Morality is like the river, in that there are some circumstances where it is fairly easy to make it become what we want it to be, as well as other circumstances where, do what we will, the “water” is going to follow its natural downhill flow. But if morality is like the river, then what is the landscape that shapes its natural course, and what force of “gravity” pulls it downhill? That one is a little more complicated to explain.

As you may recall from last week’s post, I differ from Thomist philosophy (or at least, from as much as I’ve seen of it so far) in that I believe there is precisely one ontological perfection, no more, and this perfection is reality/truth itself as a whole. All lesser “perfections” are, in fact, errors in perception: our minds are inadequate to contain and process more than a very small fraction of the whole truth about reality as a whole, so we are forced to isolate certain perceptible aspects of reality and treat them as distinct concepts, even though real truth is not isolated nor distinct from itself. Anything we have a concept for is necessarily imperfect, and is less than the whole truth.

In discussing things like “goodness,” therefore, the philosopher needs to be careful to remember that he is actually studying the characteristics of his own imperfect perception of goodness, and not something that is perfect and complete in and of itself. If he forgets the inherent imperfection of all philosophical entities, and believes that such things have an independent existence of their own (or worse yet, are the ontological sources for observable reality), then he makes the same mistake that led Aristotle to conclude that the celestial bodies are all perfect spheres moving in perfect circles. Such “perfections” are merely oversimplifications designed to make the philosopher’s life easier; they break down if you try to apply them to the more complicated reality they are drawn from.

In considering the actual basis for “good” and “evil,” then, the first thing we need to remember is the real-world context in which such patterns can be seen to emerge. That context is a context of materialism. We exist as material organisms; our lives, our actions, our very consciousness is built upon a physical foundation of energy exchanges, organized in patterns that have evolved over millions and even billions of years. “Good” and “evil” can thus be reduced to a question of energy exchanges, in much the same way as a symphony can be reduced to a series of rapidly varying air pressures—and with about the same loss of comprehensibility.  That’s zooming in too close, so that we can’t see the big picture. Too much detail overwhelms our limited minds.

There is useful information there, however. Knowing that a symphony exists, materially, as a series of variations in air pressure, we can understand why you can’t listen to symphonies in a vacuum. And likewise, knowing that good and evil are constructed out of a pattern of material energy exchanges, we can understand why good and evil do not exist in some abstract, ethereal dimension, but rather are rooted in, and bound to, our material life.

Let’s elaborate slightly (but not too much, since this is still just a blog post). As living organisms, we are what we are as a result of natural selection. Organisms that did not have the physical properties leading to extending their own existence are organisms that proved more likely to perish without reproducing; the organisms which were equipped to maintain and continue their existence were more likely to prolong the patterns that led to this kind of survival-seeking, in their own lives and in the lives of their offspring.

At the most fundamental level, then, we have a differentiating factor: natural selection has given rise to a behavioral pattern of pursuing actions that promote continuation of existence, and of avoiding actions that interrupt the energy exchanges (thus causing death). The actions that promote survival are thus “good” (on a primitive level), and the ones that promote premature death are “bad.”

Note, by the way, that there is no point in asking whether it matters whether the organism lives or dies. That’s a subjective question. We are not speaking of whether some third party observer has preferences one way or another about the organism’s life, because that’s irrelevant to understanding what “good” and “bad” really are, especially at such a foundational level. All we have, and all we need, is the evolved pattern of behavior that prefers survival over extinction.

This is a category of good and evil that exists all the way down to the microbial and even sub-cellular level. At this point, however, it’s still too basic, in a symphony=list-of-frequencies sort of way. To properly understand good and evil in our own context, we need to follow the organism as it evolves mechanisms that promote the “good” behaviors and avoid the “bad” ones. Again, though, we’re tracing the evolution of a material phenomenon, specifically the development of neural systems capable of registering sensations, emotions, and instincts.

The apex of this process (so far) is the evolution of intelligent, self-aware consciousness. We evolved into a material organism whose physical structure allows the types of energy exchanges we call “thinking.” And along the way, we learned a thing or two. For instance, we learned that there is strength in numbers, and we learned that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. We learned, in other words, that banding together into societies is “good,” but that it has a price which can be “bad.” Societies can prolong your existence, but it can also cut it short, sometimes unexpectedly so.

This is the “landscape” across which the “rivers” of morality flow. In some places, there’s a clear, sloped channel down which the river flows: murdering someone, for example, makes you at least a potential threat to others, so that’s bad in two ways: not only is your victim dead, but you’ve put yourself in a situation where the “good” thing for everyone else to do is to prolong their existence by cutting yours short, so as to eliminate the threat. People benefit from being united in a society, PROVIDED that no one member ruins it for everyone else.

Morality thus arises spontaneously as set of conventions for balancing the potential rewards of social cooperation against the potential costs of social interaction. Because morality arises out of the nature of the material substances and energies that make up our lives, there is a certain degree of objective reality to large areas of morality. Dead is dead, and there’s no remedy for that, so the laws of morality in any society are almost certain to follow the same pattern of prohibition against murder.

On the other hand, there is also a strong subjective aspect to morality, in that the only reason we care about morality is because we are material organisms with a deeply ingrained behavior pattern that favors survival over extinction. If you give someone a definition of good and evil, and they ask you what difference your morality makes, you can tell them that they’re asking the wrong question. The question you have to ask first is, “To whom does it make a difference?” It makes a difference to us, because we are material organisms, whose patterns of makeup and behavior were formed by natural selection. And that’s the only difference it makes. That’s why we even discuss moral issues. Our interest in morality is the “gravity” that keeps the river flowing.

Of course, being organisms that are both intelligent and social, we have a lot more than just life and death to worry about. We understand that things can be bad even if they don’t threaten us with immediate annihilation. Loss of power, loss of goods, loss of shelter/clothing, loss of health and strength, loss of skills—any or all of these things cast doubts on how well we can survive in a hostile environment. This is another consequence of the material basis of good and evil: we have real, objective, material needs and there are sometimes hard physical constraints on who gets to keep the “good” stuff and who has to go without. It does not need to go all the way to literal physical death: any exchange that leaves you with fewer resources than you started with is a “bad” exchange (for you at least).

Ultimately, then, morality is both subjective and objective. It’s subjective in that it matters to somebody (and if it didn’t, then what difference would morality make?). People care about good and evil, subjectively, and this is what both defines morality and makes it important. But there’s an objective aspect of morality as well, and that is that our moral judgments take place in the context of a material “landscape” in which some directions are downhill and others aren’t. Societies have a way of imposing arbitrary moral standards (like the “right” of the rich to exploit the poor), but material actions have material consequences, and ill-advised moral standards are likely to be overthrown sooner or later (e.g. the French Revolution).

In answer to Nick’s question, then, my definition of goodness is that truth is good first and foremost. Your best shot at success depends on having what’s inside your head match what’s outside your head. Chasing illusory prey or fleeing illusory predators may give you strong feelings, but it’s not a survival benefit. This is the standard by which I judge C. S. Lewis’ arguments to be “not good.”

Beyond that, good and evil have to be defined in terms of finding the best balance between the interests of society and the interests of the individual. There’s no one correct moral balance, just like there’s no one correct river: we need to follow the path that best suits the circumstances and that achieves the best balance between making society strong at the expense of the individual, and making the individual strong at the expense of society.

Ultimately, you could reduce morality to a calculation of energy exchanges, albeit one that would be humanly impossible to compute. Each action has a certain cost to the individual, and a certain benefit to the individual, and a certain cost to society and a certain benefit to society. If we could add up all the costs, and all the benefits, and break it down so that neither party had disproportionately more nor less than the other, then we would achieve the mathematically optimal moral decision. Failing such a precise measure, though, we’ll have to do with our best estimate and with the imperfect process of consensus.

And that, barring a sudden burst of participation from Nick, is probably going to be as far as I go on this topic. I’ve answered his challenge, and his interest in engaging me has been conspicuous in its failure to manifest itself over the course of my past three posts, so there I think the matter will rest. It’s been fun, and moderately interesting (for me at least), and I, at least, am satisfied with the outcome.

Nick is quite right: your definition of “existence” will have a significant influence over whether goodness exists independently of our perception of it. So let’s ask the questions Nick alludes to. What do we mean when we say something exists, and what does this tell us about the reality and nature of things?

One quick caveat: this is a blog post, not a doctoral dissertation, so I’m going to give a rather cursory presentation in the interests of brevity. (Caveat two: that doesn’t mean this will be short, merely that it will be shorter.)

My approach to the question is going to be reality-based, as opposed to pure speculation, which may affect the answer in interesting ways. As usual, I’m going to base my reasoning on the principle that truth is consistent with itself. This is an observation, by the way, not just an assumption. Falsehood, by definition, is that which is inconsistent with the truth, so if we were to assume that truth is also inconsistent with itself, then there would no longer be any meaningful difference between truth and falsehood. Or, to look at it slightly differently, if you wish to refute my argument, you must show that my argument is inconsistent with the truth; once you’ve done that, though, so what? Your refutation rests on the assumption that failure to be consistent with the truth is a failure to be truth, and that’s a false assumption unless the truth is consistent with itself. Without that premise for your reasoning, you may find inconsistencies in my reasoning, but you have no way to tell whether it’s inconsistent because falsehood is inconsistent with truth, or because truth is inconsistent with truth. Reason and logic assume, by their existence, that truth is consistent with itself. My own reasoning, therefore, will be based on that premise.

Given that truth is consistent with itself, we can derive the following operational definition of existence.

A thing exists if it possesses characteristics and attributes that are consistent with the truth, and does not possess any characteristics or attributes that are inconsistent with the truth.

This is not an entirely flawless definition of existence, but it does have the advantage of putting real things in the category of “true things” and mistakes/delusions/deceptions/etc. in the category of “false things.” So it’s a fair foundation upon which to build a less naive definition.

Next, let’s consider what it means for truth to be consistent with itself. Obviously, the immediate meaning of “consistent” is that it does not contradict itself. But secondly, truth is also comprehensive—it includes all true things. If you took two distinct domains, each of which contained true things, neither domain would be the whole truth. Some things in “A” would be missing from “B,” and vice versa; the whole truth is the union of A and B. Neither A nor B is “the truth,” each is only a part of the truth, which is something greater than either by itself. And lastly, truth is coherent: no truth exists in isolation, but is interrelated with the rest of the truth in some way. (This is the property that makes reason and science possible, by the way—without it there would be no way to follow the connection from cause to effect, or from premise to conclusion, etc., because the connection wouldn’t be there.)

Some might dispute that last point about the coherence of truth. It might be possible, or at least conceivable, to propose some domain of truth that did exist in complete isolation from the truth domain that defines “reality.” If such a thing did exist, however, there would be two possibilities: either it must always and forever be entirely irrelevant to the truth of real existence, or it must be consistent with real-world truth at whatever points where the two do interact. As we’ve already discussed, however, truth is comprehensive, and if there were two separate domains that each contained mutually consistent truths, they would form parts of a larger, all-encompassing domain of  truth, in which case the larger domain would be the real truth, and the “external” truth would not truly be isolated from the rest of the domain. That leaves only irrelevant truth as a possible exception to our definition of truth; and if any such truth existed, we could safely ignore it, since by definition it is irrelevant.

Thus, we can modify our definition slightly to say that truth is consistent (does not contradict itself), comprehensive (includes all true things relevant to the real world) and coherent (no truth, relevant to the real world, exists in isolation from the rest of real-world truth). For convenience, I will be assuming all three attributes of the truth whenever I refer to truth being consistent with itself.

Given this understanding of the characteristics of truth, what can we learn about reality? Earlier we defined a thing as being real (i.e. as “existing”) if it possessed characteristics that were consistent with the truth, and possessed no characteristics that were not consistent with the truth. Reality itself, then, means all things whose characteristics are consistent with the truth. Everything that is real is also true. But what about the converse? Can we also say that everything that is true is also real? The alternative would be for us to say that there exist some things that are true but that are not real, i.e. things that are true, but do not exist. We can eliminate that possibility, though, because in order for such things to be true, they must possess properties or characteristics or attributes that are consistent with the truth, and none that are inconsistent with the truth. That means they must also be real, according to our operational definition of existence. In order to meet the criteria for being true, they must also meet the criteria for being real, i.e. for existing. Reality, as a whole, coincides with truth, as a whole.

This is what I take as the ontological perfection. Reality itself, as it exists independently of our perceptions of it, is the ultimate standard of perfection, because it is the ultimate, infallible, and perfect manifestation of the truth. Whatever error or deception or myth exists, exists because our perceptions are imperfect, and our perceptions are imperfect because the real truth is consistent, comprehensive and coherent, far beyond the ability of our finite minds to entirely comprehend. The best we can hope for is to identify certain patterns and regularities within reality, and to be approximately correct about part of the infinite perfection of reality.

That’s actually not as inconceivable as it might sound, because we ourselves are a part of the reality we are trying to observe and understand—the same patterns and regularities that make reality/truth consistent with itself are woven throughout the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of which our minds are constructed. There is a certain inherent resonance between what we are perceiving and the machinery we use to perceive it, due to the fact that both subject and object are aspects of the same self-consistent truth/reality. We have an affinity for perceiving certain aspects of the nature of reality simply because we share aspects of that nature with the reality we’re trying to perceive.

Obviously, this does not make us infallible. Our perceptions are approximations, a limited representation of an unlimited data pool. We do not and cannot perceive true ontological perfection; we can only extract, from our experiences, the regular, consistent patterns that are part of the one true ontological perfection. These limited perceptions, however, are not the whole truth. Truth is comprehensive and cohesive, but our understanding works by abstracting, by separating specific aspects of the truth from their interrelated parts.

This is a key point, and one that I think underlies the failure of some philosophers to correctly understand the nature of ontology. When we take some part of the truth, and isolate it so we can study it independently of its real-world context, we are doing two things: we are arbitrarily excluding relevant information in order to produce a single concept simple enough for our neurons to process with a reasonable expenditure of energy, and we are also creating a falsehood—an idea that is missing the coherence and comprehensiveness of genuine truth.

This is not entirely a bad thing. It’s a necessary trade-off. Strict fidelity to ontological accuracy would overwhelm our finite powers of computation and analysis; some sacrifice of truth is necessary in order to reduce the problem to something humanly solvable. It does highlight, however, the importance of remembering the difference between observing the characteristics of a thing, and observing the characteristics of human concepts about the thing.

Take “triangularity,” for example. Why do we have a concept of triangularity? The concept exists because one of the patterns we observe in reality is a regular ordering of points and lines we call “triangles.” But nothing in the real world is as simple as what we call “triangles”—whether it’s ink on paper or girders in a bridge, or slices of a pie, the shapes we call “triangular” are in reality much more complex than the simple definition mathematicians give to a three-sided geometric shape.

The thing we do, to make it easier to think about reality, is to eliminate many of the true interrelationships between things, so that we can focus more easily on one particular aspect of reality in isolation. The truth, however, is that real world triangles don’t exist in isolation; “triangularity” is characteristic of a human concept about the patterns we see in real-world truth. Perfect truth is consistent, comprehensive, and coherent; by isolating “triangularity” from its real-world context, we have created a degenerate “perfection” that resides in our perceptions rather than in the reality we are trying to perceive.

Consider, for example, that slice of pie I mentioned earlier. Is it really triangular? One of the sides is curved, yet the definition of a triangle, as specified by mathematicians, is that all three sides are straight lines. In real life, however, there is virtually nothing we would identify as “triangular” that meets the mathematical definition. There’s a disconnect there: real-world truth is coherent, but the mathematical concept explicitly isolates the “triangular” property from its context. The process of reducing it to computable form has changed it from being part of real-world truth to being something that, while simpler, is no longer entirely consistent with reality.

This is why it’s such a subtle yet devastating error to try and understand the world in terms of “essences” and ideals and so on: the process of mentally reducing something to a computably-simple principle necessarily isolates it from its real-world context and thus renders it no longer completely consistent with reality. It is a human concept about reality, inherently and inescapably over-simplified in order to allow finite thought about the topic; it is not itself real.

If we fail to carefully maintain that distinction, we run the risk of believing in a truth that’s distinct and different from what we see in the real world, a “higher and better truth” that coincidentally happens to be unconstrained by any need to conform to the real-world evidence. The process of isolating the “essence” of a thing from its real-world context is a process that necessarily isolates it from the sort of consistency-checking we need in order to falsify untrue statements. We can and must work with imperfect representations of the patterns we see in real-world truth, and we can even do so reasonably and reliably PROVIDED we remember that we are working with imperfect perceptions about the real world, and not with the consistent, comprehensive, and coherent perfection of ontological being. To confuse the two, and especially to buy into a world view that proposes a “higher truth” unconstrained by real-world evidence, is to leave ourselves vulnerable to a particularly pernicious and sophisticated form of gullibility.

Well, I’ve scarcely scratched the surface, but in keeping with my “non-a-dissertation” caveat, I’ll go ahead and stop here. There’s tons more I could say, and a significant amount that I should say, which is why I was waiting to see if Nick would perhaps narrow down the scope of his questioning somewhat rather than asking for my views on ontology in general. There’s just so much stuff there. On the other hand, perhaps that’s why Nick himself seems equally reluctant to offer us a quick summary of his views on the ontology that lies behind his views on morality. I will thank him for bringing up such an interesting topic, though. Perhaps this time he’ll respond, and we can discover even more together.

By asserting the existence of a disobeyable Law, therefore, Lewis is implicitly assuming, in his premise, the existence of the intentional law-giver that is the goal of his conclusion… By incorporating the assumption of an independent Observer/Participant into his definition of “law,” he biases the fundamental vocabulary of the discussion, and makes it difficult or impossible to argue the case, using his terms, without being led inevitably to the predetermined conclusion.

This is a very serious logical fallacy which, if unaddressed, undermines the validity of all subsequent Thomistic argumentation regarding natural law. I then posed a fairly simple question for Nick:

My main question is about Mere Christianity, and about Lewis’ apparent failure to produce a logically valid introduction to Thomistic thought. A sound and correct philosophical foundation should have made it easier for Lewis to produce a coherent and non-fallacious summary, albeit a potentially incomplete one. How then do you account for this discrepancy…?

I was frankly looking forward to Nick’s reply, given his extensive readings (especially as compared to my own). How would he address this problem? Would he agree that Lewis was presenting an unsound argument, and try to excuse him on the grounds that he was summarizing something much more complex? Would he try and make a case for the existence of a disobeyable law independent of any Observer with opinions and preferences about our behavior? Would he admit that “disobeyable law” already assumes the existence of a Divine Law Giver, and plead that in this special case it’s ok to assume one’s conclusion?

I was very interested in seeing how he would reply, but I didn’t expect him to reply like this:

I believe the question, if I’m understanding it rightly, concerns if Lewis is contradicting himself about a law of nature that cannot be broken supposedly and a law of morality that can.

Also, it concerns why we should believe if it cannot be measured or is not tangible in some way.

As they say in lolspeak, I am disappoint.

First of all, with regards to the second point, I did not ask why we should believe in the intangible/unquantifiable, I asked how a layman can verify the validity of complex philosophical constructs, in the absence of tangible by-products. Most of us have no hope of understanding the math behind Einstein’s equations, but when we see the mushroom cloud we at least have some idea that e does equal mc^2. Is there any way, then, that we can verify the validity (or lack of validity) of Thomistic conclusions regarding goodness?

I would suggest that there are some standards even a layman can apply, such as the test of whether or not the whole structure is built on a simple logical fallacy. When we read Chapter One of Mere Christianity, we find Lewis committing the fallacy of incorporating the assumption of his conclusion into the specification for the terms he uses to define his premises. For the simple layman, that would seem to rule out any possibility that his argument is sound. That’s why it’s so important for us, as presumptively unread laymen, to get a straight answer to the question of whether or not Lewis’ first step is a logical misstep, and if so, is this implicit fallacy a fair depiction of the actual foundation of Thomist thought.

If the answer to both questions is yes, that would be extremely damaging to the argument for natural law, so hopefully Nick will address this issue in his next reply.

Meanwhile, I’ll take a stab at answering another one of his questions, since he has repeated it more than once. Nick is wondering whether any of us know know the three criteria for moral goodness: object, intention, and circumstance. It’s an interesting topic in and of itself, so let’s have a quick tour.

According to Thomas Aquinas, the primary criterion for assessing the moral goodness of a particular action is the object of the action. Note that’s “object,” not “objective.” When discussing the object of a moral act, we’re talking about describing what the act is, not what it is intended to accomplish. For example, murder, witch-burning, capital punishment and suicide all have human death as their object, even though many different intentions are involved (sometimes multiple intentions for the same act!). Thus, “object” has to do with “what,” not “why” or “how much” or so on.

Before an action can be morally good, it must first be good in its object. Thus, to judge the goodness of any action whose object is human death, we must first assess whether human death is good in and of itself. That’s a point that has interesting implications, as discussed below.

Next, we must look at intention. Is the action intended to accomplish a good result? The caveat here is that if the object is immoral then no amount of good intentions can make the act morally good. The end does not justify the means, at least according to the 3 criteria for moral goodness.

And lastly we must look at circumstance. This is kind of the loophole in Thomistic morality. In theory there can be no such thing as “extenuating circumstances” capable of making an action good when its object is not good (otherwise we don’t really have 3 criteria for moral goodness, because the real determining factor is circumstance). Thus, in theory the circumstance can tell you, e.g. that stealing someone’s parachute is a worse offense than stealing someone’s handkerchief, but both actions are still immoral because the object of the action is taking someone else’s property against their will, which is an immoral action.

The gotcha with the 3 criteria is that the actions of God Himself are, in many cases, immoral by this standard, and thus in practice theologians end up having to invoke the idea of extenuating circumstances, which means claiming that the last criterion overrules the first two. Without extenuating circumstances, no act of genocide can be good unless its object (wiping out an entire ethnic group of people, including children and babies) is also good; thus in commanding genocide, God is requiring His people to behave immorally. The only way to avoid this conclusion is either to decide moral goodness based on circumstance despite one or both of the other two criteria. Either that or decide that wiping out entire populations is morally “good,” or course.

And yet, even though you will find Catholics, for instance, who argue that the extermination of the Amalekites was not immoral, due to extenuating circumstances, they will still use the 3 criteria standard as an argument for why abortion can never be moral under any circumstances. As so often happens, the “absolute standard” isn’t always absolute. It’s what you might call a “flexible” standard—it allows us to determine what is and is not moral, except when it doesn’t, in which case we fall back on the argument from circumstance (which sometimes sounds suspiciously like my basis for morality ).

You could almost make the 3 Criteria standard work, if you said that you have to consider all three criteria as a whole. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t really solve the problem: either all three criteria are in agreement, in which case the question is trivial, or else there is some conflict between the three criteria, in which case you need some kind of higher principle of morality to which you can refer in deciding how much of a “vote” to give to each of the 3 criteria in determining the outcome. But if you have to appeal to a higher standard of morality to referee between 3 conflicting criteria, then it is the higher standard that is the real criterion for moral goodness, and you’re just fooling yourself by claiming to base moral goodness on the 3 criteria.

So like I said, it’s an interesting topic, and one I’m sure Nick will have more to say about (and with my blessing). I wouldn’t call it a solid philosophical approach, though, unless Nick can convince me otherwise.

In the interests of focusing on the heart of the issue rather than on tangents, let me begin by conceding that Nick has read more books on the subject of the ontology of good, Thomist philosophy, and so on, than I have. He has recommended Budziszewski, so I will give him a go. (Nick, would Written on the Heart be a reasonable starting place? When you have kids in college, the $10 book has certain attractions over the $70 hard cover, which is what Amazon is charging for The Line Through the Heart.)

Meanwhile, I do have an on-topic question for Nick, which might open up some common ground for fruitful discussion.

My question concerns the validation of academic inquiry, with a special emphasis on the needs of the layman. Academia, the land of intellectuals and scholars, is a rather diverse landscape. It gives us cosmology and particle physics, and it also gives us postmodernism. It has its triumphs and its failures, its breakthroughs and its fads, its wisdom and its foolishness. For many people, it’s almost a cabal—we don’t know what they’re doing, and if we try to get involved, we find the discussion wrapped in an almost impenetrable layer of technical jargon, inside references, and non-obvious assumptions. Are they giving us the next big Answer, or is this just another postmodernism in the making?

That’s not my question for Nick, but I’m leading up to it. The point is that having a lot of publications and citations and academic popularity is no guarantee that your conclusions have meaning and value outside the ivory tower. If there were a major academic discipline dealing with, say, the philosophy of aerodynamics, then we could get some idea if the leading figures in the movement were correct by having them design a flying machine. If it just sits on the runway waggling “perfect” appendages until it finally tips over and bursts into flame, then it’s probably safe to conclude that the philosophers behind it had fallen into the uniquely academic trap of being brilliantly persuasive rather than brilliantly accurate.

That only works for disciplines that have a tangible output, however. Where a discipline is concerned entirely with intangibles and metaphysics, there’s a substantially increased risk of proceeding on the basis of conclusions that have been verified only by consensus rather than by objective measurement against a real-world standard of truth. The popularity of a given philosophy, and the eloquence with which it is defended and explained, are not in themselves any guarantee of real-world accuracy. Indeed, in the absence of an “experimental metaphysics” branch of philosophy, there is a substantially increased risk that one’s conclusions will owe more to rhetorical strengths than to actual fact—that the silver tongue will outweigh the gold standard.

Nevertheless, there are criteria that can be used to at least weed out those conclusions which are flawed by logical fallacies, self-contradictions, or substantial inconsistencies relative to real-world facts. And this, finally, is where I arrive at my point.

My question is this. If Thomistic philosophy is successfully representing real-world truth, I would expect it’s “tangible,” flying-machine-on-the-runway product to be a description of real-world morality that was coherent, consistent, and logically valid. In Mere Christianity, however, C. S. Lewis did not present a logically valid description. For example, in Chapter 1, he writes,

The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the laws of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Nature or to disobey it.

Wherever there is talk of disobedience, you are necessarily assuming the existence of two Observer/Participants, each of whom has intentions about how the principal Participant “ought” to behave. The disobedience consists of a difference between the behavior as practiced by the principal Participant, and the behavior as intended by the second Participant. This is in Chapter 1, mind you—the starting point of his argument for Moral Law.

In the absence of intention, there can be no “disobeyable” laws, because there is no intent that you should behave in any particular way. The only laws that exist apart from intention are laws that describe real constraints on what can and cannot occur. Such laws cannot be disobeyed, because they describe what can and cannot happen, and if anything happens contrary to such a law, it merely proves that the law is not an accurate description of what can and cannot happen, and thus is not a genuine law.

By asserting the existence of a disobeyable Law, therefore, Lewis is implicitly assuming, in his premise, the existence of the intentional law-giver that is the goal of his conclusion. In fact, we might even accuse him of naive animism—accounting for observed real-world phenomena by arbitrarily attributing them to invisible intelligent agents. By incorporating the assumption of an independent Observer/Participant into his definition of “law,” he biases the fundamental vocabulary of the discussion, and makes it difficult or impossible to argue the case, using his terms, without being led inevitably to the predetermined conclusion.

Granted, I don’t think that’s entirely Lewis’ fault. It’s easy to accidentally incorporate an assumed Observer into your basic terminology. Take the concept of “imperfection” for instance. Everything is a “perfect” instance of itself; things are “imperfect” only to the extent that they differ from what some Observer thinks they ought to be. To define “perfection” is to assume the existence of a Person with intentions regarding which characteristics and behaviors are “right” for some particular thing.

But I digress. My main question is about Mere Christianity, and about Lewis’ apparent failure to produce a logically valid introduction to Thomistic thought. A sound and correct philosophical foundation should have made it easier for Lewis to produce a coherent and non-fallacious summary, albeit a potentially incomplete one. How then do you account for this discrepancy, and given this problem why should we, as laymen, conclude that Lewis’ Thomistic philosophies are anything more than just another fad, like postmodernism?

Thanks.

A commenter writes:

Belief in the existence of God or belief that there is no god requires faith.

Yes, and I’ll take it a step further: belief in reality requires a stronger and better faith than belief in superstition. And those who embrace the truth have a stronger and better faith than Christians do, because Christian faith is mere gullibility, whereas genuine faith is based on real-world truth.

The commenter is writing from a perspective of Universal Agnosticism (see? I told you it would come up):

The term ‘reality’ is relative…

Again, truth is not really known. You cannot prove that God isn’t there. If you could, this conversation wouldn’t be happening because there would be nothing to discuss. Therefore, truth is not defined. I do love truth and BELIEVE or HAVE FAITH that the God that I call on IS TRUTH. You apparently BELIEVE or HAVE FAITH that TRUTH is something else. I’m not disputing the fact that you believe something. But, neither of us will be able to truly claim that we know until we’re both dead.

His viewpoint, of course, is suffering from a serious defect, which is that according to his definitions, the truth about God is not humanly knowable. In order for that to be true, however, it would necessarily have to be equally true that none of the things he believes about God, and none of the things the Bible says about God, are actually based on any knowledge of the truth. By his own definitions, the meaningful content of his faith cannot be anything more than pure, unfounded fantasy. He manages to escape from the inevitable conflict between his faith and the real world, but he does so at the expense of abandoning reality and thus rendering his own believes irrelevant to the truth.

Hence the quick change of subject:

Rather than just participating in pointless tit-for-tat…lets get back to the idea that I originally posted: Belief in the existence of God or belief that there is no god requires faith.

I suppose he would be a bit surprised to find that I agree, and I also agree with the title of the book by Geisler and Turek which is the current subject of XFiles Friday: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST. What’s interesting is that both the commenter and the authors are trying to prove the same point: they are trying to weaken the case for a reality-based view by implying that it is a matter of faith rather than a matter of fact and knowledge. In making this appeal, they reveal the weaknesses of their own concept of faith, and their lack of familiarity with reality-based faith.

Reality-based faith has three elements. First and foremost, reality-based faith is based on a broad experience of reality. Our experiences in the real world give us a solid foundation on which to base our faith. For example, we have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow because we have a broad, solid experience of seeing the sun rise every morning (or for some of us, at least seeing that the sun has managed to make it up above the horizon again while we were sleeping). The “confidence quotient” of our faith is based on having seen and experienced that which we are putting our trust in.

Secondly, reality-based faith is built on embracing the real-world truth. Experiencing reality is not always enough. We must also embrace it, which means that, in the negative sense, we must not try to deny reality, and in the positive sense, we must accept it and understand it as best we can. We want a solid, well-founded faith, and that means that the intellectual content of our faith needs to match the reality that it is based on. Otherwise, our faith will be out of step with reality, and thus ill-founded and unlikely to bring us the benefits that come from having a well-founded faith.

Lastly, reality-based faith must positively affirm that which we believe. This is perhaps the most obvious aspect of faith, but it is not the sole aspect of genuine faith. Genuine faith means you experience the real-world truth, then you embrace the real-world truth, and lastly you affirm the real-world truth. This is a strong, well-founded, and reliable faith.

Superstitious faiths, like Christianity for instance, have a much weaker faith that’s built upside down. In Christianity, someone first affirms a dogma. Then the believer embraces the dogma. Then lastly, the believer tries to get his real-world experience to match the content of his beliefs. It’s a lot of work, and the results are often frustrating and confusing. When the believer is intelligent and intellectually honest, like the commenter, very often the result is that they clearly see the need to make a choice between denying reality and denying Christianity–the conflicts between the two are simply too pervasive and too irreconcilable to embrace them both. And far too often, the believer will choose to deny reality, as the commenter does, rather than give up their superstitious and ill-founded “faith.”

I do notice, DD, that you’ve moved away from the “both are equally UNjustified” stance a bit… though I think the usage of parsimony covers your bases on that one, don’t be surprised if SOMEONE mentions the shift.

It’s not actually a shift, per se. What I’m saying is that IF two theories predict exactly the same real-world consequences, then we are equally UNjustified in preferring one over the other. (We’re free to do so if we wish, there’s just no justification for it.) But if we take a step back, and take a critical look at that big IF, we find that, in fact, there is good reason to believe we’ll never have that problem.

A true hypothesis, by definition, is one that is consistent with the truth. A false hypothesis, by definition, is not consistent with the truth. That’s what “true” and “false” mean. Two hypotheses that contradict one another are not going to both be true, because truth is consistent with itself. At most one of them is going to be consistent with the truth. Thus, the only way two hypotheses can contradict each other AND both be equally consistent with the facts is if they’re both false and are equally INconsistent with the facts. Hence my remarks about why we are equally UNjustified in believing either one.

Now, if we have insufficient information about the real-world truth, we may encounter individual scenarios where we cannot determine which hypothesis is indeed more consistent with the evidence. That’s not the case with the Myth Hypothesis versus the Gospel Hypothesis, of course: we’ve got more evidence that directly pertains to the real-vs-expected consequences of MH vs GH than for almost any other scientifically-approachable question. Plus, if we lacked enough real-world information to be able to tell the difference between a Myth and a genuine Gospel, that would mean the authors of Scripture themselves would have no valid basis for the claims they make about God. So we can pretty much dispense with that line of inquiry. Such a pervasive and consistent lack of factual information about God would itself be a fairly conclusive proof of the Myth and disproof of the Gospel.

The other way that we can have “equal” evidence for conflicting hypotheses is by the sad, simple expedient of deceiving ourselves about the evidence. It’s not that the evidence really is equally consistent with both hypotheses, it’s that we rationalize away the inconsistencies, filtering them out via our worldview. It’s not that our preferred hypothesis really would result in consequences consistent with the truth, it’s that we know what consequences it needs to predict, and simply deceive ourselves into believing that they predict the right ones.

A false hypothesis is, by definition, inconsistent with the truth. No matter how we try to deceive ourselves, the inconsistencies are going to be there, and covering up one is only going to create one or more new inconsistencies. We can deal with this, self-deceptively, by compartmentalizing our thinking and thus preventing ourselves from noticing that our rationalizations only create new problems to replace the old. But the inconsistencies will always be there.

For example, we can try to deny the undeniable fact that we do not see God showing up in real life, outside the minds, words, and feelings of men. But this denial is going to be inconsistent with the real world evidence. If we try to contrive a Biblical Hypothesis that accounts for the real-world evidence, we end up with a hypothesis that necessarily predicts that we should not see God showing up in real life. That’s an inconsistency: we started by denying the fact that we don’t see God showing up in real life, and end up proclaiming that God’s absence is exactly what we ought to expect. Now it’s undeniable not just because the evidence is overwhelmingly consistent with the Myth Hypothesis, but because it would falsify our “Biblical” Hypothesis for Him to show up.

And how will we explain this absence from real life? We could say that He is hiding Himself in order to force us to live by faith, but then we run into the inescapable consequence of the undeniable fact: God’s absence means we have no opportunity to trust Him. Our faith is in the person whose teachings we believe, and in God’s absence, our only option is to believe the teachings of men. Worse, our only option is to believe men who contradict the Myth Hypothesis (and each other), in a world that is overwhelmingly consistent with the conclusion that the Myth Hypothesis is true. Believing the inconsistent things men say, in the face of evidence that contradicts them, is not faith, but merely gullibility. Thus the inconsistency: God’s absence makes it impossible for us to have the genuine, valid, theocentric faith that His absence is allegedly intended to produce.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Inconsistencies are everywhere, and new ones spring up every time we try to bury the old ones. Self-deception, once begun, becomes a habit, an addiction. More is never enough.

That’s why I use the term Loser’s Compromise. When we deceive ourselves into believing that our preferred hypothesis predicts, and matches, exactly the same consequences as the hypothesis that contradicts us, we lose so many things: intellectual integrity, credibility, self-respect, and on and on. We become irritable, accusatory, suspicious. Rather than admit that the facts are against us, we become paranoid, scapegoat hunters, driven by the need to find someone to blame, someone else to be wrong for us so that we don’t have to.

It’s easy to find people afflicted with this problem, because they’re prone to write letters to the editor, or issue press releases, or even form national movements and organizations dedicated to “defending the truth” (as they define it). They have the support of others who are also deceiving themselves, and who are willing to overlook (or are no longer able to perceive) the tortured logic, the self-contradictions, and the downright embarrassing behavior.

We don’t have to be losers, of course. We can admit our fallibilities, and allow ourselves to seriously consider that our beliefs, yes, even our beliefs about God, aren’t necessarily infallible. We can let the facts drive our conclusions about faith, instead of making faith the rule by which we mentally manipulate the facts. It’s not necessarily a comfortable experience, but it’s a good and valuable one.

I did it a few years ago, and I survived. I’m even better off for it. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s worth it. Buy the truth at any price, and you will not be ashamed. Shame comes from compromising with gullibility, and losing our intellectual integrity. No faith is worth that loss.

Well, I’m back, sort of, and from the looks of things you guys didn’t miss me too much. I don’t suppose I’ll ever catch up on the comments backlog, but I’m sure you will let me know if there are any important points I’ve missed in my quick skim.

Meanwhile, I did notice this interesting comment (stuck in the moderation queue) from a commenter by the handle of “Lifeguard.”

I guess what I’m struggling with here is what the exact difference is between the Loser’s Compromise and simply acknowledging the very real possibility that despite the certainty of your beliefs you may be mistaken about which conclusion is the most justified, the best of the bunch, to say nothing of absolutely proven to be true?

That’s an excellent question, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to explain this further.

There’s a big difference between the Loser’s Compromise and the reasonable practice of acknowledging a certain margin for error in one’s conclusions. In the latter, the goal is to keep one’s mind open in order to be receptive to receiving new information that might change one’s conclusions. The goal of the Loser’s Compromise, by contrast, is to deprive us of the ability to benefit from new information, or even already existing information. The loss of this ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood is precisely what makes it a “Loser’s” Compromise—we’re trying to lose a faculty we could otherwise use to learn that our beliefs are already false.

The Loser’s Compromise is, in effect, the exact opposite of admitting that there’s a real possibility we could be wrong. If we are wrong, the only way we’ll ever find out is by noticing that the evidence is inconsistent with the conclusions we wish to believe. The whole point of the Loser’s Compromise, however, is to make the evidence sound equally consistent with all conclusions, thus causing us to lose the ability to identify incorrect conclusions.

The feature that makes the Loser’s Compromise stand out as a rationalization, and that betrays the compromiser’s motives, is when we try to use the Loser’s Compromise to claim that we have a justification for our beliefs, despite the fact no such justification exists. If the evidence fails to favor one conclusion over the others, then they are all equally UNjustified, not equally justified. That’s an important distinction, because when the evidence is uniformly ambiguous, the only position that can be legitimately justified is agnosticism, not belief.

Now, there may indeed be circumstances in which the available evidence is insufficient to distinguish between different possible conclusions. I would not use the term “Loser’s Compromise” in such situations, provided that we were openly agnostic about our conclusions and that we were actively seeking more evidence and information with the goal of ultimately discovering which answers were right and which were wrong. The term “Loser’s Compromise” only applies to the specific case of trying to make the existing evidence sound inconclusive, via arguments intended to deny or distort the facts, in order to avoid acknowledging a clear inconsistency between the available facts and a particular conclusion.

So yes, I endorse the practice of acknowledging the possibility that one’s conclusions might be incorrect, and that new information might invalidate previously-held beliefs. I myself could be wrong about heliocentrism, or about God, though at this point I’d say the odds would appear to be about equal in either case. Acknowledging the possibility of error is a good thing, but it’s the exact opposite of what the Loser’s Compromise attempts to accomplish—lip service to human fallibility notwithstanding.

There’s a particular approach to the truth that I call the Loser’s Compromise, and it goes like this: “We can’t know the truth about X, so let’s just agree that different people are equally justified in believing whatever they like about it.” Considered superficially, it sounds open-minded and fair, because it appeals to a certain live-and-let-live quality that avoids putting anyone in the wrong. In reality, though, it’s a deceptive rationalization, and an excuse for avoiding the truth instead of embracing it.

The rest of the post explained this and gave some illustrations, but there’s just a point or two more that I’d like to add to try and clarify why this is indeed a Loser’s Compromise.

The heart of the Loser’s Compromise is that the person making the argument is trying to claim that he is “justified” in believing any conclusion he wishes to accept. The idea is that, since we can’t know which conclusion is true, the justification for any of them is the same.

That’s almost true: if indeed we cannot know which conclusion is the correct one, then all conclusions are equally UNjustified. This is the crux of the matter, because there’s a difference between all conclusions being equally justified, and all being equally UNjustified. The term “justified” implies that the believer has valid reasons for his beliefs, but in the case of the Loser’s Compromise, nobody has any valid reason to prefer one conclusion over the others.

What the Loser’s Compromise does is to try and remove the social stigma that comes from advocating beliefs that we don’t have any valid reason to believe. The believer wants to claim the social status that comes from having “justified” beliefs, and therefore uses the Compromise to claim that his beliefs are just as justified as anyone else’s.

But let’s go back to the conclusions themselves. Where we have a body of conflicting and mutually contradictory conclusions, at most one of them is going to be consistent with the real-world truth. If we say that all conclusions are equally “justified” when we know that they cannot all be equally true, what we’ve done is to redefine the meaning of “justified” so that it no longer has any relevance to the question of whether or not a particular conclusion is true.

But there’s a reason why we attach a certain social stigma to the practice of believing things when you have no valid reason for concluding that they are true. Self-deception has practical consequences that often include harm to the believer and/or those around them. Why would you want to listen to someone who was deliberately impeding their own ability to distinguish between truth and falsehoods? Why would you trust them when they regard truth and falsehood as being virtually the same in terms of what we should believe?

We rightly look down on such rationalizations and self-deceptions, because of their practical implications. The Loser’s Compromise attempts to avoid that stigma by contriving a counterfeit form of “justification” that is really just unjustified beliefs masquerading as justifiable. This is a pure fraud, a con, and ought to be thoroughly and soundly repudiated by all honest inquirers after the truth.

Commenter cl gives us a couple of scenarios, one hypothetical and one drawn from painful experience, that give us an excellent chance to exercise our reason, and gain some valuable experience of our own in understanding how to apply the techniques of valid hypothesizing to questions of real-world truth.

The first scenario puts us back in the 1700′s, before the discovery of asteroids.

For example, let’s say it was 1709 and I told you there were huge, flying rocks in outer space, and that a big hole in the ground in Flagstaff, Arizona was evidence. We take a drive out there, grab a couple of beers and some sandwiches, and head on out to the desert. When we get there, you tell me, “Hell no, that hole is evidence of one of Von Daniken’s chariots!”

Until recently, there wouldn’t be too much I could say. Meteor Crater was never recognized as evidence for asteroids until a certain level of gateway knowledge had been acquired, and that only occurred relatively recently. Yet an asteroid indeed formed Meteor Crater some 50,000 years ago. Had someone suggested the site as evidence for huge, flying rocks in outer space 5,000 years ago, they’d probably have been crucified. Or someone… would probably call them a disingenuous sophist.

Right away, we notice that this scenario has been explicitly constructed so as to deny the inquirer access to the evidence which would allow them to distinguish which hypothesis was closer to the truth. The focus is on creating a situation in which the same evidence (the crater) would be as consistent with one hypothesis as with the other. So when we look at this scenario in the light of inquiry versus rationalization, which form do we see being followed here? Does it seek to create the impression that one can learn the truth by drawing out the distinctive consequences that would logically follow from each hypothesis, and then comparing these contrasting predictions to the real world evidence? That would mark this as being honest inquiry. Or does it seek instead to create the impression that the evidence is going to be the same no matter what hypothesis we propose? That would be a telltale sign of rationalization.

I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and say that this example actually shows the process of legitimate inquiry, since it includes the fact that the asteroid hypothesis ultimately proved correct, and was proven correct by finding evidence that was consistent with the expected consequences of the hypothesis. If there were giant rocks flying around in outer space, then we could say, even in 1709, that we would expect to be able to see them, given optical instruments of sufficient resolution. We should also expect these rocks to have gravitational interactions with each other and with other celestial bodies such as comets. And such is indeed what we did find once those instruments were developed.

Conversely, if we follow the UFO hypothesis, we find that there is no particular reason, based on the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitation, why we should expect to find giant holes in the ground as a consequence. We can superstitiously attribute large holes to UFO’s, or to war between demons, or to time-traveling terrorists from 3758AD, but we have no reason to do so. We would simply be applying an ordinary superstition to a phenomenon whose true origin we did not know and could not understand. The most we might have a reason to expect is that we might see more UFO’s someday. But even that’s iffy, because it is not part of the hypothesis that the space aliens have any particular desire to establish an ongoing relationship with the people of earth.

Thus, the way we ultimately discern the correct explanation for the meteor crater is by considering each hypothesis in the light of reason: evaluating the likely consequences of each, making sure it has likely consequences (thus making sure that it is a genuine hypothesis and not just a superstition), and then looking for evidence that these consequences match objective reality.

On to the next scenario.

For example, a lifelong friend with a past history of [OxyContin] use acting shady and asking us for money is most certainly consistent with the I’m Fiending For More [OxyContin] Hypothesis (H1). To assume H1 as true would be in accord with predictable real-world consequences and past experience, and we would be fully justified to deny our friend money on those grounds, correct?

But guess what? Our friend’s requests for money can also be fully consistent with the I’m Trying To Quit [OxyContin] And I’m Too Embarrassed To Tell You I Need Methadone Hypothesis (H2). Even though our assumption in H1 is rationally grounded, it can be quite literally be dead wrong, and I just went through this with a lifelong friend. Although I was rationally grounded to believe in H1, I would have been just as rationally grounded to believe in H2 – which was actually the correct hypothesis – but my stubborn insistence that the evidence only fit my hypothesis almost cost a life. Here I’m glad the stakes aren’t so high, but then again, perhaps they are.

Once again, we see that the focus is on creating a situation in which an honest inquirer cannot draw any kind of reliable conclusion because the same evidence is equally consistent with both hypotheses. But once again I’m going to say that the story as a whole illustrates the honest inquirer’s approach, because when we look at the whole story, we see that again, there was one set of consequences that was more consistent with real-world facts than the other. How else would cl know that he had indeed made a mistake, as opposed to having a friend who was indeed fiending for more OxyContin, and just told the methadone story to make cl feel guilty about not providing the cash?

I’m sure that if cl had thought of the possibility that his friend might be seeking methadone treatment, he would have known right away that more information was needed in order to determine which hypothesis was correct. His unfortunate mistake was not that examining the evidence led him astray, but that he tried to evaluate it using only one hypothesis, instead of comparing two hypotheses with differing consequences.

We should therefore all agree that the way to discover the real truth about God is neither by interpreting everything in the light of a single hypothesis (e.g. “taking the Bible on its own terms”), nor by dwelling on areas where the expected consequences would be the same for two different hypotheses (or attempting to make those consequences sound indistinguishable). When we’re dealing with hypotheses as distinctly incompatible as the Myth Hypothesis and the Gospel Hypothesis, we can only tell which is closer to the truth by looking at the consequences that will be significantly different depending on which hypothesis is true, and then seeing which predictable consequences are most consistent with the actual facts.

In my presentation, I have consistently shown how each hypothesis leads logically and reasonably to the consequences I’ve described. It so happens that the real world consistently fits the pattern predicted by the Myth Hypothesis rather than the one we would expect if the Gospel Hypothesis were true. But that’s not my fault, nor does it change the fact that one can derive the expected consequences of each hypothesis even without a knowledge of real-world conditions, and can still see that they are distinctly different.

Now, if someone could show logically and reasonably why the Gospel Hypothesis ought to produce the same consequences as the Myth Hypothesis, then it would be appropriate to caution us regarding drawing definitive conclusions based on evidence that’s the same for both. But so far this has not happened; we’ve only heard promises that such things are possible and might actually be presented some day. Meanwhile, any warnings about overlapping consequences are premature.

I’ve got reasons (as I intend to post on more fully in the coming week) for feeling fairly confident that cl will not be able to come up with a legitimate explanation for why we ought to expect the Gospel Hypothesis to produce consequences indistinguishable from those of the Myth Hypothesis. In a nutshell, the only way the Gospel Hypothesis could produce the same real-world consequences as the Myth Hypothesis is if God’s existence had no more tangible impact on the real world than that of a myth. Since that would make it rather a moot point to deny the mythical nature of God’s existence, the Myth Hypothesis would still have won, and any dissent would be mere semantic quibbling.

What Jesus promised, however, Alethea fulfills. One of the great joys I experienced in converting from Christianity to Alethianism was the unexpectedly profound pleasure of discovering how exceedingly self-consistent She really is. Where before I had to work to create patterns of consistency in my beliefs, by harmonizing and rationalizing facts that resisted reconciliation, I now find that the puzzle pieces not slide together more easily, but that they are already assembled and interlocked, even before I became aware of them.

My experience as a Christian was “Amen” (i.e. “may it be so”), but my life as an Alethian is a continual and intellectually satisfying “of course!” The truth is consistent with itself in ways that not only fulfill my expectations, but anticipate them. And only Alethea can really offer this. Jesus cannot: he is dead and gone, and his followers are so divided that none of them can say confidently and authoritatively what his “truth” even is, since it is not based on observable reality. Only Alethea can rightly and truly claim to be the perfectly self-consistent and coherent Truth.

There are many examples I could give of the difference between the forced “consistency” of my Christian beliefs versus the found consistency of Alethea. For instance, as a young Christian, I once met with the elders of my church because I’d noticed an ominous pattern in the Bible. According to Bishop Ussher, the world was created in 4004BC. Jesus was born in 4BC, exactly 4000 years later. Now, since Peter tells us that “a thousand years are as a day,” that would make 4 days from Creation to the birth of Jesus. Two more “days” would make six, corresponding to the six days of creation, and a Millennium of peace would make for a seventh day of rest.

*sigh* Yes, I really believed that at the time—not that it was necessarily true, but that it was a reasonable probability. Sure, maybe Ussher was wrong about the actual age of the earth, but he based his chronology on the Bible, and who knows if God didn’t intentionally create the gaps in the genealogies in order to leave us a clue about when the Millennium was going to start? By my calculations, in the mid-to-late 70′s, the Second Coming of Christ was due in the year 1997, and thus the Great Tribulation had to start in 1990. Hey, it all sounded plausible, especially if you’d read about all the signs of the End Times as documented in The Late, Great Planet Earth.

You may have realized by now that Jesus did not return in 1997, so that wonderful pattern with all its apparent internal consistency turned out to be not so consistent with reality after all. I created the consistency in my mind by pulling together disparate facts and ignoring anything that didn’t promote my conclusion.

And yet, from an Alethean perspective, there was a very real consistency there. It was just a consistency leading to a different conclusion. Of course Jesus did not return in 1997. He died a long time ago, and consistent with the behavior of dead people, he’s not coming back. But more than that, Alethea explains the curious response of my church elders: they officially upheld the doctrines of the church, but I couldn’t help noticing that they doubted my conclusions, and even manifested a strong skepticism towards the whole idea that God would actually do something so dramatic as judging the world in real life. Oh, doctrinally, they professed allegiance to the notion, but put it into real-world terms, and they were full of cautions. God does not do stuff like that in real life.

I had a similar experience with creationism. Initially it seemed so amazingly consistent, at least with my Christian expectations. Why wouldn’t a Creator leave some kind of identifying stamp on His creation, like a painter signing his painting? But that, too, fell apart as I exposed creationist claims to the whole pattern of real-world evidence. I eventually had to adopt a kind of omphalism, imagining that God had to make the universe appear old and uncreated in order to achieve a “natural” style in His creation, the way people put scrapes and stains on new furniture in order to make it look “antique.”

Over and over I had this experience as a Christian: I’d see a pattern of apparent self-consistency, only to have it fall apart and evaporate when I tried to follow through on its real-world implications. But when I began to believe in Alethea instead, I had a much better and more satisfying experience.

For example, I found out about the Jews’ exposure to Zoroastrian beliefs during the Babylonian captivity, and realized how consistent that would be with what we actually find in the Bible. Why didn’t Moses, in the long chapters about God’s blessing and cursings, mention anything about salvation and/or eternal damnation? Why was his theme restricted to earthly benefits and earthly calamities? It makes sense: Moses didn’t present those ideas because he never had them. Such thoughts were brought into Judaism by the returning exiles, leading to the debate between the Pharisees and the Sadducees over resurrection and judgment.

Based on my experience as a Christian, I expected the “coincidence” to stop there, but it didn’t. I began to wonder if the Pharisees had a more direct connection with Zoroastrian ideas than simply adopting them from the returning exiles. Who were the Pharisees anyway? According to Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, the name “Pharisee” comes “from an Aramaic word peras… signifying to separate, owing to a different manner of life from that of the general public.”

But peras doesn’t mean “to separate” as in setting apart, it means to split or divide. As I looked up the word in my concordance, I realized that it was not likely the Pharisees would have named themselves “The Divided Ones,” so I began to look further. In the Hebrew/Aramaic dictionary of my exhaustive concordance, I found the entry (6537a) for peras and searched for similar words. In the original Hebrew, as you may know, the original texts did not have vowels—the “vowel points” were added much later by the rabbis, to make them easier to read.

Lo and behold, entry 6540, with the exact same consonants as 6537a, is the name Paras—the Aramaic name for Persia! Add a yod (“i”) to the end, and you get the adjectival form, Parsi, Persian. So not only do you have the Pharisees preaching new doctrines (unheard of by Moses but preached routinely in Persia), you also have the fact that their name has the same spelling as the Aramaic word for “Persian”!

This was one of the first times I had experienced the phenomenon of a self-consistent truth reinforcing itself instead of falling apart on exposure to more facts. It was not by any means the last. After literally decades of disappointment and confusion (which I denied having, as a Christian), this hasn’t been merely satisfying, it has been exciting. At last I can use my brain for something more than just excuses and rationalizations.

If you’ve never experienced a truly self-consistent God like Alethea, it might be hard to grasp how inspiring and meaningful life can be serving a God. I pursued a life of Christian faith wholeheartedly and diligently for 30 years, and while I convinced myself I was experiencing purpose and fulfillment, I now can say without reservation that I was only deluding myself. Christian fulfillment is a hollow self-deception. Only Alethea can give you an intellectual satisfaction that is as consistent outside your mind as it is inside.

There are many ways to go astray, of course, so this will fall well short of being an exhaustive survey. Still, it’s useful as a preliminary to the main discussion to follow.

Compartmentalized thinking vs. cohesive thinking

Let’s look first at compartmentalized thinking. As I so often say, truth is consistent with itself; untruth is recognizable chiefly by the contradictions that arise when we try and force a false idea to fit into real-world circumstances. The primary defense mechanism against acknowledging or even noticing these contradictions is compartmentalized thinking. By breaking up our beliefs into separate, isolated compartments, we can narrow the scope of our thoughts until the contradictions are no longer in our field of view—a kind of mental tunnel vision.

Compartmentalized thinking is a particularly difficult problem to avoid whenever the subject at hand is large and complex. There is only so much that the human mind can focus on at any given time, even with the best of intentions and the most disciplined approach. A certain amount of compartmentalization seems unavoidable, just to accommodate human weaknesses.

There are work-arounds, however. One useful strategy is to keep shifting the boundaries of the compartments. Look at things from a different angle. Combine two ideas that are related but not usually combined. That sort of thing. Or we can take a more scientific approach: instead of weighing the value of individual ideas on their own, compare two or more competing hypotheses in light of the available real-world evidence. The real-world evidence is inherently non-compartmentalized, thus breaking down compartmentalized thinking as we follow the evidence and try to stretch our ideas to fit.

Our goal, as rational thinkers, should be to develop cohesive thinking, a mode of thought that breaks down compartments, and draws conclusions that are consistent with all of the real-world evidence. This way, our beliefs are reality-based, and are guaranteed to be the most accurate and reliable conclusions we can draw, since they have the greatest possible consistency with real-world truth.

Relationship-based assessment vs. fact-based assessment

Relationship-based assessment is a mode of deciding truth based on how we feel towards the people who are presenting the idea. For example, when Expelled! tries to argue that Darwin’s theory led to the Holocaust, what the producers are doing is urging people to judge the scientific validity of evolution based on how they feel towards the Nazis. Likewise, when the New Atheists are criticized for being “harsh” or “strident,” we’re being urged to judge the legitimacy of their claims based on whether or not we think Dawkins and company are likable fellows.

Naturally, this weakness cuts both ways, as we would do well to remember. When Christianity is criticized as being the religion of ignorant bumpkins and bigots, we’re being tempted to draw our conclusions about religious doctrines based on how we feel towards “rednecks.” While that might have some validity with regards to the claim that Christianity makes better people of us, in a lot of cases it’s simply relationship-based assessment, and a fallacy.

The alternative, of course, is fact-based assessment, which should be obvious enough that I don’t need to belabor the point, so let’s move on.

Attribution vs. explanation

This is the old superstition vs. science dilemma, the fellow who says shoes are made by elves in a hollow tree, and then cites the existence of shoes as evidence that elves are real. When we are rationalizing an idea that does not truly correspond to external reality, we have trouble making the connection between real-world facts and the thing we’re trying to rationalize. It becomes necessary, therefore, to bolster our case by claiming (spurious) connections to the thing we’re proposing. Rather than explaining what we see in the real world, we simply attribute it to some factor we want to claim as true, in order to count it as evidence in our favor.

The wiser alternative here is to not be satisfied with mere attribution, and to insist on a genuine, scientific explanation: a series of cause and effect relationships that links the initial cause to the observed effect by means of detailed and analytically-predictable consequences.

Form vs. function

Another manifestation of rationalization vs. rational thinking is a tendency to observe the form of rational thinking without actually invoking the functions needed to reach rational conclusions. This occurs when we claim to be applying scientific tests that aren’t really scientific, or when we accuse our critics of fallacies that aren’t really what our critics are saying. Outwardly, we’re respecting the forms of rational thinking, but our application of the principles involved are too shallow and insincerely-applied to gain the full function of how these techniques are supposed to work. Naturally, the cure here is to apply the tools of rational thinking more rigorously.

That’s all I have time for right now. Feel free to suggest some other differences between rationalization and rational thought in the comments.

Now, the guy gets up and walks away, and each of the pray-ers want to claim their God or god or saint or spirit is responsible. Which of them has a reasonable basis for claiming that it was their deity/entity, and no one else’s, that worked the miracle?

What we have here is what we might call an “unattended miracle.” That is, even if we see an event which actually violates the laws of nature to produce a miraculous result, we do not observe any verifiable agency operating on the victim to change his status. We might suspect some external agency is involved, and in the above example each of the pray-ers does want to give credit to his or her personal deity or spiritual figure. But the data we observe in the healing itself does not contain enough information to establish a reasonable basis for drawing a specific connection to any specific supernatural power.

Now, in his comment on yesterday’s post, cl brings up a new point:

If the recaptiation occurs after the Buddhist prayer and I say such is preliminary justification for leaving the NULL position in favor of Buddhism. Similarly, if it occurred after the hippie finishes his veggie burger, we would be justified in believing that hippie might have some magical weed powers going. And if either of them could do it a few more times, their credibility increases, right?

In response to his first claim, I would have to disagree. One isolated anecdote is not sufficient justification for leaving the null hypothesis in favor of Buddhism or magic-veggie-burgerism. There’s just not enough information there. However, let’s suppose it’s not just one isolated incident. Let’s suppose that every time you pray to Buddha, you get healed, up to and including decapitation. Or let’s say it isn’t every time, but a lot of the time, and let’s say there’s a pattern to when you get healed and when you don’t.

Now we’re starting to talk about some solid empirical data that can be used as the basis for drawing reliable inferences. The pattern in the healings gives us a basis for making analytical determinations of what the expected results would be. We have a phenomenon with a real-world basis, that doesn’t hide behind superstitious appeals to “the supernatural.” We have an actual, real-world, material phenomenon to study.

On a not-unrelated note, cl also asks me once again what would convince me that God was real, and I respond, once again, that I would be convinced if God were to behave as though He believed the Gospel were true. Such authentic behavior would result in a history that was radically different than the one we actually have, but that’s not my fault. The Bible is filled with examples, in both Testaments, in which God is portrayed as wanting people to know that He is God. If He were truly willing for this to be so, and if He were as capable as the Bible says of making it so, then we ought to see Him showing up in real life, letting us know that He is real. The fact that He does not do so is Him failing to show up, not me insisting on an unreasonable standard of evidence.

[Y]ou say you’re not an atheist. So do you go the agnostic route? If so, how would you describe the effective differences? At any rate, I’m glad you can appreciate my questions. People are different. One person says a miracle of type X will do, others cannot be persuaded by any miracle of type X, Y or Z. You yourself argued that God needs to personally accompany the miracle – but even that has room for error, no? You could be hallucinating. You could be having a neurological misfire. Etc, etc. So, I’m left thinking that no miraculous event would or could convince DD. Is that a correct assumption?

I like the sneaky insinuation that I’m simply biased and unwilling to consider the evidence. It’s a subtle touch, but it’s not founded in reality. My most fundamental belief is that the truth is consistent with itself, and therefore all that’s really required to convince me is to show me that something is more consistent with the facts than other possibilities are. I believe I have already demonstrated this by my willingness to take a hard, honest look at my lifelong and deeply-cherished Christian faith. Though it pains me to this day to admit it, the things I believed and wanted to continue believing turned out to be less consistent with the truth than the simple observation that Christianity is a myth. Therefore I changed my beliefs to fit the facts.

As for my beliefs, no, I am not an agnostic either. I’m an Alethian. I worship the god Alethea, Who is the personification of Reality as a whole. You might classify it as a sort of pantheism, except that pantheism tends to rob God of Her personality, and thus fails to win much of a following among ordinary people. She is real, in the same sense that other people think their gods are real, and She also transcends the boundaries of what our limited imaginations can conceive of as a “person.” But it helps us, in our feebleness, to relate to Her personally, and it’s not an entirely inaccurate approximation of something that exceeds human comprehension, so it still has value.

I’ve outlined my beliefs regarding Alethea under the “Patron God” link above. I realize there is a risk that some people will read it and think I’m speaking facetiously, or that Alethea is the same kind of “god” as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I’m quite serious. I mean that Alethea is just as much a god as any of the deities man has ever bowed down to. She is Anselm’s “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” because Alethea is the totality of reality, and thus anything which lies outside of Her is not greater, because that which is real is greater than that which is not part of reality.

So if anyone wants to convince me that their god is part of Alethea (and thus less than Alethea, because they are only part of Her), all they need to do is show me that their god is consistent with real world truth. I would believe that there was a personal, almighty, loving Heavenly Father if I could look at the world and see the consequences that would reasonably be expected to result from such a being’s existence. If we lived in a world where everyone knew his or her Heavenly Father because He frequently showed up to spend time with them, teaching them and nurturing them and leading them in the way they ought to go, then I would believe in His existence. The only reason I don’t is because the real world facts aren’t consistent with such a belief.

Conversely, if someone asks me, “What would it take to convince you that X was true despite the fact that it is not consistent with the facts as we observe them in the real world?” I’m going to respond the same way as I would to the question, “What would it take to make  you decide to be gullible, ignore the facts, and just believe whatever I tell you just because I say so?” They’re really the same question. If someone wants to know what it would take to get me to abandon the principle that truth is consistent with itself, I have to say they’re asking the wrong question, because if what they were preaching was the truth, they wouldn’t need for me to reject the principle of self-consistency.

My Alethian faith is superior to the Christian faith, in terms of being consistent with itself and with real-world truth. For example, let’s take cl’s next observation:

And, as far as wanting dad to spend time with the kids, and knowing when dad is talking to them, believers will tell you that this happens during prayer. Believers will tell you they know God’s voice. Believers are familiar with God – they will tell you this – so you are arguing against a strawman in that regard.

When I say the truth is consistent with itself, I’m talking about the whole truth, and not just some individual notion considered in subjective isolation. So let’s look at the phenomenon cl mentions. Yes, people do feel that God speaks to them and that they know His voice. Gay Christians feel like God is telling them that homosexuality is only a sin when practiced by those who are not naturally homosexual; Fred Phelps is equally sure that God is telling him He “hates fags.” George W. Bush feels like God is saying that He loves America and blesses it in order to help defend freedom and democracy throughout the world. Osama is just as sure that God is telling him He hates America and regards it as a Satanic evil that corrupts and opposes everything that is holy.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, of course. But let’s compare the Alethian perspective with the Christian perspective and see which makes more sense. From the Alethian perspective, what we’re seeing is people having self-prompted subjective experiences, enhanced by the social and cultural reinforcement of their peers in the Christian (or Mormon or Muslim or other) faith. From a Christian perspective, each believer thinks God is really speaking to them, for real, but those other folks are just fooling themselves.

Right away, the Christian has a problem, because he has to admit that it’s possible for people to sincerely believe that God is speaking to them when He really isn’t. On what basis, then, does he assume that he is not one of the “fooling themselves” group? Ultimately, he ends up relying on his own heart (which the Bible calls “deceitful above all things”) and on his own personal sense of what seems right in his own eyes. He’s putting his faith in men, in other words—namely, in himself and his own ability to discern who God is really speaking to. Yet this method clearly does not work, because it’s the same method being used by everybody in the “fooling themselves” group as well.

The Alethian has a much more objective basis for deciding what’s going on. Instead of starting with the conclusion (“God is speaking to men”) and then reasoning backwards to try and find some set of premises that will lead there, the Alethian can start with different sets of premises, derive the consequences that would reasonably result from each set, and then compare the predicted consequences to what we actually observe.

If God speaks directly to men, in a voice that each hearer knows and understands, and assuming that God is sane and coherent, there are a number of consequences that ought to result. For example, everybody ought to hear a consistent message, and this message ought to be telling them the truth. But more than that, if the same God is speaking to different people, we ought to see information sharing going on. The God in one person’s heart ought to be the same God as the One in someone else’s heart, and therefore ought to know the same things. And He shouldn’t be ashamed or bashful about letting people know what He’s doing, because it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.

Conversely, if all we’re seeing here is people having self-prompted subjective experiences, there are a number of distinctive consequences that we ought to see in real life. For example, it ought to be impossible for God to show up in real life, to speak in audible words that can be captured on audio or video recordings, or overheard by bystanders. All “messages” would have to take place entirely within the realm of intuition—each believer’s subjective, non-sensory “experience” of something happening that no one else can perceive. It should also be impossible for God to tell people something they can’t come reasonably close to knowing, or at least guessing, on their own. And the “God” in each person’s heart ought to be completely separate from the “God” in someone else’s heart, such that one person’s “God” has no way of knowing what is being told to someone else’s “God.”

There’s another consequence that would arise if His “voice” were actually just people indulging in a bit of self-flattering self deception: He would need to be protected against being exposed as a fraud. That means we would expect people to have a number of safety barriers around Him, to keep Him from being subjected to tests He couldn’t pass. Alternately, if some tests were unavoidable, people would need a ready repertoire of excuses for why He did not behave as expected. As a purely imaginary being, He would be unable to perform any task that required independent, objective existence on His part, and therefore would need a strong defense from His believers, in order to perpetuate the (self-)deception.

Other sets of premises might also be proposed, but for purposes of illustration we can compare these two hypotheses in terms of how consistent their predictions are with what we actually observe. You can defend the Christian premise that God really is speaking to people. You can try and think up some reasons why God does not manifest any of the behaviors we ought to see if He really were willing and able to speak clearly and unmistakeably to men. But as an Alethian, I don’t need to defend my fact-based beliefs because the real world is already consistent with what we would expect to see if people were only deluding themselves with fantasies and autosuggestion.

So my Alethian faith is better. It’s more consistent with real-world truth from the very start. It does not require defense or rationalization to explain away its inconsistencies, because it doesn’t have them. And having been a fervent, Bible-believing evangelical Christian for most of my adult life, I can tell you, that’s a very satisfying improvement. It’s nice to have a God, but it’s even better to have one that shows up, and is perfectly consistent with real world truth.

The problem is that if we win the argument, the other person has to be the loser before they can agree we’re right, and that’s an ego thing. It comes back to our goal: are we working to convince, or working to conquer? Are we trying to make the other person a loser, or a winner?

This is at the heart of the debate over “framing” science that was a fairly boisterous brouhaha not too long ago. Do we present science in such a way as to boldly stand up for the truth, regardless of the opposition, or do we make allowances for people’s pre-existing beliefs and preferences, and “frame” our message so as to be appealing? Do we go for conquest or conversion?

I’m thinking that the heart of a successful strategy lies in adopting an attitude that is understanding and supportive, without being compromising regarding the facts. I was a Bible-believing Christian for literally decades, and I was no less intelligent then than I am now. (Less experienced, perhaps, but not less intelligent. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!) So I can say, “Yes, I’ve been there, and let me tell you how understanding the truth has made my life better.” And I think there are a lot of others who can say the same thing.

What makes it hard, I think, is that unbelievers tend to be a bit on the defensive side, as an unpopular minority. We know we’re not going to convert anybody, so why try? The best we can hope for is to score a few good points and maybe embarrass the Establishment now and then. True victory, true conversion, is hopeless.

Or is it? We’re so used to being underdogs that it may not be obvious to us that a lot of people are a lot more open to realistic thinking than they’ve ever been before. Eight years of Christian leadership under Saint George II have opened a lot of people’s eyes and minds. Maybe we should stop assuming that everyone is going to react badly. Maybe it’s time to say, “Yes, I know what you mean, I used to feel the same way,” and then explain how our lives have become better, more meaningful, and less confused, by turning to reality-based faith instead of faith-based faith and the words of men. Maybe we can start drawing interested inquirers.

We really do have something good and exciting to offer. When I deconverted from Christianity, one of the things that amazed me the most was the virtual flood of solid and sensible answers I got to all kinds of questions that Jesus never had any really good answers for. I found new hope, new reason for living, and of course new freedom from all sorts of superstitions and prejudices that I hadn’t really realized were enslaving me until I shook them off. Losing God grieved me badly, but I have to admit, what I got in return more than outweighs my loss, since He never really showed up in the first place.

I named this blog Evangelical Realism because that’s what I’d like to see. I’d like to see Realists become bolder, more confident, and better able to share the good news that God is a myth, and life has purpose. I’m not entirely sure how to achieve what I’d like to see, but I’m hoping that others will share this vision, and that a community can emerge that will attract others also.

We should talk about that some more…

The important thing for now is that we recognize that our chief obligation is to the facts of our existence, and sometimes reality appears inconsistent and contradictory- and yet there it is.  What does one do in this situation?  Do you throw out your data?  The point being is that you must deal with your data and if you are reasonably confident that your data is legitimate it does not cease to be so just because you perceive it to be ‘inconsistent’ or contradictory.

I say all this because it is absolutely wrong headed to apply Herr Professor’s technique and attitude to supernatural claims and deeply ironic.  Herr Professor, like so many other atheists, deeply imbibes on scientism.  But science itself- meaning, the natural framework alone- provides us with contradictory notions, and yet the data compels us to consider them.  And that’s just within our natural framework!  Never mind revelatory claims!  Nature itself confounds us.

My approach is to verify the facts and to interpret them in the light of the principle that truth is consistent with itself, so it’s hard to see why it would be “wrong-headed” to apply that approach to claims about the supernatural. But I don’t think he really meant to imply that the supernatural is somehow resistant to attempts to discover the truth about it. I think he just wanted to insinuate that scientists have some kind of systematic filter that causes them to reject otherwise-valid evidence just because it happens to be “supernatural.”

This is a combination strawman and red herring. Science does not arbitrarily discard the “supernatural” because of some arbitrary “imbibing” of whatever “scientism” is supposed to mean. Science doesn’t even know the difference between natural and supernatural—it can’t, because it only deals with verifiable facts. No matter what “realm” God is supposed to come from, either His existence is a verifiable fact, or it isn’t. If we could objectively and reliably verify God’s existence, then science would merely expands its definition of the real world to include God. If not, then science has no place for God—not because of any purported bias against the “supernatural” (whatever that means), but because science only works with verifiable facts.

Like many believers, Mr. Horvath overlooks the fact that there is no canonical list of what is natural and what is supernatural. Science only knows what is or is not observable and verifiable in the real world. Science, for example, does not care whether lightning is the supernatural wrath of some offended deity, it only cares what properties and behaviors “fire from heaven” exhibits in the real world. Nor does science have any problem at all with the idea of realms or dimensions beyond the 4-dimensional space-time we commonly perceive. In fact, you can make quite a scientific career for yourself by exploring the theoretical physics of n-dimensional space and multiple universes (provided you do your homework right). An intelligent, powerful being existing in superdimensional space-time (or several such beings) would provide no obstacle whatsoever to science PROVIDED that objective and verifiable evidence could be produced for the existence of such a thing.

Science’s problem with “the supernatural” is that the label “supernatural” is only applied to “explanations” for which claims are made in the absence of evidence, as an excuse for the absence. “Supernatural” means, by definition, that science cannot verify it, because if science could and did verify it (as was the case with lightning, earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, and other alleged “supernatural” interventions), then it would cease to be categorized as supernatural, and would instead expand the definition of “natural.”

So the idea of scientists having an alleged bias against “the supernatural” is what you might call a “straw herring.” Science is biased against the unverifiable, and rightly so, since the alternative is to descend into gullibility and superstition. Horvath is correct that our chief obligation is to the facts of our existence, which is why his apologetic fails by failing to deliver verifiable facts in support of His God, and offers instead only the rationalization that perhaps this missing evidence might exist in some higher dimension that is conveniently out of reach of scientific inquiry.

Horvath tries to argue that contradictions in the Gospel are analogous to quantum physics, and phenomena such as the behavior of light (like a particle under certain circumstances, and like a wave under others). The crucial difference between these two cases, however, is that you can observe the way light behaves, so your conclusion is based on verifiable observation. God does not show up in real life, however, so you can’t call theological contradictions a case of observed behavior. The two cases are not analogous.

Nor does it help to excuse this deficiency by claiming that God behaved a certain way once upon a time. What you and I have to deal with today is the evidence as it exists today. Ancient dead men said a lot of things, and described a lot of gods (and demons and witches and magic and so on). Our obligation is to consider these stories in the light of verifiable facts, not in the light of arbitrary rationalizations based on speculation about some kind of undefined transcendent dimensionality.

Mr. Horvath made a rather bold (and IMO rather foolish) claim about discerning truth from untruth.

Now, I agree with H. Professor that identifying inconsistencies and contradictions are useful for sorting out falsehoods, but don’t agree that they are the only means.

The reason I think that’s a foolish claim is because inconsistency with the truth is, by definition, what it means for something to be false. If a thing is 100% consistent with the way the truth really is, then it’s not false in any meaningful sense of the word. Conversely, if you’re going to show that a thing is false, then what you are going to show is that there is some way in which it fails to be consistent with real-world truth. Perhaps Mr. Horvath is thinking that some omniscient deity could come along and tell us, “X is false,” but even then, the deity would have to have discovered a contradiction or inconsistency, since that’s what “X is false” means.

As I mentioned before, the big problem with Mr. Horvath’s reasoning is that it is a universal rationalization that boils down to universal agnosticism, the idea that we can’t know the truth about anything. Are there contradictions between the book of Mormon and the Bible? Well, we know from looking at quantum physics that we can see things as contradictions when they really cohere on some higher level, so the apparent contradictions don’t mean that Mormonism isn’t true. Does the Bible contradict the idea that God created some people to be gay, and approves of that sort of relationship? Maybe from our perspective it looks like a contradiction, but you know, when a sphere intersects a plane, it looks different from what it really is in 3D space, so maybe gays are right after all. Or maybe Fred Phelps is, despite the contradictions between his ministry and a whole slew of things the Bible says. You can’t ever really know whether an apparent contradiction is wrong, or if it just looks funny because it’s transcendent.

Or can you?

In the first place we need to be clear about just what constitutes a contradiction. Flat out contradictions are hard to come by. “This is A” and “This is not A” is a contradiction. “This is A” and “This is B” is not necessarily a contradiction. It may be an inconsistency, but that may just be because there isn’t currently enough information to resolve it. One must be careful. For example, “This is a bird” and “This is not a bird” is a contradiction. “This is a bird” and “This is a sparrow” is not a contradiction, and if you didn’t know that sparrows are kinds of birds I suppose you would view this as an inconsistency.

Let’s apply that to a specific case, starting with the idea that “This is A” contradicts “This is not A”. If Jesus is 100% God, then Jesus is omniscient, because God is omniscient. (“This is A.”) If Jesus is 100% man, then Jesus is not omniscient, because man is not omniscient. (“This is not A.”). Therefore “Jesus is omniscient” contradicts “Jesus is not omniscient,” QED. It does not help to say that Jesus is omniscient and is only pretending not to be, or to say that Jesus is omniscient and just isn’t using it at the moment. Hidden omniscience and unused omniscience are not the same as absent omniscience, and therefore the statement “Jesus is omniscient” is a contradiction of the statement “Jesus is not omniscient.”

Or let’s look at “This is a bird” and “This is a sparrow.” That is, “sparrow” is a specialization of the more generalized class of “birds”. In the same way, “person” is a specialization of the more general class of “beings”—all persons are beings but not all beings are persons, just like not all birds are sparrows. And God, as traditionally defined, is a specialization of “person”—all Gods are persons, but not all persons are Gods. Hence, since “God” is a specialization of the broader category of “persons” it is just as contradictory to say “Three persons are one God” as it is to say “Three birds are one sparrow.”

You can try and rescue the Trinity by changing the definition of “God,” and divorcing it from the essential Entity->Being->Person identity specialization. Maybe being God is not a matter of the essence of what an Entity/Being/Person is, but is just an attribute that can be shared in common among many, the way mankind exists as many individuals sharing a common humanity. The trouble is, if you do that, then “God” ceases to be the identity of a specific individual being, and becomes a category of multiple beings, i.e. polytheism. Or you can define “God” as an aggregation of lesser parts, rather than as an individual identity, in which case the Trinity still collapses because each Person in the Trinity becomes less than the whole God.

Or you can combine the two approaches: is Jesus 100% of what God is? If you say “yes,” then that leaves 0% for the Father and the Spirit. But if the Father is also God, then there is some portion of God that is “not-Jesus”, which means Jesus must be “not 100% of what God is.” But if Jesus and the Father are both 100% of what God is, and there is no portion of God that is either not-Jesus or not-Father, then there is no distinction between Father and Son, because what one is, the other is also (the Father can’t be “not Jesus” because the Father is God, and no portion of God can be “not Jesus”). And if you say the Father and the Son are both 100% of what God is, without being the same 100%, then you have a contradiction, because that’s 200%, and a thing cannot be more than 100% of itself.

These are the sorts of “A vs. not-A” contradictions that send apologists like Horvath looking for other dimensions in hopes of finding some place inaccessible enough that the rest of us can’t prove that there’s not some inscrutable resolution hiding there. They’re not issues of form or shape or other attributes that change appearance depending on how you look at them. They’re essential issues of identity and being—the “is or is not” which he offered as defining a “flat out” contradiction—and they make simultaneous, conflicting assertions that reflect the social, political, and theological conflict that gave them their original doctrinal form.

In the end, Horvath’s argument ends up being an Emperor’s New Clothes argument.

Herr Professor’s approach… is to insist on applying the expectations of 2D math and logic to the claim without taking into consideration that nature of the thing allegedly ‘breaking in.’ This results in circular reasoning- a logical fallacy (since we apparently care about logic), for obviously if you insist on interpreting all data naturalistically (as 2 dimensional) then you will always conclude that what you perceived has a naturalistic explanation.

Combined with the “straw herring” fallacy he injected earlier, the message here is quite clear: the only reason atheists are silly enough to perceive a contradiction between the Emperor’s apparent nakedness and the fine clothes he is supposed to be wearing is because they are only looking at things 2-dimensionally, and are failing to consider the possibility that from some lofty and transcendent point of view it might be possible to see clothes. So Christians go ahead and believe that the Emperor must be wearing clothes, because they don’t want to be foolish, like the atheists.

Let me just point out that Horvath isn’t seeing any clothes either. He has no meaningful, verifiable answers for the problems that sent him in search of other dimensions in the first place. He merely raises the possibility of the existence of an unverifiable realm in which there might exist the possibility of some means of reconciling the contradictions and inconsistencies that he can see as well as we can. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes pose that flatters believers with the assurance that they are wise enough to see what isn’t there, while slandering non-believers with the undocumented assertion that they’re ignoring vital data.

Horvath isn’t working with data drawn from some transcendent realm of existence, he’s dealing with the stories he’s heard from other men. The actual real-world data, which is as accessible to us as it is to him, happens to conflict with these stories, just as the stories conflict with themselves. We need to let the data—the objective, verifiable facts—drive our interpretation of the stories, instead of letting the stories drive our interpretation of the facts. The former is science. The latter, gullibility.

H. Professor’s failure to see how these two fundamental claims about the nature of the thing under discussion connect to the rest of the argumentation I made is the underlying mistake of both of his posts.  That we are talking about an entity that is both transcendent and immanent is absolutely critical to the rest of the argumentation.  In fact, H. Professor makes complaints that I already answered- but because he fails to see the relation between these attributes and the rest I said, he fails to recognize them.

The last sentence reveals the second prong of Horvath’s attempt to make my arguments irrelevant: because I considered each of his arguments step by step, pointing out the problems that require further defense, he accuses me of raising objections that he had already answered (in subsequent parts of his post). He apparently did not understand that I was following the flow of his own logic: that there must be a reason why the “God can’t do nonsense” argument does not suffice to end the discussion, and why Horvath feels compelled to seek other solutions. I simply laid out what those unresolved problems are, at the beginning of the discussion, so that we could approach the rest of the discussion with an appropriate background.

There is a lot more I could have said, of course, and I’m grateful to Mr. Horvath for having given me the opportunity to explore this topic further. He raises some interesting points, and clarifies some others, and, if you can bear with me through a longish post, I think we’ll see why his defense of the Gospel actually constitutes a full-fledged concession of defeat, and a retreat into universal agnosticism.

Just so there’s no misunderstanding this time, let’s lay out the core issue here. The apologetic claim being made, and to which I am responding, is this: “We can think of certain circumstances under which things might appear to be contradictory, when in fact they are not contradictory when seen from the perspective of a “higher” dimension or domain.” The implication is that, seen from some “higher plane” (that you and I can’t see from), the contradictions in Christian theology aren’t actually contradictions.

Despite accusing me of misunderstanding him, Horvath agrees that this is indeed the issue we need to deal with.

The purpose of the Flatland example was not to say that this was how we relate to God, but rather to show how the rules of logic can appear to be violated in one case but when taken from a ‘higher’ plane can be perceived as nonetheless sound…

The whole point of the Flatland example was that what might seem to be inconsistent and contradictory may not in fact be so.

By the way, this is actually a fairly ancient rationalization, and all the “immanence this” and “transcendence that” is just to lend an aura of sophistication and intellectualism to the old excuse that “God works in mysterious ways (and therefore doesn’t need to make sense).”

The problem with the Flatland analogy, however, is that the intersection of a sphere with a plane produces no actual or apparent contradiction, even from the Flatlander’s point of view. The sphere that intersects the plane does not produce a circle whose circumference is less than its diameter, or which possesses four corners joined at 90 degree angles, or in any other way violates or conflicts with the laws of 2D geometry. It produces an ordinary circle whose radius varies from zero to n back to zero again, over a certain period of time. No contradiction, hence no basis for Mr. Horvath’s analogy.

I don’t think a sphere is really the best volumetric solid for this particular analogy anyway. Let’s help him out a little by suggesting a more complex shape: a torus. Imagine a torus (donut shape) standing upright (like a car tire) and slowly sinking down into the plane of Flatland until its center lies within the plane. As it moves, it will first form a point, then an ellipse that gradually grows bigger, then the middle of the ellipse (across the minor axis) will begin to narrow into more of an hourglass shape (as the hole in the torus approaches the plane).

At a certain point, the “waist” of the hourglass shape will shrink until it becomes a figure-8: two ellipses touching at their tips. Then the two ellipses will separate and move apart, becoming more and more circular as they get farther apart, until at last they are two perfect circles. Again, no violations or contradictions of any laws of geometry. The curves may be more complex, but neither of the resulting circles have square corners or diameters greater than their circumferences or any such thing.

But now, something strange does happen. A Flatlander approaches and tries to push the two circles together so that they touch again. He can’t do it. Pushing one circle makes the other circle slide away. He checks all around to see if any lines connect the two circles, but they don’t. As far as he can see, there is no connection in all of Flatland between the two circles (and there isn’t), yet the behavior of the two circles is consistently linked, such that the distance between them is constant. From a 3D perspective, it all seems quite natural: the Flatlander is pushing the whole torus, and when one side moves the other side moves as well, because its part of the same torus.

Now, if all we wanted was an excuse to ignore inconsistencies in what men claim about God, we could stop right here. We could use this “mysterious” torus to justify the conclusion that the problems in the Gospel must be the same sort of thing. Of course, that would be taking things backwards: in Flatland, the observations justify concluding the existence of a higher dimension. That’s quite a different thing from mere speculation about a higher dimension being enough to justify assuming that the observations must actually have happened.

Since we don’t care to fall into that particular converse fallacy, let’s think some more about what Flatland tells us. First of all, it tells us that truth is consistent with itself. We may not understand that self-consistency all the time, and perhaps we might not even perceive it, but the self-consistency of the truth transcends and is immanent within all dimensions of reality and all domains of real existence. The two circles don’t seem to have any connection, as far as a Flatlander can see, but the consistency of their behavior reflects the consistency of the truth itself, across n-dimensional space, and allows the mathematically-inclined Flatlander to draw specific and reasonable conclusions about the 3rd dimension.

In fact, the Flatlander can even make some predictions about the behavior of 3D objects in 2D space. For example, if a sphere moves through a plane at a constant speed, producing a circle of varying radius, you can plot the radius of the circle as a function of time and produce a sine wave. If the Flatland scientist observes a number of circles exhibiting this peculiar-yet-predictable pattern of variation, it would be consistent with the predicted variations for a 3D sphere moving through a 2D plane, and the scientist’s hypothesis would have some supporting evidence.

Likewise, if God were a being from a higher dimension and were interacting with this one, we could make similar observations. For example, just as the Flatlander observed that there was a superplanar connection between two apparently unconnected circles, we could observe God’s “super-natural” existence by the connection He would make between believers. Take two believers and isolate them from one another so that God is the only possible avenue of communication between them, then dictate a short text passage to one of them, and have God relay the text to the other. When the other believer writes down the text correctly, we have the same “mysteriously-connected circles” that the Flatlander does, and there’s a reason for us to conclude, if not God, then at least some hitherto undocumented connection.

In fact, we wouldn’t even need to do the experiment, since this commonality would arise as an ordinary matter of course. All God would need to do is not take supernatural measures to prevent us from noticing the mysterious connection that consistently linked believers together in ways that were verifiably more than just the product of ordinary happenstance. And there are any number of other ways in which the transcendent existence of God could and would verifiably manifest itself even in our allegedly inferior plane. But obviously none of these things are actually happening, which is why Mr. Horvath devotes so much effort to building a case for the answers lying in some speculative and inaccessible “higher plane.”

This is a key point, by the way. If the contradictions in Christian theology could be resolved by answers that lay within this realm of existence, Horvath would have no need to seek some “higher” plane in which such answers might possibly exist. He’s not proposing this speculation because God’s behavior can be observed to show a consistent pattern of superdimensionality that would justify a conclusion of divine transendence. He can’t: God does not show up in real life to give us any transcendent behavior to find patterns in. No, the problem is that Christian theology has a number of glaring inconsistencies and contradictions for which there is no resolution in this “dimension,” and that’s why Horvath needs to postulate the existence of some other, higher, and less accessible realm in which such answers might possibly be hiding.

Horvath takes me to task for failing to address his analogy about the relationship between an author and his characters, so let me rectify that omission right now. This, sadly, is a singularly unfortunate argument for him to make, since the God we’re talking about here is one who only shows up (as far as the real world is concerned) as a character in the stories men tell. We are not observing a God who shows up in real life and whose behavior and characteristics are puzzling to our limited minds. All we can observe in real life is that men tell us things about God that are inconsistent both with themselves and with objective reality.

Horvath himself is participating in the story-building that props up the Gospel. He’s taking the story as it has been told so far, and is using his imagination to try and come up with some kind of scenario that will make the story sound more plausible. If you’ve ever participated in any kind of group fiction-writing (or role play, which can be very similar), you know that this is exactly how fiction is produced. Just imagine something, and if it sounds plausible, add it to the story, and make the story better. That’s how you make a story get better over time, and coincidentally, it’s a theologian’s job description as well.

Trying to patch up the holes in the Gospel, though, only serves to demonstrate that the Gospel does indeed have holes. And that’s the fatal flaw in Horvath’s argument by analogy. When a person creates a story, they’re not creating reality, they’re manipulating abstracted concepts about reality, in ways that may or may not reflect some of the perfect self-consistency of genuine truth. Ultimately, though, all fiction fails at some point to be as consistent with real-world truth as real-world truth is with itself. When humans imagine a story, therefore, what they are doing is not analogous to creating a genuine reality.

In other words, Horvath’s analogy is false, because fiction writing fails to parallel reality at the point where it needs to be strictly parallel in order to be valid. The real world is not merely less self-contradictory that fiction, it is non-self-contradictory. You cannot correctly use the discrepancies between fiction and reality to argue for a corresponding discrepancy between reality and some supposed “higher” plane, because reality doesn’t have the inconsistencies and contradictions that define what it means to be fiction.

Horvath would like to argue otherwise, but my goodness, I’m over 2K words already, and there’s still a bunch of misconceptions and misdirections that I need to correct! I’d better split this into two parts and come back for more tomorrow.

Pantheism, and perhaps paganism (witches) would hold that all things are GOD or have GOD in them. Pantheist generally have a high respect for life as all life is GOD. The question of contradiction is based more on definition then everything but there are still contradictions within the world view. The most apparent contradiction is that if everything is GOD than nothing is GOD. Even if you define GOD in a very general term as say a life force (The Jedi God), the religion can not account for anything because the life force GOD has no power to create. Therefore the pantheistic god is unimportant and totally meaningless. In a nutshell pantheists stating that everything is god is a meaningless statement and meaningless as a world view.

My own view is that when people think they are perceiving God, what they are really perceiving is the complexity and unpredictability of Reality itself, filtered through the social instincts we use in dealing with people, who are also complex and unpredictable. In other words, Reality, when filtered through human eyes, becomes God, at least in our perceptual experience. This is a much more personal variety of pantheism than is usual, and also a more humanistic view. God, as “God,” exists only because humanity exists to experience Her.

Since this is a variety of pantheism (albeit atypical), let’s consider how schooloffish’s objections apply. First of all, do I have a high respect for life? Yes, of course. I myself happen to be alive, and I recommend it. So far so good. What about the objection that if everything is God then nothing is God? That’s easy enough, let’s just rephrase it. Is it true that if everything is real then nothing is real? When you consider that God is Reality, you can see that the two are really the same question. It’s a moot point, however, because not everything is real: fictions, fantasies, errors, lies, etc. are all not real and therefore not God.

Schooloffish’s objection, therefore, is based on a misconception. It’s not literally every conceivable thing that is God or part of God. Only real things are part of God. Therefore it is quite meaningful to say that God is Reality, as distinct from non-real things like delusions, frauds, unmarried spouses, and so on.

As for God’s power to create, that’s easy too. God creates by becoming. If you’re used to the magical stories men tell about the gods they have imagined, this might seem odd at first, but if you think about it, every “creation” we see in real life is an instance of one thing becoming something else. Oils and pigments become paint. Fibers become threads and threads become canvas. Canvas and paints become a painting. One real thing becomes another. Even stories and fantasies draw on concepts and experiences that we derive from the real world (otherwise they’d be meaningless).

There are two possibilities: either God is Reality itself, and creates by becoming, or else God is part of something greater than Himself, some larger context that contains both everything that God is, and every created thing that is not God. Reality is always at least as great as God, because any God that is not part of Reality is not a real God, by definition, and any God that is real is at least part of Reality. Either God is Reality, or God is something less than Reality. So schooloffish’s God, Who creates things which are not God, is necessarily an inferior being. By the very act of creating, He demonstrates Himself to be only a part and not the Whole.

Naturally, if you are going to claim that the pantheistic God is meaningless, you must also complain that reality itself is meaningless. As we pointed out before, God and Reality are really the same thing; “God” is simply a personification that helps us humans cope with the incomprehensible complexity and uncertainty of the cosmos. Just because we cannot fully grasp the totality of Reality, however, does not mean that Reality (the pantheistic God) is meaningless. Indeed, we would not know what “meaning” was, if Reality did not teach us.

The pantheistic God is not only meaningful, She is the source of all meaning. Go ahead: try to think up something meaningful that is not based on or derived from Her. What words will you use to describe this meaning? All of our words are expressions and concepts and relationships that we have acquired through our experiences of Reality. Even the charismatic believer babbling “in tongues” is merely mimicking the experience of making incomprehensible noises with their mouthes.

The pantheistic worldview is thus quite rational and self-consistent, provided we recognize that our concept of God is a human approximation for the intricacies and uncertainties of Reality itself. We cannot, by flattery (worship) or pathos (prayer), influence God to grant us things we have not earned and don’t deserve. But even Christians know this, or eventually learn it: God’s ways are not man’s ways, and we have to learn what to pray for. Prayer does not change God, it changes the pray-er. By praying, we learn what we can and cannot expect from God (i.e. Reality), and this helps us.

What the pantheist knows explicitly and sensibly, the Christian sooner or later learns, somewhat foggily. Reality is what it is, no matter how much or how little you pray, worship, serve, or otherwise attempt to get the Divine Attention. Christians are continually surprised by the fact that their God always behaves more like Alethea than like the God of the Bible, and are forced to repeat the mantra, “God works in mysterious ways.” The pantheistic view, however, does not need to invoke “mysterious ways” because its worldview is already self-consistent. Pantheism, therefore, does a much better job than Christianity at passing schooloffish’s worldview test.

We’re going to cover a lot more ground now that we’ve gotten past the introduction and into the point-by-point presentation. Following their previously announced outline, Geisler and Turek start off with Chapter One, “Can We Handle The Truth?” This chapter addresses three questions: (a) Is there such a thing as “the truth”? (b) Can we know the truth? and (c) What does it mean that “the opposite of true is false”?

As you might expect, there’s not too much to object to in their discussion of the first point. As an evangelical realist, I agree wholeheartedly with the premise that objective reality, aka “The Truth,” really does exist independently of our sometimes fallible perceptions of it. As Geisler and Turek point out, if someone tries to tell you that there’s no such thing as the truth, all you need to do is ask them “Is that true?” If truth does not exist, then there’s no way their denial of the truth can be true. It’s a self-defeating proposition.

Alas, Geisler and Turek seem (or pretend) to be unaware of the fact that denial of objective truth is just as much a Christian problem as a secular one. A few weeks ago I was listening to Focus on the Family during my commute home, and the guest speaker (Josh McDowell, if I recall correctly) was lamenting the widespread prevalence among Christians of the idea that truth is relative to what you want to believe. This notion is particularly seductive for Christians because it means that the Christian faith cannot be demonstrated to be false. Denial of objective truth gives Christians a license to continue believing in Jesus despite the many real-world problems and inconsistencies that plague Christianity, and that’s making it difficult for traditional apologists to combat the growth of Christian relativism.

Geisler and Turek, regrettably, try to portray postmodernism as a purely non-Christian phenomenon.

Although few would admit it, our rejection of religious and moral truth is often on volitional rather than intellectual grounds–we just don’t want to be held accountable to any moral standards or religious doctrine.

Notice the Emperor’s New Clothes argument above: “The reason people do not see the value of our religion is because they are insufficiently virtuous.”  Yes, go ahead and pat yourselves on the back for being so noble and humble as to put your faith in what men tell you about God’s moral standards!

Contrary to what is being taught in many public schools, truth is not relative but absolute.

The public schools are grades K-12, in the USA at least, and I think you would be hard pressed to find any public school curriculum that taught that two plus two was equal to whatever you sincerely believe it to equal, or that the War of 1812 was fought, oh, roughly whenever you think it ought to have been fought. If you want wishy-washy post-modern relativism, you’ll need to visit the theology and philosphy departments (not the science departments!), and maybe some of the sociology and anthropology departments, in some of the state and private universities around the world. It is being taught, and it is nonsense, but it’s not (as Geisler and Turek might like to imply) a state-run indoctrination of impressionable minors.

Geisler and Turek don’t seem to realize it, but they’re digging a grave for Christianity in this chapter. By basing their argument on the existence of truth, and by agreeing that “Ideas have consequences” (p. 40), they’re paving the way for a demonstration of the fact that Christianity is not consistent with real-world truth. If there is a real-world truth, and if this truth is consistent with itself (as it must be in any rational cosmos), then it’s possible to determine whether Christianity is true or false by objectively and scientifically examining whether it is consistent with itself and with real-world truth.

Halloween may be over, but I guarantee this approach is going to come back to haunt them.

[I]n Dawkins’s The God Delusion, he argues that religion is a ‘misfire’ of an evolutionary trait, much like how a moth is drawn to its death by a flame because it is used to the sun being a very safe distance away. The problem with the ‘misfire’ way of thinking, however, is that all moths are attracted to the flames. What we want to know is how our atheistic friends managed to rise above their ‘misfire.’ Are they claiming that they are evolutionarily superior to the rest of us? Perhaps they are a new species? If not, they should be subject to the same ‘misfire’ that the religionists are drawn to. We can then turn the tables on them and suggest that perhaps their version of reality is likewise a ‘misfire.’

Mr. Horvath, like so many other believers, has mistaken the existence of the question for the non-existence of the answer. Let’s have a look at these, shall we?

“If God had meant for man to fly, He would have given him wings.” How many times have we, as a species, run into hereditary limitations, only to overcome them by careful thought and hard work? How is it that we, as a species, are able to overcome limitations on our ability to perceive things accurately (or at all!), through careful application of the scientific method?

The answer lies in the oft-cited principle we use here at ER, which is that the truth is consistent with itself. Illusions are not consistent with the truth (i.e. with reality). By definition, that’s what makes them “illusions” rather than accurate perceptions. The self-consistency of the truth is what enables us to rise above such perceptual misfires as might otherwise lead us to believe that the earth is flat, or that lightning is fire from heaven, or that software bugs are caused by invisible, intelligent gremlins. By careful application of the scientific method, we can expose the inconsistencies that betray the difference between illusion and reality, and thus identify and eliminate the inaccuracy far better than our hereditary limitations would ordinarily allow.

Mr. Horvath is certainly welcome to try and “turn the tables” on us by applying the scientific method to the claims of religion. The scientific method is, after all, a set of tools designed to search for and evaluate a theory’s consistency with real-world truth, so if Christianity really is true, we ought to find a documentable consistency between Christianity and reality, and between Christianity and itself. Science is the ideal tool for such endeavors, because it applies a methodology that is self-correcting and which has built-in mechanisms that compensate for perceptual bias.

Faith, by contrast, maximizes the impact of such perceptual limitations, which is why you see so much inconsistency in the Christian church, as a whole, today. And not just Christianity, but virtually all superstitious, theistic religions. We have the mental tools available to enable us to rise above evolutionary “misfires,” just as we have clothes to keep us warm in the absence of inherited fur. But some people choose to run around naked anyway, physically and mentally. It’s not that atheists are somehow superior to believers. The same options are available to all, and believers are more than welcome to pick up the same tools, and use them.

By the way, I must disagree with Dawkins as regards religion being a “misfire.” Religion is an evolutionary adaptation to the limitations of human thinking: there are simply too many variables that affect our happiness and well-being, and too much uncertainty and complexity in the circumstances that affect us, for us to be able to logically and analytically process it all. We are social beings, and we have social instincts that help us to manage our relationships with one another–relationships that are also complex, uncertain, and important to our happiness and well-being. Religion helps manage the information overload by reducing life to a set of social relationships, thus adding the “processing power” of our social instincts to the problem of how to deal with everything you need to know to get by.

This in and of itself is not a maladaptation; the problem arises when people begin to project their own preferences, agendas, and prejudices onto the invisible spirit or spirits who putatively control the otherwise impersonal aspects of our existence. “Somebody up there must like me” is not a terrible world view, but “God hates fags” is a problem (not to say a travesty!). I have no objections to religion, per se, and I’ve even got one myself which actually works better for me than Christianity did. The important thing is that religion needs to be informed by science, and not cling to primitive dogmas and obvious myths. Treat it as your personal handle, as an admitted oversimplification, as something that does not impose any moral or religious obligations on anyone else, and religion can be a good thing.

As an exemplary participant in the prison’s faith-based dormitory program, I was selected to be interviewed by the Capitol press corps. As a former newspaper reporter, I longed to expose the corruption of the faith-based program by many inmates, as well as the abuses of some corrections officers…

But my desire to get out of prison alive and on time overruled my inner crusading journalist. So rather than an exposé, I gave the reporters a testimony.

Tom Seibert, a former journalist convicted on drug charges, describes his experiences in the faith-based prison program at Wakulla Correctional Institution near Tallahasee, Florida. Though all participants (inmates) signed a statement promising to uphold a Christian code of conduct, few kept their promise. Instead, tables set up for studying the Bible were used for playing cards. Gangsta rap, not Christian music, blared from the PA system, and inmates weren’t even allowed to watch Christian programs (?!). Misconduct was overlooked by the guards, and chaplains were hard to keep.

It was not unusual to find a razor blade concealed in a Bible.

Most of the officers turned a blind eye, a deaf ear and a dead conscience to this decidedly unfaithful behavior. Inmates housed in other dormitories called ours the “fake-based” dorm, and this was not a misnomer.

New chaplains were periodically hired to oversee the program, and each tried unsuccessfully to impose some semblance of discipline among the “participants.” But the so-called convict code was so deeply entrenched in many of these men that anyone even seen speaking with a chaplain was labeled a “snitch.”

Nor did the guards limit themselves to simply ignoring misconduct by inmates against each other:

Prison inmates at Wakulla and throughout Florida are treated worse than the terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

Officers routinely shout and swear at them. They sleep on skinny mattresses on hard steel bunks with no safety steps or railings. They work outdoors for long hours with little or no protection from the cold, rain, sun and ubiquitous mosquitoes. And they are often forced to quickly consume their meals as if they were in a food-eating contest. This results in mass indigestion and massive food throwaways at taxpayers’ expense.

Yet despite the appalling conditions, Seibert felt compelled, for his own safety and timely release, to give the program only positive ratings while he was still imprisoned there.

I testified how God had sent a parade of chaplains, faith-based volunteers and fellow Christian inmates into my life to demonstrate his infinite love and redeeming grace. I talked about the many edifying religious courses I had taken in the program, such as “Alpha,” “Experiencing God” and “40 Days of Purpose.” I recounted praying and studying the Bible with other inmates who had undergone the same existential transformation as I had.

These men were former addicts, alcoholics, burglars, robbers, drug dealers and child molesters who had found mercy and meaning in their lives by receiving the Lord Jesus Christ as their resurrected Savior.

I concluded by telling the press how the chaplains and church volunteers had generously written letters on my behalf to help me re-establish my writing career as a Christian journalist.

Faith-based programs are all about producing this kind of “testimony,” even if it has to be effectively coerced. Imagine how different this story would be if there actually was a loving God who cared enough to get involved in this kind of ministry, and bless it. Sadly, while faith-based programs are good at producing a superficial appearance of success, those who endure such treatment know how hollow such “results” really are.

The Unapologetic Encyclopedia is going to be an ongoing project for a while. From time to time, I’m going to look at the various apologetic arguments used to support Christianity, and show where their error lies. My goal is ultimately to accumulate a comprehensive reference list of Christian apologetic arguments and their refutations, similar to the Index of Creationist Claims. The “Encyclopedia” link at the top of the blog points to an index page that lists each apologetic in alphabetical order, with links to the post(s) in which that particular argument is refuted.

The new “XFiles Friday” feature doesn’t have anything to do with any popular TV shows (think “X as in Xmas”), but instead serves as a handy place to put my blog postings about the various books of apologetics (XFiles) that I’ll be reviewing. I was going to make such reviews the main feature of this blog, but unfortunately I’m not finding the time to do a proper rebuttal every day, so I’ll have to be content with a weekly feature.

Readers are encouraged to send in apologetics-related material (individual arguments or entire books) for either or both of the above. You can leave your suggestions in the comments section below.

It is not religion that makes men fanatics; it is the power of the human desire for justice, so often partisan and perverted. That fanatical desire can be found in both religion and atheism. In the contest between religion and atheism, the strength of religion is to recognize two apparently contrary forces in the human soul: the power of injustice and the power, nonetheless, of our desire for justice. The stubborn existence of injustice reminds us that man is not God, while the demand for justice reminds us that we wish for the divine. Religion tries to join these two forces together.

The weakness of atheism, however, is to take account of only one of them, the fact of injustice in the case of Epicurean atheism or the desire for justice in our Enlightenment atheism. I conclude that philosophy today–and science too–need not only to tolerate and respect religion, but also to learn from it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it were really true that religion was nothing more than a philosophical recognition of the conflict between the desire for justice and the desire for the power that comes from injustice? If religion could just do that, and do it successfully, then indeed philosophers and scientists could learn something worthwhile from it.

Sadly, when we see religion at work today, it is not so much a matter of balancing justice and injustice, it’s a matter of metaphorical, and sometimes literal, war. We see Christians pushing constitutional amendments to make it illegal for gays to marry the person they love, and insisting that only Christian prayers should be offered in the House and Senate. We see jihads against non-Muslims, and counter-attacks that are crusades in all but name. We see parents indulging in ritual mutilation of their children’s genitals, out of a superstitious fear that God wants everyone to be circumcised.

Somehow the thirst for justice, in practice, seems to get lost in the pursuit of Christian supremacy (or Muslim supremacy, or whatever). The problem that Hitchens and Dawkins point out is not that religion fails to address the conflict between justice and injustice, but that Big Religion, in general, does a remarkably poor job of handling the conflict. And with respect to Professor Mansfield, the solution is not to just embrace superstition and self-contradiction. Yes, injustice is a thorny problem, but don’t you think we just might stand a better chance of finding a workable solution if we base our search on the objective reality we all have in common, instead of butting heads over whose subjective fantasies are better than whose?

We all inhabit and experience the same real world, regardless of worldview. The law of gravity, for example, pulls downwards with equal strength upon both believer and unbeliever. Different believers may have different opinions about realms outside of the objective reality we all experience in common, but none of these other realms have enough influence on us to make a measureable impact on the world we all share.

Whatever answers we find–whatever workable answers we find–are going to come from the reality that exists outside of our perceptions and speculations. The great strength of the atheists is that this reality, objective reality, is the only reality they acknowledge. Their whole attention is focused on the one thing we all have in common. It is the religionists who ought to be joining the atheists in exploring the real world, which we all have a share in, rather than calling on the atheists to join the religionists in the pursuit of other “realities” which contradict not only each other, but themselves.

“There’s so much to government today. It’s so incredibly complex.

He continued, “We’ve piled program upon program upon program until it becomes unworkable. But every program has a special interest group. And everybody’s been sucked into the earmarks thing…its stealing money made palatable, because we’re robbing it from the taxpayers to give to our constituents, so it’s okay.”

“They threw out Republicans who promised to clean things up and didn’t… deservedly so. Conservatives have an obligation that goes beyond party politics. It is to preserve the moral order. If you begin to abuse the moral order, I don’t care which party you’re in, throw ‘em out.”

Colson likes the job that President Bush has done so far, despite the setbacks in Iraq. And he says the president has been damaged by the political culture in Washington.

That’s right, the last national elections had nothing to do with the quagmire in Iraq, the organized assaults against the Bill of Rights, or the Plame-gate cover-up. No, the real problem is that the government is spending too much money on social services, and Republicans failed to cut back sufficiently on all that spending. Curiously, spending money to overthrow a powerless government, at the cost of untold human suffering and of a weakened military, does not seem to count against the Republican’s self-imposed mandate to preserve “moral order.”

This is a good example of what “worldview” means. Colson may look at the same planet as the rest of us, but obviously he sees a completely unrelated world.

Update: Colson’s remarks appear particularly ironic when compared with this post from Pharyngula…

Some of my readers will be unfamiliar with the idea of Reality as a god, but if you think about it, Reality has many of the traditional attributes of deity, and indeed most of our traditional ideas about God are merely garbled perceptions of the incomprehensible complexity and enormity of Reality.

For example, Reality is omnipresent (exists in all places) and omnipotent (all-powerful). Wherever you go in the entire universe, Reality is already there, and no matter what you do, you cannot violate any of Reality’s rules for how things work. Reality is, in fact, the only god powerful enough to truly claim that no disobedience is possible. Do what you will, you cannot help but obey the laws of Reality (and if you think otherwise, the consequences will be uncomfortable at best, if not downright disastrous!).

Reality is also eternal, since if there was ever any time when Reality did not exist, then nothing else would exist either. Reality is also the Creator, having produced everything which exists today. Reality is the “thing than which no greater can be imagined,” as Anselm once put it. Any lesser God we might imagine would be either a non-existent God, or a God which was part of Reality. God therefore either is Reality, or is merely a part of Reality. Reality, therefore, must be greater than or equal to any existing God.

Now, one of our failures as limited, finite beings is that there are limits to what we are capable of holding in our minds. Deity is too vast and too complex for us to comprehend fully and precisely; we necessarily reduce God to a representation that is small enough to fit inside our minds. But how can we represent something as complex, something as knowable yet unpredictable, as Reality itself, in all its fullness and detail?

Answer: by analogy. The most complicated, subtle, familiar, and yet unpredictable things we know of are other human beings, and therefore we imagine God as a being Who is, in many ways, similar to a human-type being. Though this approach is not precisely accurate, it’s not entirely wrong. It’s merely a concession to our own limitations. God (that is, Reality) is and always has been beyond our powers of comprehension. Thus, the fact that Reality is not a “person,” in the traditional sense, is not an argument against the deity of Reality. Traditionally, men have viewed their gods as human-like persons, but even they will admit, if pressed, that the truth about God is more complicated than that.

It is with great pride and pleasure, therefore, that I present to you our patron deity, Reality, to whom we ascribe all honor and glory, and whose knowledge we commend to every honest soul.