Against the Stream

Alvin Plantinga in the New York Times

The New York Times recently profiled Alvin Plantinga, one of the great Christian philosophers of the last half century. It was a very good article, and this passage sums Plantinga's point of view very nicely:

Theism, with its vision of an orderly universe superintended by a God who created rational-minded creatures in his own image, “is vastly more hospitable to science than naturalism,” with its random process of natural selection, he writes. “Indeed, it is theism, not naturalism, that deserves to be called ‘the scientific worldview.’ ”

Mr. Plantinga readily admits that he has no proof that God exists. But he also thinks that doesn’t matter. Belief in God, he argues, is what philosophers call a basic belief: It is no more in need of proof than the belief that the past exists, or that other people have minds, or that one plus one equals two.

“You really can’t sensibly claim theistic belief is irrational without showing it isn’t true,” Mr. Plantinga said. And that, he argues, is simply beyond what science can do.

While I've made my position that belief in God is both rational and worthwhile on a number of occasions, and thus agree in substance with the argument Plantinga is making, I always get just a bit nervous at the kinds of philosophical line drawing that gets done on these issues. So, for Plantinga religion "is more hospitable" to science than atheism is" and deserves to be labeled as "the scientific worldview."

But this is just stating a different starting point for the discussion than the atheists prefer. Better to say: Science qua science doesn't give you enough information of the right kind to infer either the existence or non-existence of God because, as Plantinga rightly notes, that's "beyond what science can do." Why get into the game of oneupsmanship over who "owns" science.

That said, what Plantinga has done for philosophy of religion has been of immense value. While I'm not with him all the way through his arguments, and I can't quite get behind what he seems to mean by belief in God as "properly basic," I do agree with him that it is possible to sustain a rational belief in the existence of the God of theism, and more particularly the God of Christian faith, despite the claims made by the militants of the neo-atheist camp. But I don't believe that belief in God is in any regard uniquely religious. And on the basis of reason alone, one wouldn't be able to reach a conclusion either way.

 

He Has Raised Me From the Pit and Set Me High

I'm on a Mountain Goats kick again. It happens every couple of months I just start listening to the Mountain Goats constantly and/or trying to play MG songs on my guitar. In that vein, I came across the following quote from John Darnielle, which resonates deeply with me. Speaking of Psalms 40:2, my favorite Mountain Goats song, he says:

There's a number of different ways of feeling holy and connected with God. One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can. Because there's only one person, in theory, who can save you from that. His whole job, in a sense, is to absolve you of sin, to forgive you of sin. You're not supposed to, but you can test God by doing a lot of terrible things. If you directly intend to offend him, though, it would probably be the most direct, in a sense-- this is kind of Hare Krishna stuff, where they talk about the different ways you can stand with God. One is as a lover, but another is as His enemy. Because when you are engaging with someone in a position of enmity, that is also a very intimate relationship. 

So these people are doing some bad things and one of them, the one who sins, is sort of experiencing a connection to God in the depths of his degradation-- which I think is almost a universal experience. When do you cry out to the God you don't believe in? When you hit bottom. That's the moment at which you are going to sort of know Him best. I don't even know, when I say Him, if I should put it in quotes or not, because I don't want to sound like I'm actually saying that. But I'm also saying that your ideas of God will come to rest upon you in your moment of profoundest degradation, which is kind of what that song is about.

And of course, the video:

 

War Is Over If You Want It

The last troops left Iraq last night. The war in Iraq is over. Thank God!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Hitch Gets the Last Word

Looking over some old posts on Hitchens, I realize that I've softened a bit on him over the years, which is, I suppose, as it should be. But in honor of his memory, and to give him and his position its due, I herewith post this collection of some of his more acerbic take-downs of religion over the years:

 

On Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens died last night, December 15th, at the age of 62. The New York Times obituary provides a nice overview of his legacy:

Armed with a quick wit and a keen appetite for combat, Mr. Hitchens was in constant demand as a speaker on television, radio and the debating platform, where he held forth in a sonorous, plummily accented voice that seemed at odds with his disheveled appearance. He was a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark.

I often found Hitchens to be infuriating, but there was never any doubt about his intelligence and wit, which he was always more than happy to put to the service of cutting down ideas and individuals that he viewed with scorn.

And Hitchens did scorn well. To find oneself or one's ideas subject to his withering fusillades of rhetorical fire was never a pleasant experience, and yet, it was always possible to read something that he wrote, or hear him speak and find oneself amused and drawn in by his wit and style even when one deeply disagreed with his characterizations.

Of course, I never had the opportunity to meet Hitchens in person, nor was I ever personally the target of his acid tongue, but I would often use his arguments in classes and in my writing as exemplars of the neo-atheist stance that's gained such traction in recent years. Hitchens was clearly one of its most eloquent and interesting defenders, and it was always well worth listening to him, if for no other reason than to understand the state of the argument as seen through the eyes of Hitch.

That said, he was never really interested in having a discussion on the issue of religion. It was not for him an area of open inquiry or academic curiosity. As was quite clear from the subtitle of his book, God Is Not Great, he viewed religion as a force that poisoned everything. Thus he dedicated much of the final decade of his life engaged in a pitched battle with religion of all kinds, not out of a desire to examine the possibilities or quietly consider whether his opponents had a point somewhere along the line, but rather out of a desire to defeat and destroy a force that he understood to be a pernicious plague upon humanity, and a barrier to its capacity for peace and freedom.

In his final piece for Vanity Fair, written shortly before his death, Hitchens reflected on the experience of dying, and the capacity that it has for taking the airy glibness from our contemplation of mortality. He wrote:

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Glibness is a good defense against overwhelming fear. As I've often (perhaps too often) quipped when being told how dangerous a course of action I'm contemplating might be: I've got do die of something. Which is of course true. But what you die of and how you die of it can make a great deal of difference to the process of dying.

There is a part of me that had hoped Hitchens might open himself up to at least the mere possibility of God's existence, and perhaps even love, in the final days of his life. But from what I know of Hitchens, to have done that would have been for him a betrayal of some of his most deeply held convictions. After that final Vanity Fair article sparked rumors of a possible Hitchens deathbed conversion, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

Hitchens also said that if information emerged that he had, at some late stage, made a statement of faith, or a religious confession, including but not limited to, "I accept Jesus as my lord and savior," or, "Muhammad, peace be unto him, is the messenger of God," or, "the Lubavitcher rebbe is the true messiah and currently living in Brooklyn," that his friends were to make it known that it was not the true Hitchens doing the confessing. This is what he told me once, during a video conversation we posted on this website: "The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain," he said. "I can't guarantee that such an entity wouldn't make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark."

And I can admire the clear-eyed courage with which Hitchens embraced his atheism, and I have great respect for that stance. At this stage, of course, Hitchens knows the answers to these mysteries far more deeply now than I do (or he doesn't), and I am sure has made what peace there is to be made with the possibility of an afterlife, or its absence, and the possibility of a God, or of God's non-existence.

As a Christian, I believe that there is a loving God with whom we are destined to dwell in eternity in some form or another. To Hitchens, this would be no better than an eternity in North Korea. And one senses in his narrow and cramped view of God something of Philip Pullman's vision of God from the His Dark Materials novels -- a decrepit and superannuated dictator overseeing our every move and action. This is far different than my vision of God, which is as the ground and guarantor of being, who governs the universe not as a dictator but as the spirit of love that moves through every human heart, and that may itself be the pulse of the universe.

But I can understand why this would not be compelling to Christopher Hitchens. There is much of Ivan Karamazov about his atheism. It is reaction to a repugnant image of God that he has not been able to banish or exorcise. But even were he to arrive in the presence of God and be faced with the truth that everything he had believed was wrong, I suspect that he would, like Ivan, without rancor, refuse the ticket to the afterlife, on the ground that the price asked for admission was too high, costing as it has the untold suffering of so many, and by his lights, possibly also costing him his freedom, even his freedom ultimately to choose damnation if that's his fate. There is a courage about that, I won't deny it, even as I believe that I, on the contrary, would allow myself to be enfolded in the embrace of a loving God.

But as a Christian, I also believe in the persistence of God's love and grace. And I'm not sure that the last word on Hitchens' relationship with God has yet been written. I can well believe that God would continue to support and to sustain, to goad and to persuade, to lead and draw by attraction rather than compulsion, in order to lead Hitchens, and all of us, finally into the divine presence. Even were Hitchens to choose damnation in th face of God, nobody has to believe that such a choice is inevitable or eternal, and a choice for damnation may ultimately become a choice for salvation, given an eternity for the love of God to do its work.

I'm not sure I would go so far as to say that I will miss Hitchens. I didn't know him personally, and did not go out of my way to read his work. But I am sad for his death, and mourn for him, and send my deepest condolences to all of his family and friends. And I do recognize that the world has lost an important critical voice, one that was critical even of idea that I hold sacred. But by holding those ideas up for scrutiny, he has done me and other religious believers a great service, by forcing us to examine our beliefs more closely, think about them more carefully, and embrace them more critically than we otherwise might have. In that regard, I can only say: Thank God for Christopher Hitchens.

What's Progressive About Progressive Christianity

Note: I'm going to start bringing over some of my posts from my short-lived blog at Patheos in the coming weeks. I'll begin with this piece on the nature of Progressive Christianity.

The recent kerfuffle over Jim Wallis’s progressive credentials in the aftermath ofSojourners decision not to publish an ad by a group advocating for greater inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of the church has raised the question of what it means to actually be religiously progressive in the United States today. Is religious progressivism a kind of “big tent” that invites people with a great variety of religious beliefs to work together on those issues about which they are most deeply concerned, or must one subscribe to particular positions in order to be adjudged “properlyprogressive.”

For a very long time, the big tent philosophy has prevailed, and this has allowed Jim Wallis to work with a very wide variety of Christian organizations on those causes about which he cares most deeply, particularly issues of poverty and economic justice. These have been the lifeblood of Sojourners for a very long time, and it is understandable that Jim would want to work with any and all comers for whom that issue is of central importance, including many evangelical Christians for whom the acceptance of gays and lesbians in the church remains intensely controversial. One way of reading Sojourners‘ rejection of the ad was that it was trying to remained focused on its anti-poverty campaign, and was concerned that a potentially controversial ad could damage its ability to work across theological boundaries with many conservative evangelicals.

There are a number of problems with this stance, however. First, of course, from the perspective of the gay and lesbian community, their own rights to be accepted by society, and their desire to be included in the church, are hardly a “distraction.” Quite the contrary! And as mainline protestant churches move closer and closer to the full acceptance of the gay community in the life of the church, the harder it is going to be to treat this issue as a sideline to some set of “larger” or “more important” social issues. Second, if Jim Wallis insists on standing up as a representative of the progressive wing of Christianity, he is eventually going to have to reckon with the importance of gay and lesbian civil rights to theprogressive cause of social justice today. Just as in another era, a progressiveChristian couldn’t put off concern for the rights of African Americans, or with the full inclusion of women in the church, so today no one who wants to stand up as a leader of progressive Christianity can act as though gay and lesbian equality is an item to be placed on the back burner. To the degree that Wallis, and the organization he runs, have failed to take up this issue, they really don’t have a great deal of standing to present themselves as progressive Christian leaders.

However, this raises the “big tent” question again. Does what I’ve just written mean that everyone who calls themselves a progressive Christian must agree on gay and lesbian equality? On the one hand, I’d like to say “ideally, yes!” But on the other, I do recognize that, important as the struggle for gay and lesbian equality is, it is not everybody’s struggle, and it is not every progressive Christian’s struggle. I can even recognize that many otherwise progressive Christians may believe (wrongly, in my estimation!) that they are religiously required to be against gay and lesbian equality. I do believe that the progressive Christian tent is big enough to include these folks, just as it is big enough to include those who differ with one another on specific economic or environmental policies, the question of abortion, or any number of social or policy issues with which progressive Christians concern themselves.

In this sense, there’s a bit of a “Venn Diagram” aspect to progressive Christianity. It is less a movement than an enormous and multifarious coalition, which mobilizes in response to any number of different, and sometimes contradictory, issues. Where the circles of the Venn Diagram intersect, groups can and do work together to bring about changes in policies, fight for the causes that are important to them, organize for social change, and pray for God’s guidance in the midst of their difficult struggles. This is the strength of progressive religion, but it’s a very hard model to build ideological coherence from, and therefore it’s very difficult to pick leaders from within the progressive religious movement to stand up as spokespeople, as Jim Wallis has discovered to his detriment.

However, this raises another difficult issue as well. In a coalition organized around a vast concatenation of different issues, are we simply drawn together as a matter of political convenience? Are we all about politics, rather than about the faithful following of God in the midst of the world? Or is there a theological foundation on which progressive Christians can claim to be building the edifice of a movement?

I can only answer that question by pointing on the one hand, in the direction of a tradition, and on the other in the direction of a creed.

The tradition from which progressive Christianity draws is one that has embraced the ideals of equality, justice, and full participation in society since the beginning of the modern era. It is a tradition that can trace its roots to the Quakers in the 17th and 18th centuries, militating in their quiet way against slavery, and the abolitionist congregationalists in New England who supported the slaves fleeing north on the Underground Railroad. It is a tradition that gave birth to the social gospel at the beginning of the 20th century, and gave rise to leaders like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden. It is a tradition that gave birth to the Catholic Worker movement and Dorothy Day, that got itself dirty up to its elbows in the 1920s and 30s in the poorest parts of New York City, and extended its reach from one end of the United States to the other in an effort to bring the good news of God’s solidarity with the poor to those with nothing in the midst of the Great Depression. It is a tradition that gave us Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, and the wellspring of inspirational Christian ethics in their writings from which we still draw today. It gave us the Civil Rights Movement, and Martin Luther King. It gave us the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Plowshares movement, the Berrigan brothers, the movement to end Apartheid, and the Christian environmental movement. It also gave usSojourners and Jim Wallis. This is the tradition that gives form to what it means to be a progressive Christian today. It means that one identifies with this history, this tradition, and seeks to extend its principles to a new era, in response to a new context, and embracing new issues.

But it is also, I think, a creed. And the essence of that creed is not a set of political principles, but rather a belief that we are called by a loving and gracious God to stand prophetically athwart the path of the powerful and privileged, and prevent them from running roughshod over the poorest, the least, and the most vulnerable members of society. There are any number of ways that this can be achieved, and participants in progressive religious movements have worked on all of them at one point or another. Progressive Christianity does not believe that there is one solution, one policy that is suitable to all times, places, and situations, but rather that God calls us into the midst of the world, to respond to the concrete circumstances in which we find ourselves, seeking to find God in the midst of world, and to follow God along the path that has been set for us, toward a world of greater justice, deeper love, profounder faith, and more expansive hope for the whole of God’s world.

 

Reaping the Whirlwind

Haaretz reports on the expansion of settler violence to the Israel Defence Forces:

In September settlers broke into Binyamin Brigade headquarters and ran riot there. But the scale of the latest incidents proves that we are no longer talking about a handful of "wild weeds" on the margins of the settler community.

And the Israel Defense Forces, as is its wont, stood idly by: Not one of the dozens of people who participated in Monday's rampage was arrested. That's how the army always behaves when it comes to settlers. The IDF, the police and the Shin Bet security service stand idly by when settlers rampage against Palestinians, torching mosques, groves, cars and houses. Now they stand idly by even when the targets are IDF bases and commanders.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to condemn what happened yesterday and to convene consultations. But it is a belated and hypocritical response. He and the heads of the military establishment know full that settlers routinely run riot in the West Bank with impunity. Those who did nothing when mosques were torched are now reaping attacks on the army. And those who stay silent now will reap attacks on Jews within Israel.

The government must immediately authorize a forceful and determined operation to stop Jewish terror in the West Bank. It must break the armed militias and impose law and order. For it is not the settlers alone who bear responsibility for the lawlessness: The prime minister and the heads of the military establishment are also responsible.

Of course, as the editorial notes, the settlers have been doing this kind of thing to the Palestinians for years. So, why can't the government do anything about it? Andrew Sullivan has it right:

We have an axis not between Washington and Jerusalem as a whole, but between US Christianists and Jewish fundamentalists intent on claiming for ever the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria. They both want permanent annexation and a war on Iran. They control the government in Israel and the major opposition party in the United States. And the two likeliest Republican nominees are far more supportive of a foreign prime minister than their own president.

And, as Sullivan goes on to note, the bondage of Likud and the Republican party to the most right-wing of Israeli pro-settler nutbaggery is not becauase of American Jews, but because of American Christian fundamentalists allied with Israeli Jewish fundamentalists, both of whom believe that Israel has a divine mandate to engage in the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Both the Republicans and Likud have allowed their hands to be tied by these dangerous ideologues. They've sown the wind, and now they're reaping the whirlwind.

 

Romney, Mormonism, and the Evangelical Vote

Kevin Drum reminds of an article on the topic from 2005, written by Amy Sullivan. Sullivan's main point is much like the one made by a new-fired Gingrich staffer earlier this week:

But moderate Republicans aren't the ones who could derail a Romney candidacy. His obstacle is the evangelical base--a voting bloc that now makes up 30 percent of the Republican electorate and that wields particular influence in primary states like South Carolina and Virginia. Just as it is hard to overestimate the importance of evangelicalism in the modern Republican Party, it is nearly impossible to overemphasize the problem evangelicals have with Mormonism. Evangelicals don't have the same vague anti-LDS prejudice that some Americans do. For them it's a doctrinal thing, based on very specific theological disputes that can't be overcome by personality or charm or even shared positions on social issues. Romney's journalistic boosters either don't understand these doctrinal issues or try to sidestep them. But ignoring them won't make them go away. To evangelicals, Mormonism isn't just another religion. It's a cult.

Or, as Gingrich's staffer gaffed: 

A lot of the evangelicals believe God would give us four more years of Obama just for the opportunity to expose the cult of Mormon. There’s a thousand pastors ready to do that.

This is, I think, the great unacknowledged sleeper issue in the Republican campaign. And while none of his opponants wants to make too big a deal of it (Perry's occasional supporters notwithstanding), I suspect that among evangelical Christians, it is an issue that is roiling just beneath the surface. It remains to be seen whether it will have an effect on the final outcome of the race, but even if Romney secures the nomination, he's going to have to work hard to convince already-unenthusiastic evangelicals to come out to support him in November if he has a hope of winning the election.

Romney, the MA Health Reform Plan, and that $10,000 Bet

Tim Dalrymple at Patheos has a very good post up arguing (quite rightly) that the frufarol over Romney's $10,000 wager with Rick Perry is silly on multiple fronts. But what caught my attention was Tim's claim that it was a bet Romney would have won. Tim writes:

Perry was claiming that Romney wrote, in the first edition of his 2010 book, No Apology, and then cut from the paperback version, that his Massachusetts health-care program should be a “model” for the federal plan.  Romney offered to bet Perry $10,000 that Perry was wrong.  Perry demurred, saying that he was “not a betting man.”  Romney clearly believed that he had won the point.  One debate post-mortem gave Perry credit for having “successfully goaded Mitt Romney into one of the worst moments he’s had in a debate so far.”  Apparently one gets credit for telling a lie long enough that the opponent gets frustrated and asks you to put your money where your mouth is.

What are the facts?  As usual, Perry is confused on the details.  In his hardcover version of the book, Romney wrote: “We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country, and it can be done without letting government take over health care.”  In the paperback version, the portion written in italics above is deleted.  Romney has the facts on his side.  He did not delete from the second version a claim that the Massachusetts plan should be a model for the nation.  In fact, his statement explicitly opposed a government takeover.

On the contrary, as I wrote in Tim's comment section, Romney would have lost that $10,000. In a general sense, he said on multiple occasions that he thought that the Massachusetts plan could serve as a national template.

For example:

But in the specific case of the phrase from the book, everything rides on what “the same thing” is supposed to mean. I think there’s every good reason to interpret “the same thing” to mean utilizing the MA health reform plan as the model for the entire country, particularly in light of the quotes taken from the video above.

As a side note, I love what Romney said when confronted with the quote from his book:

“Please don’t try and make me retreat from the words that I wrote in my book. I stand by what I wrote. I believe in what I did. And I believe that the people of this country can read my book and see exactly what it is.”

To which it seems Perry would have been well justified in replying: "You stand by what you wrote, except for what you deleted, and the American people could read it, if you hadn't expurgated it in a politically convenient way." And Romney's aides don't help on this score, replying when asked that "the book was merely updated to reflect the “climate” of politics in early 2011"

On another note, the subordinate clause about “government takeover of health-care” is not a refutation of Romney's claim that “the same thing” didn't refer to the individual mandate, precisely because neither the Massachusetts plan, the Affordable Care Act, nor the particular issue of the individual mandate constitute a “government takeover of health-care.” It’s simply a misstatement of fact to suggest that it is.

I think the more relevant issue has to do not with whether Romney thought that the Massachusetts plan should be a national model (he clearly did), but how it should be a national model, and I think its completely fair for him to say that as a model it would work well on the state level by having individual states impose an individual mandate, but that this is not something the federal government should be in control of. He’s said as much at various times, and while I disagree with him on that, it’s an honorable federalist position to hold. Its the wholesale dodge that he’s engaged in now that feeds into the (in my opinion accurate) narrative that he’ll say anything to be President.

On the substance then, I think Tim has it wrong: Romney would lose that bet, and now Gingrich, Perry, and others are tarring him with the fact that he can easily afford to lose it. It reinforces both of the dominant narratives about Romney: That he's an out of touch member of the super-rich, and that he has absolutely no set of core convictions that motivate his politics.

Like An Atheist In Church

In the latest edition of Sightings (no link, sorry), Martin Marty flags an interesting study about the incidence of involvement by atheists in religious institutions:

The hyper-theistic make up a larger number than the hyper-atheistic, but both speak with similar incaution, for example between quarterback snaps in the theistic case and in most utterances of “the new atheists” on the other. Ecklund finds that one in five polled or interviewed atheist scientists with children “involve their children with religious institutions.” One is tempted to say that that is probably about the same percentage of non-atheist non-scientists. Why do scientists “practice” religion even at second-hand? Some see it as a carry-over from childhood training, in the spirit of Hilaire Belloc: “So always keep a-hold on nurse for fear of finding something worse.” Mild “involvement” with religious institutions is a safe way to hedge bets or develop quiet habits. Ecklund and others in her generation are making a fresh run and exploring all this.

I’ve long, very long, been observing what I call “practical atheism” in religious institutions or in the penumbra of social circles around them. Fifty-five years ago next Thursday—I can’t resist noting—I got a Ph.D. for tracking “the varieties of unbelief.” Having set out to find the hidden skeptics of stature that I thought must have lurked in our national past—the Nietzsches or Marxes or other titanic “god-killers”--and finding mainly humorists (a la Mark Twain, always worth a reading) or inventors of new faiths that were not called faiths, it has struck me that what goes on in a blurry-lined set of publics is that millions do not bother to fight God or strongly to affirm God but to act the same way whether or not God exists.

I think that last insight (which is not Marty's last word in his column), is the key to both much of American religiosity and American a-religiosity. I suppose it goes back to our pragmatist inclinations in the end: Americans are ultimately less interested in what you believe than in what you do. I'm not sure if I find that comforting or not, but at least its a form of consistency.