Here's a book about which I made some remarks on www.goodreads.com a few months ago. 
This is a bit like reading Paradise Lost -- but with none of the pleasure -- in that you're watching the contortions of a Christian as he struggles to deceive himself and his naive readers, and you sense that somewhere beneath all this casuistry the guy knows that what he's saying just cannot be true.
A special aspect of the disingenuous hokum in this book and others in its little posse -- the recent Christian "worldview" books, for instance To Every One An Answer by Norman Geisler, or Naming the Elephant by James Sire -- is this: they figured out that you irritate people and look foolish if you stick with the claim that your religion is uniquely true, but they remain committed to the premise that, well, their religion is uniquely true. So they creep up to the edge of the terrifying abyss of relativism (which is actually the edge of intellectual maturity) and then stop short because they're just pretending to respect other worldviews. Just as "intelligent design" is a sneaky extension of creationism, this worldview-Christianity uses the language of pluralism to smuggle-in its own soiled security blanket.
Well, I recently discovered that someone had posted a very intelligent response to my remarks:
comments (showing 1-3 of 3) (1 new)
Well, I’ve read this book and I don’t consider myself to be a naïve reader; in fact you read this book (seemingly) and I’ll bet you don’t consider yourself a naïve reader either.All we know from your review is that you attack the personal beliefs of the authors, and you attack intelligent design as a sneaky extension of creationism, which you presumably associate with the authors' beliefs as well. That's not a review.
It appears that you gave this book one star because you don't like that the authors are Christian, for nothing you’ve stated is a relevant analysis of the content of the book in question.
Perhaps your review would be more persuasive if it included some examples of Craig and Moreland's arguments that you take to be instances of mere deceptive casuistry. Perhaps you could present them in a charitable light, and then show that, nonetheless, their arguments fail to meet the necessary requirements for soundness and cogency.
Your review, however, fails to provide anything constructive and, hence, is merely a diatribe against the fact that the authors are Christian.
If you are going to claim Craig and Moreland are deceiving themselves and their readers, then you ought to show us, by explicating these so-called deceptive arguments, that indeed that is the case. It is the quality of their arguments (the ones you did not evaluate in your review) that ought to be considered, not their religious beliefs or otherwise. Instead, we are perfectly clear about your feelings, but let’s not pretend those are about the book in question.
Furthermore, you criticize the authors for being committed to the claim that their beliefs are true. Well, this is a mere triviality as far as belief goes: People are psychologically convinced of the beliefs they think are true; this does not preclude, however, the possibility of rejoinder nor the recognition of error in one’s beliefs. But insofar as one thinks all the relevant information and counter evidence doe not add up to a defeater of one’s beliefs, then it remains the case that one is committed to the truth of one's beliefs. In addition, since Moreland, and Craig in particular, are continually informing themselves of new research and evidence in the areas of which they write, it hardly is reasonable to imply that they simply are deceived.
Let's take your method of review and apply it to, say, the present spokesperson for the recent proliferation of popular level anti-religious books, like The End of Faith, and God: The Failed Hypothesis, and so forth. This is a hypothetical exercise, and I'm not claiming that you have read the book I mention below.
Dawkins is an atheist, and he has written a book called The God Delusion. Suppose we substitute all the salient derogatory terms you’ve used in this review and apply them in a similar review of Dawkins' book. The result would look a lot like this:
{“This is a bit like reading the Origin of Species -- but with none of the pleasure -- in that you're watching the contortions of an Atheist as he struggles to deceive himself and his naive readers, and you sense that somewhere beneath all this casuistry the guy knows that what he's saying just cannot be true.
A special aspect of the disingenuous hokum in this book and others in its little posse -- the recent Atheist "worldview" books, for instance Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, or God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens -- is this: they figured out that you irritate people and look foolish if you stick with the claim that your scientific naturalism is uniquely true, but they remain committed to the premise that, well, their scientific naturalism is uniquely true. So they creep up to the edge of the terrifying abyss of relativism (which is actually the edge of intellectual maturity) and then stop short because they're just pretending to respect other worldviews. Just as "scientific evolution" is a sneaky extension of Darwinism, this worldview-Atheism uses the language of pluralism to smuggle-in its own beshitted security blanket.” [sic].}
Would you consider this an unbiased, reasonable review of Dawkin's book?
PS: I am not a Theist of any kind; nor am I a deist, or a polytheist, nor a pantheist, nor a panentheist. I am not an Athiest, either. Nor am I any sort of friend of religion, of any sort; but I am not its enemy either. I respect a great many religious people, but less so because of their religion and more so because of their character and intellectual caliber. I am, however, an agnostic (in the epistemic sense).
PSS: Dawkins' The God Delusion is an incredibly poorly argued book. It consists of the weakest formulations of Dawkins' opponents' views, is full of informal logical fallacies (the kind any typical freshman could enumerate in a lower division critical thinking class), and unsupported dogmatism. It is far more an instance of third rate polemics, than anything near a scholarly inquiry into the subject.
I responded:
Hello IW,
Thank you for your thoughtful and measured reply to my remarks about Craig & Moreland's Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. I'd like to respond to your response.
1. I agree that my remarks did not constitute a review. I'm not sure this book merits a review.
2. I share your disdain for Richard Dawkins' work on this issue. I think the comparison between Dawkins and the authors of Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview is a limited but suggestive one.
3. You are correct in your inference that I am hostile to the authors of what I called "the disingenuous hokum in this book and others in its little posse -- the recent Christian 'worldview' books..." I regard these people as guilty of a cultural vandalism that has grossly diminished the cultural riches of our species.
4. I, too, am an agnostic. If you are interested, I refer you to a video I made depicting my position:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yqFxFOMz...
5. I regret that for the moment I cannot seem to find my copy of Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. I have, however, come across my copy of an allied work by the same editors, William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, called To Everyone An Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview (Intervarsity Press, 2004). It's a collection of essays by divers hands, the most relevant of which would be David Clark, "Religious Pluralism and Christian Exclusivism."
Clark begins his essay this way:
"Today's supermarket of religious ideas overflows with enticing products. It offers intellectual shoppers countless religious options -- everything from agnosticism to Zen. But which product is a Consumers [sic] Digest 'Best Buy'? Is it crucial for a wise spiritual consumer to buy into the one right religion? Or should he feel free to select any religion at all?"
This is the discourse of marketing research, not scholarship; advertising, not pastoral care; boosterism, not philosophy. He writes as if the living of a spiritual life were parallel to the search for a suitable brand of shampoo. Though he occasionally remembers to distance himself from that attitude, he exemplifies it; he writes as if all this is indeed a shopping trip, but that none of the products on the shelves is effective except the one he recommends. He also assumes, as only an American market-head could do, that religion is a business in which each "customer" is a blank slate upon whose breast the winning Brand will be incised as soon as the caveat emptor phase of the process is concluded. Nobody in this "marketplace" of religions seems to arrive with any historical roots in a tradition, nor any living relationships to a family or a community: his subject is an atomized individual in a mental S.U.V.
Here is his second paragraph:
"Many today say that every religion is right. But my claim is that wisdom does not lie with the easy assumption that all world faiths lead to God. That idea is fashionable, and it's initially attractive. But it runs into a buzzsaw of rational difficulties. Wisdom encourages a more difficult challenge: finding the one true pathway to God."
Thank goodness we have Mr. Clark to inform the rest of us what wisdom encourages. I repeat that the essence of "Christian worldview" discourse is a fake pluralism. Clark's essay is unusual for this genre in that it shows an open contempt for pluralism, though it's included in a book that claims to demonstrate the same pluralism. How could this happen? Because pluralism was never really the point. The idea of these books is to draw readers who would be affronted by a frank Christian claim to religious supremacy, lull them with lip service to pluralism, and then attempt to neutralize the pluralist scaffolding and leave the desired "Christian exclusivism" (Clark's phrase) standing.
"Buzzsaw of rational difficulties"? This is a person who claims to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was dead as a stone for three days and then came back to life. Again, I refer interested readers to a YouTube video I made in response to this sort of thing:
Here are Clark's definitions:
"Religious pluralism states: Any (or perhaps all) religions lead to God or salvation. Following any religious path enables believers to reach the religious goal. [his emphasis]
"Religious exclusivism says: Only one true religion leads to God. Attaining the spiritual goal requires a believer to find and follow the one true faith, for other religious paths will not lead to the spiritual goal." [his emphasis]
Christians of this type simply cannot get it through their heads that the frame of reference in which they live and think is just an artifact, one that has no meaning outside of particular parameters of cultural space. For example, such a person tends to think that the Christian truth lies in the proposition that Jesus is the Messiah. But the very notion of "Messiah" -- the Messianic idea -- is just one local and very strange ripple in the fabric of Jewish thought. Mr. Clark writes about "the Salvation Question," asking which religion can "really" provide "salvation." From what? From yet another local funky little idea, "sin." He simply cannot imagine that these categories are not universal.
The God of the Jews began as a wild, warrior figure who defeated His rivals; eventually He became a unique, bodiless God with no competitors and no limitations; He was not subject to the laws of nature, nor to its dimensions of time and space, nor to the logical relations which seem to govern it, such as causality, nor to the ethical categories upon which human welfare seems to depend (see Job, for example). All of this is utterly irrational, of course, but it might somehow be true anyway.
However, the notion that such a God might copulate with a young girl on a given day, in a particular town, and have her give birth to someone who is somehow identical with Himself, yet fully God and fully human, is worse than irrational. It is a head-on trainwreck of two unrelated cultures: that of the Hebraic God described above, and that of the Greek Zeus who did this same sort of thing quite often: descending from the sky to mate with mortal women, including Io, Europa, Semele, Callisto, and so on.
To stake one's self-respect -- and one's ability to cope with the anxiety of mortality -- on the claim that one actually believes this story, is to choose a position so unenviably excruciating as to require what Freud called a "hysterical defense." To everyone an answer.
In my view, astrology is to astronomy as Evangelical writers like these are to real Christian thinkers -- among whom I would place Augustine, Kierkegaard, mystics like Meister Eckhardt and Jacob Boehme, and that small handful of Christian intellectuals who are interested in behaving like Jesus of Nazareth, e.g., Dorothy Day, the Berrigan brothers, James W. Douglass, S.J., and the late Archbishop Romero (though of course this does not imply that I agree with all, or even most, of what those deed-focused writers say; I simply find them respectable and admirable, whereas I tend to experience faith-focused Evangelicals as self-deceptive people or, sometimes, charlatans). Being kind to people in need is good. Trying to escape a Hell and get into a Heaven -- especially by striving to convince oneself (let alone others!) that propositions X, Y, and Z are true -- is just medieval. Because it is also a homogenizing force of cultural aggression, it seems to me permissible to meet it firmly.
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I would submit, on a tangential note, that a similarly murderous mental exercise takes place with Obama-as-Messiah political junkies. My sentiment is: if you're going to rape me at least call it that and not euphemism for love.
ReplyDeleteBasically, all paths lead to heaven, which is horseshit. In this case 'the American way of life,' becomes heaven and all the political prestidigitation, hypocritical speeches and flat-out bald face lies become the stuff of the pundit--the middleman-- while...the issues of the truth, much less the good, become mere shades of color in the pencil box of the advertiser.
This would all be no big deal if individual liberty existed and were preserved on a macro-level, but even this is only another false-meme-tool for the oppressor.
Again, if you want to sell shit why spray if w/ perfume?
A false-meme-tool being the sleight of hand that shows you A but exacts B. This brings us full circle to the con artist, which if this world made sense would be the proper recipient of our collective adulation, insofar as the behavior and the mask would at least jive.
Just as Eckart Tolle and Oprah tell us that abundance is available for all in a finite world, thus redecorating the pyramid scheme, the corporatocracy tells us that it is possible that Obama be both the anti-war candidate and simultaneously send more troops to fight and die.
Worse, not report that fact that he continues to order strikes on Pakistan---the discourse is still making interesting and useless comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam.
Illusion as the proper study of 'magic' in the hands of the reasoning, shows that the most important components of any trick relative to the weak-minded skepticism of the audience are, ironically perhaps, based always within the participation of the audience. Drama is the same.
Democracy doesn't exist in the US--but you must vote, as it is tradition that we jerk each other off.
We can't prove that one specific form of religion is the truth, however it is tradition that we make sure everyone ends up with ours.
What a ridiculous fucking creature is man. Of course, before I close I must untangle the illusionist from the web in which he/she resides unfairly now with the very excrement of the great hucksters of religion and politics. For the illusionist tells you I am an illusionist, and thus may be regarded with respect and even wonder, at times.
Finally, I ask the lame old question in a new light: does a woman wearing sexy clothing ask to be raped? No, she asks to be adored, acknowledged, loved. We, in our individuality go to religion much the same--to be closer. But to the extent that that proximity reduces itself to rape, I think the process requires retooling. (No pun intended.)
Such with religion and politics.
"The God of the Jews began as a wild, warrior figure who defeated His rivals; eventually He became a unique, bodiless God with no competitors and no limitations; He was not subject to the laws of nature, nor to its dimensions of time and space, nor to the logical relations which seem to govern it, such as causality, nor to the ethical categories upon which human welfare seems to depend (see Job, for example). All of this is utterly irrational, of course, but it might somehow be true anyway."
ReplyDeleteWow, this paragraph strikes a chord. Like, informing me as to why it was that "God is dead" made so much sense when I first heard it.
BEWARE THE PIG SELLING PORK SANDWICHES!
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