Another month is upon us. Though March is officially the first month of Spring, there's an argument to be made (one my allergies seem to agree with this past few years) that it really starts in February here in Seattle. The rain starts to let up, the sun starts to shine, the sunset starts happening at an hour approaching reasonable, but even on the nicest day you can still feel winter's grip. Some years it's hard to even imagine that spring might be just around the corner.
March, though. Sometimes in March old man winter is still fighting to survive, but you'd have a hard time finding someone who would say that it's winter--not really, anyway. It's a month of chaos and contradictions, where a sky that's cold and dark and grey can be suddenly illuminated by the perfect gold of an unexpected sunset. It's a hard month to really get excited about, but it has its moments. It's the moment when people start coming out of their shells for the winter.
This month's theme is "returning." This time I had a story I wanted to tell and I thought of a theme to fit it, but it works, right? The return of spring, the return of life, the return of . . . I don't know, St. Patrick's Day?
14 comments:
Hey Rob,
Remember the ol' XKCD Sucks days? I used to stay posted on that in my college days. I argued about the theological problem of evil with you. Anyway, have a good day.
ah, interesting times. i sure hope our arguments w/r/t theodicy were at least interesting
It was probably interesting on your end. On my end I was just Googling the first things I could find on the subject to defend my faith. So I don't think I offered much, though I think I could give better answers now but now in a small comment.
Whatever happened to Carl? I didn't follow the blog in its last years.
Also, looking back at that you were a good writer on there. Good sense of comedic timing. I'm glad that passed off that illustrious position to you. I wish there were more opportunities for writers. Other artistic endeavors are so much easier to share. Everyone will be interested if you produce a great painting or if you can play a great piece of music but people are usually not too willing to read something you wrote. It's too bad. I would probably work more on writing if I felt I could have an audience especially since authors have had such an impact on my life.
Anyway, hope you are enjoying whatever you are doing in life now.
Also, correction for my above comment: *"NOT in a small comment." is what I meant to say.
I do occasionally miss the days of just arguing about whatever random thing was on the commenters' minds in the comment section. It was a weird time. Overall I feel like the whole xkcd-sucks thing was probably too mean-spirited, even if there wasn't really a lot of sincerity behind it. I had fun with it and some of the things I wrote for it still amuse me, but . . . man, what an odd thing to be a part of. You know?
It's always been hard to get traction for writing, especially in the year of our lord 2020 when everything happens through social media. There was a time that even this little blog had a small handful of dedicated readers and commenters, but those days are gone, partly because I stopped posting regularly for a while, partly because blogs and RSS feeds are relics of a bygone age.
But yeah, it's a shame. You can do so much with writing, have so much fun playing around with words and cadence and structure, but people just don't have the interest. It is very rewarding to finish something though, even if there isn't much of an audience, so I recommend giving it a shot. It's great being able to look at something and say "I made this!"
Carl has disappeared, as far as I can tell. Carl Wheeler was a name he created specifically for the blog and when the blog stopped being relevant (along with whatever the comics criticism blog that followed was; webcomics.me or something?) he just stopped checking the accounts associated with it. His fate will forever remain a mystery.
Yeah XKCD Sucks was an odd time. For me, I was probably a lot younger than most of the other people on there. Or at least, it felt like that. I remember it was kind of an introduction to talking to and disagreeing with people on the internet. I eventually left for a few reasons. First of all, I used my REAL NAME on much of the website which is obviously not smart. However, I also got into enough disagreements and felt put down by others, especially you actually. That isn't a criticism and you shouldn't feel bad. I was just new to that kind of thing and didn't get how to interact with others and what constitutes fa fair criticism. Basically, I remember in issues of faith as a young Christian someone would bring up something and I would Google the first thing that showed up. you know, I treated it like a battle instead of like a genuine conversation. I would give arguments that I didn't even find compelling but it was like, "Oh I have to find some sort of weapon to defend my beliefs here so this is what I found after 5 seconds of research."
I remember in particular I was going on some rant and you said "You came in here like "NUH UH, there is plenty of reasons to believe!" and then proceeded to criticize me in a fair way that I can't remember the details of, but I am pretty sure it was all fair. I was offended at the time, mostly because I saw things in a light of "you are for us or against us." I remember that I eventually swore to never to return to that website because I got in all sorts of tar baby fights and also because I generally felt offended.
However, the kind of criticism I got was all justified. I was about rules and battle lines instead of real conversation and talking to other people as people. Other people were obstacles at the time to me. Now this criticism I welcome of Christians. the kind of disingenuous thinking that plagues a lot of the church is something that I want to see driven out now. That is why I listened to and really liked Rhett's "Spiritual Deconstruction" episode on the Rhett and Link "Earbiscuits" podcast. It has caused a bit of a stir in Christian communities and in a weird way I find myself more on the side of Rhett than on the side of the knee jerk Christian response of, "No, he is just wrong, here are some reasons why."
I guess the more I think about it, going back to how I was acting during those days, I am more on the side of people like you than the person I used to be. Considering how I used to act and the way that mainstream Christianity has raised me to act, I feel like there is something I have moved away from. If I saw a conversation like the one between you and I back in that day now I would tell the old me something like: "You aren't giving any genuine answers. You see only a battleground and not people. you don't want to genuinely think about these issues. You are less of a person and more of a walking container of ideas you are taught that you are programmed to defend." Though the thing is, I don't think old me would have listened.
I am reading a George MacDonald book right now and he wrote in it. "My intellect follows my curiosity like a dog leading on a leash." I feel like I contacted you out of an impulse I didn't quite understand but I understand now. I had something to resolve: a stage of my life where I harbored feelings of petty offense that needed to be resolved. I needed to think about the many many encounters I had like the ones on XKCD Sucks and to come out on the other side. I needed to take seriously those who criticized me and my beliefs and I needed synthesize into something new.
Not that anybody asked.
The battleground mentality is a very common one, I think especially in young Christians. I am not religious anymore but when I was growing up, I went to a religious school and youth group and church and all of that. I remember very clearly learning New Arguments and being eager to try them out on one of my friends at the time, someone with whom I did a lot of recreational debating (yeah, I've always been like that). So much of the Christian culture was about going out there and winning debates and proving all those evil atheists wrong. My deconversion happened when we had a proper theology class rather than the usual Bible class, and every time I learned something new and exciting I'd try out the argument, and every time I tried I would lose. This, combined with the theological defenses our textbook provided for the problem of evil just being completely inadequate to my mind, eventually led me to conclude that my belief was indefensible.
I'm not nearly as in touch with Christian communities as I once was, for various reasons, but the ones I still talk to seem to be trying to build a version of their faith that is . . . not the old reactionary ideology, I guess. Intellectually curious, open to the possibility of change, welcoming and willing to listen rather than prone to immediately drawing the battle lines when confronted with heterodox ideas. It's nice to see.
Anyway, I always enjoy hearing from people I've encountered in the past, so I really do appreciate you checking in. If I was in some small way relevant to your spiritual journey I'm glad, though I do wish I were more polite about it.
No need to have been more polite about it. I perceived it as a problem until I realized the problem was with me. On a tangent, it is interested how often in life what you need to do is to adopt what your opponent has to say to you. Even your own friends (even your older friends or parents) will often go "Oh that's terrible they said that to you." when really what you need to do is take what that person seriously and you need to ignore any rudeness and agree with them.
I am still a Christian, though I have very recently come out of a very long period of serious doubt, due to a lot of things, but one of the main reasons is Nietzsche. It has ended recently enough for me to not be truly sure it has ended but I feel like I have been fully brought home after reading George MacDonald's "The Curate's Awakening." The prerequisite for that book was "The Brother's Karamazov" for me and then to cap it all off what I had been learning from The Curate's Awakening brought me back perfectly to John 6:25-40. I won't get into the very large story of how that all fits together but I will summarize it by saying you don't meet God by way of your own intellect. I think most people who went through want you went through with a strong focus on apologetics know what I mean. Does any of that feel like a spiritually meaningful time?
For me, I feel like my main issue with the church is not being too hardline or not being intellectually curious enough. I actually want the church to be MORE rigid in general in terms of theology. However, where we probably agree is that I want the church to be less involved in evangelism. The more we focus on growing, the less we focus on WHAT we are growing. Also, the more we focus on people outside the church the more we have all the issue I stated previously.
On the subject of the problem of evil, I have had the same question. For me, the Brothers Karamazov was the greatest book to read on that. It is a great book because Dostoevsky really REALLY takes you through the reasons to doubt God and the problem of evil. He ironmans the argument instead of straw-manning it. It certainly is the opposite of what I have stated earlier. The other book I think is really good on this, which you probably don't like at all is Job. I found it completely unsatisfying when I was younger. However, now I feel like it is the perfect answer. That is another long explanation though.
Anyway, I do suppose that a part of me still hopes that the Lord can lead you back to him, as I feel he has done for me. However, in the mean-time we can agree on the spiritual emptiness of church in general. Something in me even as a Christian, feels like the kind of step someone like Rhett made in leaving his faith is a step up. However, I feel like there is something even better in returning to the faith with a knowledge of the emptiness of the majority of the church.
People do often focus more on the tone rather than the content of the message these days, often to their detriment, but I'd still rather deliver a harsh message kindly if I can. (Which is different from being nice; niceness is interested exclusively in tone and would gladly sacrifice the message to maintain it.)
My mind has always been primed to find the answer "you can't get there by intellect" unsatisfying. Actually, that was one of the things that most frustrated me at the time. I remember very clearly that page 18 of the textbook said something like "Theology does not merely invoke mystery or incomprehensibility" and I underlined it because I hated that so much of apologetics ultimately came down to one of those things. Then we hit the chapter on the problem of evil and it ultimately just invoked mystery/incomprehensibility, and that was the assassination-of-Archduke-Ferdinand moment for me. (Most of my background in philosophy of religion of course came later.)
For some reason, instead of seeking out the company of other atheists online, I instead found a small internet forum that was populated by a lot of evanglicals and spent a lot of time arguing with them there.
There is certainly an argument to be made that the church has become more interested in perpetuating the culture of evangelicalism than the tenets of Christianity (as Mr Nietzsche once said, "There is one Christian, and he died on the cross"). The people I'm seeing aren't really trying to move away from theology but are actually trying to study it and learn from it rather than simply inheriting it as tradition; it's tradition that gets you to the place that people complain that a pastor has gotten too political when he recites the sermon on the mount in church on Sunday.
Job is one of those fascinating cases where some people can see it as God allowing a man who has done him no wrong to be tortured in order to settle a bet and others see it as an example of how God is unfathomable to mortal minds. It is the perfect example of how theodicy always ultimately ends up, I suppose: at some point, when you have attempted the various intellectual defenses and found that they are unsatisfying, you must either accept the premise the problem of evil cannot be resolved, or you must decide that the human mind is unable to comprehend the solution. I can't fault people for taking the latter reading, but it is very much alien to my being.
The teacher I had for that year when we had theology (who also had us read The Brothers Karamazov, which I very much enjoyed) was a firm believer that faith which did not wrestle with doubt was largely meaningless. (He was also a rare soul who genuinely cared for his students and wanted them to be well. I still wonder how he even got a job at that propaganda mill.) I think he was right, on perhaps a broader level than he anticipated. Doubt helps us understand who we are, helps us understand others. An unexamined life, to drag out the old Socrates line, is not worth living, and you can see it sometimes, an emptiness, an incompleteness, when you encounter people who have never once known a moment of doubt or uncertainty.
I can see why the "incomprehensibility argument" can seem disingenuous (I looked up a synonym for that word and couldn't find one so sorry guess you are going to hear that word over and over). However, I feel like it has to be true that if there is a God, there are things that are beyond us that we don't understand. As an analogy there are plenty of things that you cannot explain to a child because they wouldn't understand. It seems like God should be to us as we are to children. There are things that work together in ways that we can't understand. I think we have some hints of an answer though. For the issue of evil and suffering, we see the most meaningful moment in issues of suffering. Compassion, bravery, resilience, and over-coming struggle all need suffering to exist. Any good music has tension and resolve because there is a component to us as humans that need struggle and resolve in order to find something meaningful. However, this doesn't mean we understand entirely why all particular evil things happen.
when I was struggling with my faith in a strange way the words of Job's wife were my ultimate security. "curse God and die." You can, like Ivan from Brothers Karamazov, reject God on the basis of his world, but what lies beyond that world other than resentment of how the world is?" And who is that resentment going to even be directed against if not God? For those who leave God but chose to live a life of gratitude I feel like they have lost the expository element of Christianity while keeping something the aestetic of gratitude. Though living a contradiction where you act as though God exists is better than truly embracing nihilism. At any rate, I feel like Job's attitude "Naked I came from my mother's womb, naked I shall return, Still blessed be the name of the Lord." IS the ultimate fundamental attitude of good in a world where there will always be suffering and there will always be evil. Likewise, you have the same theme with "take up your cross and follow me." In other words, accept your suffering for that is what life is fundamentally. I think I have thought on this a lot because I have constantly thought about "what if" questions in faith which tends to lead me to ask "What if this bad thing happens?" For instance, people say "We have faith that God will heal our son." Well if that is the bedrock of your faith will you be genuine and leave the faith if he is not healed? For me, I know I don't put my faith in the removal of suffering, however great.
I do think that a faith with doubt is the greater life when compared to naivety. As I said, I appreciate Rhett more than I appreciate most Christians. It is hard for me to believe, however, that the fullness of our humanity is to be found in an agnostic wandering. It seems we were meant to resolve in due time these questions into something more meaningful.
Oh believe me, I've heard all the incomprehensibility arguments. Ultimately you end up with similar problems as you get from theodicy: God either gave us intellect and deliberately made it impossible for those intellects to grasp some essential truths, or God is insufficiently omnipotent to make it possible for us to understand. It's a common invocation for the problem of evil, as well. If you accept the premise it's a convenient patch for any problem you have in your theology, but it also effectively means accepting the premise that the search for knowledge w/r/t the divine is doomed to be fruitless. Since, you know. You think you've come to understand something but there's always the off chance that it's all ineffable and it's actually something completely different, and by definition there's no way to actually tell the difference.
Because none of the problems that I have with apologetics are problems where I feel that there just isn't a conclusion; the invocation of incomprehensibility seems to only come when the invoker wishes to say "Your argument is sound and I can't dispute the premises, but have you considered that you might be wrong anyway?" It is, of course, entirely possible, but there just isn't a compelling reason to start trying on that as an option when you don't have a vested interest in defending the divine.
Doubt is never the end itself, but it is a means to get to the point that you understand how to ask questions, how to start to see the filters that you apply to the world, maybe even how to see things from other perspectives. It's a means to ensure you're not just shuffling through life doing what's expected and never really living.
“God either gave us intellect and deliberately made it impossible for those intellects to grasp some essential truths, or God is insufficiently omnipotent to make it possible for us to understand. . . it also effectively means accepting the premise that the search for knowledge w/r/t the divine is doomed to be fruitless.“
I feel like there is no such dichotomy. There is a third option, and I feel a fourth and fifth if you thought about it. At any rate, one option is that we are capable of understanding, but not so that we ever can know everything. I feel that what we are apportioned to know is only what is in our grasp. I feel that your disenchantment is causing you to see things in what I am saying that aren’t there. Or perhaps you are seeing “inevitable” conclusions that are not actually inevitable.
It seems odd that, as far as I can tell, you seem to have the idea that unless we know all, we know nothing. So if we know that God has a sovereign plan for the world but we don’t know how our own lives or how evil fits into that plan. It seems that something in you bridles against that. Though we have that same standard everywhere. In science we discover new things while others questions remain unknown. In your personal life surely in jobs and relationships and any new thing you go along discovering what you like and what you ought to do. You never know everything about your own life. Faith is a component of life and all the same rules apply.
However, I feel that you have such a past with people dismissing argument with an “incomprehensibility argument” that you see that in what I am saying. However, I don’t feel that is what I am saying. At least, it is not what I am trying to communicate.
"Apportioned to know only what is in our grasp" is synonymous with "there are things which are deliberately designed to be unknowable." (I suppose it could be unintentionally designed that way, if you're willing to go down the road of "God is just a sloppy creator," but that one isn't usually very popular among theists of any description.) I'm not sure what your other options are, so I'll try to map it out here.
Our given premises: (1) there are important truths which are unknowable to the human intellect (henceforth, "the ineffable"); (2) God created all aspects of the human intellect. It follows, then, that (3) God created the human intellect in such a way that the ineffable is unknown to it. From this we can conclude that (4)(a) God was capable of creating the human intellect in such a way that it can grasp the ineffable, and chose not to; or (b) God is incapable of creating the human intellect in such a way that it can grasp the ineffable. I think it is safe to say that if someone is capable of doing something and does not, they deliberately chose not to do it. I suppose you can quibble about whether God was aware of this particular aspect of the human intellect if you want; I'm not sure where "God is unaware of his capabilities" stands on the scale but I suppose you can add "ineffability is an unintentional consequence of God's design that he has subsequently not modified when it was brought to his attention" as a third option if you wanted.
You are correct that I don't see any conclusions that if you allow the ineffable into your theology that you must ultimately conclude that any knowledge you claim to have gleaned through that theology is ultimately just guessing. Or perhaps more precisely, when any of the basic premises that your theology is built on are unknowable, then nothing can logically follow from any of your premises unless you deliberately ignore the unknowable.
I'll attempt to explain starting from the basics, at least partly because it's hard to articulate. Any argument which attempts to be based in logic in some way accepts certain facts as given, which we call premises. (In more complex situations, people may not actually agree on the premises; it helps to state them clearly, but that does lead to situations where people just attack each others' premises instead of trying to work out whether their conclusions logically follow from them. This is, I think, why so much internet arguing is so tedious rather than constructive. But I digress.)
(1 of 2)
(2 of 2) Most theological arguments attempt to be logical. The problem of evil, for instance, centers largely around three core premises, and people attempting to suggest that there either is or is not a logical inconsistency between them. When you attempt to resolve the problem of evil by saying "there are certain ineffable truths that we cannot know," you are ultimately adding that to your list of premises, which means that any conclusion you come by has to have the rider "...unless this is one of those truths that we cannot know." We can't know if that unknowable truth makes all of our reasoning completely meaningless, or invalidates our premises. We can't even know if it actually resolves the inconsistency.
Ultimately the problem is the same problem we all have epistemologically: what is true? How can we know what we know? At the most extreme end of skepticism are those who say that all knowledge is impossible: our senses and our memories can't be trusted; you could be dreaming or hallucinating or living in a computer simulation, and there's no way to prove it, or to prove that the universe wasn't created last Thursday with all the evidence and appearance of a universe that is much, much older.
Most skeptics, of course, dial that down a few notches, because for most of our lives we have external means of verifying the truth apart from pure reason. We can check each of the unreliable tools we have against each other; we can use tools like the scientific method to better help us approach the truth. (As an aside, it is notable that the scientific method does not prove; it disproves.)
With the divine, we do not have access to any of these tools. (There are those who claim to experience the divine but even among religious circles they aren't particularly highly regarded as trustworthy sources, in my experience. Perhaps I'm wrong, though.) We have two tools: logic, and scripture. Scripture, while interesting as a historical text (albeit not as reliable as one as the apologists would have you believe), are not particularly useful for gleaning truth about the divine, since using them relies on the assumption that scripture is divinely inspired, and ideally that it is infallible.
Which leaves us with logic. Logic is a limited tool at the best of times, and in theology especially its relationship with the truth is especially fragile. Introducing the idea of incomprehensibility is effectively acknowledging that logic will simply not work here, and if you are selectively saying "we can know X but not Y" it feels disingenuous at best. (How do you know, for instance, that the unknown thing which makes Y unknowable doesn't also make your conclusion about X faulty?)
Apologies if this is less coherent than usual; I believe I've caught the virus du jour and am feeling a bit feverish (it so far isn't too bad), and it's 4 am, and when I posted this I hit the character limit and in my attempts to paste it accidentally lost the second half. One day I will learn not to rely on websites without save functions to save text that I write, but it is not this day.
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