Wednesday I went to a program on Intelligent Design put on by a Christian organization on campus. I’m afraid that many of my worst fears about what the talk were confirmed, and I was witness to a spectacle of Christians unabashedly talking trash about evolutionary biologists. This experience, besides upsetting me greatly (it was extremely hard to control myself), has made me think about the problems I have with evangelical Christianity, and why I have left the movement. So I thought I would attempt to show some of my precise reasons, giving by no means anything exhaustive list but demonstrating what I have a problem with. I will warn the reader up-front that this is in essence a rant, and may contain offensive content.

I. Anti-intellectualism

Mere ignorance is simply that: a lack of knowledge. But anti-intellectualism goes well beyond incidental ignorance to embracing it. Knowledge that challenges previously held assumptions is viewed as a threat, not a learning opportunity; ignorance is viewed as safety, and so anti-intellectualism fosters an environment of not just circumstantial but willful ignorance.

Though this is evident in a wide number of arenas of evangelical life, Intelligent Design is a particularly potent example. From the ID materials I’ve been introduced to, as well as from the talk I went to, the movement is flagrantly unscientific and abusive of scientific methods.

The thesis of Intelligent Design is that the mechanisms of life are too complex to have arisen naturally and without an intelligence actively designing them. The first thing to notice about this is that it is not a scientific claim, but a philosophical one. Science is the investigation of the natural world, producing theories and hypotheses that can be tested and disproved. Intelligent Design’s entire thesis – that something is too complex to be randomly assembled – and all its derivative claims neither provide testable hypotheses (predictions about unobserved phenomenon) nor offer the chance to be disproved. Quite contrary to this, evolutionary biology makes predictions (which have largely yielded themselves to be true) and can be quite easily disproved (for example, finding a rabbit in a layer of Cretaceous rock). So the claim that Intelligent Design is a scientific hypothesis is false: it fails to produce the two chief requirements of a scientific hypothesis.

Often used to support the claim of “too much complexity” are two arguments: probabilistic impossibility, and irreducible complexity. The former is easily deconstructed by examining at the presumptions used to come up with the numbers. The gentleman whose talk I attended claimed that the chances of an environment arising which is suitable for life is 10 to the minus 388 (several orders of magnitude above the number of atoms in the universe). The number, however, is misleading. It was calculated for a planet being a certain distance from the sun (earth’s distance) and a certain size (earth’s size) around a star of a particular heat (the sun’s heat) with an oxygen-rich atmosphere (like earth’s), and so on. The calculation does not take into consideration that a star hotter than ours with a planet a little further away may also be inhabitable; or that a larger planet with greater amount of greenhouse gases could survive outside the so-called “habitable zone”. That is, this calculation treated interdependent variables as if they were independent, and in fact was not a calculation for the chances of a habitable planet, but for the chances of a planet in every way exactly like earth. Besides the smuggled-in assumptions to make the number bigger (such as an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which is a byproduct of living unicellular organisms, mostly phytoplankton, and not natural to a lifeless earth), the assumption that such a number is even calculable is manifestly false. I asked the speaker if he was familiar with the Drake equation, to which he assented that he was. The Drake equation is supposed to calculate the number of expected civilizations in our galaxy, and it is more a statement of our ignorance about the universe than anything else. The equation contains 7 constants, only one of which is known to any degree of certainty (the rate of star formation). The second constant – the fraction of stars containing planets – is only just now beginning to become known, and the other 5 are a mystery (included among them: what a habitable planet is and is not, and the chances of life arising). To give a number calculating the chances of life boldly and arrogantly goes against the known limits of current human knowledge. This behavior I would label anti-intellectual not because it is ignorant but because it selectively chooses parts of human (scientific) knowledge while ignoring others in order to appear as if it is intellectually rigorous, when in fact it is not.

The second argument – that of irreducible complexity – rapidly devolves into an appeal to prima facie reasoning. The argument goes something like this: because a phenomenon is too difficult to conceive of being produced gradually, and it is impossible for us to now understand how pieces of it are independently functional, it could not have come into existence gradually. Favorites of ID proponents are bacterial flagella – now being slowly debunked – and woodpecker tongues. While I feel the issue of complexity is a completely valid point to raise, I would not base any theory on an inability for current knowledge to explain something (I very much doubt ancient peoples could fathom how lightning was generated). At the end of the talk, the presenter showed us a video of an AI project called BigDog and asserting to us that we all accept it as designed, and yet real dogs are more complex. The insinuation was that it is impossible to say that the one is designed and the other is not. This is an appeal to snap judgments without looking at the matter more carefully, and is a favorite tactic of evangelicals. “Let’s abstract complexities away and go with what seems most obvious.” By the same token I could take time-lapsed videos of the sun, moon, and stars moving across the sky, compare that to people moving through a busy city, and say, “Isn’t it obvious in these what is actually moving? The people are moving… and so is the sun!” First blush, this is what it looks like, but we all know that that reality is more complicated than this, and cannot be determined by snap judgments of it.

(This does not even bring up philosophical problems with Intelligent Design – namely, if something that is complex necessitates an intelligence sufficiently complex to have created it, doesn’t the creating intelligence necessitate a creator, and so on forever.)

But this last point of prima facie reasoning is I feel the most crucial and problematic part of anti-intellectualism. The philosophy asks its followers to ignore complex arguments and reality not because they are wrong, but because they are complex. This argument riddles evangelical analysis of the Bible: how often have you heard the plea to follow the clear word of God? What if reality isn’t so clear? What if the word of God isn’t always so self-evident? What if it’s muddy, and what if it’s difficult to determine? Such questions are ignored in preference of simple answers. And for these reasons evangelical Christianity has historically been troubled by matters of science and textual criticism, and will continue to be troubled by them so long as it continues to adopt a strain of anti-intellectualism in its reasoning.

II. Appeal to Sensationalism

The talk included a plug for a new movie coming out called “Expelled”. The movie purports to be a documentary of scientists unjustly losing their jobs for questioning Darwinism. I have no doubt that many of the injustices they bring up are real and inexcusable. The problem I had with the film was not this, but its appeal to emotion and sensationalism to elicit a response from the audience: an image of a cheetah devouring a meal as the narrator (Ben Stein, of all people) talks about Darwinian theory in the classroom; appeals to Nazi Germany as an example of the outworking of believing in Darwinian evolution; chalkboard writing and scared looks by Ben Stein as if a grown man is being unduly punished as a schoolchild; etc. You can watch the trailer for it here. The most ironic part is probably the mention of Darwinists believing human beings are “nothing more than mud animated by lightning”, when we know our Jewish narrator’s own Scriptures say something about human beings created from mud animated by breath, or at least from some sort of dust that at one point had to get wet.

I would pass this by as particular to the ID issue, but it is not, as groups like Focus on the Family will appeal to sensationalism as reasons against gay marriage, or abortion, and so forth – and I have personally found this to be quite common in evangelical churches when it comes to hot-button topics.

III. Demeaning one’s Opponents

The last and most damning portion of the talk, following the plug for “Expelled”, was a guffawing and mockery by the people present of popular atheists and evolutionary biologists. The gentleman giving the talk spoke about how he thought it not at all a problem to have these atheists get their come-uppance. One prominent critic of ID attended a preview of “Expelled” in a not-at-all confrontational manner, and yet he was kicked out of the theater. The gentleman giving the ID talk said he was fine with this atheist getting “to know what it feels like”. This was followed by more laughter, derision, talk about court cases, and so forth. It all felt a bit like the Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s 1984, only lasting for much longer than a mere two minutes.

In most evangelical circles, a demeaning attitude is not so blatantly hateful. Nevertheless, those who disagree with the evangelical line are often looked on with pity, as not being able to come to grips with (either spiritually or mentally) with truth. Be that as it may, it is one thing to believe you are correct in your beliefs and another to allow this to cast doubt on your neighbor’s capacities. I remember being told in church to have compassion on non-Christians because they need Jesus just as much as any of us. In real life I have too often seen this worked out as a sort of patronizing sympathy, with the Christian not being able to treat his non-Christian neighbor in spiritual or philosophical matters as a coherent human with just as much dignity and consideration to be given him as to a Christian.

IV. Disregard for the Poor

I couldn’t help but wonder what the purpose of this gathering was. After the presentation of Intelligent Design, there was a foray into when exactly a soul is imparted to a human embryo. Besides the presumptions laden in such a question, what good would it do to be able to determine such a thing? The same gentleman and his wife who did the ID talk did a discussion on biblical gender the next day (I was unable to force myself to attend). These are the serious matters of import which this Christian organization is facing. And my answer to this is: are you shitting me? No, evangelical Christianity, seriously: are you shitting me?

This is from the 2007 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. It is on the country of Rwanda. Here are some quotes:

Small numbers of impoverished girls, typically between the ages of 14 and 18, used prostitution as a means of survival, and some were exploited by loosely organized prostitution networks.

Due to the genocide and deaths from HIV/AIDS, there were numerous households headed by children, some of whom resorted to prostitution to survive.

The law does not specifically prohibit domestic violence, and domestic violence against women, including wife beating, was common.

Where is the Christian outcry against this and efforts to improve it, or countless similar cases all over the world? What about poverty in the US which, while not so extreme, also destroys lives? And we sit here talking about the evils of evolution and women pastors and wonder when a fetus gets a soul? Let me confess something: I live daily in the sin of almost total indifference to poverty and suffering. I need help; I need to be more like Jesus, a Jesus who cared for and cured human horrors. I need a radical change not just in my heart but in my actions, and I fear I am too weak to do it on my own. But any religion or religious movement which does not concern itself with real, physical human need is not one that I have a desire to be a part of.

A break from heavier posts. A friend of mine has recently launched his music into the public arena, in hopes of something more. His work is quite good, and I encourage you to take a look.

(Okay, so I had a flash banner up, but I couldn’t get it to link nice and didn’t want to spend the time fixing it – apologies, Corey!)

“Wouldn’t it be great if there were a manual for life?” I’ve heard them say. “Well the good news is that there is. The Bible is God’s answer book for life.”

Such is the gospel of the Bible.

Don’t pretend you don’t know who ‘they’ are who say this. ‘They’ are the women with red lipstick and big smiles who so readily volunteer to teach Sunday School and raise our children up in the Lord. ‘They’ are the men who bemoan complicated ethics and theology, and plead with mankind to just believe the simple words of the Bible. ‘They’ may not use the trite little words ‘life’s answer book’ or ‘God’s manual for life’ but they treat the book just the same. ‘They’ are a good majority of the Christians I’ve met, and certainly those in the church I grew up in.

But I think this mindset represents a very real grasping at an answer to life’s difficulties, to the present management of horrors. We receive no instruction manual in our growing up years of how to navigate the world properly (receiving a mixture of advice and commands from our elders), or how to raise children, or respond to tragedy or uncertainty. We simply come into the world, without prior consent and without explanation, and we must figure out what to do about it. Living and developing into a coherent person is a messy process, and psychologically trying each time our paradigm is dismantled, complicated still by the stochastic troubles wrought on our material bodies by virtue of the type of world we live in. In the face of the horrors of life – even the ones that, filtered down through the nets of middle-class American convenience, still reach us through chance, harming our loved ones or ourselves – it does bring a degree of comfort to be able to turn to a to-do book.

Unfortunately, the Bible fails miserably as an answer to horrors. It is a complex document written by an array of different authors in an array of different cultures, and as a document both finite and static, it is incapable of addressing all the issues I or anyone may face in life. On modern topics as diverse as the appropriate use of biotechnology, how to date properly, the ethics of banking and interest rates, and the use of anti-depressants, to the specificities of choosing a degree, or a job, or having power of attorney over one’s disabled sibling, the Bible is silent on the management a number of very important matters, not to mention how it may address me in the specificities of horrendous evils I face on earth. On some matters it seems to offer contradictory advice; on still others it presents enigmas and riddles, hints of a way but not a clear path. Compounded more by significant issues raised by both the higher and lower biblical criticisms, disentangling from the web of material Christians dub ‘Scripture’ anything like an answer to every horror in life becomes an intractable, if not impossible, feat. When faced with true horrors – mental disease to the point of the destruction of a person, starvation, and all the various things lesser and greater which rob a person utterly of the possibility of positive meaning in life – to this most crucial matter, the Bible has no saving power. It is a false Messiah.

It is possible to protest that the Bible does, insofar as an honest prima facie reading of it goes, promise a future state that is not susceptible to horrors, and so offers us some method of coping. However, as I stated before and now restate: a final ending is not a complete solution, for in order to be saved from horrors (I would say, from hell), it is necessary for this salvation to be experienced subjectively and in the present. Rescue is an act inherently dependant on the rescuer’s perspective: if the rescuee does not believe he has been rescued then he has not been, for his capacity for positive meaning in life is still held captive. For Christ to rescue his beloved only in the future at the resurrection is to fail to rescue him now, to fail to do good to him now, and so to drain the cross and its gospel of all possible meaning beyond a hopeful pining for the future – for what God really has in mind to do, never you mind that occurrence some two thousand years ago. For Christ’s death to save us from horrors, while the final summation of that may be at some future point – Christ the firstborn from among the dead – it must also be initiated and be carried out through the present life.

While the Bible does not and cannot present a systematic answer for overcoming horrors, it does, to the Christian, present a unique view on the intrusion of God into this horror-filled world. In this story, of which we have four fleshed-out accounts, we see that God’s coming into this world is by a man called Jesus, living out a brief public ministry, subjected to an awful death, and if the accounts are to be believed, resurrected. In these accounts we see Christ’s own susceptibility to horrors, according to his full participation in human nature: the inconsolable grief over the death of a loved one (Lazarus), fatigue, being rejected and misunderstood, experiencing uncertainty (to the ‘day and hour’ and even, according to John, to the time and event of his first miracle), and (on the cross) the feeling of abandonment by God. While this is not an exhaustive list of every horror experienced by Jesus – and I don’t believe that the gospel accounts are meant to give an exhaustive list, leaving the better part of thirty years of his life out – it is sufficient to show that Jesus experienced many of the meaning-draining horrors both common and uncommon to the human existence. If Jesus is God, and if he experienced the horrors of a humanity that is radically vulnerable to horrors, and if he overcame this in his resurrection, both for himself and as a down-payment for an ultimate victory for mankind, we may and we must look to him in trying to understand how we, presently and on this earth, overcome horrors subjectively in our own lives.

The resurrection of the Son of God comes only after the subjugation of the Son of God to the horror of complete and utter abandonment: cursed not only by the political powers but by the religious powers, both their and his Scriptures (Deut 21:23), becoming an anathema to his friends, and experiencing the feeling, and perhaps the reality, of being forsaken by God. The cries uttered on the cross are not that of someone radically in-tune with the spirit of God, but of someone forsaken and alone, who has lost his capacity for making positive meaning by means of the destruction he finds himself in.

And so the resurrection surprises. The resurrection vindicates and places meaning on the lack of meaning in the cross. The earliest days of the Christian church saw a celebration of the resurrection weekly. It is the celebration of God working for purpose in and despite the very act that has drained the individual’s capacity for meaning-making. And more than this, they curiously participated in a ceremony called the eucharist, where they symbolically consumed their savior, a rite so sacred it was administered by the local church even to those sick or in prison. My suggestion is that this rite connects the death and resurrection of the Son of God not just to God’s horror-defeat within the Son’s life, but also to God’s horror-defeat presently being worked out in the eucharistic participant’s life. The present overcoming of horrors requires a present union with the resurrected (and victorious) Christ in a radical way.

But the story is not so simple. These eucharistic participants, and those who took the name of Jesus as the one who rescued them from their present circumstance, did not continue to experience defeat of horrors. Some went to the sword, and some to the lions; some died by painful cancers or diseases still unknown; some in their service to their neighbor during the Black Plague contracted it themselves and as their reward died in excruciating agony; some witnessed such devastation to their loved ones that they abandoned their faith altogether; some never realized the horrors they themselves were perpetrating, with their slavery and fear of foreigners, or their degradation of their wives. How is it possible in light of this that they have overcome, in any sense of the word, the horrors of life through participation with Christ?

I do not know of anyone who will not admit to feeling, at some point, a lack of meaning in life. It is precisely on this that language-game religions thrive, offering a system of rules to plot one’s meaning against, giving (as we have seen in the case of the Bible-based solution) a farcical answer to personal horrors, although sustainable for a time in certain contexts. But the eucharist suggests, horror-defeat is possible only through a radical union with one who has already defeated horrors. But union with Christ must necessarily entail, at present and in a continuingly imperfect human situation, an incomplete victory. Unlike the final defeat of horrors, and the recreation (or re-sustaining) of humanity such that we are impervious to the threat of horrors, the present victory is subjective and progressive, truly knowable only from the inside. Who besides the individual herself can state the relative effect of one horror over another in her life (such as serious questions of faith versus death of a parent)? Is it not possible that the victory – the valuation of positive meaning in the face of horrors – is a complex process the progress of which may be obscured by simultaneous advancement in the difficulty of horrors one is facing? Her subjective defeat of horrors is an incremental, personal, and creative process between herself and Christ within her. And if Christ is both example and source, then the apparent extinguishing of individual positive meaning (a la the cross) does not necessitate the victory of horrors over the individual.

In the ministry of Christ, and particularly the miracles recorded in the gospels, I see is a Jesus who at every point of his brief public ministry works for the solving of horrors in other people’s lives. Whether it be the healing of a woman who had been bleeding for over a decade, or giving sight to the blind, or working legs (and with them a place in the world) to the lame, or in whatever capacity, Jesus demonstrated his role as horror-defeater. And if we are to believe John, Jesus tells his disciples to

at least believe [in me] on the evidence of the miracles themselves. I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.

How is it that a divine miracle-worker might say that his followers will do greater things than he himself has done? But Jesus has been in the business of defeating – physically, and not just in some ethereally spiritual sense – the things in people’s lives which have deprived them of meaning. And so it may be that the atheist working for and achieving treatment for cancer or hemophilia is doing ‘even greater things than these’, and the person who gives his ambitions for wealth for the sake of assisting the poor or down-trodden, and the one who makes it his own private ambition to bring true help in whatever way possible to those around him, it may be that these are following after Jesus’ assertion a hundred times more than the preacher who gives good sermons, or those who are only religiously pious. In personal horror-defeat, I suggest that like Christ, this also means assisting to defeat horrors in the lives of those around us.

I admit to giving a sketch more than a solid doctrine. That is because I do not have a solid doctrine on this issue. This has been more than anything a journey in experimental theology, grappling with what I believe to be the most difficult problem in the Christian religion, or any religion. But what I do want to bring out is the necessity for working through the problem of horrors in the here-and-now, recognizing the necessity of union with Christ to overcome this. The practice of religion in a world such as this must find a God working in personal horrors, overcoming them as the God above horrors, ultimately toward sustaining a fragile humanity through and into the eradication of susceptibility to all horrors and evils, into the meaningful perfection that is necessarily union with him.

This is part 3 in a 3 part series.
Part 1
Part 2

It seems to me that I live in a dispassionate world. It is impossible to tell a qualitative difference between archaebacteria metabolizing in the most extreme chemical environments and variola vera metabolizing in the environment that happens to be the human body. Both are unthinking cellular forms which reproduce and further their existence to the best of their capabilities. It is only upon projecting human concern that a difference between the two becomes noticeable. From an outside viewpoint, many of these processes can be interesting and intellectually satisfying to explore. But the problem of it – and I will say, the horror of it – is that a self-aware, conscious being is subjected to such a dispassionate process, for she can know it. The self is not her own master, and she is aware not only of this, but that also there is not some force, benevolent, malevolent, capable of being bartered with, or appeased to alleviate or alter her subjugation… but she exists, by the same unyielding laws as the rest of existence.

If existence were not dispassionate, there would be no horror to it. But for a conscious creature to experience it, and to witness it experienced… the Alzheimer’s of a loved one, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Frontotemporal Dementia, starvation, poverty, or who knows of what else, of toxoplasma gondii or a host of other unknowns… in experiencing this the cognitive qualitative difference between self and the rest of the world breaks down, for no treatment is given to the self other than that given to everything else. I think it’s important to note that the discomfort of such things is not intrinsic to the disease or biological organism itself, but it is the response of a self-aware agent to them. It is entirely subjective. Without this self-awareness, the problem of horrors vanishes.

There are two major questions I can determine for religion. The first is whether it is true: that is, whether the claims made by the religion are factually correct, and if it is internally consistent. But that is not enough, for the Intel x86 reference manual is factual and mostly internally consistent, and any number of scientifically well-validated theories are factual and internally consistent. But the second critical question is whether the religion can deal with the problem of the human experience of horror on a subjective level (for as I’ve tried to demonstrate, this is a problem which exists only because of the subjectivity of the human viewpoint). If a religion cannot bring internal peace concerning the operation of what is by all appearances a stochastic and dispassionate world, and if it cannot solve the problem of horrors, it is useless for living in the world I find myself in, and worse than that, it is itself parasitic, for it demands from me both time and mental energy, while failing to meet my most basic cognitive need. ‘Salvation’, in any meaningful sense of the word, must mean salvation from horrors.

To subjectively conquer horrors requires two parts: the first is the reconciliation and redemption of the self in its present circumstance, that is, in situ; and the second is the final destruction of horrors for the self. It is not sufficient only to provide the second, for if this is the case then death, with or without religion, solves the problem. But if present horrors remain and only future ones are removed, then hell is simply moved from a time in the hereafter to all the scattered moments of dread (including that of death, which is destruction, inflicted on the self or on that which the self cares about) in the now.

Christianity proposes an interesting final solution, and that is the resurrection of the body. The concept of a disembodied soul is surprisingly infrequent in the Christian canon, and all but nonexistent in the Hebrew canon. Rather, both depend not on a metaphysical continuation of consciousness, as most Western religions have, but on a physical resuscitation in an eternal state. In this sense, the religion is surprisingly materialistic, not appealing to an immeasurable or unknown quality but that which is accessible to our senses. But there is also a spiritual side to it, which I think can be seen in the imagery of the ‘Tree of Life’. For the religion is not so optimistic as to say that the basic order of the human body will be changed so that it is no longer subject to horrors, but in both the Hebrew description of a paradise (Eden) and the Christian description of a paradise (New Jerusalem), there is a Something by the presence of which, or the ingestion of which, the blessed are able to persist, and without this something, persistence in the blessed state is not possible. We are adults and reading literature for adults, and so might I suggest that the Something described, some Tree of Life, is not meant to end in interpretation as a physical tree, transcending it either by metaphor or by symbol; but I can’t pretend special insight into this and think it may be crass to try to put it in my own words.

But as I said, this final solution is not enough. Horror must be overcome subjectively in the present. God cannot only be the God who lifts us above horrors in the future, but he must be the God above horrors now. If not, Christ is a sham, solving an invented problem and not the true problem of existence.

This is part 2 in a 3 part series.
Part 1
Part 3