Clerihews in the news!

Kim Jong Il
Fired a missile
Disguised as a satellite;
The U.N. sees it as unpolite

Do you clerihew?

Judge Sotomayor
Has got some sore
For saying she’s keener
By being Latina

I know it’s probably not the impression she meant to give, but the quote is just too funny to pass up:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life…” [LA Times]

Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

The Evangelical Philosophical Society’s periodical Philosophia Christi has a set of articles dealing with difficult ethical issues in the Old Testament like the slaughter of the Canaanites, the sacrifice of Isaac, etc.

I believe this started with Paul Copan’s paper Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?, which is in response to several different arguments presented by the “new athiests.” You can find some other articles here, but you’ll have to subscribe to get the ones from the current volume. Here are some snapshots of the different articles.

Also there will be a conference, My Ways are not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible at Notre Dame in September.

In a recent article I remarked on a particular type of flawed thinking at leads one to conclude that atheism is superior to Christianity because it has neither split nor swayed throughout its history, while Christianity has splintered into fragments until its growth looked like a great tree. The analysis of the actual argument is back in that article, but upon some further reflection I realized that G. K. Chesterton has written some superb things about this issue in the chapter “The Paradoxes of Christianity” of his book Orthodoxy. To get a real feel for what he’s saying you really need to read the chapter (free here), and ideally the entire book. Three times.

The first part of his idea is this:

Christianity anticipated the eccentricities and paradoxes in life and accounted for them, striking a balance between what seemed to be competing ideas, not by diluting them but by allowing them to range free and rage against each other, yet in harmony.

He gives the example of the virtue of charity:

Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things—pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. [...] A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive, and some one couldn’t: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

Do you follow his thinking? No longer is there this Aristotelian idea of virtues where the happy medium of courage is met by straddling a fence between the two extremes of cowardice and brashness. In its place was “conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite.” In the case of courage, “a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”

The second part of the idea then follows:

This holy balance was not only contained in just virtues, or just in the one person, but ranged through Christendom, allowing groups and even nations to balance with each other.

We see this in the next quote:

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was not always in one man’s body as in Becket’s; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon. If any one wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity, Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the Pagan empire would have said, “You shall all be Roman citizens, and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental and swift.” But the instinct of Christian Europe says, “Let the German remain slow and reverent, that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental. We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity called Germany shall correct the insanity called France.” [em. mine]

Chesterton then moves on to the salient point for us today: the vagaries and variances in Christianity that led to its splintering into movements and groups and subgroups is not because the Church made mountains out of molehills and went to war over the most trifling of ideas, but because a mere trifle can tip the scales when you’re balancing:

Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. [...] Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

I realize that this article is basically all quotes, but hey, it’s Chesterton. There’s not much else I can really do. The closing paragraph of this chapter is too good to not include, and caps our examination nicely:

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom—that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. [em. mine]

If you’ve read this post but not the entire chapter we’ve been looking at, take comfort in knowing that you’ve actually just read a decent chunk of it, and it shouldn’t be much more work to read the rest. And then after that chapter is down, there’s only a few more (okay, nine) to read before you finish the book. If you find yourself discouraged with not being able to follow his argument, I encourage you to read this article by Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society. He same some good words for you.

The Internet was never a bastion of sound reasoning, so I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that stuff like this comes out of it. However I thought this particular product of fallacious thinking was rather fun:

So what are they saying here? It’s a rather simple point. Christianity has varied wildly over the centuries while atheism has remained simple and unchanged. Then they (incorrectly) apply Occam’s Razor to shave off Christianity and leave Atheism, thus invalidating Christianity as a viable theory; voila!

Well what’s the problem? Again, it’s a simple point. Considering the branches and divisions in Atheism and Christianity as a point of contrast creates a false comparison. In this sense they are treating atheism as a philosophical proposition and Christianity as a religion or worldview. A proper comparison of propositions would be between atheism and theism. Here’s a fixed edit of the image:

What’s more, Atheism can be treated as worldview as Christianity was in the first image, and then we can see that it, too, shares the same fate of schism and division as Christianity has. The atheism of some ancient Greek sects is very different from the atheism of Bolshevism, or the atheism of Bertrand Russell. To say that their atheism is the same is to treat it like a proposition. To do the same for Christian groups would be to say that their theism is the same, which is true.

Mike has an excellent list of 10 Signs of Intellectual Honesty up on his blog today. Everyone who regularly engages in internet-based discussions should give the list a perusal, and especially make sure that they are themselves following the guidelines. Actually, “guidelines” is too weak a word. And perhaps “laws” is too strong. Instructions? Ground rules? CODES?

Anyway, the point is that you really need to follow this list and make sure that you recognize when people you are talking to are or are not following them. The bulk of my internet discussions hinge upon my attempting to point out logical fallacies in the thinking of others. Not weak arguments, not rebutting otherwise good arguments with uncompelling evidence, but thinking that is flawed in a very rudimentary way. The inability to reason correctly causes a whole other host of problems to crop up, many of which are identified on Mike’s list.

Items 2 through 5 are especially good. If you are not able to be reasonable in the assessment of alternative points of view, then you have no business engaging in these sorts of discussions. Likewise if you are unable to accurately assess the strength of your own view, the same holds true. Being able to walk a mile in the another person’s shoes goes a lot further than a mile in making you a reasonable and engaging thinker. And being humble and willing redress your own thinking could be said to go even further.

A question was brought up recently on a forum I frequent about whether or not Muslims and Christians worship the same God. It’s hardly a unique or uncommon question, and has been (adequately, I think) dealt with several times over in published works. There were a couple interesting questions brought up, though, that I think deserved to be covered here. The original statement is as follows:

1) Christians and Muslims worship the same god.

My rebuttal was based on the identity of indiscernibles, which states:

For every property P, if P is true of X and P is true of Y, then X is identical to Y.

Or less formally,  “two or more objects or entities are identical (are one and the same entity), if they have all their properties in common” [wikipedia]. What this means for us is that in order for two deities to be identical they have to have the same properties.  I used the example of triunity, the property of being three persons in one god:

1) The Christian god and the Muslim god are identical.

2) The Christian god is triune, while the god of Islam (Allah) is singular. Indeed, it is heresy in Islam to suggest that Allah is anything but purely singular.

3) For the Christian god and Allah to be identical,  for every property that is true of the Christian god it must also be true of Allah, and vice versa.

4) Therefore, 1) is false.

Further objections (what, you expected an internet debate to be resolved?) took two routes: a) the Christian god and Allah are the same because they stem from the same source, and b) the Christian god is not triune, in facty the trinity was a later formulation of the post-apostolic ecumenical councils. We are not here concerned with b), but a) is interesting, and it’s where we get to the title of this post.  Ignoring the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (since all my detractors did) are they the same because they are both offshots of the same Abrahamic root?

My retort would be an analogy. Consider that there are two baseball teams in one town. There was once one team years and years ago but the demand for baseball became so great that the team was forced to split in two.  Two stadiums replaced the one (or one was built and the other left as is, still resulting in two),  two staffs replaced what was once one staff, etc. Does it then follow that because both teams stem from the same original team, they both share the same coach? Of course not, such a statement is a non sequitir. The detractor might reply, “Ah, but they ONCE both had the same coach!” However that is also a non-starter, as either one of the original teams or both of them did not exist prior to the split, therefore there was no team to have that original coach. And even if the one team did have that coach, it does not follow that both teams must. The might but they also might not.

Consider an actual example from the history of Christianity. In the 2nd century AD, a heterodox Christian group arose called the Marcionites. Among other things they held that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were not same. They deemed the OT God to be a tyrranical demiurge who, after creating the world and tormenting its denizens for a while, wandered off and left the Earth to be inherited by the God of the New Testament, whom the Marcionites identified with Jesus. Now Marcionism and Christianity at the time of Marcionism shared the same root religion: Christianity. Or if you preferred to go further back: Judaism. But it does not follow that because Marcionism and Christianity stemmed from the same religion, they necessarily worshipped the same deity. Indeed, it was essential to orthodox Christianity that the God of the NT was identical with the God of the OT, whereas in Marcionism the exact opposite was true. The two groups were in perfect conflict on this matter. So we see that sharing a common background or source does not necessitate the sharing of other properties in common. Some sharing would be expected, certainly, but not necessarily so.

But then what about Christianity and Judiasm? Certainly (most) Christians hold that the God of Judaism and the God of Christianity are identical. As a matter of fact I think it is a necessary requirement for the Christian religion to work. However there are, some say, properties of the two gods that differ: the God of the Old Testament was vindictive, and genocidal, and jealous, and so on, whereas the God of the New Testament is presented as being loving and all-accepting. Furthermore certain realities about God are said to be revealed in the New Testament, triunity being one of them. If the God of the Old Testament is not triune and the God of the New Testament is, then they cannot both be the same God.

I would respond by pointing out that many scholars point towards the OT containing teachings which coincide with the doctrine of the trinity. Furthermore they point out that the NT contains new revelations about God’s nature, that is, teachings that are new that concern details about God, but not teachings that concern new details about God. The God of the OT had always had these qualities, but they were not revealed until the NT covenant. Consider for example the salvation of the Gentiles. Prior to the NT and specifically the gospel teachings of Paul, it was not held that the God of Judaism would allow for gentiles to attain salvation (at least in the same sense as a Jew would). With the new revelation, however, it was held that God did not desire that anyone should be lost, and salvation was open to both Jew and Gentile.

If we go back to the example of the baseball teams., we might say that it was widely held that the original team had one coach and one of the new teams had another, different coach. Then one day the coach of the new team takes off a mask to reveal that he is indeed the old coach. Neither coach was distinct but only appeared to be because of a “misunderstanding” (if we want to call it that): “his face looks like X,” when in fact it is the mask that looks like X and his face looks like Y, and the old coach’s face also looks like Y. This could be loosely said to be the case with Christianity and Judaism. The same cannot be said of Christianity and Islam. There is no “revelation” in Islam that says while it was once held that God was triune he is now revealed to be purely singular. No they hold that he was always thus.

I’m not sure that anyone will find this convincing, or even useful. I know that there is quite a lot dealing with the nature of identities and properties that I did not cover nor do I fully understand them. But I thought it was an interesting thought experiment anyway, and hope you did as well.