below the din

Tebow and Extroverted Faith

2011-12-17T13:07:00.001-08:00

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

2011-12-15T09:55:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-07T21:05:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-25T13:57:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-21T13:04:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-16T21:17:00.000-08:00

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"

2011-11-12T11:45:00.000-08:00

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.

Deal with arguments, not ad hominems

2011-11-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

My ethics students are reading Peter Singer's famous piece on poverty, and understandably irritated. Or more likely, feeling guilty because his conclusion is extremely challenging and his arguments are somewhat tight. I get agitated when I read Singer, too. But that's no excuse to dismiss Singer is someone who is "into himself," "just trying to sell books," "pathetic," "arguing from guilt," "bragging about how much he gives away," and "assinine." Those dismissals fit in youtube comboxes, not ethics discussions.

Here's the reply I posted to one particular student after she ranted about Singer in our online discussion without actually dealing with any of his arguments:

I’m not sure that this is an argument from guilt, though I’m not sure it matters if it is. So what if we act out of guilt sometimes? If we’re doing the right thing, does that necessarily matter? And I have no clue about Singer's motives. Perhaps he wants to sell books to raise money for his dying mother's cancer treatments? Or perhaps he actually wants to change the culture of excess in which Americans mindlessly consume ever more and more things while children across the world die through no fault of their own? Or perhaps he loves to dominate students with arguments and see them bow to his majesty? I dunno. Motives are a hard thing to discern.

But as for the main point of Singer’s argument, it’s important to evaluate actual arguments. You’re off to a decent start doing this, but this is an argument from analogy. As Lawhead (A-9) explains: “An argument from analogy is one in which the premises state that two cases share one or more properties in common. It is then concluded that a further property of the first case will also be a property of the second case. Some analogies can be useful, such as when we learn about human physiology by studying that of primates. However, the false analogy fallacy is committed when there are more differences between the two situations than there are similarities.”

So – rather than labeling Singer “pathetic,” see if you can point out where his analogy breaks down. And then call his argument from analogy “pathetic”... =)

Lawhead, William F. The Philosophical Journey: An Interactive Approach. 5^th ed. McGraw Hill: Boston, 2011. Print.

The problem with "picking the best” from religious traditions:

2011-10-03T19:11:00.000-07:00

Vincent Miller, in his well-researched examination of the impact of consumerism on religious belief and practice,“Consuming Religion”, sees three problems with a “spirituality” that picks and chooses from religious traditions.

First, when elements of tradition are uprooted from their context, they have less power to challenge assumptions:

“Elements of tradition are interpreted, engaged, and used in abstraction or disembedded form from their ‘traditional moorings – from historic creeds and doctrines, from broad symbolic universes, from religious community.’ These connections stabilize the meanings of religious elements and connect them to practices. Shorn of these, elements of religious traditions pose less of a challenge to the status quo; they can be more easily made to conform to the default assumptions and practices of the dominant culture.”

Second, picking and choosing makes commitment hard to sustain:

“A second related problem concerns the difficulty of sustaining religious commitment. While there is no particular reason to assume that contemporary seekers develop syntheses that are necessarily less profound than their predecessors, the emphasis on individual agency and religious experience renders sustained commitment to a religious vision extremely difficult. Without the support of a community of shared belief, commitment hinges to a great extent on the willpower of the individual believer.”

Last, these personalized syntheses are difficult to shape into a form of life and practice:

“There is a third problem related to the first two: the difficulty of connecting a religious synthesis to a concrete form of life. Great spiritual traditions are the work of generations. Much of this work involves connecting symbols and beliefs to practices that form a way of life. These connections are seldom obvious or straightforward. It is this particular connection that is most challenged by the commodification of culture, where beliefs and commitments are easily reduced to a decorative function of providing private meanings to fill in the voids left by the structures of everyday life.”

Taylor on the conditions for theodicy

2011-08-09T13:06:00.000-07:00

From Charles Taylor's A Secular Age:

"...while the issue of theodicy may always be raised in a theistic context, there are certain conditions for its being felt as a real problem, which have not always been met. Pressed by a sense of menace, both natural (famine, disease) and spiritual (devils, goblins, wood spirits, etc.), the pre-modern in an enchanted world could be more concerned with appealing to God as helper, or saviour, while acknowledging that it was quite beyond her to explain how things had come to this pass. The idea of blaming God gets a clearer sense and becomes much more salient in the modern era where people begin to think they know just what God was purposing in creating the world, and can check the results against the intention."

"...The case for the defense depends on there being more to human fate than we can exhibit as undeniable in history: that these people died in the earthquake, and those in gas chambers, and no-one came to rescue them, Christians can only reply to the accusations with hope."

The premodern view strikes me as the tone taken in the Christian Scriptures: there don't really seem to be answers forthcoming as to why this instance of suffering has occurred. Rather, the claim (the hope) is that God is doing something about it.

Baby steps in helping our children give: "Almost Expenses."

2011-07-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

Whenever I discuss Peter Singer’s work on poverty with my ethics classes, I get a bit tense and guilt-frazzled at home. I’ll think crazed thoughts about getting rid of a car, giving half our income away, or even refusing to water our lawn so much. I have a bit of an ascetic streak in me, so my wife has a hard time disentangling my passions from my pathologies.

We recently decided to start a jar for “almost” expenses. Every 3 months, we’ll pick a cause and give away the money. What’s an “almost” expense? It’s something that you came close to buying, but at the last minute, decided to forego. We put half of the almost expense into a jar. For example, last night my wife suggested that we go out to eat since I hadn’t started dinner. That idea sounded completely fabulous, but we ultimately decided to thaw some freezer leftovers from 5 months ago. We probably would’ve spent about $20, so...$10 in the almost expense jar.

Signed a contract for pest control but then changed your mind? Almost expense. Skipped snacks at the movies? Almost expense. Stayed home instead of taking the family out for frozen yogurt? Drank water at the Beer and Theology group instead of beer? Only had one beer? Almost expense. Taco Bell instead of Pei Wei? You get the idea. Notice we’re not even giving the whole amount away! Just half. We’re rookies and tightwads. But I love that it fosters choice and awareness of alternatives into how we live as a family. Baby steps.

We’d been doing this for a couple months when I saw a Nick Kristof tweet about a little 9 year old girl who was fatally injured in a car crash. Her birthday wish was to give as much clean water as possible to African village. Ever since I started trying to make 9^th graders aware of the crucial role of water in our natural resources units in Earth Science, the issue of clean water has fascinated me. I read through the wrenching story, and decided that I really wanted to tell my children about little Rachel Beckwith.

I waited until we were all eating dinner. Dinner, because I’m not confident in my 4 little children’s abilities to stay riveted during my presentations sans food. I brought the jar of money over to the table and asked them just how money gets to be in that jar. “When we skip ice cream,” my 8 year old intoned. Blank looks from the others, but not a bad start.

I showed them a video about women spending most of their day gathering water, and then showed them the news clip about Rachel Beckwith’s injuries and her selfless birthday wish. The three oldest snapped to attention when they heard that someone didn’t want presents for her birthday. They were a bit perplexed, and almost alarmed. I told them that Rachel had died from this car wreck, and that I thought that it would be a wonderful present for her to donate our saved money to her cause.

I guess I was hoping for shouts of joy, cheers, and tears. They were noticeably saddened when I told them about Rachel's death, but they showed little enthusiasm for the additional step of giving our money away. They cracked up when they heard the word “diarrhea” in the clean water video, but they mumbled "sure" when I asked about donating to clean water, and then bent back over their plates. That’s what’s wonderful and often maddening about children: they live each moment with such focus that it’s almost as if their memories, and sometimes others, don’t exist. It was another good reminder to me that family "discussions," no matter how nobly motivated, just aren't accompanied by Howard Shore and Hans Zimmer scores.

I’m hopeful, though, that providing them with heroes like Rachel, narrating the stories of women and children spending all day collecting water, and the weekly occasions to choose to change our consumption, will somehow shape their approach to this world. This seems like one simple way to start thinking about money. Something like our use of time is an entirely different beast to tackle.

The next simple thing my wife and I would like to implement is a minimalist meal: something like rice, beans, and water for dinner once a week, accompanied by stories about the lives of other children throughout the world. I’m even wondering if the oldest ones can research this themselves and tell the rest of us.

And Rachel’s legacy? Her goal was $300. She’s raised over $350,000 so far.

Is Christianity a Metanarrative?

2011-06-30T19:54:00.000-07:00

One of the courses I'm teaching uses Ronald Nash's book Life's Ultimate Questions. It contains a chapter dismissing postmodernism, and below is a post I wrote for my students hoping to prod them to question the dismissal a bit:

In Nash’s first chapter on Epistemology (chapter 10, page 234), he refers to “metanarratives,” and suggests that “it certainly looks as though consistent postmodern Christians are obliged to dispense with the biblical metanarrative." In other words, postmodernism suggests that a religious worldview like Christianity is a metanarrative, and thus can't be accepted. Clearly, according to Nash, postmodernism is an enemy!
Let’s leave aside the fact that Nash fails to quote (I believe) a single primary source from a postmodern thinker (like, say, Derrida or Lyotard). Rather, I’d like to address a different notion of metanarratives which might suggest that postmodernism might not be as harmful as Nash suggests. My thinking on this topic has been formatively shaped by Jamie Smith, a philosopher at Calvin College. He's an intellectual hero of mine, actually.

Jean-Francois Lyotard coined the term “metanarrative” to refer to the process by which modern scientific culture tries to address pluralism. We used to be able to count on shared consensus and common background on many issues, but now (according to modern thought) we must use the universal criterion of Reason. This “Reason” will stand outside any particular community or group and thus guarantee “universal” truth. However, Lyotard points out that while science tries to legitimate itself by Universal Reason, it is actually grounded in faith claims (Lyotard locates these faith claims, or “narratives” in Kant and Marx’s views of emancipation, along with Hegel – but never mind that…). So, while science pretends to be using “universal reason,” it is really just one more particular community that has its own prior ideas about what counts as “knowledge.” For Lyotard, then, “metanarratives” are false appeals to universal, rational, scientific criteria, since their universal criteria are really very particular. In other words, one could view postmodernity not as a “wordview that denies all worldviews” as Nash puts it, but instead as a suspicion and critique of the idea of some universal reason without commitments and community. Because, remember, this Reason doesn't need any sort of community or history - it's universal.

Importantly, the Bible wouldn’t count as a metanarrative, according to this view, because “the biblical narrative and Christian faith do not claim to be legitimated by an appeal to a universal, autonomous Reason, but rather by an appeal to faith.”

Smith thinks Christians can use this postmodern critique of universal reason and suggests that this is a form of Augustine’s epistemology: believing (first) in order that we may understand. After all, according to Lyotard and the postmodernists, all our worldviews and belief systems are grounded in faith, not some universal “Reason." Notice the postmodern concern with what we mean by "reason." There are lots of ways to think about it, but I don't recall Nash ever addressing this.

This postmodern criticism of "Reason" opens up a space for faith commitments to be proud of their identities, if you will. As Smith puts it, “Previously, such a distinctly ‘Christian philosophy’ would have been exiled from the ‘pure’ arena of philosophy because of its ‘infection’ with bias and prejudice. Lyotard’s critique, however, demonstrates that no philosophy – indeed, no knowledge-is untainted by prejudice or faith-commitments. In this way the playing field is leveled, and new opportunities to voice a Christian philosophy are created.”

Nash is pretty brutal with postmodernism. I’d like to suggest that it might not be so bad as he makes it out to be, and in fact, that he presents a fairly crude and unthoughtful version to slam. However – I’m still thinking through this and I’m interested in ideas. Is “postmodernism” the danger to Christianity and religion that Nash suggests?

Smith, James K.A. (2005). A Little Story about Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion, and Postmodernism Revisited. In M. Penner (Ed). Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views (p 123-140). Grand Rapids: Brazos Press.

Singer's "The Life You Can Save"

2011-05-15T10:05:00.000-07:00

Anousheh Ansari paid $20 million for 11 days in space. Comedian Lewis Black said she did it because it was “the only way she could achieve her life’s goal of flying over every single starving person on earth and yelling ‘Hey, look what I’m spending my money on!’”

It turns out that we’re all Anousheh Ansaris in subtle and not so subtle ways. This anecdote, and Singer’s book as a whole, unwraps his two key claims that 1) “If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so,” and 2) “By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.”

The most helpful part of Singer’s book, especially for those who’ve read his other oft-anthologized pieces on poverty, are those that respond to objections. Here are just a couple. “People work for their money and have the right to spend it on themselves.” Reply: If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru, you’ll find how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. Additionally, most of the poor do work at least as hard as you. “America is generous and gives plenty through foreign aid.” Reply: The average nation’s effort in 2006 came to 46 cents of every $100 of gross national income, while the U.S. gave only 18 cents of every $100 it earned. Adding nongovernmental (private) aid sums America’s total aid at no more than 25 cents of every $100 earned – still near the bottom of the international aid league.

If you’re in a hurry, you could probably safely skip the entire section on “The Facts about Aid” as well as his needlessly vise-tightening and somewhat oppositional chapter on “Your Child and the Children of Others.” His argument is just as strong without this chapter, and his main point, “parents aren’t justified in providing luxuries for their children ahead of the basic needs of others,” isn’t much buttressed by providing extreme examples of poverty zealots who are trying to refrain from loving their children more than they love the children of strangers.

Skipping the section on the Facts about Aid, though, would cause the reader to miss Singer’s horrifying account of fistulus, a condition in which there is a hole (fistula) between the vagina and either the bladder or rectum. This results in urine or feces trickling through the vagina, a foul smell, and subsequent social isolation. The Fistula Foundation is able to cure 93 percent of its patients, and when the girl is ready to go, she is given her bus fare home and a new dress. The cost? Roughly $450.

And so Singer’s book is littered with these kind of uncomfortable statements: “If you have a spare $450 and are thinking about whether to spend it on yourself or to use it to help others, it won’t be easy to find anything that you need nearly as much as a fourteen-year-old girl with a fistula needs an operation. If you have only $50, you can make the same comparison between what the money means to you and what it could mean to someone who is unable to see because of an easily removable cataract.”

Singer's is a challenging vision of what it means to live an ethical life. It turns out that the infamous "baby-killer" proponent of infanticide (who gives away 20% of his income, though you won't hear him mention that in this book) is advocating for the lives of millions of babies. But wrestling with his arguments means that our life of superfluous amenities comes under withering moral fire.