Apologetics
Disclaimer
Even though I have been trying to make this blog a (-n of course quite modest) contribution to humanity, avoiding any negativity and propaganda, an occasional more or less less serious jab at leftism disregarded, I could not resist writing, the publishing this article of a more polemic nature. As I will explain in the third or 4th paragraph, my polemic is not directed at people (love the sinner, hate the sin), nor is it against Christianity, or religion in general. I cannot stand falsehood. That includes my own. In my 50+ years of awareness, I have learned that we all, no exception, believe what we want to believe. It is very hard to discern the propaganda in our own camp. This article will attempt to show some of the techniques used and logical fallacies to justify an untenable position we nevertheless want to keep, whether it is creationism or the logical fallacy that the government helps the economy by pumping money in it. Later in the article, questions of faith will be addressed and take center stage. But the incentive to writing and to publishing this here is the exposition of these logical fallacies as much as one’s possible faith journey. When I see error, I feel the need to need to correct it. Also, science is one of the most important disciplines for mankind to survive. As I point out, the Bible doesn’t teach the lethality of arsenic, science does. If the inner need to justify scripture - or rather, one’s own extremely narrow view thereof - leads us to discredit science, we have taken a step in a direction as dangerous and destructive to society and thus our very lives, as science applied without any morality (nazism) would be. In that respect, my beloved Stephen J. Gould is right with his soon to be explained Non-Overlapping Magisteria. We need both science and morality.
In any case, God is truth and what does not match the footprints we have cannot be from God. Neither is changing the footprints, or lying about them, which falls under false witnessing. And oh, I absolutely love Susan Kuznitzky’s art work.
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Apologetics
About ten years ago, my friend Johann Sebastian Amerbach whom the Czechs call Ṧtrt, gave me a Bible in exchange for a cello lesson. I mention this because every year the honor to have taught him becomes greater, until it will be the only thing I might be remembered for in Wikipedia, if ever I make it in there. This Bible, called the Apologetics Study Bible, published by Ted Cabal at Holman Bible Publishers (“Real questions, straight answers, stronger faith”), has been one of the most invaluable gifts I have ever received in my life. For about a decade now, this Bible has been an ongoing source of fascination, it has challenged my cognitive capacities, confronted me with life’s most complicated mysteries, and it has never ceased to surprise me. The sheer number I found in this well-groomed, well-bound quality book - bible-paper, Rodin’s Thinker featuring on a stylistically well-designed cover - of logical fallacies, factual errors and possibly downright lies, I have never believed possible in this variety and diversity in a respectable publication in the western world. I’m enjoying it every day. The book also makes a great coaster.
Ṧtrt, who, like Bach, I think is not only a great musician but also a great Christian, was at tender age with its usual naiveté in grasping the intricacies of life - perhaps less so in the nature of some of the hilarious pranks he told me about having performed at that time - and he has long moved on from these people to an infinitely more spiritual, meaningful approach to Christ. Even back then, his spiritual life was already at a much higher level — for all I know, that may be true for these editors also. If this article has a purpose, it is to show how we all tend to be susceptible to mind manipulations because we all tend to believe what we want to believe, whether in Christianity, music, medicine, political ideologies and anything that involves the media in general. Of my own previously held misconceptions - because I AM talking about logical misconceptions, no matter how valuable the people committing them - the reader may find a telling glimpse further along this article, and which are adequately covered with the color red, the word “occult” and the name Heineken. Especially the last one fills me with the deepest shame.
But now for the obvious, flagrant and therefore storytelling fallacies this Bible commits in its commentaries. Let’s examine a two-page article at the beginning by an editor named Dr. Kennedy, who tells the story of a man once he met who was “completely ignorant of any evidences for the truthfulness of the Christian faith and the scriptures that reveal it” (isn’t that sentence alone delightful in its naiveté?). He answered with giving him a list of statements about somebody without telling him who it was, and had the man tell him, “assuredly, without question, about whom I am reading.” The list had 24 scripture quotes. After the latin sentences which this website’s provider furnishes to fill up empty space so the line-up looks better, you can read a dozen of them:
Aetas Andreae Macae Dauelis tantum quod adhuc memini nominem suum.
The Kings of the Earth take their stand and the rulers conspire together (Ps 2:2)
They weighed my wages, 30 pieces of silver. “Throw it to the potter,” the LORD said to me (...) So I took the 30 pieces of silver and threw it into the house of the LORD, to the potter (Zch 11:12/3)
I gave my back to those who beat me, and my cheeks to those who tore out my beard. I did not hide my face from scorn and spitting (Is 50:6)
They pierced my hands and my feet (Ps 22:16)
My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me (Ps 22:1)
Everyone who sees me mocks me. They sneer and shake their heads. “He relies on the LORD. Let Him rescue him; let the LORD deliver him since He take pleasure in him” (Ps 22:7-8)
They gave me gall for my food, and for my thirst they gave vinegar to drink (Ps 69:21)
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are disjointed; my heart is like wax, melting within me (Ps 22:14)
They divided my garments among them, and for my clothes they cast lots: Ps 22:18)
He protects all of his bones; not one of them is broken (PS 34:20)
They will see me whom they have pierced (Zch 12:10)
The LORD declared to my LORD: Sit at My right hand and I make your enemies your footstool (Ps 110:1)
Our man, our author, questioned his guinea pig: was there absolutely no doubt in his mind who(m) this was about? There wasn’t, this clearly was about Jesus. Our true man Dr. Kennedy now disclosed that all these passages were from the Old Testament, “which was completed some 400 years before Jesus was born (...) “If this were just a book written by men, would you please explain how these words were written?”
I will. I will explain these passages in spite of the author’s assurance that “they cannot be explained by any purely humanistic presuppositions.” Before I am going to do so, however, I want to make crystal clear once more that I am not questioning Christianity, the Bible, or God. I believe the story of Christ, however it is taken, is not only most beautiful but also essential to our culture, and far be it from me to cause people to stray from a faith that literally moves mountains.* (footnotes are at the end of each segment). I believe in love for all creatures, in trying to live life to its fullest and in forgiveness when we fail, I believe in mercy, and that in some form we live forever. However I don’t believe in logical fallacies and clear factual errors, and I feel called to expose them because I believe God is Truth, and nothing that isn’t true can come from Him. These people may be cornerstones of society with great family lives, intellectually they do Christianity a disservice, at least to me. They have kept me away from the church for decades. A religion that needs truth to be distorted is no true faith. Undermining the credibility of science and the humanities is not good stewardship. It is not good advertisement for Christianity either, as it is their Christianity that prompts them to adopt these errors. No Christian would be so vocally against and so ignorant of evolution if their specific form of Christianity didn’t clash with it. No Christian would be so obsessed with Moses being the author of 5 books that do not claim his authorship anywhere, if Jesus’ references to the Law of Moses had not made it into scripture. The illusion of the literal truth of the Bible may give emotional comfort, but it has paralyzed the minds of those who believe it, leading them into a sort of imaginary parallel universe I only see reflected in conspiracy theories and the cult around professional wrestling.
I also want to emphasize that these false reasonings justifying a creed I found in all regions, from politics (wiiiiiiiiidespread, I’d like to add) to law, from medicine to social work, from music to literature, from art and crafts to fashion. This article is about false logic justifying our personal ideologies.
Let me begin with two of these 12 statements that, even if we had infallible proof that the New Testament precisely and faultlessly relates what happened at Golgotha, cannot possibly be regarded prophesies. Can you detect them? Maybe you want to scroll back to see if one or two sentences seems to be different from the others, like the Jewish man about to be knighted who had forgotten the line in Anglo-Saxon every knight-elect had prepared, and muttered instead mah nishtamah halailah hazeh mikol halailot, which made the Queen turn to her adjunct and ask: “Why is this knight different from all other knights?”
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Footnote:
* One look at an altitude map of Holland suffices to see what the Reformed church has done there
All right, I will say it now. Number one and five. Eli, Eli, Lamah Azavtani, or in Matthew, sabbatani (Aramaic vs. Hebrew, or just Greek mumbling?) is what Jesus said on the cross. He was reciting a psalm! We might as well say that Shakespeare prophesied Sinatra singing to be do be do! Likewise, the Kings of the Earth take their stand is another psalm that came up as a prayer in Acts 4:26. This one is not even close even if it were a prophesy: Napoleon would be a much better candidate for that psalm verse to refer to. In Dr. Kennedy’s logic, every time either of these psalm verses occurs in a sermon or a church prayer, a prophecy would “come true”….
Wouldn’t such a obvious logical flaw in one argument tend to jeopardize the credibility of the others?
If you take a closer look at the other statements, or take a few steps back, whichever metaphor you prefer, then you will probably realize that few of these statements actually say anything very determinable. A majority (13 of the 24) of the quotes are psalms, poetry, showing feelings, moods. They can be said about a great number of people in the history of Israel, Judea, or southern North Dakota, if we know them or not. I can imagine that a good biographer might find all 24 points “fulfilled” in the life of Frederick the Great, or, possibly, in the life of a good many executed convincts. Two thousand years of church have forced us to associate these lines with the only Jew of the time of whose personal life we laymen have any information. Reading Jesus in Isaiah 7 and 53 for instance doesn’t seem that obvious without our life-long Christian education stressing it: ask a Jewish friend, if you have one*. Isaiah 7:14, .הָעַלְמָ֗ה הָרָה֙ וְיֹלֶ֣דֶת בֵּ֔ן, has always been translated “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son”, but doesn’t it mean a young woman is pregnant and shall bear a son? That’s a lòng, lòòòòòng pregnancy …! Few of those statements point directly at Jesus; the 30 silverlings perhaps, and even that that actually concerns Judas. Jefferson Moore points out in one of his films (which I enjoy) that the Cross is predicted in the Old Testament. Can anyone tell me where that would be? I have been looking for years.
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Footnote:
* I’m sure I don’t have to mention the famous exchange between Shaw and Churchill: Shaw: “Here’s two tickets for my new play. Bring a friend, if you have one.” Churchill: “I’ll come to the second performance; if you have one.”
There is also the vast number of lines that the Old Testament has. I once estimated the Bible to have over 650,000 words*, if I remember well, of which the vast majority is in the OT; it ranked third on my bookshelf of most voluminous works, only surpassed by Richardson’s Clarissa and Cao Xuexi’s Dream of the Red Mansion that I have in the 5 volume Penguin translation by Hawkes under the name Story of the Stone. How easy is it to find references in such a vast compilation of writings! Quantity is the principle under which for instance the Bible Code Prophecies work: a computer, in this case operated by New Age “exegetes”, that finds names and sentences “encoded” in the Bible that are supposedly “predictions” that get “fulfilled” in modern events. The fascinating thing about this body of prophecies and others is the infallible way it makes these predictions after an event has happened. When you assemble a million pictures of clouds taken on 9/11, one will surely look like how we think the devil is supposed to look like**. When looking for a certain event, a computer will sooner or later find something. The gall and the vinegar may qualify here: but was Jesus given gall? If not, couldn’t the reference with the vinegar be somewhat arbitrary in a poem where the two are clearly meant as metaphors? And the “fulfilment” of half the sentence perhaps coincidence? At a young age, when we all are very susceptible to influences, I found a Nostradamus quatrain predicting Hitler, whom it named by name, 400 years before the jerk lived! Well, not quite... He called him ‘Hister’. That just so happens to be an alternate name for the Danube, and the quatrain centers around a river, or two, because the Rhine is named too. The whole quatrain*** can be taken to allude to so many occurrences, though to me it hardly connects with WW2. Yet, at my tender age, it impressed the hister out of me. Or the Devin Hester. “Ridiculous …”
The third mistake (actually the 4th, but ‘third’ sounds more Aristotelian) this author makes is the one that gave rise to this blog post. Everything we know about Jesus, and I mean 100%, comes from the New Testament, written by people belonging to one group, or school. We have not a single independent source confirming even Jesus’ existence. C.S. Lewis points out that the style of especially the synoptic Gospels have the character of eyewitness reports. On the other hand, we cannot even demonstrate that the authors of the Gospels were eye witnesses. Two of them, Mark and Luke, couldn’t have been. The oldest texts in the NT come from Paul, who never saw Jesus in the flesh. John’s authorship is strongly jeopardized by two accidents: with such long dialogues, it doesn’t seem an eyewitness account at all; and it is virtually impossible that the author of the Gospel and Revelation is the same person. By claiming that they are, the Church has cast a great shadow of doubt around John’s authorship of either. That leaves us Matthew, who could have been a witness, but who could as easily have been an author writing in Matthew’s name, a practice that seems to have been quite popular at the time to gain authority for one’s writings. Without any independent corroboration of these stories, nothing about Jesus can be accepted as historical. Add to that the popularity and archetypical nature of the motives virgin birth, resurrection (“if Elvis were alive, he’d be dead by now”), transfiguration, miracles, (like three trombonists walking past a bar, it can happen), the three Wise Guys, (“three trombonists walking past a bar, it can happen”), kinship with the house of David, and we come to a quite dubious set of allegations. With ‘dubious’ I mean that those images more than match the mythical material we find everywhere else in ancient literature. Facts rearranged subconsciously (“what was it he said happened?”) to show what we feel we need to see: “that’s how it’s got to have happened!” The birth in Bethlehem may serve as a good example. Everywhere, Christ is identified as “Jesus of Nazareth”. With one exception****, Bethlehem doesn’t appear anywhere in the entire NT (!!!) except in two birth stories, one in Matthew, one Luke. Although there were public registrations performed in the Roman Empire, the census described in Luke has never been found - and the idea that one had to travel to his birth town in order to be counted seems ludicrous. By the best of my knowledge, the Star has never been identified; and the whole story of Bethlehem strongly suggests a myth created purposefully to have Jesus been born in the Holy City of David, because, as John points out in the one exception I hinted at, people expected the Messiah to come from there. Jesus’ genealogy looks like a creative attempt to trace Him back to the Lion of Judah as well. This completely matches the process behind the formation of legend. It is also extremely telling that one of these genealogies goes via Joseph, who according to the Church wasn’t even Jesus’ father.
Christians are so used to believing their scriptures are unerring, that they forget that it is only their belief that makes them unerring. That is the flaw in Dr. Kennedy’s reasoning and in the argumentations of so many others. How often have I not seen a Christian try to convince an atheist with scripture, that is, a body of texts that to an atheist are as irrelevant as an MRI to a man about to be hanged or a boob job to an 18th dynasty Egyptian mummy (the third metaphor I’m leaving up to the reader). Our Kenny here fell right into the trap: trying to prove the truthfulness of scripture with scripture itself...
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Footnotes:
* That was before the computer age. KJV, the most beautiful though not most accurate translation I know, has 783,137 words. Clarissa scores a number of 984,870, Dream of the Red Mansion an estimated 845,000, (both of my estimates surpassed a million), Atlas Shrugged has 645,000 (estimate by the publisher and the author), War and Peace 587,287, The Lord of the Rings 576,459, (all three I estimated from half a million to 600,000, of which Atlas Shrugged the largest); David Copperfield has 358,000.
** C.S. Lewis sees the devil as a bureaucrat (Screwtape Letters)
*** Bestes farouches de faim fluves tranner / plus part du camp Hister sera / en caige de fer le grand fera treisner/ quand Rin enfant Germain observera. (“Beasts wild with hunger shall cross the rivers / most of the fighting shall be close to the Hister (Danube). It shall result in the great one being dragged in an iron cage / while the Germans - I read cousins? - shall be watching over the infant Rhine.” —— None of this seems to match anything in WW2. Most of the fighting was lightyears away from the Danube; no one except Napoleon or today’s defendants in Russian courts matches the iron cage. As for the German watching the infant Rhine, the one country in middle Europe that was not involved was Switzerland, where the “infant Rhine” begins.
**** John 7:42: “Does not Scripture say that the Messiah will come from David’s descendants and from Bethlehem, the city of David?” - with which line a bystander argued that someone from Nazareth cannot be a prophet. Full circle. Jesus had to be from Bethlehem….
Some arguments are downright misleading and fraudulent. For instance: “The Documentation Hypothesis has now largely been refuted”. The Documentary Hypothesis is the claim that the Five Books of Moses have actually not been written by Moses, but much later, by multiple authors, and that they have been assembled together by a Redactor in the exilic or post exilic period, about 800 years after Moses was supposed to have lived. I am giving an overview of this hypothesis in my other post Who Wrote the Bible. This idea, which has been presented for almost 300 years, has indeed been opened for debate since the 1990s. But never in favor of Mosaic authorship!!! The hypothesis has been found too simplistic in explaining how exactly the works of the Torah’s multiple authors, who lived centuries after Moses, came to be organized in the end product we now have. My apologists (p.158) tell us that “the state of today’s scholarship is confused”. Not really. They all agree on multiple authors, half a millennium or more after Moses, and therefore the absurdity of Mosaic authorship. To use this argument to support Moses as the author is deceptive. Ceterum censeo puellas socinias plissatas caligulisque altis gerundas. Non debet credere ‘debet’ sicut ‘credit’ scribendum esse.
Sometimes intelligent people seem affected by the tunnel vision of these fanatics. David Berlinski is a self professed atheist who nevertheless joined the Discovery Institute which I believe works from a strictly Judeo-Christian viewpoint (which is also the basis of my own philosophy, but that has nothing to do with literalism). One of his criticisms of evolution is that it presupposes a gradual process, with which the Cambrian Explosion would be in direct contradiction (=> Devil’s Delusion). I wonder where he got that idea. Evolution works with genetic mutations. Those are always sudden, immediate, one-time occurrences. The gradual continuity comes from the number of such mutations needed to get to another species, and the number of species that over time evolves out of their ancestors. The 13 to 25 million years usually given to the Cambrian Explosion provides ample time for this ‘gradual’ process to occur. It took us infinitely more complex humans 4 to 7 million years to evolve from Austropithecus Kardashianensis or however the ancestor is called we share with chimpanzees. Sure, compared with the 3 billion years it took cyanobacteria to get the oxygen level high enough for larger species to evolve, it is nothing. But I don’t see how it can be any different. The Cambrian Explosion rather seems an excellent showcase for how evolution does work: 3,000 million years buildup to a favorable environment, when that is reached, BAM! 20 million years Hollywood, then many more millions of years of Hallmark: saturation and calming down of the growth curve, followed perhaps by an NBC extinction curve. I don’t see anything wrong with that picture. Of course I don’t know if 20 million years is enough for all those new species too evolve. But neither does Mr. Berlinski. I trust the scientists. He apparently does not. But his argument is false, and displays a for this intellectual surprising degree of ignorance. Am I missing something?
I can’t resist mentioning Fahrenheit 911 in this context. Chris Hitchins actually wrote a devastating article about that movie, where he claims from the original footage how the material was manipulated, often seriously, in 52 instances (I believe there is even a movie out, Fahren-hype 911). I don’t know how to get access to movie footage, but between these two men I sure trust Hitchins a lot more than the maker of that movie. Here however I just want to point at a flaw in Fahrenheit itself without any further knowledge needed. The movie claims that a pipeline through Afghanistan was a trigger for the Bush administration’s decision invade that country. Think of the money saved if that territory were controlled by us. The flaw is that we didn’t invade Afghanistan for a pipeline. We went into Afghanistan for no other reason than to get Bin Laden. When you attack the US, the US will come after you, that‘s a law of nature. It is the Iraq war for which I am still looking for reasons. When I learned however that Moore originally took the conspiracy position that 9/11 was staged, only to changd his mind at a later date, I suddenly grasped the allegation about the pipeline. If 9/11 had been staged, it would be to get an excuse for a retaliation. It would have given us a reason to invade. But when Moore changed his position about an American involvement in 9/11, no doubt because of political gain - if you make that scandalous an accusation about a government of a free country, you better stick to your guns, weasel…!!! - he lost the foundation for his pipeline accusation. The guy is not dumb. Was he just blind to the logical flaw here, or did he just figure his audience wouldn’t find out, banking on the general doubt of the legitimacy of the other invasion? If that’s the case, he sure was proven right. But what does that say about his supporters?
And to keep Christians off the hook for a little longer, let me just mention the book Where Troy Once Stood by Iman Wilkens, who beautifully argues that the Trojan War was fought in south England and the Greeks were from the Low Countries and Northern France. I mainly remember the connection Hellas, Hellespont with Helmond, which to a Dutchman sounds somewhat like connecting Wahnfried, Wartburg to Warren Ohio or San Francisco, Santiago to Sandusky. He also mentions tides in the Iliad, which the Mediteranean doesn’t have. I love that sort of maverick scholarship. It proves that if you really dig deep enough, you can find an if not solid then at least totally convincing set of arguments for anything you like to prove. Often, that sort of authors betray themselves by moving on to new equally shocking discoveries. Ahmed Osman, after claiming that the mummy called Yuya is the Biblical Joseph, goes on to claim that Moses was Akhnaton, kind of an inferior offspring of Sigmund Freud’s much more brilliant hypothesis of Moses as an Egyptian priest of Aton - and Jesus was Tutankhamon. How fortunately convenient all that! There’s also Graham Hancock* who first (I’m not sure about the order) argues that the pyramids are three times older than we think, situating the Atlantis civilization conveniently in Antarctica where we cannot dig, then goes on to talk about flooded civilizations, eventually ending up showing that humans lived on earth for ten million years, it seems.** A history student in Tilburg once told me that Holy Blood, Holy Grail had been used in her college class as example of suggestive, popular but bad scholarship. Anyway, Wilkens’ more than persuasive argument about Troy being in South England found a sudden death in my eyes when he made the link between Turkey and a village in Holland called Turkije. That’s a link all right. Still, could have been founded by an American who wanted it to be a haven for Thanksgiving. A more serious flaw however is that there weren’t any Turks in Turkey before 1200 AD!!!*** The name Turkey didn’t exist anywhere near the place and time when the Iliad was composed, supposedly after the story had been imported into Greece: the name Turkije must be from more than 2000 years after the alleged connection between Holland and Anatolia.
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Footnotes:
* Hancock in The Fingerprints of the Gods completely ignores plate tectonics in order to push a personal pet hypothesis of how Antartica ended up around the south pole “overnight”.
** I have a very skeptical colleague who doesn’t believe the Chinese Wall is real, who doesn’t believe the ceiling of the Würzburg City Hall is by Tiepolo, who basically doesn’t believe officially held tenets, but who does believe that the pyramids are three times older than generally assumed because he saw that once in Discovery Channel.
*** Granted, there were earlier Turkish tribes in the Anatolia after 1071 AD, when Byzantium was defeated in the battle of Manzikert. - I am reminded of a conversation I had earlier this year (2020) with a young chorister who had just been on one of the Greek islands in eyesight of the Turkish coast, Lesbos perhaps. He claimed that there is no reason why those islands should be Greek, being so close to Turkey. I told him that Greeks lived on that island and on the Turkish coast 2000 years before the Turks even arrived there, so who is he to tell the Greeks they shouldn’t live there?
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But what if science itself wrongfully denies true Christian teachings the title of science? What if Christian science (pun unintended) actually is science and science, out of its own bias, refuses to accept it, ignoring all the plausible arguments given in my Apologetics and other publications?
I don’t think so, and here is why.
Firstly, it is the logical fallacies again. I find them everywhere in religious publications. When I read modern scholarship has now come to accept ... and then see nothing of that in modern scholarship, I have gotten to side with modern scholarship. Question of reputation. But there is more.
A scientist is someone who wants to know how the world works. In order to do so, he or she starts out with a blank page and begins to investigate. A biblically literal Christian already knows. He or she has at some point, on faith, accepted his or her literal approach to the Bible without questioning, and everything they learn is tested against this a-priori adopted standard. Scientists are researchers: biblical literalists are advocates who have something to prove. By their own admission of taking the Bible as God’s Unerring Word, this assessment is inescapable. When a scientist finds evidence against her hypothesis, she has to change her hypothesis. When a biblical fundamentalist finds evidence against scripture, he has to discard the evidence. A scientist who changes his position is still a scientist. A biblical fundamentalist who ceases to take scripture literally is no longer a biblical fundamentalist. By nature of their own doctrines, these Christians are unable to adapt or reinterpret scripture to newly discovered facts. They have a narcissist approach to evidence: if it denies their position, it has to be discarded (“God works in mysterious ways”). No argument in the world responds to that line, just like no man answers to a bullet in his brain.
This is why I have seen so many Christians fail to understand the mind of a scientist. They think scientists predisposed against Christianity the way they are predisposed for it: it takes one to know one. They believe scientists have rejected God because they themselves have embraced Him. They cannot wrap their brain around the scientist’s creed: “God is a hypothesis I don’t need.” (Laplace). For Christians, the truth of their beliefs is so self-evident that they simply cannot imagine that their story isn’t at all that likely and that therefore there are quite a good number of sane, sound and bright people who don’t believe it. They must assume some act of rebellion in these people’s refusal, some character deficiency at the root of it*.
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Footnotes:
* No footnotes here
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But can science be wrong anyway, in view of the ever changing theories? How do we know that today’s scholarship’s state of the union is not itself in error? This question must be addressed. We don’t have absolute certainty that any theory won’t be replaced over time. But we should not make the mistake we see being made in post-modern disciplines, to think ‘we can’t know anything because we don’t know everything’. A variation of this particular logical fallacy I find among secularists when they reason that ‘since the Bible has been tampered with, everything in the Bible has been tampered with’. When a scientific theory gets refuted - which does not happen often - it usually doesn’t suddenly mean that everything is wrong about it. When we call a table red, and we see that it is grey in moonlight, it doesn’t mean that our previous assessment that is was red is false; only that it is not read in all conditions. In fact, its redness presupposes its greyness in moonlight (about redness, rednecks and my thorough disagreements with Bertrand Russell another time). When Einstein replaced gravity with relativity, it only meant that in very specific, humanly extremely extraordinary cirumstances, gravity gets taken up in a bigger theory according to which it works a little different than in the situations familiar to us. Einstein did not refute Newton, he extended him. Just like the red table will still always be red in sunlight, gravity will still always work on the earth in speeds humanly observable and endurable. Evolution has already gone unchallenged for 150 years except by fraudulent arguments, it will still work mostly the way Darwin formulated it if it ever got extended by a newer, more complete scientific theory. If we were to find a way to prove God’s Hand with real arguments in the origin of spices, we would find that God would still have taken so many million years to create spices by letting them evolve from other spices (I mean of course species, I just got a kick picturing God in the kitchen sprinkling chili powder over Turkey and that’s how it got that beautiful reddish color I so admired from the plane once). Likewise, if ever the Documentary Hypothesis will be replaced by a more precise, expanded one, it will concern details like how the multiple writers did get sorted into today’s Torah, not a surrender to and re-adoption of some rabbinic fancy of the kind similar to the Roman Catholic Church’s unfounded assumption that Mary Magdalene was the adulterous woman or the New Age’s insistence that she was his wife. Long sentences help you train your concentration skills.
Science and history have painted a picture of evolution and multiple authorship that’s too detailed and too well covered to be in danger to be abandoned in its core.
Tiet Chritulaer
What has become untenable in my experience however is the very dogma of the Bible being literally true. Based on about all I have witnessed in this life, that hypothesis makes absolutely no sense. I see multiple major religions with followers who are too similar to each other to warrant one of them being “right”. Each religion has many kinds of people, warriors, pacifists, philosophers, mystics, parrots, zealots, Cleveland drivers, who resemble each other across the board much much more than those belonging to other types in their own religion. Each religion has their scriptures, and at least in the West, each religion sticks to their own; but everybody accepts science as long as it doesn’t contradict their scriptures. Miracles and other incredible deeds I have seen, or heard about, being performed in every religion. I have seen the rigidness and falsity in the arguments defending the literal interpretation of scripture, both against science and of the various religions against each other. Everywhere, this literal interpretation of scripture is challenged by science, scholarship and mere common sense. If I only think about how 200,000 species had to live together for over a year on a boat, to which the only sensible answer could be the platitude “for God everything is possible”… I have to conclude: literalism doesn’t even remotely begin to match my experiences in this life in any way possible. I would be an absolute idiot if I were to believe that, a perfect patron of that company that advertises itself as ‘saving 15% or moron car-insurance”.
How dangerous a literal approach of scripture - or even the mere belief that ‘it’s in the bible so it must be true’ - can be shows the position of women in society. In my view, based on observation, man and woman are equal qua human being, different but equivalent qua gender. On the work floor, and in parenting, we are human, therefore equal. The idea that one mind has to give way for another just because he has a penis is - especially if the woman is called Barbara - barbaric. Yet, that’s what the New Testament clearly states in letters by Pseudo-Paul and the letter I call the Peter Principle. There is nothing in Christ’s words or Paul’s actions that justifies those statements, and I am sure they are from the 2nd century AD; but no matter by whom they are, these Bible verses can never be a foundation for upholding so unnatural a doctrine that is so strongly and clearly refuted by the example of every competent woman doctor, scientist, lawyer, judge, prime minister, pilot and astronaut. It is a huge insult to the human mind, and the fact that the whole 19th century was convinced of its validity says everything about collective blindness. If a male and a female scientist dispute about a hypothesis, how does gender have anything to do with who is right? How has gender or race have anything to do with what is morally right? The idea that a woman should yield to her husband or her co-worker just because of her gender is just as idiotic as the idea that a work place should count 50% women regardless of quality and skills. Cervix ruber (redneck) fueris si cognatorum tuorum divissimus domum novum emit adiuvasque tu rotas demere. Cervix ruber fueris quoque si laboras sine tunicam etiamque sposus tuus facit.
Any approach to scripture has to stand the challenges of science and scholarship. The sacred texts are subject to the same scientific and historiographic investigations that any other text is subjected to. Any discrepancy with one’s own religious approach either questions the validity of all scholarship, or shows flaws in one’s religion. God is Truth and expresses Himself only in Truth.
That begs a last question that has to be addressed. Is my reason capable to make this kind of judgements? Can I form any opinion about God? Is my assessment worth anything?
If my reason cannot be trusted, what would you want me to do? Surrender to Christianity? Why not Islam? Why not Hinduism? Why not Judaism? Why not Anne Coulter? Any argument you bring up will appeal to my faculty of reason, which according to this suggestion is worthless. Why believe Billy Graham, not Ahmad i’n Baghdad da’ar Magdat, who tells me that ‘if I believe that Jesus son of Mary is God, I go to hell (Al Maidah 5:72)? With an equally worthless brain, how do you know that I should not follow Tiet Chritulaer’s religion, as they seem to do in Amish country? Any superiority of the Bible over science and other scriptures that anyone tries to prove appeals to reason. Discarding that leaves us with nothing. Besides, have you ever seen any idea so arrogant? How do you know that I cannot trust my reason?
This is why discrediting science is such a dangerous, destructive activity. God never told us arsenic is deadly. Science does.
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Biblical minimalism
So far, I argued that scientists and scholars qua scientists and scholars do not have prejudices. They probably have their personal biases - it must be very hard to change an opinion that has taken years to establish - but their scholarship is or should be starting from a blank position: anyone is a suspect. By the nature of their trade, scholars and scientists are not interested in defending or attacking any a-priori position, they only get annoyed at Christians when those make irrational claims in their field of study.
In my studies about the Bible I have however ran into one specific group of scholars who do seem to have a vested interest in attacking the Bible. They are mostly biblical scholars, (I have not seen any among evolutionists) who have been accused of this mindset. They call themselves the Copenhagen Group, which consists of first class researchers, whom I often find mentioned with respect as far as their pure professional work is concerned. So I am on slippery ground here with my music degree. Yet, I do not trust their world view, for three reasons, no, four; actually, five ... èèèh, no, just four.
In the first place, their extreme position among those approaching the Bible. Extremes are suspicious. Extreme political positions, as we see them adopted again in the world today, have always led to disaster. The far left and the far right together have cost hundreds of millions of lives in the 20th century. In the discussion about the Bible, one extreme, let’s call it the right, is taken by the so called biblical maximalists, Christians set to prove the Bible to be God’s unerring Word, as discussed above. Then there is a middle group of scholars who seem to want to get to know the history behind the Bible, as already said, and who use scripture as one out of many sources to evaluate their assessment. On the far left however we find some so called minimalists who argue that the Bible is pure fiction created as propaganda by a very late group (Hellenistic period) of religious zealots, and cannot therefore be trusted at all in anything it says. All the stories are made up. This extremist and radical position in the landscape of Biblical scholarship I find suspicious because, as said before, I distrust all radical positions except perhaps the radical position against radical positions. They at least seem to minimize the Bible in a way not unlike how the far right tries to maximize it.
Second, I disbelieve their credo: ‘only use biblical material if it has been proven beyond doubt by other means’. I believe many of the Biblical texts, especially in Genesis, are sediments of older traditions, and they deserve consideration as such. The minimalists believe such consideration is pointless, under a nihilist methodology sketched below in point four, with which I strongly disagree.
Third, left-wing political bias is strong and growing in the intellectual world.* The left has strong anti-Israel prejudices, because Israel, in it’s short history, has consistently trampled almost every existing leftist ideal: interdependency, internationalism, anti-capitalism, anti-elitism, race hysteria, pacifism, gun control: Israel is its own state, doesn’t need anyone else, uses Jewish American capital, favors its own people, and when provoked, uses its guns. Israel has literally fought for its life in 5 or more wars since its birth in 1948.** The left has always hated every war I have seen fought in my life time, no matter for what reason. The left can’t stand Christianity either. While it seems to support all other religions because of their cultural value, including an Islam with an increasingly intolerant, belligerent, radical wing, because they are conceived as the “underdog”, the left fights Christians in all layers of society (for the difference between the left and liberals see Dennis Prager). That could be a reaction against the super authoritarian and closed-minded mentality of the historical Roman Catholic Church and its offshoots, the Protestant denominations, and the power they once held; in any case, and for whatever reason, I have experienced an ever growing leftist bias in western intellectual life in the last thirty years, which is about the time Biblical minimalism took root; a prejudice I now see materialized in the nationwide ban on teaching anything connected to Christianity in public schools, and in race, that’s collectivism, having become the major criterium in all leftist political actions today, with collective measures propagated as the solution for its perceived problems.*** In refuting the Bible, one can question the validity of both Israel as a nation and the Judeo-Christian religion in general with far-reaching political consequences. Even if such are not the explicit goals of movements like the Copenhagen group, they might be subconscious drives influencing their actions. With the current media going haywire in that direction, and the leftist indoctrination going on in western culture’s entire education system, on the consequences of which I have had a first hand view, it’s hard to imagine such influences wouldn’t exist.
Four: they operate under the post-modernist thought systems that use the nature of factual uncertainty to create a relativist intellectual nihilism: there is no single, authoritative meaning in a text; the ‘author’s intention’ is an illusion from the reader - there are no objective facts - reality doesn’t exist - everything is relative.**** In baseball terms: there’s balls and strikes and they ain’t anything till I calls them. I am certain these thought systems will eventually be refuted as useless, perhaps even dangerous; when everything is relative, any wacko idea qualifies. The dichotomy between the intellectual relativism of these scholars and their absolute insistence that the Bible stories are completely made-up has long been pointed out. “Everyone’s position is relative except their own”.
Last, and most importantly (so 5 reasons after all!), most legends are not totally made-up. Ever since Schliemann, the brilliant idiot from Neubukow***** got the ridiculous idea of actually digging where Homer said Troy was situated, we have learned that great myths and sagas like the Trojan War, the Arthurian legends, the Nibelungen canon and (therefore probably also) Exodus and Conquest in the Bible almost certainly have their roots in history. All of the above-mentioned sagas are related to two of the greatest social upheavals in human history: 1. the collapse of 1200 BC, which ended the Bronze Age palace cultures of Creto-Mycenaean Greece and the Hittites and which also ended the Egyptian hegemony in the Levant; and 2. the Volkerwanderung at the collapse of the Roman Empire. That can hardly be a coincidence. I strongly believe that almost all legends have a historical origin, however far the eventual story may have come to differ from it. Just like the Nibelungen saga has been shown to be a kaleidoscope in which multiple centuries are pressed together, the Exodus and the הןֹנְפןֹגְלֲלָישׁ (honfoglalás, Conquest) must have their historical roots as well, even though modern archeology has placed serious doubts to both having taken place the way described. The character of both stories sounds too real, too close to that Collapse of 1200, which incidentally was also when the Philistines emerged, to have been entirely made up in a completely different world a millennium later.
So as long as I still find enough respected scholars embracing the middle ground of archetypical creative story telling based on historical roots, I will follow their direction. What do they tell? What do they think happened, and how much of that is left in the Bible? That will be revealed in my other postings Who Wrote the Bible and my Genesis articles. Remains the question: now what?
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Footnotes:
* The Washington Times counts 10 Democrat professors for each Republican one. I also once saw a percentage of 93% of Washington journalists in an election year being democrat, and what that may mean for its coverage. Maybe that percentage was made-up. It sure seems true, based on my own adjacent world of artistic “intellectuals”.
** Proof for this is that the Palestinian people have so far exclusively been represented by terrorist organizations. The threat to Israel’s safety is real.
*** That the left cannot think in individual terms shows its proposed remedies against what it calls racism: affirmative action, reparations, which are all racist, collectivist, measures.
**** All right, here’s the Jewish history of the world. Moses: everything is law. Christ: everything is love. Marx: everything is money. Freud: everything is sex. Einstein: everything is relative. The statement everything is relative is of course absolute. Logic already shows that there must be absolutes.
***** Schliemann was not an idiot. Idiot comes from Greek ἰδιώτης “eedee-YO-tès, 'a private citizen', 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill, layman', later 'unskilled', 'ignorant', derived from the adjective ἴδιος eedee-yos 'private', 'one's own'. So an ἰδιώτης was someone who is as dumb as everyone else. Schliemann was not like everyone else. He amassed a fortune so he could retire at age 35 and dedicate the rest of his life to archeology - crazy, perhaps, not dumb.
“This is Brooklyn clam chowder. Do you have a problem with that?!!!”
I once asked a Jehova’s witness how God could have created light, the firmament and sea creatures in the first three days when the sun, and with it (literally) the days, were created only on the fourth day? She didn’t know what to say, she had to study some more, she mumbled, and left. I wonder what one of her more experienced colleagues would tell me, like the Chinese Jehova’s Witness I once had at my door, whose name was 亭東 Ding Dong …
The Jewish Bible scholar Nahum Sarna (1923 - 2005) writes: Biblical man, despite his undoubted intellectual and spiritual endowments, did not base his views of the universe and its laws on the critical use of empirical data. He had not, as yet, dicovered the principles and methods of disciplined inquiry, critical observation or analytical experimentation. Rather, his thinking was imaginative, emotional, and his expressions of thought were concrete, pictorial, emotional, and poetic. Hence, it is a naive and futile exercise to attempt to reconcile the biblical accounts with the findings of modern science. Any correspondence which can be discovered and ingeniously established between the two must surely be nothing more than a coincidence. Even more serious than the inherent fundamental misconception of the psychology of biblical man is the unwholesome effect upon the understanding of the Bible itself. For the net result is self-defeating. The literalistic approach serves to direct attention to those aspects of the narrative that reflect the time and place of its composition, while it tends to obscure the elements that are meaningful and enduring, thus distorting the biblical message and destroying its relevancy. -— Nahum Sarna, Understanding Genesis, 1966.
So here is my big question to yer biblical literalists:
Why can’t God teach us with stories? Why does every word have to be literally factually true?
I think that whoever tries to factually prove the Bible totally misses the point. The Bible doesn’t teach astro-physics, it teaches about God. Where does God reside? Where lies the strength of Christendom? In the Spirit. In Christ, all men and women who have been tramped, mauled and executed for their ideals, and all others who are really trying - “wer immer strebend sich bemüht” * - find fulfillment, recognition, acknowledgement, meaning. Christ as God in man is the example we follow in giving expression to God’s image in which we are created. It’s Christ in Whom we believe our spirits will live on forever - and that forever I believe is all the points in time, the infinite number of here and nows flowing together in one great ALWAYS - and not Christ as a name featuring on a church door, but a Spirit that is everywhere on earth, and that can be tapped into by everybody, no matter where, no matter what creed, no matter what Name, as long as it is the Spirit of Love and one “always does one’s best trying”. That’s what Christians should preach. That is the Spirit that supersedes every material factor, that gives us the will to live, and meaning to our lives; and that transforms us. Celebrate the Spirit in which we are all gathered in eternity, not just those who have filled out the “right” forms or gone to the “right” clerk in the “right” window in the “right” office building, or found the “right” website. Celebrate that Spirit so well captured by Beethoven in the Ode to Joy theme — celebrate that spirit, not by denying facts, or scientific discoveries, but by being the living embodiment of God’s creative Force, which we let act within us, thus giving homage to Jesus’ teachings and His death and Resurrection. Salvation for everyone who truly asks God for forgiveness in his own way, and who then feels lifted up by the Spirit, feels the hand in that magnificent thundering German 6/5 chord at the culmination of Bruckner 7’s adagio ….
To me, the stories are so strong because they are stories. They leave more room for grace, and penetrate deeper into the essence of things. To me, it comforts to know that I don’t have to worry about what the Canaanites did wrong for deserving to be wiped out (about the execution of which the Bible is not even consistent): perceiving that every nation has about an equal part of saints and sinners, the Canaanites are just playing the part of evildoers in the story, like Rutger Hauer with his blue eyes playing the nazi captain. I don’t have to explain how 200,000 animal species lived together for a year on a boat, what they ate, how they got to not eat each other, or why the fish were not affected in God’s destruction. It makes it possible to see the unbelievable depth of the motive of eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge between Good and Evil, such a great symbol of reflexive thinking, by which acquisition we became aware of ourselves, of our nakedness, and of the mortality not just of ourselves, but of the animals as well, not because somehow God created undying animals first, something that is denied in every fossil we find in the earth; but because in our vision, in our comprehension = in our humanity, we, as well as the animals, became mortal. Before man, the concept of death didn’t exist.
When a man speaks in the forest and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong…?
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Footnote:
* Last 8 lines from Goethe’s Faust II, quoted elsewhere on this blog, I believe it is in the Danhauser article.
In Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov is an atheist because he cannot deal with the unfathomable degree of suffering he witnesses in a supposedly just universe. When I discussed that chapter with a group of European intellectuals, most of them admired and even found themselves in Ivan’s passionate plea. No one seemed to see the the flaw in Ivan’s reasoning. He needed to know everything. He thinks he can wrap his finite, fallible human brain around the whole universe. That’s God’s job… Ivan is the man who doesn’t have enough faith. He has to see everything confirmed before his very eyes, so he can take cognizance of it. Instead of praying to God, beating his chest (Israel means ‘wrestles with God’), crying out to God, shouting Why?!!!! —— he turns his back and throws out the baby with the bath water. But where are you standing in this, my friend* the fundamentalist, who needs to see every word of the Bible confirmed by science? Do you have enough faith to see scripture in a bigger scope? Why are you so clinging to the letter of the Bible? Do you really think things are as simple as Santa Claus dropping presents down the chimney? You made the step from a literal Santa to a Santa embodied in us giving presents, right? You had to redefine your faith there, why can’t you do it here too? Why can’t you trust the greatness of a God who works on a far larger scale, through inspired people writing this magnificent work as well as others, really reaching every soul on the planet, not through some dogmatic gimmick (“Every soul gets the chance to find Christ”, give me a break!!!), but just by working in the Infinity in which He lives, not we. Do you really need a manual for life? And even manuals are written by people and have contradictions in them. Whatever you do, please don’t give a picture of God as a 12 year-old boy playing with a magnifying glass in the sun, deciding which ant lives and which ant dies —- and when that image gets challenged, then pull out all the “God is Great, Omniscient and Mysterious” platitude….
Do you really believe the Bible is true “because we need a reference point”? That’s like saying football is the only legitimate sport because we need sports. Am I your servant because you need one?**
Don’t be like Ivan Karamazov. Let go of the letter, even if that means you will have to think a little about good and evil. Have some faith …
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Footnote:
* “Watch it, bud!” —— “Who you calling bud, pal?” —— “Who you calling pal, friend?” —— “Who you calling friend, jackass?!!!!” (Ocean Eleven)
** If you are beautiful woman under 35, meet me in my truck tonight.
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Carl
To end this article, a small note for my atheist friends, in the form of two quotes by C.G. Jung, to show that atheism doesn’t mean that there is no spiritual quality working in us that can easily carry and account for all the religious experiences we have. Jung, the man of the Subconscious, has never been succeeded. What he understood as the collective forces of the unlimited, unfathomable reservoir within us may well have remained misunderstood and misunderestimated, to quote an American president’s contribution to the English language - the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for ‘entrepreneur’ is unfortunately not traceable - till this day. We did not make up God with the meagre, narrow, top-of-the-iceberg part of our psyches. God has always lived in the boundless, bottomless subconscious depths of our souls. Who really understands to what life altering tornados those enormous sweeping forces in that part of our psyches are capable, needs not wonder whether God exists: he or she knows with the same certainty that I am alive while writing this sentence, this comma, if it’s the last line I’d ever write.
Who disagrees with this, whoever disbelieves the existence of these enormous spiritual powers, negative and positive, has basically nothing essential in common with my world view. That includes, as we will see, the menschwerdung Gottes, God’s taking a human form. Here Carl Gustav, in my own provisional translation:
“That the Godhead works on us, we can only determine through the psyche, in which however we cannot distinguish whether those workings come from God or from the subconscious; which means, it cannot be determined if the Godhead and the subconscious are two different entities … The Divine Image, exactly formulated, doesn’t correspond with the subconscious as such, but with a particular content therein, the Self archetype. This is what we cannot separate from the image of God. We can arbitrarily postulate a difference between the two, but that won’t help us: on the contrary, it will only help us to separate man and God, through which the humanization (Menschwerdung) of God is prevented (my italics). Sure, faith rightfully shows us the infinity and immeasurability of God; but it also teaches God’s closeness and immediacy, and it is this closeness that has to be empirically felt, if it were to have any meaning at all. Only what works on me, in me, I recognize as real; what does not work on me, I might as well consider non-existent. Religious desire longs for wholeness and therefore grasps the images of wholeness offered by the subconscious, which, independent from the conscious (ego), emerge from the depths of the soul. — (C.G. Jung, Answer to Job)
“God has, certainly, without human help, made an unbelievably wonderful as well as uncannily contradicting image of Himself and laid that as archetype in our subconscious, not in order for theologists of all times and zones to get in each other’s hair, but in order for the unassuming human to contemplate a familiar image, built from his own spiritual substance, containing everything that he can ever invent about his gods or his spiritual base.” — (C.G. Jung, Answer to Martin Buber)
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Bonus 1: Ben
As Bonus 1 am submitting a letter written in a sort of provisional and passionate haste, by perhaps not a biblically literal but certainly a biblically attached Christian - he sure believes in the Revealed Word of God - whom I once confronted with some of the things discussed above. This is the kind of testimony I wish were printed in an “Apologetics Bible”, or which I wished I heard at EWTN’s doctrine explanation hour.* Because this is the kind of testimony that literally impresses the hell out of me.
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“(…) Human beings as a whole are so consumed in themselves. Everyone has to be right. And the only way for one to be right is to make sure to prove the opposition wrong! Well, the fundamental flaw of humanity rears its ugly head. Proving another wrong has never made another right, but we continue to believe that this actually makes a difference. I can promise you this, if you hear a "Christian" trying to disprove evolution, you are only hearing another man's opinion. You are absolutely correct in seeing this dilemma. So many of us wish to speak for God... we never can. God may speak to your heart, God may speak to you through another, Christian or Muslim. Many claim to speak for God, but when you have opened yourself to God, he will come of his own accord. Man is not God. Christians are not God. Muslims are not, and Atheists aren't. But somehow we try to look to man for God.
“God can only be experienced within you! No religion will connect you to God. As well you have seen, religion is a flawed institution. Man is trying to claim God for themselves. God claims man, not the other way around. To try to understand God by looking at the world is like trying to see the moon but only looking at the telescope. The world is not God, just as the telescope is not the moon.
“We are all flawed. This is the "science" I look at when considering God. I can imagine the earth without mankind. The perfection of all the universal systems, both creation and destruction working together in harmony, but add mankind into the mix and the system becomes flawed. Man is the problem, the flaw, and man created this flaw! So to seek God in that flaw, you will only see man. Science is not the problem, religion is not the problem. In consideration of the other animals in the animal kingdom, there is no good and evil--no right and wrong. It is this knowledge of right and wrong that separates us from a perfect creation, therefore separating us from God.
(…)
“It seems that great honor is given to Darwin in saying that life had to be created from the mud, as the Bible says "dust to dust", bringing forth plants and foliage then sea foliage then fish then birds then land animals then man. I would have to say that Darwin was several thousand years late. (…)
“I will not ever understand why evolution theory negates God. I agree with evolution. It makes perfect sense. But bear in mind that again God is not the Creation. This is the story of creation given to man. Vocalized by man. Interpreted by man. Transcribed by man and finally read again and again by man to be interpreted and reinterpreted, transcribed and re-transcribed, only to be read again for further interpretation. So to say the the Bible must be all Truth or none, I find to be absurd. The words of God are what exists just beyond the words of the bible. The Bible is the pane of glass through which we see God, as he deems us capable. Some parts of the Bible will really move me at times. They move me as God speaks, not as the Bible reads. One needs to allow God to speak; unfortunately, we normally believe we have the answers and look to the Bible to confirm them. Hence, the "Christian" with an opinion. And again the man has spoken and no one has heard God.”
Ben, Jan. 3, 2008
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Galina modum ovo ovum novum faciendo. Galina modum ovo ovum novum faciendo. Quod idem locutio, sed non idem ovum.
Footnote:
* Even though I heard some impressive testimonies on this Roman Catholic World Broadcasting station, it has also done some irreparable damage to my trust in that particular denomination. Way to go, pals!
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Bonus 2: A teeny tiny bit about evolution
To test someone’s knowledge about the theory of evolution - which is a thing that can be defined with absolute certainty - I sometimes use the following a little exercise. Let’s contemplate the following sentence, popular in Christian circles:
evolution is only a scientific theory
This sentence, though misleading, is true. Now let’s replace the word theory with the word hypothesis.
evolution is only a scientific hypothesis
Has the meaning now changed considerably? None of the two to three hundred Christians I asked* saw a major difference. The two sentences, however, are each other’s exact opposites. A scientific theory is a hypothesis that has been overwhelmingly proven by an extremely scrupulous methodology, and has acquired the status of “as close to the truth as we can get today”. Examples of scientific theories are the nuclear theory, thermo-dynamics, relativity, and in Belgium, Murphy’s Law. Conspiracy “theories” like the CIA bombed Bambi’s mom are not theories and they are not scientific, they are mere hypotheses, and dangerous ones too: Stalin didn’t get to kill 20 million people by using assault weapons, he did by getting in people’s heads. Evolution is the only scientific theory existing today explaining the origin of species. Anyone telling you the opposite is either willfully or innocently professing a lie. Creation Science is not science, it cannot be science because it is based on God, scientifically an unproven hypothesis. The very name shows the duplicity of their ideology. Passing something off as science when it isn’t is false testimony. This sentence has one verb. This one, not so much.
Science studies matter.** It can only measure what we can see, hear, smell, feel and taste, and the extensions of these senses in our machines. So if we believe in a spiritual Force we call God, science (psychology) can only assess our beliefs, not the thing we believe itself. In the 1990s there was a Cold War between Stephen J. Gould, whom I love, and Dawkins - Whoever writes about the evolution of the Hershey bar, the distance of the mount in a baseball field from home plate, or whether zebras have white or black stripes, has me, but that on the side. Their main fight seems to have been about a booklet my baseball champion wrote about Non Overlapping Magisteria, in which he beautifully argued that science and religion each have their own Magisterium, which do not overlap. Dawkins rightly denies this, and says that there is only one magisterium: God is a scientific question. Yes. But science, at this point, by its own methodological limitations, cannot say anything about this question, other than we can’t measure spiritual entities. In describing the spiritual world, if such a world exists, science is useless. And that’s where Gould comes back in the ring. Religion teaches wisdom, science teaches nothing of the sort. For now.
Non Overlapping Magisteria....
Evolution therefore is just a description of how plant and animal species got created. It doesn’t say it was God, it doesn’t say it wasn’t, except to say that both are possible. Whoever can think in universal terms should have no trouble imagining God working in the 3 billion year old history of life on earth. As GK Chesterton writes: I have no trouble believing that God took His time creating the universe.
The irony is that in appearance, I agree with the biblical literalists about evolution. I don’t believe in evolution. I believe in Intelligent Design. The devil is in the word “believe”. Intelligent Design cannot be scientifically proven. I believe it. Since evolution has been scientifically proven. I don’t believe it, I accept it as the closest we can come to explain the origin of species on the material plain. The one is a matter of faith, the other about knowledge and assessment. Technically, someone who asks me if I believe in evolution has already proven that she doesn’t know what evolution is. It’s like a conversation I once imagined having with a famous person, say Julia Roberts, in the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. Only it wasn’t Julia Roberts, who once played a girl named Tess posing as Julia Roberts. On second thought, I don’t believe that story will make this article better, so I better dump it.***
Bonus 2:
“A real Christian is an odd number anyway. He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen, talks familiarly every day to Someone he cannot see, expects to go to heaven on the virtue of Another, empties himself in order to be full, admits he is wrong so he can be declared right, goes down in order to get up, is strongest when he is weakest, richest when he is poorest and happiest when he feels worst. He dies so he can live, forsakes in order to have, gives away so he can keep, sees the invisible, hears the inaudible and knows that which passeth knowledge.” A.W. Tozer (1897 - 1963)
Doesn’t that come close to the the Tao of Pooh?****
Bonus 3: Carl
“That the Godhead works on us, we can only determine through the psyche, in which however we cannot distinguish whether those workings come from God or from the subconscious; which means, it cannot be determined if the Godhead and the subconscious are two different entities … The Divine Image, exactly formulated, doesn’t correspond with the subconscious as such, but with a particular content therein, the Self archetype. This is what we cannot separate from the image of God. We can arbitrarily postulate a difference between the two, but that won’t help us: on the contrary, it will only help us to separate man and God, through which the humanization (Menschwerdung) of God is prevented (my italics). Sure, faith rightfully shows us the infinity and immeasurability of God; but it also teaches God’s closeness and immediacy, and it is this closeness that has to be empirical(ly felt Ns.), if it were to have any meaning at all. Only what works on me, in me, I recognize as real; what does not work on me, I might as well consider non-existent. Religious need wants wholeness and therefore grasps the images of wholeness offered by the subconscious, which, independent from the conscious (ego), emerge from the depths of the soul. — (C.G. Jung, Answer to Job)
“God has, certainly, without human help, made an unbelievably wonderful as well as uncannily contradicting image of Himself and laid that as archetype in our subconscious, not in order for theologists of all times and zones to get in each other’s hair, but in order for the unassuming human to contemplate a familiar image, built from his own spiritual substance, containing everything that he can ever invent about his gods or his spiritual base.” — (C.G. Jung, Answer to Martin Buber)
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Footnotes:
* I asked between 2 and 300 Christians. I think it was 3.
** Science studies matter. Women studies don’t matter —- Hey! I’m joking! Come back here, feminists! … “Do you see me laughing?” … “I guess not, tragically …”
*** As said before, it wasn’t Julia Roberts.
**** for the spelling of Tao see my post ==> Lingerie
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Illustrations:
1. My Apologetics Study Bible holding a very rare 1-person espresso machine I got in Italy (in the rest of the world, a 2-person size is called 1-person), a 2-ounce espresso cup and in the background my Benoît Fleury cello.
2. Gossiping women, Goya, 1792
3. Gossip, Susan Kuznitzky (b. 1955, Chicago), check out her website, it’s gorgeous!!!!!
4. No one to gossip to (1911, my title), by John singer Sargent (1856 - 1925). National Gallery (Sargent’s title: Repose)
5. Cambrian sea life, photograph from 1992. They took a time machine to travel to 523 million BC. Two researchers never made it back. It is believed that on their way back, they mistakenly chose 60 million BC instead of BCE (AD) for their fuel stop. This is why I don’t use Common Era date terminology. The big thing is Anomalocaris, one of my favorite names in the world, especially the way I pronounce it. The yellow thing in the right front could be Picaia, the ancestor of all vertebrae, including us.
6. More gossip, Susan Kuznitzky (b. 1955) (Kuznitzky’s title: Finishing Touch)
7. Amish Man. My title Tiet Chritulaer should not be confused with the astronomer, television presenter and popular science writer Chriet Titulaer, who from as long as I remember was the go-to guy on Dutch TV whenever a scientific discovery had been made concerning the universe, for instance during the landing on the moon in 1969. He had a very strong Limburg accent, his name was the weirdest name I have so heard so far in any language, and I have never known anyone wearing that style of facial hair in Holland. We have no Amish. Pennsylvania Dutch is a misunderstanding: the Amish are of German origin, though you don’t find them in Germany now. They’re all here now.
8. El Jaleo, by John Singer Sergant, 1882
9. Landscape with Stream (1660), Jacob van Ruisdael
10. Christ Pantocrator, Hagia Sophia, Constantinople, 6th century
11. Creation of Adam (1508-12), Michelangelo Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, the smallest country on earth.