Thinking Christian

Stanley Fish has published a New York Times opinion piece on recent work by Jürgen Habermas titled Does Reason Know What It Is Missing? Habermas is a German philosopher, an atheist, who in Fish’s words,

has long been recognized as the most persistent and influential defender of an Enlightenment rationality that has been attacked both by postmodernism, which derides formal reason’s claims of internal coherence and neutrality, and by various fundamentalisms, which subordinate reason to religious imperatives that sweep everything before them

What Habermas has come to recognize, according to Fish, is where secular reason cannot go and what it cannot do.

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments….

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.

The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield.

Although in his solution there is still “something missing,” Habermas’s analysis of the problem (as summarized by Fish) is by far the best I’ve seen from any secularist.

Just published at BreakPoint: My article Politics, Power, and the Abandonment of Truth.

The central political tragedy of our day is not any of the decisions being made regarding health care, abortion, marriage, or morality.

Nor is it special interest group influence, campaign negativity, or even governmental encroachment on our freedoms. It is that we have abandoned truth as the guide for our political processes. We’ve given up hope in it.

Open for comments here…

From the Maverick Philosopher:

If one were to oppose all indoctrination, then one would have to present every extant view on every issue as if it had a legitimate claim on our attention.

(Maverick Philosopher: Once Again on Liberal Bias in Academe with Some Remarks on Indoctrination)

If Bill Vallicella is right in this (as I think he surely is), to oppose all indoctrination is impossible. The very act of opposing indoctrination in this sense would be to indoctrinate students into the belief that every extant view has a legitimate claim on our attention; thus denying the view that not every view has a legitimate claim on us.

Reposted from February 27, 2006

In a world of religious and ideological divisions, hardly anything evokes more anger than saying, “I know the truth.” It’s tolerated in mathematics and science, though even scientists are wary of it, knowing how often the “truths” of one age are later corrected or replaced. In morality and religion, though, it’s downright offensive. Relativism reigns. Though we don’t mind if others have opinions, if someone says, “My beliefs are the truth,” for many people that’s downright offensive.

Thus, we evangelical Christians stand in a socially awkward position. We claim to know the truth. We believe this truth is unique and applies to all people for all time. We believe that the truth is so tied together with Jesus Christ that he could claim, “I am the truth.”

Of course we know we are bucking cultural currents when we say this. We have heard people say we are arrogant. But it is not as it appears. To say, “I know the truth,” may seem to be claiming superiority, but in fact it is a position of humility. We believe the truth is not something we create or build for ourselves, it is a reality to be discovered, that holds whether we like it or not. Christians do not own the truth; we submit to it. Our position before truth is humility.

C.S. Lewis, possibly the most articulate spokesperson for Christianity in the 20th century, illustrates this well. A firm atheist, he was at Oxford when he decided to study the evidence regarding God. It led him in a direction he did not choose:

“You must picture me alone in [my] room… night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet… That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me… I gave in and admitted that God was God and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

There was no arrogance in that. There was “giving in and admitting.” He submitted to something greater than himself.

Contrast that with the idea that we can all choose our own truths. Is that not a bold stance to adopt? Is that not spitting in the face of reality? Is that not tantamount to, “Hey, Reality, step aside. It’s up to me to decide what’s true and what isn’t!” Who’s being arrogant here?

Christians know that we are constrained by reality. Though we don’t always put it this way, we don’t really believe that ”we hold the truth.” We believe the truth holds us.

It would be so simple to ride with the flow of the age, to relax and let go of issues such as abortion, gay “marriage,” sexual “freedom” and so on. We cannot. If we bow before the truth, we must be led by it, even if it leads us into unpopular territory.

“But you must have an open mind!” say some. Another sparkling writer of the 20th century, G.K. Chesterton, answered this way: “The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid.”

I have spent hours studying viewpoints contrary to Christianity. I continue to find that God’s word is solid and nourishing, and ultimately makes more sense than the alternatives. The truth holds me. Martin Luther said, “Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders.” (“Here I stand, I can do no other.”)

I wish the truth held me more. Any Christian would be deceitful to pretend he or she practices it fully, even as far as he or she understands it; and it would be just as bad to say we grasp it all. Even the simple commands, to love God fully and to love our neighbor as ourselves, have a depth beyond reaching.

Many aspects of the faith are clear, for instance, the basics: that Jesus claimed to be God in the flesh and supported his claim by his life, death, and resurrection. There are other sides of Christianity that remain mysterious or difficult. Our age has come up with new questions (genetic engineering, genocide, end-of-life decisions, and global environmental issues, for example) that require us to work out anew how God’s word applies. This, too, is reason for humility.

I’m reminded again of Chesterton at this point, though:

“What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert – himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt – the Divine Reason.”

He’s encouraging believers to be confident of the truth we know.

I’m afraid I’ve painted a dark picture here, that we’ve been forced into a corner we do not enjoy and do not wish to stand in. That’s not the case, of course. C.S. Lewis also wrote of Joy (he always capitalized it) that led him toward Christ and flowed out of his relationship with God.

The truth in Christ is not a cold, abstract principle, but a person of infinite love and grace. The Bible tells us to “speak the truth in love,” and clearly implies that it should generally be accompanied with a smile.

Those who deny there is such a thing as truth may find it hard to see that smile. We’re offering it. It’s not a smile that says, “Whatever you do, whatever you believe, is fine,” for that would be a denial of the truth – Jesus Christ – who is also love. It’s a smile instead that says, “Come see and be held by the truth that holds us, that we have come to love.

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Going to college was the best thing that ever happened to my spiritual life: it was there that I began my relationship with Christ, learned how to follow him, learned how great he was, and understood that I could serve him the rest of my life. It’s not that way for every student, though: many are unprepared for the social and intellectual pressures they experience on a secular university campus.

I gave this talk (length: 51:42, edited down from the original talk duration) in hopes that more students could have the kind of life and growth experience I had. It was given at Seaford Baptist Church on August 9, 2009. See the other posts in this series for resources connected with the talk.

Though I state this in the talk, I want to re-emphasize that the talk is intended for students who already have a faith to keep. I did not devote much time to the need for that as a basic starting point, or the necessity of a vital, strong connection in one’s personal walk with Jesus Christ. A strong relationship with Christ really is the most fundamental requirement of all, but the group I was addressing is being well taught in that already, so I focused on other, more college-specific topics.

From The Point, on a recent meeting of the 25,000-member American Education Research Association:

[Gabriel] Reich was trying to explain … why it was presumptuous for professional mathematicians (and many parents) to be up in arms about the currently fashionable constructivist idea that instead of explaining to youngsters, say, how to do long division, teachers should let them count, subtract, make an educated guess, or otherwise figure out their own ways to solve division problems. College math professors may complain that young people taught the constructivist way arrive in their classrooms unable to perform the basic operations necessary to move on to calculus, but so what? “Why should we privilege professional mathematicians?” Reich asked…. “Most of the people here at this meeting don’t think of themselves as good at math, and they don’t think math is creative.”

Let them “count, subtract, or otherwise figure out their own ways to solve division problems” to make it more creative, he says. Does that sound off the wall to you? Not necessarily so to everyone. I refer you to one of the stranger moments in the history of this blog as evidence, a strange moment that was echoed in this researchers’ meeting (caution: sexual themes in the linked page).

There are no wrong answers in constructivist theory, so Reich, pursuing his mathematical theme, had a tough sell the next day when he presented a paper to his fellow educators arguing that the principles of constructivism should be modified a bit in teaching arithmetic. “I know some constructivists might take issue with what I’m saying,” was his delicate way of telling his audience that when a student says two and two equals five, there might be a problem, if only with the child’s non-constructivist parents who might have “right-answer” concerns. Reich was suggesting that the youngster’s incorrect (or “incorrect”) answer be “vetted by the class” to see if it “works.” That way, he explained, “the students are learning to act as members of a mathematical community–they are becoming mathematicians.”

Now, why does this matter to a blog on Christian thinking? First and most obviously, it ought to be of concern to anyone, not just Christians. Students left to figure out long division on their own will either flail about uselessly until they despair, or they will “make an educated guess,” for which I will offer my own educated guess: they’re almost always going to guess wrong. (More on that in a moment.)

Second, those at this meeting who aren’t good at math (most of the people there at the meeting) “don’t think math is creative,” and one of them, Gabriel Reich, asked, “Why should we privilege professional mathematicians?” Well, why should we privilege professional musicians? I studied trombone in college and played professionally for several years. I still play occasionally, and the rules haven’t changed. I have to play in the same key as everybody else. If I’m going to play a low A-flat, I have play it in third position, and if I miss the right spot on the slide by as little as half an inch, it’s going to sound wrong. If I’m going to be really creative and ad lib a jazz solo, I’m going to be given a set of chord changes to follow. I need to know what the notation needs, and I need to stick with those chords, or it’s going to sound wrong.

Creativity depends on discipline, in other words. It only works within a structure. I wasn’t much good as a visual artist in school, but I recall my art teachers telling me the same thing: you need to learn the basics of lines, colors, and form before you can succeed in abstract art.

Ravi Zacharias has tells in one of his podcasts that another writer has summarized:

A friend of mine told me that when Christian apologist and author Ravi Zacharias visited Columbus to speak at Ohio State University, his hosts took him to visit the Wexner Center for the Arts. The Wexner Center is a citadel of postmodern architecture. It has stairways leading nowhere, columns that come down but never touch the floor, beams and galleries going everywhere, and a crazy-looking exposed girder system over most of the outside. Like most of postmodernism, it defies every canon of common sense and every law of rationality.

Zacharias looked at the building and cocked his head. With a grin he asked, “I wonder if they used the same techniques when they laid the foundation?”

(“Postmodern” as used there is roughly synonymous with Reich’s “constructivist.”) The building’s zany creativity depended on applying discipline at the foundation. Now, do you suppose the architect might have employed some mathematics in engineering the walls, the floors, the stairways and galleries, the roof? Or just educated guesses? The answer is obvious: his or her creativity was enabled by the discipline and structure of real mathematics.

So we must ask, does Gabriel Reich really think math can become more creative by letting students figure it all out on their own, or make their own guesses? Let’s ask him how long it would take these students to design a Wexner Center that way. Or to write software for a creative new computer game. Or even to compose a song—for there is a lot of mathematics in music.

One of the characteristic stances of postmodernism (or constructivism) is to set aside the importance of right and wrong. Truth is relative, especially in matters of religion, values, and ethics, but why stop there? As noted in my already-linked strange moment, 2+2=5 is an “illegitimate” answer, but it’s “not necessary” to use the terms “right and wrong.” This leads me to my third response: there is truth in religion, values, and ethics. Jesus Christ is the Truth (John 14:6), and God’s word is truth (John 17:17). There is life, first of all, that comes from recognizing that truth, and then a creativity-begetting discipline, a genuine freedom built on truth and expressing itself in love (Galatians 5:13-14).

Math, music, art, and architecture—and religion, too—none of these are simply matters of “educated guesses.” They all depend on yielding our opinions to an existing reality. There is a structure of truth under each of them: a structure that unleashes life and creativity.

Remember: it was those who didn’t consider themselves good at math who didn’t think it was creative. I’m quite sure that for them it isn’t. But why should we stifle a generation’s creative life by denying them the discipline of the truth?

Here’s an interesting discussion at Scientific American: “Is Religion Adaptive? It’s Complicated.”

Schloss’s point is the one that gets most people thinking. “That’s all fine and dandy about the scientific research, but what does it all tell us about the existence of God?” What if, as I suggested in my answer to this year’s “Annual Question” at Edge. The data suggest that God is actually just a psychological blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? Would you still believe if you knew God were a byproduct of your evolved mental architecture?

What if, indeed? That’s easy. If (and it’s a very big if) the data showed God was just a psychological blemish on my brain, then I could no longer believe.

That the question could even be asked is telling. “Could you believe in God if you knew he didn’t exist?” The question only makes sense if belief means something divorced from what we know to be true about the world. It’s another illustration of the commonly observed fact-value dichotomy: facts are about objective knowledge, while values (which include what we decide to believe) are private matters with no necessary connection to external realities, or so it is thought. For whatever reason, far too many Christians, even, have bought into this relativistic dichotomy.

Christianity, properly understood in its evangelical historical form, makes objective concrete statements about reality, and if they are wrong, then Christianity is wrong. Our belief is that God actually created the world, called Abraham, formed the nation of Israel, brought them out of Egypt through a parted Red Sea, spoke through the prophets, was incarnated in Christ who lived, died, and rose again in real history. If I ever came to know that these things were false, how could I “believe” they were true? As J.I. Packer wrote as long ago as 1972,

Nor is this all. Scepticism about both divine revelation and Christian origins has bred a wider scepticism which abandons all idea of a unity of truth, and with it any hope of unified human knowledge; so that it is now commonly assumed that my religious apprehensions have nothing to do with my scientific view of things external to myself, since God is not ‘out there’ in the world, but only ‘down here’ in the psyche. The uncertainty and confusion about God which marks our day is worse than anything since Gnostic theosophy tried to swallow Christianity in the second century.

(Knowing God, Foreword)

Amen to that. It hasn’t become noticeably better in 37 years since then.

As to the question posed in the article’s title, the answer is of course religion is adaptive. Any dummy knows it could never have evolved if it weren’t! Either it’s adaptive in that sense, or (and they apparently spent precious little time considering this) people are religious because there’s a reality beyond nature that we know we need to tap into. I’ll buy that latter option, myself.