Hit Me, Please – Hard!

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I have a favor to ask of my readers: Please hit me with specific challenges about the views I’ve expressed here. (See the left-hand column of this blog if you need reminding.)

I’m embarrassed to admit that my best motivation to write seems to be when I’m challenged about something. It’s probably a combination of a personality quirk and the years I spent doing litigation (writing briefs is just about my favorite intellectual activity).

The Episcopal Church is faced with three onslaughts:

1. Irrelevance – as David Huff put it in a comment on the Anglican Scotist‘s blog, “How well can you explain the difference being Christian makes, or being part of the Christian church makes, to those among the virtuous secular?”

2. Islam – need I say more?

3. Implacable traditionalists, especially today with the Kigali communique from the Global South primates’ meeting and the letter from the “Windsor bishops” at Camp Allen.

I’m foolish enough to think that there’s empirical evidence to support the existence of a Creator, and that an eminently-reasonable basis for following Jesus is that it’s the best way to play our role of created co-creators (to use Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner’s term). I’ve written a few things about that, but need some prodding to goose me into writing more.

BLS, David Huff, Wayne, Todd Granger, et al., help me out here.

Comments

6 responses to “Hit Me, Please – Hard!”

2006-09-23

Anonymous

You’re right about being foolish in thinking there’s empirical evidence for the existence of God.
The great thing about God is that there is no empirical evidence, just the overwhelming and apparently universal sense that there is something beyond.
That doesn’t diminish the concept. In fact, I think it enhances it. I certainly get great comfort from knowing that what passes for reason is, in fact, intellect with limited pespective.
Two wonderful things about believing there is a God (by any other name) is that the believer (not necessarily the religionist) is (a) coming to that belief by nothing more than his or her own power of perception. (The act of being able to think there is a God says remarkable things about us.) and (b) understanding in your belief that, as good as you are at figuring it out, the reality, if we ever find it out, has got to be infinitely better (more interesting, fascinating, fulfilling) than anything you could have ever come up with.

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2006-09-23

Denis Hurley

Sorry, that was inadvertently impolite. I’ve added my info.

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2006-09-23

David Huff

Actually, I was quoting the Scotist him(her)-self there 🙂 But it’s an excellent question, and one TEC must address or wither away (shallow, conservative evangelicalism is already too far gone – they just don’t know it yet).
I think, among the mainline denominations, TEC and perhaps the ELCA have the best chance of coming up with compelling answers to this (and also the UCC, but do folks consider them mainline ?)
I actually think the UU’s are ahead of us on this topic, but hesitated to mention them in fear of starting a round of UU-bashing in the comments 😉 (not necessarily by our host) Heck, mentioning the UU’s around most Christians is almost as bad as mentioning retired Bp. Spong 😀

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2006-09-25

Scott

One thing I’ve thought to put to you in the past (but have never remembered to) addresses your belief that things are “getting better.”
You sometimes reference a “thought experiment” in which you ask whether a person would trade places with their ancestor of 100 or 1000 years past, with the obvious pre-judgment that no, of course nobody would answer that question in the affirmative. There’s an interesting exchange beneath your particular post on this, and I would wholeheartedly agree with your visitor in his assessment of a certain Panglossian tone in your writings. Notably, however, there was little examination of the human population outside of the West.
In short, I think the “experiment” betrays a strongly Western, prosperous, unpersecuted, and materialistic bias. It may well be that you or I, relatively wealthy and unmolested, and steeped in Western Modernism, would decline such an offer. What, though, of the hundreds of millions murdered over the past 100 years in the name of “progress;” or of the hundreds of millions currently dying of AIDS in Africa (or of their orphans left to fend for themselves in the streets); or of the countless starving and homeless people the world over? What of the millions of children in Africa earlier this very decade, drugged and forced into brutal armies and rape gangs, made to club their siblings to death or face a more brutal death themselves; or of 12 year old girls in Thailand forced into prostitution on pain of their families’ deaths (and it’s not a few isolated cases; the sex trade is exploding all over Southeast Asia); or of those who live in mortal fear simply because, by accident of birth, they are a minority ethnicity/religion/whatever in an environment where that identity could cost them their lives? These and other atrocities have increased in recent history, not decreased. Your question is asked with an end in mind which is only possible in the wealthy Western world which we personally happen to inhabit, but which the majority of the world does not.
It is also asked with a particularly materialistic expectation that, “well, I have indoor plumbing, medicine, A/C and heat, lots of leisure, and good food, and these things definitively outweigh any good which may have been more prevalent in earlier generations.” It also neglects any philosophical system other than Western Modernism: Hindu or Buddhist thought does not place such a high value on the materialism so treasured by this question (nor, it should be noted, does orthodox Christianity).
We’ve crossed before, DC, and I want to be clear that I wish you no personal ill here; we strongly disagree on an awful lot, but civility and charity must trump disagreement. However, you’ve asked to be hit hard, so here’s my hit. I think the idea of “progress” in the Hegelian sense (and particularly this “thought experiment” along with your general arguments and thought), flows from a disturbingly bourgeois, a-historical, ethnocentric, “westocentric,” and elitist view of the world.
I think it also quite explicitly contradicts Christ’s warning against storing up treasure in this world, “where moth and rust destroy;” for “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” I could say more, but I’ll leave it at that.

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2006-09-25

D. C.

Scott, thanks for the detailed comments. They were exactly what I was hoping to get.
1. I agree 100% that, compared with much of the world, educated Westerners live a life of almost unimaginable luxury. I’ve tried very hard to take that into account in my thinking. I don’t come from money, and I’m not at all keen on becoming what Republicans used to call a “limousine liberal.”
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2. I plead not guilty to your charge of Panglossianism. I do not claim that things today are perfect; far from it. I’ve often made the point that that there’s plenty of suffering in the world, and that we need to be doing more, and doing it more effectively, to work on identifying and remediating its causes.
(That’s why I dislike so intensely the preoccupation of some with adiaphoric issues such as committed same-sex unions; the authority of Scripture; whether Jesus was or was not God; whether God is or is not a Trinity; and the like. Such preoccupation has led to the squandering of time and resources that could be put to far better uses.)
My conjecture in this regard instead is two-fold: (A) Trend lines matter; and (B) humanity’s overall trend line is indisputably in a “good” direction, even taking into account (i) our manifest current difficulties as well as (ii) the fact that our solution to one problem often creates even more problems. Let me talk about each of these points in turn.
(A) Trend lines matter because they give us insights into what might happen in the future (which is not necessarily what will happen, of course).
EXAMPLE: Suppose your child has a temperature of 101 degrees. That one fact alone isn’t cause for undue alarm. Now suppose that 30 minutes ago, the child’s temperature was a normal 98.6 degreees, and it’s been going up steadily since then. Clearly something potentially bad is going on.
EXAMPLE: If you’re a man of a certain age, your doctor will be just as interested in the trend line for your prostate-specific antigen (PSA) reading as s/he is in the PSA reading itself. That’s how my dad’s prostate cancer was caught early: his PSA reading was still within acceptable limits, but the trend line suggested that there might be a problem, and sure enough, there was.
EXAMPLE: In weather forecasting, a rising trend line for barometric pressure suggests that the weather is likely to improve, and vice versa.
(C) This takes us back to Gregg Easterbrook’s thought experiment about (permanently) exchanging places with a random ancestor of X years ago. Scott, you and I seem to agree that few if any educated, comfortable, unmolested Westerners would ever want to do such an exchange.
(i) We also agree that there are millions of people in the world who might jump at the chance to do an Easterbrook exchange. The existence of a theoretical good trend line for humanity as a whole doesn’t help rescue Darfur refugee children from the brink of starvation. This distinction troubles me, as it obviously and rightly does you.
I don’t claim to have an especially good answer to this problem of theodicy. The least-awkward answer I can come up with is to suggest that, on the whole, taking everything into account, people in calamitous situations today have far better future prospects than did people in comparable situations hundreds or thousands of years ago.
EXAMPLE: Darfur refugees, tragic as their situation is, at least have got foreign governments and relief agencies trying to figure out how to remediate their distress, with capabilities that weren’t available to benefit, say, Central Asian refugees from Mongol invasions of centuries past.
EXAMPLE: Famine-stricken populations in centuries past didn’t have agricultural scientists driving a Green Revolution with them in mind. That revolution hasn’t yet solved the problem of hunger. But it certainly has made wonderful strides in that direction by increasing farming productivity in many regions of the world. And the scientists are still working on the problem.
EXAMPLE: Tsunami victims of centuries past didn’t have the benefit of a global relief effort supported by, among others, U.S. Navy ships providing massive logistical and medical facilities.
(ii) The solution to one problem often creates still-more problems as side effects. An obvious example is the internal combustion engine: The availability of cheap transportation has been an enormous force for good in our world, but the resulting increase in carbon in the atmosphere is widely believed to have contributed to global warming.
There’s good news, however: Most of the time, we humans — using our gifts of memory, reason, skill, and cooperation — seem to recognize problems and to work on solving them. We can’t take that for granted in any particular case, but it gives us reason for cautious optimism, as well as motivation to keep working.
* * *
Positive trends in themselves won’t necessarily help someone who’s in trouble now. For example, recent research into possible cures for Alzheimer’s disease has been quite promising, but any new treatments will come too late to help my mother-in-law, who died last month from complications of the disease.
Even so, I claim firmly that for we creatures of the Creator, as a whole, the overall trend is positive.
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3. Scott, I think we agree that material wealth cannot buy all forms of happiness, and that there are forms of spiritual well-being unrelated to the material world.
But it’s beyond dispute that material wants can be huge impediments to spiritual well-being. As James says, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” (James 2.15-16).
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Thanks for the goad, Scott; it has helped me to write up some things that have been kicking around in my head for several years now but I’ve never been quite able to get on paper. I will try to work the above notes into one of my existing postings, or perhaps recast them as a new essay.

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2006-09-25

Scott

Glad I could help 🙂
I’d briefly reply that I have yet to hear a convincing argument for this supposed inexorable upswing. Technology is no indicator of better living, nor is increased life expectancy. Neither would some across-the-board self-assessed improvement in quality of life (were such a thing possible or remotely likely) necessarily constitute proof of anything spiritually–which I think we both would agree is of great, or even ultimate, importance.
Just some thoughts. Take care.

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