Thinking Christian

An outsider’s view of the West can be enlightening, especially when that person’s view moves him toward spiritual answers. Here is one such voice from China. The source is a Christianity Today article, “Great Leap Forward.”

Hsu, a former television journalist for the state-sponsored CCTV, is a telling example of how a member of China’s educated elite moves to Christianity.

Hsu told his story to CT over a meal at a crowded Beijing KFC. It began with his search for freedom—politically and personally. The search led him to European history. “Westerners are not more interested in freedom than anyone else,” he says.

Yet the West has achieved and sustained a greater degree of liberty than any other culture. Hsu wondered what the West had that China didn’t. “Before freedom comes, you have to have a foundation. In the West that foundation is Christianity.”

Hsu’s vision for a new China parallels his readings on the march of freedom in the West. From the 10th to 12th centuries, Hsu reasons, Europe developed legal studies, hospitals, and universities, all of which grew out of the church. These developments resulted in breakthroughs in human liberty, as seen in the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Today, Hsu says, the church is an incubator for similar developments in China.

“After the country adopted Western science and philosophy, it left a value vacuum,” Hsu says. “After Tiananmen Square, some scholars lost hope. They wanted to start asking the ultimate questions about the purpose of life. People in China have lost faith in human wisdom. The Cultural Revolution was a disaster, but this spiritual awakening is an unexpected result.” Hsu’s quest led him to the Bible. There, he learned that “faith in God as the Lord is the beginning of freedom.”

Recently, he delivered a paper on freedom to a local gathering of the American Political Science Association. In it he wrote, “The more I knew about the growth of freedom in the West, the more I was captivated by the role of faith in God as the Lord.”

“You need a standard of absolute truth,” Hsu told CT. “You have to convince people that the God of the Jews and Christians is the God of the universe.”

The rest of the article, by the way, is filled with encouragement for those of us who have been praying for China.

Having written a four-part series on Francis Ayala’s Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, I was already in strong disagreement over what Ayala called a “gift” to religion in Darwinism. Now I’m reading his monograph for the AAAS, “The Difference of Being Human,” and have found even more reason to disagree with him on this. The core of his argument is

(1) that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature, and (2) that moral norms are products of cultural evolution, not biological evolution.

I thought Biblical religion taught that moral norms flow from the character of God. Cultural evolution is no more friendly to Biblical religion than biological evolution; either way it contradicts what God has revealed about himself.

As far as I can remember (the book is back at the library now) Ayala did not mention this contingent, non-God-centered view of ethics in his book. Could that be because this is quite obviously not a gift to religion?

There’s a potential false conclusion to steer clear of as you read Edward Tingley’s article, “The Skeptical Inquirer,” on which I blogged yesterday. He refers to Blaise Pascal’s statement that God cannot be known through the senses. One might suppose that he is saying that it is impossible to perceive God in any way. Whatever Tingley and Pascal might say to that, I would put it this way: While it is not impossible to see God, it is possible not to see God.

I was thinking about this on my drive home from the office, on the Colonial National Parkway between Williamsburg and Yorktown, Virginia. The drive begins in a forest of tall pines, dogwoods, oak, and maple trees, and continues along the York River, a place of unusual calm and beauty. I could certainly see God in that (his workings, that is, or better yet, his artistry). I can see him in the members of my family, and hear him in the birds singing as I sit on the back porch now.

Psalm 19:1 says “the Heavens declare the glory of God.” Romans 1:19-20 adds that

what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

And yet many do not see God there.

The same could be said for the historical evidences for God in Jesus Christ. There is ample evidence for the life of Christ in history; see Craig Blomberg’s article on this, for example. As for his death and resurrection, it’s marvelously explanatory. It makes sense of the generally agreed facts surrounding the events, and it explains the remarkable turn history took following Jesus’ (by ordinary standards) relatively obscure life. It lays the foundation for answers such as no other system of thought can provide for deep existential questions regarding the human condition, and what is to be done about it.

Yet many can see the same questions and consider the same answers, and not see God.

The classic philosophical arguments for God, likewise, explain conundrums like consciousness, reason, purpose, the existence of the universe, and more. They, too, are persuasive arguments for the reality of God.

I and many others see God there, yet still others do not.

Though it is not impossible to see God, it is possible not to see him. This, I think is the point to be taken home from Tingley’s and Pascal’s skepticism regarding finding God through the senses. Evidence can be interpreted in multiple ways, so in the end, though the senses can speak to the question of God, they cannot decide it.

Tingley’s important reminder for us is that they cannot decide against God any more than they can definitively decide for God. Those who seek a final conclusion on the matter must look elsewhere. Pascal suggests the heart as one place to look. It’s a suggestion worthy of real reflection.

One of the podcasts I enjoy listening to is the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, a science-oriented, religiously skeptical discussion conducted out of the New England Skeptical Society. The shows run long, so I can’t listen to all of them, but I’ve heard a couple of them, featuring Michael Shermer and John Rennie. You can learn a lot of science and unlearn a lot of myth from these discussions.

When they wander onto religious territory, however, their skepticism tends to take a strange turn. I have noted in the past that Michael Shermer’s skepticism does not range as far as it ought. His magazine, The Skeptical Inquirer, approvingly cited a discredited article purporting to show that Christianity has negative social effects. He would have done well to treat that study with more caution.

In an article in current Touchstone magazine, titled ”The Skeptical Inquirer,” Edward Tingley takes this question of self-proclaimed skeptics’ skepticism to a far broader and deeper level. The article’s subtitle tells more than the title: it is, If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are. Tingley, a philosopher at Augustine College in Ottawa, launches a strong counter-assault on what he considers an erroneous conception: that today’s atheists and agnostics are the virtuous thinkers who never jump to conclusions ahead of the evidence.

He begins provocatively:

Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science.

That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth.

He continues in that tone for a few paragraphs, and then moves into providing real support for his claims. It’s drawn primarily from Blaise Pascal:

There are skeptical theists; Pascal was one….

“I have wished a hundred times over that, if there is a God supporting nature, [nature] should unequivocally proclaim him, and that, if the signs in nature are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether”—but nature prefers to tease, so she “presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt” (429). “We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty” (401). “We are . . . incapable of knowing . . . whether he is” (418). This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary?

This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of “progressive” folk who claim to “think critically” about religion and either “take theism on” or claim they are “still looking”—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry.

Could it be that it is the atheists and agnostics who have rushed to judgment? Have they missed 350 years (or more) of good thinking on the question of God? In what ways was Pascal a model skeptic? He recognized–did not shrink back from–our inability to judge the existence of God by our senses. Translated: our inability to judge the existence of God through science. The modern atheist says, “well, then, there’s no scientific evidence for God; thus there’s no God.” Tingley suspects more than a little of a rush to judgment in there! For Pascal,

There is still the reasoning of the heart.

The scientist Pascal claims to know a route that will take us over the ice to convincing discovery. It is the refusal to test his thinking that betrays the faith of atheists and agnostics.

No no, they will say, point to something material on which to base belief and then I will look at it. “Give us solid evidence!” They insist that every belief about reality must be accepted on the basis of evidence (“experience or logic”). On what basis do they accept that? Evidence? But there is none.

There is no evidence, that is, for the idea that every belief must be accepted on the basis of “experience or logic.”

But atheists and agnostics pick. They commit in the absence of evidence.

I have quoted enough here. The argument is Tingley’s not mine, so I will borrow no more of it. Don’t evaluate it, please, on the basis of these short excerpts; I present them here merely to stimulate you to go to the source and read it for yourself. Then we can talk about it here.

Related: “Though It Is Not Impossible To See God…”
and Evidence of the Heart: The Sense of God

Pre-Review

I’ve never before now offered a book review on a book I hadn’t even started to read. Call this a pre-review instead.

Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations by Alex and Brett Harris arrived in the mail yesterday. I showed it to my sixteen-year-old son and told him I’d like us to go through it a chapter a week. Jonathan will spend a lot of time reading things that interest him, and no time at all on anything else.

Well, he stayed up so late reading it last night that he was late getting up for school today. If that isn’t a good sign, I don’t know what is. Now I’ll have to fight him for my chance to read it.

The authors have a website for the book.

I can’t recall a time, other than during vacations, when I’ve had so little to write about on this blog as I have in the last week or two. The muse is stalled.

I think there are several reasons. One is that I haven’t actually been writing so little–the discussion here has been long and time-consuming. Ultimately it has been draining rather than productive, in my opinion and (see the second-to-last comment there) and others’ as well. I think it has kept me from other productive work. I take full responsibility for allowing it to do that to me.

And I’ve also been doing other productive work, at home and on the job, just not blogging. Our team has been working on an in-depth organizational assessment of the Jesus Film Project, and believe me, that’s no small job. (It has been a most pleasant experience, though!)

Usually, though, even when I’m doing those other kinds of things, my mind is toying with ideas to blog on, or I’m even writing ideas in my head. Not this time.

The Expelled controversy–especially, on this blog, the question of Darwin and Hitler–was intense. It’s natural to go through a letdown period after something like that.

Anyway, I’m hoping that just by reflecting on this I’ll kick loose the logjam and get things rolling again soon.

National Faculty Leadership Conf 2008

You are warmly invited to join hundreds of professors, graduate students and others serving in academia in celebrating the greatness of Christ and in enriching our ability to serve him, one another, and the world.

I was there in 2006, and found it well worth the time and expense. Check out the academic tracks and the plenary sessions. The lineup is outstanding, yet you may find that the encouragement you receive there is even more valuable than these. The conference is hosted by Faculty Commons, part of the
I am not sure at this point if I will be there this time–I’m deciding between that conference and this one from CrossExamined. If I’m not there, I’ll definitely be wishing I could have been at both of them.

Is Jabberwocky the best nonsense poem in the English language? If not, then in what language is it the best nonsense?

We’re on the leading edge of a long weekend here (Monday is Memorial Day in the United States). I’m the last to leave my office today; the boss gave us all the afternoon off, but I decided to stay a while, to read and write in the quiet. It’s not, I’m sad to say, as quiet within me as it is around me. So much to do! So much to catch up on! And why?

Christianity’s chief heresy down through the ages has been legalism: seeking to earn favor with God by what we do. It is a Christian fault because it is a very human fault. What confusion surrounds this whole matter! We do not understand unconditional love as God offers it. We want to earn his love; we want to be the sort of thing that could earn his love. We want to show that in ourselves we deserve his love, that he owes it to us, for the special things we do in particular. We are, in fact worthy, but not by our own works or goodness. We are worthy because he has deemed us so.

There is – - though this is dangerous to say – - something of an insult in the way God loves us. 

If we could stand before him and say “thank you very much, God, for your love, and we can all certainly see what I’ve done to earn it;” if we could say that, then that would be something to be proud of. That’s not, however, the way it is. One might almost say it’s regrettable that’s not the way it is. Except for this: for us to be able to face him that way, God would have to be shrunk down to our size. He would no longer be the object of our worship but the subject of our manipulation.

I think to a great extent that’s actually what legalism is about. It’s about manipulating God,t rying to get on his good side, so that we can get good things from him, or to feel good and special about ourselves. It’s about controlling God, or at least our relationship with him. Even a teenager can sense manipulation a mile away, though. How much more do you suppose God will always resist it?

But here’s the astonishing thing: though we try to shrink God to our size so we can impress him – - and how God must laugh at that! – - yet he emptied himself, and in a sense shrunk himself down to our size. He was born a babe in a stable, grew up in a craftsman’s home, wandered for a few years and taught a small band of followers. In the course of all this he met two kinds of responses: those who insisted on being impressive before him, he defeated by argument and by his works. Those who saw the grandeur of God in him, he set on a course toward a Kingdom.

He still says that those who humble themselves before him will be lifted up. For many of us, the hardest part of that is knowing it is because of his own goodness, and not ours, that he gives us his love. We need not earn it, largely because we could never earn it. But for those who want real love, it’s there in abundance, without measure and with only the condition that we accept it on his terms and not on our own.

Yes, of course there is an answer to the “why” question I opened with. Understanding God’s love, and that we cannot earn it by our work we still work because it is good to do so, to be fruitful and productive, to serve, and obviously to make a living. God worked for six days and rested on the seventh; we work to follow God’s own example. 

But our work is not a way of scrabbling toward the light of God’s love. It is a way of basking in that light.

The 225th Christian Carnival is up at Parableman.

Here is more on what the Christian Carnival is all about.