There is an article in the New York Times about the rising interest in studying philosophy as an undergraduate.  Much of the article focuses on the highly rated philosophy department at Rutgers University - right in the backyard of the place we will soon call home.  I hope the Philosophy club will let me hang out with them - maybe they will think I am fresh meat...a willing friend on the journey perhaps.  I really look forward to it - I love the love of wisdom.

Here is the link. 

(HT - Owen Strachan) 

I just jumped off the plane from Newark, NJ for a medium sized three hour layover in the Chicago airport.  On the flight into the windy city I read through an article on a persona I have followed a bit over the years.  The article was in WIRED magazine and was simply titled Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity. Well, maybe that title is not so simple nor the ideas being discussed therein.  Let me try to summarize, in a few words, the work of Ray Kurzweil.

In my opinion, Ray Kurzweil is one of the intellectual geniuses of our times. He has been a bit of a legend in the computer science and artificial intelligence worlds.  I know, that is probably something like .00001 percent of the world's population but he has contributed greatly in inventing technology that has changed the world.  His work has been mainly in pattern recognition and machine text/speech recognition.  He has invented software that can read books out loud to the blind and answer you phone calls for large companies.  Well, maybe the latter one has been a bit of a frustrating experience to some.  Kurzweil's more controversial work however has been as one of the leading proponents of what is known as Strong AI. 

Strong AI holds that human intelligence (even consciousness for that matter) can be reduced (read my previous post on reductionism) to processes similar to a very complex computer.  In other words, if you can mimic human thought, decision making...even emotions, you then have consciousness and self awareness. So in his theory, there will be a day when computers are powerful enough for Skynet to "wake up" make its own decisions and take over the world. Many of you have been exposed to the Strong AI view in pop culture through cinematic exploration.  The aforementioned Skynet of the Terminator lore, HAL2000 of 2001 a Space Odyssey, the weird boy robot flick AI, the bizarre world of Minority Report, Will Smith's rambunctious robot romp in iRobot and the new theistic, philosophical cylons of the new Battlestar Gallictica.

Kurzweil believes that as computational power increases the ability to write a brain simulating, consciousness simulating algorithm draws nearer in time.  In other words, given enough processing power, computers will some day be as human as you.  Hence, his earlier works evolved from The Age of Intelligent Machines to the book I read some years ago entitled The Age of Spiritual Machines.  Now, Kurzweill did not suddenly become a dualist in changing his language to "Spiritual Machines."  His point is simply that future computers will appear to be every bit as conscious as ourselves - they might even worship and read books by the compuDalilama (my term, not his).  His latest update of the book and its ideas deals with what he calls the singularity, and according to Kurzweil, it is near.

In the work, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking Penguin), he speaks of a soon coming day where a radical shift in life as we know it will take place. At this singularity, we will all be uploaded as software into the network, with non perishing "bodies" (if you want) and live forever.  Immortality, the fountain of youth and becoming as gods all in one push of a brain upload button.  Now, if you believe this narrative (and many do not - read the sidebar in WIRED, Never Mind the Singularity, Here's the Science, featuring research of those that think the whole scheme of things is flawed) you will want to stay alive long enough to reach this glorious land.  If you die before we arrive, so to speak, you will not get to gather at the other side with the other comphumans. Interestingly enough a Physicist Frank Tipler in The Physics of Christianity is writing about similar ideas though from a theistic perspective; though I found it very bizarre. If all this sounds a bit nuts, you are not alone. 

One of the philosophical problems with computing=consciousness is that of self-knowledge.  Computers, by nature of their design, perform by processing tasks according to algorithms.  Even the learning and evolving systems, do so according to predetermined rules of logic placed upon them from minds - in this case programming.  In other words, computers process data and symbols , they do not "know" anything.  I actually thought of this over the weekend observing the functioning of a GPS navigation system in a car.

Our realtor during our house hunting in NJ would punch in an address and then a kind woman's voice (perhaps using Kurzweil inspired technology patents) would tell us precisely where to turn to arrive at our destination.  In our case it was usually a small, dumpy, overpriced house...but I digress.  Let me do a bit of a thought experiment with you at this point.  Imagine for a moment that you were in a vehicle where you could not see where you were going yet you could cause a car to turn right or left based upon the cues from a GPS system processing your location.  You would receive data, act upon it, then arrive perfectly at your desired destination.  I felt like I actually did this many, many times sitting in the back seat of a car zipping around New Jersey this weekend.  Now, in our experiment, you would seem to have a great knowledge of the area and a great sense of directions.  Yet there is one glaring problem - you actually have no idea where you are.  You have zero knowledge of New Jersey or any conscious sense of direction.  You simply processed input and data.  Computers process symbols and data, they do not know anything.  They can do many things, appear intelligent, etc but they do not know.  For a more sophisticated argument John Searle's now famous Chinese Room Problem is similar and much more cogent.

I also find massive ethical problems with this view because it will mean the rich and technological persons will keep themselves alive while others will languish in the pre-singularity world of death and decay.  A new elitism will be even more severe in the imagined world of Kurzweil's future.  It seems like a world that will have more selfish people, concerned only about the perpetuation of their own lives.  God forbid the poor masses ever decide to pull the plug (literally) on the machines - we all know that will mean war.  I've seen the Matrix you know.  Or perhaps we will be self-deluded once again that we will make the world perfect this time around.  Perhaps we have forgotten what happens in reality, as well as literature and film, when human beings think they can make the perfect world in their own image.

So what is Kurzweil doing besides promoting his vision of the coming singularity? He is taking hundreds of supplements a day and trying to experiment with any life lengthening idea just to keep his biological existence intact so he can make it.  He is quite wealthy and is spending massive amounts of resources on keeping his ticker going as the clock ticks forward.  Unfortunately none of this can keep one from getting hit by a bus, shot by a crazy person, or succumbing to disease. Yet it does seems that hope for immortality, even eternal life, lives even among materialists.  Many today hope in aliens, hope in getting off this mound called earth by a coming Starship Enterprise and many hope to create our descendants and be transferred into machines by fiber optic transfer (or whatever high bandwidth technology is available at the singularity).  Sadly, some may choose suicide. 

What does all of this reveal about the human soul? I think we see that we long to live, not die.  We long for a better future where the harsh realities of life outside of Eden are brought to an end.  Some choose to trust in the promises of God and resurection for the hope of eternal life.  Others seek to become godlike themselves.  Where does this leave a human being?  In Kurzweil's own description - it has left him lonely.

Note

For all one of you interested in wrestling with these ideas further I recommend the work
Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I. edited by Jay Wesley Richards.

I read these over at the Prosblogian. Perhaps those who are philosophically minded will enjoy.  The Avicenna quote is pretty well known, I had not seen how John Duns Scotus had adapted it.

Those who deny such manifest things need punishment..., for as Avicenna puts it: "Those who deny a first principle should be beaten or exposed to fire until they concede that to burn and not to burn, or to be beaten and not to be beaten, are not identical." And so to, those who deny that some being is contingent should be exposed to torments until they concede that it is possible for them not to be tormented.

Duns Scotus, Reportatio I A prol. q. iii. art. i

And then in the comments, a more kind but obscure quote from one of the men my Son, Thomas Reid Monaghan is named for:

"We may observe that opinions which contradict first principles, are distinguished, from other errors, by this:-That they are not only false but absurd; and, to discountenance absurdity, Nature has given us a particular emotion-to wit, that of ridicule-which seems intended for this very purpose of putting out of countenance what is absurd, either in opinion or practice."

Just in case you wonder who the other folks Thomas is named for, please see the following link from the POC Archives: The Anatomy of a Name

This morning I stumbled across some "interesting" views of the future written by lyricist Jonathan Coulton out of New York.  This guys' music has inspired many amateur/professionals? to design music videos with various 3D, Flash and animation technologies.  I always find people's view of the future reveals much about our worldview.  As someone who likes technology, enjoys the sci-fi genre and somewhat reflective on shared ethics in society I found these to be very interesting and funny.  There are different videos for most of these songs, so I picked the ones I liked the best.  And of course, I don't agree with all of this jazz...but it did give me a chuckle...and helps to see how others see the world. I find the hope extended in the gospel and a future beatific vision to be a different sort of view...

Chiron Beta Prime 

A joyful look at a futuristic Christmas celebration

I Feel Fantastic 

Much akin to Huxley's vision in Brave New World, feeling fantastic in the future means popping lots of pills

The Future Soon 

An ironic poke at futuristic optimism

Peter Singer, the famed (or infamous) "ethicist" from Princeton University has another wonderful meditation out on life and death.  Singer is somewhat of a hero to some and a demon to others for his views on the termination of babies who have severe problems at birth and perhaps up to two years of age...only if the parents "want to" of course.  Singer is a utilitarian at heart and in his thinking. By that I mean he is a consequentialist in terms of his ethical reasoning.  He makes decision about right and wrong based on his understanding of whether suffering will be limited and happiness extended.  Now you may ask "how does one know the future and what a decision will or will not bring?"  Welcome to the wonderful world of consequentialism.  Let me give you some examples in a dialogue:

Lifescape 1

Doctor No: Your baby's chromosomes are abnormal, you will have a child with down's syndrome.  What would you like to do?

Parent Happy Me: [thoughts] this means lots of trouble for us, lots of money we will have to spend to care and raise this child - that will quell our happiness and quality of life.

Doctor No: Most children with downs life very painful lives and die very young.  What would you like to do?

Parent Happy Me: [thoughts] Well, that child will suffer, will not be very happy...after he will not be "normal" and bullies will pick on him.  He will not have high self-esteem because people are mean.  I think we want a do-over.

Lifescape 2

Doctor No: You baby is severely deformed and mentally retarded.  He will probably only life a few years and will need constant medical attention from the highest of professionals.  We are not sure if he will be in pain or not, but his quality of life will not be anything like a normal human being.  What would you like us to do?

Parent Happy Me: [thoughts] This is very hard, what will our lives be like with this child.  But what is the right thing to do?  We need some expert advice

Captain Singer Ethical Crusader: Well, it may be ethical to "end the suffering" of severely challenged human like creatures if it will alleviate suffering and promote the welfare of the parents, and not burden society's resources.

Parent Unhappy Now: Do you mean kill the baby?

Doctor No: Well, kill is a very loaded term, we like to say alleviate suffering for the common good.  To help society with unwanted burdens and make everyone's life better.  In reality, this is a very good thing you are doing for all involved.

Parent Sick to Their Stomach: We just don't know what to do...

Now Dr. Singer is weighing in on another potential problem we are seeing due to the advance of neonatal care and intensive units.  The survival of babies severely premature.  It is coming more common that children are surviving birth into the lower twenty week range (the range where abortions often take place).  Dr. Singer has written an op/ed piece over at the Council for Secular Humanism about one such astounding case (which people this is good by the way) of a girl named Amillia:

In February, newspapers hailed “miracle baby”Amillia, claiming that she is the earliest-born surviving premature baby ever recorded. Born in October at a gestational age of just twenty-one weeks and six days, she weighed only 280 grams, or ten ounces, at birth. Doctors did not expect Amillia to live, as previously no baby born at less than twenty-three weeks had been known to survive. But, after nearly four months in a Miami hospital’s neonatal intensive-care unit, and having grown to a weight of 1,800 grams, or four pounds, doctors judged her ready to go home.

These cases are problematic for Singer and like minded utilitarians.  You see, the care just to attempt and save one of these little ones is: 1) very expensive to society 2) will be very hard on parents and their happiness 3) should many not even be attempted in Singer's opinion.  So Singer's solution to this "problem" we face is to highlight research from out of the land of Australia which proposes a "gray zone" where doctors (see Doctor No above) should consult the parents on their "options" whether to treat the baby or not.  Now, we in no way can save every child - of course some will die with or without this care.  But what is troubling is Singer's disdain for the sentiment in America, that we ought to try and save everyone, despite the cost.  Some revealing portions of his essay.

 

In the United States, although the American Academy of Pediatrics states that babies born at less than twenty-three weeks and weighing less than 400 grams (14.2 ounces) are not considered viable, it can be difficult to challenge the prevailing rhetoric that every possible effort must be made to save every human life.

Emphasis added

So trying to save even the most hopeless cases is based only on rhetoric (empty, vacuous thinking, that has no basis in Singer world).  The essence of his reasoning is found in this paragraph.  I will highlight much of the sloppy thinking and crystal ball future predicting nonsense of some utilitarian reasoning:

In these circumstances, what should doctors—and society—do? Should they treat all children as best they can? Should they draw a line, say at twenty-four weeks, and say that no child born prior to that cut-off should be treated? A policy of not treating babies born earlier than twenty-four weeks would save the considerable expense of medical treatment that is likely to prove futile, as well as the need to support severely disabled children who do survive. But it would also be harsh on couples who have had difficulty in conceiving and whose premature infant represents perhaps their last chance at having a child. Amillia’s parents may have been in that category. If the parents understand the situation, and are ready to welcome a severely disabled child into their family and give that child all the love and care they can, should a comparatively wealthy, industrialized country simply say, “No, your child was born too early”? Bearing these possibilities in mind, instead of trying to set a rigid cut-off line, the workshop defined a “gray zone” within which treatment might or might not be given, depending on the wishes of the parents.

So here we are again - in the gray zone of life and death decisions which Singer says lands "on the wishes of the parents."  However, this is not very accurate.  We spent a week in the Neonatal Intensive care with our son Thomas in August, and I saw these very children. Tiny, precious, human persons.  In these scenarios the parents listen to the doctors. The parents are at one of the most vulnerable and most influenced places in their lives.  Saying it is "up to the parents" is a bit misleading as the parents will very much be influenced by the counsel from doctors and ethicists on these situations.  The question is which worldview will be brought to bear? The one who sees that all life is of equal value and dignity and worthy of our time and effort to love an nurture?  Or the one who thinks certain humans should survive based on their mathematical "good for society" calculations.  Some are amazed when they read of the eugenics movement which was common among intellectual elite less than 100 years ago in western culture.  We should not be surprised, as the seeds of that same thinking are alive and well today. It is found in the gray zone - a world created by people who desire to determine what kinds of persons shall live or die.  

(HT - thanks to Tim Dees for pointing me to the essay)

Ken Samples of the Science/Faith organization Reasons to Believe offers five philosophical reasons that God exists.  The presentation is sound and uses many standard a posteriori arguments for the existence of God.  The visuals are average, perhaps a little too many "white guy looking Jesus" pictures, but overall this is a solid and helpful 10 minute video. 

Not sure if he provided "5 ways" in honor of St. Thomas, but for those who have not read the 5 ways before, here is your homework assignment. 

Today's guest post is from Tim Dee's Fact of the Day:

------------------------------- 

CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST

The word philosopher conjures up an image of an ancient Greek with a long beard and an entourage of young followers.  In this fantasy world, they sit around and issue aphorisms.  But the reality is that philosophers can be just as petty as the rest of us.  This can be seen most clearly in the conflict between the analytic and continental philosophers.

But first, let me talk a little about those two terms, and it's worth noting that it's tough to generalize about the two schools, but let me try anyway. 

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, philosophy had stalled out.  They had been asking the Big Questions - existence, non-existence, God, being, ethics - for a long time, and they had started spinning their wheels. 

On the analytic side, one philosopher, Bertrand Russell, had grown tired of the whole thing, and he decided to strip philosophy down to its logical roots.  One young Austrian, Ludwig Wittgenstein, started showing up at Russell's lectures, and the two quickly became friends.  Shortly after, Wittgenstein locked himself in a cabin in Norway and wrote a book entitled the Tractitus Logico-Philosophicus, which effectively boiled language down to its bare logical elements.

Wittgenstein's book sent shockwaves through the world of philosophy, and Russell decided that this was the new way in philosophy.  The Tractitus attempted to make philosophy less fuzzy; if Wittgenstein and Russell had their way, philosophy would no longer be a brazenly unscientific inquiry into the Big Questions, it would be an extremely scientific dissection of language.  This grew into the analytic school.  The analytic philosophers sought to break language down to its barest elements.  If there was any room left for the fuzzy in analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein blew it away with the last line of the Tractitus, which has since become a manifesto to analytics: "what one cannot speak of, one must remain silent about."  That means that philosophers couldn't ask the Big Questions anymore.

Meanwhile, on the continent (hence "continental") another movement was going on.  Edmund Husserl, a spunky German Jew (who was later booted out of academia during the Nazi period), put together a number of disciplines - math, psychology and philosophy - and came to the conclusion that there was no objective reality.  Everything, Husserl contended, was subjective.  This meant that the things that seemed scientific and mathematical to the analytic philosophers were actually just as flaky and ephemeral as the Big Questions.

Because, to the continentals, everything was subjective, one had to talk about the Big Questions in light of history.  Thus, philosophers became involved in the moment.  They began to write history books and political books, and they began to leap across disciplines.  If there is one person who sums up the continental movement, it is Michel Foucault, a French philosopher who has used history as a means of exploring philosophy.

So the battle lines are drawn between the analytics and the continentals, and the two do not get along.  Since the 1970s, the rift has grown, and now the two will rarely even hold conferences together.

But what makes this spat different is the technique that the analytics have found to push out the continentals. 

In 1989, Brian Leiter, a hard-core analytic, published a set of philosophy program rankings, known as the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR, for short).  In 1996, the PGR went online, and shortly thereafter it became orthodoxy. 

There's just one problem with the PGR: Leiter slanted it toward analytic philosophy.  Thus, programs with excellent analytic departments, such as NYU and Rutgers, were highly rated, while programs with superior continental departments were bumped to the bottom, or left off altogether.  For instance, in 2006, Emory's program, which boasts a top-notch continental department, was simply not ranked.  On the PGR's website, Leiter has posted an essay that amounts to a defense of the relevance and importance of analytic philosophy, and it dismisses continental philosophy in passing.

Stories began to circulate about the effect of the PGR: tales of professors hired or fired in an attempt to impact rankings became commonplace, and finally Richard Heck, then a major analytic professor at Harvard, became worried that the PGR was bullying continentals out of philosophy.  A group of professors joined Heck and posted a petition, but the damage had been done.  Attempts to set up rival rankings for continental programs--such as the Hartmann Report--failed to gain traction.

The net result of all of this is that analytic philosophy runs the show in America these days.  They get the best graduate students, the best rankings, the most funding, and the most clout.  It has little to do with the merits of the two philosophical systems; it has everything to do with the state of the modern university.

 

There a strange idea associated with modern life that I want to explore a bit. My oldest daughter, Kayla, and I have discussed it as a word began to creep into her mind and vocabulary.  The word and idea is that of "luck" or "good fortune" and the way this is looked upon in culture. We are a people who love to talk about being lucky - whether it is when we get a new job, win a few bucks on a scratch off lottery ticket, or meet that special someone to walk down the aisle with.  When good times roll, American people feel and they usually talk about it. 

My noodling on this one goes back to the very early days of of being a Christian guy.  In college there was a zealous Jesus guy who just would not use the word "luck" or the well wishing phrase "good luck."  Now remember, I was sports guy so avoiding the phrase "good luck" is quite an accomplishment.  Saying "good providence" never seemed to work for me and avoiding use of the word "luck" is tough to do in today's vernacular.  It can be done - I hardly ever use the word, but to be honest I don't want to sound like a weirdo just to avoid the term.  But this is a reason I avoid using the concept of luck - not just because I believe in God's providential leading of the affairs of humanity - but because I find the term to be a philosophically vacuous term.  For me, there is simply no such thing as luck, and I find the term to be technically meaningless.  Lets look first at how it is used, then what it reveals truthfully about the human heart, and then try to redeem the feelings we have when we talk about being lucky.

First, we use the term good luck to describe outcomes that we interpret to be pleasant, advantageous to our current life goals/aspirations, or when something "good" comes our way that did not necessarily have to be.  We use the term as we look out of the mass of humanity that is not always experiencing such wonderful coincidences, so we feel a thankfulness and gratitude that we are lucky today even though we see so many who are "less fortunate."  But if we begin to ask questions we quickly see that the concept is meaningless.  The Scottish skeptic David Hume, whom I quoted at the beginning, was right about one thing, to ascribe causal powers to "chance" or "luck" betrays our ignorance of true causes.  Frankly, when something good happens today, many people simply do not have a clue why it is so...so we chalk it up to karma, rabbits feet, or literally our lucky stars.  What does this reaveal about us, this love affair with the empty idea of luck? I find it tells us quite a bit.  Lets turn to the human heart and find what we see in ourselves.s

In ascribing things to luck we are betraying some things which are fundamental to us being human.  First, we believe in objective, real goodness that comes to us at times.  We certainly know that there is a difference between good and bad, pleasant things and evil things, and this knowledge is a huge indicator as to the nature of the universe.  This is the first indicator that luck is a sham.  We know something good has come our way.  Second, we do not have any idea why this has happened to me and not someone else.  We know it does not have to be this way.  Instead of winning the lottery, you could just as easily get hit by a bus today.  Not knowing the source of something happening, we feel thankful, we feel blessed.  Yet not knowing who to thank - we just say we are "lucky," feel good about that and move on in our bliss.  But if we stopped and asked the "why questions," at least every now and then, we would have to face a different reality.  Either the world is under a control that is not our own - for instance, God is providentially guiding all things towards his desired ends.  Or the world is completely out of control and the winds of cursing can as easily befall us as the lucky winds of the day. 

Additionally, we also feel a sense of duty to others in the midst of our good fortune.  We see this in western culture - a duty is felt to others, but many times it is not out of charity or love, but out of guilt that "we have it so good" and "others have it so bad."  With a belief that the world is run be chance, human accomplishment is diminished and human misery is emptied of any meaning.  So we feel good about our luck, but we feel bad about feeling too good when others are getting screwed.  Most of the time we just raise taxes to feel like we have done something.  But what this feeling of duty reveals is an innate sense of justice.   So luck betrays our deepest desires to be thankuful and the universe to be just.  But these two feelings accord with belief in God, but have no grounding in the secular worldview.  For that matter, thankfulness is a strange idea in the pantheist worldview where all is one and all is divine.  You thank everything and in doing so, thank no-one.

So what is luck? Luck is nothing at all - an empty word to wrap around human experience which is related to us being created by God.  I believe people in more secularized Western Culture have a love affair with "fortune" and "luck" because it is a way to avoid reality and continue in what Socrates called an unexamined life.  Such life is empty and trite - and will be tossed onto the rocks when the winds of the world change one's fortune.  For the secular mind, when you have "good luck" there is nobody to thank, but feeling lucky and sharing this with friends may do the trick to keep you moving.  We feel deeply a sense of gratitude but thanksgiving is personal and the secular view is that the universe and its events are impersonal.  The other side of the coin is equally void. When you have "bad luck" there is nobody there to blame, and you are left empty.  Here we see the strange occurrence of people getting angry at the God in whom they do not believe.  Steve Turner wrote a satirical poem called Creed whose postscript exposes the emptiness of chance in the face of tragedy.

If chance be the Father of all flesh,
disaster is his rainbow in the sky,
and when you hear
State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Whites go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!
It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.

So I don't believe in Luck - it is an empty concept, for both the theist and the atheist.  For the theist, we know there is a personal aspect to the universe charged with the purposes of God.  A belief in luck or chance is out of place in the mouth of the believer.  I believe God is active in the affairs of men and any bit of goodness and any bit of pleasant circumstance, I properly call it a blessing and not "good luck."  Any bit of pain, suffering, or evil that befalls my path I believe first came to me through the hands of a good God - I can endure because the end of the story is not the pain, but the things which will be accomplished in and through it. For the atheist, every event may be explained through a series of causal relationships that did not favor anyone, but just took place.  You win some, you loose some - but there is nobody running the games.  So when you feel a deep gratitude, just drop back into the lucky chair - it is an easier place to be and not have to think about the deep mysterious of human life and reality. 

As Hume exhorted us - we can do better than saying all things happen "by chance" as if chance has the causal power to do anything at all.  Yet to take away luck is to either fill the universe with purpose or to empty it of all universal meaning.  Most don't want to make that choice today - after all, American Idol is on again this week and Sanjaya's luck just ran out!

 

JP Moreland, one of the top evangelical philosophers in the world has joined the blogging world.  This is a site to bookmark no doubt.  I'll be checking to see if he writes on issues related to Philosophy of the Mind...

I have respected and benefited greatly from Moreland's works...he has been a valuable guide on many issues for me...though I diverge from him on issues of contra-causal libertarian free will. 

Here is his site over at the Scriptorium. 

The following were notes given along with the message Woe to Him! - Habakkuk 2:6-17 given at the Inversion Fellowship on March 29th 2007. 

A Comparison of Karma and Divine Judgment

There are several views of the world which populate the human landscape each of them wrestling with the various questions we face in our existence. One of the most perplexing issues is that of our own mortality. In fact, death has been said to be the great equalizer, the fate of the rich and powerful and the poor and destitute alike. One of the great mysteries is what happens when we die. Various beliefs have been held throughout time regarding life after death, but none greater than the big two. The eastern philosophy of karma/reincarnation and the widely believed philosophy of divine judgment. People in our culture today are fixated with the idea of Karma. You see it in the obsession of a regular guy named Earl on television, in the writings of Oprah Winfrey show superstar Gary Zukov, and it even appears in a line of Ben and Jerry’s low carb ice-cream.¹ In our culture Karma has become kool and divine judgment is well, too judgmental for many. In this little essay, I want to compare the two and actually show that judgment is much more humane and coherent, though the consequences perhaps more severe.

Karma 101

Karma is one of the main tenants interwoven in the diversity of philosophical views from the east. Eastern philosophy is a literal smorgasbord of ideas, practices, and religious concepts, but there are a few ideas which are universal in the various systems. The Law of Karma, the endless cycle of reincarnation, and the oneness of all things are common threads throughout the various genres of eastern thought. The law of Karma will sound familiar in part to people in the west. At its most basic level it is a teaching that says that all our actions, whether good or bad, have consequences. These consequences form a chain creating your reality into the future. What you do, the choices you make literally “create” your future. The idea of Karma goes beyond a mere understanding that “whatever a man sows, he also reaps” for Karma extends between subsequent lives and existences. Each person builds up positive or negative Karma over the course of this life which then determines their subsequent lives after being reincarnated. A person moves “up” through a succession of being in the lives they live with the hope of escaping the endless cycle of birth and rebirth, which is known by the term samsara. If you have bad Karma you may come back as a dung beetle, good karma may have you return as an upper class Brahman Hindu. So judgment is seen in the movement “upward” and “downward” in this chain of existence. Many western people fail to see that reincarnation is not a good thing to the eastern mind, but a cycle from which the soul desires to escape, to be absolved into the oneness of the universe finally eliminating the illusion of individual existence. I find the karmic view offers true insights on several fronts. First, it acknowledges that we do indeed reap what we sow and our actions do have consequences. Second, it realizes that our actions and choices are moral in nature. Though the eastern view sees good and evil as two sides of the same coin, part of one reality, it is in the view of Karma that eastern philosophy is a bit more honest. Good is good and bad is bad and you better work towards the good or your Karma gauges will be spinning in the wrong direction. Though many put forth the view of Karma as a pathway towards moral living without any view of judgment, Karma has some serious bad Karma of its own.

Problems with Karma

There are several major philosophical and theological problems with Karma but I will only elaborate here on a very short list. First, Karma is a sort of score card for your life, where your good and bad tally up against each other. The problem I see in this is that there is literally “no one” there to keep score. Who is watching your life? Usually the answer is that the universe has a built in law that regulates these things, but there is no discussion on how this could be the case. If your good and bad “add up” it seems that somewhere this reality must be “known” by someone. This makes sense in a world in which God himself is taking our lives into account. Second, the law of Karma knows absolutely no grace. It is an unforgiving brutal taskmaster by which your life is determined by your previous lives. If you have a bad run now, it could be the result of previous incarnations where you were a real jerk. The problem is you know nothing of your former lives and are sort of screwed by them. There is no grace extended to sinners by Karma, sin becomes a millstone around your neck forever and ever through perhaps infinite reincarnations. Finally, there is an unexpected, but inevitable unjust result of Karmic thinking. You would think that this view only holds one responsible for our actions, but in fact it has unbelievably unjust societal consequences. Think about it. Who are the good guys in this life? The ones who had good Karma in previous lives. Who are these people? The upper classes, the “successful” people, the wealthy and the rulers are in their stations in life because they were good in past lives. So it is no coincidence that the Hindu system of caste, where the poor and low caste “deserve” their station in life and should not aspire better, arose from a Karmic philosophical tradition. They are working out bad Karma; these are the views that made the high caste Brahman in India, oppose the work of Mother Teresa with Indian low caste untouchables. She was interfering with them paying for their karma by serving them and helping them. The god of Karma, is the god of caste, which is a system of long term systemic oppression of those who were bad in previous lives nobody knows anything about.

Judgment 101

The biblical view of life after death is a bit different. Like the view of Karma, our actions, both good and evil have consequences, but in our view God is the observer and judge of our lives. He treats us as responsible moral agents in relationship to Him, creation, and other people. We are responsible to God and others for our actions and their consequences. All persons, rich or poor, “successful” or not, powerful or not are all completely equal and responsible for their lives. We live this life before God and when we die our lives will be judged by God and his appointed one, his own Son Jesus Christ. He does not show favoritism in that he will take our sins into account and does not turn a blind eye towards the wrong done on the earth. Wonderfully, the God who is our judge chose to take our place and receive the judgment we deserve for our sins. It is in the gospel that God extends to us the hand of mercy and grace, the very one who will judge our wrongful deeds, against whom we have committed sin, is the one who pays our debt and freely forgives. This is the view of the Bible. God treats us as responsible human beings but willingly provides payment for our sins, atonement is the biblical word, so that we can be reconciled with God and be judged as righteous because of the work of Christ. The book of Hebrews teaches us that it is appointed for a man to live and die and then face judgment. We either face God in our sin or with an advocate and substitute for our sin. Jesus is the one who delivers us from just wrath and judgment of God and all glory and honor goes to him.

The path of Karma makes you the one who receives glory for your good and blames everything bad on the sinner. In the gospel we see that God works by the law of the Spirit of life to set us free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. You might even say he sets us free from the tyranny of the taskmaster of Karma. ²

Would God Sing a Mocking Song?

In this chapter a strange thing occurs. The prophet Habakkuk is given a vision from God. This prophecy is ultimately from God through the prophet. In this vision the nations of the world which had fallen to the Chaldeans rise up in concert to mock the Chaldeans proclaiming the judgment of God upon them in a series of poetic Woes. This is a bit strange because the literary genre of the passage is in the form on an ancient near eastern taunting song. Sort of a poetic, grown up nanny, nanny, boo-boo kind of deal. So at first glance it appears that God is actually mocking the Chaldeans through this song from the nations. This has made some a bit uncomfortable.. Is this a cool thing for God to do? Mock people? After all, he is a loving God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (See Exodus 34:6 Numbers 14:18, Nehemiah 9:17, Psalm 86:15, Psalm 103:8, Psalm 145:8, Joel 2:13, Jonah 4:2). In studying this passage I even found a diverse opinion on the matter in the commentary. Yet it is clear from both the literary genre and the rest of Scripture that though God is merciful and loving, he also will in no way clear the wicked. The prophet Nahum reminds us of this as he opens his prophecy: The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty. (Nahum 1:3a). O. Palmer Robertson has some good words for us on what God is doing here:

It might appear beneath the dignity of God to embarrass the proud before the watching world. But a part of his reality as the God of history includes his public vindication of the righteous and his public shaming of the wicked. His glory before all his creation is magnified by the establishment of honor for the humble and disgrace for the arrogant. In this case, the shame of Babylon shall be as extensive as its conquests. All of them, all those nations conquered by Babylon, shall join the mockery. Even the tiniest of nations shall rehearse these sayings without fear of reprisal.³

Lest we become arrogant and proud reading this, we must not forget the devastating reality that we ourselves have no moral high ground to mock anyone. We ourselves are not better than the Chaldeans; if not for the grace of God in Christ, we ourselves would not arrive at any sure fate. David Prior gives a great reminder here:

The heart of God is broken both by the suffering of the violated and by the sinfulness of the violator. The woes are torn from that broken heart in holy indignation. It is our job, not to take the moral high ground, but to express the holy heart of God…That is the tone and thrust of these five woes in Habakkuk.⁴

Before we go pronouncing our own woes and singing our own mocking songs, we should be humbled by the gospel and compelled to share Jesus with those around us. For us and our friends our prayer is to humble ourselves before the foot of the cross and allow God to be the only one who publically humiliates the wicked in his time.

A Tough Question of Responsibility Before God

An objection can be made at this point in the book of Habakkuk. God has raised up the Chaldeans to do his will in the earth. Namely, to bring disaster and judgment upon the wayward people of Judah. God then holds the Chaldeans responsible for their sinful actions, which he used to accomplish his purpose. Do you feel the tension? How can God blame them when he sovereignly used them for his purposes? At this point we must remember a few things. First, the Chaldeans, though raised up on the world scene by God, were human beings and not puppets. Second, in conquering the nations around them, including Judah, they were doing exactly what they wanted to do. They did what their hearts desired most—namely to exalt themselves and brutally conquer others. So we must see that there are two levels of willing and acting at play, that of God and that of human beings. God allowed them to continue in their desires to conquer and destroy. His hand did not hold them back, but his hand in no way forced them to do something other than what they wanted to do. So the Chaldeans are guilty, even though their guilty actions were used, in a larger framework, to fulfill the purposes of God.

For both the will of God and will/desires of people to be connected, theologians have puzzled for years on how this works. The Scriptures are very clear on two points here. God is sovereign over all things, using both good and evil for his good purposes. Second, human beings are responsible for their actions before a completely just and holy God. If God is in Sovereign control over people and nations, then he wills all things for his purposes. If God holds us accountable our actions are very much “ours” and will be judged accordingly. This has led many theologians and thinkers to suggest the kind of “free will” that humans posses to be “freedom of desire” or “freedom of inclination.”⁵

Simply put, our hearts always do just what we desire most , and our decisions are not random and without causes. In this view, a human being, without the work of God in her life, would persist in sin and rebellion (See Romans 3). It is only when God’s grace changes us in the gospel that we now desire God and his ways and are set free to live for him. Understanding that we have the freedom to do our deepest desires demonstrates that God is right in judging the Chaldeans’ sins and it also shows us how God is still Sovereign. He in no way is caught off guard by the “free will decisions” of people who some say are spinning his world hopelessly out of control. The Bible presents a God who is big enough to use the evil of people in his purposes, but in no way relieves us of our responsibility for our sins. Yet there is the offer of full pardon in the work of Christ. Take it! Then thank God every day for him.

Notes:

• See Karb Karma at http://www.benjerry.com/our_company/press_center/press/bfyfactsheet.html
• For more on Eastern philosophy you can read the sections by LT Jeyachandran in Norman Geisler and Ravi Zacharias, Who Made God? And Answers to Over 100 Tough Questions on Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003). Additionally, though I heartily disagree with his views of election and predestination, Paul Copan’s Chapter Why Not Believe in Reincarnation from That’s Just Your Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001) is an excellent treatment of the problems in Eastern philosophy.
• O. Palmer Robertson, The Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1990), 185. Emphasis Added.
• David Prior, The Message of Joel, Micah & Habakkuk: Listening to the Voice of God (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1999), 244.
• For more on this kind of freedom see Bruce Ware’s God’s Greater Glory—The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith (Wheaton: Crossway, 2005) for the best treatment of God’s providence and evil as well as a treatment of the shortcomings of Libertarian/Contra Causal understanding of free will. For those who are bold you can take up Jonathan Edwards Freedom of the Will—very difficult reading, but worth it for those who wade in.

KASPAROV AND DEEP BLUE
by Tim Dees 

It was roughly ten years ago that the final Kasparov-Deep Blue match took place.  If you don't remember, that match was the second of two matches that pitted the world's greatest chess player against an IBM supercomputer, nicknamed Deep Blue.  In the first match, the computer put up a strong challenge, but eventually crumpled. 

The second match, however, went quite differently.  The IBM programmers made demands that Kasparov found tough to accept, such as the ability to tweak Deep Blue's software between games.  Kasparov eventually relented.  During the match, Kasparov noticed that the computer was making moves of exceptional creativity and originality.  He had never seen a computer make such moves before.  He accused the programmers of cheating, either by using a human to make some moves, or by reprogramming Deep Blue in mid-game.  To prove they were cheating, Kasparov asked to see the log files.  The programmers refused.

To this day, Kasparov maintains that the Deep Blue programming team swindled him.  But the more interesting thing is that both Kasparov's earlier win and later loss against Deep Blue demonstrates something profound about the human mind. 

When a programmer teaches a computer to play chess, he essentially has it analyze every possible board state.  So it takes every possible move and analyzes it based on the fallout from that move.  This takes enormous processing power.  That's why Deep Blue had to be a supercomputer, and that's why computers have gotten better at chess as they've gotten faster.  But the human mind works nothing like that.  The brain has nowhere near the processing power to compute trillions of possible board states.  So it must be playing by some other system, and a system that is far smarter than anything we've come up with on a computer.

There are other games, however, for which we understand how the brain works.  Backgammon, for instance.  In backgammon, a computer that uses the same processes that Deep Blue used (looking at each possible board state given trillions of possible moves) will lose to a below-average player consistently.  In the 1970s, however, computer scientists started using neural networks to play backgammon.  Neural networks are systems that work very much like neurons in the brain.  After using the neural network programming, the machine was still terrible at backgammon.  But then the programmers tried something different: they allowed the computer to play a few hundred games to train the neural network to play the game.  After that, the computer could handle even the best opponent. 

Neural networks can run on slow computers (like the brain), so computers have gotten no better at backgammon since the '70s.  But neural networks have been unsuccessful at playing chess.  So we're still left wondering what's going on in Kasparov's brain.

 

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Comments Requested - I would love your thoughts on the relationship of brains to computers, and the differences between minds, consciousness and computational machines.  Also, if anyone has knowledge of pattern recognition vs. sequential processing, that would be cool as well.

 

Alvin Plantinga, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has written a scathing critique of Richard Dawkins The God Delusion.  You can read the review from the current version of Books and Culture Magazine.

My favorite little zinger is the following:

You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take Dawkins' main argument seriously.

A great read for all those who are following the new more aggressive bread of atheists today.  For those interested in the title of this post, to Plantingize was once defined by atheistic philosopher Daniel Dennet as "making something that was believed in the middle ages sound very compelling again."  Alvin gets after it for theism.

There is quite a bit of discussion going on relating to John Piper's recent use of the language "God kicks your ass" at the Passion 07 conference.  Below are some comments I threw in the mix over at Challies.com regarding Piper's choice of words and Dr. Wayne Grudem's subsequent exhortation. 

Good discussion. I think what is missing is a real discussion of philosophy of language. Now, I am a realist so I believe that all of our linguistic symbols and signifiers have a referent. In other words, reality is not created and constructed by our words. All languages refer to things which are real in the created space/time order or metaphysical realities as is the case of language referring to God, souls, abstract ideas (sets of numbers etc.) Additionally we may logically rearrange ideas with our language as when we "refer" to pink unicorns.

The reason we can call something feces, poo-poo, etc. is that it refers to something. Additionally our language that God "kicks our ____" (choose your word) also speaks to an actual state of affairs that obtains. Now, when discussing profanities and obscenities Mr. Swindle makes a very important distinction above between the two so I will not repeat it here. (Here it is noted  that a profanity is speaking of something holy in a way that belittles, blasphemes...profanes.  Obscenities are that which is vulgar or offensive)  Yet, with the case of obscenities, one must discuss the usage of language within a cultural/linguistic group. Dr. Grudem has done this in stating the following:

A number of different words can denote the same thing but have different connotations, some of them recognized as "unclean" or "offensive" by the culture.

The problem here arises because we must ask "which culture" - There is no easily arrived at shared norm in English speaking culture today to which we can refer. If one follows what is allowable by censors on television, then ass is certainly not an obscenity at all. It perhaps was 50 years ago, but it in no way is "offensive, vulgar, etc." in the mainstream today. If however one means to "the Chrisitan community" we are again mired to differentiate acceptible language within certain subcultural groupings of Christians. Should Piper's language be considered obscene if his audience found no offense in it whatsoever? Or if someone actually took offense to it somewhere on the internet, or in the car listening to it on CD? In regards to language I believe we must realize that though reality is not constructed by language, things such as obscenities are quite communally oriented. Many words which would cause shame, derision in some parts of the body of Christ are completely benign and venacular to the culture at large. Words like "suck" "pissed off" are quite normal on the street. Many Christian converts, those who did not grow up in a certain sub culture, would have been right at home with Piper's remarks; perhaps discipleship will lead them to saying things other than "Kick your ___" or even dropping the whole "kicking" metaphor altogether. But I think what was communicated was more truthful, honest, and biblically faithful to some of Dr. Piper's hearers than just about anything I could substitute. Perhaps many who are not regularly engaged with real, worldly, non Christian speakers are outraged by someone saying "that sucks" - but believe me, in our "culture" this sort of language would not come close to meeting a dictionary definition of obscenity as: "Something or an utterance that is disgusting to the senses abhorrent to morality or virtue."

Reality, including truth and morality is fixed. I am not advocating for any sort of relativism at all. All the verses Dr. Grudem cited refer to real states of affairs before God which we must yield and obey. Yet they refer to orientations of the heart and affections and then expressions of these with words and actions. It is precisely here where it requires wisdom and discernment. To know what is corrupting talk and what is edifying in our community. Does it move one towards idolatry, self worship, the degradation of others, hatred of neighbor, profaning that which is holy, does it titilate, tear down, provoke unrighteous anger, mock, etc, etc. These are the questions we must ask for these things happen in our souls and in our communities. Does a Christian, who is looking at the death of his infant child and says "this present age sucks" committ a heinous sin? Or has he said something real and true about life outside of the garden in the language he finds as home. The language which we use to describe our inner states as well as the states of the world does shift. So my bottom line is this. I think such conversations about "corrupting talk and crude joking" will always happen within the body of Christ. Some calling for Piper's head because he said ass, others saying he didn't do a thing wrong. In the spirit of loving our brothers, our neighbors, we should not seek to offend one another, push the edges simply to ruffle others, etc. This is immature and sophomoric. Yet neither should we claim the definitive high ground above others whose language is a bit rougher than the small tribe in which we make our home. They might just be communicating gospel truth to others. Love covers a multitude of sins and helps us on in this conversation so please don't cuss me out nor smugly dismiss the discussion.

In part one of my mini series on the new atheism I thought it best to give some background to the narrative underlying atheistic thinking. For we all know that every worldview tells a story, a story which serves as the ground for understanding from within the worldview. Though its adherents may deny this, the new atheism of our day holds a large philosophical story as an interpretative framework for all its views and teaching. In other words, itt holds to a certain a meta-narrative. A meta-narrative is an overarching story by which everything else is interpreted and framed. Let me give an example for the readers of Power of Change which we would be familiar.

The Christian faith has a large over-arching story by which we build other areas of knowledge. The Christian meta-narrative is at times described with the following terms: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration. We believe that God created the world in pristine goodness. He then made human beings in the very image of God (imago dei) and as such our creation was a very good thing. We also believe that human beings sinned and rebelled against their creator resulting in this present world being under a curse. In such we see both goodness and evil in the world, both design and disruption, teleology and disteleology. In this age we hold that God has pursued creation by making covenants and entering relationships with his creatures. Then, in the fullness of time, God’s eternal plan culminated in the person and work of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, to finalize the work of God to redeem a people to be his own possession. The work of Jesus redeems us from the curse and we now await the consummation of the age with the restoration of all things. Creation will no longer groan and be in upheaval. Humans will be under the divine rule of King Jesus, the new heavens and new earth will overtake this present age reality and an eternal state of peace and blessing will commence. All things will then be fully reconciled to God and his people will rule and reign with him in his Kingdom. From within this story we interpret reality. It is how we see. From it we believe several things:

• The universe was created by a reasonable God. The created world is therefore both real and intelligible to the human mind
• Scientific study is discovering how the world is designed and created by a rational, purposeful mind…namely God. By reason, we may discover and learn true knowledge about the universe
• Human beings have immense intrinsic value as creations of God
  
• Human beings are uniquely responsible to their creator for their actions, be they good or evil
• Humans are separated from God, creation, and each other due to their sin which must be remedied. Our hearts and actions are by nature bent towards evil and we necessarily are under the wrath of a just and holy God.  The implications are that we are separated from God, alienated from one another, with our very souls living with self-deception and fracture.
  
• God has graciously dealt with sin and death through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. 
  
• Human flourishing is found in being reconciled to our Creator and then using our lives to reflect his designs, desires, and decrees on the earth

Just an example.

Likewise, the atheistic worldview also has a story to tell by which they make their truth claims. Here is an example from a recent article in the New York Times.

The Enlightenment story has its own version of Genesis, and the themes are well known: The world woke up from the slumber of the “dark ages,” finally got in touch with the truth and became good about 300 years ago in Northern and Western Europe. As people opened their eyes, religion (equated with ignorance and superstition) gave way to science (equated with fact and reason). Parochialism and tribal allegiances gave way to ecumenism, cosmopolitanism and individualism. Top-down command systems gave way to the separation of church from state, of politics from science. The story provides a blueprint for how to remake and better the world in the image and interests of the West’s secular elites.

Atheists Agonistes By RICHARD A. SHWEDER New York Times Published: November 27, 2006. (Also available here without subscription

This story is the reason we see things like the war between science and religion propagated by those from the enlightened crowd. The story is one of scientific, secular man fighting ignorance and superstition on behalf of the good of all mankind; kind of sounds like caped crusaders when you think about it. This is far from the truth. The reality is that science emerged from a people who held deep religious beliefs about the world. In fact many have made the argument that it is precisely the beliefs of Christian monotheism in Europe, which allowed scientific progress to be made. This is beyond the scope of this post so I’ll refer you to the works of Jaki, Duhem, and Pearcy/Thaxton for that discussion. Back to the atheistic metanarrative. Much of the ground for a worldview is “believed in,” it is a philosophical dictum held by all true believers. The grand story believed by the atheist is that of philosophical naturalism. If we do not understand this, we will not be able to understand our atheistic friend’s claims, arguments, and allergies to the very idea of the supernatural. So let us take a walk into naturalism as a philosophy.

Naturalism defined

Many people in our culture would see the Naturalistic worldview, that nature is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be, as a new development. Yet the historically informed know well that human history has been populated by naturalists as well as those with their eyes set upon deities. Though the “nature is all there is crowd”, has never held sway in large number on any culture, it is nevertheless not a new idea. The naturalist lineage of ideas traces back to the Ancient Greek atomists and experienced a rebirth during the renaissance in Europe much in the rediscovery of ancient Greek Skeptics such as Sextus Empricus. The view holds that our world is a closed system of cause and effect with nothing existing "outside" of nature and therefore nothing acting upon the world. No gods, devils, angels, demons, immaterial human souls, or real universal ethical truths existing at all. This is the story from which the new atheists spin both their rhetoric and scholarship. They simply see anything outside of matter/energy/space/time as silly, ridiculous, and misinformed. You can see this exemplified by the recently and cleverly created Flying Spaghetti Monster (if you have a good sense of humor, it is a clever deal - wrong, but clever). The Spaghetti Monster is the creator behind the “intelligent design” of the universe. The claim is that saying “God designed the world” is just about the same as saying “Flying Spaghetti Monster designed the world.” For those who by default cannot accept any sort of supernatural being, the concept of “God” is just silly and indefinable. You would need revelation from God to know his being, works and character. But of course if their can be no God in your story, this is of course just ridiculous. Naturalism has a very strong appeal and has grown in influence in Western culture over the last several centuries. Let us look at a few of its strengths to see why it has so powerful appeal on some people.

Naturalism – the exaltation of empiricist epistemology

One of the reason naturalism is so compelling is that it exalts empiricist epistemology. An epistemology is a theory of knowledge, or how we come to know things in the world. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, empiricism is defined as follows:

We have no source of knowledge in S or for the concepts we use in S other than sense experience.

See Rationalism and Empiricism at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/ 

In other words, empiricism holds that knowledge and truth about the world is acquired through empirical investigation and the scientific method. In order to come to knowledge about something, we form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis with an experiment whose results are observable with our senses and is repeatable by others who can verify the truth. With this method in hand, many great things have been brought to the world by the minds of men. Let’s look at the real strengths claimed by proponents of naturalism.

Strengths of the Naturalistic Worldview

It has produced great goods for human kind – the examples of the great things brought to the earth from scientific and empirical research are astounding. Advances in health, medicine, communications, transportation cannot be overlooked. The scientific method and engineering have extended life spans, eased burdens of suffering, and given us really cool MP3 players to play with. In all seriousness, science is a great good to mankind.

It is accessible to people of all cultures – Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, etc. can all use this method to study things in the world and arrive at a shared knowledge of many things. No one argues over what we observe in a test tube. Well, maybe you do, but after a while consensus arrives in the process of good science. For instance, no one will argue today that water is a compound that is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. Whether you believe Muhammad is the final messenger of Allah or not does not disqualify one for understanding basic chemistry.

Though these strengths are present, naturalism has gross weaknesses as a philosophy and it is my opinion that its strengths are actually stolen goods from another worldview. It is a worldview in which scientific realism is a distinct and expected view of the created world…but I am jumping ahead of myself. Smile. To a few weaknesses of naturalism/empiricism

Weaknesses of Naturalism

It is is self-refuting – Empiricism by nature is self-refuting. It is embarrassingly evident to all today that the claim “the only things that count as true knowledge are verifiable by our senses” is itself not verifiable by empirical investigation. Many in philosophical circles recount the embarrassing verification principle of the logical positivists of the early 20th century. The system simply logically eats itself. Its own primary truth is not verifiable by the theory. There is a good article available on the Vienna Circle and its logical positivism for those interested.

It is incomplete view of reality – It is accepted based on beliefs which cannot be demonstrated by naturalism. Some theistic philosophers have done some devastating work on the reliability of reason from “within a naturalistic framework.” Based upon naturalistic presuppositions our minds are nothing but the bumping together of atoms in the brain of a complex and specified ape. If our minds are the result of a random process, what right do we have to “believe” that our thoughts and logic have anything to do with reality? Philosopher Richard Taylor gives a fascinating example in his story of the “Road To Wales.” Let me summarize:

If we were traveling by train and looked out upon the hillside and saw an arrangement of rocks precisely configured to convey the message “Welcome to Wales!” what would we think? If the rocks were lying in that configuration by a completely random, unintelligent process, we would be fools to believe that it was communicating something “true” to us. In other words, if you thought you were actually going into Wales based on a random falling of rocks, you would not be rational to believe this. But, however, if the rocks were arranged by an intelligent agent, one would be right to believe the message found in the configuration of rocks.

If our existence is a random movement of atoms by the chance laws of nature, one is not justified in “trusting their messages” to tell us the truth about reality. If naturalism is true, we are completely unjustified in thinking our thoughts somehow tell the truth about reality. It is arrogant and ungrounded for us to believe the electrochemical machinations of the brain are arriving at anything remotely related to “truth.” However, if our minds are not the result of random, unintelligent processes, we would be justified that we have been designed to understand, think and process reality. This of course is a variation on the Argument From Reason put forth by many thinkers over time. For those interested, you can see the following.

Books, Chapter 2 - Naturalism in Ronald Nash, Life’s Ultimate Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy, CS Lewis’ Miracles, Victor Reppert’s CS Lewis’ Dangerous Idea. 

Web Sites: Robert Koons, Lewis on Naturalism, Doug Grouthis’ The Great Cloud of Unknowing, Victor Reppert’s The Argument from Reason

It does not see itself as the faith-story that it really is: Using a bit of  sarcasm, let me demonstrate with a short myth I crafted some years ago:

A long time ago, longer than any of you can comprehend there was the nothing. The nothing was infinitely small and infinitely dense, a mathematical concept called a singularity. This nothing just exploded “by chance” and went from nothing to a lot of things really fast. These things, mainly hydrogen, quickly began to combine. Overcoming the strong repulsive force, the weak gravitational force drew all this stuff together into stars. Everything came from these stars. Some of these eventually exploded in supernovas, further spreading and reorganizing the nothing. Eventually our own planet earth came from this nothing. This earth was really lucky. It would be the perfect distance from, the right kind of star to support intelligent life. It would be tilted at exactly the right angle to create seasons for growing and harvesting food. Luckily there was a soup, and there were some inorganic elements in that soup that got feeling a little frisky. They started to jump together to form amino acids, and luckily some of these were of the proper orientation and fell into the precise order to form proteins. These proteins were lucky to be folded in such a way to be useful to form all the machinery necessary to form cells. From these cells, combining and reproducing over a real long time, more complex life came about. Mutations and death and we end up with you. I’m glad we were smart enough to figure all this out. Instead of the world and life being designed and fused with meaning and purpose (which it appears). We are the result of blind chance plus matter plus time; there is no other meaning to life. And we all lived happily ever after because we are all good and nice blobs of reorganized nothing (except for the possibility of atomic bombs, terrorists, religious wing nuts, comets smashing into the earth, global warming, and swarms of nano-bots forming a gray goo that kills us all.)

Now I am having a bit of fun here to show a point. I know some secular folk are a bit red in the face for me doing this. I do want to say that I once believed this meta-narrative – the lucky star dust story. I just want everyone to agree that even the stories many of us accept as true can seem a bit far-fetched when we look at them at face value. We all need to know how our worldview sounds to those who are not true believers.

It is stealing capital from theistic worldviews - To give life meaning and value, atheists have to steal from other worldviews in order to give life meaning. They readily accept that life has no “ultimate meaning” and Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, have all affirmed the absurdity of life and its meaninglessness. Because nihilism is literally unlivable as a philosophy, many atheists today choose “local meanings” to create meaning for their lives. My life is meaningful because “W, X, Y, Z” where one might choose “Family, Success, Music, Sports” or whatever to give life “my meaning.” I will cover this in a coming entry, but I want to say here. Local meaning is not meaningful unless one denies what he already knows about ultimate reality. I do think this is done daily by many people – just don’t think about the big picture – that will bum you out. Just have sex, eat food, laugh, love and try to enjoy life before you die. Such daily distraction and self-deception must be the case if atheism is true. The problem is you must, in practice, deny the implications of your own worldview to do so. Some have even gone as far to say, that as a society, we need to tell ourselves Noble Lies to get by. I personally, prefer noble truths to noble lies. (No hat tip to the Buddha here; for a look at the Noble Truths of Buddhism, see my post – Buddhist Insight and Christian Truth)

It is arrogant and full of pride – Not that this is indicative of just one worldview, but just take a quick read at Stephen Pinker’s recent comments in the Harvard Crimson to see the “we are smarter than you” sort of view that gets contagious among the new atheists.

In conclusion, this first post was written to remind us of something as we go to several other topics surrounding the new atheism. It is important to remember that “Naturalism” is their story and they are sticking to it. This will help us understand why they teach, believe, and at times spew vitriol towards faith. There is a more excellent path – neither blind faith in believing nonsense, nor acting as if there is a “faith-less or story-less” worldview out there. It is an ancient path set forth by the prophets, the apostles, and men such as Augustine and Anselm in days past.

Fides Quaerens Intellectum – Faith (in God) seeking Understanding

That's my song...at 11:30 on Tuesday, December 5, in the year of our Lord 2006. 

Justin Taylor has a great little post to help us how to think through arguments presented in the public square.  I highly recommend going to this post and doing the little exercise recommended.

Learning to love God with our minds...a good path 

In the coming weeks I will be trickling out (without a production schedule) a blog series I am calling The Nature of the New Atheism - There has been a bit of a buzz in the media as of late about certain thinkers and leaders many are calling the New Atheism (See Wired Magazine Article - The Crusade Against Religion). 

Recently I have finished a book featuring the thoughts of Bad Religion front man Greg Gaffin, read some of the recent articles on the net and ordered another book by the atheist crusader Sam Harris.  I was thinking of reviewing books, engaging the articles, etc. but then had a bit of a different idea this morning.  What I propose I do is to cover some of the main ideological thrusts from the contemporary (really not all that new) atheistic front in our culture highlighting the books/works of various thinkers along the journey.

So in brief, here is my proposed outline with a brief abstract for each of the five stops on the path.  These entries I hope will be written well, but they will not be research papers handling all the breadth and depth of each topic.  My prayer is that they would serve as food for thought and dialog for us in these important times.

1. Naturalism as the overarching meta-narrative - the atheistic worldview has philosophical naturalism as its foundational story.  The view holds that our world is a closed system of cause and effect with nothing existing "outside" of nature and therefore nothing acting upon the world.  No gods, devils, angels, demons, non material human souls, universal ethical truths existing at all.  This is the story from which they spin both their rhetoric and scholarship.
2. Man de-centralizing man - For millennia human beings have thought that they inhabited a special and unique space in the cosmos.  Man, as it were, sat upon a throne at the top of the chain of being, a crowned creature in a world of matter, energy, things living and without life.  The atheistic project has sought to take man off of this throne and remove his crown.  Human beings are but a fortunate convergence of time + matter + chance - a combination which has deceived us into thinking we were special, that we had souls, that consciousness was spiritual, even made in the imago dei.
3. The primacy of the brain and “evolutionary wiring” - With the advent of neuroscience and the continued creation of computational devices which mimic "thinking" (think...your computer) much is being said today which reduces all consciousness to the function of specialized matter, localized inside your skull.  Ethics, language, sin, and religion are now matters of localized brain function brought into play by the work of evolution.  Over the years we were fashioned into "meat machines" whose brains foster all these illusions upon us.  Morality, God, that you are a soul not just a body etc. are just projections of human brains.  This area goes sci-fi really quickly - so we'll have some fun with this one.
4. The Fear of Religion and Anti-Religious crusading - With our world embattled by Islamic terrorism, the secularist is now setting aside his postmodern tolerance (well, only a few loud ones are) to rant against the evils of religion.  Not simply the religion which blows up one's self in the name of Allah, but ALL religions of every stripe.  They are outmoded evolutionary hang-ups that we need to grow out of and become enlightened naturalists who will bring utopia to the earth...or at least get us colonizing space before we blow ourselves to smithereens. 
5. Why Atheism is not the major boogy man it once was - Really, atheism is not the big bad enemy it was in the 19th century Europe and America.  There are new enemies now at the gates of belief.  It remains a formidable element of thought in our culture which we must engage (ie - why I am even writing this) but there are other views which I believe hold more challenge in the future of Christian Orthodoxy. I will discuss the challenges facing atheism and the new boogies in the final post.
   

Now, I just pray I can complete this sucker before Thomas Reid turns 1 in August of 2007.  Seriously, I hope I can crank these out over the next month or so.  Pray for me will you - I promise I have too much to do than try and write this stuff - but what do you do with an idea that grips tightly onto your soul...

Should be fun. 

This morning at the Desiring God National Conference, Vodie Bauchman gave a great message entitled The Supremacy of Christ and Truth in a Postmodern World.  It was very compelling and passionate plea for the truth of the Christian gospel in contrast to a secular view.  Tim Challies summarizes the message here.  

Though I thought this message was very good, it should have
been titled "The Supremacy of Christ and the Truth in a Modernistic World" - Bauchman clearly represented a humanistic/nihilistic worldview that he called "Postmodern secular humanism" - this view was not a postmodern one. 

Just for interest, Bauchman asked four questions of worldviews which I find helpful: 1) Who am I? 2) Why I am here? 3) What is wrong with the world? 4) How to we make that wrong right? Seeing how Bauchman answered these for "postmodern secular humanism" it will be evident that he was representing a modernistic view not a postmodern one:

Secular Humanist Perspective

Who am I? You are nothing! You are an accident, a mistake. You are a glorified ape and that is all you are. You are the result of random evolutionary processes. There is no rhyme, no reason, no purpose.

Why am I here? To consume and enjoy. No amount is ever enough as we always want a little bit more. All that matters is power. The answers to the first two questions bring about the social Darwinism that has caused such harm to the world.

What is wrong with the world? People are either insufficiently educated or insufficiently governed. People either don't know enough or they aren't being watched enough.

How can what is wrong be made right? More education and more government. Teach people more stuff. The problem is that if you take a sinful human being and teach him more, you create a person with greater ability to destroy. Then we govern them more, but who governs the governors?

 

This is a good critique of the worldview that flowered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but I do not see this being a view held by postmoderns.  To illustrate, I am going to track through the four questions as they might have been answered by that view.

Who am I? A postmodern reply would be along the lines of the ecclectic self.  A person is how they are self-defined through their choices and cultural proclivities.  One may choose to self-identify with certain groups, causes, styles, beliefs, brands, music, film etc.  The postmodern person can build their self how they see fit.  It is a fundamental denial of an ontological and universal human nature...in its place is substituted a constructed self made in the image of the choices of the autonomous man.

Why am I here? We are here...there is not an ultimate explanation for this fact.  Due to this reality, and my felt need for meaning, the postmodern desire is to create this meaning in community and live it there.  Ultimate metanarratives are replaced by mini narratives which we create (with language) and enjoy our together.

What's wrong with the world?  Human beings have for millenia had the perchant to absolutize the views of their tribe.  As a result peoples have sought to conquer, destroy, and oppress others with their absolutist ideologies...many times using such elegant tools of persuasion such as tanks.  This in the postmodern mind is very bad [don't ask if it is absolutely bad - that would be obnoxious of you]

How can this wrong be made right? Human beings should embrace a tolerant view of the world where all views are equally valued, even celebrated, and human beings are thereby free, without fear, to create meaning and enjoy the creation and enjoyment of their selves.

I think thinking through how the gospel Truth confronts these issues and fulfills the longings behind them, would be an interesting talk to hear Dr. Bauchman address.

On a final note - Tim Challies is summarizing the sessions on his site - they are very good summaries of the messages given.  Additionally, Desiring God will be providing the audio for download, free of charge, later in the week.  Isn't free a good thing?

I posted this as a comment elsewhere, but thought it might be an interesting read...now it was not written as a research piece, and while I was stupid tired, but I think it may be helpful in understanding the times in which we live...

The question was asked about whether in all our discussions and debates about Postmodernism and ministry, are people really asking the philosophical questions today or are these merely intramural debates which are perhaps distracting from the main issues folk are wrestling with.
 

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Continue reading "Being, Knowing, and a long long story..." »

Newsweek has an article they are calling The New Naysayers which chronicles the work of several atheists who think religion is the root of all evil.  It is interesting that the article would call Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins new faces in the atheistic world of things.  Dawkins is a well known Darwinist bull dog and Dennett is highly active with many publications which are far from friendly towards belief in God.  In fact, Dennett is invovled with the Center for Naturalism which desires to purge the world of superstitious religious beliefs.  Interestingly enough I plan on reading Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon here in the next few months.  Anyway, the article is an interesting read for those who like to know what the leading thinkers in unbelief are up to.  Here are a few examples of the kinds of explanations of life you get with this group of people.  Feel the love from the Just so stories world of Evolutionary Psychology.  It simply demonstrates what I have always found as a terrible weakness in naturalistic thought - that of explaining the prescriptive nature of ethics.  This feeble attempt to explain altruism and supererogatory acts is week enough in giving a reason why there is morality (descriptive nature of ethics - which explains what is), but it does absolutely nothing to tell you why one ought to be moral tomorrow.  You simply can do what ever the heck you want...as long as you can get away with it.

But Dawkins attempts to show how the highest of human impulses, such as empathy, charity and pity, could have evolved by the same mechanism of natural selection that created the thumb. Biologists understand that the driving force in evolution is the survival and propagation of our genes. They may impel us to instinctive acts of goodness, Dawkins writes, even when it seems counterproductive to our own interests—say, by risking our life to save someone else. Evolutionary psychology can explain how selfless behavior might have evolved. The recipient may be a blood relation who carries some of our own genes. Or our acts may earn us future gratitude, or a reputation for bravery that makes us more desirable as mates. Of course, the essence of the moral law is that it applies even to strangers. Missionaries who devote themselves to saving the lives of Third World peasants have no reasonable expectation of being repaid in this world. But, Dawkins goes on, the impulse for generosity must have evolved while humans lived in small bands in which almost everyone was related, so that goodness became the default human aspiration.

Or try this on for size.  I could replace my worship of the Trinitarian God, who loved me and gave himself up for me with the worship of [Gm1m2/r²]. 

On the science Web site Edge.org, the astronomer Carolyn Porco offers the subversive suggestion that science itself should attempt to supplant God in Western culture, by providing the benefits and comforts people find in religion: community, ceremony and a sense of awe. "Imagine congregations raising their voices in tribute to gravity, the force that binds us all to the Earth, and the Earth to the Sun, and the Sun to the Milky Way," she writes.

Praise Gravity from whom all cohesion flows, praise that mathematical reality here below, praise it for destroying us with black holes, praise quasars, red dwarfs and wormholes....aaaaaaamen. Give me a break. 

I personally worship the one whose mind designed gravity and the marvelous created universe in which it operates.

(HT - Ben Vastine for pointing me to the Newsweek piece)