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The key theme of Nancy Pearcey’s most recent book Total Truth (get it now and read it if you haven’t yet) is the harmful division in contemporary society between ‘facts’ and ‘values,’ where ‘facts’ are generally the things that science can tell us and which we can trust as true and ‘values’ are those things such as moral statements and religious beliefs which are not true in any objective way. Another way she characterizes the split is as a public/private dichotomoy where the only things we can even discuss objectively and publicly are empirical matters and where it is fine for a person to hold religious or moral beliefs so long as she does not make them part of her public life and claim they are true for anyone besides herself. One of the most interesting chapters of the book for me contains an analysis of the way that the founding of America impacted the religious beliefs of Christians in the country. In it, Pearcey discusses the way that Christians, especially pastors, took Enlightenment ideals and the liberal political philosophy on which this country was founded and incorporated them into their teachings about Christianity and religious liberty. Just as political tyranny was overthrown, so must be ecclesiastical tyranny - no one should trust what a priest or preacher or theologian says just because he has studied his whole life or has the backing of tradition; instead, each person must decide what to believe based on their own thoughts and feelings on the matter.

This is an obviously oversimplified statement of what happened, but we can see how these ideas led to a distrust of any objective religious claims and led to the formation of innumberable denominations and an atomistic and individualistic view of the church and religious truth. At any rate, the main point of this blog is just to point out something interesting I came across while doing reading for my philosophy majors’ seminar on Marxism. Namely, that Marx, probably since he was always critical of individualism of any type, already noticed and pointed out this trend that has become so characteristic of our times in his earliest writings, even before the American civil war.

In his review essay of his teacher Bruno Bauer’s The Jewish Problem, he says:

Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the field of public law and making it a private right…religion has become the spirit of civil society, the sphere of egoism, the bellum omnium contra omnes [war of all against all]. Its essence is no longer in community but in difference. It has become the expression of separation of man from his common essence, from himself and from other men…For example, the infinite splintering of religion in North America already gives it the exterior form of a purely individual affair. It is shoved away into the crowd of private interests and exiled from the common essence as such. The separation of man into a public and a private man…is not a stage but the completion of political emancipation, which thus does not abolish or even try to abolish the actual religiosity of man.

(Karl Marx: Collected Writings, ed. David McLellan, p.54 (emphasis added)).

Dr. Mark Roberts, continuing his series on the reliability of the gospels has a couple good posts on the worries caused by the variations in the wordings of parallel quotes by Jesus in the synoptic gospels. In the first he discusses the danger of bringing an anachronistic view of reliability to these passages and briefly talks about the important differentiation between ipsissima vox and ipsissima verba. In the second, he gives an apologetic for doing biblical studies while at the same time illustrating the difference just mentioned and showing the implications for gospel reliability. A recommended read.

In light of coming across a review recently posted on Albert Mohler’s blog of Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, I thought I’d take a chance to post an audio file of Dennett’s lecture he gave as a philosophy colloquium here at FSU last semester. It is a large file and of pretty poor quality. For some reason, every few minutes you can hear the whirring of my iPod, and since I made the mistake of leaning the iPod against my notebook, you can also occasionally hear my frantic scribbling of notes (it was my first attempt at recording). It is in wav format because I cannot convert it to mp3 without losing significant quality. Nevertheless, it is audible and worth listening to if you are interested. It can be downloaded here.

This just in! You can go here and watch the entire 65 minute intelligent design video Unlocking the Mystery of Life online for free! The video is very well done and has interviews with all the ID bigshots (Dembski, Johnson, Behe, Meyer, etc.). You must watch it.

In talking about free will and moral responsibility, one of the ideas that comes to surface again and again is that what we do is in some way determined by who we are - that is, the type of character we have. Further, some would say that we can only be truly free and morally responsible if what we do flows naturally and determinately from our characters. As an illustration, Martin Luther is famously quoted as saying, after refusing to recant of his published ideas that helped launch the reformation, “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Many think we should here take his statement literally, presuming that he meant that his character and what he believed literally made it impossible for him to recant.

If this is really how our characters affect our decisions, then a regress argument can be developed to show that we are never really free or responsible (Galen Strawson is one well-known defender of this type of argument). Suppose Bob performs some action and it is free because it naturally follows from his character. We may well form the question at this point, ‘But where did his character come from?’ Obviously, if someone or something else were responsible for his character, and his character determines his action, he doesn’t seem truly free. Intuitively, the answer seems to be that his character has been developed by his previous actions and choices. But these choices surely must have been free, and that means that if we look at any particular of those actions, they would have been determined by his character at that point. But where did his character come from at those points? Presumably, by other free actions. But what about those? The infinite regress should be clear.

One way out of the regress is given by Robert Kane. Although Kane concedes that many if not most of our free actions are determined by our characters, he argues that there must be actions that we do at key points in our lives which are not determined by our characters. Rather, these actions were ones for which there were genuine alternative possibilities and which actually contribute to the formation of our characters, which in turn determine certain future actions. These he calls self-forming actions (SFAs).

Philosophically speaking, I am generally inclined to think that for almost all of our morally significant choices we have genuine alternative possibilities, but I agree that our characters at least greatly affect our probabilities to do certain actions and may even limit the number of possibilities we have. I also think there is something to the claim that our actions form our characters and who we are. Reflecting on this has led me from the abstract to the intensely practical, as I realized recently something seemingly obvious and which I had heard many times before, but which never really set in - every single choice I make affects the type of person I am and will become. Thinking of this in times of temptation has greatly helped me recently. We often trick ourselves into thinking that any one individual wrong choice can be quickly and easily atoned for and doesn’t matter much. But the truth is that every single choice we make is important in forming who we are and taking us either further down the path of godliness or further away from it.

I came across this interesting and somewhat frightening report the other day and reccomend it to you all as worthy of a read. (HT SmartChristian)

Following the 2005 London transport bombings, more than eight surveys were done to attempt to discern the common opinions of the over 2 million Muslims in London, and this article catalogs some of the results. Here are some of the most alarming: among 18 to 24 year olds (those most likely to carry out an attack), 12% endorse suicide attacks on civilians, “about half the Muslims polled believe that Jews in Britain have too much influence over Britain’s foreign policy and are in league with the Freemasons to control its press and politics,” and “more than half of British Muslims want Islamic law and 5% endorse violence to achieve that end.”

A couple of the people on our blog roll have recently reviewed some resources by Anglican bishop N.T. Wright that are worth reading and thinking about.

The Jollyblogger reviewed a few lectures in mp3 format by Wright that can be found here. I think he did a fair review, although he has not (like me, unfortunately) actually read any of Wright’s books. I have listened to the lectures a couple times myself and I think they are worth a listen. Like David (the Jollyblogger), I found myself feeling a little bit lost with some of Wright’s technical terms (like vocation), but overall the lectures are quite understandable and informational and sometimes convicting. At the very least, they made me want to get around to reading some Wright (and only a month left until fall classes start!).

Also, John DePoe at FQI reviewed Wright’s new book Simply Christian, which is marketed my many as a sort of modern day Mere Christianity. In this book, Wright gives a brief defense of monotheism using a sort of four part argument from desire, then discusses basic Christian beliefs followed by a section on Christian practice. I read the first chapter in Borders a few nights ago and found it extremely satisfying. John’s positive review only increases my desire to read the rest.

One thing that is mentioned a lot in the Scriptures is the notion that we should fear God. Nevertheless, for me (and I suspect others) , it’s never been very clear what this entails. What exactly does it mean to fear the Lord, and how does it feel to do so? The standard answer is that the fear of the Lord for the nonbeliever is the fear of the terrible judgement that a holy God must exact for injustice whereas for the believer it is the reverance and awe inspired by such a perfectly good and powerful being. It seems to me that it must be a little of both.

I was thinking about this the other day and trying to find some example to illustrate and make more concrete this mix of fear, awe, and joy and I immediately thought of how I felt standing on the edge of a section of Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. There was no fence or anything to keep me from falling, and just a few inches from my feet there was a steep and rocky drop of at least a few hundred feet. I think what I felt at that moment must be very like a true fear of God. I was standing dangerously close to something so much more vast and powerful than myself - something that could end my life in the blink of an eye and which owed me nothing. It truly was scary. And yet at the same time I felt so much more alive and complete than I normally do, in awe of the breathtaking beauty. And there was a sense that all that beauty had been made just for me…or perhaps I had been made just for it. Hopefully, most people have experienced something like this and know what I’m talking about. Anyway, I think that the proper fear of God is something similar - I only wish I felt it more.

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.

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