Tales of a Scorched Earth
For me, this really begins about 10 years ago, while I'm having a discussion with a friend.
I can't remember what it was we were talking about, save for the fact that my friend is belittling the intelligence of creationists. True to his nature, he's not just making the point: he's also seeking confirmation that I agree with him in full.
I shrug, and refuse to answer.
This visibly bothers him, and he presses me on the subject. Do I believe in evolution, or do I believe in creationism? It can't be both.
Still I refuse to state my own position, and, exasperated, he says, "Just tell me this: do you or don't you believe that the world was 'created' by a higher power 6,000 years ago."
"I don't know all the details," I tell him. "Based on what little I know about science, I believe the world is more than 6,000 years old, but I can't say I know much more than that."
That seems to satisfy him enough to drop the subject and we move on. My answer is honest enough; I'm not refusing to answer because I think the knowledge cannot be attained, but simply because I know that I haven't put in the effort to attain it. I didn't study science in school, and I never went to seminary or even really attended church. Darwin is as foreign to me as the story of Creation in the Torah.
I had recently come to the conclusion that it is important not to make claims about things with which you are not familiar. I had a sense of which one of the two sides of the debate made the most sense to me, but I wasn't about to go on record stating one or the other.
Granted, I was 26 years old at the time. Perhaps by that age, I should have been familiar with each of them, and made up my mind, but I hadn't. But that's a different matter.
By the time I decided that it was time for me to investigate Christianity, a faith that has always been in the back of my mind since I was young tyke, I had a sense of why I found the waters I was entering unpleasant. The reason is simple: the conflict around the issue is far larger than the issue itself.
What does this mean? Let's take an example: Christianity and atheism. At the heart of the matter, there are a small handful of people who are very knowledgeable about the subject matter, and who have reached a conclusion based on the large volumes of evidence that they have digested, careful reasoning, and debates with their peers. These people know; even if the two possibilities being debated are at odds with each other, and cannot both be correct (as is the case with, say, Christianity and atheism), these people have weighed the information before them and made a decision based on something far beyond caprice.
From these people, you can usually get to the truth. The problem is that, if they represent the heart of the issue, they are difficult to find because they the are obscured by the masses of people who don't embody knowledge so much as they embody the conflict surrounding the issue.
I'll offer a concrete example: a couple of summers ago, I was discussing Christianity with a friend of mine. He made a passing comment about Jesus, saying that, as a man, he was simply trying to aggregate wealth by founding a church and getting converts.
This is a common misunderstanding about Jesus and who he was. People see televangelists on late-night TV, proclaiming Jesus as Lord and savior, and soliciting support for their church or organization. It's not a stretch to assume that many of these people, given the focus of their time on television, are more interested in raising money than they are in helping anyone. (Though these two things are not mutually exclusive.)
And so, people come to believe that this corruption of Christianity goes back to Jesus himself. What modern-day Christians exhibit is ascribed to all members of the church from its inception. Some high-profile Christians in our day appear greedy and power-hungry; Jesus himself must have been greedy and power-hungry.
Based on my understanding of the historical Jesus, there's probably not any truth in this. It's almost impossible to say for sure, but the founders of the church, Jesus included, probably weren't driven by financial motives so much as spiritual ones.
My point is not that my friend was misguided about his opinion of the Christian church, but that he had clearly made a value judgment about Christianity not based on what history or the Gospels can tell us, but based on his own misunderstanding.
And so it is with almost everyone. The topic comes up for debate, and everyone seems to have an opinion or set of opinions which, based on their underlying assumptions, seem to be convincing. The problem is that these underlying assumptions are often incorrect.
The debate itself, the passion and fire people have in making their arguments, grows beyond what the facts can actually tell us. This, in itself, is self-perpetuating; one misconception begets another, and all of these, in aggregate, become part of the lexicon of gossip that flows around various social circles holding one opinion or another.
In this swamp, how does one sort through the muck and determine what is actually true?
More recently, I've started posing the question to atheists: why are you an atheist? Their answer usually runs something along the lines of: "Because Christianity is bullshit!" Thus far no one has offered a better answer, but this is perhaps unfair; there is no better answer. Let me explain.
If you are born into a culture where there is no such thing as Santa Claus--that is, your society simply has never made up such a mythology in support of one of its holidays--then it would be very odd indeed to suddenly claim to everyone around you that you don't believe in Santa Claus. No one in their right mind would invent an imaginary entity and then announce that they didn't believe in that entity.
The existence of a person denying the existence of God presupposes the existence of a culture in which other people have chosen to believe in God. Something like atheism does not spawn in a vacuum.
It was Judaism that first gave the world the notion that there was a single God who was to be worshipped to the exclusion of all other gods. The Pagan deities that existed in the world prior to this did not insist that people who worshipped other gods were heathens to be destroyed. The God of the Hebrew Bible gives the world the notion of right and wrong belief; we should not be surprised that eventually this religion fractures, and this idea gets turned against itself.
Christians make unfair accusations against Jews for their role in killing its savior, but in the worldly battle to establish the One True Religion, Judaism is the one who started the fight. It is Dr. Frankenstein being attacked by his own creation. (See also: Islamic radicals.)
So now things have fractured further and further, and we finally come down to a group of people who reject the convention of monotheism and adopt the notion that no God exists. The notion of being an atheist is something that millions of people use in order to self-define, and while it denies the tribal Gods of ancient scripture, it is still tribal. It is drawing a line in the sand and saying that you are you because you are not one of the them.
Can this conflict be avoided?
"Because of the complexity of the universe," she tells me, "I'm going to go on record and state that I think there's a creator."
She's telling me that she rejects the theory of evolution, and subscribes to the notion of Intelligent Design. Furthermore, she is indirectly soliciting my opinion on the matter. To her, there is clearly a right and a wrong answer, and my answer is important to her.
"So you believe that the universe was created?" I ask her. When she affirms, I go on, "I could see that the universe might have been designed, but how do you know that there's a single creator? Maybe there are multiple creators. Given how messed up much of the world is," I quip, "you kind of get the sense that it was a committee of gods who were arguing with each other about how it should be done, and they clobbered all of this reality together. It explains all the bugs in the system."
No, she tells me. There was one creator. And how does she know this? "Because that's what in the Bible."
Proponents of Intelligent Design insist that they believe in it because it's the conclusion that they draw from their observation of the natural world. Life is too complicated, they insist, to have a come about by a process like evolution. It must have been designed. But if you counter by bringing up the possibility that there were multiple designers, this cannot be true because it conflicts with the presuppositions they're bringing to the table. Are we making observations and generating hypotheses based on them? Or are we simply pushing people to believe what we want them to? You can't have it both ways.
This is religion at its most pernicious: when it purports to masquerade as scientific in order to gain mindshare. I have more respect for fundamentalists who simply decry science altogether, and claim that they believe in the ancient scripture simply because they believe in it. While intellectually weak, it is, at least, honest.
No, I still don't like conflict. But avoiding the conflict altogether by refusing to make a decision or take a stand on an issue is not a means of practicing tolerance. Tolerance is taking a stand, but accepting that others will disagree with you, and possibly fight you on the issue, but you accept that they feel this way, defend your position, and, unless circumstances call for it, you treat the other party with respect. This is far harder than refusing to decide.
I might get annoyed with religious people who attempt to use "facts" from science in order to validate their theological claims. But for years, I felt that, since Christianity preached tolerance and loving one's enemies, then perhaps the Christian religion, to the extent that it perceives science as an "enemy", should be tolerant of the disagreement that science brings to the discussions. To try and achieve harmony in this way is to make the same mistake Christians do when they use "science" to prove their position: you cannot reject the propositions of the other side, then selectively misuse pieces of their argument to back up your own claim.
But do we even need to engage in the conflict? The answer, I've come to learn, seems to be yes. It's not that I'm claiming conflicts about matters like evolution versus Creationism are good, merely that they are unavoidable. Human beings are, by their nature, conflicted about things, and are prone to sparking fights amongst themselves. Peacetime allows you to defer making a decision, but in our world, the rubber always meets the road, the battle starts, and people have to decide which side of the fight they're going to be on.
An old Rush song says: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." No, you haven't. The two are not the same thing. And the distinction matters a great deal.
I can't remember what it was we were talking about, save for the fact that my friend is belittling the intelligence of creationists. True to his nature, he's not just making the point: he's also seeking confirmation that I agree with him in full.
I shrug, and refuse to answer.
This visibly bothers him, and he presses me on the subject. Do I believe in evolution, or do I believe in creationism? It can't be both.
Still I refuse to state my own position, and, exasperated, he says, "Just tell me this: do you or don't you believe that the world was 'created' by a higher power 6,000 years ago."
"I don't know all the details," I tell him. "Based on what little I know about science, I believe the world is more than 6,000 years old, but I can't say I know much more than that."
That seems to satisfy him enough to drop the subject and we move on. My answer is honest enough; I'm not refusing to answer because I think the knowledge cannot be attained, but simply because I know that I haven't put in the effort to attain it. I didn't study science in school, and I never went to seminary or even really attended church. Darwin is as foreign to me as the story of Creation in the Torah.
I had recently come to the conclusion that it is important not to make claims about things with which you are not familiar. I had a sense of which one of the two sides of the debate made the most sense to me, but I wasn't about to go on record stating one or the other.
Granted, I was 26 years old at the time. Perhaps by that age, I should have been familiar with each of them, and made up my mind, but I hadn't. But that's a different matter.
…
For the longest time, I avoided discussions about religion, and in particular the discussions that pit religious doctrine against the knowledge we've gleaned from science, for two reasons: 1. to avoid conflict, and 2. the subjects both seemed irrelevant to my day-to-day life.
By the time I decided that it was time for me to investigate Christianity, a faith that has always been in the back of my mind since I was young tyke, I had a sense of why I found the waters I was entering unpleasant. The reason is simple: the conflict around the issue is far larger than the issue itself.
What does this mean? Let's take an example: Christianity and atheism. At the heart of the matter, there are a small handful of people who are very knowledgeable about the subject matter, and who have reached a conclusion based on the large volumes of evidence that they have digested, careful reasoning, and debates with their peers. These people know; even if the two possibilities being debated are at odds with each other, and cannot both be correct (as is the case with, say, Christianity and atheism), these people have weighed the information before them and made a decision based on something far beyond caprice.
From these people, you can usually get to the truth. The problem is that, if they represent the heart of the issue, they are difficult to find because they the are obscured by the masses of people who don't embody knowledge so much as they embody the conflict surrounding the issue.
I'll offer a concrete example: a couple of summers ago, I was discussing Christianity with a friend of mine. He made a passing comment about Jesus, saying that, as a man, he was simply trying to aggregate wealth by founding a church and getting converts.
This is a common misunderstanding about Jesus and who he was. People see televangelists on late-night TV, proclaiming Jesus as Lord and savior, and soliciting support for their church or organization. It's not a stretch to assume that many of these people, given the focus of their time on television, are more interested in raising money than they are in helping anyone. (Though these two things are not mutually exclusive.)
And so, people come to believe that this corruption of Christianity goes back to Jesus himself. What modern-day Christians exhibit is ascribed to all members of the church from its inception. Some high-profile Christians in our day appear greedy and power-hungry; Jesus himself must have been greedy and power-hungry.
Based on my understanding of the historical Jesus, there's probably not any truth in this. It's almost impossible to say for sure, but the founders of the church, Jesus included, probably weren't driven by financial motives so much as spiritual ones.
My point is not that my friend was misguided about his opinion of the Christian church, but that he had clearly made a value judgment about Christianity not based on what history or the Gospels can tell us, but based on his own misunderstanding.
And so it is with almost everyone. The topic comes up for debate, and everyone seems to have an opinion or set of opinions which, based on their underlying assumptions, seem to be convincing. The problem is that these underlying assumptions are often incorrect.
The debate itself, the passion and fire people have in making their arguments, grows beyond what the facts can actually tell us. This, in itself, is self-perpetuating; one misconception begets another, and all of these, in aggregate, become part of the lexicon of gossip that flows around various social circles holding one opinion or another.
In this swamp, how does one sort through the muck and determine what is actually true?
…
Here's the issue that I have with atheism. (Seemingly, we've gotten away from our discussion about evolution...I promise to return shortly.) Simply put: it's an ideology that only exists in opposition to another ideology.
More recently, I've started posing the question to atheists: why are you an atheist? Their answer usually runs something along the lines of: "Because Christianity is bullshit!" Thus far no one has offered a better answer, but this is perhaps unfair; there is no better answer. Let me explain.
If you are born into a culture where there is no such thing as Santa Claus--that is, your society simply has never made up such a mythology in support of one of its holidays--then it would be very odd indeed to suddenly claim to everyone around you that you don't believe in Santa Claus. No one in their right mind would invent an imaginary entity and then announce that they didn't believe in that entity.
The existence of a person denying the existence of God presupposes the existence of a culture in which other people have chosen to believe in God. Something like atheism does not spawn in a vacuum.
It was Judaism that first gave the world the notion that there was a single God who was to be worshipped to the exclusion of all other gods. The Pagan deities that existed in the world prior to this did not insist that people who worshipped other gods were heathens to be destroyed. The God of the Hebrew Bible gives the world the notion of right and wrong belief; we should not be surprised that eventually this religion fractures, and this idea gets turned against itself.
Christians make unfair accusations against Jews for their role in killing its savior, but in the worldly battle to establish the One True Religion, Judaism is the one who started the fight. It is Dr. Frankenstein being attacked by his own creation. (See also: Islamic radicals.)
So now things have fractured further and further, and we finally come down to a group of people who reject the convention of monotheism and adopt the notion that no God exists. The notion of being an atheist is something that millions of people use in order to self-define, and while it denies the tribal Gods of ancient scripture, it is still tribal. It is drawing a line in the sand and saying that you are you because you are not one of the them.
Can this conflict be avoided?
…
In the context of a discussion about physics, the person I'm chatting with tries to shift the conversation into a more convenient direction.
"Because of the complexity of the universe," she tells me, "I'm going to go on record and state that I think there's a creator."
She's telling me that she rejects the theory of evolution, and subscribes to the notion of Intelligent Design. Furthermore, she is indirectly soliciting my opinion on the matter. To her, there is clearly a right and a wrong answer, and my answer is important to her.
"So you believe that the universe was created?" I ask her. When she affirms, I go on, "I could see that the universe might have been designed, but how do you know that there's a single creator? Maybe there are multiple creators. Given how messed up much of the world is," I quip, "you kind of get the sense that it was a committee of gods who were arguing with each other about how it should be done, and they clobbered all of this reality together. It explains all the bugs in the system."
No, she tells me. There was one creator. And how does she know this? "Because that's what in the Bible."
Proponents of Intelligent Design insist that they believe in it because it's the conclusion that they draw from their observation of the natural world. Life is too complicated, they insist, to have a come about by a process like evolution. It must have been designed. But if you counter by bringing up the possibility that there were multiple designers, this cannot be true because it conflicts with the presuppositions they're bringing to the table. Are we making observations and generating hypotheses based on them? Or are we simply pushing people to believe what we want them to? You can't have it both ways.
This is religion at its most pernicious: when it purports to masquerade as scientific in order to gain mindshare. I have more respect for fundamentalists who simply decry science altogether, and claim that they believe in the ancient scripture simply because they believe in it. While intellectually weak, it is, at least, honest.
…
Going back to the beginning of all of this, my "refusal to answer" that I offered to my friend regarding the evolution versus Creationism was also honest, but also incredibly intellectually weak. I've come to realize that "tolerance" is not in and of itself a philosophy you can live by.
No, I still don't like conflict. But avoiding the conflict altogether by refusing to make a decision or take a stand on an issue is not a means of practicing tolerance. Tolerance is taking a stand, but accepting that others will disagree with you, and possibly fight you on the issue, but you accept that they feel this way, defend your position, and, unless circumstances call for it, you treat the other party with respect. This is far harder than refusing to decide.
I might get annoyed with religious people who attempt to use "facts" from science in order to validate their theological claims. But for years, I felt that, since Christianity preached tolerance and loving one's enemies, then perhaps the Christian religion, to the extent that it perceives science as an "enemy", should be tolerant of the disagreement that science brings to the discussions. To try and achieve harmony in this way is to make the same mistake Christians do when they use "science" to prove their position: you cannot reject the propositions of the other side, then selectively misuse pieces of their argument to back up your own claim.
But do we even need to engage in the conflict? The answer, I've come to learn, seems to be yes. It's not that I'm claiming conflicts about matters like evolution versus Creationism are good, merely that they are unavoidable. Human beings are, by their nature, conflicted about things, and are prone to sparking fights amongst themselves. Peacetime allows you to defer making a decision, but in our world, the rubber always meets the road, the battle starts, and people have to decide which side of the fight they're going to be on.
An old Rush song says: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." No, you haven't. The two are not the same thing. And the distinction matters a great deal.