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.

Tom Gilson of Thinking Christian has posted a review of Michael Novak’s new book No One Sees God.

The book seems to be a call to both atheists and believers to put aside the polemics and try to find common ground; to remember that we are all human and all share the trait of not being able to “see God.” It would be nice if such collaboration was likely, however I forsee many falling back on the old question begging standpoint: “Why should I deign to comport with someone who is wrong?”

Hopefully that’s just the cynic in me.

I happened across this article on salon.com that takes Oprah’s latest psecudo-spiritual schlock to task. It appears that she’s jumped on the bandwagon of people following a book called The Secret that’s cribbed from the Word of Faith movement people but put a secular slant on it.

Now I’ve never been a fan of Oprah, and this is one of the reasons why. For a person who has the power to deeply impact such a large audience, she displays an incredible lack of intellectual responsibility. It seems like time and time again these ridiculous fads crop up on her show or on her book list. It’s almost as if she’s the gatekeeper for what her watchers will accept but doesn’t actually do any rigorous gate-keeping. In fact, it appears that she’s set herself up on top of the “pyramid scheme” this time, as it were. I suggest you read the article first for more information, then come back here.

There was one quote from the book that caught my attention, and I’d like to go over it in depth in this post, if you’ll allow me. Here it is:

“Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.”

This line of thinking seems like something that has no doubt come out of the Health-and-Wealth-gospel circles, but with it from such a fresh source I can’t help but respond. Let’s consider each of these in turn.

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More insights from The Everlasting Man:

“In Christendom hope has never been absent; rather it has been errant, extravagant, excessively fixed upon fugitive chances. Its perpetual revolution and reconstruction has at least been an evidence of people being in better spirits. Europe did very truly renew its youth like the eagles; just as the eagles of Rome rose again over the legions of Napoleon ^[1], or we have seen soaring but yesterday the silver eagle of Poland ^[2]. But in the Polish case ever revolution always went with religion. Napoleon himself sought a reconciliation with religion. Religion could never be finally separated even from the most hostile of the hopes; simply because it was the very source of the hopefulness. And the cause of this is to be found simply in the religion itself.”

As I said a few posts ago, I’ve been reading (ever so slowly) through Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The book really is excellent, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get a grasp on why Christian Thought is the way it is today. In this post I want to highlight one of Noll’s better strengths: charting the changes in the Christian mind through history.

He does this in several ways in the book, each delineated in its own chapter: the university, American culture, politics, science, etc. He points to the shifts and changes through time that show the effects that the deficiency in Christian thinking has had on each institution. At the end of the chapter on the “Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism” Noll makes an aside that I just found too interesting to pass up.

The rest follows after the jump.

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A while back I stumbled my way through St. Anselm’s Proslogium. That’s the one where he lays out the ontological argument for the existence of God. It’s a very beautiful writing, even if you don’t lend credence to the points of his case. You can find it free online here.

The following quote is Anselm’s prayer at the end of the discourse, and I just found it thrilling. Anselm goes through his work outlining how the fullness of God compares to the limitedness of man, and how the absolute greatness of God necessitates his exisence. Because we can conceive of a being whom greater than which cannot be conceived, and since it is greater to exist in reality than the mind only, that being must exist truly, or else that being is not truly greater than any other that can be conceived. Here he takes that understanding of the overwhelming fullness of God, the incapacity of our understanding to grasp it, and the fact that, in the words of a song, “He is more than enough for me,” and turns it into a prayer.

“My God and my Lord, my hope and the joy of my heart, speak unto my soul and tell me whether this is the joy of which you tell us through your Son: Ask and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full (John xvi. 24). For I have found a joy that is full, and more than full. For when heart, and mind, and soul, and all the man, are full of that joy, joy beyond measure will still remain. Hence, not all of that joy shall enter into those who rejoice; but they who rejoice shall wholly enter into that joy.

Show me, O Lord, show your servant in his heart whether this is the joy into which your servants shall enter, who shall enter into the joy of their Lord. But that joy, surely, with which your chosen ones shall rejoice, eye has not seen nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man (Isaiah lxiv. 4; i Corinthians ii. 9). Not yet, then, have I told or conceived, O Lord, how greatly those blessed ones of yours shall rejoice. Doubtless they shall rejoice according as they shall love; and they shall love according as they shall know. How far they will know you, Lord, then! and how much they will love you! Truly, eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man in this life, how far they shall know you, and how much they shall love you in that life.

I pray, 0 God, to know you, to love you, that I may rejoice in you. And if I cannot attain to full joy in this life may I at least advance from day to day, until that joy shall come to the full. Let the knowledge of you advance in me here, and there be made full. Let the love of you increase, and there let it be full, that here my joy may be great in hope, and there full in truth. Lord, through your Son you do command, nay, you do counsel us to ask; and you do promise that we shall receive, that our joy may be full. I ask, O Lord, as you do counsel through our wonderful Counsellor. I will receive what you do promise by virtue of your truth, that my joy may be full. Faithful God, I ask. I will receive, that my joy may be full. Meanwhile, let my mind meditate upon it; let my tongue speak of it. Let my heart love it; let my mouth talk of it. Let my soul hunger for it; let my flesh thirst for it; let my whole being desire it, until I enter into your joy, O Lord, who are the Three and the One God, blessed for ever and ever. Amen.” (em. mine)

The part in bold says it all.

Amen.