Thinking Christian

Book Review

The book is titled Choosing Your Faith In a World of Spiritual Options. Thankfully Mark Mittelberg, who wrote it, knew where to begin, for the first question that’s bound to come up is, Why choose any faith? It’s a good question, but I won’t take credit for it; I borrowed it straight from the title of his first chapter. Why write about choosing a faith? Is it any more relevant than a book about, say, Choosing Your Sword in a World of Knighthood? Well, yes, of course it is. Mittelberg cites evidence that religion’s influence remains strong in North America (if he had ventured into the rest of the world he could have shown the same, even more so).

Faith is a fact of life apart from religious belief. Mittelberg says of atheist extraordinaire Richard Dawkins (p. 11),

Whether the chances are large or small, the important thought to catch here is that Dawkins doesn’t know there is no God—and he even concedes the possibility that some kind of God might actually exist. Rather, he takes it on faith that there actually is no God….

That’s just the way life is. We all live by some form of faith. Which leads us to the central question: Is ours a well-founded faith? A wise faith? A faith that makes sense and is supported by the facts? One that works in real life and is worth hanging on to?

More personally, is yours a faith you’ve really thought about, carefully evaluated, and intentionally chosen—or did you just slide into it at some point along the way?

That question is directed at all of us, Christian and non-Christian alike. The next six chapters expose common ways people choose their faith: pragmatism and relativism, tradition, authoritarian sources, intuition, the mystical approach, and “logic, evidence, and science,” with an emphasis on “I’ve gotta see it to believe it.” Chances are you’re going to find yourself described in one of those chapters or some mix thereof. Chances are especially good if you’ve never given your faith much thought. Faith, after all, is a synonym for belief; and how many of us really pay attention to why we believe what we believe?

So it behooves each of us to reflect on where we’ve come from in choosing our faith. Mittelberg prefers a version of the logic, evidence and science path, renamed the Evidential path in chapter eight:

It’s the one path that tests—and ultimately supports or undermines—all the others. Its two key elements, logic and sensory experience, are God-given tools we must use to gain the vast majority of our information, to test truth claims, and ultimately to decide what to believe.

The other faith paths do not necessarily lead to the wrong destination, but within them there is little or no means of testing, nothing to correct us if, for example, we rely on tradition for tradition’s sake. (“Your parents could be wrong,” he says. I suppose that even applies to my kids’ parents.) Going on,

The Evidential approach tells us logically and empirically that there is one set of truths—based on actual, what is reality—that we need to discover and let inform our choice of faiths. We can use these tools to test traditional teachings, religious authorities, intuitive instincts and hunches, and mystical encounters, so we can know which ones are worth believing and holding on to.

On another thread I’ve been debating whether it’s conceptually possible for God to reveal himself to us just through direct impressions (the sensus divinitatus) such that we could reliably know that the encounter we’re having is with God. Clearly if there’s a God, it’s unreasonable to assume that he could not do that. I’ve had many experiences I would describe that way. For purposes of that discussion, it’s logically sufficient to establish that if there is a God, then God could do that. But that’s a very limited point, for a very limited purpose. (I wouldn’t have brought it up here except I knew it would be brought up for me if I didn’t.)

The fact is that even though I know God can convince me of his reality any way he wants to, nevertheless when I have an experience that seems like God, I want some way to check whether I’m getting it right or if I’m mistaken. We’re not left only to our impressions, as it turns out, nor are we stuck in a morass of doubt where we have nothing to turn to besides tradition, authority, feelings, or the science of the laboratory. All of these have checks and balances coming from a most useful source: objective reality. Mittelberg explores logical, scientific, and historical criteria for choosing one’s beliefs, along with ways to assess the biblical and historical evidences for Jesus Christ.

Like his friend (and author of the foreword to this book) Lee Strobel, Mittelberg writes on a very accessible level. I recommend this book highly for the seeker in your life (including yourself, if you are that seeker). For church study groups, it could provide good discussion material for assessing various worldviews. (Mary Jo Sharp recently recommended this book for the same purpose.) I especially appreciate that Mittelberg emphasizes how to think about spiritual questions rather than telling us what to think. Of course he lands on his own solid conclusion: that faith in Jesus Christ is an excellent choice, the only one that makes good sense. But he gets there through a thoughtful path that should help readers think thoughtfully about their own paths.

Choosing Your Faith In a World of Spiritual Options by Mark Mittelberg. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2008. 254 pages plus endnotes. Amazon price US$13.59 hardcover.

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Hardly anybody ever mentions it, but two of the most well-known verses in the Old Testament have significant apologetic implications, lending support to the Bible’s supernatural origins. One of them I’m sure will be a surprise to many readers here; the other might also.

I will preview the argument before telling you which verses they are. In brief form it goes like this.

The ancient Hebrews’ conception of God and his relation to his creation was vastly different from that of others in the Ancient Near East. From a philosophical perspective it has been exceedingly successful for millennia since then: it was, in that sense, very highly advanced philosophy. Such uniquely prescient and enduringly successful thinking is not explained by any prior tradition, for there is no indication of advanced thought leading up to it either among the Hebrews or in any neighboring culture. Did it come from nowhere at all? Or did it come by revelation from God?

Or:

The ancient Hebrews were astonishingly advanced metaphysical thinkers. They produced a monotheism that stood in complete contrast to all other systems of thought at the time, that still works philosophically, and that today remains coherent within its own framework. How did these Bronze Age nomads and farmers accomplish that?

I have often heard it asked, “why should we look to ancient Bronze Age or Iron Age nomads/sheepherders/farmers for wisdom? What could they possibly say to us who have the advantage of so much more knowledge and science?” Good question. How could they have known anything at all that would stand the test of centuries of inquiry? But our two “overlooked apologetics verses” have done that. They are, as I said, very familiar:

Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Exodus 3:13-14a “Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.”

The creation account in Genesis is astonishingly different from all other creation stories. Quoting from page 32 and following of Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration:

Genesis is quite unlike the Mesopotamian cosmogonies [accounts of the origin of the cosmos], for instance, which are intertwined with theogonies—accounts of the origins of the gods. In them, we are not told so much about how the universe came about—the origin of the worlds is really accidental or secondary in ANE [Ancient Near East] accounts—but how the gods emerged. And in addition to the fact that these Mesopotamian cosmogonies are really concerned with the ancestors of the gods and how they got themselves organized, they do not even identify these gods as creators. So when it comes to the elements of the universe (the waters/deep, darkness), a deity either controls one or is one….

Further, Yahweh simply speaks, thereby creating; in other ANE cosmogonies, deities struggle to divide the waters. Also in Genesis 1, the astral bodies are not gods (as in ANE accounts) but are creations.…

Gerhard von Rad makes the powerful point that Israel’s worldview, as reflected in Genesis, drew a sharp demarcating line between God and the world. The material world is purged of any quality of the divine or the demonic….

In Genesis, we read of something marvelously different than in [Ugaritic cosmogony], with its gods and hostile powers (darkness, the waters/the deep): “These cosmic monsters are no longer primordial forces opposed to the Israelite God at the beginning of creation. Instead, they are creatures like other creatures rendered in this story.” Genesis 1 depicts a “divine mastery” over these forces….

In contrast to ANE myths, there are no rivals to the Creator in Genesis [chapter] 1—let alone preexistent matter…. There is no cosmic dualism or struggle at all.

There is more but I think you can see the point: the Genesis view of God and creation is starkly different from all other views of cosmic origins and of deity. This point extends beyond ANE cosmogonies. I believe it is the case that no other independently developed creation account is even remotely similar to that in Genesis. In all other accounts, either the material world is pre-existent along with the gods (there is something like this even in Plato), it is an emanation of some god or gods, or it is illusion.

Genesis is significant simply for its utter uniqueness. There’s something there that begs for explanation. But the argument I’m presenting is not just that.  There is more to be said. It will fit better, however, once we have look at our second “overlooked apologetics verse.”

We need to approach the Exodus passage through the route of a question. How are humans known? From where do we derive our identities? The answer is, through relationships. First of all we’re known by our families. “Who is your father?” was the question in the ANE; today we’re still identified through our family names and our family heritage. We’re identified by our relationship to maleness and femaleness. As we grow and develop, our personalities are formed in relation to our relatives, our friends, even our foes or (if your school experience was like many) tormentors. Our identity is tied also to the land, also a relational matter (“Where are you from? What nationality are you?”) and to our work (“What do you do for a living?”).

How are gods known in myth? In exactly the same way: by relationship to one another and to the created order, and by what they do. Their identities too are relational.

And so it is with identity in every case. It is always relational. This is what makes Yahweh’s answer in Exodus so remarkable. In biblical culture much more than today’s, a person’s name and identity were wrapped up together with each other. God was known to the Hebrews by many titles, most of which had to do with his role or way of relating to creation: The Almighty, the Lord of Hosts (Armies), The Provider, and so on. But in Exodus Moses was apparently asking for something more: God’s actual name, which would reveal his full identity, his full relatedness. God consented to answer. And to what relationship did he point? “I AM WHO I AM.” He pointed to himself. No other relationship could be adequate to identify him. He was (and is) just who he was (and is).

Down the centuries since then much has been said about monotheism. Much philosophical and theological work has been plowed into exploring what it must mean that there is one God. Now for apologetical purposes we cannot assume that monotheism is true; that would be begging the question most illegitimately. But we can examine its implications: what if it is true? This kind of examination has been done for centuries. One of its most solid conclusions is that God is “self-existent.” He is what he is, without reference to any other being whatever. He is being itself. Blogger niwrad put it this way:

What theology calls “God,” metaphysics refers to as “Being.” And what we call the “universe” or the “cosmos” is simply the “universal existence” or “manifestation” of Being. The universal existence is everything that exists….

In metaphysics it is important to conceptually distinguish between the verbs “to be” and “to exist,” although in everyday language this difference doesn’t matter very much. The verb “to exist” (from the Latin “ex-sistere“) etymologically means “to stay outside.” Thus a thing exists when its principle or “sufficient reason” or cause stands outside itself. This is precisely the situation for all the things in the universe. On the other hand, the ontological verb “to be” has a nobler and more powerful meaning than the verb “to exist,” and for this reason it should be applied to the principle or cause of all that exists, i.e. Being, the First Cause.

The auxiliary verb “to be” is, logically and linguistically, the more important verb, as a consequence of its ontological supremacy. Every other verb, as well as any word or logical term whatsoever, presupposes the verb “to be,” and is, as it were, its consequence or effect.

That’s a very clear introduction to a very technical discussion, ending in the conclusion, God is he who is, to whom the verb to be applies uniquely. “I AM WHO I AM.” It couldn’t be said any better than that.

Whether a technical discussion like niwrad’s is clear to you is not as important for our purposes as this: advanced philosophical reflection concludes that a Bronze Age sheepherder’s name for God is as accurate a name as could possibly be advanced for a monotheistic God. The name of God Moses delivered was God being self-identified in terms of himself, for nothing but God himself is adequate for him by which to identify himself. God IS (from his first-person perspective, “I AM”). The verb to be there is the only one that suffices to describe the pure Being of God.

It would have been easy for Moses to tell the Israelites, “I was sent to you by God, and his name is ___. (Fill in the blank with any name of your choosing, or with a title like The Lord.) He didn’t do that. He said, “I AM has sent me.”

God’s name, his revealed identity, I AM WHO I AM, has never failed from within the context of monotheistic thought. It has stood many centuries’ test of philosophical and theological coherence.

This ties back to Genesis 1:1: God created the heavens and the earth from nothing. Besides himself, nothing was. There was God as pure Being, the totality of all reality. Creation had to be ex nihilo—from nothing (no preexisting matter, no material cause)—if there was to be any creation at all.

There is much I must leave unsaid about these philosophical and theological reflections upon God, and I do not suppose that what I’ve written in these prior paragraphs will be adequate or even understandable in this bare form. Suffice it to say that a very large body of literature has tested conceptions of what God must be like in his being, if there is one God; and although this literature exceeds the Old Testament in technical depth and complexity, and though we learn further aspects of God’s holy character from other biblical revelation, with respect to the being of God, the whole of all these years of reflection amounts to nothing more than footnotes to “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and “I AM WHO I AM.”

I will recap the argument here.

1. The idea of monotheism entails certain metaphysical and theological implications.

2. These implications have taken centuries to sort out and to refine, so that we can legitimately take it today that the art of thinking on monotheism has reached an advanced stage.

3. These centuries of work have confirmed the insights of the author of Genesis and Exodus on God’s self-existent eternal nature.

4. Genesis and Exodus are unique in their statements on these matters. No other ancient cosmogony or theology has had a view remotely similar to that of the books of Moses.

5. The question then is, from where did they derive an insight that would so successfully anticipate such advanced thinking, and endure for more than three thousand years?

Or in short: they did pretty well for simple Bronze Age farmers, coming up with metaphysical insight that would stand for more than three millennia. I think they had help.

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The closing event at the regional apologetics conference I spoke at last week: David Wood vs. John W. Loftus: Does God Exist?

I think you’ll enjoy this. Both Wood and Loftus are entertaining debaters. One of them makes a lot more sense than the other, though.

While you’re at it, check out the rest of “the Islamoblog of Acts 17 Apologetics Ministries.” Sharia in Dearborn? You can see it for yourself.

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A very illuminating read:

What is clear beyond doubt is that whereas in the nineteenth century the tendency of history was to cast doubt of the veracity of Judeo-Christian records and to undermine popular faith in God and His Son as presented in the Bible, in the twentieth century it has moved in quite the opposite direction, and there is no sign of the process coming to an end. It is not now the men of faith, it is the skeptics, who have reason to fear the course of discovery.

[From A Historian Looks at Jesus]

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Where can the small things take you?

Responding to my last point on the distinction between magic and supernaturalism, doctor(logic) offered this:

When you make a voodoo doll, don’t you have to follow a recipe and include one of the victim’s hairs or possessions?

That would mean that there’s a very specific relationship between the actions of the voodoo practitioner and the pain or death of the victim. There are laws that control the magic. Voodoo is predictable. Scientifically falsifiable, even.

In contrast, prayer to God has nothing of the sort. Pray for a cardiac patient, and they’re as likely to die or recover as anyone else.

The defining characteristic of superstition is improper statistical sampling, and the amplification of bias. Superstition is all about creative interpretation of individual events, and assigning significance to events based on bias and emotion. It has nothing to do with relationship or mechanism.

There’s a whole worldview contained in there, and it’s one of the most characteristically defining worldviews of our age. It’s a view that takes it that except for mathematical knowledge, all knowledge of the world begins with particulars.

What do I mean by that, and what difference does it make? doctor(logic) has given us the illustration we need to explain it: voodoo. Those of us who have followed his comments know that he does not accept the existence of magic or the supernatural, so we can be quite sure that he does not believe in voodoo (except if there is some psychological impact associated with it, which is a different thing entirely). But here he suggests the following:

• If statistical sampling were applied to voodoo in actual practice, and
• If bias were removed from interpretation of the results, and
• If a genuine, unbiased association were found between the practice of voodoo and its intended outcomes,
• Then voodoo would be predictable, and
• Then voodoo could be regarded as a real phenomenon, and presumably
• Then work would have to be done to investigate the means by which it operates.

Statistical sampling is a matter of gathering particulars: actual individual instances, each measured one by one, in which voodoo practice* is attempted, and actual individual instances of its “success” or “failure.” These individual instances are collated and analyzed mathematically. If that analysis says something is going on, then the researcher lifts up his head and looks around, so to speak, to theorize possible larger explanations and connections. If there were some statistical correlation between voodoo practice and its outcomes, and if other confounding variables were weeded out, then we would have to think hard about some theory to explain it.

This is how doctor(logic) would handle voodoo as a matter of knowledge, if I read him correctly (and he’s been saying this sort of thing a long time). Those two processes—the gathering of many individual instances, and mathematical analysis—are at the basis of all knowledge of the world, according to this viewpoint. If it’s not statistical, it’s not about reality. But we have to recognize that for what it is: particulars upon particulars upon particulars, aggregated and collated and analyzed statistically. The world is known only through its small things.

This is not only about one commenter’s position. It seems to me this is characteristic of the natural sciences in general, and even of human sciences like psychology. The description of knowledge-generation I just gave could have come from my grad studies in industrial and organizational psychology, the science of human effectiveness on the job and in organizations. I/O psychology research and knowledge is all about statistical analysis of individual people and events, measured one by one by one. Small things, aggregated.

On this view, knowledge of small things leads to knowledge of larger things: general theories or laws regarding how nature operates. It never works the other way around: we never start with knowledge of larger things. And that leads me to several questions. These are not fully thought-out conclusions, but conversation starters instead.

• Other than mathematical knowledge (based on axioms and logic) do the sciences ever start with anything other than particulars (small things)?
• Is it possible that there is a method-to-result correlation here? That is, the sciences are infamously reductionistic in their conclusions with respect to matters like thought, design, and so on. Could their reductionist results be as much a product of method as it is of the reality being so studied?

I need to illustrate my next question before I ask it. A friend of mine once told me about a certain science-fiction story in which an earthling was trying to communicate with an alien. He pointed to a rock and said, “Rock.” The alien pointed and repeated, “Rock.” The earthling, excited by that success, pointed at it again and said, “Rock.” Unfortunately, this didn’t work for the alien. It thought, “How strange! There was ‘rock’ there a moment ago, so how could there be ‘rock’ there now? What was there has changed so much since then, in all of its deep molecular and energy structure; it no longer exists in the same state. If it was ‘rock’ before, it must be something other than ‘rock’ now. How can this other being so unaware of that?”

And then the earthling pointed at another object on the ground, and again said “Rock.” At this point the alien knew it was hopeless.

Where the earthling saw similarity, the alien saw constant change and difference. Where the earthling saw and analyzed on the macroscopic level of visible and touchable hardness, color, texture, and so on, the alien saw and analyzed on the level of molecules. Where the earthling saw constancy across time, the alien saw massive change.** Which one of them was right? On what basis? How do we know what to aggregate? If the answer to that is based in some human mental process with no larger justification, then it is very contingent, and its reliability is suspect. Another kind of being might see reality very differently, and there’s no telling whether we or it have a better handle on what’s real or true. But if aggregating small things is the basis for all knowledge, and we don’t have a reliable way of knowing what or how can be aggregated, then the basis for all knowledge is highly suspect.

It’s not necessarily as hopeless as that, though, for science does offer an answer to that question: if you can correlate ‘em, you are justified in aggregating ‘em. If two events, objects, processes, or other phenomena have mathematical similarity, then you can call them similar in reality. With that as background I return to my bullet-formatted questions:

• Isn’t there some function in the human mind that just knows that a rock is a rock, and knows it with high reliability, without mathematical analysis?
• Could we even study anything on the level of particulars without prior knowledge of at least some generalities (and I’m not talking about logical/mathematical axioms)?
  If so, then not all knowledge is statistical, for statistical knowledge depends on a different, prior kind of knowledge.
• If we approach all knowledge from the small end, looking for generalities through statistical analysis of particulars, what might we be missing in the form knowledge that can’t be gained by that method?
• If there is a God, what is the likelihood we would find him by starting our search from the small end of everything? Could it be that if one insists on starting at that end, one is guaranteed to miss the potentially biggest reality of all?

Just some questions. I haven’t thought them through well enough to be sure of the answers, but I think there’s something there. If there’s a God, and the goal is to know him, can the small things take you there? I doubt it. And I doubt that starting from the small things is the only way for us to know what is real.

*There are probably errors in the popular conception of voodoo that this characterization calls to mind. I’ll grant that, and ask the reader to recognize that this is an illustration of a point about knowledge, not a treatise on voodoo; and the illustration is based on how voodoo is popularly conceived, not on how it is actually practiced or what its proponents actually believe.

**There are other interesting questions and inconsistencies to be considered in that exchange, like, did the alien actually hear the same word “rock” both times, and did it think the earthling was the same being from one moment to the next? But I didn’t read the story, and that’s not what matters here anyway.

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This has come up often enough now to merit its own discussion: the pejorative use of “magic” to describe what God does. The most recent was this morning:

Just my two cents, I consider the swoon theory among the least likely hypotheses concerning the events leading up to the emergence of Christianity as a religion.

But still a few thousand times more likely than a magical resurrection (and that’s even if we assume the supernatural exists—magical resurrections are still massively rarer than survival after grave injuries).

Let me ask: what is the definition of magic? Is there a distinction between “magic” and “work of God”? Is there a good reason for that distinction, for those who consider there is one, or for the lack of such for those who think there is none? Does “magic” do any fruitful work in the discussion beyond its emotive effect? What work is that?

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I continue my survey of historical evidences for Jesus’ resurrection with an outline of evidences for the empty tomb. This is part of a continuing set of cumulative evidences, not intended to be complete in itself but to be read as part of the series on Evidences for the Resurrection. I am using William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith as my source again.

Craig lists six “lines of evidence” supporting the historicity of the empty tomb:

1. The historical reliability of the story of Jesus’ burial
2. Multiple, early, independent attestation of the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb
3. The use of the phrase “the first day of the week” in a way that reflects ancient tradition
4. The simplicity of the way Mark presents the story: it lacks legendary or theological development
5. The account of the tomb’s being discovered by women
6. The earliest Jewish polemic, which suggests the empty tomb

I can’t (and shouldn’t!) re-write all of Craig’s support for each of these. I will just summarize a few significant points, beginning with this overall observation: the manner in which Craig and other current apologists approach these issues is historical, not faith-driven. There are historical reasons to consider each of these lines of evidence to be valid.

Concerning the multiple, early independent attestation of the stories of the burial of Christ, and of the empty tomb being discovered, we have already discussed the most contentious issue: the independence of the sources. In Craig there is much more by way of demonstration of the probable independence of the accounts, specifically on this issue. Whether one views the various Gospel accounts as having come from oral tradition, from other prior sources, or from the authors’ own experiences and recollections, the woven pattern of varying details indicates they did not draw all of their information from a single source, and they did not collude with each other to craft a single narrative of deceit.

The point regarding the “first day of the week” requires knowledge of the original languages. Craig points out that it is awkward Greek, but if the Greek is back-translated into Aramaic, the language used in Jerusalem at the time, the resulting phrase is perfectly natural and reflective of Jewish tradition (the term “Sabbath” is used). This suggests that the phrase was first used in Aramaic, which implies that it was used early.

Mark’s simple account of the resurrection is not what one would expect of a fable developing long after the events.

The discovery of the tomb by women is quite remarkable. The social status of women in both Judaic and Greco-Roman culture at the time was lower than most of us could even conceive (more here, mp3 file). They had the social status of children at every age. They were not allowed to give testimony in court; they had no credibility as witnesses. If the early church had been trying to create a believable story at some later date, it is highly unlikely they would have made women the discoverers of the empty tomb, or the first witnesses of the risen Jesus. The most credible explanation for their being recorded as the first witnesses is that it was true.

The Jews who wanted to deny the resurrection spread a tale that the disciples stole the body (Matthew 28:11-15, especially the latter part of verse 15). How did they try to put an end to claims of the resurrection? It would have been simple to say, “These followers of Jesus are nut-cases.” If Jesus’ body were still in the tomb their rebuttals would have been easier still! Obviously there was a reason they did not use that answer: anyone could have checked and seen whether it was true or not.

******

We’re on a continuing path here. The fact of Jesus’ empty tomb does not prove the fact of his resurrection, but it contributes to a historical case that I will keep adding to as I continue this series.

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