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Senator Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, recently delivered the keynote address for Call to Renewal’s Building a Covenant for a New America conference. Keith Plummer (here) and Al Mohler (here) both have interesting comments on the adress. Al Mohler points out a contradiction in the senator’s speech. Consider the following two excerpts from his speech:

But what I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition…

…This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible.

Obama states that believers do not have to “leave religion at the door”, throughout history have been “motivated by faith”, and “have repeatedly used religious language” in the political arena. After stating that the secularists are wrong, he then reverses stance and states that believers must “explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all”. The problem is, as Al Mohler points out, that this requirement simply institutionalizes secularism.

Mohler concludes with these thoughts:

But this is also demanding the impossible. Sen. Obama seems to believe in the myth of a universal reason and rationality that will be compelling to all persons of all faiths, including those of no faith at all. Such principles do not exist in any specific form usable for the making of public policy on, for example, matters of life and death like abortion and human embryo research.

This is secularism with a smile — offered in the form of an invitation for believers to show up, but then only to be allowed to make arguments that are not based in their deepest beliefs.

The senator also made a very interesting and perceptive observation: “Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic society, we have no choice.”

That is a truly remarkable statement. He recognizes that those who believe in the authority and inerrancy of the Bible must, of necessity, make some arguments on the basis of that revelation. Nevertheless, this is just not to be allowed in our “pluralistic society.”

In my last post, I commented on how difficult it is to live with a naturalistic worldview. Many speak of Christianity as being irrational, yet a Christian worldview does not require an irrational, self-contradictory leap of faith. In The Moral Animal, Robert Wright describes the naturalistic take on morality and truth:

We believe the things - about morality, personal worth, even objective truth - that lead to behaviors that lead to behaviors that get our genes into the next generation.

Free will is an illusion…a useful fiction…an outdated worldview.

He goes on to claim that naturalism calls into question “the very meaning of the word truth.” All truth claims “are, by Darwinian lights, raw power struggles.” He, unflinchingly concludes that Darwinism leads to utter cynicism. Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, claims that our genes “created us, body and mind”. We are simply “survival machines”, sophisticated robots built by our genes to perpetuate themselves. Both Dawkins and Wright then take the “leap of faith” and encourage us to “correct the moral biases built into us by natural selection, and to “defy the selfish genes of our birth”.

What these examples illustrate is that no one can live with a naturalistic worldview. Nancy Pearcey, in Total Truth, contrasts the Christian worldview with a naturalistic one:

Because it begins with a personal God, Christianity provides a consistent, unified worldview that holds true both in the natural realm and in the moral, spiritual realm. The biblical doctrine of the image of God gives a solid basis for human dignity and moral freedom that is compatible with the compelling witness of human experience. Unlike the evolutionary psycologist, Christians can live consistently on the basis of their worldview because it fits the real world.

The problem with naturalism, the belief that nature is all there is, is that we cannot live with the beliefs it entails. One can mentally assent to a belief that there is nothing beyond the natural world, however, he finds it necessary to live as if his belief is not true.

Marvin Minsky once said that the human mind is nothing but a “three-pound computer made of meat”. However, in his book The Society of Mind, he states:

The physical world provides no room for freedom of will…That concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. We’re virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it’s false.

Being made in the image of God, human beings inescapably believe in things like human freedom, even though they “know” they are false.

Philosopher John Searle said:

We can’t give up our conviction of our own freedom, even though there is no ground for it.

At least, there is no ground for it in a naturalistic or materialistic worldview. The things that mean the most in life are nothing but useful fiction, from that viewpoint. Francis Schaeffer argues that modern thinkers often take a “leap of faith” into the realm of values, dignity, meaning, and significance. Intellectually they embrace naturalism. However, because that philosophy does not fit their real-life experience, they are forced to affirm a contradictory set of ideas like moral freedom and human dignity, even though these things have no basis in within their own intellecutal framework.

A Christian worldview, on the other hand, enables one to have a coherent philosophy of life, in which he does not have to make a blind “leap” into meaning when he knows there is none.

Some would reject objective truth, at least that we can know it, on the grounds that everyone is biased to some degree. Is this true? Are we unable to know certain objective truths because of our biases? To answer this, it is helpful to differentiate two types of objectivity - rational objectivity vs. psychological objectivity.

Psychological objectivity is the absence of bias. One is not committed to a particular stance on a topic. Is it possible to be psychological objective? I believe one can be psychological objective, however, this is not necessarily a virtue. If one has no interest in a particular subject or has not thought deeply about the subject at hand he might truely be neutral on that subject. However, if one begins to think about the issue, one most likely will develop thoughtful, intelligent convictions on the topic. If one has good reasons to feel that, for example, rape is wrong, then he shouldn’t remain psychological objectivity. In fact, most people are not psychologically objective about the vast majority of things they believe. The crucial point to understand is that a lack of psychological objectivity does not matter, nor does it prevent one from arguing for one’s convictions. Why? Because a lack of psychological objectivity does not imply a lack of rational objectivity.

Rational objectivity entails the capability of discerning the difference between good and bad reasons for a belief, and holding a belief for good reasons. One’s bias does not eliminate her ability to assess the reasons for something. If rational objectivity is made impossible by bias, then the whole enterprise of teaching is wasted. Why listen to a biased representation of the facts? Why listen to someone speak against something to which they are obviously biased against?

A Christian can lack psychological objectivity regarding God’s existence, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the existence of objective morality, and still present good arguments for those beliefs. One can be rationally objective, even while being psycholigically biased. This makes for civil debate, rational dialogue, and the development of thoughtful convictions. Often, a Christian is shut out of the public debate over an issue because, obviously, he is biased by his religious convictions. Now, we see that this objection holds no water. One’s motives or background does not affect the validity or soundness of his arguments. When someone asserts that we are biased and cannot know the truth, gently point out the difference in psychological vs. rational objectivity, and refocus the discussion on the merits of the argument.

Hark, how the birds do sing,
and woods do ring.
All creatures have their joy: and man hath his.
Yet if we rightly measure,
Man’s joy and pleasure
Rather hereafter, than in present, is.

To this life things of sense
Make their pretense:
In th’other Angels have a right by birth:
Man ties them both alone,
And makes them one,
With th’one hand touching heav’n, with th’other earth.

In soul he mounts and flies,
In flesh he dies.
He wears a stuff whose thread is coarse and round,
But trimm’d with curious lace
And should take place
After the trimming, not the stuff and ground.

Not that he may not here
Taste of the cheer,
But as birds drink, and straight lift up their head,
So must he sip and think
Of better drink
He may attain to, after he is dead.

But as his joys are double,
So is his trouble.
He hath two winters, other things but one:
Both frosts and thoughts do nip,
And bite his lip;
And he of all things fears two deaths alone.

Yet ev’n the greatest griefs
May be reliefs,
Could he but take them right, and in their ways.
Happy is he, whose heart
Hath found the art
To turn his double pains to double praise.

I think Mark Roberts may have the most consistently interesting, understandable, and well thought-out blogs that I’ve come across. You may notice that I reference his posts fairly frequently. He is a Presbyterian pastor who has been commenting on the recent controversy within the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. over the inclusion of gay bishops. In today’s post, he references an old post from October 5, 2004 in which he discussed Christian inclusiveness and homosexuals in general.

We often hear how Jesus preached a gospel of acceptance, love, and inclusiveness. We are urged to stop being so judgmental and hateful and accept homosexuals as they are. His post is very helpful in clarifying the true Christian perspective in these areas. I quote his concluding points:

1. Whenever the Bible speaks positively about human sexuality, as it often does, this is always in the context of male-female sexuality. Clearly, God created sex as something to be shared between a man and a woman, and in this context it can be a very good thing.

2. Whenever the Bible speaks directly about same-sex practice of any kind, it always shows such practice to be wrong. One cannot point to a clearly “pro-homosexual” biblical text without reading between the lines so much that you can’t even make out what the original lines actually said.

3. There is no compelling argument from Scripture for the rightness of homosexual activity. At best there is a very spurious argument from silence, an argument which, by the way could also be used to defend sex between an adult and a child, or between a brother and a sister, etc. (Jesus explicitly didn’t condemn sex in these contexts either, as far as we can tell from the gospels.)

4. Homosexual activity is sinful, no matter what the context. Yes, even in a loving and committed relationship between people of the same sex, sexual activity is morally wrong. This fact doesn’t deny other good aspects of the relationship. It simply means that two people of the same sex should not engage in sexual intimacy together.

5. Christians are called to love all people, including those who engage in homosexual behavior. The behavior of many Christians towards homosexuals (unhelpfully called homophobia by gay advocates) often falls far short of the biblical ideal, or flatly contradicts it. This is truly tragic and just as sinful as homosexual behavior.

6. Yet just because many Christians have been unloving towards gay and lesbian persons, this does not mean that we should now love them by affirming their sexual behavior. From a biblical point of view, love never means saying that sin is okay. When a Christian brother or sister engages in sexual immorality of any kind – gay or straight – that person needs to hear God’s call to sexual holiness, as well as God’s offer of forgiveness and restoration. Love means telling this person the truth, even if it is difficult to say and to hear.

In light of all the conversation sparked by my father’s recent posts on postmodernism, I thought I’d step in and give some of my thoughts and a partial defense of his words and motives. Kevin Winters, in his always stimulating and appreciated comments, has given many things to think about with regard to the traditional “common-sense” metaphysic that most analytic philosophers and American evangelicals take for granted. I myself would defend the traditional view of metaphysics, but I don’t have space or time to do that here (it will come up if I can ever get around to finishing reading the metaphysics book I started). Instead, I want to say something about his fears that my father (and most other evangelical theologians/apologists) is either misrepresenting what ‘postmoderns’ believe or making such broad generalizations that they aren’t really helpful.

I think I may have mentioned this before, but the primary problem I think Kevin (and perhaps others) is having is that he is still interpreting our usage of ‘postmodern’ as describing the ideas of a select number of philosophers including Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger. Instead, what we are describing is a commonly held and pervasive, though by now pre-philosophical, view of knowledge and truth that is at least in part related to the ideas of some philosophers usually regarded as ‘postmodern,’ but also including the likes of Kant and Nietzche.

Flipping through James Sire’s The Universe Next Door, I came across his own helpful discussion on postmodernism. Here are some of the things he says:

The term ‘postmodernism’ is usually thought to have arisen first in reference to architecture…But when French sociologist Jean-Francois Lyotard used the term ‘postmodern’ to signal a shift in cultural legitimation, the term became a key word in cultural analysis…Lyotard defined ‘postmodern’ as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” No longer is there a single story, a metanarrative (in our terms a worldview), the holds Western culture together…All stories are equally valid.

I cannot catalog postmodernism as I have earlier worldviews. Even more than existentialism, postmodernism is both more than and less than a worldview. In major part this is due to the origin of the term within the discipline of sociology rather than philosophy. (italics added by me)

In other words, ‘postmodernism’ as we use it is mainly a description of the beliefs of a segment of society which has been growing (emerging) since the ’50s, which, though philosophical in nature, are not directly based off of the works of any prominent philosophers.

In my own experience talking with people, the sort of postmodernism described in my father’s posts is a reality and something that must be reckoned with by those who wish to share the Christian message, and the generalizations he is making, though broad, are helpful. Now, I can understand Kevin’s chagrin over the fact that the name of the philosophical school he associates himself with has been hijacked, so to speak, to describe a thought system that he does not necesarrily want to associate himself with. However, I don’t see what can be done about it. I disagree with him that the term is now meaningless. I just think that it has changed meanings, perhaps for the worst, in public dialogue. If it makes anybody feel better, I’m still pretty upset that when I get tired of telling people I’m happy and want to use another word, ‘gay’ is no longer an option. But I don’t think we’ll ever get that one back either.

Continuing a discussion of what postmodernism entails, it rejects the correspondence theory of truth, the notion that the truth of a proposition is a function of its correspondence with the “external” world, i.e., reality. One might also call this the classical theory of truth, since it was held by virtually everyone until the nineteenth century. As such, it is also the orthodox Christian view of truth. Truth, if it exists at all for the postmodernist, is relative to a linguistic community that shares the same narrative. Dichotomous thinking is also rejected. By this we mean the division of phenomonema into two groups, e.g., good/bad, true/false, real/unreal, beautiful/ugly. Assertions that use these terms are held to be relative to diverse groups of people. To claim that one is better than the other is meaningless outside of a group with a shared language, narrative, and culture because all such divisions are social constructions.

Also, rejected is the idea of universal, transcultural standards for determining whether a belief is true or false. There is no predefined rationality. The laws of logic, for example, or principles of inductive inference, are not universally valid. Rationality is held to be subjective in the sense that no one approaches life in a totally objective way without bias. Because there is no neutral standpoint from which to view the world, observations and beliefs are constructions that relect one’s own worldview. Knowledge itself is a construction of one’s social and linguistic structures, not a justified, truthful representation of reality.

Postmodernism rejects foundationalism as theory of epistemic justification. Briefly, foundationalism asserts that some beliefs are basic and do not need justification by other beliefs. All knowledge rests on the foundation of these properly basic beliefs. One example of properly basic beliefs might be the aforementioned laws of logic. One can simply “see” that if A is taller than B, and B is taller than C, then A is taller than C.

I began a series on postmodernism on May 2, and haven’t been able to return to it until now. It might be helpful to read that post, before reading this one. I will spend the first few blogs discussing what postmodernism is, then will offer some critique of its positions.

Traditional Christianity has held to a philosophical position called metaphysical realism. This position holds that there is a reality which is indepedent of any theories or languages we might use. There exists “out there” one external reality which is the way the world really is. In this world, the basic laws of logic apply, i.e., identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle.

Postmodernism on the other hand holds that reality is a social construction. Reality is created by language. What is real or true for one linguistic group is not necessarily real for another. Reality may be that God exists for Christians but doesn’t for athiests. Futhermore, the laws of logic themselves may be felt to be social constructions and are in no way universally valid laws of reality itself.

There are some postmodernists (e.g., neo-Kantian) who might grant that there is some external reality which exists, however, they also feel we have no way of accessing that reality. This being the case, reality is a useless notion and can be ignored.

Harry Ironside used to tell about a young Russian soldier. Because his father was a friend of Czar Nicholas I, the young man had been made paymaster in one of the barracks.

The young man meant well, but his character was not up to his responsibility. He took to gambling and eventually gambled away a great deal of the government’s money as well as all of his own.

In due course the young man received notice that a representative of the czar was coming to check accounts, and he knew he was in trouble.

That evening he got out the books and totaled up the funds he owed. Then he went to the safe and got out his own pitifully small amount of money. As he sat and looked at the two he was overwhelmed at the astronomical debt versus his own small change. He was ruined! He knew he would be disgraced.

At last the young soldier determined to take his life. He pulled out his revolver, placed it on the table before him, and wrote a summation of his misdeeds. At the bottom of the ledger where he had totaled up his illegal borrowings, he wrote: “A great debt! Who can pay?” He decided that at the stroke of midnight he would die.

As the evening wore on the young soldier grew drowsy and eventually fell asleep. That night Czar Nicholas I, as was sometimes his custom, made the rounds of the barracks. Seeing a light, he stopped, looked in, and saw the young man asleep. He recognized him immediately and, looking over his shoulder, saw the ledger and realized all that had taken place.

He was about to awaken him and put him under arrest when his eye fastened on the young man’s message: “A great debt! Who can pay?”

Suddenly, with a surge of magnanimity, he reached over, wrote one word at the bottom of the ledger, and slipped out.

When the young man awoke, he glanced at the clock and saw that it was long after midnight. He reached for his revolver to shoot himself. But his eye fell upon the ledger and he saw something that he had not seen before. There beneath his writing: “A great debt! Who can pay?” was written, “Nicholas.”

He was dumbfounded. It was the Czar’s signature. He said to himself, “The czar must have come by when I was asleep. He has seen the book. He knows all. Still he is willing to forgive me.”

The young soldier then rested on the word of the czar, and the next morning a messenger came from the palace with exactly the amount needed to meet the deficit. Only the czar could pay, and the czar did pay.

We compare [God’s righteousness] with our own tawdry performance, and we ask the question: “A great debt to God! Who can pay?” But then the Lord Jesus Christ steps forward and signs His name to our ledger: “Jesus Christ.” Only Jesus can pay, and He did.

- From STR