Ruse offers to help
It takes more than one person to argue with Michael Ruse. Jerry has, Russell has, but I still found new stuff that irritates me, so here it is.
…science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions. That Saint Paul or Uncle Tom Cobley and all thought otherwise is irrelevant. They were wrong. This is not to say that they were stupid or careless. Two thousand years ago, for a Jew to believe in Adam and Eve was perfectly sensible. But time moves on and with it our understanding of the world around us, and old beliefs have to give way to new ones. Aristotle thought that some people were born to be slaves. He was wrong. St. Paul thought we are descended from Adam and Eve. He was wrong.
But wrong in different ways, for different reasons. Science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions, but (Sam Harris notwithstanding) it doesn’t tell us that some people are not born to be slaves. On the contrary – science could well tell us that some people are born to be slaves, provided it started from some stupid (but not particularly unscientific) assumptions, such as that people with (or without) certain Xs are born to be slaves. Science could pick out which people have (or lack) the certain Xs, and the job would be done. Saying why that’s wrong is not the same kind of thing as demonstrating that Eve and Adam are fictions.
What should be the attitude of the Christian faced with clear evidence that some part of the Bible cannot be taken literally and that this must have consequences for hitherto-accepted theology? Clearly, some alternative theology must be sought. This is not giving up or mere ad hoc responding. The great British theologian John Henry Newman saw clearly that the essential truths of the Christian faith remain unchanged, but that, given new knowledge in each age, they need constant reinterpretation and updating.
An, naughty Michael Ruse – note that “saw.” Note that “saw clearly.” Ruse claims that Newman saw clearly something which is in fact contestable and contested; by wording it that way Ruse of course loads the dice. What, exactly, are “the essential truths” of the “Christian faith” and how on earth does Ruse know they remain unchanged? And if they remain unchanged, what does it mean to say they need constant reinterpretation and updating? How is that not just having it all ways, by merely saying so? The essential truth remains unchanged but it needs constant reinterpretation and updating but nevertheless it remains unchanged…apart from the constant reinterpretation and updating. A “truth” that is constantly reinterpreted and updated can’t be said to remain unchanged, can it.
Well he goes on to explain – but it’s still just saying; it’s nonsense.
God is creator, Jesus is his son who died on the cross for our sake, this act of sacrifice made possible our eternal salvation — these claims are unchanged. But what exactly this all might mean is another matter.
If what it all might mean is another matter, then the claims are not unchanged! You can’t do both, dammit – you can’t say they’re unchanged apart from being changed. Just keeping the husks of words but completely changing the meaning does not equal unchanged claims.
Oh it’s so tiresome all this special pleading.
And Ruse says it’s not mere ad hoc responding? It sure looks like it to me.
Well, I think it’s perfectly clear what it all might mean, and what needs to be done about it. Ruse-the-atheist is very helpful here, for it should be obvious what he’s doing:
“God” is “creator;” Jesus is his “son” who “died on the cross” for “our” sake; this “act of sacrifice” made possible our “eternal salvation.”
It’s not special pleading; it’s special punctuation. We can all “go around” with our hands in the air making “scare quotes” to signify when we are being “poetic” or “metaphorical” or “ironic.” Or, if our fingers get tired, we can just smile gently and shake our godless little heads over those people who take things so “literally.”
Christianity is a story about how we ought to try to love each other and be and do our very best in all things, even though it’s hard and we’ll never be perfect. There. That wasn’t too hard.
That made me laugh really hard, Sastra.
You and Cam Larios make me laugh like no one else.
Ah, yes. So theology was born to be science’s slave. No, hang on a minute, that didn’t come out quite right…
How does an atheist come to the conclusion that it’s his responsibility to explain Christianity to Christians?
We can be confident that the professors find Ruse’s continued support useful in convincing Calvin trustees and alumni that the president is a bully.
You’re not a Christian, Michael, and you were being embarrassingly arrogant when you decided, in 2004, that it fell upon you to reconcile Christianity with the knowledge that contradicts its basic tenets. At this point, you are just providing entertainment to your intellectual enemies.
It’s not abuse to which you’re being subjected, pal. It’s laughter.
The essential truth of the christian faith is this:
That adam&eve disobeyed doG. For this they were kicked out of the garden of eden and into a world where there is sin and death and people have to wear clothes.
But doG thinking it over for a couple or three millenia (during which he wiped out adam&eve’s descendants with fire & brimstone, floods, plagues etc) decided he’d been a mite hasty and decided to send himself as his son to suffer greatly as a person to assuage his own bloodlust once and for all and wipe out adam&eve’s sin. Thus humans were redeemed and delivered from the punishment for their sins. You may wonder why fires, floods, plagues, earthquakes, tsunamis continue to this day if people have had their sins forgiven – I couldn’t possibly comment!
Thus core christian faith is totally dependent on the story of adam&eve being true. If it is not then – no disobedience to doG, no exile from eden (no “fall of man” as christians put it) and no need for yeshue bar yussif to be executed, no need for him to reincarnate, no need for the pope, for the church, for the christian faith.
If christians believe that yeshue existed and was doG come to redeem them they must believe in adam&eve and their punishment as a literal true story. Nothing else works. No amount of numinous, ineffable, compassionate fuzziness can get past this obstacle.
Ken, Ruse has taken it upon himself to try to reconcile Christianity and evolution since at least 2001, with his book Can a Darwinian be a Christian? the relationship between science and religion. In a nutshell, his answer to the question is yes, as long as you’re not too much of a biblical literalist.
And for all I know he’s been doing this even longer.
I am looking forward to the time (it won’t be long) when Albert Mohler gets out his special paddle for naughty philosophers and tells Ruse to assume the position.
What matter is it? How can it be another matter if Ruse won’t say what it is? How can the claims be unchanged if they don’t retain their meaning? If Ruse feels no obligation to make sense why bother with him?
If I were going to be ultra-charitable (why, I don’t know), I’d think that
was intended to read “what exactly this all might imply.” That is, the content and meaning of the claims themselves stays the same, but what changes is what this is supposed to imply about, say, whether we should feed the poor or let gay people marry one another.
Of course, then it’s not clear how much is achieved by the whole argument, because surely the main problem is that these central claims, just as much as the rest of it, appear rather obviously to be false.
There is something rather disturbing about the spectacle of atheist apologists fighting over Christianity like dogs tugging on a bone. When the Boston Globe recently featured a written debate on the existence of God between Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins, a Baptist Minister wrote in to ask why they had chosen two atheists to take part in it. Dawkins thought it was a very good question. Armstrong, Ruse, Fish, Eagleton, and their like are the Newfangled atheists, who spew bafflegab irrelevant to the topic for both believers and atheists alike. R. Joseph Hoffman called the likes of Tillich, and the ‘Ground of all Being’ theology “methadone for religion addicts.” It doesn’t get you high, but it somehow satisfies the craving in an intellectually excusable way. Yet nobody worships the ground of all being. These people have all missed the point. Richard Dawkins is not a student of theology, but neither are practicing believers. He knows them better than all the Newfangled atheists combined. I suspect that he has actually spoken to far more of them Ruse has, since so many of them have sought Dawkins out to argue with him.
Religion has become threadbare and impoverished, and no longer attracts the best and brightest. I seriously doubt that Ratzinger believes a word of it. There is a type of language, Vatican Speak, which burned out priests spout when they are going through the motions, to which even the most devout Catholics respond by taking a nap during the sermon. Meanwhile, Karl Rove could deliver the evangelical vote so reliably that they were called Karl Rove’s base. Rove said in public that he was not fortunate enough to be a believer; in private, he called them the crazies. The religious are being led like rats by pied pipers who have learned to ape their naive sentiments and steer them in whatever political direction they choose. They are being used, and all this by people who hold them in utter contempt.
I find it quite sinister that people like Ruse will make excuses for beliefs that he obviously does not hold. They are like a parent telling children that Santa Claus is real, and there is in this an attitude more brutally arrogant than all the supposed rudeness of atheists who say what they think plainly and directly.
Yes- some central claims are constant: My contempt for all this special pleading remains completely unchanged.
Though I am constantly reinterpreting and revising my opinion of just how far theologians and apologists will go in twisting logic to maintain religious conclusions….
I don’t think that science can actually say that people are born to be slaves. Science may well say that people have or lack ‘x’, whatever that may be, but the decision to make one group slaves or not is made outside of science. Science may be able to identify individuals that society has deemed ought to be slaves, but the decision that some people ought to be property is a value judgement made for non scientific reasons.
What exactly this might mean is the only matter!
Is Karen Armstrong an atheist? thought she was a believer of the fuzzy pantheist/transcendental /spiritual type.
As for Ruse’s definition of the essence of Christianity, without the Fall, why is the sacrifice of Jesus necessary?
Here’s my take on the unchanged truth of Christianity:
You are born imperfect, tainted. I know the guy who can make you clean and perfect, but he only speaks to me. Therefore, you should do and not do exactly what I tell you.
That is all.
Then, you have people like Ruse who think other people are not strong or intelligent enough to actually consider the idea that all this stuff is only a fantasy somebody made up a long time ago to control people, and so they try to appease the dumb masses: “it’s okay, these unchanging truths you can believe in”. Is this in any way different from the “irreducible core” creationists talk about when you point out that the examples they give are not actually irreducibly complex?
Besides, those “unchanging truths” are as much truths as anything else in the bible. If there is no reason to believe in Adam and Eve, there is even less reason to believe in curing leprosy and paralysis by hand imposition, something the Bible says Jesus used to do. Not to mention dying and leaving his tomb days later. And those things might even get a pass as at least they have a connection with the real world, but what about made up concepts like sin, soul or atonement? What kind of connection do those have with anything at all? Can I make up a word now, say, gñete, and simply assert that gñetes are an unchanging, essential part of our moral and immaterial nature and therefore you should totally convert to my teachings?
I like a more simple approach. Just be honest about things. If you have an idea (like the idea that you don’t believe in God and the reasons why you don’t), why don’t you just stand by it? Come clean with people.
Mark Fournier alludes to interesting consideration that is coming to light recently, namely the split at least on the Republicans side between the Ayn Rand cult and the Jesus cult …
This is patronizing and condescending towards Christians. As a matter of fact, everything that he writes is patronizing and condescending towards them. “You should believe this. I don’t, because I am an atheist philosopher, but this is what you should believe. I want to help you stick with your religion in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence of its factual basis.”
This is what I find so odious about Ruse, and most of the other clueless gobshites. They take it on themselves to comfort Christians, by being dishonest, by patting them on the head and asking if they want more invisible ice cream to make it all better.
Re: Aristotle being wrong… I’m much closer to (though still not quite) a moral realist than most here I think, so while I recognize that “Adam and Eve were real” and “Some people ought to be slaves” are fundamentally different types of claims, I still believe both are demonstrably and non-arbitrarily wrong. I’d hesitate to use Sam Harris’ words and say that ‘science’ tells us the latter is wrong, but I feel pretty good saying that, given a few basic assumptions shared by virtually all humans, ‘reason’ tells us it’s wrong.
And in any case, even if you don’t go in for that, Aristotle was wrong about a great many things, some of them just as facepalmingly obviously wrong in 2011 as the Adam and Eve narrative. Ruse could easily have picked a more clearly science-oriented example. (Aristotlean physics? HellOOOOO??!?)
I think the difference between Aristotle and Saint Paul in this case is more subtle, but also perhaps more important: While a modern reader of Aristotle, especially one informed in some basic philosophy, will find that he is wrong at nearly every turn, in the historical context his attempt was quite remarkable. Unlike the vast majority of his contemporaries, he actually sat down and tried to figure shit out in a methodical and careful way, which demonstrated a commitment to the truth. That his methods were questionable (you worked out your basic model of physics without conducting a single experiment? Really?) and his conclusions even more so, he was one of the earliest to give it a good ol’ college try and (this is why we remember him) write down what he came up with. That’s deserving of an immense amount of credit.
Saint Paul’s thinking, on the other hand, was hardly revolutionary. Dating back to the earliest records we have — arguably even dating back to cave paintings, depending on how you interpret them — people have been dealing with uncertainty by making up stupid stories about the world around them. Or in the case of Saint Paul’s beliefs about Adam and Eve, simply parroting the received wisdom from when people generations ago made up their own stupid stories. Ho hum.
Aristotle and Saint Paul were both mostly wrong, of course. But Aristotle made an honest attempt to figure things out, using the best methods he could come up with, and recognizing that truth is a difficult business. Paul, on the other hand, threw up his arms and decided that truth was a rather simple thing that merely involved clapping one’s hands and saying, “I believe in fairies Jesus.” That’s the key difference, without having to commit to a particular meta-ethical model in order to defend Aristotle.
Crossposting a comment I made on Jerry’s site:
Can’t Ruse see what would happen if we applied the same kind of reasoning to science? We’d still be studying the properties of phlogiston- after all, even though all these experimental studies find no evidence for phlogiston, and all the phenomena which phlogiston was meant to explain have other explanations, what’s really happened is that our understanding of phlogiston is becoming clearer. Right?
[…] new article on theology and science has already been competently addressed by Jerry Coyne, Ophelia Benson and Russell Blackford. As Ophelia so eloquently says (over at WEIT): Oh hell there’s other stuff […]
Mark
You mean the Wall Street Journal, right?
Mike N @ 15 – right, she is, but that was the point – the fuffy woolly stuff she says might as well be atheism, and atheists keep pointing that out, so it was an excellent joke when the Baptist fella (was it Mohler?) said it too. She’s a de facto atheist but she won’t admit it, and on the contrary, insists that her fuffy woolly stuff is the real theism. It’s nonsense cubed.
James –
But that’s what I said – except for the “shared by virtually all humans” part. What makes Aristotle wrong is the bad assumptions, not scientific data about people.
But it’s just not true that those few basic assumptions are shared by virtually all humans. If they were, there wouldn’t be slavery and caste and gender subordination and all the rest of it. If those few basic assumptions were shared by virtually all humans the world would be a much better place.
Liam @ 13 – right. But that’s what I said!
Well said, Ophelia. The way Ruse defies common sense and logic is also especially annoying here:
“But is there not the uncomfortable worry that religion — theology — is always going to play second fiddle, having to give way in the face of science? And never the other way around. When did a Nobel Prize winner ever change his or her mind in the face of a reinterpretation of the Trinity? It may be true that this is a one-way process, but in no way does this imply that theology is inferior.”
It doesn’t?! Wow, what a considered, well reasoned opinion. D. Chopra has done something similar on HuffPost, “rethinking evolution.” And all by himself, too.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/is-evolution-ready-to-evo_b_874571.html
I know – that one was just…funny, jaw-dropping, absurd…Yes it’s all wrong and backward and not the way to think properly but that in no way implies that it’s less good. Riiiiiiiight.
That explains why archaeologists cannot find any ‘proof’ of Moses or Abraham, or of the Exodus. Aren’t both these figures decendents of Adam?
When I read this I thought of the passage from Jefferson on science and slavery:
Ok, that’s an interesting example. Hard to argue with that. If a well-controlled exhaustive study of human infants had indeed discovered that some babies are born with saddles on their backs — and other babies are born with boots and spurs on their feet — would this be a case of science telling us that some people are born to be slaves (or rides)? You could probably argue it pretty effectively, I think, since at the very least we seem to be throwing out evolution and bringing in some pretty bizarre circumstances (not to mention gruesome circumstances, from the point of view of a woman in labor) with strong teleological overtones.
I like the fact that Jefferson provides us with the hypothetical here.
At #19: There is a far deeper abyss between Aristotle and Paul: the former was trying to advance human knowledge, albeit with incorrect premises in many things; the latter was avowedly trying to destroy ‘the wisdom of the wise’. With Paul, anti-intellectualism became entrenched in Christianity. Aristotle never developed experimental observation – and Einstein used his ‘mental experiments’ almost exclusively, but had some pretty solid premises to build on.
Adam and Eve? Do a search: First Scandal.
If some people were born to be slaves, that still wouldn’t give us much reason to comply with it. What’s the relevant difference between a normal slave breeder and a magic, vague cosmo slave breeder?
Comment #27 reminds me that swedish rockstar historian Dick Harrison is currently entrenched against parts of history-Sweden over the issue of Jesus’ historicity as a human. Dick Harrison has so far presented arguments that apply equally or more to a zombie horde walking the streets of Jerusalem.
It began with Harrison’s reply to Michael Nilsson, if you’re curious about the background.
Right; that’s where the stupid assumptions come in.
When you put it like that… it could well be that some people are “born” to be “slaves”: what exactly this all might mean is another matter (wink wink, say no more).