Thanks, Bart, for the clear and actually moving account of your former faith, your questionings, and your eventual abandonment of Christian belief. I was glad to hear you say that you wrote the book not to encourage others to follow you into agnosticism (though I guess that is how the book may well work rhetorically for some), but to encourage all of us to think. That is something I constantly tell people: I believe in the authority of scripture, and in Christian tradition as the community of discourse within which Christians hear that scripture – but also, importantly, in the proper use of reason. Our culture has fallen prey to emotivism, leading people to say ‘I feel’ when they mean ‘I think’, and then – an easy shift – to allow feeling to trump thinking, and then to replace it altogether. That way, I think we agree, lie chaos and folly.
There are two large, general elements of your book, and your blog post, which I want to chew over in this first response.
First, picking up that point about thinking and feeling, I do think the rhetorical impact both of your book and of your brief opening statement is to make a powerful appeal to the emotions, perhaps particularly to the emotions of western persons such as ourselves who are insulated, geographically and culturally, from so many of the world’s horrors. You spend a good deal of time in the book, and even in your brief posting, detailing some of these horrors, as though to remind readers of what (surely?) all intelligent people know already. (I wouldn’t have been able to rattle off the actual statistics, but none of the phenomena came as a surprise.)
There are of course multiple miseries in the world, and for many (most?) of them it’s impossible to say, ‘There, look, some good came out of it.’ I think we both react in the same way against that suggestion. I once heard Rowan Williams suggest that it might actually be immoral to try to ‘solve’ the problem of evil, because as soon as you say, ‘There, look, that makes it all right, doesn’t it?’ you have radically belittled the problem, blinding yourself to the real, powerful and radical nature of evil. But I’m not sure what logical or moral (as opposed to rhetorical) force you add to your case by describing in such detail the horrors of the world.
In a sense, you simply bring us back to where western Europe found itself after the Lisbon earthquake on All Saints Day 1755. Up to then some had said, ‘Look at the world, think about it, and you’ll see that God exists and that Christianity is true.’ The earthquake was a wake-up call to casual western religion, and precipitated the whole Enlightenment revolution, first towards a detached Deism and then into agnosticism or atheism. Have you done anything other than recapitulate that moment? And, if you haven’t, I guess I want to ask: were you not aware, earlier, of the scale of evil in the world – the Holocaust, the dying babies, the inexplicable ‘natural’ disasters, and so on? You’re not implying, are you, that people (like me, for instance) who still hold to Christian faith are somehow failing to notice these horrors, or to reflect soberly and deeply on them? And if, as you say, your book (and your blog posting) do not actually constitute an argument against Christian faith (‘If you reflect on these issues you’ll see that the Christian claim is incredible’), might it not seem that the shift in your own position which you have described is a shift which came about, not because of logical argument, but because of other (unspecified) factors, with the problem of suffering providing a kind of intellectual backdrop to a journey whose main energy was supplied from elsewhere? I’m not saying the arguments are unimportant. But I’m trying to understand what you’re saying when you deny that they constitute an appeal to anyone else to follow your journey.
The second large, general point concerns your handling, and description, of the Bible and Christian faith. I want to take issue with your analysis of the biblical material. This is where I must refer to my own treatment of the same problem in Evil and the Justice of God, which forms part of the groundwork for my new book Surprised by Hope. I don’t know if you’ve read either of them, but in the former I give a very different account from you of the Old Testament material, seeing the call of Abraham not (as on your p. 66) as God simply calling Abraham ‘to be in a special relationship with him’ but as the moment when God launches the long-range plan to rescue the world from its misery. In other words, I read the story of Israel as a whole (not merely in its individual parts, which by themselves, taken out of that context, might be reduced to ‘Israel sinned; God punished them’, etc.,) as the story of theodicy-in-practice: ‘this is the narrative through whose outworking the creator God will eventually put all things to rights.’ Hence the promises of Isaiah 11 and so forth.
From this there flow three sub-points. First, your reading of ‘apocalyptic’ seems to me inaccurate in terms of substance and quite out of date in terms of scholarship. The sharp disjunction between ‘prophetic’ and ‘apocalyptic,’ and the characterization of apocalyptic in terms of dualism, pessimism, etc., is very misleading, growing out of an older scholarship which had no sympathy for what the apocalyptists were trying to do.
Second, I was startled that when discussing Paul you never even mentioned that Romans is all about ‘the righteousness of God,' i.e. the very question of your whole book; you reduce Paul’s understanding to a simplistic substitutionary account of the cross, which, though important, doesn’t catch the whole picture or his whole argument.
Third, you never factored in the way in which the gospels offer themselves as the climax of precisely that Abraham-rooted story of Israel-as-God’s-answer-to-the-problem. Jesus’ inauguration of God’s Kingdom (and the culmination of that kingdom-inauguration in the cross and resurrection), as I have argued elsewhere, was precisely his answer to the question ‘what does it look like when God is running the world’ – the very question of your whole book. It wasn’t clear to me whether you were saying that Jesus was mistaken in his beliefs and teachings . . . I did have the sense, frequently, that the form of Christian belief you were rejecting was a particular kind of north American Protestantism which I don’t believe itself did justice to the material.
In particular, of course, the resurrection of Jesus is absolutely central for me. Like many people ancient and modern, you don’t find it credible. If I didn’t believe it I wouldn’t have the beliefs I do about other things.
There is much besides, but this will do for a start. I suspect we are going to be frustrated at being limited to three posts. We’ve both already more than doubled our 500-word target on these first posts. I’m happy with that if you are.
Look forward to hearing back
Tom
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By the way Marmalade said this:
"How can people say things like this and not get immediately challenged? The only way someone could say this is if they were largely uninformed about pagan mythology. Tons of pagan gods were born of human women and some of them were resurrection deities. Dionysus is the most well-known example that preceeded Christianity and that probably was a major influence."
I see you're another parralellomaniac and you certainly don't the the TRUE story of Dionysis...Check out the pRE-SECOND CENTURY NARRATIVE...Zeus...(Dionysis daddy)fell in love with Semele the daughter of Cadmus and she got pregnant...by the way Zeus had this little problem...he LUSTED after many women...no reason to think Semele was left untouched...That junk had NOTHING to do with early or late Christian belief, only in the mind of those desperately looking for any reason to not believe.
Things like this simply show how uninformed you and other like you are when it comes to factual and verifiable records...so that shoe you were trying to put on the other person...wear it...it fits well!
Your further errors and presuppositional fallacies are far too many for me wast time with at this point, I've gotta get back to this debate. PEACE!
Anyone, like Ehrman, who has abandoned faith because of their awareness of suffering has to answer this historical question:
In past centuries people were far more intimately acquainted with horrible suffering than we are now, and the further back you go the worse it gets. Yet it is those very people who had faith. They did not have all the knowledge of all the world-wide statistics of suffering that Ehrman provides us. But they did have direct personal experience with death and pain of all kinds. Yet they still believed? Why is that?
In the Roman Empire and Medieval Europe every family would have had at least one child that died in infancy or childhood. Famines, plagues were matters of recent memory. The experience of having armed bands sweep through your town and kill and destroy all you held dear was was not rare. And yet in Roman times many pagans found Judaism profoundly interesting, and Christianity grew rapidly. Medieval Europe, of course, was the "Age of Faith".
Were all these people simply not thinking? No, they wrote works of theodicy back then too. Did they not feel pain and distress as sharply as we do now?
Justsalt,
Here is my answer to your question about why our ancestors, who on average suffered far more than we do, were also far more religious than we are. This portion is pulled from an essay I wrote in response to a book review on Charles Taylor's book on secularism. The original review was published in First Things. My response is published in ScribD:
“Taylor finds profoundly inadequate the standard view that secularism was a direct and inevitable consequence of the rise of modern science—rejecting, as he does, all efforts to account for modernity as a “subtraction story,” a simple liberation from prior confinements and a sloughing off of preexisting superstitions and illusions.
Instead, Taylor argues, the secularity of our world should be seen as “the fruit of new invention”—a reconfiguration of consciousness and a product of our own choices. As he puts it, ‘The story of a rejection of the old, unchanging religion, which uncovers and releases the perennial human, is wrong on both counts. Reinvention and innovation exist on both sides, and continuing mutual influence links them.’”
I partially disagree with Taylor here. I believe secularism is literally inconceivable without the rise of modern science—and its Siamese Twin, modern technology. Not because they “subtracted,” but because they offered an alternate story of Life, the Universe, and Everything to that presented to us by the ancient mythos of the Near and Far East.
And naturally, I also partially agree with Taylor. Secularism is indeed “the fruit of new invention,” again, quite literally. Our scientists “reinvented the universe” (see James Burke’s “The Day the Universe Changed”) while our inventers reinvented our surroundings, our tools, our work and our leisure. Secularism is a refitting of our mental models of the universe, making them more supple, more comprehensive, and more accurate, in that they explain physical processes that traditional religions merely told “just so” stories about over the centuries, not to mention explaining processes humans never had access to before. It was modern science and technology that opened our senses to the very fast, the very slow, the very huge and the very tiny events that operate in our universe and make it function.
Question for Christians:
I just watched a TV show on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneium nearly 2,000 years ago, burying thousands of people under tons of ash.
If you really do believe natural disasters are punishments from God for sins, can you imagine what sort of collective sinning these men, women, children, and babies were committing in order to deserve being buried alive???
This philosophical agnostic has far more respect for the naturalness of natural disasters than that. Mount Vesuvius is a live volcano, and has been so for ages. It threatens the lives of millions of Italians to this day. Geological forces occasionally force it to erupt. There is no meaning to it, no message in it, no punishment intended, no intent at all.
Please think through your assumptions about Reality. Please start taking matter and energy far more seriously than you have. Reality is NOT a morality play.
Thank you for reading and thinking about my very INTENTIONAL message.
Sorry but your comments do little to refute the logic and common sense displayed by Bart. I developed my beliefs independant of his analysis and was amazed when I read his books. He was able to put into place my feelings. I felt that when I read him I found a Kindred Spirit.
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