I know. I know. Jerry Coyne has already dealt with this. Sometimes I wonder how he so quickly gets to know of the latest idiocy to run off the religious press, but Chicago is clearly in the loop, and standing as it does out to sea, Nova Scotia is a bit out of it, even in this electronic age, but really, the latest argument against atheism does deserve to be noted at least one more time. In fact, it’s so funny that it really needs a stand up comic to do it some justice.
I’m talking, of course, about Jim Spiegel’s argument in Christianity Today that atheism leads to sin, or sin to atheism — well, anyway, that’s obviously going to be a problem for his argument. For, if sin leads to cognitive problems — and, believe it or not, that’s the claim — then, since all have sinned, Jim seems to be caught with his pants down. In fact, perhaps that’s what explains why his argument is really so hopeless! After all, notice that he takes Paul’s point as given. Namely, that we have no excuse, since we can — now, let’s get this straight, folks! — know that God exists. One’s tempted to say that if this is an example of Christianity today then Christianity is in deep deep trouble!
Alister McGrath, at least, is aware that there is a contradiction here. Discussing Calvin in his Christian Theology: An Introduction he says:
Calvin argues that the epistemic distance between God and humanity, already of enormous magnitude, is increased still further on account of sin. Our natural knowledge of God is imperfect and confused, even to the point of contradiction on occasion. [191]
Poor Jim Spiegel, though, closed that particular door, since he begins his funny article with the claim that:
According to Scripture, the evidence for God is overwhelming
– that is, I assume, not confused or contradictory. It goes without saying, of course, that this is not really evidence for anything. Just because it says so in a book obviously doesn’t mean that it’s true. But at least it’s clear that he can’t simply say that wickedness leads to epistemological problems, otherwise Paul’s point is pointless. But Paul doesn’t say that wickedness leads to epistemological problems. What Paul says is that the wicked suppress what they know to be true. And that’s a different story altogether. Though he teaches philosophy, Jim Spiegel appears to have failed Philosophy 101. Pity his poor students!
But, more seriously, he completely ignores the context. Paul is “arguing” that neither Jew nor Gentile has any excuse. Since it is completely obvious that God exists — we can know this just from considering the world that God has made — no one can use this as an excuse for failing to acknowledge the authority of Paul’s preaching of the gospel. (As with most things that Paul writes, the argument is all about Paul and his authority.)
Surprisingly, Spiegel thinks he can take Paul’s words simply as an affirmation that God’s existence is overwhelmingly obvious, without noting that Paul’s use of the argument is self-serving. (He can’t really think that, because Paul said it, that simply makes it true, can he?) What he misses is Paul’s claim that, since his — that is, Paul’s — gospel is so obvious, everyone except Paul is without excuse.
What we have in the first Chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans is a complete repudiation of both the Jewish and the Gentile worlds. Paul is the only one left standing. One Christian commentator on this passage writes:
The passage on the condemnation of the Gentiles which follows is one of the most violent and hate-filled in Scripture. Paul uses the message of God’s judgment to express his own antagonism and repudiation of the Gentile world. [Graham Shaw, The Cost of Authority, 145]
Something reminiscent, perhaps, of Sayed Qtub’s condemnation of the West after his brief stay in the United States. (Talking about comedy ….) But Spiegel is not entitled to use the passage simply as a philosophical proof text, as though it comes with no baggage.
What Spiegel misses, and what most Christians simply do not understand, is that to become a Christian in Christianity’s first few centuries was to segregate oneself radically from the world. Early Christians took very seriously Jesus’ claim that you had to hate father and mother, brothers and sisters, for his sake. Becoming a Christian was to repudiate the world. As a consequence, of course, many of them were quite prepared to die, in fact, many were eager to die for the sake of the gospel. The world had no allure, and life in the world was good only for the leaving of it, as Tertullian so eloquently argues in his Scorpiace:
… seeing the Master and Lord Himself was stedfast in suffering persecution, betrayal and death, much more will it be the duty of His servants and disciples to bear the same, that they may not seem as if superior to Him, or to have immunity from the assaults of unrighteousness, since this itself should be glory enough for them, to be conformed to the sufferings of their Lord and Master … [Chapter IX]
Christians forget that being baptised symbolises being buried with Christ. (You can read all about this in Romans 6.) Indeed, Tertullian goes on to say:
For the flesh is the clothing of the soul. The uncleanness, indeed, is washed away by baptism, but the stains are changed into dazzling whiteness by martyrdom. [Chapter XII]
You may think that I am wandering away from Jim Spiegel and his funny article, but I’m not. The main reason it is so funny is that he seems not to recognise how completely Christianity repudiates the world, and how, according to Paul, one must stand apart from the world in order really to know. The wisdom of the world, after all, is, for Paul, foolishness (1 Corinthians 1.20).
(It’s worthwhile mentioning parenthetically that Spiegel isn’t really entitled to his argument at all. He quotes Paul as an authority. But if Paul is an authority about our knowledge of God, then he must also be an authority when he speaks about the foolishness of worldly wisdom. That’s the problem with contradictions. Spiegel can’t have it both ways. He can’t accept Paul’s “philosophical” argument about the existence of God, and then simply ignore Paul’s anti-intellectualism. Paul is clearly familiar with the philosophical arguments for the existence of God. But he also wants to condemn them — which leaves Spiegel caught between two stools.)
Spiegel thinks it’s just a simple intellectual puzzle. He wants to understand how atheists are made, and he concludes that atheism is the result of immorality. What could be simpler? “If the evidence for God is so abundant,” he asks, “then why are there atheists?” Of course, as even Christian philosophers know, the evidence for God is not abundant at all. Crafting a convincing argument for the existence of God is exceptionally difficult, and most Christians are prepared to say that it’s not evidence that leads them to God in the first place. Karen Armstrong and other apophatic theologians say that God is simply beyond reason altogether, and that means beyond the evidence. Even Aquinas, at the end of his life, dismissed his philosophical labours as so much straw. How many Christians have said, of Dawkins’ discussion of Aquinas’s “five ways”, that they are not really proofs of God’s existence, but reflections on the relationship between faith already achieved and our knowledge of the world? No one, we are assured, thinks of these as real proofs that could actually lead one to faith.
That’s what’s so funny about Jim Spiegel’s argument. It’s a bit like trying to box in a wet paper bag. It looks as if he is carrying on a serious argument. He cites authorities, he produces what he thinks counts as evidence, and yet the whole thing is a tissue of pretences. He quotes the Bible a lot, but what does this show? Nothing really. After all, he completely ignores context. The purpose of Paul’s claim that there is an abundance of evidence for the existence of God is to argue that, in their wickedness, the Gentiles suppress the truth that they know perfectly well (despite their wickedness) — so this hardly makes his case that wickedness impairs cognition. And while it may be true that “Scripture’s wisdom literature tells us [that] obedience and humility lead to insight and understanding,” it’s only fair to point out that modern atheists are precisely those whose epistemological humility and obedience to the evidence are leading traits.
But then, there are the tautologies in Spiegel’s remarks. Take this, for instance:
The more we disobey and give ourselves over to vice, the less reliable our belief formation will be, particularly regarding moral and spiritual matters.
See what I mean? Tautology. Of course, if we really give ourselves over to vice, then our moral insight will be dimmed, or at least it will appear that way. That’s just what vice is. According to Webster, vice is “moral depravity or corruption” or “moral fault or failing”. So, of course, if we give ourselves over to vice, our morals will not be up to scratch. However, this doesn’t mean that we won’t know that we’re doing wrong. There may be nothing at all wrong with our cognitive abilities. In fact, really to do wrong means that we have mens rea, a guilty mind, and that means that we need to have our cognitive abilities in good working order; otherwise, we could not reproach someone for his moral failings. It would surely be strange to argue that someone’s immorality excuses itself, because it shows defective cognitive abilities! Paul’s point, in the argument in Romans that Spiegel makes so much of, is that the Gentiles are without excuse, because they do know.
The long and short of it, then? Well, perhaps Jim Spiegel should take a hint from his own name, and look in the mirror!
“(He can’t really think that, because Paul said it, that simply makes it true, can he?)”
In my experience with Catholics, at least, the answer clearly is “yes”. If Paul in particular says it, that’s the way it is, full stop.
Non-Catholic Christians I’ve known who fall into the Biblical literalist camp would say yes because it’s in the Bible, and therefore that’s the best proof of all that it’s true.
This hit home to me in discussions with my Young Earth Creationist boss, who was a brilliant man. He believed that anything in the Bible was not only as strong as scientific evidence, but much much stronger. If the Bible said flat-out “The sky is orange”, then that would trump the evidence of your eyes or of the scientific study of wavelengths. He’d manage to come up with some explanation for how what we thought the words said were really something different, or how we were led astray by Satan (seriously) to develop this seemingly scientific concept that is just flat-out wrong.
The Power of Assertion is mighty, my friend!
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Yes, thanks Jeff, but that was said, really, tongue in cheek!
Ah! Sorry about that, Mr. MacDonald, my sarcasm senses are weak this morning.
Personally, I found Spiegel’s arguments heartening for what they say about the current state of Christian apologetics. When you’re reduced to telling your intellectual opponents that they hold their positions as a consequence of psychological depravity, that’s about as weak as it gets.
Really? I haven’t heard a rational argument from a Christian apologist in years, just indignity that they are being asked to produce one.
‘Eric’ will do Jeff, just Eric. And, by the way, apologies not necessary. Irony doesn’t really work well online, unless it’s blindingly obvious. Sometimes I have to read Onion pieces twice just to make sure it’s a joke. I remember watching Ray Comfort’s banana gig and thinking, “What a wonderful put-down of Intelligent Design”! And then I realised he was serious!!
Yes, Ken, that’s what makes it so frightfully funny! Imagine the editors of Christianity Today reading over this article and saying, “Hey! That’s really good.” The more frightening thing is that this guy has written a whole book along these lines! I keep pinching myself and wonder if I’m just dreaming!
Isn’t apologetics the act of throwing every argument possible at the wall and hoping one of them sticks? They can false and/or contradictory – it just doesn’t matter as long as one gets the desired result.
When you’re reduced to telling your intellectual opponents that they hold their positions as a consequence of psychological depravity, that’s about as weak as it gets
Decades ago I took a course in Elementary Logic, which included a section on the common fallacies of argument, among which (of course) was Ad Hominem, which is, well, just a really bad way to argue: false, disreputable and dishonest.
So of course, Evangelical apologists baptize it and make it part of SOP.
That’s true, Eamon, but of course Spiegel is trying to claim that this is not simply ad hominem, but actually tracks experience. Of course, in order to prove the point, he would have to show — which he doesn’t — that people’s cognitive abilities are diminished by immorality. The problem here, of course, is what we are going to consider morality or immorality. I think St. Augustine was an enormously immoral person. Some of the most hideous practices of the church were legitimated by things that he wrote. Yet, I think it is evident that, in itself, this did not lead to a diminishment of his cognitive faculties. What caused his immorality was the dogmatism of his religious beliefs, but he thought about those beliefs with great rationality.
The evangelical Christian believes that the unbaptised person is somehow lacking in some cognitive abilities, and this is a deeply distressing view, but it is often repeated. One of the worst expressions in the Christian vocabulary, in my view, is the idea of the “baptised imagination.”
I was tempted to say that this Spiegel jackass is an embarrassment to philosophy, but he isn’t. He isn’t a philosopher, despite his job title, because philosophy is characterized first and foremost as inquiry — and inquiry requires pursuing truth rather than assuming it, following the evidence wherever it leads rather than hand-picking evidence which leads where you’re already determined to go. Similarly, no one working at Taylor University could ever be an embarrassment to science, or history, or any other academic discipline which involves the pursuit of truth rather than the pursuit of, say, technical skill (engineering) or beauty (fine arts). No one at Taylor is in the truth-pursuing business.
Why not? Because Taylor University demands a Statement of Faith, which logically and necessarily precludes the pursuit of truth by insisting that faculty must embrace a whole body of truth claims on faith; they commit themselves to treating these claims as true without any regard for evidence and reasoning which might — and indeed overwhelmingly does — suggest otherwise. Anyone who can sign on to the following sentence can never be considered a genuine scholar of any sort: “The Holy Bible is the only inspired, authoritative written word of God, progressively revealing God’s will for humankind.”
Not only does declaring faith in such a statement preclude any genuine pursuit of knowledge, the statement itself is clearly ludicrous on the face of it: Obviously, The Wizard of Oz is the only inspired, authoritative written word of God! Praise be The Prophet L. Frank Baum! [Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Amen.]
Yes, these “colleges” and “universities” that require an oath of allegiance to a “statement of faith” just shock me. I think I once did a post about that at B&W, some years ago. About how totally opposed to everything a university should be that requirement is.
Oh. It wasn’t some years ago, it was a year ago.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/deciding-in-advance/
Heh, and many of the same people were there, too – TPP, Eric, Michael F.
Well the things still exist so we get to go on talking about them!
All the usual suspects! But it really is profoundly shocking to see someone billing himself as a philosopher or an educator of any kind who is willing to sign away his intellect. What a bizarre act! How does one do it? Surely, no rational person could sign that document, agreeing to just those beliefs, and refusing to hold any of them up to the light of reason! And he has the never to speak of the deficient cognitive abilities of atheists!!!
CAUT — the Canadian Association of University Teachers — is involved at the moment in a dispute with Christian “universities” and “colleges” in Canada, and freedom of thought, research etc. No university that requires signing away one’s freedom in this fashion should be able to be accredited. If Christian bodies want to provide accreditation to such entities, fine, but it should be acknowleged that they are deficient as educational establishments, and that their degrees/diplomas are not evidence of a sound education.
As with the guy who was talking about our need for permanent things, my initial response was that this guy is making pronouncements from the armchair about issues that would require some proper empirical research. One could, in principle, try to explain atheism by “sin”, but then you’d need some systematically collected data, you’d need to consider other models of explanation, and you’d have to tackle the rather Herculean task of measuring sinfulness accurately. Alternatively, if you want to know how sinfulness affects our views on religion rather than explain the existence of atheism, you’d have to look at religious people as well.
And that Statement of Faith business is utterly ludicrous.
Hey, given the academic job market, can you blame someone for taking a steady gig as a liar? Yeah, I guess you can.
Heh. Yep, I can. In an amusing coincidence, I posted about a position at a much less benighted institution than Taylor just a few weeks ago.
Oh, come now. This clearly allows you license for years of free inquiry: Just what is “The Holy Bible” anyway? If it’s something that progressively reveals God’s will for humankind, it’s obviously not the book that I read before (and since) becoming an atheist.
Your philosophy sounds a lot like my science, TPP. Has philosophy changed in recent times? Is it more empirical than it was in the past?
Exactly!
But there are atheists. (“Hello! Over here!”)
Ergo, the evidence for God is less than abundant.
Vanishingly small, in fact. (Although that doesn’t follow logically.)
Forgotten about that one OB – we asked if we could sign in red ink when the loyalty oath was required at UC for employment. This was in the 80s and 90s and if you lapsed one quarter as a teaching assistant, you had to resign when you next taught a lab or discussion – not sure if it is still required. I think many people don’t even read the damn things – I have graduate students signing one page contracts who never bother to read them – surprised as hell as to what they are supposed to be doing.
It would be interesting to know what you could get away with at many of these colleges with statements of faith. If it never came back to haunt – which it no doubt would do – it might be fun to see how much one could subvert the “education” at some of these places.
This hits close to home as Spiegel was my advisor in college (I was a Philosophy major at Taylor University in the mid-90′s and have since left the faith).
I read his book, which expands on the assertions laid out in the CT article. His motivation was to provide a counterargument to Freud’s and Dawkins’ scientific/psychological theories of religion. He’s trying to turn the tables on atheists by claiming that it’s they, not theists, who are deluded and have rejected faith not for intellectual reasons, but rather for psychological and spiritual reasons. He really doesn’t provide any new arguments per se against atheism (a small fraction of the book is dedicated to summaries of fine tuning and cosmological arguments). In the end it’s really no more than a theology of atheism, with the truth of Christianity assumed as basic. (Spiegel is a big fan of Plantinga and a proponent of presuppositional apologetics.) Thus since Spiegel’s “arguments” are primarily theological in nature, there’s not much for atheists to respond to. It’s really just a big theological pep talk for theists in the face of the ever-growing onslaught of the gnu atheists and scientific progress.
Ah, thank you Louis, that puts a bit of umph into the title of my post… “let’s pretend we know.” I find Plantinga almost impossible to read, he is so annoying. Anyone who fields some of the arguments that he tries to put over on people should not be considered in the front rank of philosophy, especially his idea that belief in god is “properly basic”. Talk about begging the question!
Eric, precisely! The Reformed Epistemologists argue that there are things we all accept as basic truths that are based on “faith” (e.g., the problem of induction, the problem of other minds, etc.), thus belief in god is justified as properly basic. It’s a huge leap akin to flying a plane to the moon.
@Louis: I assume you’ve heard of Ravi Zacharias? His disciple Joe Boot was up here (Ottawa) for a couple of Does God Exist debates a year or so back, and pushed the whole Problem Of Induction argument. His argument boiled down to: “We must assume a coherent external reality in order to function, ergo Jesus; QED!”