Who's afraid of the big bad critic?

A couple of months ago, somebody wrote me who was just starting out in philosophy and apologetics. He confessed that he feared challenge and critique, not just because he'd lose face over it, but because he would fail the church because of it. I offered him my advice in reply and was just thinking it might be helpful to others, so I'm going to make a blog post out of it. Here ye go:


I think everybody, whether Christian or not, has experienced a little anxiety in a debate or when reading an opposing book or article. I think the primary reason we have this anxiety is because our ego is at stake. That's especially the case when you're in a face to face encounter. All of us, at one time or another, have discovered that we were wrong about something, and changed our minds as a result. But nobody wants to be proved wrong in the heat of battle because it stings our ego.

And people are sometimes very emotionally attached to their point of view, and it's painful to have to give it up. That's especially the case for Christians, I think, because of the emphasis we put on having a personal relationship with our lord and savior. Finding out he's not really our lord and savior is kind of like losing your best friend. If you had your whole purpose for living wrapped up in it, it's very scary to give it up.

There are a few things that have helped me with my anxiety when facing opposition:

1. Place a high value on truth. Maybe you ARE wrong about some things. We shouldn't fear finding out that we're wrong. We should welcome it. If we place a high value on truth, then we'll be thankful for whoever sets us straight. We should make a conscious decision to pursue truth regardless of whether we like it or not. As long as our goal is to discover the truth about things, we should never feel any anxiety about finding out we've been wrong.

2. Swallow your pride. You've heard the saying, "Pride goes before the fall." It's true. If you can't be humble, you can't learn. And if you can't learn, you're doomed to wallow in ignorance. Life will kick your butt if you're too prideful to be corrected or advised by other people. Solomon said, "Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you; Reprove a wise man, and he will love you" (Proverbs 9:8). Be the wise man. Instead of digging in your heals when faced with a tough challenge, acknowledge the merits of the challenge. Admit you don't know something when you don't know it. Don't just make stuff up in an effort to save face.

3. Educate yourself. The more you know, the less anxiety you'll have about being wrong. Do the hard work of studying and refining your apologetic.

4. Read your opposition carefully. There's a tendency to gloss over what our opposition says because we're afraid. This is why there's so much misunderstanding between people with differing points of view. I have found that if I try hard to really understand what my opposition is saying, and to master it to the point that I could defend their position myself, the flaws in their arguments will become much more apparent than if I had just glossed over them. Sometimes an argument can seem persuasive at first glance, but when you dig a little deeper you find the flaws. Actually studying the deep atheist thinkers has increased my faith. It's like a kid who is afraid of the monster under his bed. Once he actually looks under his bed to discover there's no monster, his fear goes away.

5. Keep in mind the core essentials of Christianity. At a bare minimum, if God exists, if he imposes moral obligations on us, if we disobey them, and if he judges us, and if Jesus is the Christ, and if he died for sins, and if he was raised from the dead, then Christianity is true. Keep that in mind because the majority of our critics will attack things that have no bearing on the truth of any of these essentials. For example, you'll hear a lot about Bible contradictions, and you can get bogged down in endless discussions of contradictions and reconciliations, but none of that tells you anything about whether those core elements of Christianity are true. So when you're faced with a challenge you can't answer, just ask yourself, "If the other person is right, what bearing does that have on these core tenants of Christianity? Could Christianity be true if my opponent's arguments are sound?" I have found this to be very useful in my debates. I avoid rabbit trails or insignificant arguments. I don't even debate inerrancy with non-believers. Stay focused when you're debating on line, and keep in mind the importance of the topic you're debating and it's bearing on whether or not Christianity is true.

I hope this helps. I also recommend reading "The Ambassador's Creed."

Open Theism

Open Theism is a subject I haven't thought much about. One of my facebook friends asked for suggestions to blog about. I threw out a suggestion that he didn't want to write about because he hadn't thought much about it. For me, though, blogs are sometimes an opportunity to think out loud, so I decided to blog about something I hadn't thought much about just to show that it can be done. I'm thinking about open theism right now, and I'm going to share my thoughts with you.

First, lemme tell you what I take open theism to be, and mind ye this is just hearsay. Open theism is the view that God does not know everything that is going to happen in the future. More specifically, he doesn't know what free creatures are going to decide in every case.

The first criticism that ordinary theists (closed theists?) might make is that God is all-knowing. That's standard Christian doctrine. And an ordinary theist might accuse an open theism of denying God's omniscience.

The response of an open theist, from what I understand, is that God is all-knowing. To be all-knowing means to know all true propositions. But God can't be faulted for not knowing something when there's nothing to know. God doesn't know what colour my girlfriend's hair is for the simple reason that I don't have a girlfriend. But that doesn't mean he isn't all knowing. There's no answer to the question, "What colour is my girlfriend's hair"? There's no true proposition for God to know. In the same way, say the open theists, there's no true answer to the question, "What is Bob gonna do with that apple?" if Bob has free will and is just as likely to eat it as he is to throw it away.

It's an interesting thing to think about. Open theism depends on the notion of libertarian free will. In compatibilist free will, our choices are determined by our natures, including our desires, biases, motives, beliefs, etc. But in libertarian free will, our choices are not determined by any antecedent causes or conditions, including our mental predispositions. Since nothing determines what a person will do under libertarianism, anything is possible (within physical limits, of course). Somehow, Open theists seem to think this removes all truth value from future tensed propositions when it comes to describing the future actions of free creatures.

One way they might get there is to say that if there is some definite truth about what you are going to choose in the future, then you can't choose otherwise since, if you did, then the original "truth" would not have really been true after all. So if there is some definite truth about your future choices, then you cannot have libertarian free will. But since you do have libertarian free will, then there's no definite truth about what you're going to choose in the future. That's a logically valid argument, but I dispute both premises. I don't believe we have libertarian free will. I'm a compatibilist. But I don't think there being definite truths about our future choices amounts to our choices being determined, so I don't think future tensed truths are inconsistent with us having libertarian free will. I won't go into that because I wrote about it here.

Also, I gave some philosophical arguments for compatibilism in various other blogs, which I linked to here. I argued in there that compatibilism makes better sense out of morality than libertarianism does. So if we have moral obligations, then compatibilism is more likely to be true than libertarianism.

But lots of Biblical arguments have been made for compatibilism, too. One of the best I've read was Martin Luther's book on The Bondage of the Will.

But even without appealing to compatibilism over and against libertarianism, a person could argue against open theism by pointing to the many prophecies in the Bible that seem to depend on human decision for their fulfillment. Clearly, God knew what people were going to do. Otherwise, he would not have been able to make those certain predictions. The Bible clearly portrays God as knowing the future actions of his creatures.

I suppose an open theist could respond by saying that since God doesn't exhaustively predict all future acts of all his creatures, these Biblical prophecies do not negate open theism. They could argue that in the case of prophecy, God overrides libertarian free will, but he only does so in isolated circumstances in order to bring his prophecies to fulfillment. It isn't his usual course of action. I don't really have an answer for that. I'd have to look up passages to see exactly what it says about God's future knowledge.

Open Theism also seems to depend on a dynamic theory of time. If time is static, and God exists outside of time and is able to observe the entire spectrum of time as if it were all "now" from his point of view, then it seems obvious that he would know everything that every free creature would ever choose. Only if God is in time, like the rest of us, would any problem arise, it seems to me, because then God would either have to predict the future or wait to see what happens. So if it turns out that the static view of time is correct, that would probably be a good argument against open theism. I happen to subscribe to the dynamic theory of time, though, so I wouldn't go that route.

Messages from God on Facebook: Hearing the voice of God

Remember when I mentioned that facebook has this "message from God" app that will post a message as if it were God speaking to you? Well, today, one of my friends got a "message from God" that went like this:

On this day, God wants you to know that silence is golden. When we are quiet, we can hear God's messages to us. Sometimes these messages may be in the form of subtle intuition. Sometimes it may feel like an inner knowing. Sometimes we may hear a 'still, small voice.' If it feels right in your heart, trust that it is God speaking to you.

This is a good example of why I don't like these. This is just silly, but unfortunately, a big chunk of the Christian population out there thinks this way. Very few actually try to live their lives this way. The few I've met have not had much success with it.

For the antidote, see Decision Making and the Will of God by Garry Friesen or Decision Making and the Will of God by Gregory Koukl.

A Calvinism thought experiment

Since becoming a Calvinist, I've given a lot of thought to the issue of how people can be morally accountable for their actions if God decrees everything that comes to pass, including human decisions. Calvinists usually subscribe to compatibilist free will to reconcile the situation, but people have a difficult time understanding how people can be morally accountable for their actions if their actions are determined by motives and desires that they did not choose. I wrote two series of blogs about this problem. The first is a nine part series called "Argument against morality from determinism" where I argued that compatibilism is compatible with moral responsibility. You can read them here: intro: the power of intuition, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, and part 9. The second is a five part series called "God's Sovereignty and Human Responsibility," where I argued, building on the previous series, that God's sovereignty is compatible with human responsibility. You can read them here: intro: My conversion to Calvinism, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. The discussion in the comments section of parts 3 and 4 are worth reading, too.

After all this, I tried to come up with thought experiments that would appeal to most people's intuition and that would help them see that people can be morally accountable for their actions even if God made them the way they are. I came up with one regarding Voldemort, which I posted on my blog here. I wanted to find out if this thought experiment would have an intuitive appeal in favour of the Calvinist view or not, so I posted it on Yahoo Answers to see what people would say. This is the question I asked:

As all us Harry Potter fans know, Voldemort is not a real person. As a fictional character, he's evil and blameworthy within the story, but not in real life. But suppose J.K. Rowling had the power to bring Voldemort to real life. And suppose that if she did so, the real Voldemort would be exactly like he is in the books. He'd be just as mean and nasty and evil. Would he be morally blameable for his actions?

I intentionally left out any reference to Calvinism because I wanted to get opinions from people without their bias for or against Calvinism playing a part in their answer. Sometimes people resist the force of an argument if they don't like where it is going. The majority of people who answered thought that Voldemort would be morally responsible for his actions in spite of the fact that he didn't choose to come into existence or to have all those nasty dispositions, which is what I was hoping for.

It wasn't until just the other day that I actually used this thought experiment in a real conversation about Calvinism in order to persuade the other person. The conversation took place on Stand to Reason's facebook discussion forum, and you can read the conversation here. As I suspected, the person I was talking to was not persuaded by the thought experiment.

So I came up with a different thought experiment, and that is the whole reason for this blog post--to share the next thought experiment I came up with and to see what you think about it. Here it is:

Let's suppose there are two people named Voldemort, and that they are exactly alike in every way. They look alike, dress alike, smell alike, talk alike, etc. They have identical DNA, an identical brain structure, identical mental structure (including desires, biases, beliefs, memories, personality, etc.). The only difference between them is that one of them was born and came into the world the usual way. The other was brought into existence by J.K. Rowling just a few days ago. Would you say...

A. They are both morally accountable for their actions;
B. Only the one born the usual way is accountable for his actions;
or
C. Neither one of them is accountable for his actions?

And since I'm making so many links in this blog entry, I might as well link to another conversation I had on this same topic. The subject came up on STR's blog, and you can read it here. And there's another related conversation here on whether Jesus could sin, and if not, was he really tempted?

There. Now I've got all these handy links in one place so if I ever want to read any of this again, I won't have to look it up. How convenient!

What is worship?

I just copied this from a comment I made on another blog...

I remember going to church when I was a lot younger and singing a bunch of songs that included things like, “I will worship you,” and things like that. It made me wonder what worship really was. I mean if singing those songs WAS worshipping God, then the lyrics should’ve said, “I am worshipping you.” So I remember in the back of my mind wondering when we were going to worship God, and what that would even mean.

Just the other day, I started thinking about the ways we worship, which usually include singing, praising, and praying. But we do all those things to ordinary people. We write songs about people, we congratulate people, and I communicate with people, sometimes even making requests (which is what “pray” literally means–to ask). So is worship just a more extreme version of all singing, praising, and praying to somebody? I mean obviously praise comes in degrees. We praise our children for getting good grades, or we praise our favourite apologist for giving a good talk. But the praise we offer God is a whole lot more lofty than the praise we give our fellow man. Is that really the difference? Is the distinction between worship and ordinary praise really just a matter of degree?

Some people say that anything we do for the glory of God is worship. Acts of kindness and charity can be considered a form of worship. Studying the Bible, or even studying philosophy can be considered a form of worship. I’m not sure how I feel about that because I can’t think of an Biblical examples of anything like that being referred to as worship.

There are several places in the Bible that say somebody “fell down and worshipped him.” When I was really little, I used to think worship was just bowing low with your hands in front of you, rising up, and bowing down again. But it can’t just be that. That’s just a physical motion. People even do it jokingly to each other (is that wrong?). Falling down can’t be equivalent to worship because (1) it’s possible to fall down and NOT worship, and (2) if they meant the same thing, the Bible would just say, “they fell down,” or “they worshipped.” It would be redundant to say “they fell down and worshipped.” But I suppose it could be that falling down was included in the worship. If so, what else was included? Since falling down, by itself, isn’t worship, but becomes worship when coupled with some other activity, what other activity is involved? Is it just a mental thing? Kind of like when everybody stands up when somebody enters the room? After all, standing up, by itself, is not an act of reverence, respect, or homage, but standing up as an intentional way of recognizing somebody’s authority, or respecting them IS an act of reverence, respect, or homage. It’s the intention that makes it so. Is it the same with “falling down and worshipping”? Is it worshipping just because of the intentional reason for falling down before God?

Thoughts anybody?

Michael Martin and Paul Copan on morality

A long time ago, there was an exchange between Paul Copan and Michael Martin on morality, the moral argument for God, the divine command theory, Euthyphro's dilemma, etc. I remember it being really interesting and educational, so I thought I'd provide links to the article in the order in which they were written, not just for you, but for me, too, so I don't have to use google if I want to find them all again. :-)

"Atheism, Christian Theism, and Rape" by Michael Martin

"Can Micahel Martin Be a Moral Realist?" by Paul Copan

"Copan's Critique of Atheistic Objective Morality" by Michael Martin

"Atheistic Goodness Revisited: A Personal Reply to Michael Martin" by Paul Copan

"The Naturalistic Fallacy and Other Mistaken Arguments of Paul Copan" by Michael Martin

As far as I know, Paul Copan never responded to Michael Martin's last article, but I did find this short interaction with Martin's last article:

Atheist Michael Martin admits to this admixture [that man is both a sinner and a saint]; within the space of two paragraphs that humans both “seem so ungod-like” and are superior to animals in “intelligence, advanced linguistic and artistic capabilities,” possessing “mathematical, scientific, and technological knowledge.”8

Fn 8: Michael Martin, “A Response to Paul Copan’s Critique of Atheistic Objective Morality,” Philosophia Christi, 2 (2000): 75-90. I reply to Martin’s mistake in “Atheistic Goodness Revisited: A Personal Reply to Michael Martin” Philosophia Christi, Series 2, Vol. 2 (2000): 91-104. For some strange reason, in a later on-line essay, Martin persists in accusing me of a “contradiction” he himself espouses (humans as a mixed bag of goodness and evil) and that I had already addressed in my response to him (“The Naturalistic Fallacy and Other Mistaken Arguments of Paul Copan” [2000]: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/copan.html). Martin’s obvious error is failing to distinguish between essential and accidental properties. Thomas V. Morris puts it this way: “There are properties which happen to be common to members of a natural kind, and which may even be universal to all members of that kind, without being essential to membership in the kind” (Our Idea of God [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1991], 164). On the differences between essential and accidental, see Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).

That's all I could find. Paul Copan has written a few things since then on this same subject, though. There's a list of his articles here, some of which are on the subject of grounding morality.

God signs

From time to time you see God signs like this quoting God. When people read them, nobody thinks God actually said these things. Even though they are usually written by Christians, nobody accuses the Christians of false prophecy either. The reason is because that would be a confusion of genre. The signs are not meant to be prophecy, so they can't be false prophecy.

On facebook, some people have this app where "God wants you to know..." something. The app posts a blurb written in first person from God's point of view that usually contains some shallow platitude or feel-good advice. But nobody thinks God himself is actually saying these things, and nobody intends for it to be taken as if he did.

I also see mock conversations between God and somebody else that Christians include on T-shirts, cards, books, or whatever that are supposed to illustrate some point. But none of these things are meant to convey what the author thinks God actually said. Nobody takes them that way, and nobody intends for them to be taken that way.

Do you ever wonder if some of the things in the Bible are that way? Maybe it's a genre, and maybe some of the "prophecies" in the Bible fall under that genre and are not meant to be taken as prophecy at all. I'm inclined to think apocalyptic literature (e.g. Daniel and Revelation) are like that. What do you think?

Natural and Unnatural

I posted a question on Yahoo answers recently asking how vegans felt about breast feeding. You see, vegans differ from vegetarians in that while neither will eat meat, vegetarians are at least willing to eat animal products such as eggs, milk, and cheese. Vegans won't even eat animal products. So I was curious to know how they felt about breast feeding since that involves consuming an animal product.

The best answer I got was essentially this:

1. Vegans are against exploitation.
2. Breast feeding is not exploitation, but eating non-human animal products is.
3. Therefore vegans are okay with breast feeding, but they are against eating non-human animal products.

That seemed consistent to me.

But there was another argument brought up that I wasn't so sure about. A few people pointed out that breast feeding is natural, but eating the products of other animals is not. It was as if to say that as long as something is natural, it is okay, and if it is unnatural, then it is not okay.

I almost posted another question about that. I was curious to know how vegans felt about homosexuality. Arguably, it's unnatural since male parts and female parts are complimentary, but same sex parts aren't. To be consistent, shouldn't vegans also oppose homosexuality for the same reason? But most vegans I've met tend to be liberal, and most liberals tend to be okay with homosexuality.

Of course a lot of people will say that homosexuality is natural just because other animals also engage in homosexual behavior. But if a vegan makes that argument, they will undermine their argument for being vegan. After all, coyotes eat chicken eggs. In fact, LOTS of other animals eat eggs that don't belong to them. Does that make eating eggs natural and therefore okay? And I've also seen interspecies breast feeding, although that usually happens in captivity more than in the wild, so I guess they could say it's still unnatural.

I'm not convinced that natural = okay or that unnatural = bad. I can think of counter-examples of both. But what do you think? Do you think if something is natural that it's okay, and if it's unnatural it's not okay? And how do you distinguish between what is natural and what isn't? Are non-human animals even capable of doing something that isn't natural? If not, then how are we? If we are capable of doing what is natural and also what is unnatural, how do you tell the difference? What makes something natural or unnatural?

If you're a Calvinist, wouldn't you have to admit that the natural state of man is that he is a sinner? Isn't sin natural? If sin is natural, then how can you equate the natural with the morally permissible and the unnatural with being morally wrong?