Undeception

As I teased earlier, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss and astrophysicist Rodney Holder engaged in a conversation about cosmological origins on Unbelievable over the weekend. It was an entertaining though not altogether surprising debate, confirming my impression of Krauss’s book. I have not read it, but as I always say in these scenarios, reading the book is not a prerequisite for commenting on what the author says is the point and thrust of his own book. This is not a review of the book; it’s a review of some of Krauss’s ideas and his presentation of those ideas, which are presumably not that different from those argued in his book.

But I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the real, if you wish, miracle that people seem to think requires the existence of God is that you can create a universe full of stuff, full of stars, planets, humans, remarkable things out of nothing, literally where there were no stars, particle, space, etc. And that particular “miracle” is something that the laws of physics certainly has plausible explanations for.

If this summarized Lawrence Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing as well as he claims it does, I doubt I would have any major problem with it. I like eliminating the god of the gaps as much as anyone. But Krauss and his New Atheist compadres have bigger ideas for his book than just that.

At one point in the interview he says, ”The key, fascinating thing to try to understand is how we got this amazing universe and how you don’t need a Creator; you don’t need someone to obviate the laws of physics to produce it.” In the book Krauss offers a few variations on how to answer the question of the universe’s origin. This would indeed problematize the cosmological argument, especially when the latter is being used as a proof rather than as a pointer; in science, the more plausible mundane explanations are available to contend with a counter-intuitive explanation, the less likely the counter-intuitive explanation (here, a divine miracle) appears. But Krauss’s interlocutor for this debate was less than convinced that his explanations were compelling enough to make natural theology an entirely superfluous supposition.

Holder, a former priest and a current astrophysicist, argues that in attempting to settle the philosopher’s quandary about the universe’s creation from nothing, Krauss does not properly begin with nothing. Indeed, in the interview, Krauss speaks of this or that conceived pre-Universe state as “approaching” the “philosophers’ nothing“. Holder is not convinced: ”He’s ontologized this nothing.” In one model under consideration, Holder points out that Krauss is not beginning with the absence of anything, but a quantum vaccuum. Krauss did not argue with this point.

Holder then noted that even under an alternative model discussed in the book beginning with an actual “absence of space,” Krauss speaks of this nothing as having properties, which would disqualify that lack of space from being the philosophers’ nothing: “…It has the property of being unstable; it has the property of being able to be acted upon by quantum fields and gravity and so on.”  Krauss objected that those things did not exist in that model: rather, there is a “metaverse” in which there is potential for those things to exist. Rejoined Holder, even the potential is not nothing. The existence of potential is still existence.

This prompted a pointed response from Krauss: “If the universe didn’t have the potential to exist, then how did God create it?” Krauss seemed similarly bothered by the “why? why? why?” question, to which he expected the answer, “turtles all the way down:” that is, if we persist on asking “why this created object?” until we get to an eternal object, we could still always ask “why that eternal object?” And like Dawkins, Krauss maintains that we could do this with the existence of God, as well.

Holder launched into an explanation of God as a necessary being, claiming that most scientists hold that the universe, on the other hand, is contingent. I consider that this difference in types of existence can conceivably be squared with apophatic theology of the Cappadocian variety, which despite on the surface maintaining that God Himself does not exist (and does exist) is really arguing that God has an existence of an altogether different kind than the way we can conceive of existence; He is the very basis for the kind of existence we are familiar with. Holder mentions Hawking’s discussion of what “breathes fire into equations.”

Another point in the book that Krauss wanted to point out is that the laws of physics creating and sustaining the universe could themselves be generated naturally. Holder didn’t repudiate the idea, but he apparently still wants to take it back one more step, asking why these particular laws exist: “So there can be the most wonderful theory, but why is this theory even instantiated?” They did not go far down this road in this discussion, but I wish they had had the time to!

One thing they did have the time to get into was the question of the value of philosophy.

Krauss stated his belief that physics has begun to answer the questions that used to be the domain of theology and philosophy. He argues that the philosophers’ distinction between something and nothing have been shown to be irrelevant distinctions under science’s microscope (note that in answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, Krauss in effect wants to deny the premise of the question). Although he occasionally equivocates on this, it certainly appears as though Krauss wants to bookend Sam Harris’s The End of Faith with The End of Philosophy.

Many philosophers are up at arms against Krauss for dismissing philosophy as increasingly irrelevant in his empiricist’s world of logical positivism, as he does in this interview (he admits that he “discounted” a recent scathing NY Times review because it was by a philosopher rather than a cosmologist). But this is not just some unfortunate parasite intruding on Krauss’s project. As fellow scientist (and atheist) Sean Carroll judiciously pointed out, this is at the core of Krauss’s project: as stated explicitly in this debate, Krauss believes that physics has demonstrated that the question of why is no longer more scientifically interesting than the question of why flowers differ in color. What Krauss is saying is that answering how, i.e. mechanical explanations, make irrelevant the question why, i.e. the question of meaning or purpose.

We can see the folly of approaching why as a how question in much smaller endeavors. If a man presented to his wife a beautiful oil painting he had created out of a spontaneous act of devotion to her, he would be wronged if she dismissed it as the ultimately meaningless result of oil smeared across canvas. In fact, the more brilliant and beautiful the painting, the more poignant its higher purpose would be to her.

More to the point, if my son were to ask me, “Why do I have to get a painful shot?” and I answered, “Because the needle triggers the pain receptors in your arm,” I have misheard his question as “what makes a shot painful?” rather than “why do I need to undergo this painful shot?” Similarly, answering “why does the universe exist?” as Krauss does is no different than if he had heard the question as “what makes the universe exist?” which of course an entirely different question than the one memorably posed by Leibnitz. Answering how manifestly does not render the question of why irrelevant. It is on this point that I agree with Gould’s NOMA principle: science seeks to answer how where philosophy and theology seek to answer why, and despite all of the efforts of Krauss and special creationists, both disciplines are ill-equipped to answer the other’s question.

This is why I’d be happy enough for Krauss’s book to completely decimate the cosmological argument. I don’t need it. I don’t need God to stand in that gap. But don’t try to tell me that knowing how something is accomplished in any way abolishes any attached purpose or meaning behind it, no matter how brilliantly or exhaustively you explain the how‘s.

There have been a few recent discussions in the blogosphere tangentially related to Lawrence Krauss’s recent book, A Universe from Nothing, including an off-handed post by me and a short one by Eric Reitan. Today’s episode of the Unbelievable radio show promises to be interesting. You can probably expect me to give my thoughts on it once I have a chance to listen to it at the beginning of the week. For now, here’s the episode summary:

Lawrence Krauss is a Cosmologist at Arizona State University who describes himself as an “anti-theist”.  His latest book “A Universe from Nothing“ has received both acclaim and criticism for its attempt to answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Debating the issue with Krauss is Rodney Holder, Course director at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. An astrophysicist and priest by background.

In a lively exchange they debate whether Krauss’ “nothing” is “nothing”, fine tuning and multiverses, scientific knowledge, miracles and the usefulness of theology and philosophy.

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.

What interests me—and what I take to be demonstrable and important—is the particular ensemble of moral and imaginative values engendered in numberless consciences by Christian beliefs. That such values had political and social consequences I certainly do not deny; I feel fairly safe in saying, for instance, that abolitionism—as a purely moral cause—could not easily have arisen in any non-Christian culture of which I am aware. That is quite different, however, from claiming that Christianity ineluctably or uniquely must give rise to, say, democracy or capitalism or empirical science. It is to say, rather, that the Christian account of reality introduced into our world an understanding of the divine, the cosmic, and the human that had no exact or even proximate equivlanet elsewhere and that made possible a moral vision of the human person that has haunted us ever since, century upon century.

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, p. 202-203

Cover via Amazon

The above quote was called to my attention by the latest episode of the Unbelievable? radio show, in which Hart and Terry Sanderson, president of the UK’s National Secular Society, debate the potential results of the new atheist goal of secularization and the relegation of all religion to individual, inconsequential observance (at best).

I’ve been interested in David Bentley Hart since my friend Cliff Martin reviewed his book a couple years ago. The above quote is indicative of his approach, which is careful not to argue that Christianity is true because it does this or that for the world. As he says on the show, “The book is not an exhortation to ‘believe, because if we don’t, we don’t have moral rationales for behaving the way we ought to behave.’ ” In fact, “It’s not that anyone would deny that there is some natural promptings and desire for the good that is part of our human natures (if you believe in human nature); every faith says as much, that these are indeed human good and human values.” He finds it “silly” to suppose that we would have rationally deduced specifically the types of values that most of us, secularists included, find most important: ”It’s simply the lesson of history that what that desire for the good produces is not a particular set of values that are immediately rationally recognizable.” His point is that we cannot and should not ignore that Christianity has yielded felicitous impacts on society that he finds exceedingly unlikely to have occurred in a truly secular environment devoid of Christian influence—benefits which he insists are likely to dwindle in the thoroughly secularized society that’s been progressively more stridently advocated in recent years.

Sanderson, of course, disagrees, which leads to some stimulating discussion. Highly recommended.

This last week’s episode of the Unbelievable? radio show was a rerun, but a good one to listen to (if you’re patient, that is). It was a conversation between apologist Jay Smith and atheist Stephen Pilcher concerning the so-called “Easter Challenge“: can you weave together all the NT accounts of that seminal event in Christian theology, the Resurrection?

The show goes as might be expected. Naturally, the apologist thinks he can meet the challenge. And so he tries, pulling together all the disparate accounts with different eyewitnesses, sequences of events, and other information and weaving them into a harmonized tapestry (compliments of Andy Bannister). The atheist isn’t buying it. The apologist hears all of the atheists’ objections, but he doesn’t buy them, either, because he has an explanation that can support his presupposition of the NT’s complete correspondence with actual history. On the whole it reminds me of another creative “enterprise” of affirming and concocting continuity.

Can Star Trek’s continuity over several series and movies be resolved? Despite certain hiccups (the Klingons’ foreheads, anyone?!), a devout Trekkie will tell you, “Sure, if you try hard enough.” The originators of new content were often simply not familiar enough with all the other existing content to produce a seamless narrative and probably nearly as often were aware but intentionally recast certain plot points or character details for the purposes of their current script. Convincing resolutions of continuity errors are debated among the fans, so it was welcome news when ENT finally explained why Klingons’ appearance changed between TOS and TMP. But unlike apologists, Star Trek fans realize that they’re only interested in the effort of clearing up continuity errors in order to preserve an ideal of continuity that was simply not shared by their sources (especially Gene Roddenberry). They were all functioning from within varying perspectives and emphases, and so their material differed.

Smith readily acknowledges that each NT author also had different perspectives and emphases: he clings to this, in fact, since that alone begins to account for the very different ways the Resurrection accounts are presented. But different emphases and perspectives are not enough to explain why the authors of the accounts selected testimony with so many surface incongruities with one another. As is commonly pointed out, for any given complex of confluent events such as those leading up to and following a car wreck, four eyewitnesses will most often have some conflicting testimony, and while those differences can often be explained (bad eyesight, fear of implicating themselves, etc.), they can’t always be believably explained away to be completely reconciled as independent, factual observations. Nor does anyone expect them to be, unless requirements of unfailing factual accuracy are applied ex post facto.

Ok, so the various authors were drawing on different sources, viewing them from different angles. But can we credibly account for the reasons the authors drew on those different sources, especially when they seemed to contradict one another? Yes, each author wrote for his own purpose and to his own audience, but if Luke’s explicitly stated purpose was to consult the various sources and compile them into an “orderly account”, this was his opportunity to do so for a subject of peak importance. Even if he did what he could with what he had available, it’s a shame indeed that the Holy Spirit didn’t inspire him to undertake what Andy Bannister would some two thousand years later!

Granted, if the events took place precisely as Jay Smith thinks they must have, the details could indeed be pulled apart and divvied up over the different NT authors to give us exactly what we have. And I’d like to go further and state that some of the discrepancies can indeed be plausibly accounted for or dismissed. For instance, Smith points out the weak objection that there are “men” at the tomb in Luke’s account vs. “angels” in Matthew’s: in the first century, angels were not pictured with wings, and so may not have been readily distinguishable from humans (cf. Heb 13.2). We can indeed get nit-picky to the point of nonsense if we’re consciously trying to pull apart a story (just ask a defense attorney), and many critics do. Still, how plausible is the intricate aggregation of all the rationalizations required to order to present a single unified account?

As with Star Trek, given the conviction that it all must hang together, continuity can be achieved. Square pegs can be crammed into round holes. This is why it’s hard to dissuade someone from believing in inerrancy: humans are well-suited for coming up with explanations to fit their expectations, even if it requires “explaining away”.

While admitting their own presuppositions, Jay Smith and host Justin Brierley both contended that Pilcher came to the table with certain theological presuppositions of his own. While no doubt true, I think this is mostly irrelevant for Pilcher’s view, but it is telling on the part of Smith and Brierley. As a Christian who believes that in one way or another the Resurrection occurred, my baseline theological presuppositions do not differ so very radically from the Christians on the show. What puts me closer to Pilcher’s views than Smith’s on this issue is only a difference in theological presupposition insofar as the Smith’s theology is based upon certain expectations of Scripture that I do not share.

As Justin Brierley admitted, “We come [to the Bible] with an attitude of faith, and when we see things that are contradictions we will happily say ‘yes’ to something which helps us to reconcile them.” First, notice that their faith is in the Bible, or at best, in God’s intention to give us a crystallized piece of truth (which happens to be the Bible). And so they approach the Bible with a certain expectation that is to be defended at all costs, and consequently they’ll gladly accept anything that appears to help their case, cumbersome and implausible as it may be on its own merit. On the other hand, I come to the NT accounts with an expectation that they are a collection of ancient texts consisting of differing people’s takes on a bewildering event that certainly would have easily outlasted the memory of the events surrounding it. If anything, for me this aftershock haze of refracted recollection and attempted reconstruction, which was then visualized by the theological emphases of the different Gospel narratives’ craftsmen, actually serves the purpose of focusing the lens on the event in question: the Resurrection.

If we wake up one morning to find Reuters, the AP, the New York Times, Yomiuri Shimbun, and the Times of India all reporting on the same astoundingly surprising story, will we insist upon a complete harmonization of their accounts before believing the story that induced them all to publish? Will we demand that every single story each paper publishes in their respective issues be inerrant as a condition for believing the basic event they’re recounting? In the end we may not believe their story, but it won’t be because of such unreasonable expectations as those.

No, the first century accounts of the NT do not come close to matching the reporting standards of a modern newspaper — understood, acknowledged, undisputed. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Outside of a presupposition of an inerrant Bible, which I don’t at all share, why should we expect such a thing from Paul, Luke, and the other Evangelists? They wrote decades later than the events they describe, only marginally intending to solidify an already fuzzy remembrance of peripheral details, and they presented the events in ways that applied particular lessons tailored to their respective audiences.

The Easter Challenge, like so many other evangelistic atheist methods, is most successful at putting Christians on the defensive about something they really have no need to be defensive about. We don’t need inerrant, reconcilable Easter accounts in order to place hope in the Resurrection. Losing one’s faith in the Bible’s ability to perfectly convey certain facts does not require a loss of faith in the facts underlying their imperfect conveyance. It requires considerably less blind credulity on my part to believe in the event testified to in the various conflicting and competing Easter morning accounts than to bank my entire faith upon the faultless concord and historicity of those accounts. Sure, we can’t prove the Resurrection, given that the event is only recorded in a Bible that is neither inerrant nor completely consistent internally, but it’s easier to believe in that event for which no contrary evidence exists than to believe that the Bible is inerrant and completely consistent internally, a contention for which contrary evidence abounds and which requires…well, creative explanations to support it.

Luckily, Paul did not say that we had to feign or psyche ourselves into absolute certainty that God raised Jesus from the dead, or that the NT contains an inerrant account of it (what rum luck it would have been for anyone alive before the Inerrant and Completely Trustworthy Account was available!): he said that believing it in our hearts was sufficient. And that I do, continuity errors notwithstanding.

When Justin Brierley, host of the UK radio show Unbelievable?, told us of an upcoming show that would pit the author of Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan, against atheist humanist Norman Bacrac on the subject of Copan’s book, I fired off an email in protest. I was afraid that, if one non-ANE scholar claiming to speak authoritatively on ANE matters was going to be challenged by another non-ANE scholar, the discussion would consist of Copan’s claims about how moral and wonderful the OT picture of God actually is and Norman Bacrac being put in the position of merely weighing in on whether he thought those claims were moral/ethical enough, when in fact there are hosts of possible guests who would hold Copan’s feet to the fire and challenge his claims about what the OT and ANE history actually say.

There are times when being right is a bummer. This was one of those times, and Bacrac was placed in the odd position of having to assume Copan had presented the ANE and biblical evidence correctly and critiquing the more marginal of Copan’s points.

Yet one interesting point Bacrac made early on is as follows:

The interesting thing is that what Paul Copan has done is…given a kind of commentary, but that is exactly the tradition which in fact is two thousand years old, commentaries on the Bible. You can even look at the later prophets in the Old Testament, how they . . . sometimes contradicted earlier statements; then Talmud, Mishna, the rabbis living at the same time as Jesus, they all made commentary on it, and [Copan has] done [his] commentary on it. And then in Islam, you’ve got the traditions there.

His point?

“So what it seems to me to mean is that you need human beings to comment on all these allegedly divine instructions and commands, and soften them down and reinterpret them.”

Don’t let them tell you otherwise: inerrantists make judgments about what Scripture ought to say no less than those of us who affirm its thoroughgoing human provenance. When they come across biblical texts that they decide cannot mean what they seem to say, they contrive clever apologetics to defend God from being charged as a moral monster. They are using their own moral sense to evaluate and find the plain readings of Scripture wanting each time they determine that, “If God did that, it would be wicked, so God must not have done it,” which they follow up by taking into account their presupposition of inerrancy, hence, “…so that text only appears to reinforce that wicked thing.” This is the best that can be done given the faulty assumption of inerrancy; even Bacrac allows, “This is a perfectly valid humanistic thing” to do.

How Copan and the likeminded would answer the question, “Is God a moral monster?” would be to say, “Yes, if He did the things you think He did — we just don’t think He did.” I agree with them, but differ especially when they say that the Bible doesn’t say He did those things: it does.

But things get worse, I’m afraid. Copan’s book is not merely content to reinterpret texts to redeem them from bad charges, but he argues against all hope as well as reason that some of those same passages are actually meant to affirm something quite good, including the idea that the Israelites’ displacement and subjugation of non-Israelite people groups was necessary to prepare people several hundred years in the future for Messiah.

Copan’s main position is that genocide of men, women, and children did not happen as such, but that the texts use this hyperbolic speech to describe a military/political takeover of the indigenous population — to save them, of course. Says he, “…God is primarily concerned about disabling the moral and religious structures of the Canaanites.” Then, without any apparent recognition of irony, Copan continues, “For example, in Deuteronomy chapter 7, it uses the language of ‘wiping them out,’ of ‘destroying them,’ and so forth, but then it says, ‘Do not intermarry with them’ in the next verse.” Was such hyperbolic, violent rhetoric itself not a problematic moral structure, an effective strategy for dehumanizing the people whose land they were being commanded to steal? This language was not only left unproblematized but was actually perpetuated for posterity in the text of inspired Scripture. Intermarriage was a big no-no, but the language of eradication, of not showing mercy even to infants…that was ok. That would have been too hard to revise. It was much easier for God to have Israel dispossess people at swordpoint and destroy their culture and religious institutions than to reform His own people’s ideas of what constituted acceptable rhetoric, rhetoric that cannot be denied to have belied the brutal ancient morality and value systems that formed it.

Translation: God used rhetoric worthy of Hilter to describe a course of action more convincingly justified as humane by George W. Bush’s speechwriters. Israel was the ancient world’s police force, it appears, speaking loudly but carrying a little stick.

But the unnoticed irony doesn’t stop there: in defending his belief that God’s wrathful judgment such as he believes was brought upon the Canaanites via the Israelites, Copan quotes Miroslav Volf (as he does in his book), who wrote of the seminal event that changed Volf’s mind about whether God could be angry and be a loving God. I sympathize with Volf, and recognize the power of what he is saying, but amazingly, I don’t think Paul Copan has realized how much this undermines the very operation he thinks God commissioned the Israelites to perform:

My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, a region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed, and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them?

If Volf is correct, God might not be too happy about the same sort of forcible upheaval perpetrated by the Israelites, or pleased with Copan and his kissing cousins, the divine command theorists, who do their best to find excuses for it.

On last weekend’s Unbelievable? broadcast/podcast, Alister McGrath and Stephen Law discussed some key points of McGrath’s book, Why Won’t God Go Away? One of Stephen Law’s primary arguments is that in a universe pervaded by a mixture of good and evil, we have no more evidence for an omnimalevolent god than we have for an omnibenevolent one. In response to McGrath’s contention that there are various Christian ways to explain evil while maintaining omnibenevolence, Law dismissively agreed how clever and sophisticated theological arguments have indeed become over 2,000 years of development. McGrath responded,

And certainly, Stephen is right, there are various notions of God down the ages, and by a process of, if you like, Darwinian attrition some of these have simply been left dead on the seashore of life. But the key point is that this vision of God remains enormously influential because people find it resonates with their experience of the world and [it is] their own way of engaging their experience.

Bear in mind, McGrath is adamant that there should be no talk of “proving” any of this in any direction. But in the absence of anything resembling proof, one of the main reasons I remain a Christian is because it indeed “resonates with [my] experience of the world”. I found the implication that the Christian understanding of a good and loving God has survived, adapted, and grown in popularity because it has been deemed especially “fit” for making sense of the world to be a fascinating idea. If someone replied that “fittest” doesn’t mean “most accurate”, that would play somewhat into Plantinga’s (problematic) evolutionary argument against naturalism, wouldn’t it?

McGrath’s was a modest claim, not a “proof”, nor even much of a “pointer”. But I found it intriguing nonetheless. What do you think?