A thought, and an addendum

First, a thought which I've increasingly come to endorse:
Character is destiny.

But I think there's a very important addendum:
Our character is not static.

Unconvincing Apologetics: Created Or Not, Part 2

So... back in December, I encountered a fellow named Tony Terrana when he commented on Bruce Gerencser's Facebook page. I summarized the exchange and what I thought of it here after Bruce got annoyed and banned him. (It's probably worth following the link and reading that, if only for context.)

Well, today he commented again.

It was the same comment. I mean, word for word, the same odd little block of text.

The Paradox of The Burden of Proof:

From our subjective perspective - either some higher-level creative Intelligence is responsible for our existence or not. There is currently no publicly-known, objectively-verifiable, scientifically-reproducible, peer-reviewed evidence sufficiently leading to proof that either is the objective truth. It is a choice to believe one or the other is the truth. Whichever you choose - you are using the concept of faith. Faith is belief without proof. Objectively speaking - only one is the truth and our subjectively formulated opinions or lack thereof have no effect on that objective truth. Such is the nature, beauty, and glory of The Truth - He is perfect and unbreakable.

So I queried him, and I got exactly the same response that I got last time, except without the bit about whether or not I believe in boots. Seriously:

Michael Mock - I'll simplify for you.
Do you perceive the following statement to be true or false?
1. From our subjective perspective either some higher-level creative Intelligence is responsible for our existence or not.

How about this one?
2. Of the two subjective possibilities mentioned in the preceding statement - only one of them is the objective truth.

So I responded again, and he "simplified" again. (For "simplified", read "reiterated".)

This time, I pointed out that I understood what he was saying, and I was impatient for him to quit saying it and move on to the next point.

(I should note that I'm assuming, at this point, that he's a person who has a selection of rote responses that he pastes in for most of his answers. The alternative -- that he's actually some sort of bot -- has occurred to me. In either case, it's a rather frustrating thing to attempt to have a conversation with him. I'm also having vague flashbacks to my attempts to interact with Dennis Markuze, which suggests some other mildly troubling possibilities.)

So, having pointed out that the points he was trying to make were so blindingly obvious that I was actually confused by why he'd insist on putting them out there, and repeating his own points back to him, I got this:

Michael Mock - right - what I am saying is so obviously true I should not have to say it - but many people do not understand these fundamental truths with respect to this conversation.

Well, first of all, these aren't "fundamental truths". They're starting assumptions for something that might eventually become an argument for Deism. And even then, I'm not sure the first point is actually undeniable; there's always the possibility that the actual situation is more ambiguous or more complicated than his either/or dichotomy suggests.

But maybe the dude thinks that this is a complete argument. It's hard to see how, but maybe... because right after posting that, he stopped responding. Now, maybe he's gone to bed, or maybe he's off having dinner, or maybe he's gone out to a club or something. (Or maybe he is a bot.) Maybe he'll come back and respond at some point.

But the fact that he posted this nothing-argument on an atheist's page, and a quick glance at his Facebook page, YouTube page, his website (which is full of odd, vaguely lyrical pseudo-scriptures which are peppered with actual Bible verses), and his Google+ Account (which is nearly empty)... well, all that leads me to believe that he isn't angling for anything as simple or basic as an acknowledgement that Deism is a defensible philosophical position. Whatever his specific beliefs, he isn't a Deist. His website looks like he's playing with a particularly gnostic and/or mystical sort of Christianity, something where God is knowable and active in people's lives, and probably the world at large. So I'm baffled as to why he would stop here. He hasn't shared his beliefs, or even laid any sort of groundwork for them.

So I'm going to give it a couple of days, maybe longer. And then there will be a follow-up post, if only so I can vent my frustration by taking apart his rhetorically-cute little comment. (Does that make me a small and petty person? Eh, whatever.)

Me-o-centrism

So, a friend pointed out this article, about a fellow who has made a film defending the geocentric view of cosmology. (In English: he proposed to show, in his film, that the Earth is the center of the Universe, and apparently this is vitally important for the future of Christendom.) Which, at a glance, sounds like the sort of batshit-crazy premise that could only be produced by a certifiable kook.

However, upon reading the article, I find that it's... well, it's far more persuasive than I would ever have imagined. In fact, the only real problem with Mr. DeLano's premise is that he didn't take it far enough.

You see, based on a lifetime of personal observation, I can only conclude that in fact the entire Universe moves around me. I am the center; everything else either moves or is still relative to me. (In fact, you could say that any observation of what any object is doing is subject to that... what should we call that... ah, yes: relativity.)

Admittedly, making that realization forces you to do some pretty weird calculations about the way things move...

For example:

I get into my car and start the engine. First, I put the car into Reverse and press gently on the gas pedal. This causes my entire house to move away from me, and in the process carries the garage away from around my car. As the end of the driveway moves past me, I turn the wheel; this cause the world to rotate as well as continue moving, so that the alley gets pulled under my car. At that point I press on the brake and the world quits moving. I then put the car in Drive, and press the accelerator; the world begins to move past me again. Throughout the whole process, I remain sitting still, surrounded by my car.

So you see, officer, you can't say that I drove into that wall. I was merely sitting in my car. Unfortunately, I happened use the controls in such a way that the wall moved over in front of my car and then crashed into me.

Unconvincing Apologetics: Created or Not?

So, over on FB, a dude calling himself Tony Terrana showed up on Bruce Gerencser's page. He opened by posting a bunch of scriptures (which, y'know, is always a winsome way to approach a bunch of atheists -- seriously, there's nothing we love more than having someone quote from the Bible to rebuke us for not accepting the authority of the Bible.) When Bruce pointed out the, um, minor flaw in that approach, he decided to go all Deep and Philosophical instead:

Subjectively speaking - either some higher-level creative Intelligence is responsible for our existence or not. There is currently no publicly-known, objectively-verifiable, scientifically-reproducible, peer-reviewed evidence sufficiently leading to proof that either is the objective truth. It is a choice to believe one or the other is the truth. Whichever you choose - you are using the concept of faith. Faith is belief without proof. Objectively speaking - only one is the truth and our subjectively formulated opinions or lack thereof have no effect on that objective truth. Such is the nature, beauty, and glory of The Truth - He is perfect and unbreakable.

Now, I have a number of issues with this bit of misguided semi-philosophical rhetoric. I settled on the one I felt was most relevant, and responded:

But you aren't interested in us acknowledging some esoteric, imperceptible "higher-level creative intelligence", are you? I mean, if you want to talk about that, sure: could be. But if there is such a thing, it's effectively indistinguishable from impersonal natural processes. It makes no difference.

No, what you want us to agree to is the existence of the God described (in many and varied ways) by Christianity. And that's something else altogether. That's an entity that, its followers claim, actively intervenes in our world and our lives; that's a being with firm opinions on how we should live and what we should value. That's not "Oh, there might or might not be extra-Universal power/intelligence/principle which created everything." It's a different sort of claim entirely. And it's a bit disingenuous to conflate the two.

Apparently deciding to stick to his guns, Tony answered:

Michael Mock I'll simplify for you.
Do you perceive the following statement to be true or false?
1. From our subjective perspective either some higher-level creative Intelligence is responsible for our existence or not.

How about this one?
2. Of the two subjective possibilities mentioned in the preceding statement - only one of them is the objective truth.

And just so I know who I'm talking to?
3. Boots exist now - at least conceptually.

At this point, I went off to have brunch; while I was away from the computer, he went back and forth with Bruce for a while. I'm not going to reproduce all that here, but I think I can fairly summarize it by saying that Tony kept trying to get Bruce to answer this set of questions, and Bruce kept responding that he had no interest in playing the Meaningless Philosophical Bullshit game. I, on the other hand, sometimes enjoy meaningless philosophical bullshit, so when I came back I answered Tony's questions, like so:

Tony, you aren't simplifying anything. You're just repeating yourself -- and the assertions (or propositions) that you're repeating aren't relevant to the argument that you eventually want to get to, which is whether or not Christianity accurately describes the world in which we live.

So, to answer your questions:
1. You're overlooking the possibility that it might be more complicated or less clear than the either/or scenario you offer... but let's assume, for the sake of argument, that everything more complicated falls into the second category, "or not". So, sure: either our Universe was created, or it just happened.

2. Unless the nature of ultimate reality is a lot stranger than any of us realize, only one or the other of those possibilities can be true.

3. What the hell are you talking about? Is "Boots" the name of your cat or something? Or are you trying to establish some philosophical point about the nature of reality by asking whether or not a perfectly mundane material object actually exists? And if so, why?

Look, you've already said that "there is currently no publicly-known, objectively-verifiable, scientifically-reproducible, peer-reviewed evidence sufficiently leading to proof that either is the objective truth." So at best, you can argue from there that some sort of Deism isn't an unreasonable view -- and I think Bruce and I would both agree with that. That being the probable extent of your argument, let me ask you a couple of questions:

1. Is there any meaningful difference between a Deistic Universe (one which was created by an entity that no longer interacts with it, and which cannot be perceived with any degree of certainty) and an atheistic/materialistic Universe?

2. Given that you've already admitted that there's no functional proof of a creator, are you angling towards some version of Pascal's Wager?

Bruce, at this point, had had enough of the esoteric mumbo jumbo and verbal dancing around, and banned Tony. Frankly, I have no problem with this; for starters, it's Bruce's page and he gets to decide what he's willing to put up with there; also, and perhaps more to the point, I agree that Tony wasn't interested in having any sort of honest discussion of views -- he was trying, fairly obviously, to trap us into some sort of philosophical argument that he thought we wouldn't be able to refute. (I'm guessing it was either #17, or #32, though there are a couple of other possibilities. If you've been an unbeliever for any length of time, you've probably run into some variation of "Let's look at this logically!" many times before.)

The argument itself isn't the only problem, either. This entire approach, this "Let's have a structured, logical argument between our views" schtick, isn't really designed to compare views. It's designed to let the person laying out the argument set the ground rules, and (ideally) lead the listeners along to his* conclusion. It's a rhetorical trick as much as, or more than, it's an actual philosophical position. I don't mind playing along sometimes, but as a general thing it comes off less as someone trying to share their faith, and more as them trying to control the conversation. And that gets tiresome very quickly.

* It's usually a "his" rather than a "her".

Reaction: J Warner Wallace and The Case For Truth, Part 4

Heh. I started this back on the 5th of February. It isn't finished, obviously. But, hey, I haven't got anything else for this morning, so here you go:

I wrote this introductory bit yesterday, when I thought I was finally recovering from the Flu. (I'm pretty sure it was the flu. Whatever it was, Tamiflu strated helping almost immediately.) So I figured I'd have time and energy to continue this the way I've been doing it so far. That was before last night. Last night was... kind of horrible. So I'm switching to a newer, shorter approach.

This post is part of an extended response to this video of a talk given by J Warner Wallace of Cold Case Christianity. Why? Well, somebody asked me to take a look and kind of offer my feedback/reactions. Here's the background. Everything I've said about the video is collected under the Cold Case Christianity tag, so that's where you should go if you want read the whole thing.

Honestly, though, I'm not sure anyone strictly needs to read the whole thing. I laid out some thoughts about Mr. Wallace's approach in the background post, and they've turned out to be fairly prescient in terms of what he has to say in this particular talk; so if you just want a general reaction, that's probably sufficient. At this point, I'm continuing on mostly for the sake of completeness, and because I'm curious if he has anything to add to the "eyewitnesses" argument for the historicity of Jesus.

In the last post, I stopped at the twenty-five minute mark, partly because the wall o' text was getting pretty long, and partly because I felt like I was getting away from explaining why I didn't find the thing convincing, and more into directly criticizing Mr. Wallace's approach. There's likely to be more of that ahead, so... um... be warned?

Yeah. Instead of going through it point by point, I'm just going to watch the rest of the talk. If he does anything that we haven't covered already, I might comment, but otherwise we're going all the way through the second half of the lecture and I'll just write down my final impressions.

I'm still very curious what the teenagers in his audience thought of this talk.

...Okay, fine, I'm going to comment a little. I'm at 31:55 in the lecture, and Mr. Wallace has been quizzing his students on whether various claims were objective or subjective. He's also been walking up the ladder of how-abstract-is-this, from physical claims, to mathematical claims (which he categorizes as "abstract"), to metaphysical claims, to moral claims. In the process, he's accidentally confirming something I talked about in the last post: this whole topic is vastly more complicated than objective/subjective and true/false. Trying to divide everything up into objective or subjective seems guaranteed to set up a false dichotomy.

In fact, rather than taking all those different kinds of claims (physical, mathematical, metaphysical, moral) and dividing them into objective or subjective, I think we'd be better off to add "subjective" in as another kind of claim: a claim of value. Are chocolate chip cookies the best dessert in the world? That's a question of value. Is tiramisu awesome? Also a question of value. That doesn't mean those claims aren't subjective; value is always perceived and changeable. But looking at it this way changes the way we make our divisions. Now, instead of having Physical, Mathematical, Metaphysical, and Moral claims which we divide into the larger categories of objective or subjective, we have five categories: Physical, Mathematical, Metaphysical, Moral, and Value claims, each of which we can approach on their own terms.

Going back to one of his earlier examples, let's look at "Hyundais can fly you to the moon." Mr. Wallace, using his objective/subjective split, classifies that as objective, and objectively false. I think there's a very good chance that he's miscategorized it -- that it isn't a physical claim at all. Instead, with such an obvious case of hyperbole, it seems far more likely that what we're hearing is the colloquial equivalent of "Hyundais are awesome," a value claim, and best considered and evaluated as a value claim rather than as a claim about the physical world.

That brings me back to Mr. Wallace's statement at 31:50 in the talk: "If there is a single objective transcendent moral claim that we can agree on, then we're stuck with the objective, transcendant nature of moral claims."

He then goes on discuss what he calls "objective, transcendent" moral claims -- basically making the claim that moral claims fall into the objective category. Now, he does acknowledge that moral claims tend to be complicated, and subject to disagreement, but I still think it's more useful to consider moral claims as kind of a separate category, rather than trying to shoehorn them into his objective/subjective setup.

Reaction: J Warner Wallace and The Case For Truth, Part 3

Okay, I'm watching this video, because someone said they'd be interested in my response to it. The background post is here. I'm almost certainly over-thinking the whole thing, but hey -- if they didn't want over-thinking, they should have asked someone else for feedback.

In our last installment, I went through about the first third of the fifty-two minute video. That took a long time, since I'd spend anywhere from five to twenty minutes responding to things that took Mr. Wallace no more than thirty seconds to rattle off. Naturally, I'm going to stick with the same format for this installment, because I don't have any better ideas and anyway learning from your mistakes is for wimps. Wrong and strong! Full speed ahead! Here we go...

...Picking up at the sixteen minute and thirty second mark:

17:54: Talking about objective vs. subjective truth: "I'm going to test you on this, so be ready." Laughter. "And by the way, most churches and most groups that I work with will fail the test."

18:30: Now he's comparing a mission trip to explain the only medical cure for tuberculosis with the need to share your faith. By implication, he's tying in the concepts that A) his brand of Christian faith is objectively true, and B) sharing your faith is a matter of life and death. Note that he hasn't actually established either point; he's just sort of sliding those assertions in as an aside.

20:20: He's... using a metaphor about a house to basically point out that people commonly confuse objective truth-claims with subjective truth-claims. That seems like an unnecessarily elaborate way to make a relatively simple claim. Also, this is kind of a false dichotomy. Truth claims don't just fall into objective or subjective categories; there are, for example, claims that might be objective but we don't have enough evidence, or adequate methods of testing them, to be sure.

20:50: Considering theological truth as subjective weakens the truth claim, "because opinions don't really matter, if you think about it." No. Just, no. Not everything has to be Ultimately Important to matter.

21:00: "We have to reunite this idea, and get to one total truth, so we understand that the truth claims about God are every bit as objective as truth claims about math." ::sigh:: Are you really sure you want to go there, Dude? I ask because, as you yourself have pointed out, an awful lot of the reasons that people believe are... well... personal. Subjective. Francis Schaeffer has an entire book entitled He Is There and He Is Not Silent -- which, if it were true, would be far too self-evident to require a book.

Also, I'm troubled by the idea of "one total truth". Are we trying to unite subjective and objective truths here? Because that seems... problematic. Or are we just going to discard all subjective truths as unworthy of the label of Truth, and make sure that theological claims don't get discarded with them? That seems problematic too, but in a different way. Precisely which theological claims are we going to establish as independently-verifiable objective truths?

I'm just going to mention again that I have biases, and one of them is a low tolerance for showmanship. If you have a proof that the existence of God and/or the historicity of Jesus is/are real and verifiable, quit dithering around and show me.

23:38: "Now if I made this statement about Hyundais: 'I'm so committed -- Hyundais can fly you to the moon.' Objective or subjective?" Depends on how you meant it, of course, which is precisely the problem with most so-called "literal" readings of the Bible. Yes, I could assume that you were making a claim of objective fact, which in this case is relatively easy to disprove; but honestly, a statement like that is far more likely to be hyperbole, a metaphorical expression of your enthusiasm for the brand -- what you might call a poetic truth -- which would be based on your experience with the cars, and your opinion of the cars, and therefore subjective, and therefore (according to what you said back at the 20:50 mark) valueless.

Except that this also shows why the idea that subjective claims lack value is at best incomplete, and at worst simply wrong. As a data point, "This person has had such good experiences with Hyundai cars that they're willing to say things like, 'Hyundais can fly you to the moon,'" is actually useful to know. It isn't the Absolute Truth of whether you'll like a Hyundai as much as the person who said it, but it's still a useful indicator.

I'm going to un-pause, now, and see how Mr. Wallace answers his own question...

24:30: He's written it off as an objectively false claim. And, almost immediately afterwards, he's confusing objective and subjective. "If I said to you, 'I believe Chocolate chip cookies are the best cookies in the world,' that's a subjective claim." No, no it isn't. That's an objective claim, because either you do believe that, or you don't. It's a changeable objective claim, since your belief might change if someone introduced you to a new, better cookie, but it's still objective. You have to take the qualifier away to make it subjective: "Chocolate chip cookies are the best cookies in the world" is a subjective claim.

I'm pretty sure that if I were, hypothetically, one of the teenagers listening to this talk, he'd have lost me right there. But, again, I was a weird kid.

25:00: "Now, let's take the test together. We're gonna divide all true claims into two sides. On one side we're gonna put all objective claims, on the other side we're gonna put all subjective claims." That's kind of a false dichotomy -- sort of like any idea that starts with, "There are two kinds of people in the world..." Never trust a setup like that. When you're talking about claims, you're talking about things said by people, and when you're talking about things said by people, it's almost always more complicated than that.

Grouping all claims into either subjective or objective categories (while, as I've noted, a very cop thing to do) completely ignores questions of context, irony, hyperbole, exaggeration, sarcasm, humor, and really a substantial portion of all the rich variety of ways that people use to communicate. To make this division, you basically have to pretend that those things don't exist (and, by extension, didn't exist for the people living in Biblical times or the people who wrote their stories). You have to pretend that people don't interact or behave like people, in other words. You have to assume that people only ever communicate with each other in direct, literal sentences which present clear, unambiguous claims.

That's... functionally illiterate, in most cases.

(I'm sorry. I really set out just to explain why this sort of thing might not be all that persuasive to unbelievers. Instead, I'm being... well, pretty harshly critical of what Mr. Wallace has to say. Admittedly, that's precisely why this sort of thing might not be all that persuasive to unbelievers, but it still feels like I'm shading over from pointing out areas of disagreement and into actively debunking his points. Unfortunately, I don't think I can tone down my response and still offer any sort of useful or honest feedback. So just bear in mind that I don't begrudge Mr. Wallace his Christianity, or his belief that Jesus of Nazareth was an actual historical person, or any of that; it's just that I have some serious issues with his methodology.)

I'm going to stop here. (That means that this is definitely going to be at least two more installments, as we're roughly half-way through at this point. I doubt I can cram the next twenty-seven minutes of the talk into a single post; in fact, I suspect we'll be slowing down rather than speeding up. Still, I can hope, right?)

Benchmarks for this point in the lecture:

1. I'm seeing a lot more rhetoric than logic. I mean, Mr. Wallace has laid out the problem as he sees it: young people are leaving The Church in droves (and, I suspect, the occasional Hyundai), because they're going off to college without being ready to defend their beliefs. He's suggested a solution: prepare the young people by showing them that Christianity (and specifically his Baptist, definitely-not-Mormon brand of Christianity) is objectively (and, by implication, provably) true. And then, instead of just laying out this proof -- which ought not to be so terribly difficult -- he changes the subject. We're halfway through his talk, and we haven't done more than touch on the idea that this proof exists; the entire lecture so far is basically just background and build-up.

2. The hermeneutic he seems to be laying out here (at least, so far) strikes me as... well... simple-minded, and precisely the sort of thing that falls apart immediately when you try to apply it to the way actual people actually communicate. That isn't entirely Mr. Wallace's fault; a lot of what he's saying is standard, or at least very common, Christian doctrine.

3. I mentioned in the introductory post that a lot of apologetics seem to be designed more to reinforce the faith of existing Christians than to persuade unbelievers. That's definitely the case here (which, admittedly, makes sense when you consider his audience for his particular talk). Sure, Mr. Wallace has mentioned the vital need for people (and especially young people) to share their faith at all times, and the prospect of having solid proof of the historicity of Jesus seems like it could be really helpful with that; but he hasn't offered any discussion on how to approach people about your faith, how to actually share your faith, or when to shake the dust from your heels and move on to the next metaphorical town. This talk is (I think) building up to his core point about how Christians can know that the tenets of their faith are objective true, but it's building up with an explicit emphasis on keeping Christian young people in Christianity, rather than on bringing in new converts.

On to Part 4!

Reaction: J Warner Wallace and The Case For Truth Part 2

Okay, I'm finally watching this video, because... um... mostly because someone said they'd be interested in my response to it. The background post is here. This is probably more feedback than they wanted, but, well, here we go...

Very, very first impressions: he's a good speaker. He's active, dynamic, charismatic; he's talking about his background, his family, offering some personal info to make a connection. He also talks quickly -- that's part of the "dynamic, charismatic" element, but it also means he's throwing a lot of information at his audience without giving them much chance to stop and assess it.

1:50 "I was the kind of atheist that was really pretty obstinate." I have no particular reason to doubt this, but it's worth mentioning that it's sort of de rigeur in this sort of "I once was lost but now I'm found" story. Lee Strobel was an atheist until he turned his skills as an investigative reporter towards finding out if Christianity was really The Truth; Josh McDowell began his journey as an atheist examining the evidence and seeking the truth. Heck, Mike Warnke was a Satanic High Priest before he found Jesus and became an evangelist -- or at least so he claimed, for years, before Mike Hertenstein and Jon Trott debunked pretty much everything he ever claimed. Having said that, I know (and occasionally work with) some police officers; and they tend to pretty black-and-white, clear-cut-categories sorts of people. So assuming that Mr. Wallace was an atheist, he probably was pretty obstinate about it. It's just that any time an apologist starts out talking about how much of an atheist they once were, I'm inclined to take it with a grain of salt.

2:22 - There's a really abrupt transition from "I was an atheist" to "I worked on a lot of high-profile cases" and then some talk about statutes of limitations and cold cases. He's basically setting out his credentials here -- he used to be an atheist, he's done a lot of investigation of things that happened a long time ago.

3:24 - "But now we're gonna take some of those techniques that we learn(ed) doing cold cases, and we're gonna apply them to the Christian worldview." That... seems like some heavy-duty conflation. "A long time ago" in historical terms is very different from "a long time ago" in terms of prosecuting a felony. The past is a foreign country, if you'll permit me to borrow a phrase. Mr. Wallace spends the next couple of minutes talking about how he, and his father, and his son all use basically the same equipment and the same techniques -- three generations! Consistency! -- and how those techniques can be applied even further back... but I'm dubious. So, I'm just going to pause here and point out -- again -- that Baby, It's Cold Outside sounds very different to modern audiences than it did to its original audience, and that's only going back to the 1940s. The idea that you can examine historical documents in the same way that you would look at modern eye-witness testimony or other evidence strikes me as hugely, fundamentally flawed.

That doesn't necessarily mean that he's wrong, of course; but to my mind it's a good reason to be wary.

5:00 - "The problem we're facing with young people ... Christians who attend college leave Christianity in large numbers. It's pretty ugly." This comment isn't exactly problematic, since he's addressing Christian youth at the Summit Worldview Conference, and -- being presumably all Christian -- we can safely assume that they agree that young people leaving Christianity is a Bad Thing. So I don't think he's wrong to mention it here, or to describe it the way he does... except for the part where he seems to be blaming colleges and/or the college environment for their departure. Again, this may be my own experience coloring my interpretation, but "going off to college" also happens to coincide with a point at which young people suddenly become much more free to make their own decisions. (I, myself, quit attending church when I went to college. I hadn't actually considered myself a Christian for two full years before that; it was just that attending church helped maintain the Domestic Tranquility Index while I was still living with my parents.) And there seems to be a social and/or historical trend of young people leaving Christianity right now, quite possibly just because there isn't as much pressure on them to stay as there was for earlier generations.

So while I understand and even sympathize with his desire to help young people remain Christians, I think the assumption that college is some sort of hostile environment may be somewhat (though not completely) misguided. Correlation is not causation.

6:00 "I think there's a simple math to the problem we're seeing... We're gonna add three things. The first thing [is that Christian students are poorly prepared]." Again, there's that belief that college is a hostile environment.

7:15 "Why are you a Christian?" He rattles off a list of answers. "Those are the same answers Mormon give -- they give the same answers as Christians give." So, apparently, Mormons aren't Christians. That's... troubling. First of all, I don't think it's his place to judge. Second, that sure as heck isn't how Mormons see it -- they see themselves, very consistently, as a return to the Christianity of the early church, albeit with some additional revelations given to them. Mr. Wallace has just said that his step-mother is a Mormon, so I find it extremely hard to believe that he doesn't know this. The alternative, of course, is that he knows but doesn't care, which indicates a degree of arrogant disdain that doesn't speak particularly well of him either.

Notice, also, that he's kind of jumping from topic to topic -- he's not laying out his thesis in a neat, orderly set of propositions. Part of that is simply a matter of being a good public speaker; if you just lay out your position one point at a time, it's pretty boring to listen to. But it also makes it easy to just sort of nod along in agreement, since you're only seeing one little piece of things at a time. Hopefully he'll do more to tie it all together as the talk progresses.

8:00 Mr. Wallace supplies another answer: "How about, 'We know it's evidentially true'? They can't say that." Um, yes they can. Maybe if you were talking about Shintoists or neo-Pagans or something, but Mormons? Mormons are working from the same starting point that you're trying to prove is "evidentially true". How do you have a Mormon step-mother and not know this?

8:20 He's finally gotten back to point #2 of the three things he referenced at the 6:00 mark: "Aggressive, antagonistic campuses." (Yep, I called it.)

I dunno, maybe I'm biased -- I mean, I started at an Episcopalian university and finished my undergraduate degree at a University founded and run by the Disciples of Christ. So maybe the public universities are hugely antagonistic to the Christian faith? Maybe it's the community colleges? Except I did my graduate work at a publicly-funded, entirely secular University, and I don't recall seeing anything in the way of Christian-bashing there, either.

"Let's face it: most college campuses are not in favor of Christianity anymore." A) In my experience, that's only true in that most colleges don't seem to care about it one way or the other. B) There's a world of difference between not favoring something -- not granting it special status or special standing -- and being aggressively antagonistic towards it.

9:10 "There's a third thing..."

9:40 Finally, we get there: "Innately fallen humans as students." Whew! Again, this is boilerplate Christian doctrine, so no real problem there.

10:00 "We have a pre-disposition as fallen humans to chase our desires anyway." Okay, I was wrong. I do have a problem with this. The idea that people leave Christianity because they're "in love with their sins" or "they want to be able to sin without being convicted" or just "they want to be able to sin" might hold water if being a Christian seemed to, you know, prevent people from sinning -- or even slow them down in any meaningful way -- but that just isn't how it works. At least, not in my experience, and not in any sort of study I've ever seen.

::sigh:: I think I was hoping that "innately fallen humans as students" meant "we're fallible and we get things wrong"... but, no.

11:25 "We have to move The Church in a new direction. That's why we have something like Summit to begin with. You are The Church. You're the most important demographic in the church." Sure, but just try getting the actual leadership to listen to anything you have to say. (Sorry, that was unnecessarily cynical, but A) I'm hearing that complaint a lot from the sorts of people who get called "post-Evangelicals", and B) I have strong memories of being a teenager, and being regularly assured that my generation had an important role to play, just... y'know... not yet, and in the meantime we should stay quiet and do as we were told.)

(I hated that. And it didn't just come from church-folk, either. Not even close. Dude, you're up there lecturing at the front of the class; you're not a "was", and your students aren't an "is". You're an "is", and if you're lucky your students are all "will-be"s. No, I have no idea how to punctuate that. Otherwise they wouldn't be sitting there listening to you tell them what to do.)

14:00 "This is a stupid missions trip. This is dumb, because this is really a matter of opinion." Nice lead-in. So, at the 14:10 mark, we get "This is the first thing we have to get this morning. You've gotta understand the nature of Truth. If there's no truth, there's no truth about God." We've just hit our first major proposition, our first vital starting point, a quarter of the way through his talk.

This is the difference between persuasive speaking, and laying out a cogent logical argument.

16:30 He's been laying out the difference between objective and subjective, and as an example he's compared a missions trip to preach the superiority of chocolate chip cookies as a desert (subjective) and a trip to explain to people stricken with Tuberculosis about the only effective cure for TB (objective). So he's tying the question of objective vs. subjective together with the question of what's really worth arguing over, at least by implication. He also seems to be making an argument that objective claims are valuable, whereas subjective claims are not -- and I don't entirely agree with that.

However, at this point I'm going to stop. We're roughly a third of the way through this; I have now spent something like four hours to get through sixteen and a half minutes of Mr. Wallace's presentation.

Benchmarks for this point in the talk:

1. I'm extremely impressed with him as a speaker. I think I'd still have disagreed with him, back when I was teen and at least nominally a Christian, but I wouldn't have been bored. A bit impatient for him to get to the meat of his argument, maybe.

2. I'm not terribly impressed with his argument so far, or where he seems to be going with it. It's hard to say for sure, of course, because he skips around a lot and seems to be laying his view out more by a process of accretion than by assembling it into a structure, but that's part of why I'm not terribly impressed so far. It's also, very probably, part of why he's a successful speaker; painstaking logical arguments tend to be boring, whereas persuasive speech needs to be engaging.

3. I keep wondering about the apparent teenagers that make up his audience: are they all gung-ho and inspired, or are there any of them who are more like I was: not responding, but weighing up Mr. Wallace's assertions privately, reserving judgement for later? Useless speculation, but in terms of laying out my biases it's worth remembering that I was a weird kid.

On to Part 3!

Reaction: J Warner Wallace and The Case For Truth part 1

One of the parents in the Christian Parents of Atheist or Agnostic Children support group asked for my reaction to this video of a lecture by J Warner Wallace, apparently entitled "The Case For Truth". It's taken me a little while to get to this -- the lecture is an hour long, and I have small children, which isn't a combination that lends itself to convenient review and reflection. Since that wasn't working, I decided to try a different approach: I'm going to watch the video in smaller chunks (at a guess, probably four sections of roughly fifteen minutes each; but that depends on how the lecture is structured) and write down my reactions here.

For anyone coming in new, it will help to understand my perspective: I'm an atheist (or an agnostic, unbeliever, or whatever label you prefer, really. "Unregenerate sinner" is not the worst thing I've been called). My role in the support group is to help -- or at least try to help -- the Christian parents get a handle on how non-believers and former believers look at things. (That's insofar as there's any one particular way that unbelievers look at things, which usually isn't the case.) So I'm not going to try to debunk or refute whatever Mr. Wallace has to say in his lecture, but I will almost certainly be trying to explain why his arguments may not be as convincing to unbelievers as they are to believers. (It's been mentioned before that a lot of Christian Apologetics seem to serve more to reinforce believers than to persuade unbelievers; I don't know if that will be the case here, but it seems likely.)

J. Warner Wallace is the author of Cold Case Christianity, which is a book and apparently (unsurprisingly) also a ministry. I have not read the book, and I don't follow the ministry, but his biography says that he was a vocal atheist who used his skills as a police detective to investigate the evidence for Christianity, and became a convinced and passionate Christian (and Christian apologist). That's oversimplifying a bit, but I think it's a fair summary.

According to the blurb on Amazon, "In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs." This isn't an entirely new approach; the basic idea isn't so different from Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands A Verdict (which I've read) or Lee Strobel's The Case For Christ (which I haven't). This... and I say this now now, so you'll understand my bias going into this... this whole approach is one that strikes me as fundamentally flawed, because it depends on treating the accounts given in the Gospels as if they were separate from Christianity. (There are other, nearly-contemporary accounts, but as independent evidence they're not that helpful; they're second-hand, written well after the events they describe, and/or open to question about how much of the text is original, as opposed to being later interpolations.)

Now, none of that may have anything to do with whatever Mr. Wallace discusses in this particular lecture; I don't know. But since I've run into his name and some of his ideas before, I thought it was worth laying out my background and the way it shapes my responses before diving into the video itself. Unfortunately, that's eaten up my writing time for this evening; so we'll actually start watching in a day or two (or three), in the next installment.

Is atheism a choice?

I'm phrasing this as a question, but honestly it's something I hear as an accusation ("How could you turn your back on God?") or as an assumption, sometimes implicit and sometimes stated openly. ("Romans 1–3 makes it plain that the knowledge of God is written on our hearts—every human being knows there is a God and every human being is 'without excuse' (Romans 1:20). So there are no true atheists." -Ken Ham) However you phrase it, it's a very common conception: this idea that becoming an atheist, like becoming a Christian, is a choice.

I don't think that's true. I think it's untrue for many Christians, maybe even most Christians. But I'm sure it's untrue for a great many people who started as Christians, and later lost their faith. I know it's untrue for me.

The problem is, I don't think the opposite is true, either. So, I don't want to just say, "It's not a choice," because that makes it sound like unbelievers have no volition - as if we're hopelessly at the mercy at forces beyond our control. That isn't really how it works, either.

It's more complicated than that.

Mainly, I don't think that the language of choice is a good way to talk about faith at all. When it comes to the loss of faith, it's even worse: it isn't just insufficient, it's misleading.

I've said this in various forms before, but - as far as I can see - the loss of faith isn't a decision in and of itself. It's one possible conclusion to a much larger process.

It starts with questioning. There may be some particular slight or injustice that acts as a catalyst, and it's easy to focus entirely on that. ("She just had a bad experience with that one church." "He's just angry at God because his puppy died." "If her Youth Minister had been able to answer her questions, she wouldn't have left.") Or, there may not be any obvious cause; a lot of people start into this process precisely because they were trying to take a deeper look at their faith, or simply because they were trying to put things together and couldn't quite get the pieces to fit. But even if there's one particular moment or incident that seems to have started someone on the road to disbelief, it's a mistake to put too much focus on it. It might have been the trigger, but almost certainly isn't the cause. Again: it's more complicated than that.

So: it starts with questioning. The questioning is the important part: what a person is wondering about, or troubled by; what they find as answers; how they sort through possible answers and reach their conclusions. Everyone, believers and atheists alike, is doing the best they can with the information they have... but we don't all have the same information, and we don't weigh particular pieces of data in the same ways, and sometimes there are other factors as well. (It's possible, for example, that a bad enough experience can basically spoil someone for a particular faith - it's possible for someone to have personal reasons that make them unable to take part in something, without necessarily believing that the thing itself is evil and wrong. Presumably God, if He is as all-knowing and all-loving as advertized, would understand and even sympathize.)

So: after the questions, there's a period of evaluation. Some people find answers. Some don't find answers, but retain their faith anyway - faith being, for them, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. Some lose their faith in particular doctrines, or churches, or denominations... but retain a fundamentally Christian faith, either changing denominations or becoming "Christian but unchurched" or "spiritual but not religious".

Some change religions entirely, but remain religious. They become Wiccans, or Buddhists, or... almost anything, really.

So atheism isn't the only possible result of this process. I suspect it isn't even the primary result of this process. Atheism is where you end up when you conclude that every religious, spiritual, or supernatural way of looking at the world just doesn't work for you.[1] And even then, it isn't necessarily an end-point. Some people leave religion, and remain unbelievers for the rest of their lives. Others pass through a period of unbelief, and eventually return to some sort of faith - either the religion of their birth, or something similar, or something else altogether.

That's what I see. That's what I hear from other unbelievers. The idea that someone would "choose" not to believe sounds... odd. Off-key. It seems like the sort of thing that only works as an answer if you're asking the wrong questions.

The idea that unbelievers are "suppressing the truth in unrighteousness" (because everyone knows that God exists and that He looks exactly the way that particular strains of American Christianity describe Him) is worse. It says that I cannot possibly be what I am. It says that I'm either lying, or I'm delusional; possibly both. I suppose that might be reassuring to believers, but it's utterly useless to me. I know I'm not lying, and I really have no choice but to assume that I'm not delusional.[2] Once someone says that to me, the conversation is pretty much over; there's nothing I can say to that, and there's no reason to listen to it.

Atheism isn't a choice, and asking if (or assuming that) it is... is a fundamentally misguided approach to understanding it.

[1] I've seen arguments that everyone is born as an atheist, but I don't think that's entirely true; I think the truth is a bit more complicated than that. People are born without any specific religion, but the tendency towards religious belief in general - towards belief is some sort of Unseen Forces That Shape Our Lives - seems to be wired into the species.

[2] Also, if I am delusional - or even just wrong - a loving God would understand and accept that.

How long can you tread water?

I have, as you might have noticed, some issues with the story of Noah's Ark. Don't get me wrong, I can see the appeal. I've had days (weeks, months) in which it really seemed like the only way to really fix things was to burn everything down and start over. (That seems, to me, to be the fundamental lure of the story.)

But unless you're willing to believe that everyone else in the world, everyone Not Like You, is evil - completely and irredeemably evil - then killing off the entire world is a monstrous and evil thing to do. It's only slightly less monstrous if you're "merely" leaving everyone else to die, as you get in some modern retellings of the story (such as Atlas Shrugged).

If other people are basically just doing their best to get by, then killing them off for their perceived failure(s) isn't noble; it's villainous. It's horrible. And if you discovered that someone was planning to do that, the heroic action would be trying to stop them.

...This has devolved into something of a rant, which wasn't exactly what I intended. So, on a lighter note, here's Bill Cosby with his own distinctive take on the story:

Until the Rainbow, Part Five

This is the fifth and final (Yay! At last!) part of a five-part series. You can start from the beginning here. I wonder, are there any great stories that aren't morally problematic?

Among the things the old man left behind, I found some paper. I've been writing this while the others work -- and despite my expectations, they've encouraged it. I thought someone would rebuke me for not helping out, but no one did. Part of that, I'm sure, was because I'd made the climb into the boat... but I think that another part of it is a desire to be remembered, to have some record of who we were, and what we did when the waters rose.

Our final project is as simple to describe as it is difficult to complete: to rip the roof off the old man's house, whole and intact, and invert it. With any luck, and a lot of work, we can make an impromptu boat and put the children inside.

When the old man and his sons lowered me out of their boat, they gave me a length of rope. Once our own boat is ready, I'll make that climb again, and tie that rope to his ship. The other end will be attached to our boat, the life raft we're crafting from his roof, tying it to his floating barn.

I doubt the raft will last long. It might not even survive the arrival of the waters, but there's nothing I can do about that. Still, if it lasts until daylight... my last, great, burning hope is that the old man and his family will be forced to choose between bringing the children aboard, and watching them drown. I hope -- and, yes, even pray -- that they'll choose the former. But if they don't, let them have my curse: let their descendents be just as we are now. Just as varied, just as selfish, just as petty and greedy and warlike. If God can curse the world to death by water, surely I can curse the old man's descendents to be human and imperfect.

And if my curse has any power, then you -- eventual reader, the person who finds this record -- will know how the old man chose.

None of the adults will go with the raft. There's only barely room for the children, and the old man will absolutely ignore any vessel with any of us in it. We've resigned ourselves to dying, to give them a better chance to live. If we are truly part of the sin and iniquity that brought about the end of the world, then we'll pay for it now.

I have an empty bottle here beside me: dry, discarded. When I finish, I'll put these papers inside and seal the top as best I can. If there's any justice in the world, someday someone will find them and learn what we did. And if there isn't, you can at least consider this my last defiant act: spitting in the eye of a god who would wipe us all from the face of the Earth for being what he made, rather than what he hoped for.

Until the Rainbow, Part Four

This is the fourth piece of a three-part four-part five-part short story. (Honestly, I really thought that three would do it!) You can read part one here. Feel free to leave thoughts or corrections in the comments.

I gripped the wet, slick wood with trembling fingers, and pulled myself up to the edge so I could see in the window. It was a ridiculous position: I was fifty feet in the air, balanced precariously on an unstable structure, in the midst of the worst downpour the world had ever seen... and I was doing this mere hours after a cross-country hike (also in the battering rain) which had taken most of the day.

We'd tried to build a ladder, using anything available: bits of furniture the old man and his family had left behind, wood from a couple of outbuildings that we'd disassembled, bits of fence post, even some scrap lumber that looked to be left over from the construction of the old man's crazy boat. What we got wasn't really a ladder, let alone anything as useful as steps. It was just a very steep pile, held together by whatever we could find: bits of clothesline, belts, and as much of our clothing as we could spare.

I was the third one to try to climb it. The first attempt had been made by one of the teenage boys. Two-thirds of the way up, the pile had shifted and he'd lost his grip. The second attempt was made by the father from a young couple who had arrived with their small children on their backs. He'd made it halfway up, then came back down and refused to try again. He said that with all the rain he couldn't get a grip on the wood, but he'd also helped us with the boy who fell; he'd seen the bone sticking out of his shin, seen us force it back in and splint the leg. If his nerve had simply given out, I really couldn't blame him. The whole attempt was suicidal. Even if one of us made it up there, we'd never get anyone else up unless the old man and his family were willing to open the door, or at least lower ropes.

I couldn't blame him, but I couldn't afford to wait for daylight, either: the ground was giving the first faint hints of trembling, precursors to the unmistakable vibration that would herald the arrival of the devouring waters.

So I climbed. The gathering darkness may have helped, forcing me to feel for my next hold as I labored my way up. There was, at least, enough angle that I could stop and lean into the slope when I grew tired.

And now there I was, balanced against the driving rain, standing atop the pile and gripping the edge of the old man's ship. The exposed deck was covered by a massive roof, which was supported by a central structure (little more than a blacker area of the darkness) that probably held the stairs down to the lower decks. The edge of the roof was just above my head, forming a sort of window that went all the way around the boat. It was about a foot and a half high: enough room to squeeze through.

I shifted my arm, and got an elbow on top of the wall. Then I pulled myself up, feet scrambling against the slickness of the hull. If this didn't work, I wasn't going to be able to climb back down.

I got my head through, hooked my other elbow over, and pushed myself out over the deck. I tilted forward, then began to slip down; fortunately, it was in the direction I wanted. I crashed onto my forearms, barely shielding my head from the impact, and let the rest of my body slide down the low wall and flop to the side. For a long moment I could barely move; I just lay there on the deck, aching all over and trying to breathe.

I'd done it.

Then there were voices, and a flare of light that seemed shockingly bright. The old man's sons were spilling out of the central structure. They were just starting to spread out across the deck when one of them saw me and cried out. Then they were all approaching.

I flopped over and forced myself up to my hands and knees. I got a foot under me, then looked up. Kneeling was about as far as I was going to make it: they were standing around me now. The one in front of me held a shovel, and think one of the others had something else, but I didn't have the energy to turn my head and see. "We need--" I said, and began to cough. They just stood there, uncertain or maybe waiting. "We need your help," I said. "There are people down there. You have to get them onto the boat."

"I have to do no such thing," said a voice. The younger men parted to make way for the crazy old man. "I couldn't even if I wanted to."

I started to say, "You can--" but he cut me off.

"The Lord himself has closed up this vessel. He has determined to cleanse the evil from this world, and only we are to be spared. You and all your kind must perish."

"What?" I shouldn't have said that; I saw his expression harden. I took a deep breath and tried again. "You know me. I run a restaurant. What have I done that's so evil that... I don't know... the only solution is to kill the world and start over?"

"That is between you and God," he told me. "I know only what He has chosen to share with me: that the world has grown full of sin and iniquity, and that He will wipe it all away."

I couldn't believe this. All this way, all this effort to save my family, and this monster was going to stand there and let us die. Anger flickered briefly through my veins, but I was too exhausted to support it. Instead, I begged: "My daughter just turned two. She's too young to be wicked. You can raise her, teach her the proper ways of worship and obedience and..." I trailed off, uncertain of what else God might find us lacking in. "Whatever else God requires. At least save the children."

But the old man shook his head. "I would not dare. If the Lord Almighty intended to save them, they would already be aboard. To bring them on now would risk the safety of the ship. If I do not abide by His commands, none of us will survive."

I put a hand on the railing and managed to stand. With nothing left to lose, I asked: "This is your idea of righteousness? To stand by and save yourselves, while all around you children die? What good and loving God would have you make that choice?"

"No." The old man shook his head. "Your mockery did not shake my faith. Your whispers did not shake my faith. Your questions will not shake it now. Go back to your family. Enjoy what time is left to you."

"Enjoy...?" I looked at his sons, and knew I couldn't take them. They were too many, and I was too weak. I had nothing left. I hadn't even brought a weapon; I didn't dare try to climb with one. "You know what? Fine. But you're going to have to lower me down." I paused, looking around me. "Or you can throw me off, and have my blood directly on your hands. I'm honestly too tired to care, at this point."

The old man stiffened. He was silent for a long moment, but finally he said: "Fetch some rope." One of his sons hurried away.

A short time later I was bumping my way down the side of the boat. They'd tied a sort of basket or harness around me, and helped me squeeze back out the window. It was not a comfortable trip, but after everything else I barely noticed.

Then I was lying in the mud, with the rain steadily battering my body: defeated, fallen, and utterly damned. There was a slight tug on the rope, and then it went slack. A moment later it began to pour down on top of me, coil after coil. They'd released it entirely rather than risk that I might try to climb back up.

Hands found me, touched me, helped up. I couldn't see the figures beside me; it was too dark for that. I could barely hear their voices over the rain. But they put their arms around me, and carried me back into the old man's house.

I should have been broken by the knowledge that we were all going to die, but I wasn't. It was as if, with my death assured, my body gave up the last of its hoarded energy. Suddenly, I had enough strength to be angry.

The others were looking at me as they carried me in the door: expectant, hopeful, sure that nobody would knowingly leave us to die in the rising waters. I stood there, not answering, and saw the knowledge and despair spread across their faces.

"One final effort," I rasped. "One last thing to try."

I knew even then that I was lying. I would keep trying one last thing until the waters claimed my corpse, or until the Almighty himself rose up to strike me down. I was only sorry that we lacked the tools to put a hole in that ridiculous, oversized nightmare of a boat. If God was really out to destroy the world, maybe that would have forced Him to renegotiate.

But we couldn't do it. So instead we tried something else. One last thing, before the waters took us.

Continued in Part Five.

Until the Rainbow, Part 3

This is the third piece of a three-part four-part short story. You can read part one here. Feel free to leave thoughts or corrections in the comments.

We gathered in the crazy old man's home. The sound of the rain was muffled here, but we still had to raise our voices in order to be heard. The air was still damp, and we had no dry clothes - but at least we were out of the rain.

I was surprised by how few people were here. Including the children, twelve of us had escaped together from the town, and we were easily a third of the overall crowd. Most of the others had come in smaller groups, and ours were far from the only children. There was one older couple, a group of four children who seemed to have come on their own, a handful of individuals, families of various sizes... and all of us wet and miserable, bedraggled and profoundly lost. We stood or sat, with barely enough will to speak, and looked at each other. We knew this shelter was only temporary.

The situation hadn't changed. If we didn't keep moving, we'd die where we sat. I forced myself to stand back up, and started a circle of the room. I asked for names and gave my own; I asked questions, knowing already that I wouldn't like the answers.

The old man wasn't in the house. His family wasn't in the house. All those animals and supplies that they'd spent months collecting -- after months of laboring on their crazy project -- were in the structure outside, and we had no doubt that the old man and his family were in there, too: safe in their ridiculously oversized boat.

Of course we'd made fun of him. Who decides to build a boat miles away from the nearest water? Who makes a boat that's too large to navigate the river, even if you could get it there somehow, and it didn't collapse under its own weight when you put it in the water? We'd called him crazy because the entire project was crazy. When he filled the boat with animals, we called it the world's most elaborate barn, and went to gawk at his madness. When he told us the world was going to end, and loaded his boat-shaped barn with enough supplies for a year or more, we laughed -- or we nodded gently and helped him on his way, humoring him. What else could we have done?

But now that boat was our only chance of survival. If the old man had known that the rains were coming, maybe he'd also known how to build a boat that could withstand the rising waters - and who knew how long they would rise? I kept thinking of the river, covering more and more of the landscape as it rose and spread, following us here a few hills and valleys at a time. How much time did we have?

Some of the others had tried pounding on the hull, hoping someone would let them in. Nobody had responded; either the old man and his family were ignoring them, or they couldn't hear them over the rain.

So I went back outside and looked at the old man's crazy boat. It was a giant block of a thing, a good fifty feet high. There was only one door that I could see, and that was sealed and too high up to reach. I thought again of the river, rising to devour everything; and I wondered how much time we had.

We were going to have to get up there, somehow. Despite the height, despite the merciless downpour, despite our exhaustion... somehow. We had to find a way to get on that boat.

Continue on to Part Four...

Until the Rainbow, Part Two

This is the second piece of a three-part short story. You can read part one here. Feel free to leave thoughts or corrections in the comments.

The countryside was better. There were people here, too, but they were doing the same thing we were: fleeing the city. I only hoped that we didn't all share the same destination.

We staggered along for only a few minutes before we left the road. I don't know who suggested it, or if we all just realized it at once, but the road was hopeless: the hard surface lost beneath a stream of mud that sucked at our feet and slowed our steps. The grass was better, the trees better still -- though there was no escape from the merciless rain. The water was just as deep here, but roots and grasses held the soil in place.

I took a guess at our direction, and we staggered on: away from the town, towards the crazy old man in the hills. We splashed across a field that was now a shallow lake, scrambled up hillsides that were trying to dissolve into mudslides.

The rain pushed against us at every step. It was a horrible, monstrous thing -- I hated it as if it were alive. The deluge left us half blind and nearly deaf. It weighed down our clothes and sucked the heat from our bodies. We carried the children, now: they were exhausted and shivering. Our weapons were our only supplies, and we carried them only from fear of more bandits. If we didn't make it to shelter, we would starve -- or drown, whichever came first.

By midday we were well into the hills, alternating between walking on thankfully-solid ground and carefully crossing the impromptu streams and cascades that had grown between the high places. We stopped to rest, huddling together like a herd of sheep for warmth; there was no way to start a fire in this, and no shelter to be found.

It wasn't courage or determination that kept us going. It was simply the knowledge that there was nothing else to do. We could either keep going, or die where we sat.

The children surprised me. They were colder and more tired than the rest of us, but they staggered to their feet when we started to move again. Those who could, walked; those who couldn't, we carried.

Somewhere in the afternoon, our path took us close enough to see the river. Or, rather, to see what the river had become. Once slow and tranquil, it was now raging and wild. Once narrow enough to swim across, it was now as wide as the greatest of lakes. Once safely contained within its banks, it was now reaching out to tear away anything it could reach. We could feel its presence as a steady, rumbling vibration in the ground. The docks could not have survived this. The town could not have survived this.

Fortunately, it curved away as we continued on. We hurried, and I felt that we were not so much avoiding the river as trying to escape it. I couldn't see it through the steady rain, but I knew it was back there: growing, spreading, climbing. Reaching. We hiked on, eager to stay ahead of it.

And, finally, we saw it: the high hill where the crazy old man had done his work. With the rain, we were nearly on top of it before it came into view; but the massive wooden construction was unmistakable. Better still, there were only a few other figures crowded around it: only a few that had made it here from the town, or from the surrounding countryside.

With our goal is sight, our steps grew lighter. We hurried forward to safety.

Continued in Part Three.

Until the Rainbow, Part One

The end was near. We all knew it, though some still screamed denials.

I led my family down the center of the street, staying away from the sidewalks and alleys. We kept the children in the center, while the adults encircled them with weapons ready. We'd fought twice already, once with another family and once with a group of men. My brother lay dead three streets back; when his wife wouldn't leave his side, we left her behind. The steady rain hid their forms from sight, but I carried that last glimpse with me.

Once, I would have prayed that she would be safe. Now... I could only hope, and I hoped with all my heart that her end would be quick and painless.

The rain continued its relentless descent, weighing us down, trying to drive us into the earth. The street was a steady stream, as deep as my ankle. We struggled against it, up the hill and away from the docks. One of the children slipped; another helped her up. Nobody slowed their pace.

The forecasters hadn't predicted this downpour. They had been as surprised as anyone when it came - maybe more so, not that it mattered. Surprised by its appearance, surprised by the way it covered everything, surprised by the way it never let up. We'd had stormy weather before, to be sure; but this was different. A week of storms was one thing, but this was one unbroken storm, and it had been going on for nine days, now. None of the forecasters could say when it would end; at least one swore that it wouldn't, not until it had consumed the world and everything in it.

We passed a shattered church and kept going. Two days ago, the steady flooding had chewed through the foundations and collapsed the building, crushing the minister and a crowd of devout worshipers; but still there were people clambering over the rubble, screaming for rescue and salvation. Their wails were audible even over the steady roar of falling rain.

No place was safe. Houses and places of business were targets, not shelters. The streets were even more dangerous. The docks... everyone wanted to get to the docks. Everyone wanted passage on a boat. Never mind that half the ships were gone, swept down the river and splintered by floating debris or underwater obstructions. Never mind that the docks themselves were half-shattered and sagging. Never mind that the remaining boats were overwhelmed with passengers, packed almost too tight to breathe. The docks were a steady riot of desperate violence. We wouldn't stand a chance there.

So we went in the only direction we could: the crazy old man in the hills. It was madness, but what choice did we have? There was no other way to go, no other way that we might survive. Not unless the rain stopped, and it showed no sign of doing that. So the old man was crazy - so what? So we'd all laughed at him - so what? If he'd done what he said he was doing, he was our only chance.

Continued in Part Two...

From comments: politeness, presentation, and ethics

I'm not sure how to introduce this, exactly. It showed up as an afterthought in the comments on one of the older posts, and I think it deserves a response, but I don't want to further clutter up that comment thread. Also, I don't really want everyone else to charge over there and respond. It's not that I don't treasure each and every one of your comments, dear readers; nothing warms my heart like finding that someone has not only read my stuff, but left an (invariably) interesting and thoughtful response. It's just that that particular thread is more than busy enough with just two of us commenting on it, at present.

...But I digress. Anonymous Commenter observed the following:

Sidebar......I just was on a blog where out of 10 comments by atheists I read bullshit, horseshit, bitch and fuck-2'x. So, atheist's morals....show. Atheists don't have problem hating what Christians say but you'all have built a fine reputation for yourselves too.

Several thoughts come to mind, here. The first, of course, is that using swear words doesn't strike me as a useful measure of moral character. Swearing can be impolite, in some circumstances; crude, to be sure; but we're not exactly talking world-devouring evil, here.

The second thought that comes to mind is, "You're talking to the wrong sort of atheists." Except, I need to qualify that, because I'm perfectly well aware that there are atheists out there who are hostile to, contemptuous of, and rude about religion. Are they the majority, or even common, or are they just a particularly vocal minority? I don't know. I do know that if I only focused on a certain group of Christian blogs, I'd come away convinced that Christians are highly judgemental, death-obsessed, and unapologetically rude. And I'd be wrong. But neither Christians nor atheists are a monolithic group; trying to talk about atheists in general is about as useful as trying to talk about Christians in general - or men in general, for that matter.

But speaking for myself - though I believe that most of my atheistic readership feels much the same - being irreligious in no way requires me to be anti-religious. For the most part, I don't much care. Occasionally something catches my eye that I think is worth poking fun at, or otherwise dissecting; but for the most part, I have no particular interest in trying to convince religious people that they ought not to be religious, or making fun of them of them for being religious per se.

Quoting my iFriends: Secular Humanism

So, emilyperson posted this in the comments over at Confessions of a Former Conservative. It struck me as one of those thoughts that ought to be shared, so I'm reproducing it here:

I’m reasonably sure you can be a Christian secular humanist. The word “secular,” contrary to popular belief, doesn’t mean “anti-theistic.” It just means it lacks mention of religion. All a Christian would have to do in order to qualify as a secular humanist is not tie hir theology up with hir humanism.

(Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Religion informs worldview, and worldview influences philosophy tremendously. But a Christian can still say “because it’s right” without adding “because God said so.”)

That'll preach.

Atheism as a Worldview redux

My basic reaction to Red Cardigan's latest atheism post (which can be loosely summarized as, “Atheism isn’t a good philosophy because it doesn’t tell us what the meaning of life is”) is that the fact that she doesn’t find the answer satisfying doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good answer. If you ask, “What is the meaning of life?” and someone answers, “As far as we can tell, there isn’t one,” well, guess what? That’s a valid answer.

Atheism as a Worldview

I (and several others) recently got involved in a discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of atheism and "New Atheism" over on Confessions of a Former Conservative. This was sparked by a series of posts over at Red Cardigan's blog. (The specific posts are here, here, and here.)

Now, to be fair:
1. Red Cardigan is trying to specifically address the "New Atheists", which is tricky since the folks who get lumped together under that banner aren't a particularly unified group. They might best be described as outspoken, vocal advocates of atheism (also skepticism, the scientific method, and a few other things) - describing them as "leaders" in any sense is misleading - who generally hold a very low, if not actively hostile, opinion of religion.
2. A great deal of the criticism of Red Cardigan's posts revolves around her misrepresenting the position of the atheists she is criticizing. While she does seem to be attacking a straw man, I think this is less of a rhetorical strategy and more of a legitimate misunderstanding. And, very much to her credit, she spent quite a bit of time and text in the comments on Former Conservative's site engaging criticisms and asking questions and generally trying to figure out what she might be missing.
3. In the process, Red Cardigan asked some interesting questions, which I think are worth repeating (along with their answers) and maybe even exploring further. Looking at my lack of belief from the perspective of classical philosophy is, quite simply, not something at ever occurred to me.

Red Cardigan appeared (to me) to be arguing that atheism, and in particular New Atheism, made for an inconsistent worldview. My immediate response (reposted here) was to stop and define what atheism actually means. Atheism is not, in itself, a way of looking at the world; it's just a lack of a belief in one, two, many, or any gods. It can be part of a consistent worldview, but it isn't the basis for one... or for much of anything else, really. It's a conclusion, not a starting point.

Red Cardigan then responded by asking (more or less - I'm trying to abbreviate the actual conversation, here) whether that didn't make me more of a subjectivist than an atheist.

To answer that, I had to go look up subjectivism (it turns out to be, basically, the belief that we can only really know the things we've experienced ourselves), at which point I posted this:

Okay, having read the Wikipedia description of relativism… Well, honestly, I think that’s beside the point. If you want to dig around in my philosophical viewpoint, you’ll find that I am to some extent a relativist; specifically, I tend to think that human beings are, by nature, very much mired in our own subjective points of view, and largely incapable of discerning Absolute Truths on our own. However, I also think that we can use intersubjective means to reach conclusions that are close enough to objective truth to be, at the very least, useful.

That really has very little to do with my main point, which was that atheism consists entirely of the disbelief in a god (or gods). It’s not a comprehensive worldview, in the way that Christianity or Taoism (etc.) can be. That is to say, while you can find meaning and purpose and even draw your morality from Christian (etc.) beliefs, you really can’t do that from a lack of belief. Conversely, because an atheist must find their sense of meaning and their morality elsewhere, the fact that atheists generally do have a sense of meaning and a moral code cannot be a refutation of atheism per se – there’s no connection between the lack of belief in gods, and the conclusion that good behavior is, well, good.

Red Cardigan also included a set of questions:
Atheists tend to say that if they don’t see any reason to believe in something, they don’t believe it. So:

a) If you believe that life has meaning and purpose, what is your reason for believing this?
b) What does your reason tell you the meaning and purpose of life is?
c) How does your reason resolve the apparent conflict between a notion of a meaning and purpose in life with life’s extremely short duration, likelihood of pain/suffering, and end in oblivion? Or does your reason tell you there is no conflict?

I responded:

Well…
A. In the grand scheme of things, I’m not sure life does have any particular meaning and purpose – aside from perpetuating itself, at least. On the other hand, human beings tend to find their own meanings and purposes – and if they can’t find them, they tend to create them. But saying that I find meaning in my life is not the same thing as saying the Life has Meaning.
B. I can’t answer this; it was pretty well obviated by my response to Question A.
C. Because I don’t see a grand Purpose or Meaning, I don’t see a conflict here. In fact, the (relatively) short duration of life, the likelihood of pain and suffering, and the inequalities in living conditions seem to me to be far more consistent with life that arose by impersonal natural systems than it does with an existence purpose-built by an all-powerful, perfectly benevolent Creator.

Red Cardigan responded (much more politely than it sounds when I condense it like this) with a few more questions. Rather than quote the whole thing, I'm just going to put down my answers along with the sections I was responding to:

Would you say that it is fair to say that your own personal ethical system is not based rigidly on empiricism, and that in fact to the extent that some of the new atheists reject what is not based on rigid empiricism you would have to disagree with their attempt to, for want of a better phrase, *make* a philosophy based on the idea that empirically provable material reality is all there is?

I’m not sure exactly what you mean by morality based on rigid empiricism, in part because I’m not sure what you perceive as the alternative(s). I think it’s fairly easy to observe that people function better in structured groups; if you have to do everything for yourself, life gets very difficult very quickly. I think it’s equally evident that part of having that sort of structured group – a society, basically – is having systems in place for getting things done. And I think that social systems like that work best, work most efficiently, when everyone is – for lack of a formal term – playing by the same rules, and when those rules have provisions that allow them to adapt to new or changing circumstances/information. Is that “based on rigid empiricism?”

To expand on that: I think that social systems work best when everyone is playing by the same basic rules (in other words, morality, of which politeness is a subset). And I think that in order to get everyone to play by the same rules, those rules need to treat everyone involved fairly – at which point, we’ve pretty much arrived at the Golden Rule.

And, perhaps, that the antitheism you describe as being part of [the New Atheist] worldview is the reason for their rather fundamentalist views regarding the evil of religion and the need to eradicate it?

I’m not sure that’s a fair characterization of the New Atheist position. I think they’re making an evidence-based argument that, on the whole, religion does more harm than good in the world. Now, the evidence may or may not support that conclusion, but I think you can reasonably make the argument. However, in order to make that argument you have to assume that religiosity can be separated from human nature, and I’m extremely dubious about that assumption.

However, the sort of antitheist atheist promoting the Doctrine of the Exclusive Reality of the Empirically Verifiable and its corollary, the evil of religion and the need to exterminate it would probably not pass such a pleasant evening in my company, nor I in his/hers.

Again, I’d argue that the argument that Religion Is Harmful is not a corollary – not a necessary outgrowth – of the idea that the things we can observe and measure/verify are the only things we can meaningfully know. I think it’s a separate argument, and needs to be addressed that way; trying to connect the two takes you down some very odd and misleading rabbit holes.

---

Now, all of that was before her most recent post on the topic. At this point, she seems to be arguing that New Atheism, or "PEV Atheism" (by which she means atheism which has its philosophical roots in materialism - as she puts it, Nothing which cannot be empirically verified can be said to have actual existence.) is philosophically unsound (or at least unsatisfying) because it doesn't address the Great Existential Questions such as "What is life?" and "Why are we here?" and "Why is there pain and suffering?"

And, once again, I think Red Cardigan is missing the point. (I'm not sure whether she's deliberately misrepresenting atheism, either for humorous or rhetorical effect; or whether she simply doesn't understand how nonbelievers think.)

Again - again - atheism, new or old, does not address those questions because it isn't the sort of thing that should address those questions. It's not a worldview; it's just a lack of belief in gods - one god, two gods, many gods. So what she's really complaining about is what I'd call materialism - the idea that the world that we can see and measure and verify is the only thing that we can meaningfully talk about. Trying to talk about this as a characteristic of some kinds of atheism is misleading and distracting.

And that sort of materialism does answer the questions she poses. Red Cardigan may not like those answers, she may not find them satisfying, but that doesn't mean they aren't answers. (And, yes, rejecting the validity of a question is, in fact, a perfectly legitimate way of answering. Have you stopped beating your wife yet?) More to the point, the fact that some answers are unpleasant does not mean that they can't be true.

So, let's take a look:

• What is life? Well, to borrow the dictionary definition, it's "the state or quality that distinguishes living beings or organisms from dead ones and from inorganic matter, characterized chiefly by metabolism, growth, and the ability to reproduce and respond to stimuli."
• Why are we here? As best we can tell, it appears to be a result of impersonal natural processes.
• Why is there pain and suffering? This also appears to be a result of life arising as a result of impersonal natural processes.
• What is the proper response to the existential horror of total non-existence which we believe is our only lasting destiny? Um, what? Look, maybe you enjoy worrying about things that you can't change; I don't. So, for starters: if it's inevitable, why get worked up about it? Make the best of the time you have. Also, Existential Horror is in the eye of the beholder.

If the study of Philosophy has taught me one thing, it's that with a little work you can manage to completely overthink anything.

Original Sin

"Really? What's so original about it?" ~Me

The doctrine of original sin says, basically, that all human beings are born sinful. Depending on the emphasis, we may be "born sinners" or "born with a sin(ful) nature" and therefore destined, inevitably, to sin. Either way, this is said to be a result of The Fall, which occurred when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. (Interestingly, there's a line in Genesis which suggests that God was not just punishing their disobedience; He was afraid they would also eat the fruit of the Tree of Life, and live forever, and become like Him.) So, basically, Adam and Eve broke the rules, and the rest of us have been paying for it ever since... but I digress.

This is one of the - I guess I'd call them "foundational beliefs" - of mainstream Christianity. That said, I'm not sure it's strictly necessary - it's not part of the Nicene Creed, for example - and I imagine that one could still be a Christian without holding to this particular view of human nature. But among the people who do believe it, I most often hear it used as an explanation for why everyone needs the redeeming love of Jesus Christ. In the more negative approach, it's the justification for why it's okay that everyone who doesn't accept Jesus will end up in Hell.

Obviously, I don't believe this myself. I don't for a moment accept that babies are born as sinners; I'm not even sure what the term would mean when applied to someone who can barely distinguish between the Self and the World. Similarly, I just can't believe that people do horrible things to one another only because our two most distant ancestors once ate a magic fruit.

But people do accept this story. On some level, it resonates. I think that's because there's some truth to it.

Here's the way it usually goes: person 1 points out that we are all born sinners. Person 2 starts to object. Person 1 says, more or less, "Think about it. Nobody goes through life without sinning." And person 2 usually finds themselves nodding their head and saying, "Well, I guess that's true."

And it is true. Nobody goes through life without making mistakes, doing things they regret, or hurting other people - not if they survive to adulthood, at least. But that's not the same thing as saying that we're born with a sinful nature. The two statements are juxtaposed as though the second supported the first... but it doesn't.

In truth, I do think it's impossible to go through life without sinning - "sin" being defined, in this context, as "doing things you shouldn't". This is not because we're born sinful, but because we're born ignorant. Morality is something we learn; and as with everything else, we learn it largely by trial and error. You can't learn that way without, well, errors. We refine our morality by seeing the effects that our actions have on others - and sometimes by observing the effects of other people's actions as well.

To come at that from a different direction, I tend to see "sin" or "evil" as a quality which describes certain actions, rather than a character trait. So, saying that we all do some evil in our lives makes sense to me. Saying that we're all sinners, on the other hand, is no more meaningful than saying that we're all saints: neither assertion is entirely false, but neither is a complete or even particularly helpful description of the human condition.

So, yes, everybody does things they shouldn't, and sooner or later everybody needs forgiveness, if only from themselves. But there's a big difference between "I've done bad things" and "I'm a bad person." (That's not to say that there are no bad people; if someone makes a habit of doing bad things, then I feel fairly justified in calling them a bad person. But, again, it's a matter of actions - of patterns of behavior - rather than intrinsic nature. They're a bad person because they do bad things; it's not that they do bad things because they're a bad person.) And when it comes to the assertion that we are all, by nature, bad people - I just don't buy it. We are all imperfect people, but that is not the same thing. The difference may be subtle, but it's important.

This didn't come together as well as I would have liked, and you're welcome to poke holes in it if you disagree. I may take another run at it later on. We'll see how I feel about it later.