Category: Sophisticated Theology

Once again, theologians get paid for making stuff up

July 16, 2025 • 9:00 am

I am in fact surprised that two Iranian philosophers (yes, from the Department of Philosophy of Science, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran) are even allowed to publish this paper, which refers to God, not Allah, and doesn’t mention the Qur’an.  Well, that’s a good question, but not the question masticated in this paper in the journal Open Theology (click title to read or see the pdf here.

What we have is the usual kind of Sophisticated Theology™: a paper raising a question based on unsupported premises (there is a god that is kind, omnipotent and loving), and which then goes on to make up an answer about how certain baffling phenomena in the Universe can comport with such a god. Normally the topic of such inquiry is theodicy: why there is evil (especially “natural evil,” like childhood cancer or earthquakes) in a world made and run by such a god. This time, though, the topic is randomness. How, the sweating pair of theologians ask, can true randomness, untouched by God, exist in his Universe? More than that: how can true randomness, as part of the evolutionary process, unerringly wind up producing a species made in God’s image. As the authors ask, pretending to be puzzled:

. . . . from a theological perspective, the randomness and lack of purpose in the evolutionary process appear to conflict with God’s power, sovereignty, and wisdom.

Theologians cannot let this stand, for nothing can be allowed to conflict with God’s assumed wonderfulness and power. Nor do they assume that the randomness and lack of purpose in evolution comes from—could it be?—Satan.  No, in the end it’s all part of God’s plan.

The authors first discuss two types of randomness: stuff that appears to be random to us but in reality could be understood, or even predicted, if we had perfect knowledge. Whether a coin comes up heads or tails (or edge!) is this type of randomness.

The other type, which the authors take it upon themselves to comport with God, is fundamental, unpredictable (“ontological”) randomness—chance inherent in a system that cannot be predicted, even with perfect knowledge.  Quantum-mechanical “randomness”, or quantum probabilistic outcomes, are of this type. As the authors say:

In contrast, the real challenge for the relationship between God and the world lies in the existence of ontological or metaphysical randomness, which suggests that chance is an inherent aspect of the world’s structure and is inseparable from its dynamic nature. Ontological randomness cannot simply be viewed as a reflection of our inability to gain a certain understanding or a cognitive deficiency in comprehending the physical world. In other words, ontological randomness suggests a type of randomness inherent in the fundamental indeterminacy of the natural world. When every explanation of cosmic, macroscopic, and even biological phenomena relies on the principles of particle physics – which itself is characterized by intrinsic indeterminacy and stochastic events – it appears that we are confronted with ontological randomness.

. . . Ontological randomness. . . refers to events that cannot be predetermined in principle. Contrary to the views of proponents of ID, evolutionists argue that randomness is inherently non-purposeful. It is not merely a matter of attributing randomness to mutations due to our limited epistemic capacity to analyze the complex systems involved in the causal processes – similar to our inability to fully understand the causes of earthquakes or the movement of airborne particles. Rather, the fundamental indeterminacy of these processes means that no one can predict when they occur, much like our lack of access to the origins of nuclear emissions from Uranium-238.

Now the authors assume that evolution is driven by ontologically random mutations (“random” meaning, in the evolutionary sense, that the chance that a mutation will occur has nothing to do whether it will increase or decrease the bearer’s reproduction).  This itself may not be a good assumption, for, if we had perfect knowledge, we might be able to predict when and where a change in the DNA might take place. The role of quantum phenomena in mutation (if there is such a role) is still unknown.

But let’s be charitable and assume that yes, mutations in the evolutionary process are like movements of electrons: ontologically unpredictable. How could such a process not reflect decisions of God and yet wind up with his most desired of all “creations,” Homo sapiens.

Here’s the authors’ answer:

Our preferred reconciliation does not view the relationship between God and the natural world as a dualistic one. Any dualistic perspective ultimately leads to the problem of interaction and, consequently, the “God of the gaps” fallacy. Instead, we embrace the open theistic view, which holds that the world exists within God. Although the divine transcends the natural world, it is also immanent within it; thus, the evolutionary process occurring in the world unfolds as a manifestation of God’s self-expression and self-consciousness.

The world is progressing toward God’s self-consciousness through the evolutionary process, which has culminated in human beings who exist within the natural world, are part of nature, and possess awareness of both their surroundings and of God Himself. In this perspective, the process of evolution becomes a revelation of God’s nature. God reveals Himself in the universe by becoming increasingly self-conscious, and this self-consciousness fosters freedom; true freedom arises from autonomy rather than heteronomy, and autonomy is rooted in self-awareness. The divine is indeed the sovereign designer and intelligent architect of the world, but does not merely create from a position of supreme distance. As Carl Schmitt notes, “The sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside. The machine now runs by itself.“

If you detect a whiff of pantheism here, you’re right, and the authors admit it (bolding is mine):

According to our panentheistic and open-theistic view, God is the designer of the world, which serves as a revelation of the divine mind and nature. God does not reside outside the world; rather, the divine is immanent within it and transcendent of it. The world does not operate on autopilot. The randomness we observe in the world signifies divine sovereignty and omnipotence, granting the world the necessary freedom to reveal its nature, which simultaneously unveils the nature of God.

Of course that last bit is totally made up, for the authors have no way of knowing that this is true of God (remember, they can’t even show us that there’s a God). This disproves the idea that the “clash” of ideas instantiated by freedom of speech will eventually arrive at the truth.  Theology is one disproof of that idea, for it and its understanding of gods haven’t advanced one iota despite many clashes of ideas.

But of course God being all-knowing, somehow must have realized that the randomness He himself created would produce, with the help of natural selection, a creature made in His own image. Isn’t that special?

These lucubrations are part of what is called “open theology,” in which God grants the world freedom. Not just physical freedom, but its result, real free will (which of course the authors see as ontologically unpredictable, though it isn’t).  In their drive to make up a concept of God that comports with ontological randomness, they hit on an answer that isn’t new: God wanted a world with maximal freedom because such a world is the best of all possible worlds:

The traditional view of divine sovereignty is often characterized by the notion of God having full control over every event, leading to the idea of eternal predetermination. This dominant perspective in the history of Abrahamic religions posits that the existence of ontological randomness implies that the entire system is not under God’s control, allowing for procedures that operate without purpose under divine sovereignty. However, according to open theism, we should comprehend God’s sovereignty in harmony with divine mercy. Thus, divine sovereignty does not imply a paternalistic control over all things; rather, it embodies the granting of freedom. The truly powerful agent bestows life and freedom, enabling others to flourish instead of confining and controlling them. The Almighty is not merely an omni-controller or authority but a liberator, allowing all creatures to choose their own paths according to their inherent potential and encouraging them to reveal their capabilities. This process of world disclosure is itself a manifestation of God and contributes to divine self-consciousness.

So God’s at the wheel after all, and the freedom he bestowed on the world includes the freedom of children to die of cancer and of the tectonic plates to cause death-dealing earthquakes and tsunamis. (This kind of theodicy the authors don’t explain.)

I can’t bear to go on much longer as I watch the sweat-sodden authors make a virtue of necessity, but I’ll quote one more bit to show how they do this. As one sees so often in Sophisticated Theology™, they simply attribute their solution to another theologian, as if citing yet another shill somehow justifies their own “solution”:

As Bradley eloquently explains, power, when understood in the context of mercy and love, does not necessitate complete control; rather, it signifies the full endowment of freedom and life. The omnipotent is the one who most effectively enables creatures to experience life freely, filled with love and happiness. Certainly, God has a distinct plan, a desired program, and a unique teleology for creation; however, this teleology unfolds through its manifestation in nature, as the natural world evolves through its history.

. . . From this perspective, the randomness present in mutations reflects the freedom that God grants to all creatures. Through the evolutionary process, the world progresses toward an outcome of self-consciousness. Consequently, human beings emerge as the result of this evolutionary journey, possessing the capacity to understand their place in the world and, as part of the natural order, becoming aware of the world itself.

It always amazes me that theologians who can offer no convincing proof of a god’s existence are so sure about god’s nature and his methods.  How do they know this stuff?  The answer is that they don’t: they are either making stuff up or stealing ideas from their predecessors.

You may have noted that yes, there is teleology here. There is surely not complete freedom, as a rerun of evolution, if quantum mechanics has any effect on mutations, would not necessarily produce either consciousness or humans. And yes, the randomness isn’t true ontological randomness because it is biased towards getting what God wants (my bolding):

. . . . if we see God as immanent in the world and, so, in a panentheistic view according to which God is transcendent of the world but is not separated from nature, then we can explain why nature is biased toward the marvelous. The reason is that nature is manifesting God’s marvelous beauty.

To that, all I can say is “oy vey!”

In the end, then, the authors have produced nothing new. They’ve espoused pantheism, in which the God-who-is-in-everything has set up the world so it produces “the marvelous”, i.e. H. sapiens. This is not novel, and it’s not even ontological randomness. It is hooey. And two Iranian philosophers of science have gotten paid to produce it. The only question is not why they go on about this stuff at such length, but how the journal Open Theology was willing to publish a paper with such a mundane answer. Do they apply no critical standards? The answer is in the second word of the journal’s title.

The biggest question, though, is how I can be on an Arctic trip and have time to go after such bushwah. The answer to that one is that today is a sea day, and I don’t have a book to read or wish to watch television.

Bushwah!

h/t: B. Charlesworth

Richard Dawkins on the “simplicity” of God

August 31, 2023 • 11:10 am

If you’re able to read the post below on Richard Dawkins’s Substack site, you get three treats in one. First, he reproduces a scathing review he wrote for the 1996 Sunday Times of London about theologian Richard Swinburne‘s book Is There a God? (The answer was “yes,” of course, and Swinburne’s god was a “simple” one.) Second, Richard re-discusses the topic based on a debate he had with Swinburne and other religionists this June about whether God was indeed “simple.” Finally, both segments are written in Richard’s inimitable clear and humorous style, and so you get the third treat of enjoying his prose. (I’d love to be able to write like him; Richard and Steve Pinker are my models for clear and absorbing writing.)

If you haven’t looked at Richard’s site, the following might be free to access. Click on it to try. If not, either subscribe or just read the quotes I’ll give below.

The book review begins with a funny rebuke:

It is a virtue of clear writing that you can see what is wrong with a book as well as what is right.  Richard Swinburne is clear.  You can see where he is coming from.  You can also see where he is going to, and there is something almost endearing in the way he lovingly stakes out his own banana skin and rings it about with converging arrows boldly labelled ‘Step here’.

Yep, he stepped there.

Swinburne claimed that God has many powers. For example, as Richard notes, the esteemed theologian thinks that God has to keep every physical particle in line, for without God’s continual intercession, every electron would willy-nilly assume different and diverse properties.

[Swinburne’s] reasoning is very odd indeed.  Given that the number of particles of any one type, say electrons, is large, Swinburne thinks it too much of a coincidence for so many to have the same properties.  One electron, he could stomach.  But billions and billions of electrons, all with the same properties, that is what really excites his incredulity.  For him it would be simpler, more natural, less demanding of explanation, if all electrons were different from each other.  Worse, no one electron should naturally retain its properties for more than an instant at a time, but would be expected to change capriciously, haphazardly and fleetingly from moment to moment.  That is Swinburne’s view of the simple, native state of affairs.  Anything more uniform (what you or I would call more simple) requires a special explanation.

“. . . it is only because electrons and bits of copper and all other material objects have the same powers in the twentieth century as they did in the nineteenth century that things are as they are now” (p 42).

Enter God.  God comes to the rescue by deliberately and continuously sustaining the properties of all those billions of electrons and bits of copper, and neutralising their otherwise ingrained inclination to wild and erratic fluctuation.  That is why when you’ve seen one electron you’ve seen them all, that is why bits of copper all behave like bits of copper, and that is why each electron and each bit of copper stays the same as itself from microsecond to microsecond.  It is because God is constantly hanging on to each and every particle, curbing its reckless excesses and whipping it into line with its colleagues to keep them all the same.

Oh, and in case you wondered how the hypothesis that God is simultaneously keeping a billion fingers on a billion electrons can be a simple hypothesis, the reason is this.  God is only a single substance.  What brilliant economy of explanatory causes compared with all those billions of independent electrons all just happening to be the same!

Not only that, but besides looking after the gazillions of electrons in the Universe (not just on Earth), God has to monitor the behavior and thoughts of every individual, human or nonhuman, and has complete knowledge of all of them. As it says in Matthew 10:29:

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.

The review is delightful, especially if you like mockery of Sophisticated Theology™, and Richard ends it this way:

A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe is not going to be simple.  His existence is therefore going to need a modicum of explaining in its own right (it is often considered bad taste to bring that up, but Swinburne does rather ask for it by pinning his hopes on the virtues of simplicity).  Worse (from the point of view of simplicity) other corners of God’s giant consciousness are simultaneously preoccupied with the doings and emotions and prayers of every single human being.  He even, according to Swinburne, has to decide continuously not to intervene miraculously to save us when we get cancer.  That would never do, for, “If God answered most prayers for a relative to recover from cancer, then cancer would no longer be a problem for humans to solve.”  And then where would we be?

If this is theology, perhaps Professor Swinburne’s colleagues are wise to be less lucid.

I feel like applauding when I read stuff like that.

After this, Richard quotes how theologians and believers went after him for his claim in the debate that God must be complex (his definition of “complex” is below), and that if you really understood theology, you’d know that its practitioners mean “simple” in a way different from both scientists and laypeople.

In the debate, Swineburne stood by his claim that God was simple, so the existence of God isn’t really a problem. (The “complexity” of any god would demand an explanation of how such a vastly complicated deity came about, an explanation that theologians aren’t prepared to give, as they don’t have one—except perhaps to claim “it’s gods all the way down”.)

In a loud, confident, articulate voice, Swinburne expounded exactly the same astonishing line as before, and I criticized it in the same terms. How can you possibly say God is a “simple”, “unitary” explanation for the universe and the laws of physics, given that, in order to create it, he needed to know a whole lot of physics and mathematics.  Plus, 4.6 billion years later, he now has the bandwidth to read the intimate thoughts of seven billion of people simultaneously, and, for all we know, the thoughts and prayers of even more billions of extra-terrestrial aliens.

It didn’t surprise me that Swinburne still thinks God is a supremely simple entity. He evidently uses the word “simple” in a special theological sense. What does surprise me is the number of others incapable of seeing the absurdity of his position. Several Twitter responses to the debate proudly proclaim “Divine Simplicity” as a thing in theology. But you can’t demonstrate that something is right merely by shoving the word “Divine” in front of it, not even if you attribute it to Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. What is the justification for invoking “Divine Simplicity in this context? Does it even mean anything coherent?

And then Dawkins explains what he means by simplicity and complexity, which is the same way scientists (and everyone else, if they could articulate it) understands complexity. It’s a nonmathematical version of “Shannon information.”  Here I have to give a longish quote:

Here’s what I mean by simple. I suspect it captures what most biologists mean, if not most scientists. It can be quantified using an intuitive, verbal version of Shannon’s mathematical measure of information. Simple is the opposite of complex. The complexity or simplicity of an entity is the minimum number of words (more strictly bits – binary digits in the most economical re-coding) you need to describe it. A centipede and a lobster both consist of a train of segments running from front to rear. The centipede is simpler than the lobster, in the following sense. To describe the centipede, you admittedly need a special description of the front and rear segments, but the many segments in between are the same as each other. Just describe one segment, and then say “Repeat repeat repeat . . . some large number of times” (it might literally be 100 times in some species.) But you can’t do that with the lobster because most of the segments are different from each other. If you were to write a book called The Anatomy of the Centipede and another book called the Anatomy of the Lobster, the second book would come out a lot fatter. Assuming, of course, that the two books go into a similar level of detail, which is an easy assumption to police.

From this you can see that simplicity/complexity is measured not just by number of parts but also by what Julian Huxley called “heterogeneity of parts”. And we have to add that the heterogeneous parts themselves, and the way they are connected up, are necessary to the definition of the entity concerned. Any old heap of junk has a large number of heterogenous parts but neither they, nor their particular juxtaposition, are necessary to the general definition of “a heap of junk”. You can shuffle the parts of a  heap of junk a million times, and all million will answer to the definition of a heap of junk. The heterogenous parts of a lobster, and their mutual arrangement, are necessary to the definition of a lobster. So they are to the definition of a centipede, but fewer of them are different from each other, and you can shuffle (most of them) into any order.

There’s more, but I’ll just give some funny bits in the form of social media rebukes Richard got (in italics) and his answers (in plain text):

“Richard, stop embarrassing yourself. Stick to science.

With all due respect – and I have a lot of respect for you – watching you switch lanes from science to philosophy is like watching Michael Jordan switch to baseball.”

I’ve become ever so slightly irritated by the suggestion that you need some sort of special training to think clearly. Philosophy is just thinking clearly. Does one not need to think clearly to do science? Or history? Or any subject worth studying. Perhaps not theology, where thinking clearly might even be a handicap.

and this:

For evolution’s sake stop trying to do theology.”

I am not trying to do theology, not least because I have grave doubts as to whether theology is a subject at all (I don’t in any way impugn the fascinating work done in university Departments of Theology on the Dead Sea scrolls, comparing ancient Hebrew texts, and similar honest scholarship). I’m talking about theology in the (I suspect but could be wrong) obscurantist sense epitomised by “Transubstantiation” and the “Mystery” of  the Eucharist, the “Mystery” of the Trinity, the “Mystery” of the Incarnation, and “Divine Simplicity”.

I am not trying and failing to do theology, Swinburne is trying and failing to do science. The question of why all electrons and all copper atoms behave as others of their kind do is a purely scientific question.  And the question of why we exist, which was the topic of the London debate, is fairly and squarely a scientific question. It is possible that science will never ultimately solve it, though I think it will, and the possibility of failure is no reason to give up without making the effort. But if science doesn’t solve it, no other discipline will.

And, finally, this:

“Stick to biology.”

Thank you, I intend to. Biology uses language honestly and solves real problems. In 2,000 years, what problem has ever been solved by theology?

In that short last sentence, Richard sums up what I try to say in my lecture on the incompatibility of religion and science. There I talk about all the scientific advances in just the last century, and then ask this: “How much more do we know about the nature and will of God since the writings of Augustine or Aquinas?”  The answer, of course is “nothing”, for theology is not a discipline in which one can investigate and test various propositions.  We still know nothing about God—least of all whether He/She/It even exists.

h/t: Daniel

More Sophisticated Theology: a religious scholar ponders whether Neanderthals had immortal souls

August 10, 2023 • 8:30 am

Lest you think that Sophisticated Theology™ has fallen on hard times, here we have an article pondering at great and tedious length the immensely important question, “Did Christ die for Neanderthals?” That can be rephrased, according to author Simon Francis Gaine, as “Did the Neanderthals have immortal souls?” (The “OP” after his name stands for Ordinis Praedicatorum, meaning of the Order of Preacher in the Dominican sect of Catholicism.)

And he gets paid to write stuff like this; his biography gives his bona fides, include a degree from Oggsford:

Fr Simon is currently assigned to the Angelicum, Rome, where he teaches in the Theology Faculty of the Pontifical University of St Thomas. He lectures on the Theology of Grace and Christian Anthropology, and oversees the Faculty’s Doctoral Seminar.

Fr Simon holds the Pinckaers Chair in Theological Anthropology and Ethics in the Angelicum Thomistic Institute, of which he is also the Director. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Blackfriars’s Aquinas Institute, the Pontifical Academy of St Thomas, Rome, and the Vatican’s International Theological Commission.

He studied theology at Oxford, and completed his doctorate in modern Catholic theology before joining the Dominican Order in 1995.

Click on the screenshot for a paradigmatic example of Sophisticated Theology™. The paper appeared in 2020 in New Blackfriars, a Wiley journal that’s apparently peer reviewed.

Here’s the Big Question:

 I have no expertise in any of these sciences, but have tried as best I can to understand what they have to say, in order to take account of what they have to say within a theological framework. Today I am going to look at the Neanderthals and their relationship to us from a theological perspective in the Catholic tradition, asking what a disciple of St Thomas Aquinas should make of them. Are they to be counted among the humanity God created in his image and likeness and which fell into sin, or are they to be counted instead among the other animal species of our world represented in the first chapter of Genesis? Or are they something else? While creation itself is to be renewed through Christ at the last, according to Christian faith Christ is said to die for our trespasses, for our sins. So did Christ die for Neanderthals?

This comes down to the question, says Gaine, of whether Neanderthals had immortal souls, so we have to look for evidence of that. If they did, then they could be saved by Jesus, though since the Neanderthals’ demise antedated the appearance of Jesus by about 40,000 years, their souls must have lingered in somewhere like Purgatory (along with the souls of Aztecs and other pre-Christian believers) for millennia. Gaine does not take up the question of whether other hominins, like H. erectus or H. floresiensis, much less the Denisovans, also had souls.

Since we have no idea whether Neanderthals had immortal souls (indeed, we can’t be sure that anybody else has an immortal soul, since it’s like consciousness), we have to look for proxies for souls. The question is complicated by the fact that Neanderthals interbred with “modern” Homo sapiens, so that most of us carry some a few percent of Neanderthal genes in our genome.

To answer his question of whether Neanderthals are “theologically human” (i.e., whether they had immortal souls), Gaine turns to his hero Aquinas:

So were Neanderthals theologically human or not? I think the only way we can approach this question is to ask whether or not Neanderthals had immortal souls, as we do. But, apart from Christian teaching, how do we know that we even have such souls? We cannot just have a look at our immaterial souls, and Aquinas thought that we only know the character of our souls through what we do. Aquinas argues from the fact that we make intellectual acts of knowledge of things abstracted from their material conditions, to the immateriality of the intellectual soul. Our knowledge is not just of particulars but is universal, enabling pursuits like philosophy and science, and the potential to be elevated by God to supernatural knowledge and love of him. If human knowing were more limited to a material process, Aquinas does not think our souls would be such subsistent, immaterial souls. Finding evidence of intellectual flights throughout the history of sapiens is difficult enough, however, let alone in Neanderthals.

. . .  What we need to look for in the case of Neanderthals is evidence of some behaviour that bears the mark of an intellectual soul such as we have.

And so an “intellectual soul” then becomes a proxy for the immortal soul, which is itself the proxy for whether you can be saved by Christ. Did Neanderthals have these? Gaine uses several lines of evidence to suggest that they did.

  • Neanderthals buried their dead (religion!)
  • Language. We don’t know if Neanderthals could speak, but they had a vocal apparatus similar to that of modern H. sapiens. Gaine concludes that they had language, though of course that’s pure speculation. But since when have Sophisticated Theologians™ bridled at usupported speculation?
  • Neanderthals made cave paintings and may have adorned themselves with feathers and jewelry: signs of a “material culture” similar to H. sapiens.

And so he concludes, without saying so explicitly, that Neanderthals had immortal souls and were save-able by Christ. This supposedly allows us to use science to expand theology:

How though does any of this make a difference to theology in the tradition of Aquinas? If Neanderthals were created in God’s image and saved by Christ, this must expand our understanding of Christ’s ark of salvation and raise questions about how his saving grace was made available to them. Because the Church teaches that God offers salvation through Christ to every person in some way.  theologians have often asked in recent times how this offer is made to those who have not heard the Gospel, members of other religions, and even atheists. It seems to me that, just as modern science has enlarged our sense of the physical universe, the inclusion of Neanderthals in theological humanity must somehow expand our sense of human salvation, given that it was effected in the kind of life Neanderthals lived.

. . . But even if Neanderthal inclusion does not pay immediate theological dividends, at least for apologetic reasons it seems necessary for theology to take account of their discovery. Unless theologians do, they risk the appearance of leaving faith and science in separately sealed worlds, as though our faith cannot cope with advancing human knowledge, leaving it culturally marooned and seemingly irrelevant to many. That is exactly the opposite of the attitude of Aquinas, who, confident that all truth comes from God, in his own day confirmed Christian wisdom by integrating into it what he knew of human science.’

But why stop at Neanderthals when you’re “expanding your faith through science”. There are lots of other hominins that must be considered (see below).  Can we rule most of these out because they might not have had language?

From the Encyclopedia Brittanica

And what about other mammals? In 2015 the great Sophisticated Catholic Theologians™ Edward Feser and David Bentley Hart argued about whether dogs can go to Heaven. (Hart said “yes,” while Feser said “no”, both of them furiously quoting Church Fathers like Aquinas to support their positions.)

These are tough questions, and of course to answer them theologians have to construct confected arguments based on casuistry. What amazes me is that people get paid to corrupt science with such ridiculous theological questions. It is unsupported speculation about unevidenced empirical assertions.

h/t: David

Tish Harrison Warren interviews an Anglican bishop who says the Resurrection was real, and he has evidence

April 9, 2023 • 9:30 am

In today’s Easter edition of the NYT, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren interviews the Jesus expert and Anglican bishop, N. T. Wright, introduced this way:

Perhaps no one on earth has studied that event [the Resurrection] and the subsequent responses to it more than N.T. Wright. He serves as senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and is emeritus professor of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews. He has written over 80 books focused on Jesus and his first followers. He is also a Christian and a former bishop of Durham in the Church of England. One of his books, “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” is an exhaustive dive into the scholarship and debates around the resurrection of Christ. I asked Wright to speak with me about his research and this baffling, world-altering claim of resurrection. This interview has been edited and condensed.

So what about the Resurrection? Did it happen, or is it only a metaphor? (We’re leaving aside the dubious claim that a Jesus person ever existed). Click to read.

What’s printed below is from the emailed newsletter I got—for some masochistic reason I subscribe to Warren’s lucubrations—so it isn’t yet up on the NYT site. When it appears, I’ll attach the piece to the screenshot below. This also explains the weird spacing below.

While Warren makes no statement about her own belief in a real Resurrection (I’m betting she’s a believer), she draws out Bishop Wright, who absolutely believed it happened. Although in his youth he was a doubter, he got convinced that Jesus really did rise from the dead by none other than that Theologian for the Masses, C. S. Lewis. That tells you something about the nature of the “evidence” for this miracle.  And although the entirety of Wright’s “evidence” rests on conflicting stories within a single book, the New Testament, that doesn’t daunt the man at all.  He’s a diehard Anglican to the point where he might as well be a full-on Catholic.

The first exchange dispels the Sophisticated Theologians’™ claim that the Resurrection really wasn’t a miracle but a metaphor. For those atheist-butters or accommodationists who argue that religion isn’t really about empirical claims, but morality and a sense of community, this will make them sit up. Warren’s questions are in bold, Wright’s answers in plain type. Text from the article is indented, text that is flush left is mine.

There’s a funny line where you write, “The discovery that dead people stayed dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.” That’s obvious, of course, but we sometimes assume that skepticism is a recent phenomenon. How would ancient Jewish audiences and Gentile audiences think about the apostles talking about the resurrection?

Early Christianity was born into a world where everybody knew that its central claim was ridiculous, and the early Christians knew it themselves. It’s not that they thought resurrection might just happen to a few people here and there. But they said it had happened in this case.

This claim seemed absolutely crazy. Ordinary, sober people knew perfectly well that dead people don’t get raised up again.

Many Jewish people for two centuries before Jesus and on for at least the next century believed that in the end, all God’s people would be raised because they believed that the God of Israel, the Creator God, would remake the whole world. But this is about one person being raised from the dead ahead of everybody else.

In the non-Jewish world, there is no evidence that anyone is expecting dead people to come back again. There’s lots of speculation about other places they might go. The Platonic speculation about going off to the Isles of the Blessed and having lovely conversations about philosophy all day. The Stoics believed that there would be a great Phoenixlike conflagration and the whole world would then be reborn.

But most people knew that when you died, that was basically it. That’s why when Paul, in Athens, said this had happened, most of them laughed at him. It didn’t fit their worldview. That’s crucial because you can’t fit the resurrection into the existing worldviews that we’ve got. The resurrection brings its own worldview with it and says, if you’re going to understand the way things are, you start with this and work out. If Jesus really has been raised, then everything is different.

Got that? Note that yes, he thinks it really happened. Later Wright says this, which he realized after reading C. S. Lewis:

But the truth of the resurrection is a truth about something that actually happened in history.

So much for Gould’s NOMA hypothesis that religion is about morality, not empirical claims of truth.  Certainly there are many Christians that do take the Resurrection as a metaphor, but surely many (perhaps most) do. For without it, the possibility of salvation—the culmination of the whole Jesus story—disappears. I don’t think a lot of people who buy Gould’s separation of the religious from the empirical magisteria realize how important it is for many believers to accept that religious claims about empirical truths are really held deeply. If they weren’t, and everything’s a metaphor, you might as well be a secular humanist.

Note above that, in the last big of the first long quote, Wright’s evidence comes close to Tertullian’s claim, “I believe it because it is impossible.” Here’s what he says in response to Warren’s second question:

So we have another reason to accept the Resurrection: because it makes everything “different”. That is, it buttresses what Bishop Wright wants to believe.  But let’s give the man a bit more credit, he immediately adduces two pieces of “evidence”—both from Scripture, of course—that the testimony of the disciples about the Resurrection really was true:

You spend time in the book looking at Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in the Gospels. It seems that the disciples’ testimony about seeing Jesus matters to you. Why do you trust their testimony?

If you understand how people thought about death and life after death in the ancient world, you will need two strands of converging evidence.

On the one hand, there are extraordinary reports about people going to the tomb of Jesus and finding that there was no body in it. In that world, grave robbery was a common occurrence, so an empty tomb by itself says, “This is odd,” but we can tell some stories about this that are much more credible than the idea that he’s alive again.

However, if at the same time this person turns up and is seen and felt to be bodily alive and speaks to people and cooks breakfast by the shore, then that is totally unexpected as well. Those two things kind of interpret one another.

You need those two bits of evidence put together and then the testimony makes sense. Otherwise, empty tomb? Somebody has taken the body. That’s what Mary Magdalene thought. Appearances? “Oh, yeah, we know about those. Just go and check in the tomb. You will find there’s still a body there.” But if there isn’t, then we are into something different. So that’s why that evidence is so important.

The bishop’s “evidence” here seems to consist of this: “if two unexpected things occur but don’t comport with each other and also imply something weird, that weird thing must be true.” But that, of course, is hokum. What Wright’s really saying here is simply that if Jesus was crucified, his body put in a tomb, but then he reappears as a living person, then the Resurrection MUST have happened. But all he’s doing is re-describing the Resurrection story, pretending that there’s some train of logic in it, and then saying that this constitutes “evidence.” The man has no conception of what empirical evidence really is, so strong is his will to believe.

Finally, when Warren asks him why it’s so important that Jesus rose from the dead, Bishop Wright again emits nonsensical theobabble. He doesn’t mention that Jesus says in the New Testament that some of his contemporaries would still be alive when he returned, but of course he hasn’t. This occurs three times (all translations below are from the King James version):

Mark 9:1

And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.

Mark 13:30

Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.

Matthew 10:23

But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come.

This look as if either Jesus was lying, made a mistake about the date of his return (off by two millennia!), or most likely, he never said this stuff but it was made up by the men who wrote the Scriptures. I’ll leave you to choose what is most likely.

Finally, Bishop Wright is asked about what I see as the Achilles heel of Christianity:  Why the world is still in bad shape, full of the suffering of innocents, if Jesus rose and was going to save people? Here’s a bit of his answer to Warren’s question (notice that, of course, she doesn’t press him on any of this):

Let’s say that what the Gospels claim is true: Jesus is risen. It seems that the world keeps going and there’s still oppression, suffering and grief. There’s still death. So what difference does it make that Jesus is raised from the dead?

. . . People regularly say, if there really was a God, if he really wanted to sort the place out, then he would come and, bang, it would be done. He would send in the tanks — metaphorically speaking, or perhaps not — and sort out the evil and wickedness in the world. But the Sermon on the Mount says that when God comes to sort out the world the Jesus way, he doesn’t send in tanks. He sends in the poor and the brokenhearted and the hungry-for-justice people and the meek and the people who are ready to suffer for getting the world sorted out. The way the Sermon on the Mount works is exactly the same way that the gospel of the resurrection works. Jesus, risen from the dead, is the planting of that great seed. And now the plant has spread in all directions.

Obviously bad things happen. Bad things happen in and through the church. We all know that. I know that as well as anyone. But all sorts of great and good things do happen. Healing happens, hope happens, and ultimately it all goes back to this single seed of the raising of Jesus from the dead.

In other words, people suffer because the Bible says that suffering people will usher in the return of Jesus. But I have news for Bishop Wright: people have been suffering for two millennia, and yet Jesus hasn’t come back! Where is he? Two millennia of starvation, war, the Black Death, kids with cancer, earthquakes, and all manner of suffering. For crying out loud, how much suffering does it take before the Jesus seed sprouts?

**********

As a palliative, I recommend this free article from Michael Shermer at his Substack site Skeptic (click to read).

Shermer dismantles all the mythology around Jesus’s life and resurrection, and then raises what I call The Argument from the Jews:

. . . . . a challenge to the resurrection miracle that I often employ is that Jews do not accept it as real, neither in Jesus’ time nor in ours. Think about that: Jews believe in the same God as Christians. They accept the Old Testament of the Bible like Christians do. They even believe in the Messiah. They just don’t think Jesus of Nazareth was him. Jewish rabbis, scholars, philosophers, and historians all know the arguments for the resurrection as well as Christian apologists and theologians making the arguments, and still they reject them. Why? If the arguments and evidence for the resurrection is so solid, in time the community most expert in that field would reach a consensus about it. They haven’t. Christians believe it. Jews don’t.

He then refers to an interview he gave to Ben Shapiro, which I haven’t watched, to explain why Jews don’t accept the Resurrection:

Ben Shapiro explains why here, in our conversation on his Sunday Special show.

Happy Easter!

Marilynne Robinson again embarrasses herself with an attempt to harmonize science and theology

December 5, 2022 • 10:45 am

I used to like Marilynne Robinson‘s fiction (she won a Pulitzer for her novel Gilead), but over the years she’s increasingly pushed her Christianity into her fiction and, more notably, into her essays. (See here and here for her rants on “scientism”.) And she is a pious Christian; as Wikipedia notes, she even preaches:

Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian and later became a Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City. Her Congregationalism, and her interest in the ideas of John Calvin, have been important in her works, including Gilead, which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister. In an interview with the Church Times in 2012, Robinson said: “I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker.”

And now she’s in the New York Review of Books (NYRB). This magazine, under editor Bob Silvers, used to be a paragon of literary thought and quality, but since he died it’s come down in the world—though for some reason it always published Robinson’s lucubrations. In the article below (if it’s paywalled, join free for a short time), Robinson tries to derive a theology from science. She fails, not only because you can’t do that, but because she really doesn’t understand science. It’s embarrassingly bad—”dreadful” is too kind a word!

Not only is it really a sermon, not an essay (it’s full of passages from the Bible), but it’s very poorly written—surprising for a Pulitzer-winning novelist.

Her goal is to “rehabilitate” the antagonism she sees between science and religion. She appears to effect this reconciliation by adducing the wonders of science and evolution as evidence for God, though she spurns the idea of even needing evidence for God (she is of course a believer, but doesn’t need no stinking evidence). She also appears not to understand science.

Her using biological complexity and consciousness as evidence for the Divine comes perilously close to Intelligent Design, though she rejects that idea, too. After all, God doesn’t need to be buttressed with evidence of any sort. But then then proceeds to give that evidence—drawn largely from evolution and quantum mechanics—for many boring pages.

I could quote her at length, but I don’t want to damage your brain.  Here are the first three paragraphs laying out her thesis (bolding is mine):

I have been interested for a long time in theology and also in science. These two brilliant fields of thought have been at odds, supposedly, since the rise of what might be called the modern period, say, beginning in the nineteenth century. For the next one hundred years and more science flourished, applying its model of rationalism to every question, while increasingly religion struggled to find any way to justify its existence in the face of triumphant demystifications of reality. Then an odd thing happened. With one brilliant advance after another, science burst out of the constraints of rationalism and found itself in the terrain of quantum theory, which everyone says no one understands, but which is very robust and has been put to all sorts of practical uses. Rationalism had been choking out religion for generations as it proposed etiologies for the creatures to refute creation myth and ethics for human beings that often ran directly counter to the traditional teachings of religion. For a while nineteenth-century versions of evolution, with sundry determinist implications, survived despite the always more subtle and complex findings in physics, genetics, and other fields.

More recently certain stalwarts of nineteenth-century truth and reason were sure they would at last deliver the death blow to religion. But they lost heart or retired or went to their reward before that mortal blow was struck, if it ever could have been. They may have noticed that science as it advanced did not much resemble their conception of it, but their views never moderated. In the meantime religion was damaged and science was, too, so far as their reputations are concerned. Religion is viewed as ignorant and fear-driven, science as atheistic and arrogant. It is not unusual for people and groups to embrace the harshest characterizations that are made of them, as seems to have happened in this case. This is one more reason why we should speak more generously of one another.

In light of the fact that science and religion are two major pillars of our civilization, it seems there should be some effort at rehabilitation. I haven’t noticed any. Science has felt the consequences of all this in budget cuts and controversies in schools and the refusal of important segments of the population, in critical matters of public health, to accept the views of scientists as offered in good faith. Religion, meanwhile, has been largely overtaken by a belligerency darker and cruder than obscurantism, the very antithesis of theology, whatever it might have to do with faith. At the end of this hard-fought and meaningless struggle nothing was resolved, but there was grave loss on all sides.

First, theology is not a “brilliant field of thought”—not unless you consider embellishing fairy tales a “brilliant” exercise.  My contention is that theology hasn’t “advanced” since the days of Augustine the Hippo (yes, I know the name is a joke). By that I mean that although Biblical exegesis has become less literalistic and more sophisticated, has changed, and has even gotten more “inclusive”, it hasn’t brought us one iota closer towards understanding the nature of God and the divine, much less giving us any evidence for God’s existence or true nature. How could it? It’s all MADE UP STUFF. Science, on the other hand. . . . well, you know what it’s accomplished.

Look at the first paragraph above, where Robinson mentions “etiologies for the creatures” that refuted creationism with rationality. “Etiologies” here means EVOLUTION, but for some reason she doesn’t say that. She’s trying to show off, I guess. In the next sentence, Robinson just gets things wrong:

For a while nineteenth-century versions of evolution, with sundry determinist implications, survived despite the always more subtle and complex findings in physics, genetics, and other fields.

In fact, nineteenth-century versions of evolution became highly modified as our understanding grew, and took a great leap in the 1930s, when the Modern Synthesis fused the young science of genetics with evolution.  I’m not sure what the “sundry determinist implications” are, either.  Evolution is no more deterministic than is physics; that is, it is deterministic save for any truly indeterministic quantum-mechanical influences (perhaps in mutation?), but I don’t think that’s what she’s talking about.  And Robinson is just dead wrong in assuming evolution is less subtle than “physics, genetics, and other fields”, but she’s not even wrong when she says that evolution survived in the face of findings of other fields. In fact, evolution incorporated genetics soon after it was rediscovered in 1900.  Truly, I don’t think Robinson knows what she’s talking about here. What is the sweating writer trying to say?

She’s right in saying in paragraph two that “religion is viewed as ignorant and fear-driven”, though not all religionists are fearful; but if science was damaged by being seen as “atheistic and arrogant”, I haven’t seen it. In fact, as belief in God is waning, public confidence in science is increasing. Below are some data from a 2019 Pew poll. Compare scientists on the top line with “religious leaders” on the bottom. Scientists win!

Science is practiced as an “atheistic” discipline—that is, one that doesn’t need or invoke the supernatural in making explanations—but is it really seen as “arrogant”? It surely is by Robinson, who’s been banging on about “scientism” for years, but if science’s reputation is eroding because of that, well, religion’s is eroding faster.  And nobody is more arrogant than someone like Robinson who strongly believes in the Christian God, and claims to know His nature—without a lick of evidence!  At least scientists can test other scientists’ claims and then show them to be wrong. What would convince Robinson that there was no God, or a god but not the Christian God she worships?

Robinson is, of course, making up a scenario here: there’s no evidence that the public has less trust in science than in religion, and to say that theology isn’t obscurantist is wrong. In fact, Robinson’s whole piece is obscurantist, as is most modern theology (try reading Alvin Plantinga or getting a lucid explanation of why God allows innocent people to suffer physical evil).

Below, Robinson raises the something-rather-than-nothing question to buttress her harmonizing of theology and religion, but then denies that the question constitutes “proof” of God. Again, bolding is mine:

Science has pondered the evolution of the eye as a special problem. In the case of the scallop, that morsel so much a staple of our menus, the emergence of the eye seems to have happened twice—once as a fringe along the shell for ordinary scallop business, and again as two stalks that look straight up so that the creature can find its way back to the shadow of the mangrove forest. This is charming. This is delightful. A courtesy, a solicitude. What an uneconomic deployment of possibility. But that phrase could be applied to humankind, to the whole of creation. After all, why is there something rather than nothing?

First, I didn’t know that scallops evolved eyes twice independently, particularly as two stalks that “help them find their way back to the shadow of the mangrove forest”.  Five minutes on the Internet yielded no verification of this, but I’ll let readers see if she’s right there. What’s more important is her last question: a staple of “sophisticated” theology.  Why is there something rather than nothing? Clearly Robinson thinks that means that there’s something because God wanted something, but this question isn’t evidence for God, much less of her Christian God (see Sean Carroll’s take here). And even if it were, then we would have to ask,  “Well, why is there a God rather than no God?” Theologians will do some fast-stepping there!

But Robinson quickly explains that she doesn’t need no stinkin’ proof of God. I’m wondering why she believes in the first place, then:

If I seem to be proffering a version of intelligent design, I want to make it clear that I reject any argument that presents itself as a proof of God’s existence. I think there is a degree of irreverence in the very idea of proof. At the same time, whether or not His existence is a factor in the nature of the world, there is a glory in creation to which the hyperbolic celebrations of Scripture are uniquely appropriate. The Book of Job describes creation as the moment when “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” In the long final speech from the whirlwind, God names the beasts and the natural forces and luxuriates in their power and strangeness, in overwhelming reply to the questioning of His justice. Granting that this is a difficult teaching to absorb, it can only mean that the world, the cosmos, in its infinite particularity, should be seen as a joy to God Himself. Let us say, therefore, that it is recommended to our attention. And it is not without meaning that we are richly capable of such attention, as the arts and the sciences have demonstrated.

She says she’s not offering proof, but she sure as hell is adducing “evidence”! She just euphemizes “proof” with other words: “let us say that it is recommended to our attention”, and “it is not without meaning that we are richly capable of such attention.”  What she’s saying is that the natural world, and our ability to understand it, points towards God.

I really can’t go on further, as I can’t figure out what the sweating author is trying to say, and her essay is so poorly written that I wonder why the NYRB, once a bastion of good writing, printed it. After all, it’s not a thoughtful analysis of anything, but is simply a sermon couched in what Dan Dennett calls “deepities”.

I’ll just leave you with her quantum woo. She reads into quantum mechanics, which we don’t fully understand nor have a good physical picture of, some divine mystery that also points towards  God. Physicists may be amused by her invoking the observer effect (which I think is pretty much defunct) and other quantum stuff that she incorporates into theology. If this is Sophisticated Thelogy®, it is obscurantist, wordy, and impenetrable.

Popular ideas of God have often been essentially anthropomorphic and have tended to limit their conception of His awareness by a standard of the possible that imagined a vastly heightened but basically humanlike consciousness. Now we know that the nature of things is negotiated moment by moment at the level of quantum indeterminacy, that from a subatomic point of view the clay is still in the potter’s hands. We know that an observer, literal or other, can effect this openness to possibility, can cause the indeterminacy to de-cohere, to become one version of the array of possibilities present in any instance. This underlies what we experience as a great constancy.

. . . Then again, if the hypothesis is correct that time and space emerge from quantum phenomena, which are therefore in some sense prior to them, then I find myself failing to imagine Being that is not spatially or temporally local and yet is generative of these conditions for and of our existence. I find myself thinking of the intuitions of the ancient people that there was a time when the world came into being. In Babylonian mythology the god Marduk slays the goddess Tiamat, a giant, raging serpent. He slices her corpse in two and uses half to form earth, half to form sky. Scholars have claimed to find evidence that a tale like this lies behind the serene, magisterial creation in Genesis. And there are glimpses in the biblical creation of the suppression of a primordial chaos, tohu va-vohu in Hebrew, “without form and void” in English. The prophet Isaiah says God will punish “Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.”

In the end, Robinson’s views are risible, and an embarrassment to both her and the NYRB. And to think that she won a Pulitzer Prize before she went off the rails and began writing stuff like this!

How low the NYRB has sunk!

The Fine Tuning argument for God: a selection of refutations (and a few supporters)

November 19, 2022 • 12:45 pm

Most of you surely know the fine-tuning argument for God: the claim that the physical constants of the Universe are such as to permit the evolution and existence of life (especially H. sapiens), and the concatention of so many salubrious constants is improbable—too coincidental to reflect anything but a Great Designer. (Its proponents claim that any alteration in these constants would make life impossible.)

This hourlong video interviews proponents and opponents of this argument for God (mostly opponents). They include philosophers, physicists, and believers. Here’s a list. Anybody whose name you recognize in the list below, save perhaps (Lennox and Craig) isn’t convinced by the argument.

Sir Roger Penrose
Sean Carroll
Alan Guth
Carlo Rovelli
Hans Halvorson
Justin Something
Chris Hitchcock
Barry Loewer
Graham Priest
Daniel Linford
Tim Maudlin
Simon Saunders
Niayesh Afshordi
Alex Malpass
Kenneth Williford
William Lane Craig
John Lennox
Abhay Ashketar
Lee Smolin
Stav Zalel
Rafael Sorkin

Nearly all the people interviewed reject the argument, largely on the grounds that we simply cannot calculate a priori what the probabilities are of the constants of nature being what they are, and there are alternative explanations for life that are purely naturalistic.

Sean Carroll makes the point that even thinking that there is fine-tuning that allows for the existence of life, that presupposes naturalism, because “God does not need the laws of physics to allow certain physical configurations to exist in order for there to be life. God is infinitely powerful; God can do whatever. The only theory under which the physical conditions need to be exactly right to allow for complex chemical reactions and biology and life and so forth, is naturalism.” I’m not quite sure about that argument, however; how do we know that God’s creation could occur unless the laws of physics were what they are? Could God really create humans in a universe with different physical constants, constants that He determines?

I do recommend watching the video; it gives you plenty of ammunition against those who wield the argument, but examines the argument from various sides, including what theological assumptions go into it. (The problem of evil is offered as a defeater for a God who would create a universe containing humans.) The arguments go further into string theory, multiverses, the cosmological constant, Boltzmann brains, and Lee Smolin’s “cosmological selection” argument for fine-tuning.

In the end, you will likely reject the fine-tuning argument (even the moderator says that there’s no justification for accepting God from this argument), but you’ll also be impressed about how much we still don’t understand about cosmology.

A reader tells us why God allows suffering

May 20, 2022 • 7:30 am

I love the amateurs who engage in theodicy, though, to be sure, they don’t give palpably worse explanations for earthly suffering than do the Sophisticated Theologians®

Reader “Travis”, a true believer, attempted to put this comment on my May 4 post, “Why should nonbelievers pray and go to church?”

The “solution” to the “problem of evil” (at least in the sense of unjust suffering), by my thinking, is this:At the end of the proverbial day all suffering will either be the just punishment  of those who reject God or will be suffering which those who love God will be grateful to have suffered for the accomplishment of God’s good purposes.

Note several things, not least the assurance with which Travis claims to understand God’s plan.  Also, this explanation fails to explain important aspects of suffering, like why infants who die of cancer or other afflictions—before they even know about God and therefore can’t love him—nevertheless suffer.  Further, who would be grateful for earthly suffering, unless that suffering is somehow a prerequisite to being with God?

And what about the suffering of people who accept God, like (honorable) priests, rabbis, and imams? They certainly don’t reject God!

The fact remains, and nobody can explain it, is that there is a huge amount of gratuitous suffering on this planet that God could have prevented had he chosen to, and the explanation above says nothing about suffering as the price of having “free will.” (That explanation, as readers have noted, makes little sense, and at any rate doesn’t explain physical evil: stuff not resulting from human action but from diseases, microbes, or catastrophes like earthquakes and tsunamis.)

Reply to Travis (politely), if you wish, and I’ll inform him/her of the thread.