Undeception

This week’s episode of Unbelieveable? was nowhere near as incendiary as the interview released from last weekend — I’m glad Chris handled that one and not me! It was, however, a rather interesting contribution to the show’s “Mind, Body, and Soul Month.” (N.B. I have inserted the Oxford comma in that title where Brierley has omitted it. Bad Brit!)

The topic of discussion was “Has Neuroscience Killed God?” Featured was a discussion between Cambridge neuroscientist Rev. Dr. Aladair Coles and psychological therapist Martyn Frame, a Christian and an atheist respectively. The discussion covered the ground you might expect, e.g. whether determining the neurological phenomena associated with religious experiences fully explained those experiences and was therefore sufficient to discount them. Overall I think this was a much better discussion than last week’s disappointing conversation between David Papineau and Keith Ward over materialism/dualism, in which I sided with the materialist over Ward (whom I really respect).

Anatomy of a religious experience (via Wikipedia)

Frame early on concedes that religious experience as emanating from divine interaction is not strictly speaking disproved by neurological evidence, but keeps insisting that (reductive) naturalism is somehow more in line with the scientific evidence. Yet when pressed to explain how this was the case, he kept wanting to offer philosophical/theological challenges. Specifically, he wondered why the Christian God wouldn’t wire people to believe in specifically Him (i.e. the Christian God) rather than to allow people to either believe in another deity or disbelieve altogether. Unsurprisingly, Coles countered that 1) this is not after all a neurological question and 2) a God who wired everyone to believe in Him would be despotic and unlike the Christian God. Coles was very careful not to dismiss Frame’s concern as a real problem, but pointed out quite rightly that it was a philosophical and not a scientific challenge. As this show’s topic was specifically on the scientific evidence, I think Coles was right in respectfully and not dismissively steering things back.

Among the more interesting scientific discussions was the evidence cited by Coles that the parts of the brain that appear to be involved in the perception of religious experience are not at all unique to humans. There is no detectable “God module” that humans utilize for their prayer lives and religious experiences; people interact with their deities in the same way they interact with other humans. For Coles, it might be easier to dismiss God if there were such a lump of cells tacked on by evolution which makes humans think they are having their mystical experiences, but having the brain act in a normal, human way when interacting with either other humans or a spiritual being is “deeply Christian” in that it coincides with the Christian belief in God as a person with whom we interact rather than just some mystical force. I found that interesting; take it or leave it.

One of Frame’s lines of evidence was pointing out that people with a dominating right hemisphere were likelier to be religious than otherwise. The right hemisphere is the creative side of the brain and notoriously can find patterns even where there are none; the popular implication is that, essentially, right-brained people are the likeliest to believe in things that don’t exist, and that this explains religious people. Coles countered that there are plenty of left-brained people who are religious in different ways: he said that although right-brained individuals seem to have more mystical experiences, left-brained individuals are likelier to view God in doctrinal or theological terms. Moreover, Coles cited studies that show people with no religious inclinations who have the left side of their brain damaged will often find a sense for spirituality as a result of their dependence on the right hemisphere. From this he suggested that we all have the physical mechanisms for religious experience built in to us, but such inclinations are sometimes “bullied” out by a dominating left hemisphere. Such people are not de facto atheists or materialists, but may find mystical, religious experiences harder to access.

A couple additional thoughts from me.

• The case was predictably made by Frame that being able to artificially stimulate mystical experiences using electrodes applied to the applicable regions of the brain invalidates any immaterial source for those experiences in other people. The implication is that if we can fool the brain into thinking there is a God through very mundane physical processes, this goes to show that it’s all delusion caused by our brains’ reactions to electro-chemical accidents. This is a very old, very tired bit of reductionism. If neuroscientists were able to manipulate a subject’s perception so that he thought his mother was in the room, this would not at all invalidate the existence of the subject’s mother, or even exclude the possibility that his mother was in the room. Similarly, neuroscientists are able to artificially approximate all kinds of reactions to stimuli that, while actually existing, are not actually present at the time. To my mind, this is a line of evidence that painfully begs the question. All that has been shown is that certain kinds of experiences that are experienced by our brain’s chemistry are in fact reproducible by chemistry.

• The topic of this show dealt specifically with religious experiences; I have indeed had religious, even mystical experiences, but I am not particularly right-brained. My left hemisphere really tries to get me to dismiss my experiences, and although I do think it important to suspend my belief in them when evaluating these questions, I find that my left hemisphere is more than adequate to explain my religious beliefs anyway. The fact is, I don’t believe primarily because of religious experiences as perceived by my right brain: equally so, perhaps even more commonly these days, I believe because the world makes better intellectual sense to me with a God behind it. Importantly, in practice I discount every mystical personal experience, mine included, and proceed with my belief in the Christian God based on a reasoned choice. All this to say, for me, not much hangs on the outcome of this discussion in either direction.

Please note that I’m not saying there aren’t real challenges for theism or Christianity from neuroscience. I honestly don’t know enough to say whether there are or aren’t. But I do know that Dr. Coles presented a better case than Mr. Frame.

Anyway, for a cordial, civil exchange of interesting ideas, I certainly recommend checking this episode out.

An article is up in Epiphenom called, “Supernatural explanations just don’t occur to kids – they need to be taught them.”

I saw this linked on Google+ from an atheist claiming this as evidence that children only believe in the supernatural because we “FORCE” them to learn about it. Religion is child abuse, etc.

It puzzles me a bit how this is touted as some kind of evidence that atheism as a default position is therefore more valid; there are all kinds of important things that kids don’t naturally know, but come to believe later after some life experience. This study, if it proves correct, may be handy as an excuse to refer to raising children from within a religious tradition as “mind-washing”, but it simultaneously seems to undermine another popular critique of religion.

Namely, is belief in the supernatural a childish, irrational, illogical, and completely unsourced just-so story, or is it the result of the higher reasoning of adults at least, or perhaps even some sort of supernatural revelation? If belief in the divine cannot be blamed on puerile and thoughtless speculation, isn’t it at least conceivable that the widespread human belief in the divine is the result of thoughtful adult reasoning (or revelation)? Occam’s razor cuts both ways.

I’m not saying any of these options is the most plausible. But the existence of different options does showcase the fact that no belief is exempt from the necessity of honest analysis, no matter how convenient it would be for our position to shortcut around it. You’ve heard of “gotcha politics”? Claiming this as proof of anything is gotcha science — hardly science at all.

…and why the Church in the East never did.

Listening to most Evangelical first-string leaders, you’d get the impression that apart from an historical Fall of Man that marred the souls of all the descendants of the ones who fell, you’d have no need for Jesus, and Christianity sails right out the window. So much more than inerrancy hangs on the question: original sin and total depravity hang on some sort of historical Fall, don’t they?

Perhaps they do (though not necessarily) — but the massive blind spot we have is that a rather large, ancient, and revered segment of the Christian Church rejected both of those teachings long before science came along and refuted the possibility of an historical first pair of human progenitors. And yet these believers still maintain that the work of Christ in atonement is absolutely necessary for every individual regardless.

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo explains:

The Schism between the West and the East is great indeed, so much so that Protestants rarely ever hear that perspective. These sorts of surprises are why I have begun to love glancing at Christian theology through the lens of the Orthodox.

NPR has a rather good article up called “Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve” (sic — what the heck is up with the indiscriminate capitalization?). It vividly showcases how the tide is (finally) starting to turn in this culture war for/against evolutionary theory. Peppered with quotes from several key people, including Dennis Venema, Karl Giberson, Al Mohler, and Reasons to Believe’s Fazale Rana, the article points out that more and more self-described Evangelicals are coming to grips with the fact that the scientific evidence against a literal Adam and Eve is overwhelming.

Image via Wikipedia

Calvin College’s Dan Harlow underscores the importance of this discussion to the vitality of Evangelical Christianity when he says, “This stuff is unavoidable. Evangelicals have to either face up to it or they have to stick their head in the sand. And if they do that, they will lose whatever intellectual currency or respectability they have.” Respectability notwithstanding, conservative standard bearers like Al Mohler see nothing in Christianity worth holding onto sans a literal Adam and Eve. Despite Venema’s confident insistence that there’s nothing to be afraid of in accepting mainstream evolution (which decisively refutes two original progenitors), obviously there are some theological implications that remain in need of explanation. And although that end is not out of sight anymore, it’s still going to take a lot more work.

This reminded me of something I learned back in my linguistics program several years ago. (This isn’t a tangent: it’ll come back around!)

When two people groups speaking mutually unintelligible native languages come into contact and have need for communication, especially in a trade situation, they are likely to come up with some sort of compromise that will allow them to interact. Often they will form a sort of hybrid communication system taking elements from each of their languages. This communication system is called a “pidgin”: the vocabulary comes almost completely from the visitors who are seeking trade (historically, usually English or French) and the grammar (morphology, syntax) is taken predominantly from the native language. This system works well enough for trade, but pidgins are not classified by linguists as languages because they lack a number of grammatical features of natural human language. Because of its limitations, the pidgin is often spoken between the two language groups strictly in order to conduct business; the grammatical holes hinder much communication beyond such practical matters.

Yet in cases such as colonization in which the language of the traders makes an established presence, a pidgin may be spoken around young children who naturally adopt it as a native language rather than a limited communication system. In these cases, something very interesting happens: as part of the language acquisition process that comes so naturally to the young of our species, children fill in the pidgin’s holes. When children speak the pidgin to others, they unconsciously and effortlessly begin inserting new parts of speech, formulating verb tenses, bringing in missing vocabulary, and creating any other necessary language features that the pidgin lacked, so that the result is a robust, full-fledged language. This nativized pidgin is what is referred to as a “creole”.

Processes analogous to creolization recur outside language: quite commonly it’s in our children that thesis and antithesis are synthesized and for whom conflicts are likeliest to be resolved or otherwise fall away. Most of my peers in my generation grew up oblivious to and often incredulous of the traumatic struggle for racial equality that our parents and grandparents had to fight so hard for; I anticipate the same for my grandchildren in regard to the currently contentious issue of homosexuality.

I hope and expect this to happen also in the area of evolution and biblical literalism.

As a case in point, I had a conversation about woodenly literalistic interpretations of Scripture and evolution with my young daughter, a science nerd; at first, as a good Sunday School pupil (and my mother’s granddaughter), she was horrified to think about the possibility that what she’d heard wasn’t God’s truth (“But God doesn’t lie!” she once whispered desperately), but it was not too difficult to explain to her that the opinions of her creationist teachers hadn’t been taking all the important information into account. So in a relatively short conversation I was able to assuage her concerns and free her of some latent fears about her beloved science books so that she’ll be a part of the first generation of American Christians that tolerates some variation in the list of acceptable “vocabulary” for the origins question; in turn, theology/philosophy nerds (my son is already heading this direction) will nativize the “grammar” of how it all works and what it all means when taken together. Most importantly, they’ll now be able to look sympathetically at believers on both side of the question to an extent much more difficult for my generation and older.

I’m suggesting that we who have struggled in our exodus from conservative Christian theologies should not despair too quickly or fear too much for our children’s ability to retain and adapt Christian theology: this transition will not be nearly as difficult as it was for us who were more inculcated in our own native tongues before we made contact with those foreigners with their bizarre, barbarian languages. My hope is that, so long as we continue to stand by and tinker at the puzzle we’ve begun and teach our children to lay down their arms when dealing with those who disagree, we can trust that they will come in behind us and, relatively effortlessly, fill in the holes.

My favorite science fiction show is the X-Files, so I was interested to discover that Wipf and Stock published a book back in April by Amy Donaldson, called We Want to Believe: Faith and Gospel in the X-Files (paperback, Kindle). Here’s part of the publisher’s blurb:

We Want to Believe

“Why would God let the innocent suffer? Can God forgive even the most heinous criminal? What if God is giving us signs to point the way to the truth, but we’re not paying attention? These are some of the questions raised by The X-Files. In the spirit of the show, this book uses the symbols and images presented throughout the series to pose such questions and explore some of the answers, particularly in the Christian tradition.”

I haven’t read it, but it apparently approaches the series from a thoroughly Christian viewpoint. Kicking around in my memory was a rumor from back when the show was running that one of the writers was a Christian. I never verified this, but the Christian and especially Catholic themes are ubiquitous. So when I noticed that Frank Spotnitz, an executive producer for the show, had written a favorable review of Donaldson’s book, I went a-Googling and came across this interview with Spotnitz and the series’ creator, executive producer, and overall genius Chris Carter from the time of the release of the 2008 movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe. The interview, conducted by a UK rag dedicated to paranormal/weird phenomena called the Fortean Times, exposed some pretty interesting things about the beliefs and spiritual dispositions of these showrunners.

[Fortean Times]: There’s a strong emphasis on Catholic faith in the film – a theme that had always been bubbling through the series. Is this something that is personal to either of you?

Chris Carter: Neither of us are Catholics. But, of course, we pick up the newspaper every day and we realize that there’s a controversy about stem cell research, which is an element in the story. And it was interesting to us.

I had also read that, as in the movie, there was a place, a facility, where pædophiles lived together and sort of policed one another, and I thought that was very interesting. And I was very interested in that they hated one another for their particular appetites. And that plays on this character, Father Joe. He is at odds with his impulses and yet he is a man of faith. How do you reconcile those things? How do you look for forgiveness? What if God were to give you an opportunity for forgiveness?

…snip…snip…

FT: When you’re writing together, is one of you Mulder and one of you Scully?

CC: Frank wears the dress! [laughter] No, it’s not quite like that, I think both of the voices are in our heads and after 202 hours of entertainment, I think they’re pretty much implanted there.

[Frank Spotnitz]: I think what was interesting to me about this script and this story is the theme of faith. Because Chris is a person of faith; not in a particularly religious sense, but still he believes in a higher power…

CC: Like Tony Blair!

FS: [Laughs] And I’m a sceptic, for sure. So, for a long time, we didn’t know how to end this movie. Because I wouldn’t feel comfortable with proof of God, and we didn’t want to deny it either. So the ending we came up with was actually sort of the perfect resolution of the two opposing points of view.

FT: Would you say, when it comes to anomalous phenomena, that you both meet in a middle, let’s say fortean, ground?

FS: I like to say I’m a humble sceptic. Because I’ve always been a sceptic. But after years of being exposed to this kind of material and meeting people – abductees and other people who have seen or experienced strange things – I realise there is so much I cannot explain. I still think science is the only way to make sense of the world, yet I think there is still an awful lot that science doesn’t yet understand.

CC: I’m the same way. I used to call myself a natural sceptic and I still think I have a sceptical nature, but I do have faith that there is meaning in something greater.

After The X-Files finished, I did a fellowship at an institute for theoretical physics. And I saw that these scientists were doing what I would call some of the most imaginal work I had ever seen. They can’t see what they’re imagining, they calculate it. It is mathematical, but it is completely imaginary. And yet, it is so beautiful. It’s almost as if they are, in a weird way, searching for God through science.

So there may not be direct links of Mulder to Carter or Scully to Spotnitz, but it’s close enough for a catchy title for this post! Besides, one of the central character developments in the series was watching Mulder and Scully gradually beginning to become, respectively, more skeptical and more “open to extreme possibilities,” which is something that it sounds like may have occurred with the showrunners as well.

I just finally got around to reading the post from BioLogos from May 31, “BioLogos and the June 2011 ‘Christianity Today’ Cover Story“. Within it, president Darrel Falk makes note that they’ve had trouble identifying theologians who affirm both the historicity of Adam and Eve and evolution. While the scientific data cannot alone rule anything out, the stance that accepts God’s selecting one man and one woman out of an early population of Homo is something Falk flags as having had little serious theological effort placed into explaining it:

The “Federal Headship” model that accepts the scientific findings while at the same time holding to the historicity of a real first couple has not yet been carefully worked out by theologians. The reason that we haven’t had many articles of that sort is because we haven’t been able to identify theologians who are looking at the question from that perspective. In general, our experience has been that theologians are in one of two camps. Either they work within the framework of a non-historical Adam and Eve or they believe the scientific conclusions will eventually prove to be deeply flawed and humans were not created through an evolutionary process after all.

That divide is something I’ve certainly witnessed, and no doubt it’s used by the latter group to demonstrate the “slippery slope”. And in this case, I think they’re right: most who go all the way to say that so many aspects of Genesis 1 and 2 are not historical or literal have a hard time drawing the line at the historicity of the first pair. The divide comes over how we deal with the NT’s treatment of Adam, who Paul especially seems to use as a key figure in his theology (I would argue that Adam is not any more key to Paul than Melchizedek is to Hebrews, used typologically). In short, it’s not nearly as much about the historicity of Adam and Eve as it is the historicity of the Fall.

Although people like Tim Keller and Denis Alexander will continue to try arguing for a first pair of souled individuals, a position that was assumed by C. S. Lewis and has recently been affirmed by Vatican theologians, my guess is that the next generation of Christians who grow up accepting evolution as a “first language” will never seriously consider it, in the same way that teens growing up today rarely crack open their parents’ books on how to install software or run basic functions of Microsoft Office. Federal headship, like most other models of the Fall, may well be a moribund theological construct.

Falk urges “caution” with the federal headship view of the Fall because there are a number of theological questions that have yet to be teased out satisfactorily. Did God only impart His life-giving spirit to two of them, who promptly turned around and “fell” in a way we might have expected from the rest of their still-animal tribespeople? How did their divinely imparted souls that separated them from their peers and ancestors get passed on to their descendants? How did their fallenness get passed on?

Given questions like these and the available alternative of understanding that the “fallenness” of humanity and its solution in Christ don’t depend on an historical Fall from an historical pair, I’m fairly confident that a denial of the historicity of Adam and Eve will become the dominant paradigm within the next couple of decades.

This prediction will lead to the question, “But what about those who hang onto inerrancy? How will they simply reject the Bible’s teachings about Adam and Eve?” Well, for one thing, I think most Christians (and in honesty, people in general) tolerate enough cognitive dissonance to the effect that this will not invariably be noticed as a conflict with an assumption of evolution. Another factor is the attempt to salvage a semblance of inerrancy by arguing for figurative language and other literary devices to account for Paul’s treatment of Adam and Eve (this was the path I took several years ago). But even more so, I think that the inevitable acceptance of evolution by the younger generations will in fact pull a modified or abandonment inerrancy along with it. As Cliff Martin likes to point out, the Church will accept evolution; it must.

Parchment and Pen has a post up that seeks to classify  the different Christian views on origins. C. Michael Patton is usually pretty good at describing different points of view sympathetically, and things were going along pretty uncontroversially as he described different types of special creation, that is, views of creation that envisage miraculous intervention of one sort or another. Then he gets to “Deistic Evolution”, whose advocates, he asserts…

Believe, as Darwinian Evolutionists, that God created the universe over billions of years, using naturalistic evolutionary processes to create humanity without intervention.

Wait…that sounds a lot like “theistic evolution” (or  ”evolutionary creation”), doesn’t it?

I call this ”deistic evolution” due to the “hands-off” approach God takes to the development of man in the evolutionary process. Darwinian evolution, through the process of natural selection, is accepted. While there is across the board agreement that God did not/does not intervene in the process of evolution, DEers are divided as to whether God directly caused the first life to begin or whether he let life come into being naturalistically (abiogenisis).

Among those he describes as “Deistic Evolutionists” who apparently believe that God was “hands off” in creation, he cites Pete Enns, who just happens to be a Reformed Christian who has recently posted part 13 of a series that outlines the relationship between evolution and God’s sovereignty from a Calvinistic perspective. For any Calvinist, the notion that God would be laissez faire about such a thing as the creation of the universe is unthinkable; deism is a four-letter word among the Reformed. Patton, a Calvinist, knows this, which I take to be an obvious backhand. It’s not as though that were the only adjective he could possibly find (I would argue that no adjective is needed for “evolutionist”), and that particularly adjective is laden with a view of God’s nature that is eschewed by most Christians, including most who accept the findings of mainstream science. I must say that this choice was unbecoming of him and his reputation as a straight-shooter.

The fact is, God can be at work in and through creation whether or not He feels the need to tweak this or that during its development. My favorite analogy is of a competent software engineer who is able to develop a program that, once executed, will perform her desired goals without requiring her intermittent input. She is no less responsible or “hands on” about how it performs, since she wrote every piece of code responsible for how it operates; in fact, the more of an expert she is, the less of her interference in its execution is necessary. This analogy is of course limited, and I’ve heard others who modified it to say that God in a sense wrote Himself into the code (which I quite like the sound of, even if I don’t fully understand all of its implications).

The last category in Patton’s list is Intelligent Design (ID). He notes that one can be both an ID advocate and a special creationist of any sort: it simply requires acknowledging that the possible influence of miracles must not be excluded from one’s laboratory research. What’s interesting here is that he subcategorizes “Deistic Evolution” and evolution-friendly Intelligent Design alike under a category called “Theistic Evolution” (TE)! Although most ID advocates (at higher levels, not so much in churches) acknowledge significant evolutionary activity, sometimes including universal common descent, the views of TE and ID have usually been placed in contradistinction to one another.

As I said above, I don’t think accepters of mainstream science need a special label, whether they’re believers or not. But for the purposes of lists like this in which the theological component is a criterion for classification, I usually prefer “theistic evolutionist” – with no ID, thankyouverymuch – (not so keen on “evolutionary creationist”).

I would suggest, however, that as long as we’re classifying these origins positions by theological commitment, perhaps my own position is best characterized not specifically by the origins component, but by the hermeneutical component responsible for it. My hermeneutic is characterized by a firm conviction that the Bible is first and foremost a literary work and a product of the times in which its constituent content was written. Further, I am convinced that an examination of the genre of early Genesis will confirm it as a work of ANE literature and that consequently we need bring no expectations of a theological nature to the table when asking questions about origins. Almost incidentally, since I do not expect Genesis to answer the question of how the heavens and the earth and all that are in them originated (its authors seemed to be more interested in why), I look to mainstream science to answer that question — as most Christians do unquestioningly for questions of weather, embryology, etc. regardless of their view on origins. Perhaps this doesn’t give me a neat, tidy two-word descriptor, unless you like (as I confess I do) a term I coined a few years back: literary-genericist.

I would be remiss in not pointing out and appreciating Patton’s fair-minded ecumenicism on the origins issue:

I believe that one can be a legitimate Christian and hold to any one of these views….While I believe that this is an issue that we should continue to discuss with excitement and hope, this is not an issue, in my opinion, that should fracture Christian fellowship.