When People Do Bad Things to Us . . .
May 17, 2008
A friend and former student wrote recently of having her heart broken by a man who had told her he loved her and wanted to make a life with her.
“Why would God allow me to be hurt like this?” she understandably wondered. “I’m not a kid, not foolish in relationships, said and did all the things I thought I was supposed to say and do, and out of the blue he dumps me. How can such a thing be part of God’s good plan?”
So here’s some of what I replied, which some of you will recognize is the perspective I outline in my book on the problem of evil (Can God Be Trusted?) and in my book on our calling in the world (Making the Best of It):
I believe that God does indeed “work all things together for good” (Rom. 8:28). But that oft-quoted Scripture needs to be understood carefully.
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In this last post, I’d like to reflect on how Richard Dawkins unwittingly and certainly unwillingly helps the Christian Church, as well as the other theists he so energetically opposes.
In particular, he helps us by showing us how some of us sound to people such as he, as well as to others who also do not share our premises. I was struck as Dawkins spoke at how similar was his style to that of many Christian apologists and preachers I have encountered/endured through the years.
For instance, he presented major issues in a simplistic fashion only to dispatch them with breathtaking swiftness. Here’s one example.
Dawkins averred that theism is patently contradictory. A God who can see the future with certainty (because of omniscience) thus is powerless to do anything other than what he foresees himself doing, thus compromising his omnipotence. Voilà! Theism is incoherent!
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Richard Dawkins has traveled the world, sowing his particular gospel of atheism, science, rational argument, and the courage to live in the light of The Facts.
He has appeared before countless audiences, participated in dozens of debates, and handled hundreds of questioners. But he seemed surprised, even nonplussed, by the line of questioning he received from several members of the UBC audience who patiently lined up to press him on . . . vegetarianism.
By the time Dawkins encountered the third such questioner, he was moved to wonder aloud whether he was encountering some sort of “lobby.” No, just the West Coast.
Yet this particular issue presented an intriguing window into Dawkins that had not been provided in his presentation. For his presentation was mostly offensive, in the sense of attacking positions he disliked, rather than defensive, in the sense of offering cogent reasons for adopting his own life philosophy. (His presentation was also at times astonishingly offensive in the other sense, but more about that in my third post.)
Being pressed about vegetarianism, then, we got to see Richard Dawkins construct and defend some ethics. And what a ramshackle thing he produced!
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Richard Dawkins at UBC: Part One, Dawkins as Rhetor
April 29, 2008
So someone at the University of British Columbia (UBC) decided it was a good idea to bring Richard Dawkins to campus to give a free public lecture. Fair enough. He’s an academic celebrity and there are precious few of those.
The two (two!) professors who introduced him, however, introduced him as someone who could impressively relate the humanities and the sciences. That claim deserves a little scrutiny.
Lots of people have analyzed and criticized Dawkins’s arguments over the years. Indeed, there are whole forests’ worth of books now in print responding to one or another of his anti-theism volumes. And who can count the number of phosphors employed similarly in the blogosphere?
What I will do over the next three posts is to offer what I hope will be some observations that complement these direct engagements with this ideas, and I will do so indeed from the perspective of the humanities.
Let’s begin with one of the most ancient of the liberal arts and consider Dawkins as Rhetor, as orator, as public speaker.
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I’m Certain that There Are Two Kinds of Certainty
April 11, 2008
There is a lot of huffing and puffing nowadays about “postmodernism” and “skepticism” and “certainty” and “absolute truth.” And it’s been going on for a long time.
On one extreme we have those who affirm that all statements are simply indications of one’s own state of mind, simply matters of opinion, and have no determinable reference to reality. On the other are those who declare their belief in absolute truth and in the absolute truthfulness of their conviction about their favourite absolute truths.
I’ll deal with the radical postmodernists/skeptics/cynics/social constructivists/solipsists another time. (I’ve already dealt with postmodernism in a previous book—Humble Apologetics—and doubtless will again.) Today, let’s deal with the other end of the scale, those who declare not only that certainty is to be had, but that right-thinking people and particularly Christians ought to say that we have it about the main convictions of our outlook.
Alas, too many of these folk proclaim that anyone (such as your servant) who questions whether a human being is actually equipped to enjoy certainty about his or her convictions is guilty of betraying the faith. Some of these folks are clearly off their rockers, while others seem sensible enough on most matters, if regrettably strident and rigid on this one.
The situation boils down to a simple distinction between two kinds of certainty. The former describes a situation and the latter describes a state of mind.
Do You Have to Choose between Your Brains and Your Beliefs? No, No, and Sort of, but No
February 3, 2008
In this short series, I’ve responded to the common charge by the current crop of atheists about Christians being not too bright (Richard Dawkins), if not positively dangerous and downright insane, such that one simply must choose between contemporary science and religious faith, between one’s brains and one’s beliefs. And I have replied twice in the negative.
But there is an important sense in which Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. are on to something.
They say they can’t see how someone can reasonably believe the basic tenets of the Christian faith: that God is a trinity of one being in three persons; that one of those persons became human in Jesus of Nazareth; that Jesus of Nazareth atoned for the sins of the world on the cross; that the resurrection of Jesus signifies eternal life for all who trust in him; and that all of these propositions can be believed because taught by the Bible, which is to be accepted as the Word of God written.
And they’re right to find it impossible to see how someone can reasonably believe that–if by “reasonably believe” they cling to a particular mode of reasoning, namely, inference from empirical data or self-evident propositions.
Much of the confusion in this discussion surrounds the question of faith. Faith is typically seen as non-rational or even irrational by its opponents, who congratulate themselves on adhering strictly to evidence, inference, and the like. Worse, faith is sometimes championed precisely as absurd or “supra-rational” by some of its defenders. (Um, thanks a lot, guys.)
At least two mistakes about the concept of faith need to be dealt with here. The first is to think that faith is a peculiarly religious word and has nothing to do with everyday life. The second is to presume that faith has no relationship to knowledge, that the two stand as utterly separate categories of assent.
Some of us might think we can do entirely without any sort of faith and conduct our lives strictly according to what we (think we) know. Everyday life, however, constantly presses us beyond what we know (or think we know) and requires us to exercise faith. We frequently find ourselves compelled to trust beyond what we’re sure of, to make commitments that go outside our sense of safety. And yet these moments of trust and commitment—these acts of faith—are intrinsically and importantly related to knowledge.
Faith is what we do when we cantilever our lives out over what we do not and cannot know, while anchoring our lives upon what we think we do know. Faith relies on knowledge even as it moves out from knowledge into the unknown.
Darrell cannot know for certain that this canoe bobbing by the dock will still float once he gets in it, but he cannot be “mostly convinced” and stay with most of his weight committed to the canoe while reserving some of his weight for the dock. To enjoy the canoe, he has to get all the way in. He has to make a commitment. He has to exercise rationally-based faith.
A young journalist once said to me, as the sound guy was winding up his cables and the camera guy was putting his equipment in its case, “May I ask you a personal question?”
She had been interviewing me for a Canadian TV network on some topic in contemporary religion and society in my historical/sociological mode and the interview had gone fine. Now we had a couple of minutes while the tech guys tidied up.
“Sure,” I replied.
“Well,” she started, “you actually seem to believe some of this stuff.”
“I do.”
“Really!” she exclaimed. “And do you go to church?”
“Yes, pretty much every week.”
“Really!” she exclaimed again. And then there was a pause.
“You know,” she then went on, pensively, “I had a roommate like you once. She was reasonably bright, and had a sense of humour, and also was a Christian. That’s now two!”
I was privileged to offer a public lecture this past week on the UBC campus on this question. I’ll write more about the topic soon, once I’m done a brief bit of travelling (Banff, Alberta, this weekend; the coastal town of Anacortes, Washington, the next).
But I confess that I had to resist offering the following flippant answers to the question instead of the serious ones I did (again, which I’ll set out for you soon):
“Yes, you do. That’s why I handed back my Ph.D. and professorship last week, and now happily believe unencumbered by intelligence.”
or
“Well, since I have so few of either, it’s no big deal for me…”
or
“Why do we have to keep answering this question? After two thousand years of Christianity, with figures as various and as brilliant as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, J. S. Bach, Blaise Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and [fill in the names of any number of geniuses here] to point to, why is this still an interesting question?”
or
“This event is sponsored by UBC Christian students, who by definition have good brains (or they couldn’t get into UBC) and serious faith (or they wouldn’t bother sponsoring events such as this). Q.E.D. The End.”
I didn’t say any of that, of course. I said something more sober and sensible.
(But I did think it, I confess, and perhaps when you read this post’s heading, you thought something similar!)
To D. A. Carson on the Emerging Church: Leave Me Out of It
November 1, 2007
A couple of years ago, a few students brought to my attention the fact that D. A. Carson, Research Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in suburban Chicago, had quoted me in his book, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications (Zondervan, 2005).
They each came to me, and several people have since approached me during speaking engagements around North America, because Carson uses something I wrote to illustrate something he doesn’t like about the emerging church. This use has puzzled each of my inquirers for the same two reasons: (1) they didn’t know I had anything to do with the emerging church and (2) they didn’t think that Carson construed properly what I wrote.
So I retrieved a copy from our library, looked up my name, and behold, on page 66, there I am.
Effective Apologetics: Buildings, Guides, and Sandwiches
September 7, 2007
During our recent roadtrip in the northwestern and north-central United States, we made a point of stopping to visit Temple Square in Salt Lake City, the “Vatican” of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). As someone professionally and personally interested in apologetics–the way in which religious groups commend and defend their views to others and to their own number–I was impressed again at how well the Mormons do things in Temple Square.
One of those things is architecture. Non-Mormons cannot visit inside the Temple itself, but walking around it nicely presents Mormonism as what it is: sort of Christian (the European medieval battlements and spires make that connection clear), but not fully Christian (one of my sons remarked on the sustained absence of crosses in and on Mormon buildings).
The famous Mormon Tabernacle is a strikingly innovative building for its time (19th century), with a rounded roof that perhaps reminds the less-lofty-minded of a Jiffy Pop bag on its way to ebullition or perhaps a large UFO, but inside it is a rather conventional, and beautiful, ecclesiastical space of its time.
The Conference Center, however, is simply breathtaking.
