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Mar. 17, 2005 I didn’t want to wade in on recent the discussion of religion. One immediately suspects closed minds when it comes to religion, for or against. It’s not as if you’re going to write anything that instantly changes minds. Instead, it always just ruffles feathers without any discernible benefit. However, lest anyone takes believers’ silence as agreement, I offer the following. One critic claims that the Bible betrays itself for reporting conflicting facts. Genealogies don’t match up, and the Christmas stories seem disconcerted, and so on. This is a problem only for an extreme fundamentalist. The rest of us don’t treat the bible as an investigative report from the Washington Post. The evangelists were first century writers, and they reflected their culture. As a Catholic, I find that comforting, and not at all threatening. When the evangelists wrote their gospels, they had no idea that their work would survive for centuries, much less that their gospels would become, well, gospel. They weren’t reporters chasing facts. They were evangelists, and they had different motives. Consider the situation at the time. Christianity was slowly but steadily spreading. The apostles knew Jesus personally, and they told the Jesus story. But by the years 60-70 AD, that generation was beginning to die off. New believers also wanted to hear Jesus’ story, but the source was drying up. To preserve the story, the evangelists emerged to assemble the story before it was lost. That’s why there was a flurry of “gospels” coming around the same time. Aside from the four we accept, there was the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of James, and some others. Years later, with many gospels to choose from, the church picked four as “canonical.” All that means is that these gospels convey the true story of Jesus, which is different from claiming they were factually perfect. The evangelists weren’t writing theological treatises to skeptical readers. They wrote to people who had heard about Jesus through fellow believers. The audience was simply hungry for more, and the evangelists were supplying the larger story. The evangelists took their information from a number of sources. Apparently, there was a collection of Jesus’ sayings, called the Q source, and that supplied the parables and speeches. For the rest, the evangelists relied on what few apostles were left. Mark was Peter’s secretary; Luke was close to Paul. The Gospel of John may have been written by a community, one created perhaps by an apostle named John (if not the beloved disciple), and that’s where they got their information. From these pieces, the evangelists pulled together Jesus’ story. If you know the background to the gospels, you know that they weren’t intended to be factual reports. Shakespeare wasn’t writing a factual report when he wrote Richard III, and yet no one doubts the existence of Richard III because Shakespeare fumbled some details. You have to respect the culture of the writers, and not impose one’s own culture prejudices. That’s why the criticism against biblical accuracy is silly, for anyone with an ounce of cultural sense. The other criticism against religion is that there are two kinds of people: those who employ reason and “blind-faith” believers, as if anyone who believes in religion rejects reason. Recently, someone wrote that religious people never subject their beliefs to scrutiny, and we must fall back to the claim that science can’t disprove religion, which suggests that believers feel free to believe anything they fancy. A strawer man you never will meet. From Augustine through Aquinas and through to the present, believing theologians and philosophers have allowed their faith to confront centuries of criticism. When Aquinas wrote the Five Proofs for the existence of God, he was doing precisely what these modern critics claimed believers never do. Apparently, these modern critics simply missed those centuries of discussion. How convenient. The argument that science cannot disprove religion comes within a context, which the critic fails to supply. Of the traditional proofs of the existence of God, one proof remains the strongest: the argument from contingency. It goes like this: everything in our experience is a product of creation. Yet, at the same time, nothing can create itself. Therefore, believers argue, the only way to explain everything is to posit an uncreated creator; one who created everything else (if not in form, then in substance) but which was not itself created. Skeptics argue, on the other hand, that it is at least as likely that the universe always existed, uncreated, as it is that there was an uncreated creator. By the rule of Occam’s Razor (an unproved axiom of science) then, we ought to prefer the explanation that doesn’t posit an extra being. Believers respond to this criticism by pointing out that Occam’s Razor is a scientific axiom; hardly binding on the rest of intellectual inquiry. The result is that there are only two possibilities: either all things simply always existed, or that an uncreated creator brought them into existence. At this point, science cannot disprove the uncreated creator theory. It is, therefore, at least as likely as the scientific explanation. In turn, therefore, believers have as much intellectual warrant to believe in God as unbelievers have to doubt it. The unbelieving critic, however, characterizes this stalemate as “meek conciliation” and “fawning” obedience to pseudo-intellectual pap. (He then offers this whopper: “Science is a continual process of discovery, and there's no reason to believe that it won't be able to eventually answer any question we throw at it.” How’s THAT for blind faith?) I don’t mind having intellectual discussions about religion. However, when you have such discussions with critics lacking in any cultural maturity, or those who drink science as kool-aid, it’s hard to have a reasonable discussion. ------------ About the author: KC Mulville holds graduate degrees in philosophy, and is an ex-Jesuit. Now a husband and father of four, he is a programmer for databases and for the web. Email KC Mulville: kcmulville@hotmail.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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