The answer to the question posed in the last post concerning the reliability of the Bible as an epistemological source can, in my opinion, only be arrived at within a theistic worldview. Clearly, we cannot believe that a writing is the word of God unless there is a God whose nature permits him to have this kind of relationship with human society. Apart from this, no writing can be rightly viewed on the level that Christians view scripture. While a collection of writings across a few thousand years might contain a great deal of valuable human wisdom and much historical interest, it should hardly be viewed as a guide by which we can reliably obtain moral and spiritual truth, unless we have the firm belief that its authorship ultimately transcends the intellect of man.
Again, we cannot arrive at this view unless we already assumed that a personal/ transcendent God exists, but once this is accepted, it begins to seem logical that He would have given us some form of revelation. We can see His truth revealed in many places and ways in this world: by the moral impulses we all have, the profundity and meaning of human emotion, thought, creativity, and knowledge, the beauty of nature, the mysterious rapture of love, etc. By these, many of the larger truths of life can be comprehended: we can see that there is meaning, even if we don’t understand it, that there is right and wrong, that there is a creator, who, we might speculate, is a creative, rational, and relational being, since that is how He made us. But this is all speculative, and in regard to our moral sensibilities, right and wrong are left so subjective to our own judgement as to allow us to build our own moral codes and condition our own consciences to the point that we commit terrible acts of injustice against others, and drift further from the principles which we, and ultimately all of existence, was made to embody.
It is in our very nature as humans to search for truth. We do so scientifically, by observing the physical world, psychologically, by observing ourselves, and philosophically, by examining the nature of both these spheres as they relate to each other and to the larger considerations of existence itself. We certainly do produce creative works that give insight into these areas of thought, many of which can be (to a certain degree) affirmed as true. Yet in Scripture, we see a higher level of revelation than I believe can be seen in any work of mere human authorship. Much of this is due to that which is often pointed out:
-It was written over many different years, and by different authors, but a grand, over-arching message of fallen humanity and a divine plan of redemption appears.
-yet this message does not appear as though one author simply picked up the pen of the previous author and began where he left off in saying roughly the same thing. The message of the Bible can only be fully seen when viewing the work as a whole. This is especially true in the Old Testament books of prophecy, law, and to some extent, the poetry and history, when things were foreshadowed that the human author could not have fully understood, or seen by his own power.
-Prophecies in one part are fulfilled later on, often in ways that could not have been intentionally played out by humans wanting to make them come true, as in the details of Christ’s birth, betrayal, and death.
-The miracles it discusses (and these will not be considered impossible by those who seriously accept the existence of the divine) give further evidence.
-All of this is well substantiated by geographical, historical, and literary evidence to which no other ancient writing remotely compares.
-The message that Scripture brings answers the inherent problems that we as humans must have, if indeed we view our existence in the light of theism. The solution of to the inherent moral problem of human sin achieved by Christ on the cross is the only satisfactory solution that we can have, and we are left with a hope of eternal life, glory, meaning and happiness in a relationship with Ultimate Reality that is the central to the desires of the human heart.
-It has profound personal effect on those who read it. This cannot be convincing to those who have not experienced it themselves, but for those who have, it reinforces conviction. The changed lives give a powerful testimony, too.
-To believe it seems like a win/win situation, in terms similar to Pascal’s wager: If we believe in it and it’s true, we have good news. If we believe in it and it’s not true, then either were nothing but worm food anyway and believing something nice didn’t hurt, or we’ll go on to achieve a higher state of being because of the good moral principles it promoted. If we don’t believe it and its not true, we’re missing out on something incredible in both this life and the next. If we don’t believe in it and it’s not true, it still doesn’t really matter either way, as long as we enjoyed ourselves, and perhaps, depending on the true nature of reality, lived a good life.
None of this is anything like conclusive proof, of course. For the theist, however, I think that it is very compelling, and even for the non-theist, I believe that it provides something worth chewing on.
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4 comments:
Whoa...this really is a can of worms. It might be wise to keep the lid nearby. There's no telling how long they'll crawl.
Yes, this has given me a lot to chew on. I like that. Without questions, the answers aren't worth having. But enough with the cheesy metaphors; I'll get to the real beef now.
I looks like I should probably do more research so I can sort out the real story here. It has been my understanding that what we call the canon was assembled long before Constantine, and even before Christianity had much social influence at all. The council of Nicea was for the purpose of resolving a theological controversy on the precise nature of the Trinity, and the canon would have been established by then. The additional writings to which you refered that were not included in our Bible are the gnostic writings. Gnosticism was based on the ideas of neoplatonsim, a mixture of the Christianity of the apostles and the original early church with Greek philosphy, creating a syncrotistic set of beliefs that was never accepted by the early Church as a whole. Most were written long after the cannonical gosples and epistles, and our manuscripts for these books are less reliable. They also include teachings that were not at all in line with what has been included in the Bible. I'm not up on what happened in 1611, but I think that may have been the council in which the catholic church chose to include the apocrypha, largely for the purpose of bolstering some doctrines which protostants apposed as being unbiblical. I'll grant you that this was a manipulation of a power-hungry institution. If you want to complain about the church being about money and power, I'll be glad to join you. (Unjustified generalizations put asside, that is.) Again, this is what I have learned about the Bible so far. I need to do the research to see whether your argument is supported by actual historical evidence or by the Da Vinci Code theories now in vogue.
But here's what else I've been chewing on: I was thinking about that one post you wrote (I think back on Bry's site) in which you discussed your foundation for morality. To be honest, I found much of what you had to say truly inspiring. I was startled with how much it resembled my own system of thought in that regard. Yet the one critical difference I observed was this: the God of whom you speak is not distinct from the world He has made, whereas mine is. We both use the word "God", but mean very different things. When you react incredulously to the claim that God is likely to given us a written form of specific revelation, you speak with honesty from your own worldview. In my worldview, in which God cannot possibly be called "it", regarding the Bible as divine is indeed feasable; there is no reason why such a God should not deem it proper to thus relate to His own created beings.
Therefore, when you discredit belief in the Bible as God's word as unreasonable, you are really discrediting the whole underlying worldview as unreasonable. You are dealing with the implications of my worlview as though it shared the same basis as your own, something I expect I have done myself at times. Based on your worldview, of course faith in the Bible doesn't make sense.
But here we get back the foundational issue of epistemology. My primary (absolutley first) locus of epistemology does not inlude the Bible, because things have to be assumed before it might be accepted as true. It includes impirical observation, reason, and the admission that more than the impirical can exist and be known as true. As near as I can tell-forgive me if I have misundertood you-but I see no such admittence on your part. You clearly love science (I do to), but just as you have asked me to question both the Bible and the underlying epistomological reasons which lead me to it, so I am compelled to suggest that science is not above questioning. You hold science to be what I have defined as an epistomological authority, but authority, in the way that I use it, does not mean that it is not above questioning.
In the last seveal hundred years, there has been, due to the growing prominence of science, a tendancy to devalue anything which does not fall within its ken, as though impirical obsevation (an activity of fallible beings) is in its very essence superior to accepting revalation, supposing it does exist. Again, it has been assumed that such a divine existence as would make this type of revelation likely is inherently inferior (epistemologically) to what we can confirm by science. Many Christians foolishly fear science because they think it will not permit God, many scientists foolishly fear anything that will allow Him.
The point is that while you have challenged me to understand that my faith must be questioned, I wish to challange you to question your faith as well: your faith in independent impiricism. For the intellectually honest (and I hope that I am, as I know you do), nothing is above criticism.
Well, I'm not sure where the lid is anymore, and I havn't answered your objections exaustively. If we both mean to do that, we'll be here a long time. But one question: You say that Jesus was misunderstood. Who do you say the real jesus was?
Xeric, thanks for looking into some of this stuff. Especially about Shakespear; that is very interesting. I looked it up in a KJV myself, and found it to be true, except that I found it in Psalm 46, with 'shake' and spear' 46 verses from the ends, respectively. But I see no reason to dismiss it as untrue. I'd like to learn more about the relationship between Shakespear and the KJV.
But about the discrimination between books of the canon and those that were rejected: having apparently researched something about the Bible, you might already know all this, but the books of the Bible were canonized by the early church based on several different criteria, which included apostolic authorship (any of the original disciples, or an associate thereof such as Paul), general acceptance among the believers, first-century origin, and finally, coherence with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Many gnostic books, like the Gospel of Thomas, were not not written by those for whom they were named; it was a popular practice to name a work after someone, and nobody would have assumed this individual to be the author. Concerning general acceptence of a work, the canon was complete before the institution of the Roman Catholic Church existed, and so it is probably unlikely that there was any political agenda in supporting a particular belief system. The four gospels, according to most scholers, were written within several decades after Christ's death, except John (Matthew: before AD 70, Mark: Probably the first written, possibly in the 40's, Luke: early 60's, John: maybe in the 90's, but no later.The web page you gave me seemed to generally agree with
this) The gospel of Christ would have been well known through what was written and what was passed down by those who saw first hand; aural tradition at that time was closely gaurded enough to ensure that it would not have been very embellished within the single generation between Christ's death and resurection and the writing of the Gospels. That is what I have learned on the subject, anyway.
Any claim of Jesus being a gnostic would be substantiated by the gnostic gospels, but the verses you chose don't conclusivly show any such teaching. They might be interpreted to simply imply the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. An alternate translation of Luke 17:21 says "before you" rather than "within you", which lines up well the the broader emphisis of Christ's message, which focused on drawing attention to himself, not to any internal sense of divinity.
I don't know how much the Roman Church distorted Christ's real teachings, but I will agree that they placed them beyond the reach of all but the clergy, who in most cases were more political authority figures than honest spiritual leaders. This abuse was, in my belief, abandoned in the Reformation, which restored the church and its doctines to something more closely resembling the real teachings of scripture. I'll grant that Christ's moral teachings (but not his personal claims) resembled that of Buddha and other great moralists. The moral codes of almost all moral teachers throughout history agree on most general teachings and values, a fact that I find very compelling regarding the nature of moral truth.
Thanks for seeing where I'm coming from in calling the Bible God's word. But why would an almighty and detached God care about microbes? My question is why such a God would care even if we cared. No doubt, the cosmos is a big place, but I can't help but feel as though I was put here for a reason, and that almighty God doesn't assign random, trifling tasks to beings and then forget that He did.
Yes, you did open up a new can of worms with reference to extra-terrestrial life. I find it ironicl how naturalistic atheists use possible evidence of of this to argue against theists, but theists can just as easily use such evidence for the existence of a Creator. The argument doesn't change the game, it just makes the playing field a whole lot bigger.
Just as Plato made a distintion between knowleged and belief, I would also make a distinction between belief and faith. Belief is unjustifed knowlege, whereas faith is knowlege, justified or otherwise, that one has chosen to act upon, thereby treating it as knowlege. I don't believe that the world is round, I know: but it is ultimately by a basic step of faith that I can say that I KNOW this, or know anything. And yes, I do place faith in the belief that What Jesus did is the only way that I can be reconciled with God.
"To say 'life exists on earth and earth alone' is huge underestemation of God."
Yes, I would agree. More than anything, I think that this statement betrays intellectual arrogance by claiming with certaintay that e.t. life does not exist, simply because we have not seen it. It's tantamount to saying that God cannot exist because we can't see him under a microscope. (Although I think that both of us would agree that we do indeed see God under a microcope, although each in a different sense.)
The possibilities opened up by what we do not yet know are tremendous, like the possibility that our galexey is the equivelent of a subatomic partical in a macrosphere of existence that might be, in its proportion, somewhat like ours, or conversly, our subatomic particles could contain worlds of their own. Rather far out, I know, but I see no reason whatsoever why God couldn't have created other populated realms of existence, just as he created ours.
I had one question regarding your definition of God: If God is contained in all things, and all of us are, in a sense, a part of Him, is there possibility of relating to the divine, or connecting with the divine nature of reality? I'm interested to know where your belief in God takes you.
You also made a comment about God's accomplishment in materializing ideas from matter. This is an enormous philosophical concept. I've sometimes wondered myself whether ideas were derived from matter or whether matter is derived from ideas. In my own thinking, I've generally concluded that both really require each other: perhaps they must always coexist in some way?
Like you, I have been raised as a churchgoer, and at two decades myself, I have not felt as though I have been intellectually manipulated. Part of that, though is the way I was raised. I don't really remember my parents telling about Christian beliefs all that much. They mostly set an example in their lives that influenced me to make decisions for myself. I certainly have had personal doubts about Christianty and the Bible growing up, but by and large, my personal searching and questioning has led me accept them, through the epistomological framework of my own philosophy or worldview that I have been developing.
You say that there is no guesswork in knowledge-is there no guesswork absolutely? Don't we ultimately have to build our knowledge upon some basic assumptions to arrive at fact? This is, in part, what I mean by faith: it's first of all assuming that we can know anything it all, and then eventually taking the step of putting our knowledge into action. I don't see how we can ever trust our own ability to know completely; I think that every bit of knowledge requires a step of 'faith'.
Now, about your last question: This statement about unity in the messages of moral teachers certainly fits in with a Christian belief system. I believe that all people, being members or parts of God's whole system of existence, have a sense (granted, an imperfect sense) of what is right, or what coheres with this system. Therefore, those who have taught such moral truths are respected. If things are right and wrong by their accordence with God's created order, it stands to reason that all human members of God's created order would have roughly the same ideas of right and wrong. Technically, I suppose it's theorically possible for God to have made different systems, and thus a different ethical basis, into which different cultures would fit, but I believe it is not in God's character to act this way. Having made the universe and its laws as a reflection of His own nature and character, I believe that we live in one wholistic system, in which the same principles, the same 'clockwork' by which all reality opperates apply to all and will, in some degree, be acknowledged by all.
I do believe that different religions teach different things. The differnces, however, do not reside in their moral teachings, but the frame of reference in which these teachings have ultimate meaning. They each propose a different worldview framework in which human reconciliation to these moral standards have meaning and can be attained.
Hey Xeric, I don't know about you, but I'm finding it a bit annoying to have to scroll down this far all the time. I posted a random poem so that we could continue the discussion there. Thanks,
Micah
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