A lot of people think that a belief in absolute truth necessarily leads to dogmatism; that is, it seems to me, the main thing that moves people to conclude that truth is relative, because the alternative produces such unappealing behavior. Really, though, it’s not the belief in absolute truth as such that produces dogmatism, but the combination of a belief in absolute truth with a belief that the self is absolute; and it’s to defend that belief in the absolute self that people declare the truth to be relative. For my own part, I believe that the truth is absolute, and I am relative; my certainty is necessarily limited, not by the absence of absolutes, but by my own limited ability to perceive and apprehend them accurately. As John Stackhouse says, we may be pretty sure we’re right, but we lack the ability to get outside ourselves and our own limitations enough to be absolutely sure. We should believe what we believe firmly and with conviction; but also with humility. After all, the fact that we believe something doesn’t guarantee that it’s true; as Dr. Stackhouse says, it’s about confidence in God who is truth, not about certainty in ourselves, who aren’t.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Answering Islam on its own terms
Though I know he’s out of favor these days, and I’ve learned not to trust his account of modern philosophy as much as I once did, I still must confess a great debt and greater admiration for Francis Schaeffer; though I might have learned the presuppositional approach to apologetics from Cornelius Van Til or other figures in my own Reformed tradition, I learned it from Schaeffer, and I’m deeply grateful for that.For those not familiar with this approach, here’s a very brief summary, taken from the Wikipedia article: “The goal of presuppositional apologetics . . . is to argue that the assumptions and actions of non-Christians require them to believe certain things about God, man and the world which they claim they do not believe. This type of argument is technically called a reductio ad absurdum in that it attempts to reduce the opposition to holding an absurd position.” I appreciate this approach both for its recognition that none of us ever really starts from a neutral position—we all begin with a particular point of view, from a particular standpoint—and for its understanding that we can’t “prove” the Christian faith simply by piling evidence on people; we need to take their standpoints, their worldviews, more seriously than that.This is, I believe, the best way to contend for the Christian faith in any context, but especially in the Islamic world, given the nature of the Muslim faith and its view of non-Muslims; which is why Fr. Zakaria Botros is such an amazing and critically important witness to Christ. A Coptic priest and Arabic TV personality, Fr. Botros challenges Islam in its own language, on the ground of its own teachings, from its own texts.
Each of his episodes has a theme—from the pressing to the esoteric—often expressed as a question (e.g., “Is jihad an obligation for all Muslims?”; “Are women inferior to men in Islam?”; “Did Mohammed say that adulterous female monkeys should be stoned?” “Is drinking the urine of prophets salutary according to sharia?”). To answer the question, Botros meticulously quotes—always careful to give sources and reference numbers—from authoritative Islamic texts on the subject, starting from the Koran; then from the canonical sayings of the prophet—the Hadith; and finally from the words of prominent Muslim theologians past and present—the illustrious ulema.Typically, Botros’s presentation of the Islamic material is sufficiently detailed that the controversial topic is shown to be an airtight aspect of Islam. Yet, however convincing his proofs, Botros does not flatly conclude that, say, universal jihad or female inferiority are basic tenets of Islam. He treats the question as still open—and humbly invites the ulema, the revered articulators of sharia law, to respond and show the error in his methodology. He does demand, however, that their response be based on “al-dalil we al-burhan,”—“evidence and proof,” one of his frequent refrains—not shout-downs or sophistry.More often than not, the response from the ulema is deafening silence—which has only made Botros and Life TV more enticing to Muslim viewers. The ulema who have publicly addressed Botros’s conclusions often find themselves forced to agree with him—which has led to some amusing (and embarrassing) moments on live Arabic TV.Botros spent three years bringing to broad public attention a scandalous—and authentic—hadith stating that women should “breastfeed” strange men with whom they must spend any amount of time. A leading hadith scholar, Abd al-Muhdi, was confronted with this issue on the live talk show of popular Arabic host Hala Sirhan. Opting to be truthful, al-Muhdi confirmed that going through the motions of breastfeeding adult males is, according to sharia, a legitimate way of making married women “forbidden” to the men with whom they are forced into contact—the logic being that, by being “breastfed,” the men become like “sons” to the women and therefore can no longer have sexual designs on them.To make matters worse, Ezzat Atiyya, head of the Hadith department at al-Azhar University—Sunni Islam’s most authoritative institution—went so far as to issue a fatwa legitimatizing “Rida’ al-Kibir” (sharia’s term for “breastfeeding the adult”), which prompted such outrage in the Islamic world that it was subsequently recanted.
Islamic leaders have proven unable to challenge him, because he’s beating them on their own terms; combined with Fr. Botros’ presentation of the truth of the gospel, the result has been millions of conversions to Christianity every year. There have been threats against his life in consequence, but he will not back down, and so far, no one has been able to make him. A billion cheers for Fr. Botros, indeed.The success of Fr. Botros’ flank attack on the Islamic world, coming as it does at the same time as the frontal assault Pope Benedict XVI launched with his Regensburg address in 2006, highlights an important point: the West cannot answer Islam by purely political means, whether military or diplomatic. Indeed, Islam cannot be addressed on any sort of secular grounds, because the liberal secular mind does not understand religion. As Spengler argues and as the case of Magdi Allam demonstrates, the West can only respond effectively to the Islamic challenge by returning to its Christian (and thus Jewish, and thus Eastern) roots, because “one does not fight a religion with guns (at least not only with guns) but with love” (a point made also by Chuck Colson) The great struggle for the soul of the West against Islam, though it surely must involve military efforts at times against the likes of al’Qaeda and Hizb’allah, will most basically be a struggle for the souls of individual Muslims, and thus for the lives of those who seek to leave Islam for Christianity. To quote Spengler,
Where will the Pope find the sandals on the ground in this new religious war? From the ranks of the Muslims themselves, evidently. Magdi Allam is just one convert, but he has a big voice. If the Church fights for the safety of converts, they will emerge from the nooks and crannies of Muslim communities in Europe.
The parallel he draws to the conversion of the pagans who overran the fading Roman Empire is a compelling one; those tribes conquered Europe, and thus the Western church, but the church in turn absorbed them by conversion. Faith conquered where military power failed. The key, as Wretchard points out, lies in your presuppositions, the foundations of your life, and having a place to stand that you know is worth standing for.
Challenging Islam’s roots requires the challenger to have an irrational [or better, superrational] loyalty to roots of his own. Faith is a special kind of information that arises from providing answers to questions that are undecidable within our formal logical system; that lie beneath the foundations of our civilization rather than in a development of its precepts. It lies within our choice of axioms rather than the theorems that arise from them. And because axioms cannot be proved, “our way of life” will always rest on prejudice—or if you will—faith. Like Camus, we can never rise completely above all our attachments and still retain our capacity to act.
HT: Presbyweb, BreakPoint
Brief meditation: on art
What is art? It’s a question that resists easy answers, in large part I think because it’s beyond us to ever fully answer. Art is something we do after the image of God, because he who is Creator made us (to use Tolkien’s term) sub-creators in his image; art then is something which partakes in some way of the nature of God, and so I suspect that just as we will never be able to fully define God, so we will never be able to fully define art. But then, what is a definition? It’s an attempt to constrain something, to confine it to a purely rational and intelligible space so that we can say confidently that we know what it is, and thus have some control over it. For most things, that’s good, because most concrete things and most concepts are small enough to be defined; but God isn’t. We shouldn’t seek to define God, because if we could define him, he’d be too small to be God. By analogy, I wonder if we should really want to define art. If it were that small, would it be worth pursuing? Rather, just as God calls us to know him not by definition but by recognition—”My sheep know my voice”—so too I think understanding art is a matter of learning to recognize it when we see it.
That does still raise the question, though: what are we looking for? Is art a matter of great skill and technique—is it something that can be graded empirically? I don’t think so; skill and technique unquestionably have their part to play, but art is bigger than mere virtuosity. Art, I believe, is akin to priestly ministry, and the work of the artist is somewhat like that of the priest, in that art is an act of mediation. Much as the great Episcopalian preacher Phillips Brooks described preaching as “the communication of truth through personality,” I would argue that the artist mediates a vision of reality through their personality, gifts, and chosen medium, to give that vision a particular expressive form which can be intuitively and sympathetically apprehended by an audience. That vision doesn’t necessarily need to be objectively correct in order for the result to be art, just as one doesn’t necessarily need to worship the true God in order to be a priest; I do think it helps, though, and that a truer vision makes greater art, just as better skill and technique makes greater art.
Bumper-sticker philosophy
Driving in to church this evening for the Wednesday night stuff, I ended up behind a car (briefly) with a bumper sticker that read, “Question everything.” I thought, “Really? Everything? Does that include questioning questioning everything? Why question everything? Question it how? On what grounds? And if you question everything, what sort of answer should you expect to get?”
I was of course partly being snarky (to myself); but I do wonder, does that person really mean it? What would they think if you started questioning science? “Are you sure the theory behind the internal-combustion engine in your car is sound? Why should you trust that gravity will hold your tires on the road? Can you be certain that turning the wheel actually makes the car turn? On a different note, why do you believe in the theory of evolution? Is there really the evidence to support it? Can you be sure that the people who support it aren’t doing so from ulterior motives?” And so on, and so forth . . .
Then too, I saw recently, I don’t remember where, that someone (Richard Dawkins?) had propounded a set of “Ten Commandments for Atheists.” Leaving quite aside the question of why atheists would support having commandments in the first place, one of them was, “Question everything”; and yet, I know they don’t mean that, because on the evidence, they certainly don’t believe one should be commanded to question atheism. At least, Dr. Dawkins and his ilk tend to respond pretty sharply to those who do.
The truth of the matter is, no one ever means anything like “Question everything”; even René Descartes, who came the closest, didn’t get that far (nor, I think, did he want to). Most people, when they say “Question everything,” really mean something like this: “Let me question everything you believe that I don’t want to believe in, and let what I want to believe right alone.” Saying that would be far more honest; somehow, though, it doesn’t have quite the same ring.
David Mamet moves right
In what might be the strangest event yet of this truly bizarre election season, renowned playwright David Mamet has published an essay in the Village Voice on “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.'” This startling change of mind came during the course of writing a play titled November, which he describes as
a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention. I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
Indeed, it seems he has, as he goes on to write,
Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out. And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting). And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace. “Aha,” you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
I suspect this essay will induce a fair bit more tooth-grinding on the part of a lot of liberals, but I hope people can get beyond partisan reactions (whether rage or glee) and read it for its own sake, because it’s a fascinating essay in practical political philosophy (not least for the presence of that rabbi, who I think is spot-on). Plus, I appreciate Mr. Mamet’s concluding paragraph:
The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.
Adolescent atheism and the nihilistic impulse
When I put up my earlier post on atheism, I didn’t expect the response I got (though perhaps that’s only because I hadn’t run across Samuel Skinner before; as much time as he spends on other people’s blogs arguing his position, he really ought to start his own). I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, however; what I described as the adolescent atheism of the self-impressed isn’t an attitude conducive to taking criticism well, or to having one’s heroic self-image challenged. Given that, I probably should have expected someone to take umbrage; after all, when you consider yourself the only rational person in the room, as Mr. Skinner evidently does, it’s a little hard to have someone tell you your thinking is shoddy, adolescent, self-deluded and shallow.
Given that there was a response, however, the arrogant, dismissive, and hostile tone of that response was no surprise at all. As R. R. Reno notes, that sort of tone is becoming de rigeur from atheists these days.
The intemperate, even violent tone in recent criticisms of faith is quite striking. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens: They seem an agitated crew, quick to caricature, quick to denounce, quick to slash away at what they take to be the delusions and conceits of faith. And the phenomenon is not strictly literary. All of us know a friend or acquaintance who has surprised us in a dark moment of anger, making cutting comments about the life of faith.
This isn’t how it used to be; atheists of past generations could be calmly superior, unconcerned in their certainty that religion was dying away. Voltaire, for instance, calmly predicted that Christianity would be extinct within fifty years of his death. Why the change?
I suspect the answer is to be found in part in this comment from historian Paul Johnson: “The outstanding event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear.” The calm face of atheism past was founded on its smug certainty that religion was on its way out; that certainty no longer holds, so atheists must actually deal with religion, and as Dr. Reno concludes,
There is something about faith that agitates unbelief. . . . As Byron recognized, modern humanism can easily become cruelly jealous of the modest claims it stakes upon the noble but fragile human condition. To believe in something more—it can so easily seem a betrayal. And because the reality of faith cannot help but ignite a desire for God in others, it is not hard to see why our present-day crusaders against belief take up their rhetorical bludgeons. They fear the contagion of piety.
It seems to me, then, that the sheer persistence of religious faith is eroding the urbane face of atheism, exposing the violent impulse underneath; though Mr. Skinner tried to deny it in his comments, there is a link between atheism and nihilism, because atheism is ultimately a belief in nothing. It isn’t alone in this, either; there are many who consider themselves religious believers who actually, at the core, share that faith in nothing; as the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has written, the common religion of our culture “is one of very comfortable nihilism.”
As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives.
This is, as Dr. Hart notes (in what is truly a brilliant article), the inevitable logical consequence of
an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess . . . a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want—but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value.
As Dr. Hart goes on to demonstrate, this is the logical consequence of Christianity, which strips away all other gods, leaving only one choice: Christ, and the paradoxical freedom of the gospel, or nothing, “the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity.” As already noted, there are many who would say they worship Christ who in truth worship at the altar of their own freedom of choice; but they at least have another option before them, however imperfectly or confusedly they may understand it. For the atheist, there is no other option than “an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.” Indeed, atheism is a commitment to want no other option; and faith, even as confused as it often is, threatens that commitment. That, our “present-day crusaders against belief” simply cannot tolerate, and so they “take up their rhetorical bludgeons” to destroy “the contagion of piety” once and for all; and when they march, they march under the banner of Nothing to eradicate belief in Something—or rather, Someone.
The adolescent atheism of the self-impressed
Atheism is a profitable subject these days, having launched a number of bestsellers—and not only by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Richard Dawkins; the notoriety of their books has created corresponding interest in books by Dr. Alister McGrath (The Dawkins Delusion) and the Rev. Tim Keller (The Reason for God), among others. Indeed, the Rev. Keller’s book currently stands at #18 on the New York Times bestseller list and #56 overall on Amazon.com, which wouldn’t have happened without the conversation Dr. Dawkins et al. began. There is more of a market for serious apologetics in this country than there has been probably in decades, and we owe it all to enemies of the faith.
As I stop to consider that fact, I can’t help thinking that for all the outrage from some quarters directed at folks like Hitchens, Dr. Dawkins, Sam Harris and Dr. Daniel Dennett, the end result of their efforts may well be to boost the church rather than atheism. I’ve protested before the intellectual shoddiness of the “new atheists” in their engagement with theology, philosophy and history; what I hadn’t noticed was how shoddy their atheism itself is. Georgetown’s John F. Haught, writing in The Christian Century, points out that they essentially want to throw out God but keep all the trappings; Marx would have called them incurably bourgeois, and there’s no doubt that they lack either the insight (into what they’re really asking) or the courage (to face that insight) of older atheists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. Hitchens and his confréres think their critique of religion is original and radical, and are quite impressed with themselves for it (as indeed they seem to be in general); but the truth is, compared to Nietzsche in particular, they’re pikers. Their atheism, far from being the evidence of maturity they appear to believe it to be, is essentially adolescent in character, founded less on a serious engagement with the world than on a visceral rejection of things they don’t like. On an intellectual level, it simply doesn’t measure up to the wealth of Christian apologetics; and if reading God Is Not Great or The God Delusion spurs people to go on to read The Dawkins Delusion or The Reason for God, I can’t help thinking that the church will come out best of it in the end.
The spirit of the soul
My wife and I had an interesting experience while watching NUMB3RS tonight (as I’ve noted before, I like mysteries, and the writers are doing a good job with that one). Just past the teaser, up came Lynn Redgrave, looking regally and serenely into the camera, declaring, “I want to die from eating too much chocolate. Or from exhaustion, dancing the tango. I want to die of laughter, on my 87th birthday. But I refuse—I refuse—to die from breast cancer. I want to die from something else.”
I’m not ordinarily much of one for commercials (that one was for Bristol Myers Squibb), but that was truly cool. Part of it, of course, was that Lynn Redgrave is a woman of great presence. More than that, however, I really liked the attitude she expressed. There was no fear of death, nor any effort to avoid the fact that she, like all of us, will at some point die; that much, she accepted as a given (which far too many people don’t). It was simply the determination not to let that beat her, not to die that way.
I realize, certainly, that there’s a danger here, that of coming to believe that we can die on our own terms; I realize that that way lies a great many dangers. And yet . . . there is still something noble and honorable in the refusal to accept defeat at the hands of a dishonorable enemy; when paired with the acceptance that death will come at some point, and the understanding that it really is beyond our control, to stand and fight and refuse to give in is admirable, as long as it isn’t taken too far.
It reminds me of Harvey Mansfield’s recent article in First Things titled “How to Understand Politics,” in which Dr. Mansfield (a professor of government at Harvard) insists on the importance of the Greek concept of thumos. He defines thumos as “the part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance . . . Sometimes translated as spiritedness, it names a part of the soul that connects one’s own to the good. Thumos represents the spirited defense of one’s own characteristic of the animal body, standing for the bristling reaction of an animal in face of a threat or a possible threat. . . . Thumos, like politics, is about one’s own and the good. It is not just one or the other . . . It is about both together and in tension.” Like almost any good, we can become unbalanced in pursuing it; but we can also become unbalanced in undervaluing it. Lynn Redgrave, in that commercial, is expressing thumos; and I say, good for her—and thanks for letting us see it.
Tributes
The big news, of course, is the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell; there’s a nice reflection on the man and his work by Joseph Bottum over on the First Things blog. Really, by this time, the Rev. Falwell was about 20 years past his period of broad cultural relevance, though he continued to be important as the founder and patriarch of Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University; but all in all, for all the points where I disagreed with him and the times when he made me cringe, I’d still have to say that our nation is better off because he lived, and that from where I stand, it looks like God used him in powerful ways. Rev. Jerry Falwell, RIP.
On another note, there’s an equally good tribute to the philosopher Charles Taylor, written by Dinesh D’Souza, on the tothesource website, on the occasion of Dr. Taylor having been awarded the Templeton Prize. If you haven’t read Taylor, and you’re up for a good deep read, you ought to–probably starting with his magisterial Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Meaty stuff, and very, very important.
Presumption, my dear sir; pure presumption
It’s one of the interesting (and annoying) things about scientists these days—well, to be precise, about the high-profile ones who write heavily-publicized books attacking Christianity—that they refuse to hear of anyone without a Ph.D. in science writing anything at all bearing in any way on science, and treat anyone who tries with utter contempt, but don’t hesitate to wade into the fields of the humanities, of which they know nothing at all, with the serene assurance that since they’re scientists, they must be experts here, too. Watching the likes of Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg dress up as philosophers, theologians and historians would be hysterically funny were it not so embarrassingly cringe-inducing, at least for those who actually know something about practicing the disciplines of philosophy, theology and history; it’s amateur hour to the nth power, rather as if someone stepped out of America’s Funniest Home Videos and into the finals of American Idol. Watching the noted philosopher Alvin Plantinga dismantle Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, however, is a very different experience, one in which Dawkins’ work plays the role of carrot to Plantinga’s Cuisinart; for his part, Weinberg’s smug, self-satisfied theory of historical development doesn’t fare much better against Barton Swaim.
I’ll concede, it would be unreasonable to expect these folks to stop trying to refute Christianity; but I would appreciate it if they would at least set aside their disciplinary arrogance and treat the humanities with the same academic respect they demand for the sciences.
Edit: as noted in the comments, including Daniel Dennett with Dawkins and Weinberg was inappropriate in more than one respect; he has therefore been removed. Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa. That said, I would still appreciate it if he would “treat the humanities with the same academic respect [he] demands for the sciences,” even if he’s formally a philosopher himself, as he treats even his own ostensible discipline with public disdain.