Courage, my friend

Truth versus Belief

Posted on 19 March 2008

Henry Neufeld writes a blog on issues of Christianity, which I read (cough) religiously.  He’s always thought-provoking.  Today he posted on the topic of how Christian writers often seem to distort or misrepresent the truth when arguing against things they don’t believe in.  His particular context for this discussion is the creationist/evolution debate that always seems to be raging in the US.  However, I’ve had similar feelings about some of the things I’ve been reading about the historical accuracy of the bible, so thought I’d respond with them.  The reply ended up being so long and rambling, I figured I’d better post it here, instead. 

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Hi Henry,

I’m not sure I’m the audience you wanted to hear from, but here goes. 

As you may recall, I’ve been struggling with my faith for a while, trying to reconcile the things I was brought up to believe with the actual evidence and context those beliefs were drawn from.  I’ve read a variety of books over the last several months, from people on both sides of the “argument”.  I put “argument” in quotes because one side seems to made up mostly of agnostics and liberal Christians, who don’t seem to have a huge personal need for their answers to be right.  In that respect, only the other side seems to be really “arguing”.

Anyway, I have to say that — as a group — the people defending the “traditional” faith seem to be considerably less rigourous in their arguments than those questioning it.  And while those questioning it tend to make their arguments in a balanced fashion — pointing out flaws in their own positions, pointing out places where the data is insufficient, and pointing out where they are stating opinions and conjecture — those defending the faith seem — too often — to pick their facts to suit their argument, and engage in circular reasoning the eventually comes down to “what I believe is obviously true because it is what I believe”. 

I realize I’m making broad statements here without any intention of backing them up.  To be honest, this is a statement of my impression of the books I’ve read, not a statistically accurate literature review.  And don’t get me wrong, there are Athiests I’ve read who are as invested in their point of view as the Christians arguing opposite.  But maybe that’s my point — it is those with the strongest beliefs in a certain “shape” of the universe who seem most willing (or able) to distort things in their favour.

Let’s take Ehrman’s book “Misquoting Jesus” as an example.  He starts out by going over the methods by which textual criticism is done (for about half of the book), then discusses particular cases that even the NIV footnotes as being questionable, then finishes with about 20 pages on specific and (he admits) “out there” theories about smaller passages he thinks have been altered.  He makes a detailed case for each, drawing on the techniques he has explained and a vast knowledge of the history of the texts.  He’s doesn’t even get around to questioning the correctness of the original texts — only how they may have been changed since they were written.  His writing is clear and accessible and I never once found myself thinking, “Ah ha!  I’ve caught you in a half-truth!”  And trust me, I was looking.

The strange thing to me is that Ehrman’s book has inspired some of the most strenuous rebuttle I’ve seen, despite the fact that 90% of the book is about undisputed facts, discussion of scientific methodologies, and general history.  It seems, in fact, that most of the counter-arguments I’ve read don’t take issue with his observations at all, but instead attack the conclusions he draws from them — conclusions that seem a fairly natural result of his observations.

In “Misquoting Truth” — a book praised by many on that side of the argument — Timothy Paul Jones counters Ehrman’s very specific examples of how things have actually changed with general rhetoric that any changes don’t matter.  Let me restate that.  He doesn’t say any of Ehrman’s observations are wrong!  He sidesteps them in their entirety, instead arguing in a folksy manner that the observations don’t matter.  He then quickly drifts off Ehrman’s treatise altogether, and by the middle of the book seems to be engaged in a circular argument that Christianity has to be true because if it wasn’t true it wouldn’t be the same as it is now.

In “The Case for the Real Jesus”, Lee Strobel takes a self-claimed “journalistic” approach, interviewing people who counter Ehrman’s (and other people’s) non-traditional positions.  I put “journalistic” in quotes, because he only seems to interview people who hold his own viewpoint, and never bothers to probe the weaknesses of their arguments.  Before I go on, I should point out: I only got halfway through his book before giving up in frustration.  At the time, I was starving for someone to put Ehrman in his place.  And after Mr. Jones failed, Mr. Strobel’s infuriating lack of even-handedness was too much for me.  Still, I remember a few points that I think are relevant here. 

One of Strobel’s first interviewees was Dr. Craig Evans, billed as one of the foremost biblical scholars on the planet.  And I have no reason to doubt the claim — his interview certainly indicated a wealth of knowledge and scholarship.  But the problem is that Strobel accepted Dr. Evans’s positions as truth — even when they were just opinion — as if expertise makes one safe from interpretation error or conjecture. 

Two of Dr. Evans points stick in my mind as needing further questioning — questioning they weren’t given. 

First, Dr. Evans makes a connection between Jesus’ reference to himself as the “Son of Man” and the passage in Daniel where the term clearly has implications of divinity.  He does this as proof that Jesus viewed himself as divine, and that it wasn’t simply attributed to him by his followers.  But he doesn’t point out that “Son of Man” was used in many places in the Old Testament, most of which have no divinity attached to the term.  He also doesn’t point out that Daniel itself is a subject of debate as to when exactly it was written, and by whom.  In a more numerically-oriented science, those exclusions would be referred to as “lying with statistics”. 

And second, he argues (I’m paraphrasing) that the Gospels are trustworthy because the contents mattered to the people who wrote them.  He freely admits that at least 30 years passed between the events and their writing, but argues that it doesn’t make any difference.  And Mr. Strobel doesn’t hesitate to accept this line of argument.  Let me ask you: Can you remember details of events important to you from 30 years ago?  Can you remember what anybody said around you the day you accepted Jesus as your personal saviour?  Can you remember exactly what you said to your wife when you asked her to go out with you the first time?  Can you remember the exact sequence of events the first time a pet died?  My personal answer to those questions is, “No, I can’t.”  And my conversations with the people who were there lead me to believe the things I do remember aren’t very accurate.  And for me, none of those events were even 30 years ago.

Further, Christianity did not develop in a vacuum.  It grew up from nothing in very brutal, turbulent times.  To say that politics did not affect people’s beliefs . . . is ludicrous.  It is exactly because it did matter so much to people that changes could take place.  It’s not even a matter of it being a malicious process: when people are afraid or stressed, their perceptions change.  How many Americans still believe there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or that Iraq was involved in 9/11.  And would it not be fair to say that a disproportionate number of those people would describe themselves as Christian?  The Jesus presented in the Gospels was very clearly two things: a pacifist, and a communist.  To the first, he regularly preached about solving problems through forgiveness, and responding to wrongs with right — he went so far as to rebuke his disciples for violently defending him from arrest.  And, to the second, he preached very regularly about giving away all your possessions to help the poor.  On more than one occassion, he implied that getting into the Kingdom would be nigh on impossible for the rich.  And yet how much of either of those things seems have affected the Church?  For about a thousand years, the Pope was probably the richest man on the planet; and a lot of modern fundamentalist Protestant churches seem to be all about tax cuts and the accumulation of wealth.  Further, the US went to war in Iraq on the strength of the Christian vote.  I’m not arguing these points because I think either pacifism or communism are the way to go — I have small doubts about the former and large doubts about the latter — I’m just pointing out that people hold contradictory and incompatible beliefs all the time, and it isn’t because they are evil, it’s just because that’s the way we all deal with the complexities of the world.  Why is it we would want to think that the people in the early church are so much “purer” than we are?

My larger point is that those writing in defense of the traditional view of Christianity seem often to believe that the ends justify the means.  They know the truth, so anything that counters that position must be wrong.  It doesn’t even have to be malicious.  They really may not see the flaws and holes and circularities in their arguments, because, for them, the facts are secondary.  It is the belief that matters.  All other concerns are secondary.  And I’ve seen this bias in arguments both from Christians and Athiests (and, yes, from people strongly attached to other religions, too).

My personal belief is that truth is more important than being right.  If there is a God, and e created this universe, then the truth must be a more direct route to him than a beautiful, elegant, traditional and wrong belief system.

To my reading of the Gospels, there is a definite tension between those that talk about right as a matter of action from belief, and those that talk about right as belief.  The gospel of John definitely falls into the latter category — the author essentially discards right action, going so far as to claim that belief is all that is necessary for salvation.  As such, action becomes a side-effect of belief, and not even a necessary one, at that.  It is that “classical Greek thinking” — the idea that a beautiful theory must be correct, and that testing is for people who don’t have enough faith — that seems to have grabbed a lot of minds in the Christian community.  But I do not believe that Jesus himself felt that way.  The Jesus in the other three gospels seems to be all about action.  Yeah, the belief matters — but only in so much as corresponds to motives.  Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons — I think Jesus would argue — isn’t doing right at all.

The Quakers have a saying: God has no grandchildren.  It’s the idea that you can’t come to God through your parents.  You have to come to em directly, from real searching, from real yearning.  And, to some extent, it refers to how faith changes from the first generation to the second.  For the first generation of Quakers, things like plain dress and plain speech were natural results of their belief in the direct, personal availability of the small, quiet voice of God to each of us — if God wanted a personal connection with each of us, then who were we to put on airs or to imply we were somehow more or less important than someone else.  But that second generation didn’t so much get it.  Too many of them didn’t understand the very personal core of their parents’ belief, and so took the trappings for the real thing.  Suddenly plain dress and plain speech, and various customs and mannerisms — became the religion.  Nothing else mattered.  If you believed certain things and acted a certain way you were Quaker, and if you didn’t you weren’t.  That the original faith believed quite the opposite didn’t seem to matter.  And it took a long time before that original faith could be reclaimed — could be redeveloped from first principles. 

I think the Gospel of John is another instance of God has no grandchilren.  Most of the scholars I’ve read date it around 90 AD or a bit later.  If so, its author never met Jesus, and probably didn’t personally know anybody who did.  Further, by that point, the Jewish state had mostly been wiped out by the Romans — and the drifting of Christianity from its Jewish cultural roots was mostly complete.  It isn’t surprising that John has a Hellenistic slant — it’s author would have been raised in that school of thought, and he’d have had no particular attachment to Jewish idea of God or to Jewish concepts of right and wrong.  And John has a great deal to do with what Christianity became, precisely because he spoke in terms the larger, educated, Hellenistic world could understand.  Whether or not it had anything to do with what Jesus actually preached doesn’t seem to have bothered very many people.

But, here’s the thing, classical Greek thinking isn’t a good way to find truth.  Aristotle’s theory of gravity was beautiful and intuitive and wrong for 2000 years before anyone thought to step out on a roof and test it by dropping a couple of objects over the side.  And because somebody did, we have physics, and calculus, and general relativity, and quantum mechanics — all of which are necessary for computers to exist to allow me to write you this response to your blog.  And that’s not even to mention the impetus that discovery gave to the industrial revolution and all the things that make our present civilization possible.

Science is very simple.  You start with your observations, and find conclusions to explain them.  When new observations are made that contradict your conclusions, you discard the conclusions as wrong.  Why?  Because reality is more important to truth than what you believe.

And that, I think, is the problem.  For too many Christian writers, reality is secondary to what they believe to be true.  It has to be, because they have put so much stake in the belief — eternity in heaven versus eternity in hell, to be exact.  I know that fear, and it is deeply motivating.  And with such high stakes, it is not surprising that people see what they want to see.

But I don’t believe for a second that God wants us to discard our brains in order to save our souls.  If God really is omniscient and omnipotent and internally consistent, then while reality may not give us all the answers, it most certainly must not contradict any of them.  Otherwise, God’s a liar, and we’re all in real trouble.

Regards,

   Chris.