The Questioning Christian

More experimental evidence of divine intervention

Well, not exactly. But this news report from Scientific American provides us with a bit of ammunition to argue that, in the very long term, the Creator has been using our gifts of memory, reason, and skill in the on-going construction of our universe:

To explain why cooperation with nonrelatives arises and persists in populations, British researchers developed a computational model in which players have varying degrees of cooperativeness (a willingness to allow partners to accrue benefits at their own expense) and choosiness (a willingness to leave partners based on their teamwork).

After each round of play, an individual receives a payoff that reflects the effort both teammates exert. Individuals do best, however, if they manage to get their partners to do most of the work.

After the payoff, players can continue together to the next round or decide to divorce the other, in which case each would be randomly paired with another partner.

Because players that are repeatedly divorced get slapped with greater costs [known in business as switching costs - DCT] than those that stick together, cooperation and choosiness rise in tandem when many rounds are played—the equivalent of long life spans.

Choose the January 10 Nature for the complete payoff.

Philip Yam, Choosiness for Cooperation, Scientific American, Mar. 2008, p. 31 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).

Related posts:

• What it's all about

• A response to an inquiring non-believer

Science is the current best guess

From the March 11 issue of The Christian Century (page 9):

There are two sayings that astronomer Aileen O'Donoghue repeats to her students: "Science is the current best guess" and "You can't do science in your basement."

By the first remark, she means that we can never be certain about scientific theories (which is not to say that theories are not to be taken seriously or that the theory of evolution, say, or Newton's law of gravity can be discarded).

Her second point is that though you can do experiments in a basement, findings must be brought into the light of day and subjected to the scrutiny of the scientific community. The testing of some findings can take a long time—it took 300 years for an error to be discovered in Newton's Principia

(The Sky Is Not a Ceiling: An Astronomer's Faith, Orbis).

Warren Buffett on love and happiness

From a Q&A between Warren Buffett and some business students:

"... The future is exciting. As Bertrand Russell says, ‘Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.’ I won the ovarian lottery the day I was born and so did all of you. We’re all successful, intelligent, educated. To focus on what you don’t have is a terrible mistake. With the gifts all of us have, if you are unhappy, it’s your own fault.

"I know a woman in her 80’s, a Polish Jew woman forced into a concentration camp with her family but not all of them came out. She says, ‘I am slow to make friends because when I look at people, I have one question in mind; would they hide me?’ If you get to be my age, or younger for that matter, and have a lot of people that would hide you, then you can feel pretty good about how you’ve lived your life. I know people on the Forbes 400 list whose children would not hide them. ‘He’s in the attic, he’s in the attic.’ Some of them keep compensating by joining board seats or getting honorary degrees, but it doesn’t change the fact that no one will give a damn when they are gone.

"The most powerful force in the world is unconditional love. To horde it is a terrible mistake in life. The more you try to give it away, the more you get it back. At an individual level, it’s important to make sure that for the people that count to you, you count to them."

Pew data shows religion is a matter of taste, not truth

There's lots of news about the Pew Forum report, especially the data concerning religious mobility in America. The NY Times says that "If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations."

What these data really imply is that religious belief is essentially a matter of personal taste.

Which in turn implies that religious doctrine is less a reflection of the reality that God wrought than of wishful thinking.

Nicodemus sermon critique

Our rector preached today about Nicodemus, who was the subject of today's Gospel reading.  The rector is a good friend; I sent him this email, adapted from material linked below (I've made minor edits here and there):

A good sermon today, but with two serious weaknesses: 

First, you need more support for your claim that Nicodemus was born again.  The gospel record simply doesn’t do it. Certainly Nicodemus argued (rather mildly) to his peers that Jesus was entitled to due process.  And after the crucifixion he helped retrieve Jesus’ body from the cross. But these things suggest only that Nicodemus likely was a mensch. They don’t come close to establishing what you claimed about him – especially since after the crucifixion he vanishes from the story of the early church, which you wouldn’t expect of someone in his position who had been born again.

Which leads to the second weakness, which is that you didn’t address an obvious follow-up question:  Why was Nicodemus not a prominent leader in the early church? And while we’re on that subject, why does Joseph of Arimathea, not to mention Lazarus (who owed his life to Jesus), also disappear from the record? 

• Even if these three men had never personally experienced the risen Jesus — whatever that experience actually was — surely they would have credited the tales of his resurrection if in fact he had appeared to more than 500 others, as Paul claimed years later. 
• There would have been no reason for them to remain closeted as secret disciples if in fact "the number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith" (Acts 6.7). 

It just doesn’t add up. 

My own conjecture is this:  Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, etc., never signed on with what became the Christian movement because they simply didn't buy the fantastic tales about a risen Jesus, his imminent return, and a special preaching commission to the surviving Eleven — who were part of Jesus' entourage, but were not nearly so important to his ministry as was later claimed.

Even so, a good sermon.

Regards,

--D. C.

A response to an inquiring non-believer

Commenter Jason, who seems to be related to ee cummings <g>, asks some good questions this morning about a posting I did a few years ago: 

... as a non-believer (some call me atheist), this has been an intriguing article to stumble upon. frankly, i am at a loss as to understand how you can display such sound logic and skepticism, yet at the same time maintain a claim to be christian, or even religious at all. ...

... you say you are christian, which is to say that you do in fact have faith about certain metaphysical matters. how can you believe in a heaven or hell if the very source and support for that idea is something that you admit is not reliable? 

... please contact me. your position is very interesting and new to me, as such i believe i can learn quite a bit from you.

Jason, I'm very glad you wrote. I'll try to respond succinctly, and I'm grateful to you for providing the impetus to do so. 

Christian is as Christian does

I don't agree that, to call yourself a Christian, you have to "have faith about certain metaphysical matters."  That puts me at odds with a large number of people who think that, to be a Christian, you have to believe in, for example, original sin and salvation through Jesus' atoning death.  Personally, I'm not persuaded about these things (except to the extent that original sin is a metaphor for our inherent imperfection).  I reject the idea that this disqualifies me from being a Christian, or from being 'saved,' whatever that means.

I think the Jesus described in the New Testament had a very different view than do these latter-day Christians. Jesus the Jewish reformer seemed to want people simply to serve God and one another.  He stressed, correctly in my judgment (more about which below), the importance of the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law, which I would paraphrase along the following lines: 

Acknowledge the Creator and commit your whole being to serving 'his' purposes. In particular, seek the best for your neighbor just as you do for yourself; and keep in mind that 'your neighbor' is not just your kinsman or countryman, but anyone who crosses your path, even your people's hereditary enemy. 

In response to a question from an expert in Torah, Jesus is reported to have said, "do this and you will live [eternally]."  (Luke 10.25-37.) 

If we're to believe Jesus, it would seem that anyone who does these things may claim the title of "Christian," no matter what particular theological doctrines they happen to believe to be true.   

FOOTNOTE:  Some of my Christian friends will scoff that the preceding paragraph smacks of salvation by good works, which is anathema to many Protestants, instead of by faith. They argue that you cannot be 'saved' unless your faith is such that you truly "love the Lord."  My response is that people usually can't control whether they "love" someone as we understand the term, so Jesus must have meant that we should <em>serve</em> God and our neighbor.  Moreover, serving God and others by doing good works can cause a change of mind and heart — Greek: metanoia, usually translated as "repentance" — which can lead to precisely the faith that some Christians insist is a prerequisite to salvation. 

FOOTNOTE:  It's hard to believe (and we have no evidence) that God would punish someone for failing to believe the "right" things: so far as I can tell, what we happen to believe is something over which we have little or no volitional control.  Of course, we can indeed sometimes talk ourselves into believing that which we really want to believe, regardless whether it's true.

Motivation:  Reasons for doing what Jesus said to do

Of course we have to ask why we should seek to follow the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law. After all, as many have pointed out, these injunctions are by no means unique to Christianity; they come from Torah and are manifested in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

For many if not most Christians, the principal motivation is the claim that Jesus was God Incarnate, and therefore we should do what he said. I'm afraid that doesn't do it for me, nor has it ever for the majority of the world's population. Indeed, those of Jesus' followers who actually knew him in life didn't seem to think he was God.  So Jesus' alleged divinity would not appear to require that we follow his teachings.

My own motivation is largely pragmatic.  I've come to believe that, on the whole, following the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law is humanity's best bet for evolutionary success, and also for cosmic significance.  In particular:

1. To me the evidence makes it quite likely that there is a Creator; undoubtedly not precisely like the God described in the Bible (who really knows?), but probably not entirely unlike that.

2. At least locally, the universe hasn't devolved into chaos, but has evolved into the relatively highly organized form we have today. And there's not much doubt that this constitutes "progress" as we define it, because few if any people, at any time in history, would permanently trade places with a random  person who lived, say, 1,000 years previously.

3. The Great Commandment and Summary of the Law "just works."  People who stay real, who don't worship their own wishful thinking, but who instead live in the reality that the Creator wrought, are more likely to survive and reproduce.  And over the long term, altruistic cultures have proved more likely to survive and grow than narcissistic ones.

All this suggests that the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law summarize one of the fundamental mechanisms by which the Creator's universe is being caused to evolve.  They appear to be like laws of nature.  Doing the math, it seems entirely plausible that they were ordained by the Creator so that we would function as created co-creators in his continuing creation of the universe.

This possibility is supremely exciting to me.  It might be just a matter of egotism, of my personal liking to be "where the action is," perhaps like Jesus' disciples James and John (and their mother!) importuning him to name them his chief lieutenants . If that's the case, it is what it is.

I can't be sure I'm right about this, of course.  But every day we make bets, choosing particular ways to conduct our lives on the basis of uncertain information.  This particular bet seems like an eminently worthwhile one.

FOOTNOTE: For an account of how I arrived at the above beliefs, see this posting about Why I Still Call Myself a Christian, and an Episcopalian.

FOOTNOTE:  Some of my Christian friends criticize me for relying on "private judgment" in reaching the conclusions above. Ultimately, I believe, it's I who am responsible for use of whatever gifts of discernment and judgment have been entrusted to me.  (Cf. the Parable of the Talents.) Prudent stewardship of those gifts will often entail choosing to rely on the judgment of others smarter or more knowledgeable than I. But in the end, "the buck stops here"; I'm the one who is accountable for my stewardship.

Faithfulness

I also admire Jesus because he was faithful to his people and to God's calling as he understood it. 

True, some of his early followers believed he was the long-awaited Anointed One, a man designated by God to become the warrior-king who would soon return to rescue Israel from oppression and usher in the Kingdom of God. The New Testament claims that Jesus himself believed this (although personally I'm skeptical about that). None of this happened, of course.

But that error is pretty inconsequential, as long as we're willing to face the facts, and not insist on living in a fantasy world.  Jesus was human; being wrong on that point takes away nothing from his faithful pursuit of his duty as he saw it, even unto death.

* * *

Thanks again for writing, Jason, and please do so again. You might read some of the postings listed in the right-hand column, if you haven't done so already.

Start from where you are - not just a trite catch phrase

A few days ago I saw the phrase "start from where you are" in a newspaper ad for a fitness center.  A quick Google search revealed that the phrase is not an uncommon one. When I thought about it, I realized that the phrase is deeper than it first seems. Unpacking it a bit reveals several important things embedded in it:

• To start from where you are, you have to have an idea where you are. More generally, you have to face the facts about where you are — which incidentally is a corollary of the First Commandment.  Given that we're all human, and we all err, developing an estimate of where you are entails gathering as much information and insight as possible, including from other people both present and past.

• Starting means you're not settling for staying where you are, passively accepting the existing state of reality. (Compare with the vaguely-unsettling injunction "bloom where you're planted.")  Instead, you're estimating what it is about reality that you'd like to be different, and starting to try to make it happen. By the way: When you do this, you're serving as one of God's created co-creators, helping advance his eons-long cosmic construction project.

• The reality-changes that you want aren't going to happen instantaneously: You're going to start making those changes, because it's a movie, not just a snapshot.  You might not live to see the fruits of your labors, but 13.7 billion years of history suggest that your efforts won't go to waste.

• If you continually face the facts as you go, you won't be afraid to change your mind (Greek: metanoia, commonly translated as "repentance") about the approach you're taking, and perhaps even about what it is you're trying to accomplish, when that seems to be called for.