I ran across an interesting quote today over at Dan Miessler's blog and thought it'd be great to get some feedback on this one. I have a few thoughts on it myself, but figured I'd throw it out there and let others comment first. What say you?
Everyone is walking around presuming to know that there isn’t a Zeus, there isn’t a Poseidon, and there isn’t a Thor. Can you prove that Thor with his hammer isn’t sending down lightning bolts? No, you can’t prove it. But that’s not the right question. The right question is, “Is there any reason whatsoever to think there’s a god named Thor?” And of course there isn’t. There are many good reasons to think that he was a fictional character. The Batman of Scandinavia.The problem for religious people is that the god of the Bible is on no firmer footing, epistemologically, than these dead gods. Which is to say that nobody ever discovered that Thor doesn’t exist, but that the biblical god really does. So we have learned to talk and use the word ‘god’ in a way so as not to notice that we’re using a very strange word and evoking a very vacuous concept, like the concept of Thor. — Sam Harris
It's an interesting quote. A significant difference between the Triune God and Thor, Zeus, et al. is that in our framework God does not primarily reveal himself through the phenomena of nature like lightning bolts, hurricanes, and earthquakes, though these are still considered "acts of God" and fit into our theology somehow. Instead, we can appeal to a few things, but perhaps the areas where our strongest defense lies are the moral intuition (I'm thinking of what Lewis used in several sources, esp. 'The Abolition of Man' where he refers to the 'Tao') and the belief that God has revealed himself through a Person.
ReplyDeleteJust my initial thoughts.
But what theologically is the difference between revealing yourself as "nature" and as "man"? They both are fundamentally the same type of revelation of a supernatural power and hallmark, as it were, of the divine: a control over forces we do not (did not) understand and ability to create them where we cannot. Whether one makes oneself known via a lightning bolt, earthquake, communicative wildlife, or another human one simply expounds a control of form. Further, there are plenty of Old Testament examples of revelations in non-human form. Basically, an appeal to the form of the act of revelation isn't particularly dispositional.
ReplyDeleteWho said God reveals God's self "as" nature? "Through" perhaps but the distinction is that we do not affirm that the lightning bolt "is" God but we do believe that Jesus of Nazareth "is" God.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing to stop a "Zeusian" or a "Thorian" from *believing*---which is a very key word in the structure of your statement---that the nature *is* Zeus or Thor. Given a few more centuries of story telling and, in the case of Thor at least, a wider audience and they could have developed just that theology. The infant years of the Christian church were devoted to just this debate (the divinity of the whole and the part) wasn't it? (I'm not having that debate or opening that door, just backing up that it was a belief decided later, and argued extensively, as it could have been for other "gods".)
ReplyDeleteSo the stories told on top of the revelation differ, however, and quite substantially. Which is likely why religious people---as Sam Harris is implying---don't normally drill down to this level of discussion. But does that justify not addressing the underlying similarities among god stories and mythology in general? What or where from does a Christian derive the theological authority to a priori deny Zeus and accept God? Is that the leap of faith right there, at step 1? Is the story that God's revelation is "through" rather than "as" enough?
I should be clear that I'm not attacking your points but rather trying to dig a bit deeper. Sam Harris' quote, in larger context, is a question as to why Christians don't all question more. The logic a Christian could use to attack Zeus is dangerously analogous to the logic a non-religious person could use to attack Christianity, thus making the questioning relevant (at least to the extent that "dangerously analogous" approaches "the same as", which is what I'm driving at.)
I'm going to jump in here and say that I'm loving this discussion; exactly why I posted this, I thought it was a very compelling quote and wanted to, as you say Kooch, dig a bit deeper.
ReplyDeleteThese are the sorts of questions that "seekers" or "non-Christians" or "outsiders" or whatever you want to call "them" are asking, questions that - quite honestly - are very valid and worth delving into for ALL humanity. Why and how do we know what we know? Are we believing things simply because it's convenient, or because we've thought through them?
But again, Kooch brings up a good point - at some level, you HAVE to make a leap of faith to believe in ANYTHING. God is not obvious to everyone like Wesley thought He ought to be; not everybody grew up in a culture in which God was "obvious" (aka part of the cultural education and structure).
Keep talking, I'm enjoying this :)
Very good points! I hope I wasn't taken as trying to communicate a simplistic answer to a complex issue. In addition, it was not my intention to "attack Zeus" (I'm not sure if you were implying I was doing so) but merely to share a bit of the difference in the beliefs between the worldviews. I acknowledge that belief is a key word in what is being discussed here. But this word is as significant in the "non-belief" of God as it is in the belief in Divine being(s).
ReplyDeleteWhat say you about the argument from morality?
agreed, great points. And I hope my rebuttals didn't come off combative (they weren't suppose to, but the faceless toneless interwebs can often lend that feeling to any question/answer/debate thread).
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I think Chris' expression was more clear than mine (i've never been known to be concise): what makes God more/less obvious than ______.
Save for a few accidents of history, we could have a whole tangle of far more similar than dissimilar theologies. It's irrelevant which one is "true" and which are false/plagiarized. All that matters is it would be even less "obvious" how to chose and likely that Sam Harris' question would be a constant point of debate. Granted, there's something to be said that those accidents of history did not occur...
As to morality, I'm in the shallow end of that discussion. How does the moral intuition that arrives with the Christianity differ from moral intuition as it was/could have been in other religious societies? Is the argument that moral intuition can only flow from God, or rather that God gave this form of moral intuition which is better than previous moral compasses?
I think maybe what you're trying to say is that all of the so-called "proofs" of Christianity (or any other ideology or religion) are ultimately useless as anything but indirect evidence. Someone will always have a way to throw moral intuition into question, new evidence casts doubt on old evidence, yadda yadda yadda ... in the end, we take it all on faith. There IS no such thing as proof, and anyone who says otherwise is selling an agenda. We all decide to believe what we believe.
ReplyDeleteThat's not to say there is no ultimate reality, no gods other than the ones we create, whatever. What it IS to say is that reality is far harder to comprehend when you have an opaque pair of glasses through which to view it. All of us are biased, our spiritual lenses tainted with the soot of experience and the smudges of the history of our people. The mere fact that God ever makes Himself known to any of us shows how ingenious He is - even in the state we find ourselves, He can still seem to form an image through the looking glass and say 'hey.'
I'd say that the problem ends up being an interpersonal, intercultural one; it's between us as people, as beings with differing perceptions. And we all get parts of it wrong, some more than others, but all of us get at least some of it wrong. Sometimes we even deliberately mislead ourselves so we can believe something that we want to.
Truth is messier than we like, I think.
I see your theoretical point there Chris, but it's still wide open for a non-believer to say that God hasn't done a better job at throwing shadows on the dirty glass than ______. Then you end up waging a quantitative war with the opponent on the evidence, with both sides using admittedly bounded perceptions/conceptions of truth.
ReplyDeleteGod has not made himself known to everyone. There are many who have no experience of revelation, and many more who think a different god has made himself/herself/theirself known. And then we're back at Harris' square one: What makes your revelation more special than mine, to the point that I don't have to spend time denouncing yours or even investigating my own?
Of course it is - that's the point. "Wide-open for criticism" is precisely the problem; everybody's experience is subjective and there's no knowing for sure, despite what scientists and fundamentalists will tell you.
ReplyDeleteBut.
That doesn't mean God hasn't made himself known, it just means we may not have been listening or looking hard enough. I'm just admitting it as a possibility. One of the precepts of Christian Missions is that we, the missionaries, are simply "tour guides" to show those we meet how the Holy Spirit (one of God's expressions, I guess is one way to say it) is already at work in their lives. I'm not going to get into a debate about salvation here, but suffice it to say, at the VERY least, if the Christian narrative is true, where there are Christians, there is a revelation of God in the Body of Christ: the Church. But I digress.
I think most Christians at this point in the conversation would say something about "nature" being indirect evidence of God's creative hand, but again, it's indirect. You're right - God doesn't seem to reveal himself in an undeniable way to anybody/everybody. I think, honestly, that this has more to do with US than with Him.
But to really answer your question, as I see it, nobody CAN claim that their religion is more "special" or whatever, but we CAN say that others ought to at least investigate what we believe. We tell the story and see if it fits with their experience. Sometimes we change the way we tell the story so that it makes sense in their culture (we call this "contextualization" in my research field), but in the end, it will ALWAYS take the person suspending their disbelief and taking a leap of faith to see if the experience fits.
We have to actively search for it. I think that inherent in Harris' statement (or maybe your interpretation of it, I'm not sure which) is an assumption that we shouldn't have to work to understand Truth, that God, if He's there, should just make it undeniable to everybody. And in my experience, God doesn't work like that.
I think I'm following you, but I'm a newbie so be gentle. I think you moved away from Harrs' point in your last paragraph, and I'm seeing I did too many dances around it too: once you go actively searching for it (Truth) you have the problem of asserting God v. Zeus (thor, wodan, mithras, zoroaster, mother earth).
ReplyDeleteClearly, you have done work to understand Truth, and that work has led you to the conclusion that God is there. What is it about the work that leads you to God that is different and inherently more worthy of your belief than work that would lead someone to ______ (I don't want to keep picking on Zeus, in case we have any greco-roman scholars here). And what do you say to someone who has done equal work, which led to their conclusion that Zeus is there? Or that no one is there?
Hmm. I'd probably say "I disagree, but I can respect that you've done the searching too. Tell me about it." Then I'd shut up and listen, and hope maybe they'd ask the same of me in return.
ReplyDeleteBut in the end, I think that our searching should never end; we ought ALWAYS be trying to integrate new information and experiences into our worldview; I think that God is bigger than the narrow box many have tried to use to contain Him. Jesus himself said that if you seek Truth, you will find Him.
And eventually you have to say, "though I can't know for sure until the End, this is my present decision." As a missionary, I hope that such a choice is to choose the God of the scriptures. As a human being, I hope the same thing; the "religion" described by Paul and James and others in the New Testament would make this world a far better place (taking care of the helpless and broken, among other things). Even if for some reason it turned out there's no god or deity and we just melt into the earth, I think that behaving as Christ modeled improves everything. But again, I still toss my hat into His camp because I believe I've met and experienced him ...
Here is part of my story that you might find helpful to this part of the conversation ...
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link. That does give relevant backstory. And then back to Sam Harris' quote.
ReplyDeleteYour answer to why you do not contend with Zeus or other dead gods is because you had a personal revelation with Him, but not with another. That personal experience at least started you down the path and now you feel that you have sufficient reason to believe fully (where fully is an evolving and likely expanding metric) and therefore the Zeus question is, as it is for most believers, a non sequitur.
And we're back to Jeffrey's original comment that the difference is a personal revelation; in your case, that was intimately personal where in other cases it can also be a revelation through the specific form chosen (a man) and the subsequent actions and teachings that were made possible thereby. If I'm summarizing correctly then, the equally vacuous epistemological footing for a "god" is then irrelevant, as opposed to grounds for invalidating both or all religions/mythologies? It is the entirety that follows the presumption of an existent god which validates the exercise?
...and if I might point out the red herring in your last paragraph. :-) I suppose it leads somewhere---to another debate---but it certainly leads off of the question at hand. Not sure if you wanted me to address it or if it was just a personal afterward. I'd vote we save that for a later thread and stay on this one...because I'm still behind you both in understanding, but you're both good expositors, and I appreciate the education.
ReplyDelete... so ... I really have no idea what you're asking. I've read and re-read it a few times and it's still not quite clicking. Sorry, but do you think you could re-state the question? I still can't guarantee a good answer, but at least if I understand it, there's a better chance ...
ReplyDeleteBut we could open up the question a bit and ask, what is it - really - to "know" something or someone? Are there different kinds of "knowing"? I'd wager so, and to say that the Greek idea we're all used to of this sort of empty knowing of facts doesn't even BEGIN to cover it. It ignores the idea of intuition, makes very little sense of relationships between people, etc. So with that in mind, maybe you could ask your question again?
Sorry I've been out of touch for a bit, but as Chris knows I've been traveling for the last couple of days, headed home from a 2-week visit in England. A couple of things:
ReplyDelete1. In reply to your question to me, Kooch, I'd say that I was working on two fronts: a. Defending theism against an atheistic attack (in which I invoked the argument from morality); b. explaining the difference between a Christian belief in God from other views that have been and are espoused (in which I invoked the argument about God as a Person). I didn't clearly explain that difference and am glad your question helped point that out. I see, however, that your questions have been more on along the lines of the latter. I'm not sure if Sam Harris' original statement was asking the former or the latter so perhaps I should have researched that before giving a response.
2. During my travel back home, I have read the first 100 pages or so of N.T. Wright's 'Surprised by Hope,' whose topic is on the resurrection of Jesus and its relation to the Christian belief in the future resurrection event. I must say that part 1 of the book gives a very solid defense of Jesus' resurrection. Further, he speaks on some of the issues that have been raised here: are there different kinds of 'knowing'? What is the relationship between history and science, in terms of knowing? Is rationalism the answer for defending Christianity, in general, and the resurrection, in particular? What is so interesting about Wright is that after he gives a very solid, reasoned defense of the probability of the resurrection (and that based on the concept of resurrection in Judaism and the concept's non-existence in any pagan religion at the time, it is extremely more probable than all other theories that attempt to explain the physical resurrection away as something else), he says that rationalism is not the central issue to the resurrection, but it is one of 'faith' (nor is that to divorce 'faith' from 'rationality'). It simply is another type of 'knowing,' which I think Chris is trying to get at. There's much more he said about this so I'd highly recommend reading it.
hmm, let me try a restatement, weaving in both of your wider definitions of "knowing", i think i get your points. I would caution though about opening that definition too wide, or else it seems a cope out, or haven, where anything is possible. On a more practical level too, this is a blog entry around Sam's quote, and we don't want to just free-wheel (or do we? it's not my blog or my rules.) In this case though, I (think I) see that it is the key to your points.
ReplyDeleteWhat you're saying is that Sam Harris' quote is irrelevant because we DO "know" something more about God than about Zeus, thus rendering it a non sequitur...but contingent on the willingness or ability to open up the definition of "know" to allow in what we "know" of God. And as long as we use that bigger definition, what we "know" of God trumps what we "know" of Zeus?
I apologize for the use of quotations, it's to emphasize that we're using the broader philosophical definition of "to know". I know quotation marks in paragraphs like this can come off poorly.
And on the same note, there's no atheist attack here. I'm an interlocutor here and certainly hope I'm not coming across as trolling. I simply saw the quote, read your comments, and thought there could be more to the conversation, and figured I could jump in and perhaps spark that for my own benefit of clarity. Not to try and change anyone's mind. My criticism was aimed at the logic, not at the religion. I hope I succeeded in that. But we can check that Just by going back through and replacing all my references to God or Zeus with other names.
I like the question that Harris poses precisely because it makes people think long and hard about why they think what they think. The reason nobody believes in Thor anymore is that all the things people told us about him - the rituals we were supposed to do, the things we weren't supposed to do that might piss him off, etc. - were shown to be bogus. When we stopped doing the rituals, we noticed no increase in lightning bolts or deaths or whatever.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the same cannot be said of the God of the New Testament. People still continue to experience God in many ways. We can't disprove Him, and lots of us still think that there are reasons to believe he's there. So no, you can't disprove Thor, and you can't disprove God. But it DOES come down to a question of what you find as sufficient evidence. For many people there IS no such thing as "sufficient evidence" because they have already decided that they don't want to believe in a god. It's a question of bias, and that's bad science, and it's bad epistemology.
People, in general, have a very hard time suspending disbelief and trying to understand the perspectives of another. But that is precisely what we as a species need to learn how to do in order to get along, in order to search for truth, and I think, in order that our search will lead to the God who said "I AM the Truth." People who don't find God - and even some who do, I'll admit this - often didn't really want to find Him in the first place. Their search for the break in the clouds was spent staring at the forest floor; it was sabotaged the whole search long because they refused to admit to themselves the mere possibility.
Sufficient evidence is a weird thing. Sam Harris is (i think, in another restatement) asking "what do you mean that `[p]eople still continue to experience God in many ways?' Are people not experiencing Zeus in many ways? Could they still experience Zeus (or Jupiter, had the Roman era not collapsed.)? Could they go out and search for Zeus?"
ReplyDeleteGranting an expanded definition of "to know" is a good thing for any argument for belief. It's possible that you did have a very personal experience with God at an earlier age that set you on this path. That "experience" fits inside the larger definition of knowledge and is, on that level, evidence. And the old lady, who lives down the street from me, who is Wiccan, experiences the Earth Spirit (she does not like the term Mother Earth) when she tends her garden.
So we don't have to suspend disbelief nor question belief here. We can see a form of the point as the problem between two believers, coming face-to-face with equivalent experiences or evidence of very different belief. Bias runs strongly not only in disbelief, it works with believers too I'm afraid. With a believer always feeling that their knowledge, however expansive one makes the definition, trumps the other knowledge.
Quite so, and I think that this is one of the biggest challenges that faces ANY system of ideas today. I heard it said once that change doesn't happen through persuasion, but rather a paradigm ends when its old adherents die off and a new generation grows up learning the new paradigm. Bias is HUGE. But this also tends to ignore the fact that people really DO convert, really do change systems of belief. Some do it less noticeably, over longer periods of time, but I know for a fact that people can change their religion and do so in a manner that doesn't make any sense when one looks over their history. Sometimes it's small, like Wesleyan to Mormon, but sometimes it's HUGE, like Buddhist to Presbyterian, or Hindu to Muslim. I'd say that this is some evidence that there is, at the very least, a spiritual realm at work.
ReplyDeleteI think the other thing we ignore in this discussion sometimes is the fact that many if not all spiritual claims come with a light side and a dark side, which can really explain why religions compete with one another: one of them is right, and the rest are being deceived. The problem that it always comes back to is the very question we started with: how do you tell which is which? And my answer, once again, is that we have to admit that we can't ever know for sure.
sorry for the late reply, but I was off the grid for the weekend. and it looks as though you've found a good place to rest this thread. I'll have to do some more reading on/around your blogs before the next round!
ReplyDelete