Revelation as Dialectical Prsence

The atheists are making comments, not just atheists, to the effect that if you aren't an inerrantist you aren't a Christian. I want to keep the lid on that can of worms, but I will post the first part of my page on revelation and Biblical inspiration since I published the second half as part of the previous post. I will also add a few comments after that.


Christian Beowulf says:

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If you seriously think the Bible is just an imperfect mandmade book written by guys trying to guess at what God is like and what he requires and how he will save us etc., then why even be a Christian at all? Why not merely be a theist and make up your beliefs about God totally from scratch? Your position is totally illogical.

By Blogger beowulf2k8, At 1/10/2009 02:09:00 PM

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Atheist Anonymous says:

Unless it is perfect, it has no relevance. My ideas about God are just as good as someone else' guesses, especially some adulterous murder who lived thousands of years ago--right? "No, because the community..." Community smoonity! The community means nothing. Large groups of people are MORE likely to be wrong than one person by himself, in fact. Its called herd thinking, and it generally results in atrocities. So, if the Bible is indeed not the perfect revelation of God to man, then it's not worth messing with. But while you can't believe the Bible you also can't bring yourself to leave the superstitions you inherited from your Catholic family, so you pay Christianity lip service and go on with your her thinking.

These are the kind of faulty assertion I was discussing in the previous post. I remind you that the views I documented of different ideas of revelation were all by Evangelicals and conservatives. Carl C.F. Henry was, in his day, the most respected Evangelical scholar bar none, on par with F.F. Bruce and few others.

Here is the Material from Doxa that deal with position on revelation:


Atheists on the internet are always talking about contradictions in the Bible. These alleged contradictions fall into many categories. Most can be extinguished simply by remembering that all language had connotative meanings and all good writing uses literary devices, but many are based upon an inadequate understanding of the nature of divine revelation.

The problem with the notions of revelation in the Christian tradition is that they don't really conform to the earthly or human idea of what revelation should be. The human notion can be seen with the Book of Mormon—handed down from angels on high on Gold tablets—or the Koran—dictated by an Angel who grabbed Mohammed by the throat and forced him to write. The human notion tells us that there should be no mistakes, no problems, and the revelation should be ushered in with fanfare and pomp, clear and indisputable. But that is not the way of many religious traditions, and certainly not Christianity. There are problems, and even though most of them are conceived by ignorant people (most of the Internet atheists claims to "contradictions in the Bible" are based largely on not understanding metaphor or literary devices), there are some real problems and they are thorny. There are even more problems when it comes to the historicity of the text. But the important thing to note is that the revelations of the Christian faith are passed through human vessels. They contain human problems, and they are passed on safeguarded through human testimony. Even if the eye-witness nature of the individual authors of the NT cannot be established, the testimony of the community as a whole can be. The NT and its canon is a community event. It was a community at large that produced the Gospels, that passed on the Testimony and that created the canon. This communal nature of the revelation guarantees, if not individual authenticity, at least a sort of group validation, that a whole bunch of people as a community attest to these books and this witness.


The Traditional view of "Inerrancy."

Most people tend to think in terms of all or nothing, black and white, true and false. So when they think about the Bible, they think it's either all literally true in every word or it can't be "inspired." This is not only a fallacy, but it is not even the "traditional" view. Even in the inherency camp there exists three differing views of exactly what is inerrant and to what extent. Oddly enough, the notion of verbal inspiration was invented in the Renaissance by Humanists! Yes, the dreaded enemy of humanism actually came up with the doctrine of inerrancy which didn't exist before the 19th century, in its current form, but which actually began in the Renaissance with humanists. The documentation on this point comes mainly from Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation, New York: Double Day, 1985. The humanist argument is documented on p. 36. He also demonstrates that the current Evangelical view basically dates form the 19th century, the Princeton movement, and people such as Benjamin Warfield (1851-1921). Proponents of this view include Carl C.F. Henry, Clark Pinnock, James I Packer, Francis Shaffer, Charles Warwick Montgomery, and others.


Dulles Lists Five Versions of Inerrancy.

remember now these are by the conservatives!

*Inerrency of original autographs and divine protection of manuscripts.
Proponents of this view include Harold Lindsell.

*Inspiration of autographs with minor mistakes in transmission of an unessential kind.
Carl C.F. Henry.

*Inerrency of Textual intention without textual specifics.
Clark Pinnock.

*Inerrancy in Soteric (salvation) knowledge but not in historical or scientific matters.
Bernard Ramm

*Inerrent in major theological assertions but not in religion or morality.
Donald Blosche and Paul K. Jewett


Basic Models of Revelation:

these are by the liberals

Dulles presents five models of revelation, but the faith model really amounts to little more than "the Bible helps you feel good," so I am presenting only four. This core summery will not come close to doing justice to these views. But time and space limitations do not allow a discourse that would do them justice.

Revelation as History:

The Events themselves are inspired but not the text. John Ballie, David Kelsey, James Barr. This view can include oral events; the inspiration of the prophets, the early kerygma of the church (C.H. Dodd) Creedal formulation, as well as historical events such as the atonement. This view was largely held by a flood of theologians up to the 1960s. According to this view the Bible is the record of revelation not revelation itself.

Revelation as Inner Experience:

This view would include mystical experience and views such as Frederich Schleiermacher's feeling of utter dependence (see argument III on existence of God). Religious doctrines are verbalizations of the feeling; the intuitive sense of the radical contingency of all things upon the higher aegis of their existence; part of the religious a priori.

Revelation as Doctirne:

This is the basic doctrine of inerrancy as stated above. In most cases it is believed that the autographs were inspired but some allow for mistakes in transmission and other inaccuracies of an inconsequential nature. This means that 90% of the criticisms made my atheists and skeptics on the internet don't count, because most of them turn on metaphorical use of language or scribal error. I take this position based upon personal experience on many apologetic boards.

:Revelation as Dialectical Presence

The view that there is a dialectical relation between the reader and the text. The Bible contains the word of God and it becomes the word of God for us when we encounter it in transformative way. Karl Barth is an example of a major theologian who held this view.

No one of these views is really adequate. I urge a view based upon all of them. In some sense, that is, the Bible manifests versions of each of these views. So it is not just governed by one revelatory model, but is made of redacted material which exhibits all of these views. For example, the prophets spoke from their experience of God--their inner experience of God's prompting. Their words are recorded as the books of the prophets in the Bible. The Biblical prophetic books are then the written record of the inner experience of these men. The Gospels exhibit all of these tendencies. Passed on from oral tradition, redacted by members of the communities which passed on the traditions, they represent the written record of the events of Christ's life and ministry. In that sense the events themselves were inspired. But Jesus teachings, which we can assume were transmitted accurately for the most part, represent the word actually spoken by Jesus, and thus by God's perfect revelation to humanity. Jesus is the revelation; the Gospels are merely the written record of that revelation passed on by the Apostles to the communities. Thus we see both the event model and the revelation as doctrine model (traditional view). In the Epistles we see the inner-experience model clearly as Paul, for example, did not know that he was writing the New Testament. He demonstrates confusion at points, as when (in I Corinthians) he didn't recall how many of Stephan’s household he had baptized, but when it came to his answers on doctrinal matters he wrote out of the inner-experience of God. We can also assume that the redactions occurred in relation to some sort of inner-experience, they reflect some divine guidance in the sense that the redactors are reflecting their own experiences of God.

I know these views sound wildly radical to most Christians, but they are based on the works of major theologians, including those of the most conservative schools. The dialectical model is vague and sounds unimpressive. It really seems to be tautological statement: the word of God becomes meaningful when we encounter it in a meaningful way. Therefore, I adopt a model of revelation based upon all four models (granting that we do encounter it in more meaningful ways at some times than at others, but provided we understand that this is not saying that it ceases to be the word of God when we don't so encounter it), and of the doctrinal model accepting the views that say inerrant in intent but not specific transmission. The transmission includes some mistakes but of a minor kind.



end of material on Doxa.


So the point is there's a dialectic. Dulles calls his view "Dialectical retrieval." All of these different points come together and are sublimated in one move of inspiration of the spirit. In other words God uses all these different kinds of revelation. So the first task in evaluating any text of the Bible is to ask "what kind of text is it?" We cannot assume that they are all alike. They are written for different reasons, over long periods in different cultures. We tend to lump it all in as "ancient world." But they are actually very different and written in different cultures, very diverse.

The bible is foreign. Its written in a different language by cultures we don't understand. You have to study to understand it. We have developed literary techniques in a science called "textual criticism." We see in this realization that the first think we have to understand is that it is literature. it's mostly narratives, and even expository bits belong to narrative. That is to say they have narrative as their base and as their background and context.

The second step is to ascertain the original reading. We know they are redacted and they have been edited and changed over time. So the first thing we have to do is get as close to the original as possible. We can do this with scholarly methods and they work pretty well. A great deal of the spade work has been done now. Then we have to understand the context. What kind of text we are dealing with will be of paramount importance. The Genesis creation myth is as different from the story of Ruth, or the proverbs or Psalms as is Hemingway from a Superman comic book. We need to understand are we dealing with mythology? If so why are using a myth? Are they turning the myth of a pagan nation on its head? This is what they do with the Genesis creation story; because they are salves int he Babylon and they are redacting the Babylonian myth to show that God (the Hebrew God) is the true creator.

Is it supposed to be scientifically accurate? The fundies assumed so, but it doesn't say that. That's just baggage from the American south. Is it suppossed to be historically accurate? why would it be if they standing pagan mythology on its head? Is it suppossed to be funny? Is it propaganda? when we look at Exodus, this is a story about their ancestors who were slaves in Egypt and yet writing it they are slaves about to undertake their own Exodus back to the promised land. Maybe it's time to talk about the origins and how their original guys came to the promised land the first time? So maybe idealized patriotic history is more important in that telling than literal factual history?

The reason atheists think that this is all just guessing at what God wants is becasue they don't know God. They don't understand what it means to seek and follow God. That's why they imagine it has to be a memo from "the big man upstairs" and they don't trust the heart, they don't' trust the sense of feeling God's presence, it ha to spelled out and proved 100% before they can trust.

The redactors see the work and understand it in light of their own experinces of God. To trust that one must understand the validity of experinces of God. If you have not had any of course you are not going to see it that way. So they say "O this story tells a truth that rigs true in light of what I experince of God, so it should be included." I am thinking here of the OT but it works with the NT too. Then of course they applied the criteria of Apostolic connections and so forth. But the main reality of it is that they weren't concerned with the factual accuracy because they weren't worried about epistemology; they were concerned with the ability of the text to bestow Grace, and that's how they understood "this matches the truth I've been taught."

I can understand why atheists aren't going to truth that. But what they cannot understand is that those of us who have experienced God's presence know that we can trust it. With the NT texts there are objective criteria as well, Apostolic assent, Apostolic authorship or connection to the author.

Jesus gives us the assurance because he knew. He knew up close and personal because he was the embodiment of the divine. The authorized the system of checks. He chose and taught the Apostles, the Apostles taught and chose Bishops, Bishops, chosen by those chosen by the Apostles chose the texts. The real revelation is not the Bible. The real revelation is Jesus and the NT is just a record of what some people who were given the word understood about what they were given.

The real acid test is not the accuracy of the revelation in scientific and historical terms, but hte ability of the text to bestow grace. In bestowing grace the text demonstrates to those of us who know what God's grace is like, those of us who have received it, that we can recognize it there and know that it's real and that it stacks up to the truth revealed in Jesus

Seeking an Adiquate Model of Biblical Meaning: Answering Lee Randolsph at DC blog

Homer's Iliad is such a disaster. The Iliad is responsible for every major scourge on the planet. I just wish that people who like literature would really read the Iliad and see how out of date it is, how totally unscientific it is. Why we could never build a supercomputer using the Iliad as a guide. Homeric Greek is even antiquated and hard to read compared to Attic. Since Attic is what most people learn that should be the standard.

How absurd to it would be to see someone seriously make such arguments, don't you think? Why should we use only the standard of scientific advancement as a worthy goal of literature? Why is Attic Greek any better than Homeric? How foolish it would be judge great immortal classics of literature by the standards of a modern science text book, technical, guide or journal. Yet this is exactly the sort of thing Lee Randolph proposes doing with the Bible in his very silly article "IDQ Flow of Meaninglessness Representation in the Bible." (Debunking Christianity blog, 12/31/08).

Very little in the Bible can be understood as it is written. To be understood as relevant and applicable to today necessitates speculation, interpretation and pre-processing for general consumption. The Bible, as it is written, has become meaningless even though Church leaders try to speculate, interpret and derive meaning from it. Since Christian leaders don't agree, large portions of the data in the Bible is demonstrably meaningless which is a result of the Information and Data Quality flaw of "Meaningless Representation".

This Article is part seven of the series of articles applying Information and Data Quality (IDQ) Principles to the Bible. The purpose of the series is to show that the Bible is not a reliable or trustworthy source of information about God because it has problems from its origin identified in Information and Data Quality research as causing inaccuracy and unreliability. Links to the previous articles are listed below.

Information and Data Quality is something from the computer world, but it reminds me of a model of speech/communications that assumes expository prose and a clear attempt to be as open and concise in meaning as possible. It's the sort of thing I studied as a communications major, its designed for business conferences and to help factory managers learn to communicate with workers better and that sort of thing. The idea actually applying it to read the bible is total inane. I am not going to try to disprove all the little fiddly bits because they are very unimportant. The fact of the matter is there are just a major principles that atheist refuse to ever learn. the rational for this kind of approach has been dashed in the head a million times. These guys have to mentally impaired because as many times as we have answered this stuff they keep making the same basic mistakes over and over again. How many decades? in fact I doubt atheists would even make the same assumptions about the Bible and communications that they make constantly if it wasn't' for message boards and websites. Every time one group of atheist finally get's the idea through their heads, another group comes up and finds the old web sites and starts on the classic misconceptions. But there are enough that refuse to ever let go that they just never learn. I wont bother to answer the little fiddly crap about a mistake here and mistake there, a real perfect God wouldn't have a book that's a bad science text book, and so on. I'm going to deal with the major misconceptions overall.

The first major assumption these guys always make is that the bible is word for word verbatim a memo from God. God wrote it. I see atheists make the statement "God wrote the Bible," many many times. I have never seen a fundamentalist or Evangelical of any strip actually say "God wrote the bible." I don't think any kind of Christian is stupid enough o think that god actually sat down at a desk with heavenly pen in hand and wrote the bible. No one really thinks that, and in fact among conservative view points there are quite a few that would surprise even other Evangelicals. What follows are several different view points as to what verbal plenary inspiration really means. In his great book Models of Revelation Avery Dulles documents several of these views.

Dulles Lists Five Versions of Inerrancy.

*Inerrency of original autographs and divine protection of manuscripts.
Proponents of this view include Harold Lindsell.

*Inspiration of autographs with minor mistakes in transmission of an unessential kind.
Carl C.F. Henry.

*Inerrency of Textual intention without textual specifics.
Clark Pinnock.

*Inerrancy in Soteric (salvation) knowledge but not in historical or scientific matters.
Bernard Ramm

*Inerrent in major theological assertions but not in religion or morality.
Donald Blosche and Paul K. Jewett

Those are the conservative view now. Not the liberals but the conservatives, the f undies, the evangelicals. As the reader can see these views include mistakes and non literal statements and they all assume a human author through whom inspiration travels, not the actual writing of God himself.


The next misconception is that perfect can't produce imperfection. In fact The author of the article says this to me in his response to my comment in the comment section:"Humans are defective products of a perfect being." (Lee Randolph). That's Randolph's concept of a problem with the Bible. Just a couple of problems here:

(1) This principle is never stated in scripture.

This is atheists deciding for themselves what they think God should do and how they think god should Be. It has nothing to with any actual claims made by any actual religious people.

(2) contradicts the entire basic set up of the bible.

Not only does it contradict the concept of sin and the need for redemption, but also of sin and rebellion in the OT. I get that he's trying to turn this into an argument against the Bible. What he doesn't get is that you can't do that because it's at the foundational premise of the whole bible nd the whole religion. It's opposed to all religion. All religion is about resolving the human problematic. he wants to say if there is a problematic at all then religion of any kind is disproved a prori. that's just not cricket because the basis of religion assumes this is an attempt to recover something we've lost. I hate to quote someone I basically regard as a crack pot, but occasionally he did find place to stand that gave himself a fine vantage point: as Francis Shaffer once said "the atheist assumes an unbroken line between God and man. But the bible assumes the line is broken." For better or for worse they are just not willing to allow the Bible to proceed along the lines of its own assumptions.

(3) The idea that the Bible must be totally accurate in all that it says,



especially history and science. This assumption just flows out of the one above, as does the next one. It assumes that everything has to be perfect and problem free if God is perfectly, for why would a perfect God allow problems. Of course my theory of Soeteriological drama answers this problem perfectly (which should prove something). This concept tells us that God allows the world to be as it is so that we will have to seek truth for ourselves and thus internalize the values of the good.

Basic assumptions


There are three basic assumptions that are hidden, or perhaps not so obivioius, but nevertheless must be dealt with here.

(1) The assumption that God wants a "moral universe" and that this value outweighs all others.


The idea that God wants a moral universe I take from my basic view of God and morality. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics) I assume that love is the background of the moral universe (this is also an Augustinian view). I also assume that there is a deeply ontological connection between love and Being. Axiomatically, in my view point, love is the basic impitus of Being itself. Thus, it seems reasonable to me that, if morality is an upshot of love, or if love motivates moral behavior, then the creation of a moral universe is essential.

(2) that internal "seeking" leads to greater internalization of values than forced compliance or complainance that would be the result of intimindation.

That's a pretty fair assumption. We all know that people will a lot more to achieve a goal they truely beileve in than one they merely feel forced or obligated to follow but couldn't care less about.

(3)the the drama or the big mystery is the only way to accomplish that end.

The pursuit of the value system becomes a search of the heart for ultaimte meaning,that ensures that people continue to seek it until it has been fully internatlized.

The argument would look like this:


(1)God's purpose in creation: to create a Moral Universe, that is one in which free moral agents willingly choose the Good.

(2) Moral choice requires absolutely that choice be free (thus free will is necessitated).

(3) Allowence of free chioces requires the risk that the chooser will make evil chioces

(4)The possiblity of evil choices is a risk God must run, thus the value of free outweighs all other considerations, since without there would be no moral universe and the purpsoe of creation would be thwarted.



This leaves the atheist in the position of demanding to know why God doesn't just tell everyone that he's there, and that he requires moral behavior, and what that entials. Thus there would be no mystery and people would be much less inclinded to sin.

This is the point where Soteriological Drama figures into it.
Argument on Soteriological Drama:


(5) Life is a "Drama" not for the sake of entertainment, but in the sense that a dramatic tention exists between our ordinary observations of life on a daily basis, and the ultiamte goals, ends and puroses for which we are on this earth.

(6) Clearly God wants us to seek on a level other than the obvious, daily, demonstrative level or he would have made the situation more plain to us

(7) We can assume that the reason for the "big mystery" is the internalization of choices. If God appeared to the world in open objective fashion and laid down the rules, we would probalby all try to follow them, but we would not want to follow them. Thus our obedience would be lip service and not from teh heart.

(8) therefore, God wants a heart felt response which is internatilized value system that comes through the search for existential answers; that search is phenomenological; intetrsubective, internal, not amienable to ordinary demonstrative evidence.



In other words, we are part of a great drama and our actions and our dilemmas and our choices are all part of the way we resond to the situation as characters in a drama.

This theory also exaplins why God doesn't often regenerate limbs in healing the sick. That would be a dead giveaway. God creates criteria under which healing takes place, that criteria can't negate the overall plan of a search.

Thus, there are perfectly logical reasons for imperfection to be allowed by a perfect deity.

(4) A perfect God would communicate so perfectly that his followers would only have one view point.

The final assumption I will deal with here is this:if God is real than all communication form the divine would say the same thing and be of the same view point. That's a very silly point of view for people who are suppossed to believe in "free thinking." But I think the reason is since they imagine that religion is about being a good little sheep and all saying the same things, then they can't imagine that this is not the case. Of course no group of people are enslaved by their ideology than atheists, except perhaps communists, anti-communists, and people who watch Dragnet.Unless of course it's people involved in Amway. So these guys are once again imposing a preconceived view upon Christian thinking. but this time they have a classy gimmick: a communications model that charts unclear and clear communication. Of course it's not meant to work on literature or narratives. But why let technicalities stop us?

I know this kind of model. I have not studies this one in particular but 's so very like all the one's did study. It goes back to a guy Kenneth Burke, and to something called "JoHari window" which is not by Burke but influenced by the kind of thing he did. It's nothing more than charting the way communication flow works. You start with the assumption that there's a sender, there' a receiver, and the interference such as static on the telephone or the temperature of the room or anything disrupts communication is "noise." So in charting the bible one could say God is the sender, man is the receiver and sin nature is noise. But let's don't. Instead let's talk about what the bible is suppossed to do, and the arbitrary assumptions some people make about what they think it's suppossed to do.


Randolph uses these assumptions, all tacitly implicit and applying computer programmer speak basically argues that the Bible is not the product of a perfect God because it is not perfect communication. Of course what is perfect communication but his computer speak? So it's just another exercise in imposing modern standards upon the world.

When the information system contains superfluous information then it can lead to a situation where the Information System does not accurately represent (map back to) a real world state. For example this can occur by the use of too many descriptive terms, undefined terms or some minor addition to the story intended as an elaboration. Meaningless states can still represent Real World states properly, however it is not a good design in principle to include meaningless data if for no other reason than users may expend resources and make commitments based on the data only to later discover the data to be meaningless. For example, the ancient Greek historian Heroditus, while accurate to a large degree, is known to have exaggerated and to have uncritically included information from apparently unreliable sources.

Figure 1 illustrates this point by showing two instances of data represented by spheres in the column labeled RW (Real World) and three instances of Data in the D column. One instance of an information state is not represented by or does not map back to a real world state.

Insert here a nice little graphic consisting of circles are arrows and totally meaningless.

then:

In human terms, garbling occurs at the point of "consumption" or reading and interpretation. In Information Systems, it occurs at operation time or when the database is being accessed. Garbling occurs when a Real World state is incorrectly mapped to a wrong state in the Information System. There are two cases in which this occurs. If a meaningless state exists, then Real World mapping will be to a meaningless state, or the mapping might be to a meaningful but incorrect information state. This can occur as a result of inaccurate data entry or omissions of real world states at the creation or origin of the data. Analogous examples of this type of garbling are legends, folktales and the "Artistic License" of the author or originator.

What does this pseudo techno babel indicate? He uses the typical atheist Bible contradiction pablum to shovel in more of the same. It's a tribute to the same old think for the fifty thousandth time. Liberals take the bible Metaphorically, sure God could be more clear, therefore, religion is wrong and bad. The same old same old. Long lists of thumb nail descriptions of Bible passages in the Genesis creation story to get across the point that some people take it metaphorically.

As one goes line by line through the Bible elaborating and assessing the information contained within, its mythological character should become undeniable to most people. If we take the Bible to be 100% true when we start reading it, then as we go through it and find statements that we know to be false and we find statements whose truth depends on false statements, then we should reduce our percentage of belief with every fact shown to be false.

Below is an overview of some major but not all inclusive problems with the remaining chapters of Genesis up to chapter eleven. Why is Genesis important? Because it lays the foundation for the human necessity of redemption by way of the Human Sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross.

GENESIS 1 continued
* Genesis 1:1-25 Is An Amalgam of Near Eastern Creation Myths
* Genesis 1:26-1:27, Creation of Humans in Near Eastern Myths And The Paleolithic Era

GENESIS 2
ADAM AND EVE
The Story of Adam and Eve is considered a metaphorical story in Liberal Christian Circles. Several disconfirming facts are listed below with links to my articles elaborating on them.
- Being made in the image of God is meaningless, there is no consensus on what "the image of God" is.
* Disqualifying Adam and Eve. There is no reason outside of the Bible to accept this story as representing a Real World event.
* Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil. Shows how the Christian Tenet that humans are "incompetent" nullifies any reliable interpretation of the Bible or any knowledge supposedly gained through flawed Human reasoning.
* GENESIS 1:28-2:4a, Be Fruitful And Multiply, Founder Effect and Genetic Diversity. Shows how lack of Genetic Diversity would prevent the establishment of a Robust and Healthy population.
* Genesis 2:4b-20: Man Made From Earth Is Folklore, Conflated River Elements and the Myth of Adapa. Discusses a correlation between Hebrew and all other Folklore typologies regarding the first humans.
* Genesis 2:21-25: Woman From Rib and Mother Goddesses of Near Eastern Myths. Discusses a correlation between Hebrew and all other Folklore typologies regarding Eve.

Of course it's only a problem if you make the assumptions that he makes above. His ultimate argument is going to be that if he were a prefect being trying to communicate with a bunch of know nothings he wouldn't do it like God did with the Bible. He would use his computer diagram of clear data info and maybe through in the JoHari window for good measure.

At this point we can stop the exorcise and just make one observation which kills this whole argument: my view of Biblical inspiration is designed specifically to answer these kinds of problems. Pointing that the Bible contains mythology is not a serious argument against the validity of the Bible, because I point that out all the time. Serious evangelicals from Dallas Theological Seminary have argued the same thing. I don't have a published source by I know Bill Tsamis did argue this on my message board and others. The more sophisticated evangelical has been aware of such view points for a long time. This is one of the drawbacks of the Dawkamentalists who think they don't need to learn theology. But then they wind up missing everything that is being said by theolgoians and arguing in ways that are centuries behind the times.

In a nutshell here is my take on Biblical inspiration:

From Doxa:


The problem with the notions of revelation in the Christian tradition is that they don't really conform to the earthly or human idea of what revelation should be. The human notion can be seen with the Book of Mormon—handed down from angels on high on Gold tablets—or the Koran—dictated by an Angel who grabbed Mohammed by the throat and forced him to write. The human notion tells us that there should be no mistakes, no problems, and the revelation should be ushered in with fanfare and pomp, clear and indisputable. But that is not the way of many religious traditions, and certainly not Christianity. There are problems, and even though most of them are conceived by ignorant people (most of the Internet atheists claims to "contradictions in the Bible" are based largely on not understanding metaphor or literary devices), there are some real problems and they are thorny. There are even more problems when it comes to the historicity of the text. But the important thing to note is that the revelations of the Christian faith are passed through human vessels. They contain human problems, and they are passed on safeguarded through human testimony. Even if the eye-witness nature of the individual authors of the NT cannot be established, the testimony of the community as a whole can be. The NT and its canon is a community event. It was a community at large that produced the Gospels, that passed on the Testimony and that created the canon. This communal nature of the revelation guarantees, if not individual authenticity, at least a sort of group validation, that a whole bunch of people as a community attest to these books and this witness....

"The Bible is Just Mythology"

The most radical view will be that of mythology in the Bible. This is a difficult concept for most Christians to grasp, because most of us are taught that "myth" means a lie, that it's a dirty word, an insult, and that it is really debunking the Bible or rejecting it as God's word. The problem is in our understanding of myth. "Myth" does not mean lie; it does not mean something that is necessarily untrue. It is a literary genre—a way of telling a story. In Genesis, for example, the creation story and the story of the Garden are mythological. They are based on Babylonian and Sumerian myths that contain the same elements and follow the same outlines. But three things must be noted: 1) Myth is not a dirty word, not a lie. Myth is a very healthy thing. 2) The point of the myth is the point the story is making--not the literal historical events of the story. So the point of mythologizing creation is not to transmit historical events but to make a point. We will look more closely at these two points. 3) I don't assume mythology in the Bible out of any tendency to doubt miracles or the supernatural, I believe in them. I base this purely on the way the text is written.

The purpose of myth is often assumed to be the attempt of unscientific or superstitious people to explain scientific facts of nature in an unscientific way. That is not the purpose of myth. A whole new discipline has developed over the past 60 years called "history of religions." Its two major figures are C.G. Jung and Marcea Eliade. In addition to these two, another great scholarly figure arises in Carl Kerenyi. In addition to these three, the scholarly popularizer Joseph Champbell is important. Champell is best known for his work The Hero with A Thousand Faces. This is a great book and I urge everyone to read it. Champbell, and Elliade both disliked Christianity intensely, but their views can be pressed into service for an understanding of the nature of myth. Myth is, according to Champbell a cultural transmission of symbols for the purpose of providing the members of the tribe with a sense of guidance through life. They are psychological, not explanatory of the physical world. This is easily seen in their elaborate natures. Why develop a whole story with so many elements when it will suffice as an explanation to say "we have fire because Prometheus stole it form the gods?" For example, Champell demonstrates in The Hero that heroic myths chart the journey of the individual through life. They are not explanatory, but clinical and healing. They prepare the individual for the journey of life; that's why in so many cultures we meet the same hero over and over again; because people have much the same experiences as they journey though life, gaining adulthood, talking their place in the group, marriage, children, old age and death. The hero goes out, he experiences adventures, he proves himself, he returns, and he prepares the next hero for his journey. We meet this over and over in mythology.

In Kerenyi's essays on a Science of Mythology we find the two figures of the maiden and the Krone. These are standard figures repeated throughout myths of every culture. They serve different functions, but are symbolic of the same woman at different times in her life. The Krone is the enlightener, the guide, the old wise woman who guides the younger into maidenhood. In Genesis we find something different. Here the Pagan myths follow the same outline and contain many of the same characters (Adam and Adapa—see, Cornfeld Archaeology of the Bible 1976). But in Genesis we find something different. The chaotic creation story of Babylon is ordered and the source of creation is different. Rather than being emerging out of Tiamot (chaos) we find "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Order is imposed. We have a logical and orderly progression (as opposed to the Pagan primordial chaos). The seven days of creation represent perfection and it is another aspect of order, seven periods, the seventh being rest. Moreover, the point of the story changes. In the Babylonian myth the primordial chaos is the ages of creation, and there is no moral overtone, the story revolves around other things. This is a common element in mythology, a world in which the myths happen, mythological time and place. All of these elements taken together are called Myths, and every mythos has a cosmogony, an explanation of creation and being (I didn't say there were no explanations in myth.). We find these elements in the Genesis story, Cosmogony included. But, the point of the story becomes moral: it becomes a story about man rebelling against God, the entrance of sin into the world. So the Genesis account is a literary rendering of pagan myth, but it stands that myth on its head. It is saying God is the true source of creation and the true point is that life is about knowing God.

The mythological elements are more common in the early books of the Bible. The material becomes more historical as we go along. How do we know? Because the mythical elements of the first account immediately drop away. Elements such as the talking serpent, the timeless time ("in the beginning"), the firmament and other aspects of the myth all drop away. The firmament was the ancient world's notion of the world itself. It was a flat earth set upon angular pillars, with a dome over it. On the inside of the dome stars were stuck on, and it contained doors in the dome through which snow and rain could be forced through by the gods (that's why Genesis says "he divided the waters above the firmament from the waters below”). We are clearly in a mythological world in Genesis. The Great flood is mythology as well, as all nations have their flood myths. But as we move through the Bible things become more historical.

The NT is not mythological at all. The Resurrection of Christ is an historical event and can be argued as such (see Resurrection page). Christ is a flesh and blood historical person who can be validated as having existed. The resurrection is set in an historical setting, names, dates, places are all historically verifiable and many have been validated. So the major point I'm making is that God uses myth to communicate to humanity. The mythical elements create the sort of psychological healing and force of literary strength and guidance that any mythos conjures up. God is novelist, he inspires myth. That is to say, the inner experience model led the redactors to remake ancient myth with a divine message. But the Bible is not all mythology; in fact most of it is an historical record and has been largely validated as such.

The upshot of all of this is that there is no need to argue evolution or the great flood. Evolution is just a scientific understanding of the development of life. It doesn't contradict the true account because we don't have a "true" scientific account. In Genesis, God was not trying to write a science text book. We are not told how life developed after creation. That is a point of concern for science not theology.

How do we know the Bible is the Word of God? Not because it contains big amazing miracle prophecy fulfillments, not because it reveals scientific information which no one could know at the time of writing, but for the simplest of reasons. Because it does what religious literature should do, it is transformative.


All religions seek to do three things.

All religions seek to do three things:

a) to identify the human problematic,
b) to identify an ultimate transformative experience (UTE) which resolves the problematic, and
c) to mediate between the two.

But not all religions are equal. All are relative to the truth but not all are equal. Some mediate the UTE better than others, or in a more accessible way than others. Given the foregoing, my criteria are that:

1) a religious tradition reflect a human problematic which is meaningful in terms of the what we find in the world.

2) the UTE be found to really resolve the problematic

3) it mediates the UTE in such a way as to be effective and accessible.

4) its putative and crucial historical claims be historically probable given the ontological and epistemological assumptions that are required within the inner logic of that belief system.

5) it be consistent with itself and with the external world in a way that touches these factors.

These mean that I am not interested in piddling Biblical contradictions such as how many women went to the tomb, ect. but in terms of the major claims of the faith as they touch the human problematic and its resolution.

How Does the Bible fulfill these criteria? First, what is the Bible? Is it a rule book? Is it a manual of discipline? Is it a science textbook? A history book? No it is none of these. The Bible, the Canon, the NT in particular, is a means of bestowing Grace. What does that mean? It means first, it is not an epistemology! It is not a method of knowing how we know, nor is it a history book. It is a means of coming into contact with the UTE mentioned above. This means that the primary thing it has to do to demonstrate its veracity is not be accurate historically, although it is that in the main; but rather, its task is to connect one to the depository of truth in the teachings of Jesus such that one is made open to the ultimate transformative experience. Thus the main thing the Bible has to do to fulfill these criteria is to communicate this transformation. This can only be judged phenomenologically. It is not a matter of proving that the events are true, although there are ensconces where that becomes important.

Thus the main problem is not the existence of these piddling so-called contradictions (and my experience is 90% of them stem from not knowing how to read a text), but rather the extent to which the world and life stack up to the picture presented as a fallen world, engaged in the human problematic and transformed by the light of Christ. Now that means that the extent to which the problematic is adequately reflected, that being sin, separation from God, meaninglessness, the wages of sin, the dregs of life, and so forth, vs. the saving power of God's grace to transform life and change the direction in which one lives to face God and to hope and future. This is something that cannot be decided by the historical aspects or by any objective account. It is merely the individual's problem to understand and to experience. That is the nature of what religion does and the extent to which Christianity does it more accessibly and more efficaciously is the extent to which it should be seen as valid.

The efficacy is not an objective issue either, but the fact that only a couple of religions in the world share the concept of Grace should be a clue. No other religion (save Pure Land Buddhism) have this notion. For all the others there is a problem of one's own efforts. The Grace mediates and administrates through Scriptures is experienced in the life of the believer, and can be found also in prayer, in the sacraments and so forth.

Where the historical questions should enter into it are where the mediation of the UTE hedges upon these historical aspects. Obviously the existence of Jesus of Nazareth would be one, his death on the cross another. The Resurrection of course, doctrinally is also crucial, but since that cannot be established in an empirical sense, seeing as no historical question can be, we must use historical probability. That is not blunted by the minor discrepancies in the number of women at the tomb or who got there first. That sort of thinking is to think in terms of a video documentary. We expect the NT to have the sort of accuracy we find in a court room because we are moderns and we watch too much television. The number of women and when they got to the tomb etc. does not have a bearing on whether the tomb actually existed, was guarded and was found empty. Nor does it really change the fact that people claimed to have seen Jesus after his death alive and well and ascending into heaven. We can view the different strands of NT witness as separate sources, since they were not written as one book, but by different authors at different times and brought together later.

The historicity of the NT is a logical assumption given the nature of the works. We can expect that the Gospels will be polemical. We do not need to assume, however, that they will be fabricated from whole cloth. They are the product of the communities that redacted them. That is viewed as a fatal weakness in fundamentalist circles, tantamount to saying that they are lies. But that is silly. In reality there is no particular reason why the community cannot be a witness. The differences in the accounts are produced by either the ordering of periscopes to underscore various theological points or the use of witnesses who fanned out through the various communities and whose individual view points make up the variety of the text. This is not to be confused with contradiction simply because it reflects differences in individual's view points and distracts us from the more important points of agreement; the tomb was empty, the Lord was seen risen, there were people who put there hands in his nail prints, etc.

The overall question about Biblical contradiction goes back to the basic nature of the text. What sort of text is it? Is it a Sunday school book? A science text book? A history book? And how does inspiration work? The question about the nature of inspiration is the most crucial. This is because the basic notion of the fundamentalists is that of verbal plenary inspiration. If we assume that this is the only sort of inspiration than we have a problem. One mistake and verbal plenary inspiration is out the window. The assumption that every verse is inspired and every word is true comes not from the Church fathers or from the Christian tradition. It actually starts with Humanists in the Renaissance and finds its final development in the 19th century with people like J. N. Drably and Warfield. (see, Avery Dulles Models of Revelation).

One of my major reasons for rejecting this model of revelation is because it is not true to the nature of transformation. Verbal plenary inspiration assumes that God uses authors like we use pencils or like businessmen use secretaries, to take dictation (that is). But why should we assume that this is the only form of inspiration? Only because we have been conditioned by American Christianity to assume that this must be the case. This comes from the Reformation's tendency to see the Bible as epistemology rather than as a means of bestowing grace (see William Abraham, Canon and Criterion). Why should be approach the text with this kind of baggage? We should approach it, not assuming that Moses et al. were fundamentalist preachers, but that they experienced God in their lives through the transformative power of the Spirit and that their writings and redactions are a reflection of this experience. That is more in keeping with the nature of religion as we find it around the world. That being the case, we should have no problem with finding that mythology of Babylonian and Suzerain cultures are used in Genesis, with the view toward standing them on their heads, or that some passages are idealized history that reflect a nationalistic agenda. But the experiences of God come through in the text in spite of these problems because the text itself, when viewed in dialectical relation between reader and text (Barth/Dulles) does bestow grace and does enable transformation.

After all the Biblical texts were not written as "The Bible" but were complied from a huge voluminous body of works which were accepted as scripture or as "holy books" for quite some time before they were collected and put in a single list and even longer before they were printed as one book: the Bible. Therefore, that this book may contradict itself on some points is of no consequence. Rather than reflecting dictation, or literal writing as though the author was merely a pencil in the hands of God, what they really reflect is the record of people's experiences of God in their lives and the way in which those experiences suggested their choice of material/redaction. In short, inspiration of scripture is a product of the transformation afore mentioned. It is the verbalization of inner-experience which mediates grace, and in turn it mediates grace itself.

The Bible is not the Perfect Revelation of God to humanity. Jesus is that perfect revelation. The Gospels are merely the record of Jesus' teachings, deposited with the communities and encoded for safe keeping in the list chosen through Apostolic backing to assure Christian identity. For that matter the Bible as a whole is a reflection of the experience of transformation and as such, since it was the product of human agents we can expect it to have human flaws. The extent to which those flaws are negligible can be judge the ability of that deposit of truth to adequately promote transformation. Christ authorizes the Apostles, the Apostles authorize the community, the community authorizes the tradition, and the tradition authorizes the canon.

The true purpose of scripture is not to commuicate a memeo fromt the boss. This is the mistae the Reformers made in truing the Bible into epistemology. For a better understanding of this view see Willaim Abraham's ground breakign work Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology.

The true of scripture is to administer the sacrament of Grace. It's not a history book, it's not epistemology, it's not a science textbook. It's a source of healing, and its a source spiritual enlightenment. Before we go tearing it apart under the pretext that its' "outdated" or something foolish like that, we need to be sure that is outdated (and as long as it does actally administer grace--and it does--then it's pointless to call it dated). To judge its relevance by people outside the community of faith is quite foolish. The collection of materials called "the Bible" is not meant to be an apologetic handbook, its not for the outsider its not for the uninitiated.

In taking this approach the atheists demonstrate their blind nonspiritual nature. I recommend therapy. They should start by exploring self realization through JoHari's window which might have some insights they need to know.

Positive Atheist Froum Deals with Atheism as Hate Group

The blog Positive Atheist Forum Deals with the Question "Are Atheist Groups Rightly Seen as Hate Groups?" This was the original question ask by this blog, and its' original mission, to make know to the public the dangers of Hate group atheism. Apparently the question was bothersome enough that some atheist have felt compelled to answer it or deal with it in some way.

Positive Atheist Forum deals with first by distancing themselves from right wing racist group World Church of the Creator:


From their blog:

* Reference: Our Identity As Atheist Organizations by Cliff Walker
* Perspective: Letter Submitted To US News
* Perspective: Letter Submitted To The New York Times

In researching the piece "Our Identity As Atheist Organizations," I wrote to Matthew Hale, leader of the World Church of the Creator, and asked him if they call themselves an "atheist group." The response from his office was a resounding no.

From: Positive Atheism
To: Matthew Hale
Subject: Atheists?
Date: Wednesday, July 14, 1999 4:00 PM

Much discussion has ensued since The Washington Post called The World Church of the Creator "an atheist group." The other major journals we've consulted (New York Times; US News) fall short of using that word. Our question is, would you use the word "atheist" to describe the World Church of the Creator?

the other way they deal with it is to have atheist write in and say "we are not a hate group." But this proves nothing. I don't think there is an actual hate group that can be labeled as "the atheist hate group" and I have said from day one of this blog that I a not claiming that all atheists are like this. There is a fundamentalist end of the atheist spectrum that fits the profile of a hate group (see the post on this blog). That is segment is growing and is probably fueled by the internet.


here's an example of the sort of deniel:

From: "Many Paths"
To: "Positive Atheism"
Subject: Are_Atheist_Groups_Rightly_Seen_As_Hate_Groups
Date: May 15, 2002 2:28 AM

Are atheist groups rightly seen as "hate groups?"

The term "hate group" as I see it refers to particularly vicious organizations such as; the KKK, neo-Nazis, skinheads, Fred Phelps and the like. Some of the factors that these groups have in common are; authoritarianism, dogmatism, and generally a narrow view point. Atheist organizations on the other hand encourage independence of thought, to search for truth rather than insist that we know everything and are always right. To lump atheists in with these other groups is absurd.

I have never heard of a religious person being violently attacked by a group of atheists (it may have happened once or twice, but I've never heard of it.) The cases of vandalism of churches seem to be done by other religious groups, racist groups, or stupid drunk teenagers -- not atheists. Atheists do not picket funerals of dead religious leaders, they do not have Bible bon-fires, or consider any particular type of person to be unworthy of joining.

But the reason there is no violent attack as yet is because we are only at stage four on the FBI model. violence hasn't occurred yet, although there was one case where an atheist or a group of them were caught planning to burn a church but were unable to. Violence my be coming, it hasn't happened yet because we are not far enough along on the evolutionary process of hate group development. It may even be that even though message boards galvanize the haters and work them up they may also function as a safety valve.


here is stage four through six of the model:

Stage 4: The Hate Group Taunts the Target

Hate, by its nature, changes incrementally. Time cools the fire of hate, thus forcing the hater to look inward. To avoid introspection, haters use ever-increasing degrees of rhetoric and violence to maintain high levels of agitation. Taunts and offensive gestures serve this purpose. In this stage, skinheads typically shout racial slurs from moving cars or from afar. Nazi salutes and other hand signals often accompany racial epithets. Racist graffiti also begins to appear in areas where skinheads loiter. Most skinhead groups claim turf proximate to the neighborhoods in which they live. One study indicated that a majority of hate crimes occur when the hate target migrates through the hate group's turf.15


Stage 5: The Hate Group Attacks the Target Without Weapons

This stage is critical because it differentiates vocally abusive haters from physically abusive ones. In this stage, hate groups become more aggressive, prowling their turf seeking vulnerable targets. Violence coalesces hate groups and further isolates them from mainstream society. Skinheads, almost without exception, attack in groups and target single victims. Research has shown that bias crimes are twice as likely to cause injury and four times as likely to result in hospitalization as compared to nonbias crimes.16

In addition to physical violence, the element of thrill seeking is introduced in Stage 5. Two experts found that 60 percent of hate offenders were "thrill seekers."17 The adrenaline "high" intoxicates the attackers. The initial adrenaline surge lasts for several minutes; however, the effects of adrenaline keep the body in a state of heightened alert for up to several days.18 Each successive anger- provoking thought or action builds on residual adrenaline and triggers a more violent response than the one that originally initiated the sequence.19 Anger builds on anger. The adrenaline high combined with hate becomes a deadly combination. Hard-core skinheads keep themselves at a level where the slightest provocation triggers aggression.

Stage 6: The Hate Group Attacks the Target with Weapons

Several studies confirm that a large number of bias attacks involve weapons.20 Some attackers use firearms to commit hate crimes, but skinheads prefer weapons, such as broken bottles, baseball bats, blunt objects, screwdrivers, and belt buckles. These types of weapons require the attacker to be close to the victim, which further demonstrates the depth of personal anger. Attackers can discharge firearms at a distance, thus precluding personal contact. Close-in onslaughts require the assailants to see their victims eye-to-eye and to become bloodied during the assault. Hands- on violence allows skinheads to express their hate in a way a gun cannot. Personal contact empowers and fulfills a deep-seated need to have dominance over others.

It may be that we are not far enough along in the process to have open attacks yet. Maybe that will never come. But one thing that can be seen by anyone at any time is the depth of hatred that exists out there for Christianity on the net and message boards. No atheist has of yet taken up my challenge to go on a message and pretending to be a Chrsitain. Of course the right kind of message board such as Atheist.net, Infidel guy, the Secular Web.

Richard Carrier: About Supernatural

Kandensky

Richard Carrier (of Secular Web fame) has written a pretty good article on the supernatural. I say it's "pretty good" he obviously put a lot into it, but it brings me back to one of my old soap boxes. Its not really about the supernaural. It's not Carriers fault, I think the concept itself has been degraded. He takes science and law to task for imposing their own definitions upon the term "supernatural," terms which do not regard the metaphysical. Since "supernatural" is a metaphysical term we should have a metaphysical definition. He also argues that such definitions should take account of the way people use such terms. He then loses us by defining the term in this way:

In short, I argue "naturalism" means, in the simplest terms, that every mental thing is entirely caused by fundamentally nonmental things, and is entirely dependent on nonmental things for its existence. Therefore, "supernaturalism" means that at least some mental things cannot be reduced to nonmental things. As I summarized

in the Carrier-Wanchick debate (and please pardon the dry, technical wording):

Unfortunately, this is not what people mean when they say "supernatural" nor does it have anything to do with metaphysics. Its' not historically the way the term has been used. More important than metaphysics is theology, because this is primarily a theological term. While I agree that we should take the public use of a term into account, when we have a specialized term that is primarily the property of an academic discipline such as theology, we should consult the history of the term as well as the special to use to which it has been put.

The term suffers from a callsic symptom; he thinks "Super" as the prefix would make supernature the oppossite of nature. So sstarting from this jucture,the assuption that these diametrical oppossites is symptomatic of what has happened in the degrrading of the term in the first place. He then uses his own philosphical hobby horse to define "nature" and thus defining "supernature" (a term he doesn't use but the proper term none the less) is just a matter of advancing the oppossite concept as the definition. But "Super" doesn't mean oppossition nor does it mean oppossite, nor does it mean immaterail, way out, or imaginary. it means "above," "over" or "supirior." What this means for defining the term I'll get to in a moment.

Carrier goes on to illustrate the way the term is used,in his eyes, by talking about ferries and demons and the force in star wars without ever realizing that most of that is not defined as supernatural. I don't recall a line in the movie saying "use the force, Luke,... it's supernatural."

I have previously illustrated my own understanding of supernatural, which excludes this kind of phenomena, the ferries and so forth. That was published on this blog, so I'll repeat it here.

I have several pages about the supernatural on Doxa.

Supernature



The problem in all these discussions about the supernatural is that we are dealing with a degraded concept. The notion of "Supernatural" is a misgnomer to begin with, because modern people construe the idea as another place, an actual location that you can go to. It's the unseen invisible world that is filled with ghosts and magic and so forth. It's in the realm where God can heaven are, we supposed. But what they don't realize is that this is the watered down, dilapidated concept. It's not even understood well by Christians because it was destroyed in the reformation.


The term "supernatural" comes from the term "supernauturalator" or "Supernature." Dyonisus the Areogopite (around 500ad) began talking of God as the supernaturalator, meaning that God's higher nature was the telos toward which our "lower" natures were drawn. St.Augustine has spoken of Divine nature as "Supernature" or the higher form of nature, but that is speaking of nature in you, like human nature and divine nature.

In the begining the issue was not a place, "the realm of the supernatural" but the issue was the nature inside a man. Human nature, vs. divine nature. The Sueprnatural was divine nature that drew the human up to to itself and vivified it with the power (dunimos) to live a holy life. This is the sort of thing Paul was talking about when he said "when I am weak I am strong." Or "we have this treasure in earthen vessels." The weak human nature which can't resist sin is transformed by the power of the Godly nature, through the spirit and becames strong enought to reisist sin, to be self sacraficing, to die for others ect ect.

This was the "supernatural" prior to the reformation. It was tied in wiht the sacraments and the mass. That's partly why the Protestants would rebel against it. St. Agustine (late 300s early 400s) spoke of Christians not hating rocks and trees, in answer to the assertion that Christians didn't like nature. But the extension of the natural world as "nature" didn't come unitl latter. The idea of "the natural" was at first bsed upon the idea of human nature, of biological life, life form life, that's what the Latin natura is about.


Prior to the reformation Christian theologians did not see the supernatural as a seperate reality, an invisible realm, or a place where God dwells that we can't see. After the reformation reality was biphercated. Now there came to be two realms, and they juxtopposed to each other. The realm of Supernature, is related to that of Grace, and is holy and sacred, but the early realm is "natural" and bad it's meyred in sin and natural urges.

But all of that represents a degraded form of thinking after goign throught he mill of the Protestant Catholic split. The basic split is charactorized by riationalism vs feideism. The Catholics are rationalists, because they believe God is motivated by divine puropose and wisdom, the Protestants were fiedeists, meaning that faith alone apart form reason because God is motived by will and sheer acceptation, the desire to prove soverignty above all else.

The rationalistic view offered a single harmony, a harmonous reality, governed by God's reasoned nature and orchastrated in a multiferious ways. This single reality continaed a two sided nature, or a mutli-facets, but it was one harmonious reality in wich human nature was regeuvinated thorugh divine nature. But the Protestant view left Christian theology with two waring reality, that which is removed from our empirical knowledge and that in which we live.

The true Christian view of the Sueprnatural doesn't see the two realms as juxtoppossed but as one reality in which the natural moves toward its' ground and end in divien nature. It is this tendency to move toward the ground and end, that produces miracles. A miracle is merely nature bending toward the higher aspect of Supernature.

but with the Protestant divinsion between divine sogerignty, acceptation and will motivating the universe, we mistake univocity and equivocity for nature and supernature. We think nature and supernature are not alike they are at war, so difference marks the relationship of the two. But to make the Suepernatural more avaible they stress some aspect of nature and put it over against the rest of nature and pretend that makes it sueprnatuarl, this is univocity, it's the same. So will and acceptation, soverigty, God has to prove that he is in charge, these are all aspects of univocity.

It's the natural extension of this biphercation that sets up two realms and sees nature as "everything that exits." or "all of mateiral reality" that sets up the atheist idea that supernatural is unnecessary and doesn't exist.

The medieval Christian doctrine of the supernatural has long been misconstrued as a dualistic denigration of nature, opposed to scientific thinking. The concept of supernature, however, is not a dualism in the sense of dinigrading nature or of pitting against each other the "alien" relams of spirit and matter. The Christian ontology of the supernatural bound together the realm of nature and the realm of Grace, immanent and transcendent, in a unity of creative wisdom and purpose, which gave theological significance to the natural world. While the doctrine of supernature was at times understood in a dualistic fashion, ultimately, the unity it offered played a positive role in the development of scientific thinking, because it made nature meaningful to the medieval mind. Its dissolution came, not because supernatural thinking opposed scientific thinking, but because culture came to value nature in a different manner, and the old valuation no longer served the purpose of scientific thinking. An understanding of the notion of supernature is essential to an understanding of the attitudes in Western culture toward nature, and to an understanding of the cultural transition to science as an epistemic authority.

The ontology of supernature assumes that the natural participates in the supernatural in an ordered relation of means and immediate ends, with reference to their ultimate ends. The supernatural is the ground and end of the natural; the realm of nature and the realm of Grace are bound up in a harmonious relation. The Ptolemaic system explained the physical lay-out of the universe, supernature explained its theological relation to God. The great chain of being separated the ranking of creatures in relation to creator. The supernatural ontology is, therefore, sperate from but related to cosmologies. This ontology stands behind most forms of pre-reformation theology, and it implies an exaltation of nature, rather than denigration. This talk of two realms seems to imply a dualism, yet, it is not a metaphysical dualism, not a dualism of opposition, but as Fairweather points out, "the essential structure of the Christian faith has a real two-sidedness about it, which may at first lead the unwary into dualism, and then to resolve ... an exclusive emphasis on one or the other severed elements of a complete Christianity...such a dissolution is inevitable once we lose our awareness of that ordered relation of the human and the divine, the immanent and the transcendent, which the Gospel assumes." Yet, it is this "two-sidedness" which leads unwary historians of into dualism.

In his famous 1967 article, "The Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Lynn White argued that the Christian belief of the Imago Dei created "a dualism of man and nature;" "man shares in God's transcendence of nature." This notion replaced pagan animism, it removed the "sacred" from the natural world, and with it, inhibitions against exploiting nature. Moreover, by the 12th century, nature became a source of revelation through natural theology. In the Latin West, where action prevailed over contemplation, natural theology ceased to be the decoding of natural symbols of the divine and became instead an attempt to understand God through decerning the operation of creation. Western technology flourished, surpassing even that of Islamic culture (although they still led in theoretical pursuits). Thus, White argues, medieval theology did allow science to grow, but at the ultimate expense of the environment.

The insights of feminist scholarship, however, suggest an even more subtle argument for the denigration of nature. Feminist theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruther, argued that there is an identification between the female and nature, the male and transcendence. Women have been disvalued historically through the association between female sexuality and the "baseness" of nature. Londa Schiebinger, calls attention to the fact that the Judeo-Christian cosmology placed women in a subordinate position. Gender was more fundamental than biological sex, and it was a cosmological principle, "...Men and women were carefully placed in the great chain of being--their positions were defined relative to plants, animals, and God." The subordination of women was predicated upon their position in nature. "Male" and "Female represented dualistic cosmological principles penetrating all of nature, principles of which sexual organs were only one aspect. One might suspect that the place of women on the great chain of being is indicative of the true status of nature itself in Christian ontology; an overt denigration of women indicates a covert denigration of nature.

Some more problems with Atheism

I wouldn't say such disparaging things about atheists if they didn't pull such sneaky tricks. Now of course I don't mean all atheists. But there are atheist fundies just as there are Christian fundies, and there's an atheist atheism of the gaps kind of argument. The atheist fundie fools himself into thinking that his view is totally empirical and demonstrated by science but "nothing in Christianity is objective," you know they don't understand anything about epistemology when they start demanding "objectivity." Espeicially to demand it from a world view. I can see asking for "objectivity" in the form of veri similitude for a study on air bags in automobiles, for example, but not backing up a world view! That's as idiotic as believing that you are being scientific because you life white lab coats.

The problem is this kind of atheist fundi fools himself into thinking that eh as some real verification and objective demonstration of his world view, but he's only being fooled by a self induced con job. It works like this. First he imposes a self privileging ideology upon the world. He privies doubt, so in his mind doubt comes to equal truth. Then he orients his world view around a value of accepting "only empirical evidence." He cons himself into thinking that he only accept ideas that are proven with empirical scientific evidence. Then attaches such importance to this concept that he is able to make a leap of faith and pretend that somehow valuing induction proves the materialist conclusions that he leaps to. So he think just because he wants all of his positions to be proven with empirical evidence, they must really be so. And of course he convinces himself that the task of science is to protect form religion and then science becomes his get out of hell free card. Let's review these steps.

(1)Impose ideology privilaging doubt
(2)accepts value of empirical data only
(3)leap of faith from value of emprical data to assumption of emprically based conclusions
(3) sanctions with the arua of science.

Of course he has no such data. There is no data that God doesnt' exist or that there is nothing beyond the material world.He has no of proving this at all. But that's OK he says because it's having a scientific way of life that counts. At least his over all view is supported by his love of "objectivity" so that sanctions his conclusions even if logic doesn't' sanction them.

The truth is he has no such proofs and his bold scientific way of life is a sham because he has many assumptions upon which his world view is predicated, the basis of which cannot be supported by science. I've made lists like this before, they include all the basic epistemic assumptions:

(1) The existence of other minds.
(2) that the future will be like the past
(3) that the sun will come up tomorrow
(4) That a world exists external to his own mind.

Now most of these are reasonable assumptions. But the point is he holds them without the possibility of any sort of real direct empirical scientific evidence, all the while claiming that as the basis of his entire world view.

The thing is, I wouldn't mind that so much, but then he tries to use this in contrast to religious thought. Everything that religious thinkers say or do receives hyper criticism from them. He imagines that theologians like Paul Tallich are just glorified sudayschool teachers with nothing going on up stairs. He waves around the word "objectivity" like there's really something to compare.

But he wont evaluate Christniaity on the terms of its own inner logic and every attempt to expalin what is is met with "but that's not objective, you dont' have anyting objective," that's just the illusion created by their value system.

Answering Baggini

Julian Baggini

There's a website called Arguing with Atheism. I know who does the sit but for some reason he doesn't include his name so I don't know if he wants the public to know. I'll honor what I imagine to be his wish for anonymity and just refer to the site itself. The point of the site is to carefully examine the very best sources of atheist thinking and to investigate the "better side" of atheism. The site takes this "better side" of atheism (the non hate group side, the real thinking core of the atheist community) and seeks to really understand their point of view; in so doing to test one's own belief.

The first project toward this end is a review and summary of a book by Julian Baggini called




Julian Baggini (editor of The Philospher Magazine)

Author Atheism a very short introduction.
Atheism a Very Short Introduction. Baggini is the editor of The Philosopher Magazine.


Baggini talks about his personal background, his childhood, his road to his current outlook. While he agrees with the usual self definitions of most atheists, the lack of belief in God, Baggini holds out for more than just the negation of a set of beliefs. This is will be important because Christianity is not just a set of beliefs, its not just adding information to the universe. But this phrase is used by the website to describe what Baggini tags onto the conventional definition of atheism:

But atheism is not merely or even principally a series of negations or denials; rather, it is a positive view of what the world consists of and the nature of human beings. At the core of atheism lies a commitment to naturalism, broadly construed as the assertion that “only the objects of the physical sciences-physics, chemistry and biology-exist.” (4) Atheists, however, are not necessarily committed to strong forms of physicalism such as eliminative materialism. The upshot of this description is that the evidence for atheism, according to Baggini, is not primarily counterevidence to the existence of God, but rather consists of the positive evidence for naturalism, broadly construed. This is an important move because it enables him to sidestep the interminable debates in philosophy of religion over the problem of evil, etc. and instead focus on the evidence for naturalism provided primarily by the sciences.

My first reaction to this novel approach is to wonder why reductionists, which Baggini clearly is, make such a big thing out of the little nub of being that's left after they go through tearing away everything in life that is worth living for, then declare the wonder and joy of this nub of a universe that's left. It's a ridiculous outlook. They lose the phenomena of all view points that don't cow tow to their ideology of reduction and then declare their view is the only one of substance because it's the only one standing after they get through stripping away the evdience for any other view. Their approach to hiding the evidence of other views is varied but basically boils down to circular reasoning. Baggini is no exception. The circular reasoning runs like this:

There can't be any evidence for the supernatural because evidence for the supernatural would contradict the ideology and the ideology must be right because science depends upon it. Science is the only form of knowledge, therefore, it has to be protected. Thus any evidence for the supernatural is automatically invalidated and thus must be dismissed.

Now there is no evdience for the supernatural(because any evdience for is automatically wrong since there can't be a supernatural) and that's why the supernatural must be false, therefore, the claims of the supernatural are a priori false. Thus we know there is no supernatural because all the claims for it keep getting dismissed, therefore, there is no evidence for the supernatural.

In Chapter 2 Baggini outlines the positive case for atheism he has in mind. He begins by outlining the components of a persuasive case for any particular point of view: evidence, arguments and rhetoric. The latter, however, can only make the case more persuasive, whether it is reasonable or not, so Baggini focuses on the first two.

Baggini demonstrates this tendency in the very first description of his argument. He sets out criteria whereby one can judge good evdience from bad. The first principle he lays out (this is according the Arguing with Atheism Website)is that anecdotal evdience is not good, evidence but be replicable and public. That is more people who see it the better. The more times it can be repeated the better. That's all find and good, but then it starts getting a little biased. He sets out the example of ice freezing. Of course this is something we all see so its' common, it' also trivial and doesn't have any bearing the question of God. But the image of rock solid science is offered to the reader's mind. What is religious believe contrasted with? The spontaneous combustion of dogs. Yes, dogs, burning up spontaneously.

So evidence that ice freezes at zero degrees centigrade, for example, is strong evidence because it is publicly and universally accessible, whereas the evidence for the spontaneous combustion of dogs is weak because it is anecdotal, that is “it relies upon the testimony of a single person relating one incident.”(13)

Obviously that is pretty anecdotal. So we have this daily event of making ice vs something the vast majority of people live their whole lives and never see. Now for those whose concept of religious experince is the parting of the read sea this may seem like a fair comparison. But there really is a lot more ordinary and available stuff going on God-wise than incendiary K nines.

He could contrast that with mystical experinces, because they are so common some researcher estimate they are had by one in four people. But then he would not be able to set up the premise that supernatural evidence is all anecdotal because mystical experince is demonstrated by 350 or more empirical studies over a four decade period. If you start factoring in studies on religious belief and participation and the effects on health you could have about 2000 studies, and most of them are very good scientific studies. But he would not be able to put up the image that atheists thrive on that "o there's no evidence for the supernatural" not one little bitty piece. Of course if you define the supernatural not as it is in the theology but as atheists want to see, as that which cannot happen because it contradicts reality, then of course there's no evidence for it.

Based on this criterion, Baggini’s contention is that “all the strong evidence tells in favor of atheism, and only weak evidence tells against it.” This is so because, as we saw earlier, in Baggini’s view the evidence for atheism is not merely or even primarily counter-evidence to the existence of God, but rather consists of the evidence for naturalism, broadly construed: “This is only evidence against God’s existence in a negative sense: that is to say, evidence for God’s existence will be found to be lacking and so we will be left with no reason to suppose he exists.” (16)

This move does not strike me as a particularly fair way to evaluate the claims of religious belief.First of all,it is slanted to deny the opportunity for the believer to present best evdience. It practically lays down a guideline if evdience for religious belief doesn't' such it doesn't count as real evdience. This clearly an exercise in begging the question. I will be very interested to see what he trying to analyze as "best evidence." I am so far not impressed because I see no mention of anything that really exists as evidence believers actually use. I suspect that the subtext to his guides are really the idea that science is the only form of knowledge and anything that doesn't count as empirical scientific view point is not admissible as evidence. Clearly this is a move aimed at disposing of the best evidence the believer has before the debate can begin because it compares two things that cannot be compared. God is not given in sense data so the nature of the physical world and sciences ability to discover the workings of the physical world can never be taken as proof against the existence of God. Those are also part of the believer's belief system, I don't know any believers who don't believe in the physical world. Thus he's just crossing categories. He's ruling out the best evdience before the debate starts.

I would term this move as a "trick," and this trick is grossly unfair becasue it's just trying to turn scientists only success (the production of scientific data) into a monopoly for atheist thought and deny the believer any recourse to scientific thought, thus creating the stigma that belief is unscientific. In reality the idea of comparing factual accounts of belief or unbelief to scientific rigor is a huge mistake. Not only do people research according to their biases but science is not a pristine march from ignorance to totally knowledge over the mountains of data. It's a cultural construct. It turns upon paradigm shifts. when the paradigm shifts the whole world turns over all the good little facts from the farmer paradigm become embarrassing old anatomies in the new one. This is why secular minded scientists and atheists have to be skeptical of supernatural effects because their paradigm rules out the supernatural a prori. In other words. it's not the result factual investigation but of ideology.Baggini is hip enough to have read Thomas Kuhn.

He knows that he's just skating over this stuff without even acknowledging it.Because the "cultural constructivist school" has said that science is a social or cultural construct (really the same thing) this has been understood to mean that "science is wrong," or "science doesn't work." He is not saying that Science doesn't work, but he is saying that science is not cumulative progress. The old image of the scientist faithfully stacking one fact upon another, facts patiently gathered from totally objective and therefore totally true observations, is old hat and has to be replaced. Sorry to break the news to the reductionists, but the concept of "progress" is, itself, a cultural construct. There is nothing in nature called "progress." That is a Western notion that comes to us through philosophy and is not strictly speaking, a scientific term. Scientists don't record in their experimental observations "I found the progress in my subject matter." Progress is social and cultural, and it is a relative notion. When we decide we are making progress it is always at the expense of someone elses notion of progress. Due to the nature of paradigm shifts, science does not stack up facts one upon another until x amount of progress is achieved. Science regularly wipes the slate clean and starts over on new paradigms and each new bust of "progress" has to be judged relative to many factors, such as it's social effects.

What then is the positive evidence for naturalism? Baggini uses the example of the nature of persons: the verdict of science is that human beings are mortal animals composed of biological bodies. This is what the atheist’s naturalism would lead her to expect. Any evidence to the contrary, i.e. that points to the existence of a disembodied immortal soul, is weak and anecdotal.

But you see by the nature of this statement, even this is the paraphrase of the guy with the website, the circular reasoning I've already described. He assumes from the outside without presenting any evidence that the believers evidence will be weak and anecdotal. He's also arguing against a straw man version of religious belief as the notion of an Immortal soul in the sense of the ghost in the machine is not indicative of modern Christian theology. This is not what modern Christian thinkers believe, it's an old fashioned verse designed to bring shame to believers. The assertion that the evidence for believe must be wrong and outmoded without knowing what it is is hilarious and I did predict it. The soul is not a Casper the friendly Ghost living inside you. Nor does the Bible tell us that it is. The Bible says that the soul is the life of the believer from the standpoint of the relationship with God. So we do not have souls, we are souls. what might live on after death, if anything, is consciousness, or mind. This is analogous to "spirit" in the Bible. Spirit = mind.

The notion that consciousness is reducible to brain chemistry and nothing that survives exists is totally un-demonstrated and flies in the face of a ton of good scientific evidence. A ton of data supports mind over body. There are basically three arguments:

(1) the hard problem

(2) Top down causality

(3) Veto Power.

There is a movement in property dualism led by David Chalmers, such scientific heavy weights as Penrose are on his side. There is no victory for the brain/mind functionalists yet, far from it. In fact this dichotomy hints at a much larger conceptual frame work that threatens to break open into a total paradigm shift. The handwriting is on the wall for materialism. Major scientific thinkers have already began to see consciousness as other than just some individualistic qualities in each individual person's head caused by brain chemistry and have begun to think of it as something broader, a basic property of nature that we share in, that we exhibit rather than just a side effect of the wiring in our heads.

this is a statement by Peter Russell who was a Cambridge physicists and student of Hawking. I've quoted it on this blog quite recently.

The 'Hard Problem' of Consciousness

The really hard problem-as David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, has said-is consciousness itself. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain lead to an inner experience? Why doesn't it all go on in the dark, without any subjective aspect? Why do we have any inner life at all?

This paradox-namely, the absolutely undeniable existence of human consciousness set against the complete absence of any satisfactory scientific account for it-suggests to me that something is seriously amiss with the contemporary scientific worldview. For a long time I could not put my finger on exactly what it was. Then suddenly, about four years ago on a flight back to San Francisco, I saw where the error lay.

If consciousness is not some emergent property of life, as Western science supposes, but is instead a primary quality of the cosmos-as fundamental as space, time, and matter, perhaps even more fundamental-then we arrive at a very different picture of reality. As far as our understanding of the material world goes, nothing much changes; but when it comes to our understanding of mind, we are led to a very different worldview indeed. I realized that the hard problem of consciousness was not a problem to be solved so much as the trigger that would, in time, push Western science into what the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a "paradigm shift."

The continued failure of science to make any appreciable headway into this fundamental problem suggests that, to date, all approaches may be on the wrong track. They are all based on the assumption that consciousness emerges from, or is dependent upon, the physical world of space, time, and matter. In one way or another they are trying to accommodate the anomaly of consciousness within a worldview that is intrinsically materialist. As happened with the medieval astronomers, who kept adding more and more epicycles to explain the anomalous motions of the planets, the underlying assumptions are seldom, if ever, questioned.

I now believe that rather than trying to explain consciousness in terms of the material world, we should be developing a new worldview in which consciousness is a fundamental component of reality. The key ingredients for this new paradigm-a "superparadigm"-are already in place. We need not wait for any new discoveries. All we need do is put various pieces of our existing knowledge together, and consider the new picture of reality that emerges.

Consciousness and Reality

Because the word "consciousness" can be used in so many different ways, confusion often arises around statements about its nature. The way I use the word is not in reference to a particular state of consciousness, or particular way of thinking, but to the faculty of consciousness itself-the capacity for inner experience, whatever the nature or degree of the experience.

A useful analogy is the image from a video projector. The projector shines light onto a screen, modifying the light so as to produce any one of an infinity of images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we experience-what I call the "contents of consciousness." The light itself, without which no images would be possible, corresponds to the faculty of consciousness.

We know all the images on the screen are composed of this light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself; our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but we are usually aware only of the many different experiences, thoughts, and feelings that appear in the mind. We are seldom aware of consciousness itself. Yet without this faculty there would be no experience of any kind.

The faculty of consciousness is one thing we all share, but what goes on in our consciousness, the content of our consciousness, varies widely. This is our personal reality, the reality we each know and experience. Most of the time, however, we forget that this is just our personal reality and think we are experiencing physical reality directly. We see the ground beneath our feet; we can pick up a rock, and throw it through the air; we feel the heat from a fire, and smell its burning wood. It feels as if we are in direct contact with the world "out there." But this is not so. The colors, textures, smells, and sounds we experience are not really "out there"; they are all images of reality constructed in the mind.

It was this aspect of perception that most caught my attention during my studies of experimental psychology (and amplified by my readings of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant). At that time, scientists were beginning to discover the ways in which the brain pieces together its perception of the world, and I was fascinated by the implications of these discoveries for the way we construct our picture of reality. It was clear that what we perceive and what is actually out there are two different things.

This, I know, runs counter to common sense. Right now you are aware of the pages in front of you, various objects around you, sensations in your own body, and sounds in the air. Even though you may understand that all of this is just your reconstruction of reality, it still seems as if you are having a direct perception of the physical world. And I am not suggesting you should try to see it otherwise. What is important for now is the understanding that all our experience is an image of reality constructed in the mind.

Rosenberg's 'liberal naturalism' [CS:JCS:3.1.77]:

"The question of scientific objectivity becomes more compelling when one considers that doubts about the reductive paradigm are by no means new. William James (1890), Charles Sherrington (1951), Erwin Schrodinger (1944, 1958), Karl Popper and John Eccles (1977)--among others--have insisted that the reductive view is inadequate to describe reality. This is not a fringe group. They are among the most thoughtful and highly honored philosophers and scientists of the past century. How is it that their deeply held and vividly expressed views have been so widely ignored? Is it not that we need to see the world as better organized than the evidence suggests?

"Appropriately, the most ambitious chapter of this section is the final one by Willis Harman. Is the conceptual framework of science sufficiently broad to encompass the phenomenon of consciousness, he asks, or must it be somehow enlarged to fit the facts of mental reality? Attempting an answer, he considers the degree to which science can claim to be objective and to what extent it is influenced by the culture in which it is immersed. Those who disagree might pause to consider the religious perspective from which modern science has emerged.

"There is reason to suppose that the roots of our bias toward determinism lie deeper in our cultural history than many are accustomed to suppose. Indeed, it is possible that this bias may even predate modern scientific methods. In his analysis of thirteenth-century European philosophy, Henry Adams (1904) archly observed: "Saint Thomas did not allow the Deity the right to contradict himself, which is one of Man's chief pleasures." One wonders to what extent reductive science has merely replaced Thomas's God with the theory of everything."

The brave atheist physicalist wishes to pretend that his side has total absolute triumph and the silly little religious view point is going "gluge gluge gluge" as it sinks into the sun lite waters of the ocean, but the truth of it is the paradigm shift is already underway. Materialism has vanished. I call my essay "Materialism Vanishes" but it is already gone. Atheists put a happy face on it and call it "phsyicalism" and say it's gotten better, but the truth of it is materialism is gone and it left behind a form of physicalism which incorporates all sorts of idea that just one hundred years ago would have been seen as magical thinking and nonsense. That essay I link to itself offers a wealth of first rate evdience for the supernatural.


Back to the review of Baggini we find more comparisons of non evidence to irrelevant psychical processes of nature that we all agree exist.

Mediums, for example, who claim to be able to communicate with the dead “are unreliable…no medium has ever been able to tell us something that proves beyond reasonable doubt that they are party to information from the ’spirit world’.” (19) Baggini rejects the burden of having to examine each and every possible case of evidence for life after death, because these cases can plausibly be explained by human gullibility and the emotional need to believe in an afterlife. Retreating to the claim that life after death has not been conclusively disproven is not a desirable move either, because many other beliefs which we think are patently absurd are also unfalsifiable.

That just beats the hell out of Christianity. I know so many theolgoians who base their world views on mediums. But notice he refuses to investigate on a case by case basis. I don't care about mediums but this also means that he wont investigate on a case by case basis when it comes to real sure enough God-miracles. That means he's just chucking best evdience without even examining it as I predicted he would. It's just part of that scientific double talk that amounts to circular reasoning; all the cases of claims for supernatural must be wrong because there can't be a supernatural since there's no evidence, we know there's no evdience because we can rule it out without examining it. He says the cases can be explain by human gullibility, but then he's just dumping the while class of evidence without examining it, begging the question that it's all gullibility. How does he know that? Because it violates his ideology so he can just assume so.

The existence (or lack thereof) of life after death contributes to an inductive case for atheistic naturalism: “The evidence of experience is that we live in a world governed by natural laws, that everything that happens in it is explained by natural phenomena.”

What is his assertion based upon? Upon mediums? Mediums can be swept aside without examining their claims, therefore, there's no life after death? This guy is a scientist? How does he know there is no life after death? Of course we are not dealing with his arguments directly, but the website is in capable hands and the one who does the site is very fair minded and I'm sure he's giving Baggini the best possible hearing.

Baggini also offers an argument to the best explanation, contrasting atheism as a worldview with other worldviews. Among the advantages of an atheistic worldview: 1) “It is simple in that it requires us to posit only the existence of the natural world,” whereas “alternatives also require us to posit the existence of an unobserved supernatural world”

I think it would come as a huge shock to most atheists I encounter that atheism is a world view. Most of them relish the arguemnt that its' merely the absence of belief thus freeing it from any responsibility to really explain the world.

2) “the naturalistic worldview…is also more coherent, because it has everything in the universe fitting into one scheme of being. Those who posit a supernatural realm have to explain how this realm and the natural one interact and coexist” 3) “Atheism has great explanatory power when it comes to the existence of divergent religious beliefs”, and so on.

This is an extremely troubling statement because as a world view based upon naturalism and nothing more he's leaving out all sorts of things that even other atheists had the sense to include, but he can't include them unless he's willing to admit that science is not the only form of knowledge. If he does admit that then he has to admit the best evdience of belief, which is philosophical,deductive, and/or phenomenological in nature. What he's leaving out is demonstrably among that which makes life wroth living and yet is naturalistic but inter-subjective and thus opens the door to other form of knowledge that are not naturalistic. I speak of things like Music, art, literature, philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology.

So we can summarize Baggini’s case for atheistic naturalism as follows: naturalism is inductively supported by the (strong) evidence we have for the regularity of the natural world and the fact that many if not all phenomena we observe have natural explanations, and is the best explanation for a variety of phenomena which are puzzling to the theist.

That there is a physical world and it can be studied scientifically is not in question. Therefore, any attempt to compare this to religious belief is mere a chimera. It has nothing to do with a religious view point.

There is a great deal of empriical evidence supporting the supernatural. But of course it depends upon the Peroper Understanding of the Sueprnatural because the atheist's notion of the supernatural as an unseen realm filled with ghosts and demons, angels and major power is the degraded false watered down version that is left in the wake of enlightenment reductionism and Reformation equicicalism. The great psychologist and social scientist Abraham Maslow equated the supernatural with ordinary psychology and he said:

Now that may be taken as a frank admission of a naturalistic psychological origin, except that it invovles a universal symbology which is not explicable through merely naturalistic means. How is it that all humans come to hold these same archetypical symbols? (For more on archetypes see Jesus Chrsit and Mythology page II) The "prematives" viewed and understood a sense of transformation which gave them an integration into the universe. This is crucial for human development. They sensed a power in the numenous, that is the origin of religion."

"In Appendix I and elsewhere in this essay, I have spoken of unitive perception, i.e., fusion of the B-realm with the D-realm, fusion of the eternal with the temporal, the sacred with the profane, etc. Someone has called this "the measureless gap between the poetic perception of reality and prosaic, unreal commonsense." Anyone who cannot perceive the sacred, the eternal, the symbolic, is simply blind to an aspect of reality, as I think I have amply demonstrated elsewhere (54), and in Appendix I, fromPeak Experience

--Abrham Maslow

He was not far wrong. Religious experince is an empirical example of the supernatural. It is exactly what the supernatural was suppossed to be according to Mathias Joheph Scheeben (Natural and Grace, 1865) the nature of God elevating human nature to the higher level.This is studied empirically and is demonstrated in 350 empirical studies. Some of the distillation of those studies can be seen on Doxa. There is fine scientific empriical evdience for Miracles at Lourdes but one must go on a case by case basis. This is what's so phony about Baggini's approach, becasue in denying case by case basis he's merely ruling out best evidence. The miracles committee uses strict rules,the committees seat the finest medical experts in Europe and even have skeptics on the committee. Best medical evidence is required and rules are designed to screen out remission.

But there's no point to any of this because the best evdience for belief is not empirical evdience at all but the realization of what what it means to be. For that one must face life holistically. The problem with Baggini's approach, and to the extent that he represents a form of atheism, the problem with atheism itself is that it resists a holistic approach to life. It's a reductionist approach. you can't holistically. This is the problem with the empiricist view, it ultimately destroys all forms of knowledge and reduces life to a dull set of facts that aren't worth knowing. The minute one begins thinking about what life means and what its for, the minute one begins thinking there must be something more than just this dull bombardment of atoms in the void,(I don't mean thinking of God I just mean thinking about art or music or what life exists, or why be alive or what is there to live for) one is transgressing, moving over the life of good scientific evdience into the dreaded no man's land of the horrible "subjective."

Belief in God is a realization of what it means to be. Denial of belief is a rejection of everything life is about and everything worth while about living. The reductionist view is an anti-life view.