Today I’m going to take the day off from posting about faith or science and talk about how we should argue about these topics online.

The ways we think and act in situations are deeply influenced by the metaphors we use to describe those situations. It is no wonder that the Scriptures use a rich variety of metaphors to help us understand life in Christ (including, of course, the metaphor of biological life itself).

This fact of life matters for the way we disagree online. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe in their book Metaphors We Live By, a dominant metaphor in our culture for argument is competition: sports or battles. (We take and lose ground, score points, etc.) This isn’t entirely bad; war metaphors can underline the seriousness of the contention, for instance, or the need for effort and readiness (just look at Eph. 6). But I think it’s easy to let these metaphors get the best of us by keeping us from arguing effectively and (far more important) loving those with whom we argue.

So I’d like to propose that we think about our arguments less as competitions and more as gardening: planting and watering seeds while praying they will bear fruit. Competitions bring immediate results. Sports are attention-grabbing, and bring glory to the victor. Battles are won by a killing stroke that destroys the enemy. But gardening is long-term: we may never know how God will use our words in someone’s future. Planting is a quiet, unassuming endeavor: the farmer must trust God. And we water, but God makes life grow.

In my own life, I’ve very rarely had my mind changed by a forceful argument made by an aggressive stranger on the Internet. But the deepest and longest-lasting changes, the ones that move not just my head but my affections, have come about not through a sudden clang of words hit against each other. They have come through careful, charitable, winsome arguments made repeatedly by people who didn’t seek to press battered opponents and destroy their pride, but instead simply planted an idea, and trusted God with the results.

So if you want to convince others – and if you want to love – think less like the characters of Inception and more like a sower of seeds. And pray to the Lord of the Harvest to bring thirty, sixty, or a hundred-fold results.

Grace and peace.

Tags: argument, metaphor

Many different arguments have been made against Christianity and other religions because of evil. It’s understandable; just think of atrocities like the murder of youths in Norway last summer (recently in the news again as their killer has been declared insane). And smaller, everyday kinds of evils are also disturbing (of course, part of the horror of things like murder is precisely that they happen every day).

The best of these arguments focus on evil that purportedly lacks a morally sufficient reason. For God might well allow evils whenever He has good reason to do so, but it’s hard to see how a good God could allow gratuitous evil.

So the basic argument (offered in its most sophisticated form by atheistic philosophers like William Rowe) is this:

1. There are some evils for which we can find no morally sufficient reason.
2. Therefore, there is likely no morally sufficient reason for these evils.
3. If God existed, He would not allow evils without a morally sufficient reason.
4. Therefore, God probably doesn’t exist.

There are a few problems with this argument. I’ll focus on the move from 1 to 2. Why think that our lack of ability to find such reasons means they don’t exist?

Sometimes, of course, when we can’t find something, that’s a very good reason to think it doesn’t exist. We are designed to be pretty good at seeing middle-sized objects like buses or St. Bernards right in front of us.[1] Other things we’re not so good at: the detailed structure of big, complex situations that we can’t personally do much about, like the weather. Or like God’s reasons for making the world.

We just have no reason to think our natural abilities are that good at seeing things. How could a person whose life is determined by a squishy, small pile of grey matter approach the skill required to know about the total picture of a universe this complex—and which includes, of course, the squishy bits of matter without we couldn’t think? We can often sense good and evil in particular situations, but the larger framework of which they are a part is beyond our ken. So good reasons that rely on the complex interworking of creation—the sorts that would probably be most on God’s mind when deciding what to create—aren’t the sort of thing we could see. We can’t even see in the dark!

And the history of salvation supports the idea that we aren’t good at telling God’s plans and reasons. Who would have guessed that God would reveal Himself to a particular tribe, or decide to fulfill His promises to them by becoming incarnate, or use controversies about the person of Christ to produce the great creeds? Yet all this happened, despite the fact that people likely couldn’t tell at the time why things were unfolding the way they were.

So we shouldn’t place much confidence in our ability to tell exactly how all things are working together for good. We’re not so good at figuring out the “all things” that such knowledge would require. And this means it isn’t at all surprising that there are evil things for which we can’t see a morally sufficient reason.

It would be surprising if things were any different.

Tags: evil, skeptical theism

Why the “no evidence” accusation misses the point.

“Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!”
   —Bertrand Russell, upon being asked what he would reply if, after dying, he were brought into the presence of God and asked why he had not been a believer

Bertrand Russell was certainly not a believer in God (though he has since, to quote a teacher of mine, changed his view!). But, to my knowledge, he never made the crazy charge I now hear occasionally put forward by skeptics, that our faith is irrational because there is no evidence for it.[1]

This charge betrays a lamentable ignorance of some subjects, like 1^st-century history: The idea that none of the New Testament documents provide any evidence for Christianity should be pretty hard for even a serious skeptic to hold.

But let’s suppose we bracketed history, and granted for argument’s sake that there was no scientific evidence for Christianity. Would the skeptic be right in this case?

Not necessarily, even after those generous concessions. That is, even if there were no scientific or historical evidence, these do not exhaust the kinds of evidence there could be. To see this, it’s helpful to understand a distinction between two different senses of the word “evidence.”[2] I think this “no evidence” objection usually rests on confusion between these two kinds of evidence.

The first is evidence as that which justifies our beliefs, i.e. which gives us a reason to believe them and provides our rational basis for belief. We can call this “normative evidence” because it is what gives us reason for believing (the word “normative” means having to do with a reason for something).

The second kind of evidence is what we could call “indicator evidence” (it could also be called “scientific evidence” in a broad sense). It consists in a regular connection between two objects “out there” in the world, and science makes progress largely by discovering this kind of correspondence between objects. In fact, science can only study indicator evidence; normative evidence, being inside our minds, is beyond its reach.

We can see the difference between these kinds of evidence easily by considering how smoke is evidence for fire. Because there is a reliable (though not perfect) connection between smoke and fire, smoke is indicator evidence for fire. And when you or I look at smoke, we know this, and so smoke typically also serves as normative evidence for fire (that is, we typically become more rightly confident in believing there is a fire somewhere when we see smoke there).

But suppose a young child who didn’t know about the fire/smoke connection saw some smoke in the distance. This child would have indicator evidence for fire, but not normative evidence, since the child did not know about the connection.

So indicator evidence can exist without normative evidence, as for the child. And normative evidence can exist without indicator evidence. For instance, take your belief about what you last had for dinner. It is perfectly obvious that this belief is rational, though you likely have no scientific/indicator evidence for it.[3]

Is it likely that Christian belief has normative evidence in its favor, apart from scientific/indicator evidence? Yes. For instance, consider the Reformed epistemologists (see here and here) who take many Christian beliefs to be rational because of the witness of God’s Spirit, or a spiritual perception of God. Spiritual perception and divine witness would certainly give normative evidence, since it is rational to believe because of them. And they are plainly not indicators of anything in the scientific sense. So attempts to demonstrate the paucity of evidence for Christianity on the basis of a lack of indicator evidence fail, unless reasons can be given to reject these sources of evidence.

And, of course, all this would be the case even if there were no indicator evidence in favor of Christianity. Even if we were to come close to giving away the store to the skeptic, there’s still enough material left behind the counter to provide evidence for Christianity.

Tags: evidence, epistemology

Once, not too long ago, the vast majority of scientists (then called naturalists) believed in God. In fact, the more reputable and well-known the scientist, the more likely he was to be a theist – and most theists were Christians. These English scientists, and their political leaders, celebrated science as a way to unite a people who had been torn apart by religious and civil war.

Science could unite the country because science showed that there was a God. It didn’t prove that this God was the Christian God, but that was all right. It showed that God existed, so evildoers would be punished. And since science also showed that God had created a stable, unchanging natural order, people were taught this meant they should submit to the order of the state, rather than destroy the country through strife, like their parents. So science brought in God, and God brought in peace.

And the main reason science proved God was because it revealed a natural order like a machine—a machine that everyone knew couldn’t have simply assembled itself. Both the natural world and the corresponding political order showed evidence of careful design. The greatest expounder of the order in nature, William Paley, was an able synthesizer and popular writer who was (like many) most impressed by the biological world with its adaptations of species to habitats. He compared the wonders revealed by biology to watches, and inferred a watchmaker.

But politics and science changed. Social reformers rejected the idea that the current political order was the good production of an orderly God, for the obvious reason that it was full of oppression. And the newfound complexity of the adaptation of species to environments was no longer thought to prove God, when a shy naturalist named Darwin put forward a thesis plausibly showing how species had adapted to their environments through a process that seemed much more full of pain and chance than divine order and blessing.

So the Victorians had a crisis of faith, and Christianity has never been in the English-speaking halls of power in the same way since. There’s more to the story, of course—nuances, exceptions, qualifiers I’ve missed. But the basic plot shows a people who put their faith in science to ensure their religion and their politics, and how their hopes were bitterly disappointed. Like the pagans before them, they put their hopes in the creation rather than the Creator, and received in due course the penalty for their error.

May we never make their mistakes.

Tags: history, Paley, Darwin

Recently I was talking with some friends, who are secular analytic philosophers, about some contemporary puzzles in ethics. I was struck by how thin their ideas about moral behavior seemed to be—in particular, they seemed to believe that consequences are all that matter when determining whether something is morally wrong or acceptable.

It was suggested that violent fantasies were wrong only if they made someone more likely to act badly towards others; that there was nothing morally wrong with using a flag as a rag; and that incest or bestiality (as long as there were no children or emotional consequences) was morally permissible. And most of those I was speaking with specialized in ethics!

I should stress that these philosophers would certainly never do such things themselves; in fact, they freely admitted to being disgusted at the prospect. But absent some physical or psychological harm caused, they couldn’t find any moral reason to condemn such things.

I could write about the reasons for this—the history of consequentialism, the modern tendency to reduce morality to psychological well-being, the desire to avoid condemnation, and the (not always bad) philosophical distrust of emotional responses. But I don’t have the heart.

It grieves me to see my friends in such captivity, and I long to see the Church model a better view of ethics. We need to remember that life is about more than the calculation of consequences. We need to teach that to find satisfaction in horrors is to make yourself horrific. We need to point to a richer view of life that recognizes the value of symbols, and realizes that to profane them is to disrespect what they stand for. We need to live out a dignified view of human sexuality that sees our bodies as set apart for intimate relationship.

Let’s not give in to the modern worship of the sciences, those predictors of consequences. Let’s live human lives, lives filled with God’s grace and peace.

Tags: Ethics

This November’s Scientific American has a short report on a new movement known as “experimental philosophy.” (Unfortunately, most of it is not available for non-subscribers.) The hope is that by using the methods of the social sciences, philosophers may get more insight into why people disagree about perennial philosophical problems. Already, some interesting results are in; for instance, researchers have found a correlation between belief in moral relativism and openness to seeing things from others’ perspectives—more on that in a minute.

Much of the work thus far hasn’t been up to the scientific standards needed for real confidence in specific results, and experimental methodology cannot decisively settle philosophical problems. Christians can learn from this movement, however. As it progresses, it may help us to understand why we disagree with each other, and perhaps even give us clues about what positions are correct.

For instance, one area of research in experimental philosophy has been whether people would consider criminals to be morally responsible if the criminal’s actions were completely determined by the laws of nature. This issue is part of the ancient philosophical discussion of free will: is having free will compatible with having one’s actions “fixed” beforehand by something? Christians have disagreed on the subject, sometimes with shameful results. If we can discover the sorts of considerations that pull us in one direction or the other, perhaps we can evaluate them, or at least better understand our opponents.

There is a deeper lesson that experimental philosophy can teach us as well. Much experimental philosophy focuses on the ways that irrelevant factors distort our judgment. (For instance, the order in which we consider cases influences our answers to philosophical thought experiments.) We are easily deceived, and relying mainly on our gut is a bad way to find the truth about hard topics.

So we should pause before we confidently rely on ourselves to be able to discern the truth. Christians don’t have access to the truth because we have more reliable intuition. Instead, God has revealed Himself to us in order that we don’t have to try to work out the most important things through unreliable introspection.

The recent data correlating opening to other’s perspectives and belief in moral relativism is a case in point. This new data from experimental philosophers will probably be used to argue that people who reject moral relativism do so because they cannot imagine other points of view. It may well be true that some of the more ardent popular critics of moral relativism could use some more openness to other people’s perspectives. But Christians should not worry about their belief in moral absolutes on the basis of these experiments. After all, we have been given knowledge that moral absolutes exist because of an absolutely holy God. We don’t need to say that moral absolutes must exist because we can’t imagine how someone else could have a valid point of view; we affirm that there is a moral law built into reality because the Lord of all reality has crashed into our fallible perspectives. It is trust in God, not in our own intuition, that undergirds our belief in a moral reality.

The Scientific American article should remind us that we don’t have to oppose moral relativism for the reasons the world does. Let’s oppose it because the Lord has come into history to judge and save.

Grace and peace.

Tags: Experimental philosophy, relativism, free will

[Genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.

                        -Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2^nd edition, page 21

It is a perennial temptation for scientists and laymen alike to draw unwarranted metaphysical conclusions from scientific theories. Occasionally, some well supported scientific view will have metaphysical implications, but generally these are very limited and difficult to discern. In fact, the same theory can often be interpreted differently to give very different metaphysical results.

Case in point: Richard Dawkins’ quote from The Selfish Gene. Dawkins portrays the gene as the secret master controller of our human reality.[1] Is this just a natural implication of evolutionary theory?

Not according to systems biologist Denis Noble. Here is his parody of Dawkins’ claim:

[Genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy that we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence.

                        -Denis Noble, The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome, page 13

Noble shows that it is possible to take the same scientific data (that we have genes) and give a very different account of it. In Dawkins vision, genes are active masters, and are the cause and purpose of our existence. In Noble’s systems biology version, genes are simply tools, dependent on us, and their purpose is to help us.

Neither of these visions is provable by the science. But scientists, science popularizers, and even theologians routinely mix such metaphysical claims with their empirical claims, suggesting that they are a single package and must be taken as such.

The truth could hardly be more different. Typically, metaphysical and empirical claims have very different amounts and kinds of evidence, and it is highly misleading to treat them as though they were joined at the hip. We understand the world by combining our beliefs, including philosophical, religious, and scientific ones, and this integration is good to do. We must remember, however, not to accept the integration of others uncritically.

Because even expert scientists aren’t expert metaphysicians. 

Are either Dawkins’ or Noble’s views of the genome compatible with Christianity? Should we find either plausible?

Tags: Biology, genetics, metaphysics, Dawkins, McGrath

Keeping the conversations going.