Wittgenstein and Hope beyond hope

Recently a friend of mine posted a neat quote by Wittgenstein:

One can imagine an animal angry, fearful, sad, joyful, startled. But hopeful? And why not? A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe that his master will come the day after tomorrow? —And what can he not do here? —How do I do it? — What answer am I supposed to give to this?Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of language? That is to say, the manifestations of hope are modifications of this complicated form of life. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Philosophy of Psychology — a Fragment,” i.)

Should we rethink the dates of the New Testament?

Recently, New Testament scholar Jonathan Bernier has put forth a powerful proposal about  "Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament". He shows that in the era of modern Biblical scholarship, there have been three basic kinds of dates proposed for the writing of the New Testament:

Religious Fascination

I am fascinated by religion, and the process by which humans have created structures and norms and beliefs and practices which allow us to connect with the deepest aspects of who we are, the Source we come from, and the Destiny we are headed toward. I am fascinated by the sheer variety of rituals and art and foods and clothing through which people get glimpses of the Divine. I am fascinated by the constellations of overlapping and diverging beliefs about God and creation and humanity and final destiny. I am fascinated by the process of moral reasoning, through which ancient texts collide with contemporary experience to forge new paths into a (hopefully) better future. I am fascinated by how all of this intersects with our particular place in space and time, in the unfolding of history and culture, to form our sense of personal identity and collective destiny. But to truly study and embrace religion, we also have to embrace something like this insight from Acts:

God Insists

Two quests for God seem equally misguided: The quest to abolish God, and the quest to establish God. 

Why we really believe what we believe

So I’m on this religion discussion board, and recently the rather mundane observation was made that people’s religious beliefs tend to mirror their family of origin. Overwhelmingly, Muslim adults were born into Muslim families. Jewish adults were born into Jewish families. Christians in Christian families, Hindus with Hindus, Buddhists with Buddhists, etc. A very low number of people, statistically, tend to adopt a spiritual path that they did not grow up around and have extensive interactions with. Many Christians who commented on this discussion board seemed to have a huge problem with this mundane statistical fact. They found this undermined the veracity of their belief (because they assumed that a belief handed down from others is somehow less true), as well as the authenticity of their belief (because most wanted to think of their belief as something they chose for good reasons). But is this the case?

A Provocation on the Constant of Change

The common sense insight that “the only constant is change” may have more going for it philosophically than we give to most platitudes. If change is constant, absolute, and unchanging, then let us take it as such. There has to be an unchanging Reality which is the engine driving all change which itself does not change. Because if change were to change, it would have to change into “not change”, into static unmoving immutability. Which would be to say it would change into nothing: Non-Being. But if beings exist and change, they must be upheld by a Dynamic Being, a Transcendent Life, which keeps all other things in motion around it and alive within it. This eternal constant of Change must therefore give Being to beings that they may exist and have life. This diffusing self giving for the Good of others is what we call Love. The Dynamic of Change is the Love that moves the Stars. Call it Love. Call it Life. Call it the Source. Call it Reality. Call it Change. Call it the Self. Call it God. But whatever you call It, call on it to make Its Self known to you in the depths of your self. 

When Words Fail

How both Theistic and Nontheistic language fails to describe Ultimate Reality

In the constant back and forth between Theists and Nontheists, one of the frequent criticisms hurled from both sides regards the problem of language. Both sides claim that that other side slides into nonsensical or tautological language that fails to say anything about Reality. At some point, each side gets to ideas that are so foundational, so axiological, to their interpretive framework, that all they can say is "it is what it is".

What is interesting to me is that this point of linguistic "no return" is precisely at the same point and regarding the same issues. This break in meaningful, non-tautological language happens precisely at the ultimate origin, the ultimate value, and the ultimate destiny of all things. At these three points both the Theist and the Nontheist are effectively reduced to silence. This is when our words fail: When we lack the ability and even the concepts necessary to describe the ultimate nature of the Reality we find ourselves in.

In the Divine Symphony: Why I think God is Real

In the school where I am chaplain, two of the skills we try to teach students are: First, how to build an evidence-based argument, and second, how to present the view you hold without demeaning or belittling those who disagree. This is especially true with controversial subjects that people hold strong opinions on. 

Since we give feedback about this so often, to so many of our students, I thought I would create an example of a controversial, evidence-based argument, which was presented in a way that sought to include even those who disagree with my conclusion. And voila: This sermon was born. The texts read before this sermon included: Psalm 19.1-9; Acts 17.27-28; Romans 1.19-20; 1John 4.7-16.

As we continue our journey through Epiphany, the season when Christ's Light shines on ALL kids of people, through ALL kinds of experiences, I wanted to challenge you a little today about HOW we see God's Light. And this challenge comes from a question I frequently get asked, and that I was asked again last week. The question goes something like this:

"Fr. Nate, you seem like a smart guy. How come you still believe in God?" 

A provocation on Scriptural inspiration

God inspired Scripture not only to show us what to DO, but also to show us what NOT to do. The Bible is not only filled with positive examples to imitate, but also negative examples to avoid. So beware, lest you model your life on a negative example and invite your own destruction. For we can tell the intent of the Spirit’s inspiration of a text by asking what end it resulted in. Did the text result in death and destruction and character that is the inversion of Christ? Then the Spirit inspired it that we may avoid its example. Did the text result in Life and Love and striving for Christlikeness? Then the Spirit inspired it that we may follow its example. 

The Trajectory we follow in interpreting Scripture

For the last several years, I have been tweaking a Hebrew and Greek daily Scripture reading system, with a lectionary for reading through the English Bible every year and a half. If you are interested in viewing or using it, a PDF is available HERE. 

What is of interest here is that, in the introduction to this reader (pages 2-3), I most clearly lay out how I interpret Scripture, and the main concerns I pay attention to when seeking to understand what God has revealed to us through Scripture. I have written elsewhere about how I apply the Biblical laws to our ethical life, and how Scriptural difficulties are worked out when we see Scripture as a process of Developmental Revelation, which is on a trajectory that is fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. In this understanding, to use words spoken by Martin Luther King Jr.: The Moral Arc of History (and Scripture) is long, but it trends toward Justice. This view has been shaped by voices as diverse as CS Lewis (in terms of overall narrative development of History), NT Wright (in terms of looking at the Old Testament from the perspective of the New Testament), Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (in his work on confronting violence in the Torah). 

Childlike Faith and the Neverending Story

I watched the Neverending Story with my kids this morning. This movie impressed me deeply as a child with a view of imagination, and multiple dimensions of reality, which shaped me at a deep level. In many ways this movie and several other books I read as a young person “baptized my imagination” to experience our co-authorship, with God, of the great unfolding Story of Creation and Redemption centered in Christ. What I did not realize until watching this movie as an adult: 

First, this movie may be the best illustration of Jesus’ saying that the Kingdom of God belongs to those with childlike faith which I have ever seen. 

Second, it is a potent critique of living in a world culture of Consumerism, in which every Corporation and advertisement seeks to co-opt our imagination, and stop us from dreaming, with the lie that their products can satisfy our every desire, and bring us to true happiness. 

Truth is always Stranger

Tertullian once said “I believe because it is absurd”. It is the strangeness of an idea— it’s undeniable texture and inconsistent density— which is a hallmark of its truthfulness, and not the smoothness and consistency of an idea. The old quip that “truth is stranger than fiction” has much in common with Tertullian here. Fictions have smoothness and consistency, clear beginnings and symmetrical endings. But reality makes twists and turns which, while they do not contradict reason, neither can they be predicted by reason. Real things are irreducible, and defy being fully encapsulated in a conceptual system, to be rendered completely predictable, and hence controllable. 

On Physics, Possibility, and Resurrection

Recently I was in a discussion about the Resurrection of Christ in which someone posted that "classical theism allows for the possibility of such contravention of the ordinary laws of physics". This raises the most commonly voiced objection I hear to the Resurrection, which was popularized by philosopher David Hume: The resurrection cannot occur because it is a miracle, and miracles are violations of natural laws, and since natural laws are universal, then we know a priori that miracles cannot violate them. For Hume, physical laws govern causality and what can, and cannot, happen to matter and energy within spacetime. This is further complicated by Hume's insistence that we can never "prove" causality, we can only note a correlation between two events. So for Hume, physical laws govern causality, while at the same time causality is a mental inference and not objectively part of the universe.

Following Jesus without God?

As many who read this blog know, I am a Christian priest who serves as a school chaplain and head of religious studies at an Episcopal Middle and Upper School (grades 6-12). My position shares a great many commonalities with being a parish priest. For instance, I am the "village vicar" and pastoral presence for nearly 600 students and staff, and their families as well. But there are significant differences too. Chief among them is the fact that my parish not only includes Episcopal Christians, but also Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants of every stripe, and every variety from Nominal to Committed to Conservative to Liberal. But not only does it include a broad spectrum of Christians, but my parish includes Muslims and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, and many who Secular and even Atheist.

On making images

When taken at their best
Even idols give us glimpses
Of the God beyond words
And reveal that uncontained Other
Contained in matter and mind

And when pushed to their limits
Even the most accurate prose
And the most inspirational poems
Become idols
Which damn and destroy

That of which we cannot speak
We must pass over in silence
Except we can't not
Speak of what we have experienced
Except we can't not
Paint what we have seen
Except we can't not
Pray to the One
Who calls us from Beyond

Just because words
Always make us liars
Doesn't mean we can't use them
To point to the Truth

Just because images
Obstruct the Light
Doesn't mean we can't make them
To reflect the Sun.

Holy Crap

This is a poem inspired by Philippians 3.8 and it is not for the easily offended. So if you are easily offended, please read something else. With that said, here we go…

Chasing Falsifiability down the Rabbit Hole to Transcendence

In my Philosophy of Religion class the other day, a student brought up Karl Popper’s principle of “falsifiability” as a criteria for whether a knowledge claim is valid. The way that my student put it: A claim that is empirically sensible is thus falsifiable (it can be refuted by empirical observation), and thus counts as real knowledge. But knowledge claims that are not empirically falsifiable— such as claims about God, ethical value, aesthetic value— do not count as the same kind of knowledge. Perhaps they are a lesser, derivative kind of knowledge. But they are not the kind of absolutely true knowledge one would want to build their world view upon, because they cannot be empirically falsified. And thus, while God, might be an optional or extra belief added onto a scientific worldview, God could never be essential to a worldview, or even a necessary explanatory hypothesis for the nature of Reality, because the idea of God cannot be falsified scientifically.

The Superstition of the Science of Superstition

A colleague of mine recently sent me an article from the Atlantic entitled "The Science of Superstition", which appears to be a précis  of a book by the same name. This article claims to do something that very badly needs to be done here in the buckle of the Bible-Belt: Open our eyes to the dangers of the superstition and magical thinking that cloud our everyday lives and judgements.

However, I will admit that my first reaction to this article is one of minor disdain, as if the author is quite naive about all of the assumptions he is making about "the way things really are", and the fact that there are myriads of PhDs in every field of research who would question his basic assumptions. There are many, in fact, who might call his assumptions mere "superstitions" made without reference to empirical observation, nor without reference to the background assumptions that make science itself work.

Is Religion JUST a response to fear?

Beware of generalizations that start with "every" or "all", as they are almost always wrong.

A recent article on io9 stated that climate change may make the human population more religious. Why? Because when droughts and famines begin to affect global society, people will turn to propitiate their "gods" to make the suffering and privation go away. This article was greeted by usual comments from folks who are non-religious or post-religious that this trend was a bad thing, that the world needs less religion (not more), and that hopefully the suffering allowed by their "gods" would turn more people away from religion until there was no more religion, and we finally enter into the secular utopia long prophesied by the secular prophets of the Western Enlightenment.

OK, I may have added a little flourish there. But that was the gist. And if you dig past the veneer of "just the facts ma'am" on the surface of anti-religious claims about the good that can be brought about by secularism, you soon find a robust religious faith in an ideology that has borne little fruit in making the world a better moral place, despite all our technological advances. For instance, John Lennon wrote the secular Hymn "Imagine" which prophesied secular world peace and prosperity at a time when various secular regimes that "imagined no heaven" (such as China, Russia, Vietnam and Cambodia) were also engaged in various atrocities.

But my real problem is that this article assumes that the major (or only) reason to be religious is out of fear: To get a divine being to protect you from something you are afraid of, or to change something that is threatening you.

Neuroscience, Philosophy, God and Jackson Pollock

A Pollock painting or random paint splatters? You decide.

A friend of mine who is a librarian recently sent me a link to an interesting video by a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon named Robert Sapolsky (who also happens to have an awesome beard!). In this video Sapolsky brings together key findings on brain structure and function to "explain the Biological Basis of Religiosity, and What It Shares in Common with OCD, Schizophrenia & Epilepsy".

Although Sapolsky was raised as an Orthodox Jew, he has since left his childhood faith and describes himself as an atheist. However, he says, "I’m not saying ‘you gotta be crazy to be religious. That would be nonsense. Nor am I saying, even, that most people who are, are psychiatrically suspect." Sapolsky is fascinated by the underlying biology of these traits common to to both certain kinds of abnormal psychology and extreme religious experience. And he confesses that his atheism seems to be something he "appears to be unable to change".