Science Vs. Religion: Once More, With Feeling

Despite it’s antiquity and the recycled, warmed-over arguments, we just can’t seem to get away from the science vs. religion debate.  Here is a trailer for a new film (documentary?) in which Richard Dawkins and another guy go around the country talking about how awesome science is and, as a corollary, how illogical and silly religion must be…

It seems that neither religious folks nor science folks (or, more accurately, people who have traded faith in a higher power for faith in the scientific method) can get away from this unnecessarily binary view of the search for truth.  We’ve been doing it a couple of hundred years and many on both sides seem unable to find a bridge.  Even the most crusty scientist should be able to admit that science cannot tell us everything – especially the deep questions, the questions about being, about why (which are much more interesting to me than the “how?” questions on which these debates so often focus).  And for Christians – here I must admit no faculty for speaking as a general “religious” person as if such a category existed – we have no need to fear science.  The search for truth is ultimately a search for the One who is the way, truth, and life.  Many scientists of the early modern period understood their work as seeking to understand God’s ordering of the universe.  There is no reason science should not still be viewed as such a helpful discipline.  In our day, few have bridged the gap between legitimate science and faithful Christianity.  One who has done it well is Alister McGrath, and we should hope that his tribe increases.

I hope that the brilliant Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart takes the time to review this film.  He has been one of the most vociferous interlocutors with the whole “New Atheism” phenomenon, and his critiques are withering.  Take, for instance, this bit from a First Things piece:

“What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel.”

Such words can only be written by someone who has taken the time to read, appreciate, and understand that which he critiques.  One can only hope that the evangelically-inclined atheists will one day stop navel-gazing enough to actually encounter faith with honesty and integrity.  We should hope for the same among believers, for we have nothing to fear.

For now, here is a good, civil dialogue between Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cardinal and Chief Inquisitor of the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins.  It’s worth your time, regardless of where you fall in these debates:

Politicians as Rice

I greatly miss Chappelle’s Show.  It was one of the funniest shows on television before the eponymous comedian, concerned with the direction of his program, walked off the show and took a sabbatical halfway through the 3rd season (leaving behind a multimillion dollar contract).  One of his friends, Neal Brennan, was also a writer on the show.  In looking into the demise of the show, I came across this great nugget from an interview with Brennan, himself a standup comic:

Brennan met President Barack Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011 and says he seemed like a cool, personable guy. “I just wish he was better.” Brennan’s dissatisfaction with the president is more reflective of his views of politics in general. “I thought a black president would make a difference,” Brennan says. “Maybe what I’ve come to realize is that politicians are like rice. Whether it’s brown rice or white rice, it’s empty calories either way.”

Yet another reason why Jesus is my candidate.

All Religion is in Trouble…Even Atheism

It is commonplace in the rubble of the mainline denominations these days to drone on and on about the sorry state of the church in the West.  We go to workshops, blog, read books, and wallow in anxious conversation all with the same subtitle: “How do we not die?”  Not exactly a vivifying conversation.  We think the non-religious forces are winning; that secularism is successful and popular “New” Atheism is ascendant.  But is atheism doing so well?

If you actually listen to the things that atheists are saying, there is little here that is a challenge to faith of any brand, much less that of Christians.  Indeed, atheist literature and public discourse tends to be just as vain as popular Christian discourse.  So laments Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart:

…it seems obvious to me that the peculiar vapidity of New Atheist literature is simply a reflection of the more general vapidity of all public religious discourse these days, believing and unbelieving alike. In part, of course, this is because the modern media encourage only fragmentary, sloganeering, and emotive debates, but it is also because centuries of the incremental secularization of society have left us with a shared grammar that is perhaps no longer adequate to the kinds of claims that either reflective faith or reflective faithlessness makes.

Yes, reading Hart for long periods of time will hurt your brain.  He is as acerbic as he is brilliant, which is a feat.  Nonetheless, I think his premise is hard to argue against.  Case in point: an interview I read over on MMA Weekly with Seth Petruzelli, an MMA fighter (most famous for knocking Kimbo Slice off of any serious fan’s radar) who happens to be an outspoken atheist.  He explains how his first conflict with religious members of the MMA community came on the set of the reality show The Ultimate Fighter:

The first time it actually came up was in season 2 of The Ultimate Fighter in the house. Marcus Davis, he’s a pretty hardcore Christian and a lot of the guys in the house were the same way, especially with Matt Hughes being one of the coaches. There’s a scene actually in The Ultimate Fighter house where me and Matt kind of get into an argument for about 15 minutes or so about the bible, and obviously I think the bible [sic] is a bunch of BS, and that obviously struck a nerve with him.

To be an atheist is to – “obviously” – believe that the Bible is “BS”?  That is a stronger claim than many Christians would make about the holy books of other communities.  I have certainly never taught my people that the Koran or the Vedas are “BS,” even though I would not say that these words are inspired of the Triune God.  And yes, if you dismiss the word of God as BS, them’s probably going to be fighting words (unless you’ve been reading a lot of John Howard Yoder).  Petruzelli further describes the conflict with an outspoken Christian fighter:

We kind of had an argument back and forth, with me coming out on top obviously cause you can’t argue with science. Science trumps faith in all aspects of everything. But they had group bible sessions in the house and I just kind of had a little dialogue obviously with Marcus Davis too about it, all kinds of stuff in the bible [sic].

Is this the kind of reflection that the supposedly super-rational New Atheism is producing?  At what point will the hackneyed ‘science vs. faith’ thesis be done with?  Granted, there are Christians that still have not gotten the memo that science is not something to fear.  But we’re working on it.  There are plenty of Christians working in scientific fields who are faithful people.  Christians need not shun the search for truth in whatever form.  Thoughtful atheists should see the dialogue not as science vs. faith but atheism vs. various kinds of theism, Christianity among them.  The scientific method, which, if my high school biology class was right, deals with observable, verifiable, and repeatable phenomena, can neither confirm nor deny the presence of a deity.  Even psuedo-scientific work that purports to “prove” a divine intelligence can only get us to a vaguely theistic being, not the Triune God revealed in the Bible.  Neither faith nor non-faith should claim to be provable by science.  Doing so, whether one is a Christian or an atheist, belies a fundamental perversion of what faith actually is.  To whit:

Faith to me is intellectual bankruptcy…I have faith in my fighting ability because there’s facts to back it up and that I can fight. Blind faith? Like I said, it’s intellectual bankruptcy, it’s a cop out. Tim Minchin has a great quote about this. ‘Science adjusts its views on what is observed, and faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.’

Intellectual bankruptcy?  Ouch.  That aside, Petruzelli confuses confidence with faith.  “I have faith in my fighting ability because [there are] facts to back it up.”  If there are facts to back “it” up, then what you have is not faith.  As Hebrews 11:1 makes clear,  “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  There may be evidence of faith, indeed, fruits of the Spirit, or the inner witness so important to Wesley and other spiritual writers, but this is not the kind of evidence that will be observable under a microscope.  It’s also just barely worth pointing out that there is no monolithic “science,” and that the work of Thomas Kuhn and others shows how often scientists disagree on, willfully distort, and ignore supposed facts.  Scientific revolutions often only occur after a long, hard fight about what indeed the science is saying.

It seems somewhat unfair to criticize Petruzelli, who, as far as I know, has no theological training.  I don’t mean to be unnecessarily harsh, and I like to think that I’m equally critical of poor arguments made by Christians.  He is, however, making some striking claims in a very public space, and I think that makes confrontation both fair and necessary.  The Church must have answers to such arguments, for in the years to come they will only get louder.

If only a serious dialogue with atheists was possible.  When I read folks like Nietzche, I am challenged to think about my faith, to really question its basics.  This is a service to the faithful, for our critics really are our friends.  To return to a fighting metaphor: if Nietzche’s arguments are useful sparring partners, then, by comparison, the shallow vitriol of the New Atheists can only be described as the vain thrashing of an infant fighting off a clean diaper.

We’ll let a more skilled combatant fight the closing round.  Hart expresses disdain for such a-thinking (see what i did there?) with adroitness, arguing that today’s atheists

 …lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel. So long as one can choose one’s conquests in advance, taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one without a Waterloo, the other without the clap)…A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

May God grant us the blessing of able conversation partners, and save us from shallow faith, whether it is our own, or that of others.

P.S.  For the record, I think Damon Martin’s piece drastically overstates the place of religion in the fight game.  Atheists may be offended that there are so many nods to Jesus in the cage, but beyond post-fight shout-outs and mildly offensive clothing, I don’t think there is much substantive Christianity there.  More likely is that, in an increasingly secularized world, many folks in the media are frankly caught off guard when someone like Benson Henderson (or Tim Tebow) makes public statements of faith.  Rather like the pagans of bygone (?) eras, cultural observers and elites are surprised to find a small cadre of men and women who will not sacrifice to the official cultus and, rather offensively, talk about God beyond the privacy of their own closet.

A History of Philosophy in One Paragraph

Courtesy of Marva Dawn:

A premodern umpire once said, “There’s balls and there’s strikes strikes, and I calls them as they is.”  Believing in an absolute truth that could be found, earlier societies looked for evidence to discover that truth.  A modern umpire would say instead, “There’s balls and there’s strikes, and I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em.”  For the modernist, truth is to be found in one’s own experience.  Now a postmodern umpire would say, “There’s balls and there’s strikes, and they ain’t nothin’ till I calls ‘em.”  No truth exists unless we create it. (p. 36)

That covers a lot of ground in just a few sentences.  Just one of the many gems I’ve discovered thus far in Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down.

Vaccinating the Church Against Modernity: The Hartford Appeal, Then and Now

In 1975, a group of folks got together to refute 13 heresies of modernism affecting the church(-es).  I don’t know enough to say if they represented a “who’s-who” at the time, but they certainly do now: signees include George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, Avery Dulles, Alexander Schmemann, Thomas Hopko, Lewis Smedes, William Sloane Coffin, Peter Berger, Robert Wilken and Richard John Neuhaus.  They came from many parts of the Christian family, but agreed on one thing (though expressed 13 ways)…faithful Christians across the board had to stand up against the modernist impulses that were threatening the teaching, preaching, and spread of the gospel.

Their original introduction and the rejected themes are below:

An Appeal For Theological Affirmation
THE renewal of Christian witness and mission requires constant examination of the assumptions shaping the Church’s life. Today an apparent loss of a sense of the transcendent is undermining the Church’s ability to address with clarity and courage the urgent tasks to which God calls it in the world. This loss is manifest in a number of pervasive themes. Many are superficially attractive, but upon closer examination we find these themes false and debilitating to the Church’s life and work. Among such themes are:

1. Modern thought is superior to all past forms of understanding reality, and is therefore normative for Christian faith and life.

2. Religious statements are totally independent of reasonable discourse.

3. Religious language refers to human experience and nothing else, God being humanity’s noblest creation.

4. Jesus can only be understood in terms of contemporary models of humanity.

5. All religions are equally valid; the choice among them is not a matter of conviction about truth but only of personal preference or lifestyle.

6. To realize one’s potential and to be true to oneself is the whole meaning of salvation.

7. Since what is human is good, evil can adequately be understood as failure to realize human potential.

8. The sole purpose of worship is to promote individual self-realization and human community.

9. Institutions and historical traditions are oppressive and inimical to our being truly human; liberation from them is required for authentic existence and authentic religion.

10. The world must set the agenda for the Church. Social, political and economic programs to improve the quality of life are ultimately normative for the Church’s mission in the world.

11. An emphasis on God’s transcendence is at least a hindrance to, and perhaps incompatible with, Christian social concern and action.

12. The struggle for a better humanity will bring about the Kingdom of God.

13. The question of hope beyond death is irrelevant or at best marginal to the Christian understanding of human fulfillment. (1)

There seem to be a lot of seeds here.  Shades of post-liberalism, radical orthodoxy, and emergent Christianity are plenty.  Though many conservative Christians, especially fundamentalists, are stuck in their own varieties of modernism, this seems to be a clear shot across the bow of liberal (think Enlightenment-worshipping) Christianity.  Such Christianities are still alive in both the mainline Protestant denominations and elsewhere.  They were admirably dismissed by H. Richard Niebuhr, who summarized their basic assumptions as, “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

Some useful commentary and background was later published as Against the World for the World. The full text is linked below.

Yeah, I know it’s old news.  But for those of us attracted to these ideas today, it is interesting to see the early stages of later seminal works like The Nature of Doctrine.  Do these affirmations hold up 40 years later, or were they wrong from the start?

1. http://www.philosophy-religion.org/handouts/pdfs/Hartford-Affirmation.pdf

“The Judgment That Judgments Are Wrong…”: Scruton on Contemporary Culture

A very handsome Roger Scruton.  Foxy.

I’ve been a fan from afar of Roger Scruton for quite some time now.  He is a brilliant and sometimes hysterical British thinker whose published works range subjects as diverse as aesthetics and fox hunting.   In an attempt to become more philosophically adept, I’m reading his An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy.

Philosophy really, really is not my gig.  I’d prefer to read one of Scruton’s works of political theory; he is a British conservative, which means that his reflections are often as sweet as honey compared to what passes for conservatism in the US.  But I need some philosophy bad.  On the whole, this is an interesting and satisfying little book.  Reading all 164 pages is worth it for gems like this:

Nothing in this world is fixed: intellectual life is one vast commotion, in which a myriad voices strive to be heard above the din.  But as the quanity of communication increases, so does its quality decline; and the most important sign of this is that it is no longer acceptable to say so.  To criticize popular taste is to invite the charge of elitism, and to defend distinctions of value – between the virtuous and the vicious, the beautiful and the ugly, the sacred and the profane, the true and the false – is to offend against the only value-judgment that is widely accepted, the judgment that judgments are wrong. (An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, [New York: Penguin 1996] 12)

Of course, if he’s right, it may mean that most of us ego-centric bloggers are only contributing to the increasing quantity of communication, with its resultant damage to the quality of discourse.  Oh well.  I try my best to buck this trend.

Oh, and one more thing: Scruton has the stones to call Michael Foucault a “fraud.” (8)  Zing!