Ep. 78: Norton in da house

[Brad]

...
Brad, I'd like to add a "me too" to just about everything you've just posted in this thread.

I'd also like to add a "me too" to the above sentence, with one correction and one shift in emphasis:

The reason why the concept of evolution, especially that of Homo sapiens, is threatening to many Christians is that it eliminates the necessity of God as an explanation for their own lives and families.

And that's the important point. We Christians have an over-active urge to explain things, and I think that's part of where the resistance to evolution comes from. Mystical denominations (e.g. Quakers) and religions which don't have this urge (e.g. Judaism) tend not to have a problem with evolution. I think we can learn something from them.

Thank you, Pseudonym. I'm hoping to make time to read all of your exchanges with our new participant, Shans (Welcome Shans! ), but first I really must spend some time reading and responding to SS's very nice thread about his faith, which I'd somehow missed several months ago.

I see what you mean, I think, about many Christians having an over-active urge to explain things - to find satisfaction by putting "God" into every hole in human comprehension and to therefore avoid uncomfortable ambiguities and uncertainties, right?
I guess, in that light, non-believers (and especially those of a scientific bent) and more mystically oriented religion proponents like yourself have something in common, in that we're much more comfortable, even excited by, the unknown.
But then, as a non-believer, I think even less doctrinaire and mystical Christians have a similar tendency to "see God" in places where doing so is an unnecessary and unjustifiable proposition, which is to say, everywhere!

By the way, recently I listened to an interview of Karen Armstrong on the program "Speaking of Faith." (Do you know of this program? It's an American public radio show and podcast. I think there a quite a few things there you'd enjoy. You can check it out through itunes.)
Unsurprisingly, Ms. Armstrong made mention of her position that religion is not about beliefs, but about practices and so forth. Then just a couple of minutes later, she was back talking about beliefs as though that was the central aspect of religion. In the end, had someone less fawning than the SOF interviewer been conducting the interview, I think Ms. Armstrong might have had to confess that belief is what drives the practice and that the two elements can't really be separated.

[Shans]

Hi Pseudonym,

Again, thanks for you response. Let me begin with an apology if you thought I was insulting you or the church beyond disagreeing with doctrines etc. I’ve re-read my post and the only thing I could pick up as insulting is the issue of cognitive dissonance (if it was something else please inform). I’m a social scientist and sometimes I employ verbiage that ends up sounding different to theologian’s and philosopher’s ears. We all carry CD about many reasonable things. And if it becomes too great to sustain one set of ideas in light of numerous counter ‘facts’ we can switch sides. At which point we have the remnant old un-attributable facts, beliefs and emotions that become the source of CD the other way. No insults are meant, although I often write at 1 or 2 in the morning after 1 or 2 glasses of wine and I can get sloppy.

Now to a couple of points.

Leaving aside the question of what "born again" means, let me note that this isn't quite true. Liberal denominations actually get quite a few people joining, but the catch is that they're usually middle aged.

Liberal denominations do get some saints circulating through the denominations but very few new converts are ‘wins’ from the other teams. They are primarily those raised in the church who are returning, whether they are from an inactive pool or those who have been in other denominations during their thirties and forties and are looking for more substantial mature worship and fellowship. There is certainly an attraction – and if I were to participate in church community again it would be in such a denomination even though I have never done so in the past beyond the odd service or two. I can’t return to an Evangelical, Fundamentalist, or Pentecostal denomination – even the politics puts me off. And I would not care to be Catholic because of the institution and leadership. Of course there will be some true converts but the numbers are negligible at least as I have examined them in Canada and United States – Australia may be a different sample altogether. And I’d love to read a paper to the contrary.

The question follows - why believe anything in the Bible?
People keep asking this question, but makes no sense to me. I think it could only make sense to someone who starts with a black-or-white, all-or-nothing attitude.

I suspect that you don't actually have that attitude. I'm sure that you think that at least some of the Bible has to be historical, such as, perhaps, large slabs of Chronicles. Perhaps we don't know which bits are historical, but I'm sure you'd concede that some of it is. I'm also sure that you think that at least some of the Bible is intentionally poetic, symbolic and/or allegorical. ?

This was a bit of hyperbole on my part. It is a series of stories, histories, teachings, and prophecies – of course there will be portions that are grounded in history. It is often difficult to set an internal criteria for discerning truth from legend and myth, and that is usually set with the help of extra-biblical data such as archaeology, collaborative secular histories, etc. For the most part the histories are written centuries after the events are said to have happen with level of details that force incredulity. You look to Chronicles – which begins with Adam, Noah, etc. Which ‘large slabs’ are we believing and on what grounds. Certainly not internal proofs. These large slabs come across no different that the other portions. So the writer(s)/editors drew oral tradition based on archaeological remnants that, at times, seems to cross into true history. If it is true Chronicles was written 5th century BCE at the earliest (likely edited well into the 4th and 3rd century BCE). The writer is therefore writing about Saul, David and Solomon over 500 years after their reigns – and he has direct quotes! Now, as you get closer to the Babylonian exile and destruction of Jerusalem the stories become more credible but nonetheless they are histories written for a purpose which must taint them.

But I’m not an OT scholar and I don’t mean to get bogged down in such matters. When I ask why believe anything in the Bible I mean to ask when it comes to history, science, social morays, etc – what is your criteria for discerning what we should believe? I have come to suspect everything beyond the obviously lessons of understanding what post-exile Jewish religion taught (or at least one slice) and the 1st/2nd century church believed (again, or at least one slice). It seems to me you likely as I rely on external non-biblical sources to verify and learn which portions, statements, etc are worth noting as “true” – beside the religious ‘truth’ moral teachings one might wish to internalize. So in the end, the Bible doesn’t actually assist us – since it is most often so fantastical as to not be trustworthy as a source document.

The Australian Aborigines, like the Native Canadian traditions, have symbolic stories told as history - that's what makes them mythology. But they also believe the waves are laughing - do you?

Do they believe it today? Literally? In the same sense that you believe that matter is made of atoms?

For what it's worth, I love that line, "the waves are laughing". I intend to drop it in casual conversation.

I’m drawing on the work of my anthro of religion grad professor David H. Turner (U.of Toronto) [there is a brief Wiki article about him if you care to check him out] based on a decade of ethnological work and wrote extensively about Australian Aboriginal culture. His PhD was from the U of Western Australia and his primary work was with the Warnindilyaugwa of Groote Eylandt, the Mara/Anyula of southern Arnhem Land. I, like Tony Swain (University of Sydney) do not ’hold truck’ to the notion of “amawurrena” and the perceptions of Forms as literal. But nonetheless the idea of laughing waves comes from the term “megamainggamandja” – literally, “the sea is laughing with whitecaps”. And apparently, according to David’s ethnography, some Aboriginal men see another dimension though this Amawurrena can only be truly grasped while Singing Agwilyunggwa. I don’t buy it any more than I do Aristotle’s Forms. But the concept is that, yes, they literally see these forms.

Rudolf Bultmann took the line that the only historical fact that Christianity relies on is the "bare fact of Christ crucified"; not even a historical resurrection was important for him.

And that is why Bultmann is vilified by many Christians (even Catholics) but if it is all ‘just’ story and allegory pointing to a higher truth (e.g. God loves us and provides a way for us to live peaceably with each other and Him) then why is Christianity true in any apologetic sense? And don’t you get the sense that the liberal church (and/or liberal theologians) would not fit in at all with the early NT church – or really any historical church era before our own? IF that is the case then there must be a dramatic disconnect with today’s church and any historical sense of Mere Christianity, to borrow a phrase.

The question can be asked, why be Christian at all?

[Exrev]

This was a bit of hyperbole on my part. It is a series of stories, histories, teachings, and prophecies – of course there will be portions that are grounded in history. It is often difficult to set an internal criteria for discerning truth from legend and myth, and that is usually set with the help of extra-biblical data such as archaeology, collaborative secular histories, etc. For the most part the histories are written centuries after the events are said to have happen with level of details that force incredulity. You look to Chronicles – which begins with Adam, Noah, etc. Which ‘large slabs’ are we believing and on what grounds. Certainly not internal proofs. These large slabs come across no different that the other portions. So the writer(s)/editors drew oral tradition based on archaeological remnants that, at times, seems to cross into true history. If it is true Chronicles was written 5th century BCE at the earliest (likely edited well into the 4th and 3rd century BCE). The writer is therefore writing about Saul, David and Solomon over 500 years after their reigns – and he has direct quotes! Now, as you get closer to the Babylonian exile and destruction of Jerusalem the stories become more credible but nonetheless they are histories written for a purpose which must taint them.

Great book on this subject is The Bible Unearthed (archaeology's new vision of the ancient isreal and the orgine of is sacred texts), by Israel Finkelstien and Neil Ashersilberman

[magnumdb]

Hello,

I have to say, I'm a bit shocked at the simplistic way Norton dodged the topic near the end of this episode.

Emery talks about how life is more special in his view of how things began than how the Bible explains it because with abiogenesis and evolution, it's almost a "miracle" than anything happened at all. The chances are so miniscule, but with God, he can make people any time he wants, any way he wants.

Norton's counter-point is that that it's an argument akin to "Kids who live in big families aren't that special because they've got seven or eight brothers or sisters. And their parents can pop out another child any time they want. So they're really not that special. What's really special are parents who can only have one child."

But of course 1) Parents can design their children before making them, like God can. 2) It's really difficult for many parents to have children, it's not a 100% guarantee that sex will end in pregnancy, where as God will be successful in making people EVERY time. 3) Unlike God, parents don't punish future children for the mistakes their first two children made. 4) Parents don't go to the length of killing all their kids to start over fresh, unless the parents are psycho.

Emery tried to clarify his point by saying, God creating people as he can do is like "Saying the Grand Canyon is special, but a plastic replica of the Canyon that gets stamped out of a mold and put out by a company as a souvenir is not as special because you can always make another. Whereas the Grand Canyon is never going to occur like that again. God is the mass-producer.

Norton's counter-point to that is "If a parents kid dies, you could just say, 'What's the big deal, you can just have another one!"

Now, I don't really understand where Norton is coming from. How does Norton get from describing a God as a mass-producer (because he can!) to talking about a scenario in which you tell a parent to chill and just have another kid?

Because, as Emery mentioned parents can't just choose to have kids, especially not an identical one.

Emery ends by saying, "Well, science may change it so parents CAN choose their kids!" But this is just a lame reply, because science HASN'T created that, so why is that an argument about what we have going right now? And even if science did come up with a way to choose your kids somehow 1) How many parents would actually go through with that? And 2) I doubt it would ever be as custom designed as God apparently can do.

I just think this was very, very weak on Norton's part. I feel like all Norton thought he could do was just to SPEAK, because silence would be worse.

[mitchellmckain]

I changed the "can" to "can't" in the quote since I think that was a typo.

But of course 1) Parents can't design their children before making them, like God can. 2) It's really difficult for many parents to have children, it's not a 100% guarantee that sex will end in pregnancy, where as God will be successful in making people EVERY time. 3) Unlike God, parents don't punish future children for the mistakes their first two children made. 4) Parents don't go to the length of killing all their kids to start over fresh, unless the parents are psycho.

Emery tried to clarify his point by saying, God creating people as he can do is like "Saying the Grand Canyon is special, but a plastic replica of the Canyon that gets stamped out of a mold and put out by a company as a souvenir is not as special because you can always make another. Whereas the Grand Canyon is never going to occur like that again. God is the mass-producer.

Norton's counter-point to that is "If a parents kid dies, you could just say, 'What's the big deal, you can just have another one!"

Now, I don't really understand where Norton is coming from. How does Norton get from describing a God as a mass-producer (because he can!) to talking about a scenario in which you tell a parent to chill and just have another kid?

Well IF Norton really agreed on these 4 points then there would be some inconsistencies in his position. I certainly cannot speak for him on this point, but NEITHER can YOU. The idea of design was not even discussed. If you can just assume that the God's creation of life was a matter of design (and no different than mass producing machines) so that the argument doesn't work, well then I can assume, on the basis of my own belief that the nature of life is incompatable with design, that God's creation of man was never a matter of design or any kind of predictable process at all, so that the argument does work. Not only is it natural to make whichever assumption makes the argument work, but it is the one that is consistent with the fact that Norton has come to agree with the theory of evolution rejecting the usual watchmaker image of God. So frankly I think it is you who are just blowing a lot of smoke in our faces.

The argument CAN work if you seriously take the relationship between God and man to be that of parent and child, within the limits of some necessary differences. Parents do not have to create their children from scratch whereas God must. It is a question of what differences makes a parent-child relationship really impossible. I think that absolute predestination is a theological ingredient that makes it impossible and renders the argument unworkable. Thus if you really were interested in logic here, that is what you would be telling Norton, that his argument implies an abandonment of this rather common theological position.

So blowing away the smoke and remembering that evolution was taken as a given, I will take this point by point:

1) God does NOT design living things. The creation of man was by a process of EVOLUTION.
2) The idea that parents would not think their children are all that special if only they had a guarnatee that they could have another child, is ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS!
3) It is an inalterable fact of life that children suffer from the mistakes of their parents. This is part of the meaning of the choices we make now and the actions we do, that our children and decendents suffer from the consequences of what we do wrong just as they benefit from what we do right. If there is an imposition of punishment here it is, as it always is in the case of punishment by parents, given so that their children can learn what they need learn INSTEAD of facing the full brunt of the natural consequences of their actions.
4) God doesn't kill his children at all because His children are eternal spiritual beings not primates. Since the creation of life occurs through the process of evolution we cannot forget that this isn't like making shapes with playdo. The evolution of life requires a constant challenge to species survival. So if God is playing that role, then His tools of the trade are plagues and wars and near extinction events. We will indeed have to leave that job to the grown up who has the stomach for it and not to the pansies.

[martinjbaker]

Apart from the parenting section, I think Norton was being very dishonest with himself here and trying to have it both ways. He certainly weasled his way out of Emery's challenging questions.

I can't buy this convenient concept that Genesis 1 should not be taken literally. It was a weak argument to give the examples of "This cup is my blood" and "I am the door" when these lines are so obviously allegorical. It's some stretch to say that Genesis 1 is purely allegorical when it reads from start to finish as a factual account of events. When the human race didn't even know about evolution, does Norton think any Christians interpreted Genesis as poetical myth and not a truthful historical account? I somehow doubt it.

BTW How can a day in Genesis possibly be any longer than a day? It's defined repeatedly right in the text:
"God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day."
"And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day."

Emery, you clearly touched a nerve with the question to Norton about how his life would be less meaningful if God didn't create him. The uncomfortable pause, the awkward cough were very telling. It's just a great shame that he couldn't be honest about the real answer.

[Pseudonym]

I can't buy this convenient concept that Genesis 1 should not be taken literally. It was a weak argument to give the examples of "This cup is my blood" and "I am the door" when these lines are so obviously allegorical. It's some stretch to say that Genesis 1 is purely allegorical when it reads from start to finish as a factual account of events.

See, I just don't get this. Genesis 1 looks like a poem to me. It has six stanzas with a refrain at the end of each, it has parallelism (days 1-3 parallel days 4-6)... pretty much everything that you'd expect from an Ancient Hebrew poem.

But then, I guess that you could argue that Dante's Divine Comedy and Orwell's Animal Farm read like factual accounts of events if you don't understand the genre of satire.

When the human race didn't even know about evolution, does Norton think any Christians interpreted Genesis as poetical myth and not a truthful historical account? I somehow doubt it.

Did you check? A couple of years ago, I did a random sample of every pre-Darwin Christian theologian who wrote a commentary of or homilies on Genesis, and every single one of them read the narrative of Genesis figuratively or in a way that was consistent with a figurative interpretation. All of them found it "truthful" (big surprise), but nobody in my sample treated it as a literal scientific account in the sense that we would think of it today (also big surprise; they weren't writing about science, after all).

Here are a few examples to illustrate what I mean:

For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. The child of the slave was born according to the flesh; the child of the free woman was born through the promise. Now this is being allegorized: for these women are two covenants. One, indeed, is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. This is Hagar, for Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is a slave with her children. But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother.
-- Galatians 4:22-26

This isn't Genesis 1, of course, but you get the idea.

For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars? And that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky? And who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? And again, that one was a partaker of good and evil by masticating what was taken from the tree? And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.
-- De Principiis IV, 16

With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.
-- De Genesi ad literam 2:9

For it appears opposed to common sense, and quite incredible, that there should be waters above the heaven. Hence some resort to allegory, and philosophize concerning angels; but quite beside the purpose. For, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.
-- Commentary on Genesis

Now, to be fair, my sample didn't include early Eastern Orthodox theologians such as Basil of Caesarea and Ephrem the Syrian, mostly because I'm not very familiar with their lives and work. I've been (IMO reliably) informed that literal interpretations of Genesis 1 were quite popular in the Byzantine world.

Reality has always more complex than one might hope, and has this nasty property that it always gets in the way of a nice clean thesis. But I digress. I can happily concede for the purpose of this discussion that non-literal interpretations of Genesis 1 were only the majority position, as opposed to the overwhelming majority position. Either way, your doubt is misplaced.

BTW How can a day in Genesis possibly be any longer than a day? It's defined repeatedly right in the text:
"God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day."
"And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day."

I see that you spotted the refrain at the end of every stanza.

[martinjbaker]

So would you say Genesis 1 is purely fictional?

[mitchellmckain]

So would you say Genesis 1 is purely fictional?

The opposite of purely scientific or purely historical is not purely ficitional, but simply NOT purely scientific or NOT purely historical.

I would say that the first chapters of Genesis comes from a time long before the specialization of human activities into those of history, science, philosophy, law, exhortation, nusery rhymes, and entertainment, and thus we can find elements of all of these functions in first few chapters of Genesis. Thus this is not a matter for classification but of abstracting whichever of these elements that you are looking for, if there are any. In my case, I see nothing of the scientific, but much of the historical (if rather encoded in the symbolism of myth) and nursery rhyme, as well as a little of the law, exhortation, but nothing of the fictional for entertainment purposes only.

[Pseudonym]

So would you say Genesis 1 is purely fictional?

I agree with Mitchell, but I'll add an analogy which may help.

George Orwell's Animal Farm is, at one level, a tale about farm animals who overthrow the farmer. In that sense, it is fictional. On another level, it's a satire about the early history of the Soviet Union. In that sense, it's not purely fictional.

If you really need a single pigeonhole that Genesis 1 can be put in, probably the best one is "mythological". Certainly better than "fictional", anyway. But like most stories of comparable antiquity, Genesis 1 isn't really "purely" anything.

[marcuspnw]

So would you say Genesis 1 is purely fictional?

It's a story. Humans have been telling stories for a long time. It's creative and not bad given the level of human understanding at the time it was being told but I certainly wouldn't bet the farm on it. My favorite part is the idea that the creation was good, an act of a thoughtful, loving God not some afterthought or mistake by a lesser being.

[Pseudonym]

My favorite part is the idea that the creation was good, an act of a thoughtful, loving God not some afterthought or mistake by a lesser being.

I so agree with you there. Most creation stories have the various bits of the world being created almost by accident, as a byproduct of a pantheon of deities squabbling with each other.

Now don't get me wrong, there certainly is some "Just So Stories"-type material after chapter 1, such as most of the Eden narrative, the Tower of Babel story and so on. But Genesis 1 is a wonderful poem depicting the world being created as good as a deliberate act of love. I really like that.