With the (minor) hoopla surrounding the recent atheist shindig in Washington, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a “freethinker.” A foundational plank in the public strategy of new skeptical movements is that religious belief is delusional and that atheism is the only truly rational position. When pressed as to why only atheism is reasonable, skeptics often appeal to the amorphous notion of freethinking, with the unbelievers portrayed as the epistemically virtuous freethinkers and the believers as mindless sheep who follow religious authorities over the cliff of Bronze Age stupidity.

This is nonsense, of course, but here I want to explain why. Contemporary atheists like Richard Dawkins embrace the idea of freethinking (Dawkins once suggested that “Think for Yourself Academy” would be a suitable name for a public freethinking school in the UK), but the modern secular movement finds its origins in the Enlightenment. In fact many early freethinkers were neither atheists nor theists, but deistic provocateurs like the philosopher Anthony Collins. Collins was a friend of John Locke, adversary of institutional religion, and proponent of freethinking in the 18th century. Here is Collins in A Discourse on Free-Thinking:

The Subjects of which Men are deny’d the Right to think by the Enemys of Free-Thinking, are of all others those of which Men have not only a Right to think, but of which they are oblig’d in duty to think; viz. such a of the Nature and Attributes of the Eternal Being or God, of the Truth and Authority of Books esteem’d Sacred, and of the Sense and Meaning of those Books; or, in one word, of Religous Questions.

1st. A right Opinion in these matters is suppos’d by the Enemys of Free-Thinking to be absolutely necessary to Men’s Salvation, and some Errors or Mistakes about them are suppos’d to be damnable. Now where a right Opinion is so necessary, there Men have the greatest Concern imaginable to think for themselves, as the best means to take up with the right side of the Question. For if they will not think for themselves, it remains only for them to take the Opinions they have imbib’d from their Grandmothers, Mothers or Priests, or owe to such like Accident, for granted. But taking that method, they can only be in the right by chance; whereas by Thinking and Examination, they have not only the mere accident of being in the right, but have the Evidence of things to determine them to the side of Truth: unless it be suppos’d that Men are such absurd Animals, that the most unreasonable Opinion is as likely to be admitted for true as the most reasonable, when it is judg’d of by the Reason and Understanding of Men. In that case indeed it will follow, That Men can be under no Obligation to think of these matters. But then it will likewise follow, That they can be under no Obligation to concern themselves about Truth and Falshood in any Opinions. For if Men are so absurd, as not to be able to distinguish between Truth and Falshood, Evidence and no Evidence, what pretense is there for Mens having any Opinions at all? Which yet none judg so necessary as the Enemys of Free-Thinking.

Collins’ charge is that religious believers blindly accept whatever their grandmother tells them without thinking through these matters independently, which they have the right and the obligation to do. Let’s move the clock forward. Read the rest of this entry »

The Reason Rally is billing itself as “the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history.” This is probably true, but whether you’re a supporter, detractor, or merely an inquisitive bystander when it comes to what’s happening today on the National Mall in Washington, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s the first time that atheists and secularists have come together to celebrate reason and secularism. I personally find the notion of celebrating reason to be very odd, but the gathering of Dawkins and the throngs of enlightened and self-assured skeptics with him is thoroughly unremarkable when compared to the original “Festival of Reason” that French secularists celebrated after the French Revolution.

Shortly after the overthrow of the Ancien Régime, the leaders of the Revolution attempted to quash religion by closing churches and replacing Christianity with a new secular religion. In Notre Dame, Reason was actually enshrined as a goddess (although portrayed by an actual woman), and the adherents of this new Cult of Reason held festivals around France as churches were converted into “temples of reason.” Here for your creepy reading pleasure are a few excerpts from a description of one of these festivals in Châlons-sur-Marne in 1794. These are taken from The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick:

The festival was announced in the whole Commune the evening before; for this purpose, retreat was sounded by all the drummers and by the trumpeters of the troops in barracks at Châlons, in all parts of the town …

The former church of Notre Dame was, for lack of time and means, cleaned and prepared only provisionally for its new use, and in its former sanctuary there was erected a pedestal supporting the symbolic statue of Reason. It is of simple and free design, decorated only by an inset bearing this inscription:

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a meditation on my children’s future, a subject that intrudes on a multitude of my waking hours. I have been considering what I will tell them about love, and here I present my thoughts. Call it a paean to love if you will, but a paean to the real thing, not to the double-dealing charlatan that pop culture blindly worships like a wooden god.

As a child and connoisseur of American pop cultural output of the last three decades, I think I can paint a largely accurate picture of how media and the arts (often) depict love. Call this popular picture “the folly of sentiment.” Contemporary western culture certainly has an intimate knowledge of the type of sentimentality and emotional connections that play a role in real love, but it often deletes the other components that complete the picture. Like an artist who thinks all he needs for a masterpiece is paint and canvas, stupidly unwilling to see that he must conjoin them in a formal way, contemporary people are taken with the notion that sexual chemistry, strong emotional ties, and the nebulous “right person” can be put into the blender of life without additional ingredients and thereby produce a magical outcome. (Incidentally, for info on recent books that attempt to explain how we arrived at this strange moment in the history of love, see this set of reviews in the Wall Street Journal).

I’ll give you an example. In our house recently an episode of “The Bachelor” was on the idiot’s lantern. As far as TV shows go, there is no greater offender in promoting the folly of sentiment than “The Bachelor,” and the statements about love that issue from the contestants’ mouths are often cringeworthy on a cosmic scale. On this episode, one of the female contestants was being interviewed about her prospects with the titular man of the world. She herself was a divorcee, but she prattled on about how true love happens when you “meet the right person” and “fall in love” and thereby live happily ever after. Stars flickered in her eyes as she spoke, and it was apparent that she walked by an extraordinary faith in that nebulous thing called “true love.”

Only a fool would view love in this way. Consider an idealized picture of love: young, passionate, beautiful, and most-importantly, existence-affirming, for lack of a more elegant term. In pop songs, films, TV shows, perfume ads, and so on, we often see this ideal pictorialized: two young and beautiful people in a passionate embrace, consumed totally with one another. They have found each other: the right people at the right moment! Further, they “complete” each other. All my life I have been waiting for this man/woman, and the problem with all those other people with whom I had sexual flings and similar emotional attachments was that they weren’t this man/woman. Perhaps most importantly, implicit (and often explicit) in this picture is the idea that in “completing” each other, the lovers have found the highest meaning in life and achieved the highest level of human fulfillment. Romantic love is thus portrayed as an almost religious ideal. Authentic spiritual (and thus ultimate) fulfillment comes when one finds this perfect, life-affirming lover.

Love is thus seated on the throne of God, and the wise see that it sits uncomfortably.

No one with a modicum of experience with personal relationships can accept this overly sentimentalized and idealized picture. I assure you that if my wife had any delusions about me completely fulfilling her life when we got married, I dissolved them almost immediately. Investing one’s total happiness in a human being is an exercise in despair. Even the best of humans are not built for that task.

The folly of sentiment thus cheapens love by making it ultimate, like putting your dog on a pedestal and worshiping him, believing he can fulfill all your needs. No. In doing so you violate the purpose of both yourself and the dog. Instead of creating a meaningful relationship you sow the seeds of its destruction. True love is something more.

That is the first fundamental mistake entailed by the folly of sentiment. The second mistake is the notion that love “just happens” and that sexual chemistry, “passion,” infatuation, and emotional connection somehow lead to lasting love. They do not. In fact I would argue that the highly emotional period of being “in love” isn’t even a necessary condition for authentic love, and on its own it can actually deceive people into thinking they’ve found the real thing when they are nowhere in its locale. Passion, chemistry, and emotional highs certainly help, and for the fortunate among us they serve as catalysts for the real thing, but they are poor candidates for being the foundation of a relationship. I will tell my children that every broken heart, every shattered marriage, every Jerry Springer-like outburst of betrayal and hatred, every violent act of romantic revenge, and practically every out of wedlock child was born in the passionate throes of “being in love.” Sentiment is a harsh and vile god: always promising but never granting. Behind the mask of love it wears there is only the husk of rushing chemicals in the brain. Naked passion ends only in tragedy.

What then should be added to passion, chemistry, and all the rest to get true love? Commitment, sacrifice, a joint moral outlook, and most of all, a shared view of the purpose of life. I cannot speak for all Christian believers but both my wife and I view our relationship as an extension of our Christian faith. It is not primarily an institution for our own mutual benefit but a picture of inter-Trinitarian love and, more specifically, the eternal love of Christ for His church. It is therefore not based merely on emotion or passion. Those things are present, of course, but we view them as extraordinary gifts from God rather than as foundational to our relationship. Neither do we engage in a misguided exaltation of each other as being the answer to all of our problems. My wife is all too aware that putting all her hope for meaning, purpose, and final fulfillment in me would be the same as putting it in a bowl of soup. The irony of a successful marriage is that by demoting passion and chemistry to their proper place, a married couple actually receives the full bounty of their benefits. It is their misuse that makes them cheap and removes their glory.

Consider again love pictorialized. The image of two beautiful young people in a passionate embrace loses some of its teeth when compared against the folly of sentiment that often fuels it. Perhaps a better picture of love is two older people in the golden years of their life, joined not in the sexual image of bodies twisted around one another but in the childlike image of holding hands, their love not symbolized by unrestrained fire but unwavering commitment and the simple enjoyment of the other’s presence. Not the bonfire of passion but the slow burn of a shared eternal vision.

Here’s the new venture started by my brother Brett and his partner Matt Keller:

1for1 Water Video from 1for1 Water on Vimeo.

Some Christians kick and scream about how bad the world is. Others just decide to change it. This is conscientious capitalism in action. More here.

From Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian:

What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by wandering bands of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building – these things stand in judgment on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

It’s strange how such prose can set a man’s mind on unknown paths. I read these lines from McCarthy’s epic and have the following thought: modern man (if I may use a well-worn term, multifariously defined) takes himself to be very clever. See his iPods, his moving machines, his paper stories, his homes built light and strong! Wonder at his tricks: minimal work but maximal comfort, physical love without the worry of natural consequences. Marvel at his cleverness! But his time is made of straw. In distant ages future no trace of him will be found. His houses will turn to dust, his achievements to ruin. But the work of the savages to which he considers himself superior will remain, those crude predecessors who knew nothing of Facebook or frozen corn dogs or quantum mechanics. In their quest for survival they created something that will outlast the so-called wisdom of those who walked the same land after them.

I recently got around to listening to the much ballyhooed debate on God and morality between Bill Craig and Sam Harris at Notre Dame. Craig was arguing that atheism can provide no legitimate foundation for objective moral values and duties, and Harris was arguing that it can, based largely on what he has said in his recent book. As usual, I think Craig got the better of his opponent from a philosophical standpoint, but Harris made more effective rhetorical points.

I highly recommend the debate for anyone interested in the ongoing polemics between theists and atheists, but I won’t try to summarize it here. Luke at Common Sense Atheism has already done a fine job of that. I do want to make a few points, however, as an illustration of the schizophrenic world of the new atheists, they who fancy themselves as the champions of reason but often practice very poor philosophy.

Late in the debate, Harris completely abandoned trying to answer some of Craig’s charges about the insufficiency of atheism to provide a reasonable basis for moral values and duties. Craig made at least two arguments that I think are particularly poisonous to Harris’ position and that Harris never answered. For example, he pointed out that Harris was quite fond of equivocating on the varying uses of the terms “good” and “bad.” In fact I think Craig could have argued that Harris’ entire moral system trades on this equivocation, but Harris was fortunate that Craig didn’t press the point. Read the rest of this entry »

For anyone attending the ETS/EPS Midwestern Regional meeting in Cincinnati this weekend, I’ll be presenting a paper on presuppositionalism on Friday. The preliminary conference program is here.

For any philosophers attending the Eastern Division Meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers in New York next month, a preliminary program has been posted at the conference website here. I’ll be presenting a paper on divine simplicity during one of the sessions.

A Song for Simeon
by T. S. Eliot

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have taken and given honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.

Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

According to thy word,
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.

(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

————————

Merry Christmas to all. Biblical context here.

Over at his blog, philosopher Stephen Law thinks the following principle is plausible:

P1 Where a claim’s justification derives solely from evidence, extraordinary claims (e.g. concerning supernatural miracles) require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of extraordinary evidence there is good reason to be sceptical about those claims.

One way theists respond is by making what Law calls the “presuppositions move”:

Some theists (though of course by no means all) have challenged the application of Sagan’s principle to religious miracles, maintaining that which claims qualify as “extraordinary” depends on our presuppositions.

I’ve already discussed two (mostly unsuccessful) ways which the PM might be interpreted. Here are two more interpretations that are a bit stronger, both which are closer to how I think theists mean the PM to be understood.

First, the PM might be intended to make the claim that we all have pretheoretical worldview commitments (hereafter referred to lovingly as PWCs) that are not themselves subject to testing or evidence, but through which we filter our experience of the world. But this way of putting the PM goes further than the two claims I wrote about in my earlier post. On this understanding, the PM defenders are actually claiming they have the epistemic high ground because they are acknowledging that there is no neutral ground when discussing things like miracle claims. Here the theist is basically accusing the skeptic of engaging in a philosophical farce by pretending there is some neutral ground from which to evaluate miracle claims when really there isn’t. We all start from the PWCs we already have, and that’s it. If one set of PWCs has the advantage over another it’s because that set of PWCs has more explanatory power over the world than another set of PWCs.

This sort of argument is characteristic of some presuppositional apologetic approaches, despite the fact that it has a decidedly postmodern ring to it. It’s similar to epistemological approaches that argue for coherentist models of justification over foundationalist models, and if this way of pressing the PM is to be at all successful, it would have to proceed along those lines. But in that case, what it’s really arguing for is the explanatory power of theism over one aspect of the world (purported miracle claims), and of course that sort of argument isn’t of much use unless it’s paired with other arguments for theism’s explanatory power over other facts about the world, and so on. So in that case the PM rests on a very different argument from the one described by Law, and the success or failure of the PM depends on the success or failure of a total case for the explanatory power of theism.

This leaves us with one more option, and the one I think carries the most weight. On this reading of the Presuppositions Move, the theist is claiming that the skeptic is engaging in a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand regarding what counts as an “extraordinary” claim or what counts as “extraordinary” evidence for such a claim.

Here’s how this works. Let’s accept the skeptic’s claim that he isn’t building naturalism into his interpretation of miracle claims and discounting them right from the start. Very well. What then does he mean in saying that a miracle would be “extraordinary”? He basically means that it isn’t something that normally happens. Human experience directs us to think that such an occurrence would be very much out of the ordinary. So a man rising from the dead after three days extraordinary in this sense: if it happened, it would be extremely rare.

So “extraordinary” in this sense just means “infrequent with respect to our experience.” But if so, what would “extraordinary” evidence for such a claim look like? The skeptic’s claim is that because a miracle event would be infrequent with respect to our experience, we need extraordinary evidence for it. But extraordinary in what sense? Should the evidence also be “infrequent with respect to our experience?” But what would that look like? Investigating a historical claim like a miracle claim would seem to require finding standard historical evidence. What shape would “extraordinary” historical evidence for something like the Resurrection take? I think what skeptics like Law want to imply is that “extraordinary” evidence for out-of-the-ordinary events would have to be evidence of a very spectacular sort. Or, at the very least they want to say that the amount of evidence would have to be significantly more for miracle cases than for other historical events.

But here the PM defender will question this move. Why should evidence for out-of-the-ordinary events be any more spectacular or more abundant than evidence for other historical events? This move doesn’t make much actual sense if all we’re talking about is a purported event that, if true, would be rare. Why would evidence for a rare event have to be spectacular? Since we’re talking about frequencies and probabilities here, which are very sticky subjects, I’ll give a thought experiment to illustrate why the PM defender doesn’t have to think that miracles need this kind of “extraordinary” evidence.

Suppose I tell my wife that I saw a man walking down our street dressed as Darth Vader and leading a monkey on a leash. Well, this event would be very improbable, since in all our years of living in the same house I haven’t seen an event even remotely like this. Since my wife didn’t see it, all she has to go on is my word. But, considering that my wife knows that my word is reliable, that I always tell her the truth, and that I am suffering from no cognitive malfunction, why wouldn’t she accept it? Why should she require evidence that is somehow more “extraordinary” than my own testimony? So taken in this way, the Presuppositions Move is designed to challenge the notion that evidence for a rare event would have to be of a different quality than normal historical evidence for other events. This oversimplifies the issue, of course, but I think this at least shows where the real disagreement lies in debates over supernatural historical events like the Resurrection.