The Failure (and Ironic Success) of Apologetics

The Failure (and Ironic Success) of Apologetics

        In 1988, a book by Alasdair MacIntyre was published under the title, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?  Without attempting to summarize the argument of its 400 pages, suffice it to say that MacIntyre demonstrates admirably that Justice (and, by extension, morality) is a word or concept that means different things to different cultures and times.  He traces, as a paradigm case, the change from what people meant by "justice" and "rationality" (two ideas MacIntyre claims are always deeply intertwined) from presocratic Greek thought, through Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, through the Middle Ages to Hume and his heirs.  The change, even within Western history, striking.

         Some would argue that this means that there is no such thing as "absolute" justice, morality, rationality and the rest.  The argument being, if so many different cultures disagree on what these terms mean, how can we possibly say that one of them is right and the rest of them are wrong?  This is amplified when we consider that we have a tendency to assume that the rationality, etc. that we are immersed (or grew up) in is "right."  In such a case, how can a claim to be committed to an "absolute" truth of any kind be anything other than a new form of imperialism, where we go into new cultures and, under the guise of spreading "rationality" or "truth," in fact end up spreading nothing more than our own forms of thought and life?

        I am not entirely convinced that arguments like MacIntyre's (and also, in their own way, of Kuhn, Feyerabend, and others within the philosophy and history of science) lead us to conclude that there is and can be no such thing as absolute truth.  Rather, it means that, if there is such a thing as absolute truth, which is not just a characteristic of Christian faith but also is true of philosophical systems like Plato's (as well, incidentally, of Eastern philosophies which do not so much emphasize what is, but what is not which, ultimately, presuppose their own metaphysical convictions), we do not have access to it in any way that somehow manages to bypass a particular language and conceptual framework.

        There has been a longstanding strategy in modern Christian apologetics which gets an awful lot of mileage out of the idea (which, in my opinion, is suspect if not entirely false) that, because all human beings are created in the image of God, we all share a kind of common moral awareness.  By building on that, along with other related claims to commonality, apologists often try to reason that the "whence" of that moral awareness is God, and therefore, since everyone already believes in moral standards, everyone already believes in God.  It should be noted that, while many contemporary apologists for Christian faith would identify as being theologically (if not politically) conservative, this idea has far more in common with the theology of Schleiermacher, the father of Liberal theology, than the example of Paul the apostle and the other Biblical authors.  It should also be noted that, even if this line of reasoning were valid, it would not be a victory for Christian faith but for classical theism.  Any train of thought that simply does not take the actual life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ is not a distinctly "Christian" argument.

        What is interesting is that, in addition to the fact that this line of argument is not good theology, nor is it good apologetics, it is also fundamentally flawed from a philosophical and sociological point of view.  The irony of this is that anyone who is involved in missionary work can see the flaws.  It does not matter into what culture you enter, there are interesting differences as to what is "just" or "moral" that belie any real confidence in the standard apologetic argument from morality.  The best one could say is that, because every culture has moral standards (though they are often very different from one another), the source of the existence of standards in general (not the standards themselves) is God.  If this line of reasoning is sound, it is no more helpful than the other.  There have been several missionaries in the last twenty years or so who have shared how their experiences in other cultures have called into question their conviction that their own culture was the standard by which to judge the values of others, but this has challenged them to reflect all the more deeply about the nature of justice, morality and truth, rather than abandon them.

        All of this is to say that this line of reasoning (that truth and faith are bound up with moral standards) has become so deeply engrained into our culture that both the theological (and political) left and right believe it.  In fact, it has become something of a basic axiom which people have turned into a means to critique Christian faith from a new angle.  The argument goes something like this.  You are correct that I have a deep moral sense.  It is part of my very identity and I believe it, even when other things seem uncertain.  When I take this moral sense and I read parts of the Bible (or, as often as not, when I hear others tell me what is in the Bible), I find things there that violate my sense of right and wrong and so, therefore, I stand in judgment over what I find there.

        It is significant that, in many ways, this is nothing more than a contemporary, non-Christian (not to say atheistic) appropriation of the apologetical argument from morality.  While Christian apologists attempted to say, "Anyone who reflects for a minute on their sense of morality will realize that the gospel is true," these new non-Christian apologists are attempting to say, "Anyone who reflects for a minute on their sense of morality will realize that the gospel is ridiculous, as well as the Bible in which we read about it."  It is deeply ironic that this way or arguing has demonstrated that the apologists have actually won, even if their victory doesn't look like they wanted.  They have finally convinced the American people of their major premise, that our moral sense ought to be judge of everything else.  The only problem is that people took that major premise and concluded, not that they were immoral, but that the gospel is immoral.  If we combine this with a decreased sense of the majesty of the Christian tradition (which may or may not be too bad a thing), we find that people are unwilling to give the gospel the benefit of the doubt and, when their first encounter is bad, simply dismiss the rest.

        The problem with this is that, in the attempt to reveal Christians as naïve and non-Christians as enlightened, the secular world has joined large portions of the church in their naïveté by becoming every bit as imperialistic and paternalistic as the views they condemn.  We don't say that sex-slavery is wrong because it violates our own, culturally conditioned notion of how we ought to treat other people; it is wrong because it violates universal human rights.  In many ways, this is a more arrogant position than a Christian position that says that, because sex-slavery is clearly against what God would will, as revealed in Christ, it is against God and therefore is wrong, which at least recognizes that we need to be informed by God what really is right and wrong and that we cannot trust our feelings to always be right on the topic of morality, because it presupposes that there is something about humanity that should make it clear what is right and wrong and that people who do otherwise are not just in communities that have not yet been shaped by the gospel but are fundamentally evil and must be restrained from maintaining their tradition.

        If we cannot understand that other people have different points of view from ourselves and that we will need to translate and, at a more basic level, learn to listen, we will never rise above name-calling.  Baptizing our own point of view and using it as the standard by which to judge others does not become magically noble when separated from Christian faith.  Secular culture is every bit as biased and full of agenda as religious culture.  What we must do is learn how to work together and acknowledge the fact that, if indeed there is such a thing as absolute truth (which, as a Christian, I believe in wholeheartedly) it very well may stand in every bit as much judgment over me as it does over you.

Experience and Self-Deception

Experience and Self-Deception

A week ago, I was involved in an accident while driving a church van. The roads were incredibly icy and we ended up fishtailing off the road and tipping over on the passenger side. It was an amazingly surreal experience, something unlike anything I have ever experienced before (even though I had previously been involved in a one-car accident, it was of a profoundly different kind). It was one of those moments where the accident seemed to be over in a moment and yet seemed, simultaneously, to be in slow motion.

There is a fair amount of physical evidence that this accident actually happened. In addition to my own experience there were two other people in the van when we went off the road (other people's children. Thankfully, nobody was hurt). There is an accident report that was filled out by the state trooper, the bill from the tow truck who tipped the van right-side up again as well as physical damage to the van (of course, as the van is going to be repaired, this last evidence will soon be done away with).

The thing I have noticed in the week following the accident is that my memory of it is not like much of my memories of ordinary experiences. In the main, the things I experience are similar to other experiences I have had. This one, however, is markedly outside the realm of that ordinary experience. I find that, when I recall the accident, it does not feel altogether different than when I recall a particularly vivid dream. The questions that I have been asking myself in the past few days are these: "What if there were no physical evidence at hand to support my thinking that I was in an accident recently? Would that make that experience any less real?" Also, "In the absence of such evidence, would it be possible to convince myself that the accident had never happened?"

Granted, these are perhaps slightly artificial questions given the inherently physical nature of such an experience. When a full-sized van lands on its side, you lose the mirror on that side as well as suffer damage to the body of the van. But we can surely imagine a situation where the police were not notified and we can surely imagine a situation where, through some other means, the van was righted without such documentation as I received. If someone were to quickly repair the damage on the van, what is left? Just the personal testimony of three, admittedly shook-up passengers. How would such people justify their experience to one who didn't see it? It would be very easy for a hearer to doubt that the accident happened at all and that we simply made up the story, for attention perhaps.

And yet, that would not make our experience any less real. It still happened. Even if, in the absence of the physical evidence that I do, in fact, have, I were to begin to doubt the reality of that experience, that doubt would not undo it. Even if nobody ever believed me, the experience would stand, with or without "sufficient evidence."

When the time comes and the van is repaired and I manage to misplace my copies of the police report and tow truck bill, would it be possible for me to convince myself that the accident didn't happen? I could be told by others who heard the story that it happened, I could be reminded by the other passengers that it happened, but if my own experience is the yardstick of what I will or will not accept, is it not possible that I could refuse to be convinced, even by strong arguments and testimonies from outside of myself? After all, there is much in the experience that is easy to doubt. It was an incredibly bizarre day; many odd things that had never happened to me before happened. Again, the memory of the actual crash is not altogether unlike my memories of vivid dreams. How am I to know for sure that I did not make this "experience" up as well?

Granted, this is not the situation and, even if I were to feel that my memory is betraying me, I imagine that I will choose to believe the testimony of others and the physical pieces of paper that bear witness to the accident. But is not my appropriation of that evidence truly a choice, a decision I have to make? It is clear that evidence can be manufactured and I could convince myself that it has been so in this instance, or I could choose to believe that nobody would make up something as mundane as this (after all, people have accidents every day and nobody died or was injured). And yet, that does not mean that I was not deceived. At the end of the day, I have to put my trust in the belief that the external evidence bolsters my memory sufficiently to conclude that it was not a dream. It can never rise above radical skepticism, but it is a decision I make and live in light of.

I cannot help see the parallel of this line of thought with questions I have had regarding people who had profound religious experiences and then ultimately renounce any religious faith. It seems possible that such a person may really have had such a profound experience but have convinced themselves that they were mistaken, or that they manufactured the experience because of pressure from the rest of the community, or some such thing. It must be granted that this kind of thing does happen, from time to time.

The question is, on what basis can we decide for sure whether the experience (which, in spite of witnesses and others having similar experiences, is radically subjective in the actual event of the experience) was real or merely a deception, whether from ourselves or others? The fact of the matter is that there is no surefire way to decide. We are always having to do tacit statistical analysis to decide whether our experience was likely or not (though "likely" must never be actually equated with "real"). The unlikely happens, the real is often baffling. Though we must admit that most memories we have of experiences that are radically outside our everyday experience are false, it does not follow that all such experiences are false. The trick, for which there is no infallible method, is to discern the truth, from case to case.