Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
When I was watching news reports of George Michael’s death yesterday, I was struck by how many of them used the word “passed” or “passed away” compared to the word “died.” (Newspapers seem to use “died” more often than verbal reports.) Here, for instance are three Twitter reports:
It seems to me that people try to avoid using the “d-word”, and have done so for a while. In a cemetery in Cornwall, for example, I saw that a lot of gravestones gave the date of death as “fell asleep on. . .”. (The Old Testament, which doesn’t refer to an afterlife, also uses that phrase.) Other euphemisms include “passed on” and such; Wikipedia gives a long list of less polite synonyms for death, including “croak,” “count worms,” and the classic from Monty Python’s “Dead parrot” sketch, “joined the choir invisible.” And of course there are the past-tense verbs like “rests in peace” (also in the Python sketch).
I can think of three reasons why people try to avoid the word “died” in obituaries (when I have to report a friend’s or relative’s death to others, I always used “died”):
It reminds us bluntly of our own mortality
It is considered insensitive and cold, and therefore impolite
It comes from religions in which people believe that death is not final, and therefore use phrases like “passed on” to suggest that the deceased has gone to a better world (the possibility of a worse world is never mentioned!)
And, of course, it could be all three of these. What do you think?
Keep sending in your photos, folks! Today we’ll finish up with the second installment of Mark Sturtevant’s insect photos (first bit here). Mark’s notes are indented:
I generally don’t take more pictures of insects after they are well documented in my portfolio, but the jewel wing damselflies are among the exceptions to that informal policy. Besides being very beautiful, I enjoy the challenges that they present. They are shade-loving, which presses me to use the flash, but their metallic colors tend to not come out well with the flash, so I have been trying a variety of experiments to get the right effect. This summer I learned that I can sometimes get a true representation of their colors by bouncing the flash up from the ground or down from the canopy.
This picture shows a female ebony jewel wing (Calopteryx maculata). As one can see they are a bit duller in color [compare to male in previous installment], and they have white stigmata on their wings. When getting pictures of this one I was lying flat on my stomach. After a time she nipped out, grabbed a small moth, and returned to her perch with her meal stuffed into her surprisingly capacious mouth.
Next is a very large ladybug larva, probably belonging to the giant fifteen-spotted ladybug (Anatis labiculata). This one was grazing on a colony of leaf beetle larvae. I was a bit surprised to see this since I thought of ladybugs as aphid predators, but they clearly do not care what I think. The leaf beetle larvae seem to be using excrement as camouflage. So, eww.
Next is a longhorn beetle, the elm borer (Saperda tridentata). Although the adults are rather pretty, the larvae can do serious damage to elm trees as they bore extensive galleries under the tree bark.
Nearing the end, the next picture is what certainly looks like a caterpillar but in fact it is the larva of a sawfly wasp, probably in the genus Abia. One difference between sawfly larvae and caterpillars is that the former has abdominal ‘prolegs’ on pretty much every segment of the abdomen, but lepidoptera larvae would have two or more segments without prolegs. Their resemblance to caterpillars is an example of convergent evolution, since like caterpillars they crawl around on leaves and branches, eating the foliage.
The final two pictures feature the long-jawed orbweaver, possibly Tetragnatha elongata, or T. versicolor. The color patterns are a bit variable, and it can be difficult to really be sure. In any case, these largish, semi-communal spiders are commonly seen hanging along branches over water. Long-jawed orbweavers look pretty scary with their oversized chelicerae and fangs, but they are handled easily. According to some pictures I have seen, the big chompers are for clasping between males and females.
The first picture is a female, and the second picture shows a male. I had quite a time trying to get the latter picture since he simply would not sit still in the field. I resorted to bringing him home for a staged shot while isolated on a stick in my back yard. But he would have none of it. The male immediately ran up to the top of the stick and posted his abdomen into the air while waving his back legs. I barely had time to realize what he was up to when he suddenly flew away, making a beeline through the air for a nearby tree canopy! The crafty little bugger had sent out an airborne dragline into the breeze, and waited for it to catch onto something before making his get-away along it. I intercepted him just before he was out of reach and returned him to his perch. Seconds later, off he went again! So I had to bring him indoors for pictures where there was no breeze. But even then he was a complete pain in the *ss and the entire process was pretty exhausting. I have developed considerable admiration for this challenging spider, and I would like to return to this group again to try to get pictures that show off their ‘flying’ talent. But since they are good at it, I expect I will need to collect several of them to replace the escapees.
It’s the day after Xmas, and all through the site, it’s crawling with kitties, but none of them bite. Yes, it’s December 26, 2016, and it’s the second day of Koynezaa. It’s also National Candy Cane Day, when you have to figure out what to do with all those crook-shaped sweets, designed, as you may know, to represent the staffs of the shepherds who visited Baby Jesus. (I’ve also heard that the red symbolizes Jesus’s blood, but I can’t be arsed to look that up). It’s also St. Stephens’s Day and Boxing Day in many places, and Hunt the Wren Day in Ireland and the Isle of Man.
On this day in 1799, George Washington was buried and, in 1825, the Decembrist Revolt was suppressed in Russia. In 1919, Babe Ruth was sold to the New York Yankees by the Boston Red Sox (not a good sale!), and on this day in 1963, according to Wikipedia, “The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” were released in the United States, marking the beginning of Beatlemania on an international level.” I remember that well, but since I lived in Germany before then, I was already acquainted with the rise of that best of all rock groups. The evolution of the Beatles in only a few short years from songs like that to “Rubber Soul”, “Revolver,” and “Abbey Road” is one of the great stories of music.
Another rock star has been taken from us: George Michael of Wham! died yesterday of heart failure at only 53. Grania has listed for us his most famous songs, adding a few comments:
Wake me up before you go-go
Faith
Outside (his screw-you to the media for trying to shame him for being gay and being arrested at a public toilet)
Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me (the one that’s a duet with Elton John)
Somebody to Love (the Freddie Mercury Memorial Concert)
It was a bad year for rock and roll; but actor Carrie Fisher still seems to be hanging in there. Notables born on December 26 include Charles Babbage (1791), Henry Miller (1891), Phil Spector (1939), David Sedaris (1956) and Jared Leto (1971). Those who died on this day include Weegee (1968), President Harry Truman (1972), Jack Benny (1974), JonBenét Ramsey (1996, murdered at age 6) and President Gerald Ford (2006). Weegee (real name: Arthur Fellig) specialized in street and crime photography in New York City, and here’s perhaps his most famous 1943 photo, “The Critic“. It ostensibly shows a homeless woman glaring at two bejeweled socialites entering the opera, but in reality Weegee got his assistant to get a Bowery woman drunk, brought her to the gala, and then propped her up, hoping to capture a photo like this:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili patiently explains human nature to Cyrus:
Cyrus: What is hypocrisy?
Hili: When somebody is making monkey out of you while pretending he is not a swine.
In Polish:
Cyrus: Co to jest hipokryzja?
Hili: Jak ktoś cię robi w konia i udaje, że nie jest świnią.
Here are the submissions to this year’s “Merry Kitmas” thread (see last year’s thread here). Readers’ comments are indented. Happy holidays to everyone!
If you sent me a kitty photo before noon and it didn’t appear, please inform me, re-send it, and I’ll add it to the thread.
We’ll start with one of the three cats staffed by contributor Matthew Cobb:
Yesterday we found a white cat Xmas bauble, and our kids transformed it into a Harry bauble. Harry was most impressed.
Here’s another of Matthew’s cats;
Pepper watching the potatoes being peeled. The meal was largely vegetarian, so he was somewhat disappointed, though there was a small dinosaur that he got some of.
And. . . here’s Gus, sent by reader Taskin:
Here’s a picture of Gus and his holiday Tissue paper. He waiting for me to slide his new catnip toy under it. Best Game ever!
From reader Rohit:
This is is Miss Marple, our 8 year-old Ragdoll (dressed up by friends who are taking care of her over the holidays). By all accounts, she refused to participate in her indignity and did not move until the costume was removed. Photo taken in Melbourne, Australia.
From an old college buddy, Stash Krod:
Qbit the quantum kitteh getting deep with The Grateful Dead’s “Ripple”. She’s in many places at once & entangled in everything.
From John H.
This is Sam. He is 6 months old. For hist first Christmas, Santa has brought him a new cat tree to climb. I’m not a big fan of cats but my wife and four kids worship Sam. As mitigation for accepting the new member of the family, I was allowed to name him after a famous atheist … but apparently neither Kierkegaard nor Wittgenstein are “appropriate names for a cat”.
From reader daveau:
While we don’t celebrate Christmas as such, I do have this nice picture of six year old Merlyn and a pagan holiday plant. Festive!
From readers Laurie and Gethyn:
Our beautiful black, velvety boy is 12 years old and still behaves like a kitten. He is loud: we call him, “a mouth with a cat attached as an afterthought.” He even sleeps loudly, singing arias from “Don Giovanni” in his slumber (this is true: he seriously sub vocalises!). He is also a moose: when he he jumps — even when he walks! — one hears every impact tremor and foot fall. And he is wonderfully lovely!
And here’s a photo of your pal Theo opening his Catmas gifts from atheist Mummy and Daddy… Geth urging him to show some interest in the actual gift…
From reader Somer:
This is dear Bella who I adopted as a stray kitten. She is 8 years old, very small and loves to lick people’s faces, sleep, purr, daintily sniff then hiss at suitors, or do micro tiger sentry duty on the corner fence post. She’s very affectionate, can be shy but defends her patch.
From reader Rich Wilson:
I’m afraid I don’t have them in one shot. (Truth be told, there’s only one hat, crocheted by co-staff Lilia).
The black one is Ginger, who was previously featured nomming wheat grass.
Popsicle was featured last year mid-tree.
Popsicle went on a 10-day walkabout in early November, so we’re extremely grateful to have him back healthy and well fed. He is chipped, and had our number on his collar. We went so far as to pay Facebook to blast our neighborhood, but in the end he just came back on his own, as cats will.
From reader Rachel Sperling:
Happy holidays, Professor! Here’s Sophie (black and white) and Lloyd (black) having some fun with a friend’s sled a few Christmases ago. It was all fun and games until Sophie tried eating the (fake!) Christmas tree. They’re both seniors, but still spry, and their favorite things are sardines, birdwatching, and snuggles.
From Robin in Boca Raton, Florida:
Here is the lovely Clementine, 9 years old and just doing her job, which is to grace our home in all seasons.
Dennis Dingley sent a picture of his cat Chessie, lounging in a cat-themed chair:
Ed Suominen sent a photo of the vanished Frisky II;
Alas, he took off shortly after we brought a new kitten home last summer and hasn’t been seen since.
From Mark Jones:
Early morning Xmas day. Mooch (10 years old) is one of those cats that likes the Christmas tree, so she sits under it or by it from when we put it up to when it goes down. I’ve no idea what she finds so alluring about it!
From reader (and frequent photo contributor) Jacques Hausser:
Domino, 11 years old, is rather reluctant at the idea to participate… but as soon as the family will have turned away, he will try to climb on the tree end ruin it. Happy Xmas and Koyneeza !
From reader Fiona, who sent a photo of “Threadsy aka Fred”:
This is our cat Threadsy who appeared from the forest near where I live in Switzerland. She followed us for a bit and then disappeared. This happened several times over many weeks until she followed us home one day. She is in fact a he and is now called Fred.
From reader Glenda:
Perhaps this photo taken of my two Devon Rex girls will meet your standards. These little cats are both eight years old now. The darker one in the background is Minky, a quadruple grand champion – and ditzy. The lighter one with the Santa hat is named Kofi (in honour of Kofi Annan) and she is a complete badass. These precious animals make me smile every day. Merry Christmas to all.
From Cate:
Our third youngest cat (out of four) Yossarian, trying to figure out how to make trouble at the gift table. He likes to rub noses and when too enthusiastic, he smashes his face into our noses with the force of a sledgehammer. Merry Christmas and Koynezaa!
From Victoria P.:
Heathens’ greetings from Cleo “Sweet Pea” Strayhorn, now about 8 years old, but only 3 when she posed fetchingly inside the front screen door, with poinsettia plant just outside during a balmy South Florida December.
Reader Robin sent a photo of her niece Quincie with her beloved cat Joe, asking us to “note the antlers”:
From reader Michael F.:
Leo (age 2) is contemplating the meaning of Christmas after receiving his stocking filled with mouse toys.
From Merilee:
What’s more Xmassy than boxes? Booker T and Carmen Dingle and a mauled Santa:
Reader Keiko from Japan sent Siammy, who wrote his own caption!
Today my stupid staff rushed to a pet shop in Tokyo to buy this ridiculous red thing for me to wear, and I really hate it! Luckily I managed to continuously mess it up to avoid looking cute in it, which would be quite embarrassing for a boy like me. Anyway, Happy Holidays and Happy 2017 to you, Professor, from 6-year-old me, who adopted my staff when I was two months old.
From reader Dan:
Here is Calliope, a 1 year old from the mean streets of Brooklyn. Partially blind, but an excellent hunter of fake mice.
From Beckie:
Lilith and Norbert are 8 months old and filled with holiday mischievous. They love wrapping paper and supervising the gift wrapping process.
From reader Chris B.:
Hi, if it’s not too late, here’s Muffin again. Last year he was helping with the wrapping; now he’s just relaxing among the presents. Photo by daughter Valerie (who was also the one who named him eleven years ago).
From reader Su:
Zena, now seven months old. Yes, she is the same kitten I tried so hard to get a home for, now all mine. Which was clearly the intent of the Universe all along. She used to be “Xena” (for the Princess Warrior) but now spells it with a “Z,” (a nod to Zorro) because she is that quick.
When you’re a cat, *everyday* is a holiday, and all boxes are yours. (This one happened to actually be for her.) Let the new box shedding begin in earnest. Zena devotes a minimum of 15 mins a day to shredding.
From Don B.:
Here is our daughter’s cat Sheba, a gift to her from the staff of the veterinary clinic in our Vermont town, where she used to volunteer on weekends when she was in middle school, some 14 years ago. Like any sensible feline, Sheba is naturally drawn to boxes. Christmas never fazes her. An indoor cat (we have lost too many to coyotes and fishers down through the years), she takes the tree and all the activity in stride, although she cannot resist curly ribbon, which, on her account, we cannot use or keep anywhere in view.
From reader Craig;
This is Arthur whose staff is my daughter and her family. Arthur is eight years old and was a rescue kitty.
From Lori:
Hi Jerry! Spot says Meowy Crispmouse!
A Bengal from Alexandra Moffat (photo by Streling Moffat):
Here is Sparrow, a young Bengal who belongs to my granddaughter, Leslie Moffat. Photo taken in Lyme NH. He lives with an older female. His compantion is Kestrel. They are indoor cats but go on escorted walks in the NH woods every now and then. Tomorrow they leave for the ski country in Utah for the winter months with Leslie and her husband – by car. It may be a noisy trip – Sparrow talks a lot!
Keira McKenzie sent a Xmas photo of her beloved Plushie:
Here is a pic of Plushie with Christmas ribbon. Normally at this time of the evening (still light in the southern hemisphere, though deliciously cool right now), she would be outside, soaking up the last of the sunlight and generally not come in until around 8.00 pm (when she gets shut in for the night). However, she is in early, keeping me company as I’ve decided to stay home rather than go to a Bixing night gathering as I’ve got a nasty new arthritic joint. Very painful. She is a sweetly empathic girl, my Plushie 🙂
Finally, a non-cat from reader Christopher Moss:
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukah, Jerry. I prefer to think of the 25th of December as the birthday of one of the most important men who ever lived ………Isaac Newton.
I’m sorry this isn’t a cat, but he just presented himself today. This chap was photographed through the dining room window. He spent about 15 minutes just standing there as if offering himself for dinner, an offer which I declined, shooting him only with a camera:
I’m going to stop accepting Christmas cat photos at noon Chicago time (in about an hour), so if you want yours to appear in the Merry Kitmas thread, send it it pronto! I’ll post the thread at 12:30 Chicago time. We already have about three dozen photos, proving that the readers here love their kitties.
We have to have at least one post about religion today, and here it is.
Oy! The New York Times, for its Sunday Christmas Review, features a long interview of Pastor Timothy Keller, an evangelical Christian whom the interviewer, Nicholas Kristof, characterizes as “among the most prominent evangelical thinkers today.” Keller is also the author of the best-selling books The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith, and Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God.
The interview, called “Am I a Christian, Pastor Timothy Keller?“, is characterized by Kristof expressing his doubts about Jesus’s divinity, the truth of the Resurrection, and the Christian doctrine that only acceptance of Jesus as savior will get you to Heaven. Keller slaps these doubts down one by one, assuring Kristof that yes, all these things are true, and that Christianity is certainly based on true statements about how the world is. (That’s a point I made in Faith Versus Fact, but one that many religionists still deny, claiming that much of the Bible is metaphorical, and yes, everyone has the chance to go to Heaven, be they Jew, Buddhist, or Muslim.
In the end, Keller tells Kristof that he, Kristof, is not really a Christian!
Here are a few bits of the Q&A that I’ve put under my own headings (bold). Kristof’s questions are in italics, Keller’s answers in Roman type.
Religion is based on truth statements, not just communality or moral sentiments. Absent those empirical truths, religion is worthless:
KRISTOF Tim, I deeply admire Jesus and his message, but am also skeptical of themes that have been integral to Christianity — the virgin birth, the Resurrection, the miracles and so on. Since this is the Christmas season, let’s start with the virgin birth. Is that an essential belief, or can I mix and match?
KELLER If something is truly integral to a body of thought, you can’t remove it without destabilizing the whole thing. A religion can’t be whatever we desire it to be. If I’m a member of the board of Greenpeace and I come out and say climate change is a hoax, they will ask me to resign. I could call them narrow-minded, but they would rightly say that there have to be some boundaries for dissent or you couldn’t have a cohesive, integrated organization. And they’d be right. It’s the same with any religious faith.
Kristof then asks whether one can be properly skeptical of the Virgin Birth. Keller’s response:
If it were simply a legend that could be dismissed, it would damage the fabric of the Christian message. Luc Ferry, looking at the Gospel of John’s account of Jesus’ birth into the world, said this taught that the power behind the whole universe was not just an impersonal cosmic principle but a real person who could be known and loved. That scandalized Greek and Roman philosophers but was revolutionary in the history of human thought. It led to a new emphasis on the importance of the individual person and on love as the supreme virtue, because Jesus was not just a great human being, but the pre-existing Creator God, miraculously come to earth as a human being.
And that is that! Then Kristof, chastened, asks about the Resurrection: did it really happen? Keller, of course, says “yes”:
Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines. If the Resurrection is a genuine reality, it explains why Jesus can say that the poor and the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). St. Paul said without a real resurrection, Christianity is useless (1 Corinthians 15:19).
. . . The Christian Church is pretty much inexplicable if we don’t believe in a physical resurrection.
They then go back and forth on the Resurrection, with Kristof, who knows his Scripture, pointing out the discrepancies in the different Gospels’ accounts of that miracle, with Keller proffering the usual apologetics, rationalizing these discrepancies and making the dumb claim that the Resurrection must have happened because women were the first eyewitnesses, and who would have believed women if the story wasn’t really true? QED
Can you be a Christian unless you buy the whole hog?
Kristof, then, wonders if he’s a real Christian. Keller dashes what hopes he had:
[Kristof] So where does that leave people like me? Am I a Christian? A Jesus follower? A secular Christian? Can I be a Christian while doubting the Resurrection?
[Keller] I wouldn’t draw any conclusion about an individual without talking to him or her at length. But, in general, if you don’t accept the Resurrection or other foundational beliefs as defined by the Apostles’ Creed, I’d say you are on the outside of the boundary.
Faith, says Keller, is perfectly concordant with science, and, anyway, we have lots of faith-based beliefs.
When asked why would should suspend our skepticism when it comes to religion, and just take things on faith, Keller drags in Tom Nagel, a philosopher who is one of the doubters of materialism when it comes to evolution and consciousness—though Nagel is not a believer. (Read Allen Orr’s negative review of Nagel’s ideas.)
I agree. We should require evidence and good reasoning, and we should not write off other religions as ‘superstitious’ and then fail to question our more familiar Jewish or Christian faith tradition.
But I don’t want to contrast faith with skepticism so sharply that they are seen to be opposites. They aren’t. I think we all base our lives on both reason and faith. For example, my faith is to some degree based on reasoning that the existence of God makes the most sense of what we see in nature, history and experience. Thomas Nagel recently wrote that the thoroughly materialistic view of nature can’t account for human consciousness, cognition and moral values. That’s part of the reasoning behind my faith. So my faith is based on logic and argument.
But of course Nagel is buying the “The Something of the Gaps” argument, one that is deeply flawed. We can alter consciousness (or remove it and then bring it back) by material intervention, which is pretty good evidence that consciousness is indeed a material phenomenon, even if we don’t yet understand how it works or how it evolved. Keller goes on:
In the end, however, no one can demonstrably prove the primary things human beings base their lives on, whether we are talking about the existence of God or the importance of human rights and equality. Nietzsche argued that the humanistic values of most secular people, such as the importance of the individual, human rights and responsibility for the poor, have no place in a completely materialistic universe. He even accused people holding humanistic values as being “covert Christians” because it required a leap of faith to hold to them. We must all live by faith.
Here Keller is conflating the religious view of faith (“believe these fairy tales without evidence”), with a confidence we have that if we treat people better, our society will wind up the way we want. Yes, it is a preference to favor human rights and equality over human non-rights and inequality, but you can at least see what kind of societies result from different interventions, finding out if what you wanted comports with what you do. Morality is also a preference (I don’t believe that moral values are objective), but I wouldn’t call it a “faith”, since it’s not belief without evidence. Your choice of a moral system is no more a “faith” than is your preference for steak over tilapia or chocolate ice cream over broccoli.
Keller’s non-Bayesian view of God.
Keller seems to think that because we don’t really know whether God exists, the odds must be about 50/50. But what about the priors: the lack of any evidence for a god, much less the Christian God? There are, after all, such things as likelihoods, and Keller’s embrace of Christianity seems no more rational than a Muslim’s embrace of the Qur’an as the literal truth:
I don’t see why faith should be seen as inconsistent with science. There is nothing illogical about miracles if a Creator God exists. If a God exists who is big enough to create the universe in all its complexity and vastness, why should a mere miracle be such a mental stretch? To prove that miracles could not happen, you would have to know beyond a doubt that God does not exist. But that is not something anyone can prove.
. . . I’d also encourage doubters of religious teachings to doubt the faith assumptions that often drive their skepticism. While Christians should be open to questioning their faith assumptions, I would hope that secular skeptics would also question their own. Neither statement — “There is no supernatural reality beyond this world” and “There is a transcendent reality beyond this material world” — can be proven empirically, nor is either self-evident to most people. So they both entail faith. Secular people should be as open to questions and doubts about their positions as religious people.
Of course one can’t prove there is no god, but, as Victor Stenger used to say, “The absence of evidence is the evidence of absence—if there should have been evidence.” If God wants us to accept him and his son, why did he withhold the evidence from us, and in fact allow most of the world to believe in non-Christian faiths that Keller absolutely rejects? I’m sure Keller would reject all kinds of things (like Russell’s teapot) for which there’s as little evidence as there is for his Christianity. We simply have no evidence for a God, just like we have no evidence for a real Santa Claus. The sensible and parsimonious thing to do is provisionally reject a god.
Non-Christians don’t get saved.
Sophisticated Theologians™ twist themselves in knots trying to show that yes, even Jews, Muslims, Hindus and—except for Edward Feser—even dogs can be saved. Keller slaps them all down, though he can’t really give a good reason why all those non-Christians will broil in Hell. In the end, Keller just punts and says salvation is reserved for Christians because the Bible says so. But of course the Qur’an is clear on the same issue, but with respect to Muslims. And, in the end, Keller punts again and says, well, God’s ways are mysterious (my emphasis in the following):
The Bible makes categorical statements that you can’t be saved except through faith in Jesus (John 14:6; Acts 4:11-12). I’m very sympathetic to your concerns, however, because this seems so exclusive and unfair. There are many views of this issue, so my thoughts on this cannot be considered the Christian response. But here they are:
You imply that really good people (e.g., Gandhi) should also be saved, not just Christians. The problem is that Christians do not believe anyone can be saved by being good. If you don’t come to God through faith in what Christ has done, you would be approaching on the basis of your own goodness. This would, ironically, actually be more exclusive and unfair, since so often those that we tend to think of as “bad” — the abusers, the haters, the feckless and selfish — have themselves often had abusive and brutal backgrounds.
Christians believe that it is those who admit their weakness and need for a savior who get salvation. If access to God is through the grace of Jesus, then anyone can receive eternal life instantly. This is why “born again” Christianity will always give hope and spread among the “wretched of the earth.”
I can imagine someone saying, “Well, why can’t God just accept everyone — universal salvation?” Then you create a different problem with fairness. It means God wouldn’t really care about injustice and evil.
There is still the question of fairness regarding people who have grown up away from any real exposure to Christianity. The Bible is clear about two things — that salvation must be through grace and faith in Christ, and that God is always fair and just in all his dealings. What it doesn’t directly tell us is exactly how both of those things can be true together. I don’t think it is insurmountable. Just because I can’t see a way doesn’t prove there cannot be any such way. If we have a God big enough to deserve being called God, then we have a God big enough to reconcile both justice and love.
What a reprehensible and unempathic little toad Keller is! And why did Kristof and the NYT give his blatherings space in the Christmas issue. Where’s an atheist to talk about evidence?
