Archive for the ‘Theology’ Category

My lovely wife has requested that I explain the tagline of this blog, since she felt that “slouching towards eternity” could be interpreted in a negative way. So here goes.

The tagline itself is a play on a line from a poem by W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming.” I was an English major as an undergrad, and I always loved Yeats. Here’s the full text of the poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Don’t ask me to give you a detailed explanation of what this poem means, because I can’t. I haven’t seriously read English literature since my college days. Commentators say Yeats meant it to refer to the chaos of Europe after World War I, and that seems about right. At the very least the events of the second stanza represent some terrible power gaining control of the world during a time of great upheaval and ushering in a new age. The last line is particularly famous, and it’s been picked up and used elsewhere, such as in a book by Robert Bork. I don’t hold any affinity for Yeats’ political passions that informed the poem, but I do like the line itself. I actually intended it to have two meanings: one personal and one philosophical.

On the personal side, I liked “slouching towards eternity” because it represents my own struggle in being the type of Christian I want to be. It’s actually a testimony to God’s grace: I don’t approach him by the goodness of my intentions and graciously offer myself to be his loyal servant. At best, on my own power and under my own sinful motivations I throw a few bones in his general direction. I can talk a good talk about seeking the kingdom of God but if it’s left up to me I just don’t do very well. Any desire for God that I find in myself is a desire that was put there by God himself. He draws me to him kicking and screaming, as it were, and that’s grace.

On the philosophical side, most of the posts on this blog will probably be about philosophy of religion and the intersection of philosophy and faith. I have a Ph.D. in Christian philosophy, and it’s one of my passions. However, I also know that as a “route” to God, philosophy is woefully inadequate. By sitting in my chair and pontificating about reality I can approach a hazy notion of God’s existence at best, to say nothing of what he’s like or what he wants out of human beings. To truly know about God, we have to let him define himself, which I think he has done most completely in the person of Jesus Christ and the record we have of him in Scripture. So, theology is superior to philosophy because it deals directly with what God has revealed about himself rather than relying on the imperfections of human reason. Hence philosophy is a discipline that “slouches” toward eternity, as it were.

Now, I know things are much more complicated than this with regard to the relationship between theology and philosophy. Theology, for one, can’t get along at all without the proper use of reason, so in that sense it’s dependent on the philosophical discipline of logic. This is true, but the point remains: I can’t get to God merely by thinking my way to him. He has to reveal himself to me, and he has to draw me to himself since my sinful heart is always trying to run the other direction.

And yes, if you detected the influence of Reformed theology on both of these positions, you’re right. The first reason is informed by the doctrine of irresistible grace, and the second reason is influenced by the reformed objection to natural theology.

Here is yet another post inspired by a spirited conversation with the scrappy Lutheran known as John Fraiser. We recently engaged in a philosophical kerfluffle over whether God knows what it’s like to be Napoleon (or a bat, or a pimp, or the present king of France, or Schrödinger’s cat, or anyone God does not happen to be). The debate arose after jointly considering Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument against materialism in the philosophy of mind, but the topic soon led to whether any such arguments could be applied to God’s knowledge.

I affirmed that God did indeed know what it is like to be Napoleon. John gave a negative answer, and the contest commenced. Although this important question is clearly pressing on the hearts of many Americans during these troubled times, the goal of this post is not to give an answer but to clarify what the arguments are and where the disagreement lies. After explaining the arguments, I will address some tentative reasons for why I take the (clearly) correct position.

Here is John’s argument, reconstructed as I understand it:

(1) It is a necessary condition of having a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon that one believe he is Napoleon.
(2) God believes no falsehoods, so God does not believe He is Napoleon.
(3) Therefore God does not have a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon.

The first premise is the hinge on which John’s argument turns. According to this premise, one can reasonably imagine what it is like to have some of Napoleon’s experiences. For example, one can imagine what it is like to stand on a hill in Waterloo and order your cannons to fire on Wellington’s cavalry, or what it is like to be short, or what it is like to keep your hand in your coat while posing for a portrait. Although we are limited in what we can imagine of Napoleon’s experiences and properties, God can imagine what it is like to have all of Napoleon’s experiences and properties. However, this act of imagining (on our part or God’s) does not deliver a complete knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon, for to have that one must also believe that he is Napoleon. In other words, having a first person perspective on what it is like to be Napoleon is a requirement if one wants to truly know what it is fully like to be Napoleon. So in addition to imagining having the various experiences and properties of Napoleon, one must imagine that he believes that he is Napoleon. This is something of a contradiction, since in the very attempt to imagine one is acknowledging that he is not Napoleon at all. Hence only Napoleon knows what it is like to be him, since only he possesses a first person perspective.

This has strange consequences when we apply it to God. God certaintly doesn’t believe He is Napoleon, for He believes no falsehoods. But if premise (1) is true, then God is forever separated from what it is fully like to be any human other than Jesus Christ. This means that, in a very significant sense, God doesn’t know what it’s like to be me. He simply cannot imagine in the most important sense what it is like when I kiss my wife, or wrestle with my children on the living room floor, or even what it is like when I pray to Him or worship Him.

This seemed problematic to me, so I offered two counterarguments. Here is the first:

(4) God’s omniscience entails that He knows all truths that are possibly known.
(5) “What it is like to be Napoleon” is a truth that is possibly known.
(6) Therefore God knows what it is like to be Napoleon.

This seemed a bit ambiguous, so I issued a second argument, adjusted for clarity:

(7) Since God is both omniscient and omnipotent, He can perform any mental task that does not involve a logical contradiction.
(8) “Knowing what it is like to be Napoleon” is a mental task that does not involve a logical contradiction.
(9) Therefore God can know what it is like to be Napoleon.

Implicit in (8) is a rejection of John’s premise (1). I rejected (1) because it seems arbitrarily limited by human experience. Of course you and I can’t imagine what it is like to be Napoleon or what it is like to believe that we are Napoleon, but it doesn’t seem right to say that it would be logically impossible for God. God’s powers of imagination aren’t limited. He possesses unlimited cognitive capacity. Further, He created the cognitive environment in which human beings think, believe, and experience, and thus has privileged access to that cognitive environment and the types of things therein. If I create characters for a novel I am writing, I am in complete control over the mental world in which they live, and I have access to that mental world in ways my characters do not. This way of rejecting premise (1) needs to be worked out in more detail, but I think it is the defender of (1) that bears the burden of proof. It just doesn’t seem intuitively plausible that no mind could ever completely grasp what it is like to be Napoleon without accepting the Napoleon identity.

Further, I argued that the vagaries of human experience means that even Napoleon doesn’t know what it is like to be Napoleon, at least in the fullest sense. The human psyche is a deep and mysterious well. We all have questions about who we are and we are often aware that mysterious forces drive our choices and contribute to our own sense of personal identity. God, however, knows everything about Napoleon. He understands the deep reasons for his internal drive to conquer Europe, and so on. There are no deep psychological mysteries to the Ancient of Days.

These are only starting points for a response, but I think I’m on the right track. The key issue is how God’s imagination can overcome the third person perspective that seems to limit one’s ability to fully imagine what it is like to be another person. This challenge is significant, but to say that God can fully imagine what it is like to be Napoleon without believing He is Napoleoon does not seem to be on the same level as saying that God can make 2 and 2 equal 5. He can’t make 2 and 2 equal 5, but this is no limitation on His sovereignty or His power, for it is no true limitation to say that God can’t perform nonsense. It just isn’t clear that having a full knowledge of what it is like to be Napoleon is logically contradictory or nonsensical in the same way.

Note to the new atheists: what we need isn’t less religion, but better theology.

[This post originally appeared at my old blog on April 27, 2006. The original is here.]

“Christianity is a myth,” declared the professor in my college folklore class. “However,” he continued, “that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true.” The word “myth” as it has come to be used in the common vernacular simply means “something that isn’t true.” So in this sense the idea that President Bush was behind the attacks of 9/11 is clearly a myth.

But let’s distinguish for a moment between this common definition of myth and the somewhat different notion of mythology. What is a myth in this second sense? According to the Encyclopedia Mythica, a myth is

a story of forgotten or vague origin, basically religious or supernatural in nature, which seeks to explain or rationalize one or more aspects of the world or a society … Broadly speaking myths and mythologies seek to rationalize and explain the universe and all that is in it. Thus, they have a similar function to science, theology, religion and history in modern societies.

Mythology, then, serves the same function as a worldview, but in narrative form. It is a way in which people understand themselves in relation to reality, what there actually is, and thus it is a way in which people understand their own meaning.

Now back to my question: is Christianity mythology? Well, not in the first sense of being a story that isn’t factually true. But do mythic stories have to be false? To put it another way, does the concept of myth entail falsehood? C. S. Lewis certainly didn’t think so. In his excellent essay, “Myth Became Fact,” he defends the idea that Christianity is the one, true, factual myth. He sees the function of myth as that of taking abstract truths and completing them, and thus completing human knowledge:

In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to the experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction … When we translate we get abstraction – or rather, dozens of abstractions. What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis ["In this valley of separation"]. Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.

For Lewis then, mythology may help us better understand those ultimate, metaphysical, and sometimes mysterious truths about the world in which we live. However, Lewis sees the Christian story as the myth, the one that teaches us the ultimate truth about reality itself. But unlike the other mythologies, the Christian story is factually true, and that is what makes it so important:

Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other …

Those who do not know that this great myth became Fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied … We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there – it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic — and is not the sky itself a myth — shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.

In a world of where rationalism and materialism act as usurpers to the epistemological throne, the declaration of the true myth of Christianity – the story of the world above reaching down to the world below – is essential. The fact is that many people do believe in various mythologies: they literally idolize their favorite sports teams, or musicians, or pop singers, or political theories, and yet none of these can do the job, for they are all unfortunately tied to the finite and temporary realm in which we live. The myth of the dying, atoning God, of eternity’s Messiah who saves mankind, is also fact. It is the one true mythology, the one true story by which faltering humanity may chart its course to eternity.

[Note: "Myth Became Fact" can be found in the excellent anthology of Lewis' essays and articles, God in the Dock.]

[This post originally appeared on my old blog on November 9, 2009. The original is here.]

From Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence:

Does this [view that science has done away with minor supernatural entities because they play no explanatory role in the world] mean that the progress of the natural sciences has given us equally good measure to deny God’s existence? Not necessarily. Scientific progress would supply such reason only if theistic assumptions were in direct competition with naturalistic causal explanations. The reason we shouldn’t believe in demiurges and sprites is because they are entities whose existence was to have been vindicated by citing their role in explaining the very phenomena that the natural sciences can now explain better. For most theists, God no longer plays that role. God isn’t introduced to explain why a volcano erupted, or a hailstorm destroyed the crops, but instead for a variety of functions (e. g. as the author of the moral law) other than that of actively intervening in earthly affairs so as to continually cause all that occurs in the natural world. That sort of God would be one whose postulated existence would be in direct competition with the causal explanations offered by the natural sciences. But theists needn’t take such a view, and so needn’t fall prey to the argument that has entitled us to dismiss the minor supernatural characters (leprechauns, trolls, etc.) from our ontology. (114-115)