December 30, 2008: "They Take Away People's Minds"

Years ago my brother Dave told me he read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian concurrently with C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, and that he would have liked to have seen a debate between those two. "Lewis would have destroyed Russell," he said.

Recently I read Russell's essay myself and found that my brother under-spoke. Why I Am Not A Christian strikes me as the work of a child. Granted, a very witty and smart-mouthed child - but a child nonetheless. Before reading it I assumed that the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and standard-bearer of 20th century atheism would at least be a worthy opponent for Lewis, and that bringing these two minds into dialogue would be a stimulating exercise. But it is not so. A "debate" between Lewis and Russell would have had all the sizzle of a grown-up corralling a boy who is just playing verbal "Gotcha!" and changing the subject every two minutes. Russell's colleague Alfred North Whitehead knew whereof he spoke when he told students at Harvard, "Bertie [Russell]...is simple-minded."

Two examples of what I mean:

Russell understands the "First Cause" argument to mean that everything has a cause, and notes, "If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause" (I heard Richard Dawkins make the same mistake in his debate with Oxford mathematician John Lennox, asking rhetorically: "If God made everything, who made God?"). But this point involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument from causation! No theistic philosopher would be so stupid as to claim that everything has a cause; what has frequently been claimed (and I believe justly) is that everything that begins to exist must have a cause. The distinction between existing and beginning to exist is what the causation debate is all about! Russell's sleight-of-hand at this point is breath-taking, since later in the same paragraph he simply assumes an atheistic answer to the beginning-to-exist question without ever having noted (or noting himself?) that he has moved the debate onto different ground.

That which is truly eternal, which has no beginning, need not - and, I would argue, cannot - have a cause. The interesting question then, the one on which the whole debate turns, is whether the universe is eternal. I believe there are good reasons for believing it is not. (For an excellent discussion on this matter, please read chapter 5 of Lee Strobel's The Case For Creator, an interview with philosopher William Lane Craig.) But even if the universe were eternal in the only sense it could be - extending backward in time through an infinite succession of moments - it would still not have the kind of eternality which theists have traditionally claimed for God. God has been understood to be eternal in the sense of having existence outside of time, with "time", like "space", merely being things he might choose to enter or exit as a man would his own house. (Christians in fact understand that this is precisely what he did in the incarnation and ascension of Christ.)

Russell is playing a child's game when he asks, "If God made everything, who made God?" That is a question I first heard as a young teenager, along with, "If God is all-powerful, could he make a stone so big he couldn't move it?" Such questions did not impress me as profound even then, when I knew very little and had not read anything. They're barely worth the intellectual effort required to dismiss them.

A second example concerns one of Russell's attacks on Christian morality. He writes, "Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says: 'This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life.' And no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to syphilitic children." Russell calls this a "fiendish cruelty", one example among many of the ways the Church inflicts suffering on people.

Wait a minute. First of all, I personally do not undertake to defend any Catholic dogma that conflicts with Scripture, and Russell's attempts to condemn Christian faith because aberrant Romanist practices have attached themselves to it like leeches is simply illegitimate. Russell's point might better be made in an essay titled Why I Am Not A Catholic rather than Why I Am Not A Christian.

Second, Jesus explicitly taught that divorce was permissible in the case of sexual immorality (Matthew 19:9). A woman may freely divorce her adulterous husband - even as Joseph nearly divorced Mary on the suspicion of unfaithfulness (Matthew 1:18-19). If Russell had thought about it for two seconds, he would have seen that he actually agrees with biblical policy, and that what he finds cruel is Catholic repudiation of it!

Third, all brands of Christian faith teach faithfulness and chastity. It is not through following the Church's moral teaching that a man becomes syphilitic, but through rejecting it. If, on the other hand, a man adopted Russell's moral code and personal example, he might indeed become as syphilitic as Nietzsche (who died deranged of the disease), and give that wasting illness to his wife and kids too. The problem here is not with Christians who obey the Church's teaching, but with people - Christian or not - who defy it.

The intellectual poverty of Russell's essay puts me in mind of something my son Ben said when he was just three years old. It remains perhaps the one truly mystical experience of my life. When we were living in Colombia my wife and I took Ben to the beach one night to see a dance performance. We thought he would enjoy the spectacle of a bonfire and drums and energy and movement. As the first dance played out, it dawned on me that what we were watching was a reenactment of a frenzied pagan ritual. (The dancers had dressed as Chimila Indians; one character in a mask portrayed the devil who was tied up by others and then released.) Neither my wife nor I said anything, but when the dance ended, Ben said quietly, "They take away people's minds." We stared at our little boy and asked, "What did you say Ben?" and he repeated, in a small voice, "They take away people's minds."

We left immediately. Ben said nothing else, and we questioned him no further. But I felt that I had grasped the import of what was actually a prophetic statement - a word from God, if you will - and have reflected on it many times since. To "take away people's minds" is the work of demons. The forces arrayed against God have, as one of their goals, the corruption of human intellect. Though they may leave intact the IQ, and memory, and faculties of expression, they hinder the mind's ability to think rationally, and leave vacuous space where otherwise a mind might work to perceive spiritual truth and awaken to God.

I do not think that demons can do this to us without our permission, which we grant by sinning. I have known several former Christians who became "Russellitic" in their thoughts, and, for every last one of them, the loss of faith was preceded by (or at least accompanied by) obvious personal sin. The correlation in my experience is 100% exact,
and I do not regard it as coincidental. I have seen the correlation work the other way too. In discussing his reluctant conversion from atheism to Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes, "[I]t is significant that this...happened at a time when I was making a serious effort to obey my conscience." (in C. S. Lewis: Christian Reflections: "The Seeing Eye"). Submission to conscience brightens the mind, even as rebellion against it summons intellectual darkness.

In John 7:17 Jesus laid down a gauntlet challenge to any who might question whether he was speaking for God or blowing smoke out his ears. It was simple: do good. "If anyone chooses to do God's will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own." The best preparation for contemplating ultimate truth,
including the weighing of the claims of Christ, is to behave well. Do good. Submit humbly to the voice of conscience and divine authority, and watch where your thoughts go.

Or sin, and, apart from God's grace, you will manage to find verbal mush persuasive. Russell himself is the best example. He was an utterly despicable human being, a would-be genocidal maniac (see my November 18 essay) and serial cheater so enslaved to the urges of his genitalia that T. S. Eliot labeled him "Priapus in the shrubbery." (And that was before Russell seduced Eliot's wife!). If you go in that direction, abandoning your morals to the self-serving call of fallen human nature and despising the voice of duty, conscience and law, you risk having your mind taken away, and philosophical rubbish of the sort that Russell spouted may start making sense to you.

December 16, 2008: What Would Abraham Do?

Recently I read a broadside against biblical faith that focused on the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son Isaac. The author wrote, "What was Abraham thinking?...[He] receives the instruction to kill his son. But wouldn't he be mad simply to go ahead and do so?...It might not be God talking, but the devil; Abraham might be mad; the test might be to see if he refuses. All three of these possibilities seem more plausible than the idea that God wants his son dead, since what kind of loving God would command such a barbaric act?"

Researching the matter I found another writer who said: "Abraham is nothing less than that person who unthinkingly says 'Yes, Lord' when told to murder another human being...[H]ow can we possibly feel anything but horror at what he was prepared to do? Here is a man who was prepared to murder his own child,... - and this is the example which the Bible holds up as praiseworthy. Think about it: Nowadays, any parent who claimed she killed her child because God told her to would be thrown into jail, or into a mental institution...I challenge anybody to find one person who would hear about it and exclaim, 'Wow, I wish I had that much faith!'"

I think these writers make a good point. If any man today killed his son (or tried to) because God commanded it, we would not praise his faith but execute him or lock him up. And this isn't merely a hypothetical mental exercise - many people have indeed murdered family members for just such religious reasons. Jon Krakauer's amazing book Under The Banner Of Heaven tells riveting stories of Mormon Fundamentalists who killed because God told them to. And remember that poor psycho Andrea Yates? In 2001 she drowned her five kids because she thought that was what God wanted.

So, was Abraham a psychopath for believing that the voice in his head saying, "Gut and bleed Isaac for me" was the Lord's? And are Christians inconsistent for exalting him as a man of faith while imprisoning, executing or confining to mental institutions those who act upon the same instruction? Can we praise Father Abraham, but run and call the police when some parent starts asking himself, "What Would Abraham Do?"

I have a thought that I'd like to throw into the discussion. It seems to me that the disgust about Abraham and the voice-in-his-head-that-claimed-to-be-God fails to take into account the religious context of Abraham's day. Abraham was born into raw paganism and knew practically nothing about God. Joshua 24:2 says that his father worshiped other gods. Abraham came to theology "green," we might say, with no Bible to read and no church or synagogue to attend. He not only lived before Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, but before Moses and the 10 commandments. His template for understanding the supernatural would have been the pagan religions around him, and the gods of those faith communities - the Chemoshes and Molechs and Ashterahs - often demanded child sacrifice from the truly devout.

I don't believe that Abraham understood at first that the supernatural being who spoke in his ear and promised him good things was necessarily all that different from Molech. In fact, I see no convincing evidence that Abraham was even a monotheist! When did the Lord ever tell him that there were no other gods? Abraham only worshiped and served the Lord God, but that does not mean he necessarily disbelieved the existence of others.

So part of Abraham's theological education had to involve unlearning some of the elementary things he thought he knew about "gods and their behavior." And I believe that much of the significance of the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac is lost if we don't understand that God was at this point distinguishing himself from the gods of Abraham's acquaintance. We who occupy this spot on the timeline of revelation history don't need this lesson, because we know God – or should know him - well enough for something as simple as that. But from Abraham's perspective, it would have been a commonplace, unquestioned truth that all gods demanded blood somehow - even human blood. And when the order came to sacrifice his son, I suppose he was disheartened but not surprised by it. "Oh. Of course. I might have known. So that's what you're like."

But that isn't what God is like. Molech may have been pleased with the smell of burning infant flesh, but not the God who spoke in the ear of Abraham. After proving (or, rather, after having Abraham prove to himself and to us) that Abraham was no less devoted to God than pagans were to their demons, God provided a substitute.
A ram sufficed
As sacrifice
To self-appease
The great I Am.

In this instance Abraham learned at least a couple things: (1) His God was much nicer than Molech, and (2) His God was no softie. Just because God was good did not mean he had less of a claim to ultimate devotion from Abraham than the demon gods had from their worshipers.

While I believe the story of Abraham nearly killing Isaac makes sense in its context, it is still incomplete until you get to the New Testament. There God himself endures the torment he spared Abraham, giving up his Son - with no last-minute substitute, and it wasn't mercifully quick - so that sinners could live. In comparing the stories of Isaac's near-death experience with Jesus' crucifixion, we come to learn, and love, the shocking truth that God is kinder to us than he is to himself.

If you allow the analogy, I might compare the moral revulsion that skeptics feel over Abraham's action with Isaac to the aesthetic revulsion we would feel over examining a square millimeter of a beautiful woman's face. If you pressed your eye up to a magnifying glass an inch away from her skin, she would not look pretty at that distance. No one would. You must back away and take in the context. Likewise, if you take in the context of Abraham's religious environment - and the great work God would do 2,000 years later - you can then appreciate the beauty of the whole.

And as for any evil psycho who claims today to murder at the command of God - "just like Abraham!" - I think the rebuff comes easily enough. "Oh no. We've known for 4,000 years now that God isn't like that. And even granting that he commanded Abraham to kill Isaac – in circumstances that do not hold today, and that foreshadowed the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ - don't forget that God provided a substitute ram, and that, in the end, Abraham never killed anybody."

December 9, 2008: Bank Error In Your Favor - Collect $200.

In his book The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten, Julian Baggini writes up and comments on "100 experiments for the armchair philosopher." Many of the thought experiments involve ethical quandaries. For example:

Richard went to an ATM to withdraw 100 (British) pounds from his account and received 10,000 pounds by mistake. Certain that the bank would catch the error, he put the loot away and waited. But after a couple months and no word from the bank, he took the money and went to put a hefty down-payment on a new luxury car. "On the way, however, he did feel a twinge of guilt. Wasn't this stealing? He quickly managed to convince himself it was no such thing. He had not deliberately taken the money, it had just been given to him...No, this wasn't theft. It was just the biggest stroke of luck he had ever had."

Baggini invites the reader to do some moral reasoning about Richard's actions. He notes, "In real life..., we might expect an honest person [to notify the bank]. But how many people would? Not that many, I'd guess."

Some would. I know someone who did. About 30 years ago, Baggini's hypothetical scenario actually happened to my parents. Even the numbers were the same, though the amount was in dollars rather than pounds. My mother deposited $100 in the family checking account and later found out that the bank had recorded it as $10,000. They had apparently left out the decimal point between dollars and cents.

So mom immediately notified them of the error. (In her letter she playfully suggested, "Of course, if it is too much trouble for you to adjust your records, we will gladly adjust ours!") The bank quickly corrected the mistake - though without thanking my mother for bringing it to their attention - and $9,900 that my parents could have made prudent use of was carried away by that steady-blowing wind of moral integrity that characterized their lives.

As I look back on it now, one of the early signs that I was marrying into a family of very different moral outlook was when my father-in-law-to-be told me about the time a teller made a huge error in his favor when he was cashing in some bonds - and boy did he walk away with a chunk of change! I hardly knew what to say. I didn't tell him my mother's story. Some years later, though, it made sense when my (now ex-) wife came home with a pair of jeans that a checkout clerk neglected to ring up, and I was the one who trudged back to the mall to pay for them.

Be scrupulously honest all the time. It is wrong to take advantage of correctable mistakes made in your favor. Any follower of Christ should know this instinctively, live accordingly, and train his children to do the same.

December 2, 2008: Dropping Off Your Kid In Nebraska

Outrage greeted the news that parents were abandoning their older kids at Nebraska hospitals this fall. A safe-haven policy designed for newborns actually set the age limit at 18, so instead of getting day-old babies from panicked young moms, hospitals started receiving teenage kids from parents in their 40s. Who could imagine a parent so evil? What mom or dad would just dump their kid like that?

Then we started hearing about some of the kids.

Melyssa Cowburn's 5-year-old "tried to bash in a baby's head with a hammer. Then he set the shower curtain on fire. The next day he plugged all the sinks and toilets in their apartment and flooded the place." (Chicago Tribune 11/21/08). This child was the offspring of a crack addict who had abandoned him when he was 16 months old. Melissa became his guardian and decided, "I'm going to love this little guy and it's just going to make everything better." Right. Despite Melyssa and her husband's loving efforts, the child remained a violent screaming monster who constantly got expelled from day-care programs. Melyssa tried everything - even a drug overdose to end her own life - but nothing worked. She drove him to Omaha, said good-bye, and cried herself all the way back home to Washington state.

Parents of older devils have feared, with good reason, that their sons would kill them in their sleep or rape their daughters. What would you do with such a son? I could see myself handcuffing him and throwing him in the trunk of my car and speeding westward on the I-80. I say "I could see myself" doing this because there's no reason it couldn't have happened to me, good parent though I am. Years ago a missionary friend told me, "My wife and I had three good kids and always thought that parents whose kids were out-of-control just didn't know how to raise them. Then we had our fourth...". He didn't even finish the sentence. The fourth was a candidate for a Nebraska hospital drop-off.

The Bible teaches that there is such a thing as evil you can't fix. I hope this provides some comfort - cold comfort, a "quantum of solace" - to parents of really bad kids. Scripture shows no naivete about the wickedness that can be bound up in the heart of a child. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 told ancient Israelites what to do with their chronically bad kids in a policy so fierce it makes Nebraska abandonment look like treacly indulgence:

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard." Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.

No, I don't think we should kill bad kids. Even rabbinic tradition holds that the death sentence above was never actually carried out. (But what a powerful deterrent! Israelite parents never needed to tell their hellions that the boogey-man would get them: they could just point to the sacred scroll and say, "Listen, numb-nut. Me and the elders are going to pelt you with rocks.")

The larger point though should not be missed: some kids (like some grownups) are just bad, and the strongest measures must be taken concerning them - not necessarily for their rehabilitation (who knows if that is possible?), but simply for the protection and sanity of those around them. Such cases provide the more fortunate among us, the ones who have decent kids, with opportunities to extend the mercy of God to longsuffering parents, and judge them not, lest we be judged.