Right Reason

If you’re one of the people waiting for the next installment of the podcast series on philosophy of mind, or you’ve notice that the rate of production for blog posts is fairly low at the moment, and you’re wondering “Glenn, why are we always waiting for stuff?” read on.

There are some really great Christian blogs and podcasts out there. Not as many as I’d like, but there are some fantastic ones. A lot of them have some (but not all) of these features in common: The people whose material appears there don’t work on the blog or podcast, which is handled by people who do that and get paid to do that; the blogs/podcasts are those of people who are currently working in their academic area of interest and who – as part of their time spent in their normal employment, are researching and writing material some of which will appear in their blog or podcast; the blog or podcast is itself part of a full time professional ministry activity so there is no day job to get in the way of that ministry; they are not themselves working full time, eight hours a day five days a week (perhaps they are students or they work part time), and as a result have considerably more time than some people to work on material for their blog or podcast; they are either unmarried or they do not have children, so they do not spend their time on their spouse and/or children; their blog and/or podcast is created by a team of two or more people so that they are not the only person creating posts or episodes. There may be other situations that escape me right now, but those are the ones that I can think of.

None of these scenarios resembles me and what I do at Say Hello to my Little Friend, as much as I might like one or two of them to.  I go out each morning at the start of the day and work eight hours a day in a job that has nothing whatsoever to do with my academic qualifications or areas of interest. I come home, have dinner, and get to spend just a couple of short hours with our children, I get a little quality time with my wife, and I’m left with precious little at the end of it. I use that time to write blog posts, respond to comments, do research for future blog posts or podcast episodes, write and record podcast episodes, search for academic job listings in my field of interest, apply for jobs (writing application letters, filling our application forms, tweaking my CV for specific roles, etc) and so forth. Unless I have something pre-written from another project, it can take up nine hours or so to write a podcast episode, and I have to get up the next morning to go to work again, so I can’t stay up to the wee hours to get it done.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I just want to make sure everyone realises the major mismatch between what I’d like to do here and what I’m able to do here, so they appreciate what they actually get here just that little bit extra, and also to temper any expectations I might have created for listeners/readers here with a dose of reality. 🙂

[Note: This blog entry also appears as a guest post over at MandM, the blog of Matt and Madeleine Flannagan.]

I take some things for granted. People with a background in theology, biblical studies and hermeneutics or literature will be familiar with theories of meaning, but not everyone has (or wants) this background, and not everyone is familiar with theories of meaning. I thought it might be interesting to some readers to say a few words about it. Think of this as a very introductory post to the subject.

The question has importance for scholarship in general, but as a professing Christian the issue has a special importance to me because I believe that in the Scripture of the Old and New Testament we have something with a unique type of authority, so the way we interpret it is important. The issue centres on the following question: What does a piece of writing mean? To some the question seems a bit silly. If you want to know what it means you just read it and find out. It means what it says! But strictly speaking, even someone who says this is likely to admit that not everything means exactly what it says. Writing comes in all genres: literal history, biography, poetry, parable, apocalypse and so forth. There are cases where meaning is bound to be unclear to many readers. So what, in principle, does a piece of writing mean? To the unfamiliar reader, I’m going to outline two major alternatives: an authorial intent theory of meaning and a reader response theory of meaning.

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Out of concern that a Christian apologist was not responding fairly or charitably to him, John Loftus recently brought to my attention his comments about a man who prominently placed the ten commandments on his property, a move that some in his community called “courageous.” John’s comments are HERE.

Loftus doesn’t think there’s anything courageous about displaying the ten commandments on one’s own property because that’s a constitutional right. I don’t know about that. The fact is there may be any number of things that a person has a right to do but for which there may be negative consequences such as social pressure, ridicule, even in some cases vandalism and violence. Posting something as overt as this in a prominent location could easily attract discrimination in various forms, so there may well be something courageous to it (being unfamiliar with the community in which this took place, I can’t say for sure).

But it’s John’s apparent criticism of displaying the ten commandments that caught my attention. In spite of the fairly good education in Christian thought that John has, his comments about the ten commandments struck me as fairly dismissive and at times superficial. The first quick comment, although not developed or substantiated, is that there are three versions of the ten commandments, versions that disagree. This is not a new claim, others have made it, but it is not a substantiated claim. The three versions, says Loftus, are in Exodus 20, Exodus 34, and Deuteronomy 5. The claim is that Exodus 20 and Exodus 34 present conflicting versions of the ten commandments. This is highly dubious for two reasons. The first reason is that Exodus 34 is in fairly close proximity to Exodus 20, and the writer of the narrative portrays God in verse 34 saying: “Cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.” The thesis here is that the writer or editor of this narrative apparently did not realise what was in the ten commandments as listed in Exodus 20 just chapters earlier, so came up with a list of instructions (very few – not ten), and called them the ten commandments. Ancients were not morons. Secondly however, a more obvious response is to actually look at Exodus 34 and note that the ten commandments are not spelled out at all, let alone in conflict with the list of commandments that recently appeared in chapter 20. What we do see in Exodus 34 are four groups of rules that God told Moses to write down (verse 27 where God says “write these words”). However the same chapter, as noted earlier indicates that the ten commandments were written by God. Why these other groupings of rules are placed here in the narrative as well I do not profess to know, but the suggestion that not only was the writer or editor so dull that he did not realise that within the space of a few chapters he had two conflicting versions of the commandments, but that within a few short verses he had two conflicting accounts of who wrote those commandments, is a stretch.

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This coming Wednesday the 6th of May I’m flying up to Auckland for a week. I’ll be staying with my friends Matt and Mads from the M and M blog.

On Tuesday the 12th of May before flying home I’ll be speaking at the Auckland branch of Thinking Matters. The subject of the talk will be Religion in the Public Square. Here’s the short story:

According to a number of influential thinkers, it is wrong for citizens to support policies because of their religious convictions because this would make those policies unjustified in a liberal democracy. Is this true?

Dr Peoples argues that the rules used to exclude such policies are simply not workable or reasonable. He explains that more sensible and fair models of public justification do in fact permit us to promote policies that we hold on the basis of our religious convictions. However, when the architects of these improved models realise that they have now opened the door to religious participation in public life, they change the rules, shifting the goalpost and inventing special exceptions in order to maintain that those with religious convictions should keep them out of the public square.

Location: Lecture Room 2, Laidlaw College, 80 Central Park Drive, Henderson, West Auckland

Time: 7:30pm, Tuesday the 12th of May

On a related note – Episode 27 , the second part in my podcast series on philosophy of mind, isn’t finished yet. I’m going to have to put it on hold until I get back.

For those of you who are Facebook users, feel free to add me as a friend there. Be warned, I am seldom to be taken too seriously there! My Facebook name is “Glenn Andrew Peoples” of New Zealand.

I’m a bit of a fan of the moral argument for the existence of God.  I think that theism provides a foundation for moral truth. There are a few ways that Christians have made this argument, but the model that I have settled on is a divine command theory of ethics, where moral right and wrong is determined by the commands or will of God.

Raymond Bradley isn’t a fan of the moral argument. Not at all. I know, infidels.org hasn’t exactly built up a reputation for stellar or fair minded scholarship in the philosophy of religion, but bear with me. Not only does Bradley not buy the moral argument, he also thinks that Christian theism, if true, would fail to provide a basis for moral truth. He goes even further: Christians find themselves in an unavoidable contradiction.  Observe:

[T]heists are confronted with a logical quandary which strikes at the very heart of their belief that the God of Scripture is holy. They cannot, without contradiction, believe all four of the statements:

(1) Any act that God commits, causes, commands, or condones is morally permissible.
(2) The Bible reveals to us many of the acts that God commits, causes, commands, and condones.
(3) It is morally impermissible for anyone to commit, cause, command, or condone, acts that violate our moral principles.
(4) The Bible tells us that God does in fact commit, cause, command, or condone, acts that violate our moral principles.

The trouble is that these statements form an inconsistent tetrad such that from any three one can validly infer the falsity of the remaining one. Thus, one can coherently assert (1), (2), and (3) only at the cost of giving up (4); assert (2), (3), and (4) only at the cost of giving up (1); and so on.
The problem for a theist is to decide which of these four statements to give up in order to preserve the minimal requirement of truth and rationality, viz., logical consistency. After all, if someone has contradictory beliefs then their beliefs can’t all be true. And rational discussion with persons who contradict themselves is impossible; if contradictions are allowed then anything goes.

Let’s have a look for this contradiction.

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Thomas Talbott is Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.

One of Dr Talbott’s online activities is as a scholar in residence at The Evangelical Universalist (along with Gregory MacDonald). Talbott (I hope he won’t object to me just referring to him by last name) is a proponent of universal salvation, the view that everyone who has ever lived and will ever live shall, at some point, be reconciled to God, trust in Him and enjoy eternal life as a redeemed child of God. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I don’t share this view (click the “heaven and hell” category to see what  I mean).

One thing that’s done at the Evangelical Universalist is that a guest is invited to have a one on one dialogue with Dr MacDonald or Dr Talbott on a subject, and when they’re done, questions are invited from onlookers. At the moment Dr Joel Green from Fuller Theological Seminary is in discussion with Dr MacDonald on Universalism and the issue of free will. I’ve been asked to take part in a discussion with Dr Talbott. I’m not sure that the subject has been hammered into shape yet, but my guess is that it will be something involving universalism (no surprise there) and annihilationism. We’ll see how it shapes up and I’ll let you know when it’s about to take place.

Glenn Peoples

Julian Baggini is an atheist who’s quite happy for people to know about it. I wish he weren’t, but hey, whatcha gonna do?

Recently Baggini has commented on the embarrassing spectacle that is the “new atheism,” a movement marked by volume and vehemence rather than substance and insight, spearheaded by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, unconcerned by the need to study or understand the target of it’s frothing at the mouth, tub thumping tirades and wide eyed cheering, stomping and whooping from its young zealous audiences at speaking engagements that would easily pass for “God sucks” rallies.

I think that in a relatively short space, Baggini was exactly right and exactly wrong. He’s right about the new atheism. he says:

What [another writer’s opinion piece] revealed is the negative perception people have of the godless hordes, and the New Atheism must share responsibility for creating its own caricature. You can’t publish and lionise books and TV series with titles like The God Delusion, God is Not Great and The Root of All Evil? and then complain when people think you are anti-religious zealots.

This can’t be dismissed as “mere perception”. Appearances count, which is why those able to present a more agreeable face have come to dominate the moderate middle ground, even if their arguments are often vapid and shallow.

and:

Perhaps a period of New Atheist exuberance was necessary. At least it got people thinking, although I fear it has confirmed every negative stereotype about it.

Indeed. If ever conservative Christians needed to be encouraged to think that atheism is as much a fanatical sect as any other, the new atheists have given it to them on a silver platter.

Now, along the way, Baggini reveals the odd bit of ignorance of his own here and there. In arguing that historically, religious people have indeed cared about the truth of their beliefs, he asks, “Did doctrinal differences about Christ’s divinity have no role in Rome’s split from the Orthodox church?” Well actually – no they didn’t The divinity of Christ was a dispute primarily associated with the Arian controversy, not the split of Rome from the East. But such errors are excusable coming from someone who doesn’t set himself up as an expert in the subject, unlike the targets of his criticism.

But he manages to go quite wrong in a different way. One of Baggini’s stated goals is to encourage atheists to challenge fluffy liberal religious people to snap out of it and realise that the truth value of a religion really matters. He says:

Liberal believers and agnostics get away with this nonsense because religious belief is much more than a matter of doctrine, and practice can be as important, or more so. So while the atheists destroy simplistic, traditional creeds and dance on the ruins, much of the rest of the religious edifice remains intact. The fluffy brigade are then free to plant their flag on it unchallenged.

Atheists need to challenge these liberal theologians, so that they admit their vision of doctrine-lite faith is not a description of how true religion always was, but a manifesto for how it should be. If they do that and succeed, then good luck to them. I don’t care if people want to retain a sense of being religious, as long as what they believe stands up to intellectual scrutiny. Atheism needs critical friends as well as true non-believers, so that it is subjected to such scrutiny itself.

Perhaps a period of New Atheist exuberance was necessary. At least it got people thinking, although I fear it has confirmed every negative stereotype about it. We now need to turn down the volume and engage in a real conversation about what of value is left of religion once its crude superstitions are swept away.

The impression I get from the article as a whole is that he thinks that truth oriented Christianity with a belief in its own serious intellectual defensibility is really on the wane, and liberal religion has stepped in to fill the void, trying to keep the religious flame burning now that we can’t go around taking it intellectually serious any more due to the fact that astute atheists have torn it down and are dancing on the ruins.

Baggini is the editor of “the Philosopher’s magazine” according to the article I’m quoting from, but I have to think that he spends very little time staying abreast of the literature in analytical philosophy of religion, and he surely has no exposure to actual intellectual exchanges between Christian scholars and their critics. He probably does, but this piece does not reflect any such awareness. In those fields in particular, it is precisely the type of religion that Baggini thinks is in ruins that is postiviely thriving. The top journals in philosophy of religion are no longer dominated by sceptics but by believers. Within academia at least, what the world has witnessed is a resurgence of religious faith: Conservative, truth-oriented religious faith that is prepared to not only defend itself but actually take the intellectual fight to the naysayers.

But the article was half good.

Glenn Peoples