The Biggest Bubble?

David Marshall made an interesting comment in the latest Apologetics 315 interview:

"I'm not a real big fan of inerrancy, because it's kind of like blowing up a big balloon and then asking the opponent to pop the Bubble, pop the balloon with a pin. Even if the Bible is without error, I wouldn't be a fan of the doctrine because I think it's bad strategy. The materialist, skeptics and atheists, they've blown up the biggest balloon of all and that balloon is materialism. They're saying that not one single miracle has ever happened in the history of the universe. Well I'm sorry but they do happen. And that's another contribution of missions. Working as a missionary in Asia, I found that God did sometimes answer prayer, sometimes the answers changed lives in amazing ways. Now of course there's all kinds of difficulties about proving that, and we can't use the scientific method to test a historical claim, but it's much more fun to make a positive argument for something than to defend against somebody else's attack".

There's two interesting comments here that are worth expanding on so I've highlighted them. One is the nature of historical events. By definition, Historical events happen once. And by definition, Science looks for repeatable patterns. So by mere definition, we can't expect historical events to meet the standards of scientific evidence. Does this mean that we can never have reliable evidence for Historical events? No, clearly not. Not unless you believe documents, writings, archaological findings, eye witness reports and all manner of historical data are all conceptually incapable of providing evidence for something.

The more interesting comment is the first bolded part where Marshall refers to Materialism as "The Biggest Bubble". Marshall is referring to what I call The Problem of Total Denial. To me, this is the single biggest problem for materialism and for naturalism. The problem is this: If they're consistent, Materialists and Naturalists must deny the many reported events and occurences in the world which do not fit into their paradigm. They must take many reports and then either deny that the event happened as it was described, or find a naturalistic explanation for it. I will write about this more in the future as I really want to develop my thinking on the issue. In the books I've read on Philosophy, Apologetics, the Historicity of Jesus etc, this is an issue that doesn't receive nearly enough coverage. It is truly underrated. I'm glad Marshall reminded me of it!

How NOT to review a book

I love reading, as I've written about before, and I usually review the books I read on Amazon.

Two recent events have raised the issue of how NOT to criticise or review a book. I will use these two examples to illuminate this common error.

The first occurred on facebook. John Dickson wrote an article criticising Andrew Bolt's attempt at Biblical criticism, and then this article was linked on the Public Christianity facebook page. A guy named Dave Singer responded with this gem:


I note that John offers, as usual, NO evidence whatsoever to support the claim that the Gospels are true.

He may as well call Andrew Bolt an idiot for thinking the Phantom Menace contradicts The Empire Strikes Back.

 I responded by pointing out that it's an error to judge an author by a standard that he never intended to meet. John Dickson's purpose wasn't to "provide evidence to support the claim that the Gospels are true", it was to show that the problems raised by Andrew Bolt aren't all that troubling at all. I also referred to Dickson's latest video where he talks about historical reasons to believe that the Resurrection accounts are historically plausible- 1. They're historically very early, 2. The testimony of women and 3. The conviction of knowledge (as opposed to belief) evidenced by the early followers.

A second example occurred on Amazon.com. A review of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible was heavily critical of the book, on the basis that Smith's argument was "hoisted on it's own petard". The author of the review, S.D Parker, berated Smith because Smith apparently criticises the Bible for not being definitive enough, but Smith's own conclusions won't reach definitive agreement either! As I pointed out in response to Parker, Smith never intended for his own conclusions to reach definitive agreement! He clearly states that his views are merely some suggestions to get the discussion started on how to better approach the Bible, and not the final word. Further, Smith's argument was not against the Bible for not being definitive enough, it was against a particular view of the Bible (Biblicism) which implies the Bible should reach definitive agreement when it clearly doesn't! Big difference.

 

 

Smith devotes the second half of the book to arguing that the theology of the Bible does contain ambiguities (Chapter 6) and even the theological conclusions that we can reach are not entirely based on the Bible but are developed with later reflection and discussion (Chapter 7).

 

 

Parker was welcome to argue that Smith's suggestions don't work, but it was a simple error to criticise them for not being capable of reaching definitive conclusions. Smith never said they would! In fact quite the opposite. Not only did Parker misrepresent Smith's argument, but he judged Smith by a standard he never intended to meet.

 

 

It's interesting to note that Parker deleted that review the day after my response. The moral of the story here is that you can only judge a book by whether it sets out to do what it intended to achieve- NOT whether it achieved what YOU want it to achieve.

Bolt and Dickson on Biblical contradictions and Historical Errors

Conservative political journalist Andrew Bolt ventures onto writing about the Bible and John Dickson responds.

Update

I haven't paid sufficient attention to this blog recently, as is evident from the time it's been since my last post. I've still been spending time reading books, however I've kept my thoughts to my minimal personal notes, along with the notes in the margins of the books I've been reading.

Here are some good links I've recently discovered on various topics:

The Christ Myth

In internet circles, many atheists consider it fashionable to make statements like "What's the point of arguing about Jesus's Resurrection? After all, Jesus might not have even existed". This is called "The Christ Myth", or the idea that no man named Jesus ever even walked the earth. This claim is fairly radical. Most intelligent skeptics argue that Jesus was a travelling wise man, or was an apocalyptic prophet who was put to death for his anti Temple rantings. However the Christ Myth claim says that not only did Jesus fail to have any supernatural powers; actually he didn't even exist.

I've heard the anti-Jesus argument refuted many times, for example in the following places:

- John Dickson's various materials: The New Atheism DVD, The Christ Files DVD and book, and The Life of Jesus book.

- John Dickson's videos on Public Christianity's web site.

- Gary Habermas and Michael Licona's A Case For The Resurrection of Jesus, where an extensive footnote lays out why Josephus is very good evidence of the existence of Jesus.

However, I was interested to hear a fuller and more detailed representation of the alternative argument, as the above sources only provided small quotes here and there. This is one reason why I purchased Five Views On The Historical Jesus, where Robert Price is alloted 20 or 25 pages to make his case. Price is one of two historians in the world that I'm aware of who argue for this view. As is obvious from the review I posted on Amazon, I was not impressed. The case that Jesus never existed relies on ignoring a lot of evidence, twisting the rest of the evidence with bizarre leaps of (il)logic and relying on mere possibility when it's crystal clear that the probability suggests another interpretation.

This is why I'm glad to have recently found James Hannam's four part series on the issue. This is a succint and clear refutation of The Christ Myth. You could read the whole thing in half an hour or less and you'd have received a solid summary of the reasons why the arguments for The Christ Myth are exceedingly weak. In another entry, I will either explain or link to an article explaining why it's historically certain that Jesus at very least existed.

Audio Bible

Go here for a fully dramatised NIV audio bible. The only downside is that you'll have to download each chapter seperately- there doesn't seem to be an option for downloading entire biblical books at a time.

Communication, information, and the beauty of the internet

One important aspect of communication is this: The medium of communication must match it's target audience.

Often I'll read a book or an article on a particular subject and I'll want to talk about this subject with others, or will want to suggest the resource to someone (on a forum for example). However, many people simply aren't interested enough to buy books; they might not be the type of person who'll sit down and read for an hour or two. Alternatively, even when people are the reading or studying type, they often don't consider the issue enough of a priority at that point in time to consider alloting any significant amount of time on it. This is one reason why the internet can be so good: The variation and amount of information on the internet is astounding. Journal articles? Look around, you will find plenty. Some professors upload their journal articles on their faculty pages. And there's some good resource websites out there too: Last seminary.com, for example. Full length books? You'll find a few for free (for example go here and scroll down the left hand side till you find "Online Books"). Or look through bookdepository.co.uk,amazon.com and booko.com.au for the cheapest prices. Shorter, less scholarly articles? Plenty, of varying quality. Videos? Again, plenty of varying quality. Want to find further resources on a particular subject? Google is your best friend. Wiki is a good friend too, as is the "people who purchased this book also purchased...." section on Amazon.com.

I'm continually aiming to A. Build up a list of the best sites to visit online, B. Hone my internet information searching skills and C. Work through ways to best collate or record the information I find for further thought, connect the new information with other knowledge I've gained, and store information for later reference. One of the main roles I see this blog as serving is providing a summary of solid information gleaned from the depths of the vast Internet Ocean.

Women In Ministry


This is an interesting issue and it's one that I don't like being dogmatic about. It's definitely an "open hand" rather than a closed fist issue for me, to borrow an analogy from Mark Driscoll. But I strongly lean towards the idea that women should have just as much of a place in ministry as anyone else. Perhaps, for pragmatic and socialogical reasons it may be wise to have a male head pastor in most cases however I don't see that as a hard and fast rule as far as the theology of it goes.

Many people have a reasonable level of interest in this topic, but I'd wager few would consider it important enough to read any extended treatment on the issue. I myself have only read one extended treatment, and that was due to the topic being couched inside a book on something else- the issue was used as a case study for Scot McKnight's approach to reading the Bible in The Blue Parakeet, a book I highly recommend.

Without further ado, check out Ben Witherington's interview with PublicChristianity.com. . The most relevant section is 3:10- 4:26. Here are my comments following brief summaries of Witherington in bold:

- Examples of Bibical Women and the roles they fulfilled: Phoebe, Junia, Priscilla etc. If women in the early church were church leaders ("apostle") and taught men, what makes us think we possess a better system for the church in the 21st century?

- An explanation of passages in 1 Corinthians and 1st Timothy which makes good sense of the fact that women acted in the various roles in point 1. This explanation highly contextualises those passages, and Witherington summarises his point very briefly. This explanation makes more sense of the Bible as a whole and the big picture than the view that women should, to put it crudely, sit in church quietly and not take any major role in church leadership or teaching type ministries.

Many would no doubt complain that Witherington's take doesn't involve a plain vanilla reading of the passages. However, as Witherington says: "A text without a context is simply a pretext for whatever you want it to say". The pastoral epistles and the doctrinal books of the NT were written to specific people in specific places and were used for particular purposes at particular times. This does NOT mean that we can simply write them off as irrelevant. However, it does mean that we ALWAYS need to be aware of the historical and contextual issues surrounding the texts and that these issues will impact on our interpretations. (Although I don't want to go along that line of thinking any further here, other than state my view of the application to the issue at hand).

With Women in Ministry, 1. We have strong reasons to doubt that a vanilla reading makes sense of other parts of the Bible. (Paul describes and works alongside women leaders and teachers in the early church and then explicitly forbids women leaders and teachers forever and beyond. Really?) AND 2. There's a case to be made that the texts in question were utilised for a particular time and are not relevant today. Scot McKnight discusses some historical and textual arguments for point 2 in his book and Witherington summarises one brief argument in the linked vid.

In combination, these two points make the interpretation given by Witherington and McKnight more plausible than the interpretation that we should take Paul at his literal word, as if it were directed to 21st century western culture and command women keep silent in churches.

Philosophy of the Bible- Video

Today I've found a video by Gordon J Glover, titled "The Evolutionary Creation Video". This 9 minute piece basically combines the modern scientific consensus (Big Bang and Evolution) with the timeless story of Jesus revealing himself to humanity and cancelling the sin of the world by reconciling people to God the Father.

I title this "Philosophy Of The Bible" because the point made so clearly by Glover in his accompany blog post is that we need to challenge the presuppositions around how we look at the Bible and what we expect from it.

For example, would it have made sense for God to have told Moses that E=MC squared, or would it make more sense for God to reveal things that people in that day and age needed to hear...? If you look at history and it's development, it's clear that in every age and culture, people's needs are different, EVERYTHING, in fact, is different.

I feel there are major difficulties in the way many conservative Christians read the Bible- how they approach it. I would bluntly summarise some of the problems as: lack of regard for context and history, minimal attempts to consider the implications of other fields of knowledge, a lack of integration between what we know about the Bible itself and how this might relate to our understanding of it, and a small picture outlook (as opposed to a Big Picture outlook). All of this leads to a unrealistic and occasionally absurd understanding of inerrancy and a general lack of thoughtfulness when approaching the Bible. I found Scot McKnight's book Blue Parakeets to be very helpful in exploring these issues, and it's a topic I enjoy thinking about and discussing so it will receive significant attention on this blog, I'm sure. Glover's video is superb, but it was the food for thought he provides around what I call "Philosophy of the Bible" that captured my attention.

See the blog post and video here:

http://www.blog.beyondthefirmament.com/video-presentations/the-evolutionary-creation-video/

The Great Theological Debate of Calvinism vs Arminianism

Neither Calvinism nor Arminianism are completely “biblical”. Calvinism seems to be to me slightly more “biblical” than the alternative but I don’t consider myself a Calvinist for reasons I’ll now go into.

I’ve found that there are many passages in the Bible which are difficult if you try to map the mind of God like a puzzle, which is effectively what you’re doing if you choose one system over the other and say “without qualification, this is the correct system”. And this goes both ways. The Calvinists will talk about certain passages and they make perfect sense, yet when discussing other things in the bible they really are forced to make some quite implausible interpretations and create some difficult justifications to make them fit within their system. Similarly, there are some passages in the Bible which align perfectly with the Arminian understanding, and others where the Arminian theologians are forced to scratch their heads and come up with less-than-perfect interpretations. Also, this is a philosophically difficult issue. This point gradually dawned on me, especially when I read a book 18 months ago with four theologians/philosophers making their case for different understandings of God’s sovereignty and human free will.

How does a Calvinist account for God appearing to change his mind? How do we account for passages that seem to say contradictory things? Why do both systems have what appear to be inexplicable problems which weaken one aspect of God's character at the expense of another? Why are theologians and philosophers who study this issue forced to supply complicated explanations which leave the average person's head spinning in order to make sense of their own system? (For example the Calvinist idea that God has two seperate wills- his perfect or sovereign will and his permissive will? Somehow an all powerful being, who ordains all things needs to have two distinct wills, within himself. Somehow man has no power to overcome God's will, except in instances where it's convenient for Calvinists. OK slightly flippant, but my point is clear- this whole idea is simply a complicated, convuluted system created by man in order to understand God).

This problem led me in the direction of some conclusions on the matter. This post is an introduction to my views so I'll summarise them here. My conclusions also closely relate to my view of the Bible and how it is to be interpreted, and this is yet another topic which will receive attention on this blog in the future.

Firstly, perhaps the Bible isn’t completely inerrant in the word-for-word sense which is assumed when topics like these are debated. Perhaps Paul, and other biblical authors were simply writing down their understanding about the will and God’s control. Perhaps we need to give more dues to context, and I'd strongly suggest we also need to question whether the Bible was meant to be some kind of word to word dictation or whether there is a more sensible approach to take. Many Christians seem to hold that the Bible is a word for word dictation like the Koran, but I think this view looks silly once you look into debates such as Calvinism vs Arminianism, Faith vs Works and compare the various passages on these topics.

Secondly, perhaps there is this conflict in the Bible for a reason. Perhaps this is a mystery that God is leaving open. In the absence of clear answers, and considering the difficulties of fitting each and every passage into one system or the other, this seems a reasonable view to take. We see through a glass dimly.

Thirdly, it makes sense that finite beings who are constrained by time may not be able to effectively figure out how an infinite being (who is not constrained by time), relates to time. Rob Bell gives an illustration of how someone in a two dimensional world would have no idea what they were looking at if someone from a 3D world entered into their 2D situation. Something similar could be analogous here. This all makes me wonder whether it's acceptable and rational to plead mystery in some instances (this being one of them) rather than create complex systems which will inevitably leave us with more questions than answers.