwhelming evidence for c apart from the Bible, then we can increase our confidence in B, but if we have overwhelming evidence against c apart from the Bible, then we must decrease our confidence in B. If someone makes claims that you can verify, then you should trust them. On the other hand, if someone makes dubious claims, you should doubt them.

We accept or reject the truth of the Bible just as we accept or reject any other notion. We evaluate the balance of evidence for and against the Bible by examining as many claims of the Bible as we can and comparing those claims against what we know from extra-biblical sources of knowledge. These comparisons are fuzzy though, because we are skeptics, so we have to weight apparent contradictions by the confidence we have in the opposing statements. If we have some low-confidence reason to believe that Jesus was not a real man who lived in the 1st century AD, but we also have a high-confidence reason to believe that Jesus really did live at that time, then we must accept the claim with higher confidence, perhaps with a slight discounting of its confidence level. Having evaluated all the claims of the Bible that we can, we develop a degree of belief in the proposition B. Because we can’t check everything in the Bible (some of its claims are unfalsifiable), and because we cannot have perfect knowledge to check the Bible with, we cannot reach 100% certain belief in all the claims of the Bible. To evaluate the truth of the Bible at some sub-100% level of confidence, then close our eyes to the degree of confidence and dogmatically assert the truth of the Bible is illogical.

However, our belief in the Bible based on skepticism does not preclude confidence or faithful actions:

  • ‘I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!’ (Mark 9:24 NIV)
  • ‘Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” He replied, “Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”’ (Matthew 17:20-21 NIV)

We trust in the Jesus revealed in the Bible not with a dogmatic faith, but a humble one. We do not face the fragility of dogma, but we have unprejudiced, honest, and fair confidence in what we are convinced to be true based on what we see and we risk our lives on the hope of Jesus, trusting him with what we cannot see. Far from devaluing the Bible or its author, we are loving the Lord our God with all our minds.

Some problems facing Logo are:

  • Logo’s argument is present as if he had all the evidence. However, we only read the scroll of knowledge as it is unfolded to us. Consequently, we face potentially troubling changes as we discover new things and make new theories to make sense of what we discover.
  • Eve (and Kat, the Roman Catholic Christian) may find that she cannot cooperate with Logo because no stable agreement can be found. Indeed, we Christians must unite in love around the truth. However, stable agreement is too lofty a goal. If each person is to honestly seek truth, then we must be willing to cooperate even in the presence of unstable, partial agreements. But Logo cannot stop Eve or Kat from excommunicating him.
  • Logo may be constantly suffering from doubts as he reads the Bible and tries to weigh the claims of the Bible against what he knows from elsewhere. What does Logo do when faced with:
    • Creation and evolution?
    • The Flood and archaeology?
    • Methuselah’s longevity and estimates of the maximum human life span?
    • Miracles and physics?
    • The Great Commission and the survivability of ideas (memes) and Black Swans (Taleb2007)?
    • God’s moral commands and Pinker’s description of the decline of violence (Pinker2011)?
    • The commandments to teach faith to your children and its amazing effectiveness for many religions and one’s own indoctrination as a child (see http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html)?
    • The claims of Jesus’ death and resurrection and the evolutionary models of religion or the idea that religions are like viruses that have one part lie to create group cohesion and one part truth to aid group survival (see http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html)?
    • The belief in an omnipotent God and the neuroscience study reporting that people can be made to have religious experiences by sending magnetic pulses into their brains (Persinger et al.2010)? (Maybe it’s just suggestibility (Granqvist et al.2005).)
    • The belief in life after death and the frequent effect of ‘seeing a light at the end of the tunnel’ (or similar) when the brain experiences oxygen-deprivation in a near death experience (I learned about this from Sacks2007)?
    • Arguments for Jesus’ resurrection based on Christianity’s wide and sincere adoption, and the success of Scientology, a demonstrably and wholly invented religion?
    • The age of the Bible, and the general lack of reliability of ancient documents and the extreme suspicion that must be placed on all historical sources (Taleb2007, and others taught me to distrust history)?
    • The creation of man in God’s image (and God’s special plan for my life) and the consistent failure of human-centric theories (and me-centric theories), such as the geocentric astronomical model, vitalism, and the lack of extraordinary biological distinction between people and animals?
    • One’s prior social and intellectual commitments to Christianity and confirmation bias (Nickerson1998)?

    If Logo finds that something contradicts the claims of the Bible with greater confidence than he has in the truth of the Bible, then Logo must reject the Bible.

  • Logo may have built his assumptions on the prevailing cultural tide rather than sound logic and Biblical truth.
  • 5 Conclusion

    I outline my best understanding of the dogmatic evangelical position on the truth of the Bible and I present an alternative view. A dogmatic approach to the Bible is inconsistent with the axioms of minimal prejudice, skepticism, and equal treatment of all truths. Dogmatically asserting the truth of the Bible raises serious questions about the interpretation of the Bible and the canon. My analysis may fall short of doing justice to the evangelical position, in which case my argument would be erroneous. Taking a minimally prejudiced, skeptical view of the Bible satisfies my desire to be humble and intellectually honest but it causes new problems, especially in apologetics. Furthermore, an adherent of this view of the Bible could face social ostracism if he or she were previously rooted in an evangelical or Catholic community.

    Appendix: Summary of ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God

    Am I being disingenuous in arguing against the weak position of Eve? After all, I have previously claimed that every arguer has the obligation to maximally steel-man their opponent’s side, see my post on Nash and the Straw Man. Perhaps Eve’s position could be made stronger – replacing Eve’s position with something more like Logo’s would be a start – but I think that real people hold positions quite similar to Eve. For example, I think the late Dr. J. I. Packer did.

    In ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God: Some Evangelical Principles, J. I. Packer defends the Evangelical notion of the authority of Scripture over reason, particularly attacking the Liberalism or ‘Biblical Theology’ described in Gabriel Herbert’s work Fundamentalism and the Church of God (S.C.M. 1957). Packer argues with clarity, grace and thoroughness, carefully expressing his opponents positions before mounting rebuttals.

    Packer asserts that the Bible claims to be written by a truthful, divine author and that a right response is a faith in that author that leads us to believe that the Bible is the highest authority on all matters that it speaks. Therefore, any results from history, textual criticism, or any other discipline are subject to being overruled by the words of God should they apparently contradict any well-established truth revealed in the Bible.

    Packer claims that the logical conclusion of the Liberal or subjectivist approach to truth, the one that places reason as an authority over the Bible, is no sensible Christianity at all. By claiming that the Bible is the highest authority, and by making a number of claims on how to interpret the Biblical message, Packer also contradicts the supposedly Roman Catholic notion that tradition is an authority equal to or higher than the Bible.

    While Packer holds the Bible as the highest authority, he claims that reason is most free when it is subject to the assumptions that are faithful to the Bible and that in fact, good reasoning is necessary and useful for understanding and applying the Bible. Packer argues that people’s reasoning is corrupted by sin and that approaching the Bible without the assumption of its inerrancy is a bad way to apply reason.

    I consider that Packer does not adequately address the possibility that tradition may be an authority with equal rank as the Bible (what I understand the Roman Catholic church to teach), however, this question is only tangentially related to Packer’s scope, which mostly addresses the supposed Liberal heresy.

    Furthermore, I find that Packer’s notion of faith that leads to dogmatic belief in the scriptures to be epistemically distasteful. While it is prudent to follow the fullest implications of whatever truth one knows, it is also important to keep one’s mind open to some degree. (This is the philosophical equivalent of the exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (Sutton and Barto1998).) Accepting any dogma is problematic since it leads to the closing of one’s mind; evaluating truth based on degrees of belief (‘skepticism’) seems better to me. Following skepticism, I need not definitely choose a highest authority for truth but rather might tentatively accept both X and Y as sources of truths with varying degrees of confidence and also say ‘I will reject some claim of X if Y contradicts that claim with a greater confidence than X makes that claim.’ For example, I might accept both Scripture and Reason as sources of truth and I would suspect some rational claim against some part of Christianity, unless that rational claim seemed like a fully and direct contradiction that was well-supported by good evidence.

    The advantage of this multi-faceted approach to authority is that I do not need to treat Christianity any differently than other religions before I begin my inquiry. For example, I can open the possibility of Islam being true, then close it if Islam makes some claim that I believe to be outrageous. (However, perhaps my method is denying the general idea of authority, or perhaps it is accepting my own reason as the highest authority.) While I appreciate Packer’s Calvinistic notion of saving faith being a divine gift that goes beyond reason, it makes me wonder how to address other religions. Atheism has developed a number of crafty tools for attacking religions in general, in fact, atheism must defeat religion wholesale. Since I reject other religions myself, it is tempting to accept the logic of some of the atheistic methods. The question remains, why not apply those methods also to Christianity? Atheism’s own answer is: ‘Peter will not reject his own religion because he was brought up being taught that he belongs to a special group and he cannot bear to shamefully admit that he’s wrong.’ I would suggest the same reasoning to a Muslim, to convince him of the truth of Christianity, so why don’t I apply the same reasoning to myself? How likely is it that I was raised believing the truth? To be honest with myself, I must address that possibility by evaluating Christianity with the same measure that I would evaluate other religions. If I say ‘I trust the God of the Bible,’ then somehow I must explain to myself why I do not trust the Allah of the Quran or the concepts advanced by any other religion.

    If the Bible is the highest authority, then what do I do about all the other texts that make similar claims? Shouldn’t I read them, join their community for a time, and see if that text’s deity gives me saving faith in himself (or does some equivalent thing)? Perhaps I am subconsciously using reason as an escape from this logic by claiming: ‘Christianity is reasonable therefore I need not examine other religions; I know it’s true so I don’t need to test other religions as much.’ One danger here is that reason, or science, can assault that position by suggesting that the Bible makes testable predictions which can be experimentally verified in some way. For example, the idea that evolution contradicts Genesis is one such example of how science and the Bible can be seen to be at odds. While I feel comfortable believing both evolution and the Bible, I worry that other tests that science might produce may not end so favourably. I also worry that theology may constantly wiggle under the pressure of what science reveals, leading to a faith that ‘reforms’ to dodge current science while claiming to be some orthodoxy that ‘good Christians have always believed.’ This, perhaps, is evidence that people are good at reconciling apparent contradictions by subtly redefining terms, changing claims and rewriting arguments: see James vs. Paul on ‘faith’ in the light of the Reformation. You can read about the maybe-contradition between James and Paul from an Evangelical position here.

    If I escape the possibility of science contradicting the Bible by asserting that my faith leads to a dogmatic belief in the Bible, then I feel I am rightly stuck with the possibility that I would be suppressing the truth (contrary to Packer’s claims and in unison with his opponents) and that I am committing the epistemic error of treating Christianity and other religions unequally.

    References

        Granqvist, P., Fredrikson, M., Unge, P., Hagenfeldt, A., Valind, S., Larhammar, D., and Larsson, M. (2005). Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields. Neuroscience Letters, 379(1):1–6.

        Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology; Review of General Psychology, 2(2):175.

        Packer, J. I. (1958). ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God: Some Evangelical Principles. Inter-Varsity Fellowshop, London, UK.

        Persinger, M. A., Saroka, K., Koren, S. A., and St-Pierre, L. S. (2010). The electromagnetic induction of mystical and altered states within the laboratory. Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, 1(7).

        Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Viking Adult.

        Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Knopf, 1st edition.

        Sutton, R. S. and Barto, A. G. (1998). Reinforcement Learning. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

        Taleb, N. N. (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House, 1st edition.

Sunday, February 20, 2022

Part I: From Christian faith, to doubt, then anti-metanoia

Faith, Doubt and Anti-Metanoia series, part I


A distorted photograph of me. (Image is my own work.)

This is the personal story of how my Christian faith ended. I grew up a Christian. While I was in graduate school, faith gave way to doubt and then to an experience opposite of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus: anti-metanoia, the dissolution of my Christian belief.

The first and larger part is a snapshot written in 2015, a transitional time when I was still a Christian, but weighed down with doubt. I have not corrected details about myself that later became untrue. For example, it says “But lose my faith entirely I did not,” which was true in 2015, but not later. The second part is a more brief addendum written in 2021 with my post-Christian perspective.

This post has explicit discussion of mental health issues and suicidal ideation. If you experiencing mental health problems yourself, please get help. See https://www.mentalhealth.gov/get-help for some suggestions, or search the web for “mental health help.”

Snapshot from the Christian walk slowed to a crawl, written 2015

Since early 2012, my reading and my learning in church have led me to rethink the reasons that I believe in God and my view of the Bible. Generally, this has been a process of learning new ideas about the world in general (and seeing old ideas in fresh light) that has lowered my estimation of the probability that God exists and undermined my belief that the Bible is inerrant. The new ideas came to me suddenly at particular moments in time, such as when I read "The Black Swan" by N. N. Taleb, but the thorough incorporation of each idea and all its associated implications has been a slow process.

Until these doubts of mine started to set in, I had several reasons for being a Christian. Here are some:
  • Morality
  • The inexplicable rise of the church
  • Creation
  • Miracles
  • The historicity of Jesus in the Gospels
Some of these reasons were undermined by things that I read:
  • I used to think that God's existence leads to an explanation of the history of the church that is better than the explanation that atheism could offer. But reading "The Black Swan" by N. N. Taleb made me think that the church's history needed no further explanation. "The Black Swan" isn't meant to debunk the significance of history of the church specifically -- the book is more about epistemology, statistic and even finance! A "Black Swan" is an improbable event with high impact, like the fall of the USSR, 9/11 or the discovery of penicillin. History comes in jerks and starts with Black Swans of various sizes. While each Black Swan looks improbable by itself, they are actually very common stuff: one in a million chances happen to each of us every day, etc. So I accepted the thesis of the book, but the implications blew a fatal breach in the hull of one of my arguments for Christianity: the church grew boldly and suddenly in the first few centuries but that doesn't imply that Jesus really rose from the dead.
  • Reading Paul Graham's essay "Lies We Tell Kids" (http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html) made me think that religions could be highly adaptive and survivable even if they weren't true (see also "Antifragile" by N. N. Taleb). This relates to a thought I've had for a while: why don't I investigate other religions? I collected arguments against religions in general but then they also work against Christianity. In addition, "The Black Swan" also made me think that Christianity was less unique as a religion.
  • I used to think that pervasive human moral failing substantially supported the Biblical idea of sin. However, reading "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Steven Pinker made me think that psychology presents a sufficiently powerful view of human moral failing (and human love too) that the Biblical idea of sin is not logically necessary. Furthermore, on a more emotional level, I had been carrying around a lot of guilt about some of my more persistent sins. But in the same few years, I improved my self control in some ways and started carrying less guilt around. In itself, that was definitely a good change. But it had a secondary effect too, which, depending how you look at it, was either that I relied on God less or that I was clear minded to see how much my own guilt had been pushing my worldview in some direction.
Other reasons for my believing were undermined without being catalyzed by a specific thing that I read:
  • Quite some time ago, I had accepted that God could have used evolution to create humanity and that evolution need not be a stumbling block to a careful reading of Genesis. The start of Genesis is highly poetic. But the subtly is that God is no longer logically necessary for humanity. But maybe the Big Bang is evidence for God's existence? It could be, at least until the next scientific theory deflates that step in the infinite regress of whys. I still feel like creation is a marginal win for the theist, if we had to call the fight now.
  • I gradually abandoned my belief that miracles today were evidence for God's existence. I had stopped going to a Pentecostal church a long time ago and I started going to Campus Church, an independent church that was started by a bunch of Sydney Anglicans (they must have been pretty aggravated with the denomination!). Campus Church seemed to more or less believe that miracles ceased after apostolic times. The leadership of Campus Church took a strong view on the Bible. My impression was that I should take God at his word (the 66 books of the Protestant Bible) and in short, "only a rebellious generation asks for a sign." (Fortunately, this view of miracles helps to shield oneself from the classic arguments against miracles à la Hume.)
My membership and increased involvement in Campus Church, with its strong evangelical focus on the Bible, made it ok for me to carefully and thoughtfully overturn my belief that miracles were evidence for God (it also helped that I didn't see any going on). But I was left with an even bigger problem: suddenly everything hinged on the dogmatic inerrant truth of the Bible! So I had to take my fine toothed comb to the Bible. That lead me to examine what evangelicalism really was and to look deeply at questions surrounding the content of the Bible. For example, why these 66 books and not the deuterocanonical books too? Why include Esther? What's with the writer of Hebrews referring the Janes and Jambres? What about Jude quoting the Book of Enoch as prophetic?! What do scholars think about the dating and authorship of each book of the Bible? What about the New Testament apocrypha, like the Gospel of Thomas? (And who put in those chapter and verse numbers?) Many of these questions are not that problematic to the Christian, but if the Bible is the be-all-and-end-all, then they've gotta be answered.

One leader at Campus Church described the way to accept the Bible with a circular argument. I distilled that circular argument in the following way:

1) Jesus is divine
implies 2) Jesus' words are reliable
implies 3) all claims in the Bible are true in ways that accord with the literary styles of the Bible
implies 1) and 2).

It wasn't quite that simple, but being told to accept a circular argument didn't work for me at all. After reading the pastor's recommended text on evangelicalism, "'Fundamentalism' and the Word of God" by J. I. Packer, I concluded that Packer's brand of evangelicalism is utterly worthless. 

I had the confluence of intellectual doubts about my arguments for God's existence and problems with my church's fundamental premises about the Bible. The pastor encouraged me to view my beliefs less in terms of a stack of bricks -- one idea built on another, and more like a spider web of strengthening interconnections. He might have a point there, and I've since learned more about this idea and it is helpful to an extent (see my discussion on foxes and hedgehogs below). But the overall picture at this point is nihilistically black. The real chronological order of the development of my doubts is not exactly like what I've described here. There wasn't really a 'rock bottom' point in time when depression suddenly caved on me as I realized that I needed to fail my wife, friends and my past self by rejecting God's existence and putting my Bible on the fiction shelf. But just as the events of my story are spread over months and even years, so the bad feelings were spread over time and mixed in with plenty of nicer experiences in life (like a happy marriage!). But the bad feelings were there and are still partly there. I felt like a hypocrite when I helped in church activities. We all love people who have lost their faith and it's hard for everyone. I never realized how hard it is for the person doing the losing.

But lose my faith entirely I did not. This is the first time I've carefully written all of this down. I feel like now might be the first time that I've really understood some parts of doubts. For a while I was in a gray fog. I was busy with stuff and it was never fun to just spend a day thinking on these depressing things. When would be a good time to strain my relationship with my wife, make all my Christian friends talk behind my back about how Peter's backsliding is such a shame and unravel my whole worldview to the point where everything is in question and no values remain? I justified delaying because it's better to remain a "weak reed, swayed by every breath of wind" than to become a tree planted in the wrong woods, and partially I think I was right to. One problem is that I know that all the psychological biases lead one to keep obsolete but dearly loved ideas around well past their use-by date, systematically rejecting any evidence to the contrary. If I were really lead to the water of rejecting Christianity, then maybe it's just that I couldn't bear to drink?

At the start of 2014, I decided to devote a month to trying to resolving my worldview. In the end, I concluded that I couldn't fix my doubts entirely in that time, but that I would continue trying to be a Christian. I had decided to follow Jesus, so no turning back. I still have unresolved concerns. Before my doubts began, my judgement was that God probably existed. I mixed in a little bit of Pascal's wager and out came a functionally certain Christianity. Now I have trouble shaking the feeling that God probably doesn't exist. But I crawl on. Moses spent 40 years in the desert and Isaiah was forbidden from wearing pants for some length of time that probably felt longer than 40 years.

A precious few ideas are ingredients of potential salve for my burning. They don't form a complete re-construction of a complete and happy world view, at least not yet.
  • Reading "Scripture and the Authority of God" by N.T. Wright was encouraging. I like Wright's view of scripture much better than Packer's. I felt like I could keep being a Christian when I read "Scripture and the Authority of God."
  • I learned about the idea that some people think in "fox" terms, while others think in "hedgehog" terms. (For more detail, see http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus-and-the-weasel/) Hedgehog thinkers form world views that attempt to completely explain what the thinker knows. Hedgehog thinkers can act robustly, easily applying their world views to new situations, however their world views are fragile to disturbances. Fox thinkers collect examples en masse but do not necessarily generalize those examples into a world view. Fox thinkers are fragile in their actions (like when faced with new situations) but they are robust in belief. I am definitely a hedgehog thinker facing the fragility of my own beliefs. My wife is more of fox thinker. Maybe I can learn some of her thinking style. Maybe that's why God put her in my life.
  • The lead singer of a metal band I like, Tim Lambesis, hired a hitman to kill his wife. (Probably this is evidence that rock music is of the devil.) He was a Christian who lost his faith. I read a transcript of someone's interview with him just before he was sentenced to 9 years. He discussed how Christians often teach people that morality can only be objective and that it can only come from God and how he lost his morality along with his faith. He said something along the lines that morality doesn't need to be fully objective and doesn't need to come from Christianity. (I might not be getting this exactly right, but it's what I got from it.) It's not exactly an argument in favour of Christianity, it's more like an insurance policy for a Christian's morality: if one loses their faith, then they do not necessarily have to lose their morality.
  • "Antifragile" by N. N. Taleb's presents the idea that definite action should be taken without definite knowledge. Strangely, I've heard that Taleb is an Orthodox Christian. What irony, given that his book kindled my doubts.

Addendum post-Christianity, written 2021

Since 2016, I have no longer been a Bible believing Christian.

Losing my faith meant breaking my identity. I didn't just believe in Christianity, I was a Christian. Take that away and I was in danger of not being. I was depressed and had a degree of suicidal ideation. I saw a counselor for a few sessions and at one point he said that he was excited for me, because I would get a new identity. I was not excited.

Ultimately, his words were in the right direction, but in a form that was not like I expected. I partially credit the writing of David Chapman with saving my life in that crisis through his hypertext book (= website) meaningness.com. One of the key ideas of meaningness.com is that meaning is both patterned and nebulous at the same time. Like a cloud, we can definitely claim that a cloud is in the sky, but when we get to the edges, it's hard to say exactly where the cloud begins and ends. So it is with meanings: they are patterned, definite and real but also nebulous, with fuzzy edges and strange exceptions. 

Christianity, as I practiced it, is a beautiful and rigid pattern and it conveniently denies a lot of nebulousness. I was tempted in my moment of crisis to choose a new identity of the same form. Like, say, Communism, or Islam: two other belief systems with perfect and rigid patterning. But my narrow understanding of "identity" was really what was at fault. My new identity is one that tolerates (and maybe one day will embrace) nebulousness. Now I have been too hard on Christianity, Communism and Islam. Many practitioners of these religions may be great at balancing the patterned with the nebulous in many ways. Chapman talks about adult development in terms of numbered stages. Many different belief systems can exist at all different levels of personal development. But for me, Christianity couldn't survive the personal-development-level-change.

Some version of "I" made it through. I regained my sanity and I try to gently walk a new line without treading on my Christian wife and the nascent Christianity of my kids. I continue the discussion of my new identify in Part VII.

Parts II through VI give you some insight into what I was thinking and reading during this transitional time. Then I fast forward to 2022 and Parts VII through X present hindsight reflections of my loss-of-faith journey, plus some details about my current perspectives.

Saturday, February 19, 2022

Introducing a series on faith, doubt and anti-metaonia

Faith, Doubt and Anti-Metanoia series, part Ø, introduction 


I grew up a Christian, but, from early 2012, began to have significant doubts. By 2016, I had abandoned Christianity.  Over time, several people have asked about my faith-to-doubt-to-no faith journey, so I am writing a series of blog posts addressing that topic. 

Conversión de Saulo by Guido Reni. (This image is in the public domain.)

The unbelieving Saul became Saint Paul in a process of metanoia. “Anti-metanoia” is my answer to the question, “What would the reverse be?”


This blog post series describes my own path, but I hope you don’t follow the same path. There was too much pain. Take an easier way! Before reading my work, read everything on meaningness.com and convince yourself that meaning is obvious and that nihilism is a mistake.


In some ways, this series represents a regression to the style of the pre-Facebook intensely personal blog, with all the risks such content entails. On one hand, this is a deliberate reveal of my personal journey so that you might know me better, like the “Essays” of Michel de Montaigne. On the other hand, it’s an abstract battle of ideas that are beyond myself and the publication of that battle is a way to expose the flaws in my reasoning to the ultra-violent radiation of internet commentary. (Comments on this blog are and will continue to be disabled. Write your response on your own part of the internet.)


Related blog posts

Three previous blog posts are related to this series:


Nash and the Strawman

This is about how to argue well. Especially how to argue with yourself about which worldview to pick. I aspire to have followed my own methods here. Published in 2014, in the midst of this struggle, while I was still a Christian.


The Anti-Jefferson Bible 

This is a less-than-completely-serious analysis of "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" by Thomas Jefferson. Think of this as the comic relief. Published in 2017, after I stopped being a Christian.


Electrons and Void 

In 2018, I released an album of music which you can listen to on my Bandcamp site. The blog post also includes poems and photographs. The post also includes a paragraph that pre-figures this new blog post series: 

The (long) development of this album spanned a period of disruptive internal change in my life, which is ultimately reflected in the album itself. Mostly in the accompanying words, to a lesser extent in the music itself and probably least of all in the photographs that I included here. The change was something akin to what happened to Saul, simultaneously on the road to Damascus, on the way to becoming the Apostle Paul, and to becoming (temporarily) blind. But for me, the change was sort of the opposite of what it was for Paul: anti-metanoia, perhaps. Under a given condition, x, I passed into a new state, and under another condition, y, I passed into another state, and these two states may have been potential in my earlier self, but only in the sense that they came to be developed under the conditions, x and y. But it is plain that I did not escape the difficulties concerning metaphysical predication in this changing world; indeed, such difficulties included intense personal pain, even mental illness. Not at all to say that this transition and the subsequent pain are somehow decodable from the sounds of my instrumental music, but the echo and reverberation of my changing self is inevitably there, in however ghostly a form. 

Roadmap

Much of the material is my personal summaries of books that I read and found useful in my journey. Rather than being straight summaries, they’re intentionally slanted with my opinions, frustrations and criticisms of the works. Refer to my post "A Program of Reading Better" for more details on my method of reading. Read the summaries of books that pique your interest; to go deep, read the whole of the original.


Here’s the roadmap for the series to come:


Part Ø: Introducing a series on faith, doubt and anti-metanoia

This blog post.


Part I: From Christian faith, to doubt, then anti-metanoia 

This is the story of my personal journey. The parts that follow are, in many ways, material to support and then to continue this post. 


Part II: Against evangelicalism

An original essay grappling with Biblical inerrancy and reason, written in late 2012 / early 2013, while I was still a Christian. To give realism and life to the position that I’m attacking, I also include my summary of “‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God: Some Evangelical Principles,” by J. I. Packer.


Part III: A clash of ideas: books summaries from a period of searching

This post presents summaries of several works that I read during my period of searching:

  • “On Miracles,” by arch-skeptic David Hume
  • “Mere Christianity,” by the celebrated Christian author C. S. Lewis 
  • “The Meaning of Human Existence,” by the biologist E. O. Wilson
  • “Jesus: The Human Face of God,” by Jay Parini
  • “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” by Stephen Greenblatt 

Part IV: Non-canonical books

Questions about the Bible and what it contains are key to my faith-to-non-faith journey. But what about the books that were considered but ultimately excluded from the Bible? This is my summary of the book “Lost Scriptures” by Bart Ehrman, along with my brief summary of the Book of Enoch.


Part V: Three summaries of Biblical canon scholarship books

This post presents summaries of three books that go deep on how ancient texts were selected for inclusion in the Bible: 

  • “The Canon of Scripture,” by F. F. Bruce 
  • “The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission and Authority,” by Lee Martin McDonald
  • “The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance,” by Bruce Metzger

Part VI: On Meaningness

I found meaningness.com by David Chapman to be incredibly helpful. Collected here are some comments and thoughts on Chapman’s wonderful work. After lots of material related to Christianity, this post changes direction. Meaningness.com had a major influence on my thinking and the rest of the series uses the terminology of and makes constant reference to meaningness.com.


Intermezzo: Fast forward to 2022

This post serves to make the transition from material mostly written years ago to material written in 2021 & 2022.


Part VII: My new identity

In this post, I continue the thread that concludes Part I: after Christianity, who am I? Spoiler: pretty much who I was before. 


Part VIII: Dodging nihilism better

Above, I mentioned that you shouldn’t follow my path through nihilism. This post makes some guesses at what one should do instead. 


Part IX: Answering Eternalist objections to the Complete Stance

This is my own defense of my new approach to meaning, written primarily for myself. The “Complete Stance” is a term invented by David Chapman to describe the simultaneous acceptance of the existence of real meaning (contra nihilism) and the acceptance that meaning is often nebulous. The nebulous character of meaning is in contradiction with what Chapman calls “Eternalism,” which is a stance that artificially fixes meanings. An Eternalist can have easy ways of grounding her or his meanings and conveniently pre-packaged communities to join. Where does that leave someone trying to hold the Complete Stance?


Part X: Next steps in meaning-space

I take a moment to speculate on my future directions and discuss some of my open questions. Where am I going next in the realm of meaning? How does that relate to the larger trends in society?


Conclusion to a series on faith, doubt and anti-metanoia

The conclusion to the series and the mirror image of this blog post.