Last weekend, our very own Adam brought to our attention an article that was published in Australian’s Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday 5 May. The author, Ms Nina Funnell, lamented that she believes women still do not have total authority over their own bodies. There is the Pill (which, I might add, recently became 50 years old) but yet there is still no widespread abortion-on-demand in Australia. On the latter, she is of course right: in Australia, only the State of Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory have decriminalized abortion. In all other states and territories, abortion remains illegal in just about all circumstances. As Ms Funnell points out in her article, a 19 year old woman and her boyfriend face a possible jail term of up to seven years for procuring an abortion in the state of Queensland. She doesn’t, however, provide any reason as to why this couple sought an abortion but we are expected to feel sorry for them, regardless.

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I just love the metaphor presented in this picture and wanted to tell you about some of my recent reflections that flowed from it.

This is the perfect picture of the hope I would have for my children. Notice the metaphors that surround her; money, sex, drugs, alcohol, violence, pornography (to name a few) - and she is totally centred on God’s Word. A fantastic image! And as Christians, isn’t this one of our most persistent concern for our children which we lay daily at God’s feet through prayer? Is it not also our own desire to do as the Lord instructs in raising Godly children like this?

Now for the reality check…

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I [the LORD God] will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. Where, O death, are your plagues? Where, O grave, is your destruction? ~ Hosea 13:14

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said” ~ Matthew 28:5-6

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power ~ 1Cor 15:20-24

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed ~ Isaiah 53:5 (NIV)

I was inspired to post this following the conversation about grace on an earlier post.

I heard the song East to West by Casting Crowns for the first time on a myspace site a few years ago and became addicted to it almost instantly. The lyrics will really hit home for those of you who know what it means to struggle with sin everyday. But it also touches very personally on many truths at the heart of Christianity and paints a vivid picture of Christ crucified for the purpose of separating us from sin as “far as the east is from the west”.

For example, you may recognise the reference in the song to this passage from Scripture:

‘as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.’

Psalm 103:12

The significance of the comparison of East with West being that the two are mutually exclusive; necessarily separate; the one can never unite with the other.

I think the writers of this song (Mark Hall and Bernie Herms) demonstrate – not just through this song, but many others they write – a proper attitude to sin and to Christ, as well as the ability to capture, through the lyrics, imagery and music, the anxiety that Christians face every day about their sin. Don’t be afraid to allow this song to stir the emotions. You may just find that it brings you to tears as it does me.

‘East to West’ – Casting Crowns
(Album: Altar & the Door)

Here I am, Lord, and I’m drowning
in your sea of forgetfulness
The chains of yesterday surround me
I yearn for peace and rest
I don’t want to end up where You found me
And it echoes in my mind, keeps me awake tonight

I know You’ve cast my sin as far as the east is from the west
And I stand before You now as, as though I’ve never sinned
But today I feel like I’m just one mistake away from You leaving me this way

From an old Table Talk article posted by Douglas Wilson, titled ‘Sanctified Apathy’

When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were commanded to bow down to the Babylonian idol, they refused. They knew that God was able to deliver them, and they said as much to the king. “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up” (Dan. 3:17-18). They said that their God could deliver them. But even if He decided not to, as far as they were concerned, the king could throw them into the furnace. They didn’t care. Of course they didn’t care about the furnace because they did care, and deeply, about honoring God. And this is the basis for sanctified apathy.

The more we care about honoring God, the less we will care about receiving honors from men. This is important because if we care about the opinions of men in the wrong way, it keeps us from being able to believe in Jesus (John 5:44).The more we care about being approved as a faithful workman by God, the less we will care if others condemn or oppose us on their own puny authority (2 Tim. 2:15).

Modern Christians are constantly exhorted to care. This is legitimate, indeed it is inescapable. But the problem is that we are regularly told to care about all the wrong things. “If we continue to maintain that God created the world in six days, we will not be granted academic respectability.” To which we must reply, well, who cares? Why should we care that the guardians of the academy believe that we are not intellectually respectable? They believe that the moose, the sperm whale and the meadowlark are all blood relations. Why do we want their seal of approval on our intellectual abilities? It is like asking Fidel Castro to comment on the economic viability of Microsoft.

Full article available here

I don’t tire of saying it, Akshay is simply one of the most insightful well-articulated obscure young(?) Christian thinkers in the blogosphere.

I’ve been told more times than I’d like to have heard it that religion is the root of all war. The people who say this are generally people who believe that religion is irrelevant, unscientific, illogical and unreliable – the kind of stuff that weak people need to believe in so that they can cajole their insecurities, calm their restless fears and play the sacrificial host to their nagging superstitions – the kind of stuff that helps you sleep at night.

Their views of religion aside, I find it naive and somewhat ignorant that one would assume that religion was the root of all war. Naive, because it assumes that man would not go to war if not for religious beliefs. Ignorant, because it negates all the war and violence in history that was initiated by the most non-religious of men. [eg. Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Stalin]

Men go to war because men have war in their hearts. Religion may fuel the fire, but I find it naive to think that religion started the fire. If there was no religion, would not men fight for the color of their skin, for their place on the ladder of social class, for the borders of their countries, for the expansion of their kingdoms, for the establishment of their non-religious dogmas? Have they not gone to war for those very reasons in the past?

To take religion out of the picture would only mean that there was one less reason/excuse in the world for men to go to war. The fact that men go to war is not the failure of religion. It is the failure of man. It is his greed, his pride, his stubborn rebellion against reason and his insatiable hunger for glory. To fail to recognize that, is to fail to confront ourselves as a people. To fail to confront ourselves, is to set the stage for a world at war with itself. With or without religion.

http://whereisakshay.blogspot.com/2007/10/at-head-of-every-sword.html

Sorry misotheists, I know this is news to you but religion is not to blame; certainly no more than skin colour or social class systems are to blame. Because without all these things men would still have war in their hearts. Religion is not the reason for wars or the cause of our ills. It doesn’t poison everything as one of the four horsemen of the new-atheist apocalypse puts it. Far from it. You see, it’s not skin colour; it’s pride. It’s not social classes or land; it’s greed. It’s not religion; it’s man. Man is to blame. Man and every wicked thing within his heart. The rest is just an excuse. It’s fluff. And as soon as you take your focus off the man to point the finger elsewhere, you’ve taken your eye off the real instigator.

At The Philosopher’s Magazine (TPM) web site there is a fun games and activities section, and one of the available games is called “The Philosophical Health Check” which is supposed to evaluate whether one’s answers to pre-selected pairs of world view questions demonstrate any contradictions or tensions. While not exactly serious it can nevertheless be somewhat interesting. I took the test and was pleased to discover that my world view is remarkably self-consistent and contains zero contradictions.

But it did identify two opposing answer pairs that apparently generate tension amongst themselves. But as the site itself admits, that tension can be removed by finding “some rationally coherent way of reconciling them.” The tension was found between my answers to the following two pairs of pre-selected questions. (For example, they ask you a pair of questions concerning morality that are worded quite differently, then compare them for consistency.)

First Answer Pair Tension

I agreed with the statement that “there exists an all-powerful, loving and good God.” But then I also agreed with the statement that “to allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly when one could easily prevent it is morally reprehensible.” Agreeing with both of those statements generates a tension, I was informed, a philosophical paradox known as the Problem of Evil.

The problem is simple: If God is all-powerful, loving and good, that means he can do what he wants and will do what is morally right. But surely this means that he would not allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly (as he could easily prevent it). Yet he does. Much infant suffering is the result of human action, but much is also due to natural causes such as disease, flood or famine. In both cases, God could stop it. Yet he does not.

It is sheer irony that TPM would be found committing such a basic question-begging fallacy. In reality there is no tension at all between my answers. Notwithstanding my agreement that there exists a God with the above described attributes, I had agreed that it is morally reprehensible to “allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly when one could easily prevent it.” Notice that emphasized word, for it is critically important. If there exists a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent then there cannot exist gratuitous evil or suffering, for the two are mutually exclusive in the same way that an Irresistible Force and an Immovable Object are. One can posit that my two answers are incompatible only by begging the question (fallacy) that some humans suffer needlessly; to assert that gratuitous evil or suffering exists shoulders an enormous burden of proof in a critical evaluation of the God of Christianity.

Second Answer Pair Tension

The idea that it is “reasonable to believe in the existence of a thing without even the possibility of evidence for its existence” was something I confidently disagreed with. But then I agreed that “atheism is a faith just like any other, because it is not possible to prove the non-existence of God.” That creates a tension, they told me.

In disagreeing with the first statement you are acting consistently with the general principle which states that in the absence of good grounds for believing something it is not rational to believe it. … This is not to be thought of as a matter of faith but of sound reasoning. But asserting that atheism is a faith just like any other, because it is not possible to prove the non-existence of God, contradicts this principle.

Not, it does not. I wonder if anyone else has ever noticed the bait-and-switch employed here. The first statement said that it is reasonable to affirm P (e.g., “God exists”) even when there is no possibility of evidence for it. I disagreed with that statement, for I think there is nothing reasonable about that. If there are no good grounds nor even the possibility thereof for believing P, then doing so is actually contrary to reason.

The second statement said that atheism is a matter of faith (which TPM interprets as belief without good grounds) because it is not possible to show that P is false (or that ¬P is true). And I agreed with that statement, having in mind the agnostic or ‘weak’ atheist who readily admits that God might exist but does not himself believe it. When we look past the epistemological component to the metaphysical structure of his world view, we observe that he must take it on faith that P is false (or that ¬P is true) precisely because it is not possible to show that it is. (There are those who say that atheism is the negation of a belief, not the assertion of a belief. They are simply wrong, for atheism is the positive belief that “no deity required,” that no feature of our world requires deity to account for it.)

But I want you to notice the bait-and-switch that TPM engages in. In their criticism they assert that it is not rational to affirm a proposition (whether P or ¬P) in the absence of good grounds for doing so, but it cannot escape our notice that this is a very different sort of beast. The clever switch they pulled may not be obvious but it is certainly clear. Their criticism regarded believing some X exists without good grounds for doing so, but the original question they asked regarded believing some X exists for which it is not even possible to have good grounds, which is a very different sort of thing. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the question of whether or not John has proper warrant to believe some X exists is a very different question from whether or not that warrant is appropriate for Peter’s belief that some X exists. (For example, if an alien is before John then he has proper warrant to believe it exists, but for Peter that evidence is anecdotal and may not be appropriate for his belief that it exists.)

At any rate, according to TPM it is not reasonable to believe some X exists when there is not even the possibility of good grounds for doing so. And I agree. But if by pairing this with a question about atheism they wish to suggest that such is the case for belief in the existence of God, they shoulder a heavy burden of proving that said belief is beyond even the possibility of having good grounds.

(The ‘strong’ atheist is in a worse position, for he draws a metaphysical conclusion from an epistemological argument, that is, he claims to know that P is false because it has not been shown to be true, or that ¬P is true because it has not been shown to be false, which commits the fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam.)

Third Answer Pair Tension

This alleged tension was so erroneous it barely deserves attention, but I am mentioning it for its comedic value. On the one hand I agreed that “judgements about works of art are purely matters of taste,” while on the other hand I agreed that “Michelangelo is one of history’s finest artists.”

The tension here is the result of the fact that you probably don’t believe the status of Michelangelo is seriously in doubt. One can disagree about who is the best artist of all time, but surely Michelangelo is on the short list. Yet if this is true, how can judgements about works of art be purely matters of taste? If someone unskilled were to claim that they were as good an artist as Michelangelo, you would probably think that they were wrong, and not just because your tastes differ. You would probably think Michelangelo’s superiority to be not just a matter of personal opinion. The tension here is between a belief that works of art can be judged, in certain respects, by some reasonably objective standards and the belief that, nonetheless, the final arbiter of taste is something subjective. This is not a contradiction, but a tension nonetheless.

The problem, of course, is that my answer to the second question was a matter of personal taste! I did not pretend that my agreement was somehow an objective judgment. I could either agree or disagree with the statement, but to disagree would have been false. So I had to agree, aware of the weak and obvious trap they were laying.

(And notice the “you would probably think” statements they impose on me in their criticism. No, I would not probably think that, because I had just said that judgments about art are purely a matter of taste.)

Since David’s essay was a response to mine, I thought that this response back to him should take the form of several responses to selected excerpts. Without further ado:

“He was simply repudiating as personally irrelevant various reasons anecdotally given for why a person would be an atheist.”

Yes, that’s a succinct and correct way of saying it. My short essay was perhaps bordering on a rant, with little content into which one could sink one’s intellectual teeth. However, David makes a valiant effort, and succeeds. I hope I can satisfactorily explain the points of contention.

“And this world view of his, which we may grant is atheistic, in fact is much more than a mere absence of belief that God exists.”

My world view is scientific. Let me qualify this. I’m not a practicing scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but I love reading about and learning about science. In the field of competing ideas, I’m on the sideline, cheering science on and waving my banner. My atheism has little to do with my world view, except insofar as it describes my stance on the question of the existence of gods.

“So biographically Havard believes that God is not required to explain the intelligibility of the human experience, but that raises the epistemological question as to whether or not he has good reasons for that belief. Unfortunately, he did not get into this; but since it was not the point of his article in the first place, he cannot be faulted for it. However, it is hoped that this encourages him to perhaps write more on this point.”

I have, on occasion, confessed that my reasons for being an atheist might not be entirely based on reason, and I stand by that. Asimov, struggling for years on whether to call himself an atheist or not, said, “I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.” This has become a favorite quote of mine. The only positive evidence that I can point to is the apparent lack of evidence for His existence. Now, I say “apparent” because naturally, I am only one person and may be missing vital evidence that, if provided me, would convince me. It sounds trite because of the repetition, but for me at least, it really is true: There are lots of things whose existence I don’t believe in, gods included (I trust I don’t have to reproduce the list).

“The nature of rebellion is made evident by other atheists who have stated quite frankly that, even if the existence of God were made conclusively evident to them, such that they would have to believe he exists by force of the evidence, they nevertheless would still refuse to obey or glorify him.”

This is an interesting observation. If God’s existence was made conclusively evident to me, I would certainly have no choice but to accept that He exists (naturally). Whether or not I would obey or glorify Him depends on His nature. Would I obey Him if He commanded me to slay the unbelieving tribe living down the valley? I would hope that I had the courage to refuse. Would I obey Him if He commanded me to love my neighbor? Yes. Would I glorify Him? Well, would He want to be glorified?

In a similar vein, David asks:

“Even if the existence of God were made indisputably evident to him, fully satisfying whatever criteria he might posit, would obedience to God depend upon Havard’s own personal evaluation of his commands?”

This is an extremely tricky question. Again, it utterly depends on the commands. But you specifically restricted the evidence to show only His existence, not necessarily His omnipotence or His omnibenevolence. Suppose he was an evil God with limited knowledge? In that case, I would certainly trust my own reasoning above His. But if His superior knowledge and goodness could also be made indisputably evident to me in some way, then I would have no choice but to obey, since I would then know perfectly well that it all works out for the greater good. In truth, I’m extremely unsure about how to answer this question.

“Every moment in which, and every means by which, they knew that God exists will be exposed and inescapable. They can get away with it before man, but they won’t before God. That is the eternal gamble they make of their lives.”

This strikes me as a veiled accusation of dishonesty. If it isn’t, then I apologize, but if it is, I can do nothing more than (yet again) repudiate it. I honestly don’t believe in any god. If all the facets of my inner life were laid bare to me and it could be shown that, yes indeed, here, here, and here is where I know God exists, then I would simply be baffled and then have to come to accept it. Maybe I just lack the requisite introspection?

“In other words, he actually does not find meaning in his personal life, because there is no meaning to be found; rather, he experiences a certain biochemical state of affairs when placed in particular circumstances. [...] If someone were to ask Havard how he can bear living under the view that there is no objective purpose or intrinsic value to life—i.e., how he escapes the joylessness that haunts nihilism—he would evidently shrug his shoulders and disclaim ‘I just do.’”

Thankfully, then, I am no nihilist. And in any case, if the universe turns out not to have an overall purpose, well, that certainly should not (and in my case, does not) put a lid on my jar of joy. I live on a wonderfully rich, lush planet, with people whom I love very much, and friendships that run deep. I value and cherish these things, and my knowledge that all things must die (as Tennyson put it) does nothing to dampen that. (Tangentially, that Tennyson poem should really be all that needs to be said on the subjects of death, in my opinion.)

“I should like to understand how it would be a ‘waste of time’ any different from, say, playing video games or reading a book (which I know Havard rather enjoys).”

Maybe I was a bit too glib in that remark of mine. I retract it. What I meant by it, anyway, was that it’s a waste of time if there turns out to be no one listening. Of course, prayer and church-going are by no means a waste of time—or at least no more a waste of time than playing video games—for the comfort of the individual doing it. I would not be so crass as to suggest that prayer has no benefits for the believer. It just isn’t for me, you know?