Christians and sex

A couple of quick warnings. Firstly, please note that this post is about sexual matters. I hope that the content proves useful, particularly to Christian parents who need to talk clearly with their children about sex, but I would encourage mature Christians to read and think about this, and make sure that they understand it themselves, prior to simply pointing anybody else to it.

Also, this is a long article (over 2000 words). I suggest you print it out to read rather than trying to wade through it on screen. If it is of any use to you, I can send it to you as a PDF file - add a comment, and I can pick up your email address from there.

Christians are reluctant to talk about sex. I can suggest various possible reasons for this. One is embarrassment - there are too many "naughty words" that we feel should be omitted from polite discourse. One is a dualistic hangover that many of us still feel, namely that the physical is dirty and bad, and it's only the spiritual that can be good. One is the fact that it stirs up strong feelings and we are perhaps a little worried about them.

The effect of this is that Christians often offer nothing of substance to discussion about sex. This isn't a good thing. We are generally bad enough at understanding the impact of worldviews in any case, even when we are able to make the case for the Christian worldview. But when it comes to sex, the worldview of the surrounding culture is left to dominate, with Christians rarely seeming to say anything more constructive than "Do not taste, do not touch" - as though sex is simply a matter of rules that we have to adhere to. So this post is an attempt to redress this balance somewhat.

What happens when we start from a basically materialistic, darwinian worldview - the one that dominates intellectual discourse today? We deduce that we are fundamentally biological (and thus chemical, and thus physical) entities, and everything we see is of necessity derived from this. In this context, reproduction is - well, not the highest good, because "good" implies a value system which is ultimately absent when physics is all there is - but certainly the fundamental necessity in biological terms.

This would explain why our sex drive is so powerful. However, at this point, the explanatory power of materialism ceases to be helpful. As in so many other areas, materialism and darwinism aren't so much scientific theories as means of accounting for any observation - a worldview which is used to interpret phenomena.

At one end of the spectrum, if physics is all that there is, ultimately, then it really isn't possible to say much more in consideration of sex than "this is what happens". Objects with mass attract one another. Space is curved. De Sade felt that it was legitimate for the stronger person to dominate the weaker. Certain people abuse children and have a desire to rape. If physics is ultimately all that there is, then all of these are ultimately just observations about the universe, and disapproving of sexual "deviancy" is a bit like disapproving of gravity. Even when such people harm others, do we have any real basis for saying that this shouldn't happen?

Few people accept this, of course, although it is hard to see how to find fault with it intellectually. From a materialistic point of view, morality is usually defined in terms of sociological acceptability, with sociology being some kind of emergent property at the level of the species. Note that individual morality can't really provide much guidance - because if somebody else has a different morality, then how do we choose between mine and theirs? But sociologically, perhaps, "morality is a herd instinct". If this is the case, then sanctions can be applied by the "herd" to constrain the behaviour of individuals within appropriate boundaries. And this is pretty much where we are at. Although society generally accepts and enforces certain limits, it means that there are no absolute standards of morality, in sexual terms. A hundred years ago, it was considered morally correct that sex ought to be confined to heterosexual marriage (however widespread deviation from this actually was). Now things are different. It is assumed that people in the west will be sexually active before forming a permanent or semi-permanent relationship; that it is better for people to live together before they marry; that sexual fidelity is no more than an arbitrary choice. The change in the sociological landscape itself justifies the changes in behaviour.

Bear in mind that the dominance of the materialistic worldview is a relatively recent (last 30 years or so) phenomenon. During this time, the fact that we have a biologically strong sex drive has led to the general acceptance that fulfilment of that drive is pretty much a biological necessity. So over the course of that time, we have seen (for example) increasing acceptance of pornography and prostitution, and the increasing acceptance of homosexuality within mainstream culture.

But even accepting the consensus of the materialistic culture up to this point, it now breaks down. The analysis that a male within the culture might make (if - and it is often a big if! - he were able to string together the ideas sufficiently coherently to express them!) would be to say that the biological sex drive finds its release in the orgasm. This justifies the acceptance of pornography and prostitution, and sex before and outside marriage in general. These things don't hurt anybody, it is argued, therefore there is no reason for them to be considered immoral.

However, many women would increasingly reject this analysis. Female dissatisfaction with the limitations of sex - even within the boundaries of a materialistic worldview - can be found throughout the culture - in popular shows like Sex and the City, in the feminist rejection of patriarchal models of sexuality, and on an everyday level with the fact that following the liberation(!) of the sexual revolution, men walk away from sexual relationships far more easily than they used to, with far less guilt, leaving women to deal with the consequences - emotional, psychological and physical. Perhaps the biological foundation for this is that women are designed to nurture children, and seek a stable relationship with a male who can provide for them whilst they are caring for the child. But the point is that the materialistic metanarrative has not managed to establish a coherent justification for a new pattern of sexual behaviour, and over the last 15 years it has arguably ended up looking less likely to do so. Whereas the consensus about "right" and "wrong" prior to the sexual revolution provided a framework for a society which had largely functioned in a stable manner for thousands of years, I would suggest that the widespread acceptance of a materialistic and sociological consensus about sexual relationships has largely led to the breakdown of social structures, and has also had a negative impact on individuals' sense of identity.

Another challenge to the materialistic approach to sex comes from the fact that such a large proportion of sexual activity (using the term in its widest sense) is not and has never been related to procreation. And given that the explosion in all sorts of sexual activity following the rise of materialism and the sexual revolution has not led to a population explosion, it can't be seriously suggested that sex, and the sociologically permitted changes in sex that we have seen, are fundamentally about strengthening the relationship between partners for the purpose of rearing children. Therefore, it seems reasonable to cast doubt on the original premise - namely, that sex is about the biological drive to reproduce.

So although people accept the materialistic idea that sex is the biological imperative, we find that we have moved away from any shared concept of how this ought to be expressed, and the phenomena we observe doesn't really seem to be consistent with the idea anyway. So the evidence suggests that the worldview may not be correct.

What is the Christian alternative? Firstly, sex has to be moved away from being the central item in the discussion. Christianity argues that although humans are animals (and therefore have a biological nature), there is more to them than this - there is a fundamental difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, which Christianity talks about as being the image of God. Whereas sex might be considered the biological driving force throughout the natural world, it isn't for humans.

Even this assertion starts to show Christianity as being different from some highly pervasive materialistic ideas. It allows the possibility, for example, that aesthetic sense isn't solely on some level about sexual arousal. It suggests that creativity isn't fundamentally about attracting a mate. It permits the possibility of a desire for knowledge which isn't just about passing genes onto the next generation. These are helpful steps forward, as explanations of these phenomena which reduce them to outworkings of our sex drive were never really convincing.

I would suggest that relationships are a fundamental part of our identity as humans, and this is different from animals - it is part of the image of God. Incidentally, this assertion also means that the worldview which I am talking about is distinctively Christian (in which relationships exist within the divine nature, as a consequence of the Trinity) rather than any other monotheistic worldview. Inherent in the idea of relationships is the idea of love. There are different Bible words which are translated as love, but the focus should be on what they have in common, rather than their differences. Love, in Christian terms, is about giving myself for the other person. This is most completely expressed in the love that Christ had for his people, which resulted in him laying down his life for them ("Greater love has no man than this ..."). But we can see that this is the key component of love in all sorts of relationships - a parent's sacrifice of their own time and money for the sake of their children; a child's love for its parents expressed in the acceptance of the parents' authority over their life; the love for a friend which sacrifices time and care for them. Of course, the nature of love is that sacrifices don't feel like anything of the sort - but from the perspective of the observer, it can be seen that a person is giving up something of their own for the sake of another.

The example of Christ and the church is an important one, as the Bible talks about this being the prototypical marriage relationship. Christ gave up heaven, privilege and ultimately his very life for the sake of his people. Within the institution of marriage is the idea that husbands should give themselves up for the sake of their wives ("Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church..."), and that wives should be as devoted to the husbands who give themselves up for them as the church should be to its Head. Whereas love can be expressed in many ways to many different people, there can only really be one person to whom you give yourself up in this complete way - only one person to whom you can really say, "All I am and all I have is yours." Having done that for one person, you are no longer yours to give away.

Sex is the physical expression of this complete abandoning of yourself to another person. "All I am and all I have is yours ... and that includes my body, which is yours for your delight." The husband and wife give themselves to one another in a physical way, and again, this complete giving of themselves is something that is only really meaningful in the context of a relationship with one person. It follows as a physical act from a commitment that has already been made.

Of course, this is thoroughly consistent with the content of the wedding service with which we are still so culturally familiar. But it is a major departure from the ideas of sex which we get from the culture around us. The ideas which have become common currency in the last 30 years and which simply didn't exist before - like sexual compatibility and trial marriages - simply have no place in the Christian worldview. It's not a question of a reactionary attempt to turn the clock back. It's the fact that the Christian worldview is so fundamentally different from the materialistic one that hardly any of what has been derived from materialism can be meaningfully accommodated if you start from the Christian worldview.

Christians don't talk about this too much, and in many cases they haven't thought out what their worldview says about it. There are many sections of Christianity which simply work out some way of accommodating the materialistic approach - after all, this is usually easier than being "in the world but not of the world". Sections of the church work out how to accommodate homosexuality at all levels, nobody asks questions about people's lifestyles, Bible teachers avoid speaking about, or relativise, the sections of the Bible that address matters of sexual morality. Perhaps most disturbingly, Christian parents lack confidence in offering guidance to their children. The consequence of this is that even people who consider themselves Christians rarely demonstrate anything distinctive in terms of their sexual morality.

As Christians, we need to have a clear idea of the impact that the Christian worldview has, in this area as much as all others. We also need to understand the change in worldview which has been expressed in cultural changes, and be prepared to point out to the people around us the consequences of their worldview. If Christianity is true (which we believe it is), it should be true no matter how deeply you scratch it. If the alternative worldviews are false (which we believe they are), then at some level there must be a contradiction between expected and observed phenomena. This can be seen in the breakdown of society which has taken place following the adoption of the materialistic worldview, and the fact that materialism simply fails to give a good account for so many of the things that we see.

I hope that this article helps Christians to be more confident in giving a reason for the hope that is in them ....

Science versus faith or ....

David Heddle suggests otherwise here. And I agree.

Interesting propositions

A society without insulting and boorish behaviour is one without freedom. A society without freedom is not civilised.

Discuss.

I have reservations about the second statement and disagree with the first, but I think they are interesting points for debate.

Regarding the second statement. The problem here, as I see it, is one of definitions. "Society" I can run with, at least for now. But what is "freedom"? What is "civilised"? I would suggest that such terms are socially conditioned, not universal - and I would suggest that this can be demonstrated historically.

To consider the sentence in today's cultural terms, people's normal understanding of "freedom" normally means "individual freedom" - the freedom for me to do as I wish, at least as long as it doesn't harm anybody else. Trivially, if somebody considers "individual freedom" the highest good for a society, then the sentence is tautological - and with respect to the commenter, I suspect he/she may be in this category of people. As for me, I do regard individual freedom as a desirable characteristic for a society - but this is coupled with the fact that I believe people should largely be prepared to use their individual freedom for the sake of others.

The next issue is, given the first sentence, whether being "insulting and boorish" is actually harming anybody. I would suggest that it is causing harm - it is psychologically intimidating, and provoking others to dislike. Should freedom include the freedom to be insulting and boorish? Actually, I would say yes - because my idea of freedom (perhaps like my commenter) acknowledges the fact that it includes the potential for harming other people.

This is actually kind of obvious. If I am permitted to drive a car at normal speeds, then I actually have the freedom (technically) to run somebody over and kill them. This is a "freedom to harm somebody" that we all take for granted. Of course, it would be socially unacceptable (and in fact, a criminal act) - but our society grants us the freedom to do it - it doesn't constrain us in such a way that we are unable to do it.

Does that mean that being insulting and boorish is characteristic of a free society? Well, hopefully not. Not in the "conventional" free society in today's terms - because being insulting and boorish is harming others. And not in my "free" society either - because the freedom of the individual is used primarily to serve other members of the society, rather than get what the individual wants. (I trust that theologically aware readers may recognise the sort of behaviour that is required of Christians in this model of a free society.)

So how would I rewrite this first sentence? I would have said, "A society in which insulting and boorish behaviour is forbidden is one without freedom." However, I don't think that such behaviour is a sign of a healthy society - and were my commenter not being an apologist for Richard Dawkins, I think he would concede this as well.

There are many people who don't have much time for the idea that an omnipotent god could allow evil. However, this discussion relates closely to how Christians traditionally justify the presence of evil behaviour. Should people be created genuinely free, and consequently able to do things that are wrong? Or should their freedom be circumscribed, to prevent this? Many people might suggest that the fact that people are capable of doing things that are considered evil means that there can't be an omnipotent god.

Oddly, the data can be interpreted in exactly the opposite way. If a god creates us genuinely free, then we have to be free to do evil, not just good. Conversely, I would argue that the whole concepts of "right" and "wrong" become fundamentally meaningless without the concept of an external absolute. Of course, people don't behave that way, and will argue that morality is an evolutionarily advantageous trait. I certainly don't disagree that both the theist and the atheist are moral beings. I'm just not convinced that (as with many aspects of how atheism works) the case for morality as it is found in humans is coherent within an atheist framework.

Reconsidering the Jesus We Never Knew

The Jesus we never knew was a thinker (even a philosopher) and moral reformer who did not bow down before the status quo nor accommodate moral mediocrity. He did not place blind faith over God-given reason. He did not place men over women. He also laid claim to the unique theological prerogatives that we may be more used to thinking about. Although the Gospels report Jesus as speaking with a divine prerogative, he also argued logically for his views in the face of considerable and well-schooled opposition. He did not evade, equivocate, posture, or propagandize. His view of politics and religion, of virtue and knowledge, of women’s significance, and much else are quite telling and of contemporary pertinence, whether one is religious or not. Perhaps it is time to open the Gospels once again, in order to bring new questions to ancient texts, and possibly to discover unexpected answers.

Douglas Groothuis (The Constructive Curmudgeon, I believe!)

Clipped from Bethinking.

The Book of Acts - peer review

From here.

In his life Sir William Ramsay did extensive archaeological work in Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Entering into this work he was an unbeliever who was thoroughly convinced that the book of Acts was the product of the 2nd Century (a theory taught in the German schools of higher criticism). As a matter of fact, one of his goals was to prove that the history given by Luke was inaccurate. However, his beliefs were drastically changed as his archaeological finds proved that the book of Acts was accurate to the minutest detail. As a result Sir William Ramsay became a Christian. He writes:

I may fairly claim to have entered on this investigation without prejudice in favour of the conclusion which I shall now seek to justify to the reader. On the contrary, I began with a mind unfavorable to it...but more recently I found myself brought into contact with the Book of Acts as an authority for the topography, antiquities, and society of Asia Minor. It was gradually borne upon me that in various details the narrative showed marvelous truth. In fact, beginning with a fixed idea that the work was essentially a second century composition, and never relying on its evidence as trustworthy for first century conditions, I gradually came to find it a useful ally in some obscure and difficult investigations. (W. M. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1951), pp. 7-8.)

Luke is a historian of first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy...this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians. (W. M. Ramsay, The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1953), p. 222.)

Counter-culture in universities

I am thankful to the Witts for pointing out this article in World Magazine, by Marvin Olasky.

The back story is that Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of "Privileged Planet", has been denied tenure at Iowa State University. This was not because it is a common occurrence there, nor because of the quality of his academic record, but because unlike Ward and Brownlee, who wrote "Rare Earth", Gonzalez and Richards interpret their data within a non-naturalistic framework as revealing something about the nature and intent of a designer. It is worth pointing out, in this context, that there has been no substantive refutation of "Privileged Planet" - most of the response to the book from the naturalistic community has incorrectly identified it as nothing more than anthropicism ("Of course the universe is adapted to life, or we wouldn't be here."), or presented absurd caricatures of their arguments ("If the fact that life is uncommon suggests that there is a God, then if it never occurred, that would be absolute proof!" Douglas Adams did similar things with his arguments - except they were meant to be parodies).

I digress.

The effect of this seems to be pretty much to expect Gonzalez to leave ISU, and without the endorsement of the university. Opponents of ID ask why more scientists in mainstream universities don't talk about their beliefs in ID, and why more papers in support of ID aren't found in mainstream scientific journals. And yet good scientists are being effectively removed from mainstream institutions through political means - unsurprisingly, they find themselves work in institutions that are more open-minded to alternatives to naturalism. How exactly is ID supposed to become part of the mainstream scientific agenda when debate is closed down by political means, rather than by substantive and thoughtful interchange?

I digress.

Aaaaanyway, the reason for picking up the "WORLD Magazine" article was actually to disagree with it - or at least, the conclusion.

The possibility of building beachheads remains, but our larger goal should be to build up strong Christian colleges that can attract the best students.

How does this relate to the sub-culture/anti-culture/para-culture/counter-culture thing that I picked up from Tim Keller below - and which, incidentally, is a pattern we see not only in Acts but in Romans and Corinthians that I can think of off-hand? Olasky is pushing for something between an anti-culture and a para-culture. Christians are called to be counter-cultural.

The questions is: what would that look like?

PS Blogger now has Autosave - and I am sincerely thankful!

"The God Delusion"

Another substantive interaction with Dawkins' book can be found on the Bethinking website.

When I settled down to read Richard Dawkins’ latest book, The God Delusion, I was surprised at just how much of his book I agreed with. And yet my view of the world is very different to that of Richard Dawkins. Something very strange seems to be going on here!! It seems to me that Dawkins has been very clever in the design of his book. It is written very powerfully – the stories and illustrations he uses tend to persuade the reader to agree with him and by doing so it is easy to get drawn into believing that he is providing supporting evidence for his main thesis, that God is nothing more than a delusion. But rhetorical power does not equate to rational proof, and on the latter I am afraid the book is rather lacking.

"What have the Romans ever done for us?"

All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

In commenting about the worldview outlined by Schaeffer below, Corkscrew says:

The general theory is justified by its specific successes. Same goes for our models of the universe. What successes do your extensions to consensual reality have under their belt?

I would argue (with Schaeffer) that, if you can live with the existence of God, this worldview provides, beyond religion, a necessary and sufficient explanation of such non-obvious facts as the presence of the universe at all, consciousness (mine and others'), morality, reason, our sense of justice, our desire for perfection, our perceived freedom as agents, the problem of evil, the meaningfulness of science and the coherence of the scientific method, the pursuit of the transcendent, beauty, aesthetics, desire, the difference between animals and humans, the specialness of the location of the earth within the cosmos, the information content and the apparent design present in life.

And if you can't live with the existence of God, you still have to explain all of those things.

Alvin Plantinga says ...

Among our chief intellectual obligations is that of believing a proposition that is not certain (i.e., either self-evident or incorrigible) only on the evidential basis of propositions that are certain. What I argued, in essence, is that from this point of view belief in other minds and belief in God are on an epistemological par. In neither case are there cogent arguments of the sort required; hence if the absence of such arguments in the theistic case demonstrates irrationality, the same goes for belief in other minds. If you flout epistemic duty in accepting one, then you flout it just as surely in accepting the other; hence if the former [belief in God] is irrational, so is the latter [belief in other minds beyond mine]. But clearly the latter isn't irrational; this version of the evidentialist objection to theistic belief, therefore is a failure.

Alvin Plantinga - "God and Other Minds", Preface to 1990 edition (emphasis mine)

Which is pretty much what I was saying. The difference is that Alvin Plantinga backs this up with 260 pages of substantial logic and philosophy of religion.

Sovereignty and free will

Dunno if I've blogged this before, but it bears repeating.

How can God be sovereign, but humans still have free will?

Look at it this way. Conceptually, I could write a computer program that carries out an action on the basis of a random number. Then I could set the seed of the random number generator. Which means I can know (as the author of the program) exactly what random number will appear, and hence how that program is going to behave. But from the perspective of the program, it was coded to cover any random value that appears at that point. There is a difference between my knowledge (as programmer) and the program's "knowledge". The program is written in such a way that it is able to deal with any value that pops up, even though I know as the programmer what value it will get and hence how it behaves.

Now I believe that God is sovereign. From his perspective, he knows what I am going to do - indeed, he has ordained it. But as a human, I have absolutely no knowledge of what he has ordained - and I am acting as far as I can tell perfectly freely. Furthermore, I have the potential as a human being to act perfectly freely - I am not a robot constrained to behave in a particular way.

People argue that if I believe God is sovereign, then I weaken human freedom. But since my knowledge of the fact that God is sovereign tells me nothing about what God's plan is, nor does it constrain my behaviour in any way, I don't see that it is wrong to describe me as being free, and also responsible.

I can think of all sorts of illustrations that would relate to this. The disciples all knew that somebody was going to betray Jesus - but Judas still did it. The Bible said that the Servant would be cut off from the land of the living - and it still happened.

On a more domestic scale, I might forbid a small child to do something - in the fairly sure knowledge that they will not listen to my prohibition. I "sovereignly" know that the child will disobey my prohibition - but that makes the child no less responsible when he or she does what I have asked him or her not to do.

Update: I thought I'd posted something like this before. See here - a more substantial post.

Epistemology - the alternative

Part 1, Part 2

Now, what becomes obvious, despite the current popularity of street-level postmodernism, is that we do have a sense that there is such a thing as objective truth. Postmodern writers, despite what they say, write assuming that they are able to convey something real about the nature of the universe – even when what they write is supposedly denying this. And the assumption of empiricism is that there is such a thing as objective truth, even if modernism doesn't provide us with an adequate means of knowing what the objective truth is.

So what we really need is another epistemological foundation – one that doesn't throw away the idea of objective truth (like postmodernism), but one that doesn't ground the idea of objective truth in the first instance in the observer (like modernism), which we have seen is also a dead end in epistemological terms.

The universe didn't start with the arrival of Descartes, and as I hinted before, the epistemological basis of the first scientists wasn't that of the modernists. Modern science actually arose, by and large, in post-Reformation Europe. The Reformation took place at around the same time as the Renaissance, but whereas the Renaissance was a humanist movement that looked back to the classical era, the Reformation was fundamentally a Christian movement, that was shaped by people with a high regard for the Bible. The epistemology of the Reformation was widely shared in post-Reformation Europe, even though the man in the street would perhaps have been no more able to explain it than the man on the Clapham Omnibus can today explain postmodernism, despite the fact that he has an aversion to the idea of absolute truth.

So what was this epistemology? It was based on the Bible, and it is founded upon the idea of a God who had created the universe. There is a gap between this creator God and humanity, caused by the rejection of the authority of God by humanity. This means that the creator God is now hidden from humanity, and the universe is “messed up”. But God wanted to act to restore the proper relationship between himself and humans, and has acted to do so.

God has made himself known to humans, firstly in general revelation (the idea that when we look at the universe, or ourselves, there are signs that there is a god), and secondly in special revelation (the Bible gives us a much more full account of what God is like, in particular in the person of Jesus, and these are consistent with what we see in the world).

The picture we are given about God in the Bible is that (from the point of view of a working epistemology) he is eternally consistent and he is the creator of the universe. Humans were created within the universe to know God, and he is seeking to make himself known to us.

So what, in short terms, is the nature of this epistemological foundation? It is that we can know truth because there is an external absolute who created us to know it. We are unable to know more than subjectively, but we can be confident that there is a correspondence between our subjective knowledge and objective truth about the universe because there is an objective knower who is making it known to us.

What are some of the effects of this?

Our instinct that there is such a thing as objective truth would be well-founded – it isn't simply a by-product of a chemical reaction. Nor is it simply a “good working hypothesis”, with no necessary basis in anything that is real.

No human viewpoint is artificially “privileged” - everybody has access to both “general revelation” through which God makes himself known and now also “special revelation” in which God gives more detail about what he has done to deal with the gap between himself and humanity.

The gathering of knowledge about the universe (“science”) is a reasonable pursuit – if God is eternal and consistent, we can work on the basis that all else being equal, the universe will behave in a consistent and predictable way. So naturalism is a sensible methodological approach within this epistemological framework. Further, perhaps one could argue that the more knowledge that we gather about the universe, the more clearly the God who created it will be revealed.

On the other hand, since God as creator is free (in the same way that he was free to create, or not create) we have to allow the possibility that not everything about his actions will be comprehensible. His consistency doesn't mean that he is bound by the laws of the universe (which after all, he would have made!), but it does mean that he is bound by the laws of his own nature. What are the limits of this? Perhaps one could argue that naturalistic consistency would apply unless this would override God's purposes to make himself known – his self-revelation.

Due to the difference in nature of the creator and the created, we wouldn't expect to know exhaustively about what God is like – but that doesn't prevent us from truly knowing about God.

It can hardly come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog that this is very much my epistemological foundation. I see big flaws in the alternatives, all of which are dealt with in this reformed epistemology.

In future posts, I'd like to try and show how different epistemological worldviews shape other aspects of people's philosophy.

Epistemology - postmodernism

Part 1

Another possible foundation has been proposed. This foundation is that there is no such thing as objective truth – that all that is possible is to know that something is subjectively true “for me”. This is the postmodern epistemological foundation.

The problem with this foundation is that it doesn't even hold itself up. We can't come to the conclusion that all truth is subjective if we have no way of being able to establish that something is objectively true – the statement that all truth is subjective is itself a statement that makes objective claims about the nature of truth. This can be written right across the entire output of postmodern philosophy. We are told by postmodern writers (for example, Derrida) that the interpretation of a text depends not upon the author's intent, but upon the reader. This is founded upon the postmodern epistemology, that truth is subjective. But if the same process is applied to the text of the postmodern writer, then it is obvious that his or her writing has no objective force at all.

For people who haven't come across “high postmodernism”, this form of explicit statement about the nature of truth may be something of a surprise. However, you don't have to look very far into our culture to see things like “feminist interpretations of Shakespeare” (with the implicit assumption that Shakespeare's interpretation of Shakespeare doesn't exist, and that this interpretation is at least as good as any other). Also, we now have a culturally instinctive opposition to any statement that sounds like a declaration of absolute truth. For example, I remember a conversation I had once. The person I was talking to said something along the lines of: “I don't smoke, but I think people have the right to do what they choose.” I said: “I think smoking is a stupid, dangerous habit, and the only reason it is allowed to continue is because the government makes so much money from it.” “Well, we're all entitled to our opinions,” was the prickly response – in the sense, presumably, that whilst I might consider smoking to be stupid and dangerous, people were quite at liberty to believe something else if they chose to – whether smoking was stupid and dangerous was a matter of subjective truth. So at the level of normal people, the postmodern idea that truth is entirely subjective is increasingly taking hold.

Epistemology - modernism

Epistemology is a part of philosophy that is to do with how we can know. It represents a foundation for our knowledge. We need to know how we can know before we can draw meaningful conclusions about what we know. Questions of epistemology are deeply fundamental – even more fundamental than questions like whether or not there is a god. The nature of our epistemology will have an impact on the conclusions that we draw about the nature of the universe. But epistemological questions are so fundamental – so low-level – that for the most part, they remain below the level of our consciousness. In this series of posts, I want to talk about what I understand of epistemological questions, where I am coming from, and how I justify my beliefs.

A possible epistemological foundation is the idea that an observer is able to objectively apprehend the nature of the universe around him or her. We can know things because when we look at the universe around us, we see it universe as it truly is. This is the foundation of modernism and naturalism – it continues to underlie the work of most scientists. Its philosophical roots were in the Renaissance – in, for example, Leonardo da Vinci looking as an observer for universals (incidentally, he failed – he was left only with mechanics) – and it reached its height in the Enlightenment.

But there are various problems with it. One is that it is not possible to determine whether an observer's view of the universe is objective. I don't know whether what I perceive of the universe is really how the universe is like. Hence the reference to Descartes in earlier posts - “I think therefore I am” allows me to conclude that I am truly conscious. However, it doesn't allow me to be confident of anything “outside” me – it gives me no confidence that what I perceive has any objective reality. In philosophical terms this foundation was beginning to look shaky before Darwin appeared. Various things have acted to discredit it. For example, Gödel's incompleteness theorem showed that there were propositions within mathematics that could not be proved – and that maths isn't an “absolute”, or an “objective truth”. The neodarwinian synthesis – a concept built up from this foundation – suggests that our consciousness is no more than a side effect of chemical processes. As such, we have no reason to believe that there should be any correlation with what our consciousness perceives and the nature of the universe. The fact that data can be interpreted in different ways also takes away confidence in this understanding of the universe.

It would be wrong to suggest that this foundation was useless. It wasn't the foundation of knowledge that modern science was originally built on (I'll come to that), but “modernist” scientists continue to dominate science – and they have achieved a great deal in helping us to understand the universe, even though their epistemological foundations don't allow them confidence that the universe exists!

One might argue: “Well, if this foundation is so helpful in allowing us to understand and explain the universe, then why not just run with it?” I would suggest that it's all about the difference between a mathematical observation (say that the sum of the squares on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides) and a mathematical proof of that observation. We may observe that we seem to be able to objectively apprehend the rest of the universe – but if we are unable to prove why that is the case, then have we missed the point somewhere? Many people simply work on the basis that this sort of knowledge is impossible, but they assume that their analysis of the universe is correct – I think this is what “empiricism” is. But without knowing that we have a sound epistemology, we are left wondering: will the universe continue to behave in this way? Do I have any way of knowing whether my observations of the universe will still be correct tomorrow? Do I have any way of knowing that my observations of the universe are shared by anybody else? Do I have any way of refuting an observation that somebody else claims to have made about the universe?

What Humphrys found out about God ...

... can be found here, in a Christmas special from the Daily Telegraph. My comments on the first part of the series of three interviews "In Search of God" can be found here. Unsurprisingly, he reports that few things he has done have resulted in a bigger postbag - from atheists, agnostics and theists.

He says in the article:

The last time [I set foot inside a church] was for my much-mourned colleague Nick Clarke [another well-known and loved Radio 4 journalist]. St Mary Abbots in Kensington, west London, was packed with the great and the good and, more importantly, with Nick's friends. The choir was superb and the eulogies perfectly judged. The problem was the vicar, Gillean Craig.

That may sound a little harsh. He is, I'm sure, a thoroughly godly man doing a good job of running his magnificent church. But in the opening moments of the service Father Craig (as he likes to be known) struck a horribly discordant note. Here's what he said: "Terrible though it is to us, God grants the same freedom to cancer cells that he grants even to the most noble and virtuous of us."

This was a pretty silly thing for the vicar to say - it was poor science, and poor theology. What I'd like to do, if I have the time, is to write a series of posts on the section of the Bible called Job, which is all about why bad things happen to good people. And no, there isn't a nice tidy answer, but it hopefully starts to unravel aspects of the issue.

Without going into that now, or going any further into Humphrys' article, it struck me that it was already clear that he was missing the point.

From a Christian perspective, the presence of the great and the good, the location, the choir are all irrelevant. The role of a vicar isn't "running his magnificent church" - by which Humphry's evidently means the building. And there is not much more reason to think that you will get coherent theology out of any vicar than you would out of the man on the Clapham Omnibus.

Humphrys spoke in his radio series to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, as I described before. Again, I assume that his expectation was doubtless that Williams would present an authoritative answer on behalf of Christianity. But his trust in the established authorities is misguided. Although it is doubtless surprising for people who continue to rely on the local parish church for a few helpful words when people are hatched, matched or dispatched, the fact is that with the impact of modernism and postmodernism on the Anglican seminaries, the diversity of "theology" within the Church of England is immense. I suspect that different sections of the Anglican communion have significant mistrust for each other - and those different sections are all represented within the Church of England. For example, I did three years of theology study by correspondence with this organisation. It is well-regarded by evangelical churches of many denominations in the UK, and has a close association with St. Helens Bishopsgate. The fact that I have done this study means nothing to my local anglican vicar, who is much more interested in Churches Together, an ecumenical organisation.

Now the Archbishop doesn't represent an "average", any more than my local vicar, the one at Nick Clarke's funeral, or anyone else within anglicanism represents a "typical" anglican position. So you can't really expect to learn anything meaningful from what they say. You may do. But you can't expect to. I can think of various people who Humphrys would have been better served talking to or listening to - not to get a "more muscular version" of Christianity, but just one that presented what I would understand to be a more intellectually and spiritually coherent one. John Blanchard. Don Carson. Philip Yancey. Sinclair Ferguson. Josh McDowell. Alvin Plantinga.

We also heard an account of a funeral this week. It was of a two year old girl we knew a little about (not the one I wrote about here - she continues to respond well to treatment, and is still in remission) who had been suffering from leukaemia with other complications. Somebody who attended described the funeral as intensely emotional - both sad and joyful. He said the person reading the Bible read as well as he had ever heard - and being involved in full-time Christian work, he has heard the Bible read on many, many occasions. The message was helpful, and again was as good from the speaker as he had ever heard.

The pain of losing the youngest child in a family is no less for evangelical Christians - especially when it has been such a long and wearing battle. But at this funeral there was more than resignation, resentment, and rejection of the idea of God.

We all got the chance to hear about the shooting in the Amish community in Pennsylvania. How many of us also followed the news for long enough to hear about the healing and restoration that followed, I wonder?

It is too simplistic to say that this sort of thing rules out the idea of God - because there are too many accounts of this sort of thing where the people involved would say that God is at work amongst them - even if they don't understand how or why.

Christian philosophy

The Constructive Curmudgeon, Douglas Groothuis, writes a eulogy for Dr. Robert T. Herbert, who died recently.

Professor Herbert and I disagreed on many things. In a Philosophy of Religion seminar he was leading, I voiced concerns about a paper in which he argued that believers come down with faith as one comes down with a cold. That is, the faith is neither rational nor irrational. (The paper was subsequently published in Faith and Philosophy.) He asked me to write a response to his paper. I agreed with some hesitation. (Whether I really had a choice, I do not know.) When I received the paper back, it was filled with red ink comments challenging nearly every one of my criticisms. At the bottom of the last page was the grade: A+.

I have been involved in an email discussion recently relating, in effect, to epistemology - that is, the foundation of knowledge, both for Christians and non-Christians. This pointed me in the direction of Cornelius van Til. If you follow this link, you will find his "Credo", at the Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics. I was surprised at how closely it fit with my own (less organised!) philosophical thoughts - and I was both gratified and a little disturbed to find this perspective described as "calvinist" - a label I had always shied away from for various reasons.

That's my king!

I'd never heard this before. If you are a Christian, this will help to remind you of why. If you aren't a Christian, it is a different experience from my stumbling and inaccurate apologetics.

H/T Andrew and Cora.

Humphrys in Search of God - to an extent

If you are going to ask somebody to try and convert you, it is unlikely to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. But then, neither are you likely to make a radio programme out of the conversation. These were two somewhat flawed premises of what was nonetheless an interesting programme on Radio 4. John Humphrys, a well-known and acerbic radio journalist, is inviting leaders of the three monotheistic religions to “convert” him in a half-hour radio programme. If you want to listen for yourself, you can listen to an extended version of the first interview through the link.

When Rowan Williams was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury – probably one of the most intellectual of the bishops in the Church of England, following George Carey who was considered to be an evangelical – many evangelicals had serious concerns that the church would be led abruptly in a liberal direction. We picked up various papers and talks he had given in the past in support of this view. But at least in this conversation, the archbishop presented Christianity in a form which, whilst perhaps not exactly as many evangelicals might have hoped for, was certainly as close as many of them would expect to get in a similar conversation at work, or down the pub.

What Rowan Williams did say.

He defended evil as the outcome of genuine free will. Along the lines of: “If God is going to give creatures free will, then there has to be a sense in which the outcome of this may be evil.” He nonetheless sought to defend the sovereignty and goodness of God. Whilst not quite saying that “death isn't actually the worst thing that can happen to somebody”, there was certainly that sense in what he did say. And whilst not quite saying that God has an overall plan which is good, there was again this sense in what he said.

He also didn't shy away from the exclusive claims of Christianity – in a setting in which it would have been easy and acceptable to do so. In talking about how he would engage with people of other faiths, he pointed to the fact that even in the New Testament (Paul's engagement with pagan cultures), engagement with different cultures was a process, not a simple assertion. Given his position, it would be difficult politically to go much further.

From an evangelistic point of view, he was also good at not offering formulaic answers, but getting John Humphries to explain what he thought – what it was exactly he “lost” when he lost his belief in God; what exactly he thought was the “faith” he was looking for (which to an extent, underlined the fact that this programme was somewhat artificial in its concept).

He also pointed out that, in considering the problem of suffering (why bad things happen to good people), there was a difference in thinking about it as an intellectual issue and as a pastoral issue.

What Rowan Williams didn't say.

He didn't mention Jesus in the whole programme, I think. He talked about the love that God has for people – without saying how that love is most visibly expressed.

He didn't mention eternal judgement (I don't think). Humphries tried to pin him down towards the end of the interview about this – but Williams leaned towards the idea that even after death, we still have the opportunity to respond to God. Similar ideas seem to be expressed in, for example, “The Great Divorce” by C.S.Lewis – but the weight even of this book is that the patterns that are established before somebody dies are pretty much final, and this is probably as far down the line of “non-final-judgement” that any evangelical would be prepared to go. In the archbishop's position, I would probably have wanted to point out that if somebody has rejected God throughout their life, then separation from the presence of God (which is part of the imagery of God's judgement) would seem as much an act of mercy as judgement. Also, God's love and the death of Jesus in place of the sinner are somewhat meaningless if you take away the idea of God's judgement.

This was an interesting programme, even though it had its flaws. I have no doubt that there will be other evangelicals who will be profoundly negative about what Rowan Williams said – but I thought it could have been an awful lot worse.