Deep Thinking and Christianity - DTC Preface

Is this even possible?

DTC, that is, Deep Thinking about Christianity, or some such similar thing, is a series of nontechnical posts that contain my responses to the biggest intellectual challenges to Christianity. As I explain in this preface, I hope that both naturalists and believers will benefit from this series.

Preface

You don’t typically associate Christianity with deep thinking, right? Just the opposite? I get that. There are plenty of examples to illustrate that perspective. More to the point, though, there are things inherent to Christianity that seem deeply irrational. A being is beyond space and time? Surely that can’t mean anything at all. Sin and Evil? Why would these things exist? An incarnate son-person of God sacrificed himself for our sake? Simply absurd. These and dozens of other objections to Christianity are, as far as I can tell, the sorts of barriers that hinder the modern person from considering Christianity as rational. In this series, I hope to work on these questions while maintaining the utmost intellectual honesty, transparency, and dogged pursuit of the truth.

Whether you yourself “have faith” or not, I believe that thinking carefully about these questions will be a good way of growing your understanding of the world around you. While I myself am squarely in the Christian tradition, most of my reasoning in this series will be applicable to the other major monotheistic religions. Where it is not applicable will be obvious, as the discussion will explicitly involve features exclusive to Christianity, such as the Trinity, the God-man Jesus Christ, or the inherent love of and (thereby) nearness of God. In considering the sheer number of Christian or even Christian-influenced individuals in the world, it seems obvious to me that ignoring, or worse, strawmanning, the intellectual tradition of Christianity (yes, it exists) is an act of absurd arrogance for those who speak against it. But don’t take my word for it—I’m biased! Luc Ferry, a philosopher at the University of Paris, in his book, A Brief History of Thought, puts it like this:

Even if one is not a believer, and all the more so if one is hostile to religion — as we shall see in the case of Neitzsche — we have no right to ignorance. If only to oppose it, we must at least be familiar with religion in its various forms, and understand what we are opposing. At the least, it explains many facets of the world in which we live, which is the direct product of a religious world-view.¹

Furthermore, various sects of Christianity have had a difficult time accepting rationality into their tradition. For those who claim Christianity as their own, I believe that shunning the intellectual side of religion is a willful and lazy blinding of faith. I am not ignorant of the substantial debate on this point, but rather, am planting my flag squarely on the side of rationality. I believe that all truth is God’s truth.² If God made this world, then to understand it rightly is to understand Him. There is a substantial link between reality and God.³

Playing both sides, that is, writing to both those who believe in the Divine and those who believe otherwise, may introduce methodological issues. First, there are, ostensibly, significant differences between the truth-seeking approaches adopted by these two groups, and even differences between subgroups of each group. Second, arguments made based on certain assumptions, typically called priors, which are a type of prerequisite for making arguments in the first place, are not acceptable to both parties. An obvious example of this is that an argument made based on an interpretation of the Bible may not be persuasive to a secular person. Nevertheless, I will try to write to both groups. I address the first problem by arguing that a belief in something like Christianity, that is, at least in its core doctrines such as the existence of a singular divine and loving triune Person, the creation of everything by this Person, and the incarnation of this Person into the real person of Jesus Christ, could, in principle, be reached by someone without prior beliefs in anything of the like using nothing except a rational methodology if they are given the right evidence.⁴ As for the second methodological concern, I will simply do my best to assume nothing that is obviously disagreeable to either party. But the issues are much deeper, and deserve a closer look. Let’s think deeply about this for a moment.

The first concern that I point out, namely, that there are some fundamental methodological disagreements between the different groups that I hope will be able to follow my reasoning, requires some clarification. What groups am I specifying, exactly, and what are their respective methods of seeking truth? Despite the risk of oversimplifying both groups, let me characterize them. The first group is made up of those who are generally characterized by a naturalist perspective that I may call philosophical naturalism.⁵ While the term has its roots in philosophers who deny the supernatural, I use the term inclusively, referring to most anyone who strongly links the natural world and truth—they may not deny the existence of supernatural things, but at least are agnostic of them, ignore them, or consider them unimportant. This group’s epistemology, that is, their method of seeking knowledge,⁶ is roughly rational. But, what is rationality? The second group is characterized by their beliefs in and about various supernatural entities by faith. But, what is faith?

Let’s start with faith. Faith is knowledge in something assented to with commitment.⁷ Notice that in these conditions for faith, namely that faith is knowledge of and assent to something,⁸ that knowledge already exists, without any real preconditions or suggested methodology for discovering it! This definition of faith begs for refinement, and the epistemology we were hoping to find is entirely missing. This won’t do at all; we at least have to have some priors on which to work—something to fill in the gap of what knowledge is specified in our definition. As we are in the context of religious faith, let’s consider the Christian tradition. Some, especially those in the Protestant tradition, would suggest that something like faith in the Bible, or, at least, faith that the words of the Bible, being inspired by God, is a sufficient basis for knowledge. Others, perhaps those in the Catholic tradition, may suggest that the Church, as an institution established and maintained by God, provides a sufficient basis for knowledge. These things may or may not posses and convey various truths, but I do not think they make for very good methods of seeking truth in general. However, both of these options presuppose a faith in God. We can work with that. A third Christian assumption is that we, as humans made in the image of God, are ourselves the best epistemological tools at our disposal. We have been granted rationality to a degree that is sufficient for abstraction, and through abstraction, we can, in principle, understand truth about the world around us. The methodology, then, would be something like the following: seeking God and/or the truth through His creation, especially humanity, which is made in His image. In our minds, we can strive to understand the greatest good; indeed, we believe by intuition or reason that God is the greatest good.⁹ The object of faith that is assumed, then, is God, perhaps His goodness, and certainly that He has made humans to be rational, capable detectors/perceivers of the truth.¹⁰ Faith, then, in my formulation of its priors, provides a transcendent grounding for human rationality, and when framed as an epistemic method, suggests a truth-seeking methodology that is essentially what we call rationality.

It may be difficult to explain the existence of rationality from a naturalist-evolutionist perspective,¹¹ but in any case, I think it should be possible to describe what it means. At its core is something like skepticism: demanding reasons for belief or action—doubting things until they are shown to be true.¹² Reasons, then, would have to be based on priors acceptable to the rational person. Things like mathematics and formal logic fit the bill. Now, this can be modified in all sorts of ways—imagine someone identifies as a “common sense rationalist”: a person who assumes that whatever they deem to be common sense is true. They would be rational to draw conclusions, have beliefs, or behave in ways that are based on their common-sense priors. There is an element of directionality to rationality as well. This is called instrumental rationality, which is possessed by a person to the extent that they follow strategies or any means that help them achieve their goals. Rationality qua rationality, that is, rationality in and of itself, is difficult to conceive of. It would be like a computer calculating ad infinitum without any purpose in mind—but this is self-defeating, as doing something without reason would seem to be, by definition, irrational, and perhaps even impossible. All this to say, a method emphasizing rationality is going to emphasize tools and techniques that are reliable and predictive, such as those of mathematics, statistics, logic, and philosophy, to achieve their goal.¹³ In our context, something like “seeking the truth” is the presumed goal of the rationality of the hypothetical group of individuals in question. In summary, I have said that the philosophical naturalist's method of seeking knowledge is rationality, which is the employment of reliable tools and techniques to achieve the end goal of seeking the truth.¹⁴ It's exactly what it sounds like, and I may not have needed to write this paragraph.

The second problem, that of each group having different assumptions, remains. But is this really a problem of writing to both audiences, or merely a difference within the audience? It would only become a problem if I were to invoke these priors as fact, or as the basis of my reasoning. But, as I have suggested above, the actual methodologies are actually quite compatible. So long as I do not regress to base, shallow thinking, making conclusive assertions out of prior assumptions, the problem will remain at bay like a lurking sea monster. You can be the judge of whether or not this beast rears its ugly visage. As long as it stays away, we may find out that naturalists and believers have more in common than is typically thought. That would be a good thing, right?

Also note that the type and domain of knowledge sought by either approach is not really in question. Sure, the priors connote different areas and sorts of knowledge, but the methods do not. Experiential, emotional, and embodied knowledge, as well as knowledge in its typical propositional form, are all fair game here. Thus, without methodological limitation to scope, I will employ a rational method that does not assume priors disagreeable to either naturalists or believers in my pursuit of deep thinking about Christianity. In this way, I hope to find answers to some of the most difficult questions facing the world’s largest religion.

1. Ferry, Luc. A Brief History of Thought : A Philosophical Guide to Living. 1St U.S. ed. Harper Perennial Modern Thought. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011, 55-56.

2. While I may need to define truth in a particular way, this is a belief held by, if I may be the judge, the greatest theologians of Christianity. Here are four examples:

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update (La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995), Jn 14:6.

Augustine, on whom so much of the Christian tradition depends, puts it plainly. “A person who is a good and a true Christian should realize that truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found, gathering and acknowledging it even in pagan literature,” Augustine, On Christian Teaching, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999), 47.

This translation of Thomas Aquinas is esoteric at best, but the point is perhaps more pungent in his writing. “I answer that, As good has the nature of what is desirable, so truth is related to knowledge. Now everything, in as far as it has being, so far is it knowable. … And therefore, as good is convertible with being, so is the true. But as good adds to being the notion of desirable, so the true adds relation to the intellect.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920-42), I, q. 16, a. 3.

Calvin rants about this! I find this so entertaining that I must include the quote at length. “Therefore, in reading profane authors, the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind us, that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator. If we reflect that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we will be careful, as we would avoid offering insult to him, not to reject or contemn truth wherever it appears. In despising the gifts, we insult the Giver. How, then, can we deny that truth must have beamed on those ancient lawgivers who arranged civil order and discipline with so much equity? Shall we say that the philosophers, in their exquisite researches and skilful description of nature, were blind? Shall we deny the possession of intellect to those who drew up rules for discourse, and taught us to speak in accordance with reason? Shall we say that those who, by the cultivation of the medical art, expended their industry in our behalf, were only raving? What shall we say of the mathematical sciences? Shall we deem them to be the dreams of madmen? Nay, we cannot read the writings of the ancients on these subjects without the highest admiration; an admiration which their excellence will not allow us to withhold. But shall we deem anything to be noble and praiseworthy, without tracing it to the hand of God? Far from us be such ingratitude; an ingratitude not chargeable even on heathen poets, who acknowledged that philosophy and laws, and all useful arts, were the inventions of the gods. Therefore, since it is manifest that men whom the Scriptures term carnal, are so acute and clear-sighted in the investigation of inferior things, their example should teach us how many gifts the Lord has left in possession of human nature, notwithstanding of its having been despoiled of the true good.” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge. vol. 1 (Edinburgh: The Calvin Translation Society, 1845), 317–318.

3. This is a very difficult idea to make precise, but the Christian tradition has worked on this problem in a variety of ways, perhaps most notably in the Thomistic tradition in relation to his analogy of being doctrine. Here, it is a mere statement of personal belief.

4. “Evidence” is a slippery term for philosophers to nail down. Let’s treat it here as something like “replicable observations”.

Alvin Plantinga posed a much better-known solution to this problem, which we may call “properly basic belief”. Essentially, it is the argument that believers in the Divine may have, even through their sense of of the Divine, rational justification which qualifies their beliefs in the Divine as properly basic—this makes such beliefs inscrutable, in a way. Alvin Plantinga, “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?,” Noûs 15, no. 1 (1981): 41–51.

5. For a contemporary reflection and summary of this position, see David Papineau, “Naturalism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2021 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/naturalism/.

6. This is a major field of philosophy. Essentially, it is very tricky to precisely define knowledge, that is, to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge to exist and, more generally, what is and how might we achieve various cognitive successes including and beyond propositional knowledge. While the Aristotelian theory that knowledge is justified true belief has had great success, it is not without problems. In part, this is complicated by the difficulty of understanding the relationship between the mind and the body, or if and how experiential, mental, subjective states, called qualia, arise from physical bodies. How does recalling knowledge encoded in our brain relate to the experience of thought? My personal opinion is that contemporary epistemology is fraught with difficulties because there is not a good consensus on the theory of the mind/consciousness.

7. The source of this formulation, or, really, the Latin formulation that faith has the components of notitia, assensus, and fiducia, is not entirely clear to me, although I have seen it several places. I do not see it as obvious from the Bible (Hebrews 11 is not that specific, and it is only synthetically present in Romans 6). It is sometimes attributed to early church fathers, but my research comes up blank for that era. Other times, it is attributed to early Protestant writings, especially that of Martin Chemnitz in his Loci Theologici. While the elements of the formulation are roughly present, I do not find an exact specification of faith therein. The closest I can find is in the Preface of Philipp Melanchthon to his Theological Topics—Martin Chemnitz, Loci Theologici, trans. Jacob A. O. Preus, vol. 7, Chemnitz’s Works (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Pub. House, 2008). In all seriousness, this is troubling, as this formulation is regularly taught in Christian education. If anyone knows a better source, please, please let me know. If not, I will go on doubting that this is indeed a classical or even Protestant formulation of faith.

8. Commitment seems implied by assent, and really, assent seems implied by belief, but we let that be, as it at least specifies that the belief is held rather than just known.

9. This is a typical philosopher’s approach to understanding God, but I do not know its origin. It was at least commonplace by Anselm’s day, in the 11th century AD, as it is featured in his famous ontological argument. Anselm’s approach and his comments on faith and understanding are actually quite pertinent to this discussion, so I’ll include a taste of them here. At the end of chapter 1 of the Proslogium (discourse), after waxing eloquent in prayer to God, Anselm remarks, “For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe,—that unless I believed, I should not understand.” Saint Anselm, Proslogium, trans. Sidney Norton Deane (The Open Court Publishing Company, 1939).

This statement from Anselm is remarkable and enigmatic. It echoes certain statements from Augustine. I think it characterizes the difference between faith and reason in a colloquially acceptable way. Faith believes, assents, acts, and assumes the details, and in Anselm’s case, does so in order to better understand, whereas reason insists upon the details ahead of time, and does nothing so rash as believing without both having sufficient reason and knowing in acceptable detail the content of the belief.

10. This is tangential to a more analytical argument for the existence of God based on humanity’s positive epistemic status, that is, that (most of us believe that) we have properly functioning faculties that can acquire knowledge. How are we to understand proper functionality outside of a designer or creator? There is more to it than that, but I, personally, don’t buy this argument entirely (see below), although it may be slightly persuasive in an abductive way; that is the argument’s intended use. A technical exploration of this can be found in Justin L. Barrett, “The Argument from Positive Epistemic Status,” in Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God (Oxford University Press, 2018), 159-169.

11. I mention this as it is a topic of some interest to me, and it may come up again later. My belief is that it is possible and even likely that evolutionary methods, as popularly/colloquially proposed, would arrive at a valid epistemic methodology resembling rationality, as I do not think that there are adaptation methods that reliably enhance general fitness outside of truthful detection of the environment; general being the key word. It would take some time to explain, but the gist of my perspective is that general fitness, that is, fitness across a plurality of environments is, ultimately, an outcome of the long-term scheme of the evolutionary process, as fitness across more environments, without loss of fitness in a single environment, is superior to fitness in a single environment. My belief is that the only reliable, genetically transferrable way to achieve such general fitness is through adaptations that cause/include valid knowledge acquisition faculties, from which something like rationality emerges. This is, however, an actively debated topic and my view is probably uninformed, as this is not a field of primary concern to me. For a formal analysis contrary to my view, see Chris Fields, Donald D. Hoffman, Chetan Prakash, and Manish Singh, “Conscious Agent Networks: Formal Analysis and Application to Cognition,” in COGNITIVE SYSTEMS RESEARCH, no. 47 (2018).

12. This idea has an apt expression in Clifford’s Principle, which states, “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” For an explanation of this statement, it’s context, and a summary of the topic, see Andrew Chignell, “The Ethics of Belief,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2018 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/ethics-belief/.

13. A further exploration of the tools of philosophy may be needed at some point. Suffice to say, for now, that there are two primary “schools” of philosophy in our contemporary day: continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. Their methods are divergent, but both are deeply rational. The details are not important now, but it is interesting to me that it is difficult even for philosophers to agree about methodology of their inquiries.

Note also that my use of rational and rationalism has no intended reference to the 17th century philosophers who sometimes are called “rationalists” or “continental rationalists”.

14. For an outline of such tools and methods, including a look at common mistakes in reasoning, see Steven Pinker's recent book, Steven Pinker, Rationality : What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (New York, New York: Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021).