The phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is associated particularly with the scientist Carl Sagan . By “extraordinary evidence” Sagan means, of course, extraordinarily good evidence – evidence much stronger than that required to justify rather more mundane claims. The phrase “extraordinary claims” is admittedly somewhat vague. A claim need not involve a supernatural element to qualify as “extraordinary” in the sense intended here (the claims that I built a time machine over the weekend, or was abducted by aliens, involve no supernatural element, but would also count as “extraordinary”). It suffices, for our purposes, to say that whatever “extraordinary” means here, the claim that a supernatural miracle has occurred qualifies.

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. Suppose we begin to examine the historical evidence having presupposed that there is no, or is unlikely to be a, God. Then of course Jesus’ miracles will strike us as highly unlikely events requiring exceptionally good evidence before we might reasonably suppose them to have occurred. But what if we approach the Jesus miracles from the point of view of theism? Then that such miraculous events should be a part of history is not, one might argue, particularly surprising. But then we are not justified in raising the evidential bar with respect to such claims. So theists may, after all, be justified in accepting such events occurred solely on the basis of a limited amount of testimony, just as they would be the occurrence of other unusual, but non-supernatural, events. The application of Sagan’s principle that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” to the Jesus miracles simply presupposes, prior to any examination of the evidence, that theism is not, or is unlikely to be, true. We might call this response to Sagan’s principle the Presuppositions Move.

Law doesn’t like this move at all, but I’m not sure what specific argument he has in mind here. His blog post is part of a forthcoming article in Faith and Philosophy, so I’m eager to see what the rest of his argument looks like.

Disregarding presuppositionalism as an apologetic strategy (which is a different discussion altogether), I can say I’ve certainly encountered what Law calls the “Presuppositions Move” before in discussion of miracles, but it’s usually more nuanced than Law makes it out to be. There are a few different ways we might approach this issue.

First, it’s a trivial observation that we filter how we perceive the persuasive value of “evidence” through our deeply held background beliefs or what we take to be our justified prior commitments. If a scientist encounters data that doesn’t fit with the dominant theory in his field, he’s usually going to work out some way to explain the data within the theory rather than immediately claiming that the theory ought to be overturned. Perhaps the “Presuppositions Move” is meant to warn skeptics that they ought not hold their background beliefs to such an absolute extent that they wouldn’t let any supposed miracle count as evidence against their anti-supernaturalist precommitment. In other words, perhaps the move is meant to point out to skeptics that they may be poisoning the well by planning (consciously or unconsciously) to discount the possibility of miracles to begin with. This is true, but ultimately insignificant as a general argument against skepticism, because this sort of move cuts both ways. The religious apologist might be tempted to do the same thing. He might too readily accept the evidential value of a miracle claim because it agrees with his supernaturalist precommitments. So interpreted this way, the Presuppositions Move does nothing more than point out a valuable but trivial epistemological truism: do your best to avoid confirmation bias, evaluate evidence objectively, don’t treat your background beliefs as absolutely unchangeable, and so on.

There’s a second way the Presuppositions Move might go that proves a bit more useful, but not by much. Here the apologist for miracles might be taken to mean that the skeptic ought to examine those pretheoretical beliefs that are the types of beliefs that don’t easily admit to justification, like root level metaphysical beliefs about possibility, etc. This way is a bit more difficult to pin down because it’s hard to identify what types of beliefs fall into this category and to set out the criteria for identifying them. One example is belief about metaphysical possibility: do I believe that the natural world is closed or open? In other words, suppose I’m agnostic about whether there is some supernatural reality that exists on a different metaphysical plane than the natural world. Given my agnosticism, do I believe that it is even possible for something outside nature to interact with the natural world? Beliefs about this topic and others like it are often governed by intuitions or hunches. I think people often don’t realize the power their unexamined intuitions have over how they interpret their experiences. If the skeptic is interpreting the evidence for miracles based on his own strongly-held but ultimately baseless intuition, then that’s certainly illegitimate, because despite his intuition there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to limit metaphysical possibility in this way. But of course no skeptic will think he’s doing this, just as no Christian ever thinks he’s doing it either if the roles are reversed.

There’s a third way of interpreting the Presuppositions Move that’s more interesting and fruitful, but I’ll hold that one until my next post.

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.

Listen, I prayed for a lunacy, and he gave it to me. It’s a bit of a sick thing when a 17-year-old says in her nightly prayers that I would rather die young and a legend than be married with children and die an old lady in my bed.

One of the commenters at Feser’s blog points out that the media-savvy Ms. Gaga seems to treat her interviews as a kind of performance art, so she makes all kind of outrageous statements designed to reinforce her public persona as a wacky pop goddess. I have no idea if Ms. Gaga actually prayed to the Almighty for such a lunacy, but it wouldn’t suprise me if she did. She certainly seems to be pursuing the ideal of living young and famous rather than dying old and responsible.

I am tempted to make a comment here about Ms. Gaga’s prayer being emblematic of modern man’s desire to have fame, fortune, and youth at the expense of traditional human ideals like growing old, marrying, and having children. But then I am reminded that the quest for this kind of worldly immortality isn’t limited to western, 21st century, post-Christian figures like Ms. Gaga. Homer essentially says the same thing of Achilles in The Iliad. The gods offer Achilles the choice of either dying young in glorious battle or living a long, obscure life at home. In the end, Achilles chooses the former, and three thousand years later his name is still heard in Literature departments and sports medicine clinics across the globe.

Achilles’ feats will almost certainly outlast the vapid babble of Gaga and her contemporaries, but they share a common view of human meaningfulness: that the only way to stave off the threat of historical obscurity is to make oneself into a god among men. It’s foolish, of course, but for some it’s certainly appealing in the absence of some more transcendent view of human purpose. I think this view of life represents a total selfishness, an abandonment of those traditional human roles that actually benefit society, such as marrying and raising children, for a me-centered worldview that subordinates other human goods to the personal goal of receiving eternal adoration. It’s odd, but for those whose god is themselves it makes perfect sense.

This video has been very popular on Youtube recently, with over 6 million views:

I’ve blogged about this before, and this is the drum that conservative commentators like Mark Steyn have been beating for years. However, projecting long-term cultural change from current demographic data is always a tricky business. Cultural and demographic changes are often the results of numerous processes and trends. It’s true that fertility rates are a huge factor in projecting these types of cultural changes, maybe even the biggest, but there are other factors to consider. The Network for Strategic Missions has a few quotes up by missions researchers about the video. Hence Jason Mandryk of Operation World:

One element that we cannot possibly accurately estimate (at least I cannot see a mechanism for accurate estimation) is the secularizing effect of European society on immigrants with a religious affiliation and on the children of religion parents . . . Can we have ANY idea about how effective secular materialism will be in converting Muslims, Hindus, non-Western Christians, etc to non-religion? I don’t know, but on an anecdotal basis, the large majority of the Muslims I know in the UK – which would consist of about 40 people, predominantly male and Pakistani and under 35 years old – demonstrate high degrees of nominalism and almost all of the same traits which have seen the exodus of a younger generation from Christianity to non-faith in the last 10-20 years. Many younger Muslims in the UK (and in other Western nations) show the same social values that nominal Christians do – and as great a personal commitment to secular materialism as to their religion – and as such, make for perfectly acceptable and indeed welcomed citizens of a pluralist society.

And Peter Crossing of the World Christian Database questions some of the stats used in the video:

The grain of truth that the Muslim population percentage is increasing in Europe is correct, but WCD projections show Europe overall at 7% by 2050. It may partly be the difference between a straight mathematical extrapolation, and a projection which includes factors that change current growth. (Large growth rates are only sustainable for small populations and inevitably level out as the percentage increases. ie. it’s easy for a population to increase from 20 to 40, but much harder from 20m to 40m).

The base data too, from which the extrapolation is calculated, is very different to WCD:
e.g. Britain Muslims (WCD)
1970: 635,000 1.14%
2010: 1,680,000 2.73%

(as against YouTube’s something like 80,000 in 1970 to 2.5m in 2009–big difference in the extrapolation!)
WCD has 2050: 2,850,000 4.15%

And, by the way, it just seems really unlikely that 1m Muslims in the Netherlands are having the same number of children as 15m non-Muslims. UN says 180,000 births per year, which would mean 90,000 Muslim births. There are 500,000 Muslim females, but say 250,000 at a stretch of child-bearing age–that’s almost every second female giving birth, every year.

If I were a betting man, I’d say the demographic shift described in the video is definitely happening, but not quite at the drastic rates reported. I’ll remain skeptical about any supposed certainties that such demographic numbers can deliver about the future. However, it’s definitely something to think about. If the numbers about European and American birth rates are even close to correct, then it seems clear that the combination of secularism and affluence is poison to a culture’s ability to reproduce itself.

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.

This guy

Nevertheless, there are things I like about the movement. Or perhaps I should say that the new atheism may have unintended consequences that I like. Here is a review for a new book that apparently makes the argument that at least one way Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al serve Christendom is by holding believers’ feet to the fire in regard to intellectual honesty. This is true and valuable, because I think many Christians tend to be intellectually lazy. From their perspective, they’re already in possession of “truth with a capital T”, and therefore they don’t think they need to think very much about their faith. When the new atheists point out that religious believers don’t have a solid intellectual foundation for their faith, they are partially correct. There are unfortunately very many Christians who are utterly incapable of giving a coherent reason for why they believe in Christianity (a fact that has no bearing on whether Christianity is true or rationally acceptable, however, a point I made to Uncle Skeptic on my old blog).

When an intellectually shallow Christian encounters the arguments of the new atheists, he must either (1) reevaluate the epistemic foundations of his faith and think critically about Christianity in a way he hasn’t done before, (2) stick his head in the sand and ignore their arguments, or (3) accept their arguments, leading to a crisis of faith and possibly unbelief. The new atheists want the results of their efforts to be (3), but I think they miscalculate that many Christians will take option (1). New atheist arguments, febrile as I find them to be, can have a strengthening effect on the church by driving individual Christians to a stronger and more rational intellectual position.

Likewise, although it’s certainly tragic when someone takes option (3) and apostasizes, it’s probably better for the church. Those who leave the faith because they read Richard Dawkins or develop an obsessive fascination with the mountain of atheist polemics online probably never had a very strong faith to begin with. If I read one more “deconversion” story where someone says they were a believer for 20 years but then started reading infidels.org and “realized” God was just a fantasy drilled into their head by pastors and Sunday School teachers, I just might puke. If your faith is this shallow and your cognitive capacities so susceptible to cheap rhetoric passing for logic, you probably have no business being in a church anyway. That’s not to say that there aren’t intelligent Christians who honestly wrestle with their faith and eventually leave it behind for intellectually respectable reasons (see here for a tragic and heartbreaking example), but there are plenty of gullible churchgoers who accept their newfound atheism for reasons that are probably just as unwarranted as the reasons they accepted Christianity to begin with. Hence the new atheism gives the church a bonus by separating the sheep from the goats.

The leftward tilt is certainly present, but it’s more thematic than anything else, and I found myself rooting for Al Pacino’s plucky journalist as he attempted to stick it to the nasty tobacco corporations. The setup is this: Russell Crowe plays real-life tobacco executive turned company whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, and Pacino plays the feisty ‘60 Minutes’ producer who sticks with Wigand through the whole sordid process, culminating in an industry-shaking interview that Wigand grants to Mike Wallace. It’s a true story made all the more compelling because the most dramatic and incredible plot points actually happened. Mann makes quite a spectacle of the inner machinations of big media and the extraordinary legal power that large corporations can bring to bear on their opponents. That tobacco company lawyers from a firm based in Kentucky could bring a media giant like CBS to its knees is almost unthinkable, and Mann plays the bizarre scenario for all the dramatic impact he can get.

The film is unapologetic in portraying Pacino’s character as a left-wing media activist. He tells Wigand he was part of the “New Left” of the sixties and glowingly reminisces about his political mentor Herbert Marcuse. Nevertheless, I think the film is a good illustration of the way in which the excesses of the free market require a free press to keep it honest. Free market conservatives and libertarians often attempt to absolutize the virtues of the free market, claiming that any state interference into the free market is unjust and bound for failure anyway. This may or may not be the case, but the role of government in regulating the free market is not what I want to address here. Here I want to point out that the free market, like any other hegemonic cultural institution, always needs outside influences to hold it morally accountable. Conservatives often argue that the market requires regular injections of moral virtue to keep it honest, but I rarely hear them talk about the power of the media as the minister of such injections. The true story that inspired Mann’s film is a perfect example of how the free press can act as a cultural regulating power for the free market, exposing particular areas of vice and injustice and opening new doors for legal ramifications.

The market, contrary to the grand claims of some free market advocates, isn’t inherently noble. It’s true that free competition will often weed out undesirable elements in the market, but I don’t think this is enough. The power of the market must be subject to outside checks and balances in the same way as the powers of the state and the press. Since I’m convinced that the state should play a minimalist role in regulating the market (except in clear cases such as prohibiting unjust child labor, enforcing a minimum wage, protecting the environment, and so on), I think other, non-legal checks and balances should be brought to bear on the market as well, such as the power of the free press.

It’s also worth pointing out that, like the market, the free press isn’t inherently noble either, and it requires its own system of checks and balances. Ask a political liberal if he is as interested in the state regulating the free press as he is in regulating the free market and you will get an emphatic “No.” The excesses and injustices of the free press often go unchallenged and unchecked. The only real regulating power for the press (outside of certain laws that govern speech not covered by the First Amendment) is the press itself. The rise of conservative media outlets over the last few decades is a good example of how this works. I’ll never understand why liberals spew hatred for the conservative slant of Fox News, when the very existence of conservative outlets like Fox and the Wall Street Journal act as a balancing force to their left-leaning counterparts in the mainstream media, just as those same leftist counterparts provide much-needed accountability for Fox. Interestingly, the rise of the blogosphere has resulted in a new force for holding the press accountable for its moral failures, as witnessed most clearly in the Rathergate controversy.

We always want the guy on the other side of the aisle to be held accountable, but blind allegiance to political ideals often obscures the need for our own side to be held accountable as well. The Insider is a good reminder of that for free market advocates, and I’m glad I finally watched it. It’s no Last of the Mohicans, but it’s still a great film with a valuable message.

I’m hopeful but wary about this one. Prince Caspian was big and loud but I thought it missed the heart of Lewis’ novel. Walden Media is producing again, but this time Fox is financing and distributing the film since Disney gave up on the franchise after the mediocre domestic success of Caspian. The capable Michael Apted is the new director, and I can only hope he and his creative team have captured the spirit of one of my favorite Lewis novels. The ending with Reepicheep is a particularly powerful moment in the series, but the rest of the narrative is a bit untraditional for a fantasy story. It may be hard to pull off, so I’m approaching this one with cautious optimism.

GOD AND MORAL FACTS:
A TRINITARIAN REALIST
MODEL OF CHRISTIAN METAETHICS

Michael Brian Trapp, Ph.D.
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010
Chairperson: Dr. Mark Coppenger

This dissertation is a model of Christian metaethics based on God’s Triune nature.

Chapter 1 discusses overall issues and problems in metaethics and how they relate to Christian theology, with emphasis on problems for Christian metaethics.

Chapter 2 examines contemporary secular versions of moral realism in the academy. It also inquires into the various ways God may be related to moral obligations.

Chapter 3 includes a broad survey of traditional Christian metaethics. Christian thinkers from both natural law and divine command traditions are examined.

Chapter 4 surveys metaethical models of writers from the revival of Christian metaethics in the twentieth century.

Chapter 5 includes the dissertation’s main argument for Trinitarian moral realism. God’s Triune existence is posited as a fruitful way of founding moral obligations that dodges familiar conceptual difficulties.

Chapter 6 seeks to show how Trinitarian realism can move from theory to practice. It first compares Trinitarian realism with Islamic metaethics. It then shows how the model can be applied to a particular moral case and, finally, to Christian apologetics.

Therefore, those who have no experience of reason or virtue, but are always occupied with feasts and the like, are brought down and then back up to the middle, as it seems, and wander in this way throughout their lives, never reaching beyond this to what is truly higher up, never looking up at it or being brought up to it, and so they aren’t filled with that which really is and never taste any stable or pure pleasure. Instead, they always look down at the ground like cattle, and, with their heads bent over the dinner table, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. To outdo others in these things, they kick and butt them with iron horns and hooves, killing each other, because their desires are insatiable. For the part that they’re trying to fill is like a vessel full of holes, and neither it nor the things they are trying to fill it with are among the things that are.
                   
            – Socrates, in Plato, The Republic, Book IX, translated by G. M. A. Grube

In other words, it’s better to spend your life seeking the true, the beautiful, and the good, than wasting it by merely indulging the flesh. Here’s a pictorial representation:

Any questions?