Tebow and Extroverted Faith

Over breakfast with some good friends this morning, the conversation turned, as all Colorado conversations must inevitably turn in order to fulfill their fall telos, to Tim Tebow. I remarked on how hilariously fascinating it was that a Tebow mic'd up clip showed him singing "Lord, I lift your name on high" as he ran out for an offensive series. It shows Tebow ceaselessly encouraging his teammates, and it also shows his gregarious Christianity with the name of Jesus always on his lips.

One friend remarked that his wife had been quite bothered by viewing the clip. The rest of us were surprised by her lack of faith in our Bronco messiah, and he explained that she thinks that the hype tends to reinforce the paradigm of extroverted Christianity. I knew she’d been reading Adam McHugh’s book Introverts in the Church, and I think she’s onto an interesting connection. Something that’s not in the least bit Tebow’s fault, but possibly a reinforced paradigm nonetheless.

Here’s an example of what McHugh has in mind about introverts:

Unfortunately, owing to a few antisocial types as well as to a general extroverted bias in our culture, introverts get a bad rap. Mainstream American culture values gregarious, aggressive people who are skilled in networking and who can quickly turn strangers into friends. Often we identify leaders as those people who speak up the most and the fastest, whether or not their ideas are the best.

As a result, introverts are often defined by what we’re not rather than by what we are. We’re labeled as standoffish or misanthropic or timid or passive. But the truth is that we are people who are energized in solitude, rather than among people. We may be comfortable and articulate in social situations and we may enjoy people, but our time in the outer worlds drains us and we must retreat into solitude to be recharged. We also process silently before we speak, rather than speaking in order to think, as extroverts do. We generally listen a little more than we talk, observe for a while before we engage, and have a rich inner life that brings us great stimulation and satisfaction. Neurological studies have demonstrated that our brains naturally have more activity and blood flow, and thus we need less external stimulation in order to thrive.

Watching Tebow mic’d up certainly seems like watching an extroverted Christianity, though there are probably elements of the NFL quarterback/superstar role being performed. Perhaps Tebow is really an introvert who often needs people to get the hell away. But I can see how introverts and the like would be troubled by the media’s idealization of the gregarious, extroverted aspects of Tebow’s Christianity, even if it’s unintentional.

The Sunday School class of my dreams

The central thesis of Merold Westphal’s Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism is that “the atheism of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche should be taken seriously as a stimulus to self-examination rather than refuted as an error. This is because their critique of religion seems to be 1) all too true all too much of the time and 2) a modern echo of an ancient assault on the devotion of the devout, the one developed by Jesus and the prophets of Israel.”

Westphal thinks we should read these atheists for Lent.

And I think that kind of project would make for the greatest Sunday School class ever, so here’s my dream church class for Lent, based off of sections in his book:

February 26: Atheism for Lent, or, when NOT to argue against Atheism

March 4: Freud as theologian of original sin

March 11: Marx: how religion embraces evil

March 18: Marx II: The biblical critique of Christianity

March 25: Nietzsche and our glittering vices

April 1: Conclusion: The Dangers of Suspicion

I haven't been to a Sunday School class for years upon years. But I'd sure go to something like this.

"Continental" philosophy

I don’t know jack about Continental philosophy, so one of the books I’ve picked up is Simon Critchley’s wonderful little Continental Philosophy: a very short introduction.

Critchley identifies John Stuart Mill as someone who illustrates that the concept of “Continental philosophy” goes back to debates about the relationship between Britain to the European Continent. Mill thinks that Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had radically different philosophical approaches, such that Mill could say, “it may be...affirmed, that every Englishman of the present day is by implication either a Benthamite or a Coleridgean.”

Critchley comments,

Mill thinks Bentham asks of any ancient doctrine or received opinion, ‘Is it true?; whereas Coleridge asks, ‘What is the meaning of it?’. So, ‘the Continental philosophy’ is concerned with meaning, whereas its Benthamite opposite is concerned with truth...If Bentham is concerned with the question of knowledge, then Coleridge is concerned with the question of wisdom.

...It is extremely tempting to psychologize what Mill is saying here, for in the winter of 1826-27, at the age of twenty, he underwent a severe ‘mental crisis’. Mill asked himself, like many young people, whether he would be happy if all his objects in life were realized, and had to answer that he would not. The utilitarianism of Mill’s extraordinary education produced knowledge but was inadequate for wisdom or, indeed, happiness. Mill partially overcame his depression through the reading of Wordsworth’s poems, remarking, ‘From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness’. Mill learned, in his words, that ‘I was not a stock or a stone’, and was led to dissent from Bentham’s judgement that ‘poetry was no better than push-pin.’ Mill decided it was a lot better than push-pin and immersed himself in the reading of the Coleridgeans, and their German predecessors, such as Goethe, whose ‘many-sidedness’ Mill admired, and the humanistic philosopher and linguist, Wilhem von Humboldt. When asked by the historian Thomas Carlyle whether he had entirely changed his opinion of matters, Mill replied, referring to the logic on which he had been brought up, ‘I believe in spectacles’, but added, ‘but I think eyes are necessary too’.

Gay Marriage and Moral Neutrality

Usually the same-sex marriage debate is framed so that there are only two choices: recognize marriage between a man and a woman, or recognize same-sex and opposite sex marriages. But why can’t there be a third choice? The state shouldn’t recognize marriage of any kind, but leave this role to private institutions. As Michael Sandel puts it, this would be a sort of “disestablishment of marriage” in the same way that we’ve disestablished religion in terms of getting rid of an official state church while allowing churches to exist independent of the state. Sandel quotes Michael Kinsley:

Let churches and other religious institutions continue to offer marriage ceremonies. Let department stores and casinos get into the act if they want...Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want...And, yes, if three people want to get married, or one person wants to marry herself, and someone else wants to conduct a ceremony and declare them married, let ‘em. (Sandel, 256).

If we were to replace all state-sanctioned marriages with civil unions, this would avoid having judges and citizens engage in moral and religious issues about the purpose of marriage and morality of homosexuality. Interestingly, while Sandel doesn’t accept this solution, he thinks that the other approaches must necessarily deal with questions of the purposes of marriage and the goods it honors. The case for same-sex marriage, he argues, can’t be made on non-judgmental grounds, despite claims to be merely supporting the ideas of nondiscrimination and freedom of choice:

when we look closely at the case for same-sex marriage, we find that it cannot rest on the ideas of nondiscrimination and freedom of choice. In order to decide who should qualify for marriage, we have to think through the purpose of marriage and the virtues it honors. And this carries us onto contested moral terrain, where we can’t remain neutral toward competing conceptions of the good life (260).

Sandel, Michael. Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Print.

Foreknowledge, Free Will, and Minority Report

My philosophy class and I are viewing Minority Report to supplement our discussions of free will. In the movie, the precog Agatha says that since John Anderton knows his future, he can change it.

I don’t think so.

I’m reminded of a similar problem regarding petitionary prayer to a God who foreknows the future. John Sanders puts it as follows:

...if God’s EDF is based upon either simple foreknowledge or timeless knowledge, then foreknowledge is useless for providence. SFT affirms timeless foreknowledge of our future actions in order for God to use this knowledge for providential control. For example, it is thought that if God foresees that I’m going to marry Alisha which will result in a horrible marriage, then God can take the appropriate steps to bring it about that he guides me to actually marry Beatrice instead. But this “solution” does not work at all! According to simple foreknowledge or timeless knowledge, God has only true knowledge of our future; what God “foresees” is the actual world—which events will actually occur in history. If God foresees what will actually occur, then God cannot bring it about that these events fail to occur since that would render his timeless knowledge false. If what God foresees is what actually happens—that I marry Alisha and have a horrible marriage—then God is powerless to stop it. The traditional Arminian understanding of foreknowledge is simply useless for divine providence.

It’s a nice thought that if you knew the future, you could change it. But in that case, you wouldn’t really have known the future. If you know the future, you’re powerless to change it.

Scientific confirmation and logical fallacies

The fallacy of affirming the consequent goes like this:

1. If P, then Q.
2. Q.
3. Therefore, P.

1. If you have a Ph.D, then you spent a lot of time and money.
2. You spent a lot of time and money.
3. Therefore, you have a Ph.D

The error is obvious. But notice, this also factors into scientific knowledge and theory confirmation:

1. If my theory/hypothesis is correct, then this experiment will produce ______ result.
2. This experiment produced ________ result.
3. Therefore, my theory/hypothesis is correct.

This doesn't follow. Theories are, as they say, underdetermined by the data.

"It's my Body"

For whatever reason, I always forget that Mary Anne Warren rejects the "It's my body" pro-choice argument, and I'm always surprised to read what she says:

...the appeal to the right to control one’s body, which is generally construed as a property right, is at best a rather feeble argument for the permissibility of abortion. Mere ownership does not give me the right to kill innocent people whom I find on my property, and indeed I am apt to be held responsible if such people injure themselves while on my property. It is equally unclear that I have any moral right to expel an innocent person from my property when I know that doing so will result in his death...

Ultimately she holds that the moral community is "people" rather than all human beings, and distinguishes between the two. Her argument isn't that abortion is permissible because of a woman's right to choose; instead, it's because fetuses aren't part of the moral community.