21st-century Christian Philosopher

First a word to the faithful who cannot fathom a doubting “Christian”: I would not hold myself up as a example in this. (I would only plead that this is my “personal shape”.) I do not subscribe to any great value in doubt. And were it to wound your conscience on the matter, I prefer that you at least avoid the articles on my blog for the time being.

Instead I wanted to talk to those of a more doubtful frame of mind. And I do so by featuring my doubt; I “flash my creds” when I talk to doubters. My name is John. I am a doubter.

Doubt filters. What am I filtering? A lot of things that people say. A lot of rules on how I should live my life and how I should know that this is the way to live my life.

I believe in “facts”. That I’m extremely unlikely to float over the Grand Canyon like Wyle E. Coyote should I find myself there, to me is a fact. So, says the skeptic (me), that Jesus could have walked on water is extremely unlikely as well, right?

Well, the Bible does not represent the case as likely. It does not suggest that a great many people walked on water. And it does present the case that when the disciples saw somebody that might have been walking on water, they thought it was a ghost. In that thought, neither do the disciples easily accept that it is likely that a person is walking on water. So the Bible as well affirms an “unlikeliness” to it. They also attribute an “unlikeliness” for Jesus to calm storms. “Who is he?” the disciples ask.

Could they have made the whole thing up? Sure. That’s not outside the realm of possibility.

And they could have feigned disbelief just like people in infomercials.

I accept that the role of “doubter” can often present a sort of community of “former doubters” who say “I was blind, but now I see.” You can see too. When we hear someone who expresses that they doubted until they believed, our own circumstance of doubt can be socialized away from us, by entertaining the idea that it is socially acceptable to come to belief because we’re not singular in this. Other people don’t think you’re crazy for thinking that a mop can really clean a car engine–”I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes!”

Likewise, Thomas can be a motif, used in the Bible to make the incredible just a touch more credible. “I would have never believed that Jesus rose from the dead, had I not put my hand in his side–but he did!” Wow! Thomas was a realist just like me!

In fact, I could even be convinced that this is all I’m doing here. I’d have to think long and hard about it, though. And I may yet do so.

So because the “doubt” of the apostles could have made their stories more credible, I have a rationale for the depiction of doubt in the stories. And some people say that because I have a “more reasonable” case for its depiction, that I don’t need to consider any others.

Here’s where I part company with you, good skeptics. “More what-able?”

Erich Fromm said:

“What the majority of people consider to be ‘reasonable’ is that about which there is agreement, if not among all, at least among a substantial number of people; ‘reasonable’ for most people, has nothing to do with reason, but with consensus.”

So a majority of the people think (or thought) they see “reasonable” in a consensus. But, they are wrong, according to Fromm, it has little to do with “reason”. Now I can imagine that a majority of people can be wrong about something. But just as well, I can imagine that a minority can be wrong as well. Both occur.

In this case, I don’t think a standard of “reasonability” exists without siding one way or the other. But since I can observe a use of “reasonability” as “the way one ought to think” in a number of cases, this generally distributed tendency is enough to consider about any claim for “reasonability” and I don’t need to think any further—in order to be “more reasonable”!

I really don’t need to consider the case that anything is “reasonable”, but then again, the lure of reasonability (or “thinking the way one “ought”) is why I decided to reduce the equation to simple human foibles, isn’t it? So if I can use a reductionistic way to reduce “reasonable” out of the equation, what is left of the lure to reductionism? Is it really the case that once I’m there, I really need look “no further”? Thus, such simple reductionism, to me is a iffy heuristic.

Let’s try this one (often used on God as well): if God (something unseen) existed, we wouldn’t have such various opinions about Him/Her/It!

So we would have consensus were God reasonable! So is Fromm correct or not? Let’s not assume that we know. We cannot see the criteria of “reason”. Various people believe various things are “reasonable”, we might be able to conclude that if there were something definite there, more people would agree on what it was. Thus reasonability would have greater ties to consensus, because the frequency of people associating what is “reasonable” with what is “agreed”.

It’s not something I like to talk about. In fact, it invites all sorts of pictures of the type of man I am into my head. I can see some reactions. Faith is so precious, and the entire basis of salvation among we evangelicals that we kind of make it into our part of the bargain to erase doubt from our minds.

In fact, it is one of the door-opening questions of our ilk that goes “Do you knowwhere you would go if you died today?” The resolution of this sequence is that you say the prayer of salvation and you, at the end, know.

So in my moments of doubt, I actually would answer the question theway a total unbeliever would. Again, this makes me uneasy to talk about it. The case that I can be back to square one in moments of doubt, just because I don’t know where I’m going, scares me a bit.

In case anybody’s wondering, I already know a good bit of the quotes you can throw at me. I even know how it all can be blamed on my meddling with “deceptive philosophy” which takes “after the traditions of men”. I mean after all, “philosophy” is kind of in my name and it is“forbidden” by Colossians 2:8, right? And, don’t be fooled that that isthe most I can throw at myself in these instances, either. In fact, I can turn this post into a litany against my doubting flesh.

I have another plan, though. I want to talk about what I realize inthese moments. I revisit similar themes, and those themes (I believe,through the ministry of the Holy Spirit) draw me back to God. I findmyself like the apostles in John 5, I have nowhere else to go.

I could call this an illustration of the principle that I am in Jesus’ hand, and not even I can tear myself from his grip. On the other hand, I could call it persistent delusion or even a “meme” (if I believed in memes, that is).

But let’s start out with a reference to a post that actually illustrates the “value” of atheist moments to me (and perhaps you) if there were any. Some people think I just play at things. I thinkHoratio might have thought so. He conveyed that opinion to me (here). And I’ve never been certain that the casual unbeliever reading Answering the Many Creeds Question (Sort of…) was completely convinced that I wasn’t just strawman-ing the whole thing.

But, I think that one can start to see that, I’m at least trying to be honest when I talk about how I would see things on the other side. I find myself on that other side sometimes.I ended that post as follows:

[W]hen I lean back and wonder how I would ever cross the line again, it comes to me clearly that I could likely only be an unbeliever again by believing in something else, by investing inanother model and its promises. And because I lack the ability to see what that would be, I definitely lack the ability to answer how I know it is the case and none other.

I still am convinced of what I wrote. And this conviction that I have about the solving the Many Creeds question for myself (here)is what has given me the confidence to make the argument that I did.And it is my sincerity (whether or not you believe it) in approaching the argument, which makes me believe that I have done the question service. (Whether or not I answered it.)Because in this, I ask whether this principle is a good “heuristic”?(I apologize for what might be a strange word.) How well does this form of argument work in a wide field? How likely is it that applying thisrule produces something that coheres with the entire body of thought. (Here again, you might notice where disparate vs. consistent thinking shows itself again.)

I’ll continue this in Godless Heuristics (next).

Ray commented on my post Thought Control. As usual, it stirred me to a reply that I tried to squeeze within a comment. Utterly failing that, it’s now a post.

Ray said:

What do you think about the possibility that the Consensus circle straddle the No Faith line? In fact, I’m wondering if there might be a circle of nominal believers on the left side of the No Faith line? That, of course, would be an arrogant position for me to take, wouldn’t it?

[If you don’t know Ray, you can’t easily see the underlying smirk that I do.]

First of all, it’s funny that that fits with what I cut out of the post. Both Francis of Assisi and Kierkegaard strike me as religious men who stressed moving beyond the crowd. I cut them both. There were easy points to make, and the “skeptic” usually resorts to a sort of dogma to dismiss them: “They thought like the 85%, thus they are the same.” Ultimately though, I didn’t think I needed them.

Instead, I wanted to set up the diagram as close to the atheist camp as I could. People throw out that 80-90% of all people identify a “belief in God”, so that’s in there. People who identify themselves as having no belief in God often see themselves as removed from a sort of nominal faith of the center. And, in concert with them, I wanted accept the idea that a lot of similarity in religious people. I just stop short validating the claim that we are “all alike” and that’s all there is to it. Of course, it’s an overly dogmatic claim, and one that doesn’t stand well up to some arguments I give below.

However, Ray’s comment centers on the problem of labels. If you draw a circle and put labels on it like “Faith”, people are going to take it for many things. And they might think it represents more than it does.

Thus readers of a precipitative positivist bent might ask whether there could be anything to that diagram if people are going to see different things in it. For example, “faith” is as slippery a fish as any. However, the diagram is used to counter the claim that “religious people” think “the same”.

Such a pronouncement is equally fishy, or atheists must mean something when they name this group. So my circle attempts to stand for what atheists mean when they say “religious people”. After all, were there was nothing definite behind the phrase “religious people”, their complaints about this imagined group would hardly have substance.

The criticism relies on three labels being reasonably valid: “religious”, “non-religious”, and “alike thinkers”. I believe I can tear apart the last one on by over-playing skepticism, but I don’t need to, so we advance with three “distinct” categories that make the criticism possibly valid. We can then think of it like a Venn diagram or its textual component, a syllogism.

We can see three circles, just like a standard Venn diagram: People, atheists, consensus. Instead of shading, we moved the circles around. It says that some people are atheists. It also says that no people in the main body of the consensus (of faith) are atheists.

The rules of Venn diagrams are rather easy. Thus, if we take them in their syllogistic form, we get:

Some people are non-believers
All non-believers are mavericks

You could conclude nothing about believers from those premises. Even if we formed these into a syllogism, considering mavericks to be the complement of mainstreamers and non-believers to be the complement of believers.

Let’s put it into terms of “believers”:

Some people are not believers
All mainstreamers are believers

We only get that some people are not mainstreamers. That is hardly helpful. Simply because we know this from the non-believers who are mavericks, does not mean that no believers are mavericks.

Of course, my diagram has a visual sense of scale. Venn diagrams don’t. Syllogisms, also, don’t contain numbers or scale. My diagram tries to. Thus, instead of shading in a section, I move the consensus circle into the “people” circle. I move it away from the non-believer circle (or fully into the believer circle ). If we look at it, we get the sense that

1. All members of the non-believer group have a minimal distance d₁ from the consensus.
2. At least 90% of all believers have a maximum distance d₂ (Again, I’ll even give them that.)

But you cannot conclude that no believers have greater than a distance d₁ from the consensus. That might be the case, but as that 10% of believers might range farther than distance d₂ from the center is consistent with these two rules. And nothing but the absolute statement that exactly 100% of all believers fall within d₂ would alter the possibility of a select amount of believers.

However, this still doesn’t rule out the possibility of a second cluster on the other side. None of this can be asserted by citing a prevalence for religious people of the same faith to agree with each other.

Were things so tightly defined, we could make this argument. But they’re not even that defined. And none of this yet rules out the possibility of a second cluster on the other side. So they can look at the religious corpus and see similarity, meanwhile clustering in their own way on the other side. The spread of religious thought has no bearing on how atheistic thought is distributed. However, the claim that “most/all believers think alike,” in order to be meaningful, should not just be replicated on the other side. But we don’t have that much, just by pointing out similarity of the opposite group.

Now here we get into the academic definition of atheism. The atheist will tell me, they are not distributed around a centerpoint because they simply share a lack of belief in God in common. But this would betray a confusion between definitional freedom and exhibited pattern. But, just because you have degrees of freedom by definition, doesn’t mean that there aren’t other structuring mechanisms. For example, there is nothing in the “definition” of a human being that keeps them from having three eyes. There are structural forms against that however.

Evolution is a good example of a system that free by definition to produce what it will, but bound by circumstances to produce only the forms that it can. Here again, is another case where I don’t think most atheists know what exactly is implied by evolution. You don’t examine the designs on a rock whose main purpose is to chuck at somebody’s head.

People embrace a materialist worldview without understanding what it implies. So I’m trying to mimic a reductionistic methodology.

The answer to any variance is randomness. Thus I’m looking at the tendency of an individual to self-identify as a believer in God as a product of numerous other biological and cultural factors, which has a certain scatter pattern.

The “scatter pattern” is the bedrock reality of stochastic systems, not the labels by which one describes the distribution. The words are only useful in that they describe traits of the distribution. You should actually change the words if they don’t do the facts justice.

Within this methodology, the label is just(?) a human pattern overlaid on the distribution. And in this model any heuristic is as good as any other. In this view the term “atheist” can only describe the products of the distributing factors which are produced in the human being. So an atheist isn’t just anything that doesn’t believe in God. It actually is a label for output that ends up fitting the description “does not believe in God.”

Of course, if there is enough variation in this product, I don’t see why it can’t work in the other way around. I can view “The Religious” as simply those people who answer “yes” to the question “Do you believe in God?”. However, certain atheists see only one form in which this can take place: some sort of brain impairment. Thus, although the question could gather up a diverse group that share this “trait”, these atheists view it as a “syndrome”.

I want to put a neutral label on both. Make them both designations made by humans of the distribution of humans who will answer “yes” to the question “Do you believe in God?” Without knowing their forces, we can consider it variation within the species and perhaps some accumulative culture adaptation.

“Religious” could be just as much a trait with positive or negative survival implications as “kind” is. The lovely thing is that in this world, evolution has proven itself capable without (as I am required to say) a guiding intelligence. Creating some interpreted pitfalls to a trait that really should be tested in the theater of survival, is arguably foolhardy and rash.

Human-level intelligence is a rather recent development, Science even more recent. As boons to revolutionizing the survival potential of a system which has overseen the survival of many species in 99% of the other “progress” obtained, the data is sketchy.

The value of a sort of scientific puritanism is overstated. Religion might (but I doubt it) have cause numerous wars and persecutions over the many ages of man. But Science in the hands of the NAZIs, courtesy of the brilliant scientist Werner Von Braun, would have killed millions more. In fact, Von Braun’s research was so advanced in his field that in order to come close in this nuclear race, we needed him on our side.

But to clarify, my point is not saying that religion is the product of godless, “blind” evolution. Just that even as such a product, atheists fall short of the goal of arguing that there at least a scatter pattern.

Of course this ignores that we really don’t have fixed definitions of what a location at a certain point definitely implies. Some atheists would throw the flag at this point and having found a vagueness here, would have seen all they needed.

Of course all this ignores the that the idea of “similarity of thought” is itself a fuzzy concept. What are the degrees of similarity? How do we judge similar concepts? There is simply no scientific magic bullet for the art of interpretation and following chains of implication. And I think that is why it throws many non-believers.