A philosophical journey continues.
1.1 Unexamined Assumptions
1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutes
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1. They say that there are two subjects that you do not discuss in polite company: religion and politics. People can seem perfectly rational about many subjects and can calmly converse on many subjects without getting out the knives. But often not on matters religious or political. Our ability to reason seems to go out the window.
There was a great sifting of Facebook friends during the first Trump presidency. Families divided. People changed churches. Some stopped going to church. More than any time in my lifetime of well over fifty years, politics divided and continues to divide America.
A book that I found very insightful in this regard came out in 2013, several years before the Trump phenomenon. This was Jonathan Haidt's, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. [1] A fundamental metaphor in the book is that of a rider on an elephant. The elephant, he suggests, is largely going to go where it wants to go.
Meanwhile, the rider may like to think he or she is in control of the elephant. They might be able to steer the elephant a little one way or the other. But, mostly, the elephant is going to go where it wants to go. The rider is more likely to go along with the elephant than to truly be the one calling the shots.
In the metaphor, the rider represents our reasoning. The elephant represents our inner drives and impulses, our intuitions about the world. In my terms, it represents the assumptions and inclinations that we have absorbed from our cultures and subcultures, our instincts about the world. It represents our "gut" responses and our tribal thinking. It represents our unitary and binary thinking.
2. We like to think that we are reason-driven. I always smile around people who think that if we can just get our ideas straight, our lives will fall into order. Codswallop. It's the other way around for the most part. People primarily come up with ideas to justify their impulses. I'm not just talking about people who aren't into ideas. The personalities that most talk about ideas are often some of the most driven by group, tribal thinking and a drive to hide the thinking of their subcultures behind a veneer of intellectual argument and reason.
Some of the smartest people in terms of intellect are often some of the quirkiest when it comes to ideas. When I went through a time of questioning after seminary, I once said to myself. "Maybe I could have maintained some of my old views if I were smarter or more ingenious. The evidence just doesn't seem to add up to my little brain."
What I mean is that, as I studied, I often found incredibly bright people who seemed to apply their considerable intellect to trying to wiggle out of what seemed to me the most obvious conclusions. I would later chalk some of my problems up to my love of science in high school -- you should choose the hypothesis that bets fits the evidence in the most straightforward way.
Ironically, some of the influence of American fundamentalism on me contributed here too. Josh McDowell's book Evidence That Demands a Verdict came out in 1972, and it implicitly affirmed that the normal rules of reasoning and assessing evidence worked in favor of Christian faith. [2] We were still in the age of modernism at that time.
Christian fundamentalism did not question whether logic was valid or whether scientific reasoning was valid. On the contrary, McDowell's point is that reason and evidence "demand" a Christian conclusion. I emerged from my teens with the mindset that I absolutely could use scientific reasoning and good logic when in the pursuit of truth. Reason and evidence would end up supporting my faith, not contradicting it.
Indeed, I was shaped to think that the problem with secular and non-Christian thinkers was that they did not reason well or follow the evidence well. I was shaped to think that it was their biases and faulty presuppositions that led them to other conclusions. I was given a green light to use the best logic of Aristotle and the best scientific reasoning of Francis Bacon. It would only lead me to the truth of Christ.
3. I mentioned "modernism." In the late 1900s, there was a "philosophy of history" that was quite common. In this schema, the period before the 1600s was the pre-modern era. By and large, people took the world as it appeared to them. They didn't see their own assumptions clearly. They largely argued for the ideologies of their tribes uncritically.
Then came Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Descartes went on a quest for certainty that questioned everything. [3] He concluded that reason was the only sure path to truth. The stream of "rationalism" would suggest that the pursuit of truth is best carried out by the vigorous pursuit of clear and distinct thinking.
Around the same time, Bacon articulated clearly what we now call the scientific method. [4] The best path to truth, he suggested, was to gather evidence from our senses. We formulate hypotheses. We test them. We modify them. We test again. Eventually, we refine theories. Thus we have a stream of "empiricism" that has shaped a large amount of what we might call "Western" thinking.
In the philosophy of history I experienced in the first decades of my life, modernism was the era from the 1600s to the mid-1900s, where the pursuit of truth primarily focused on reason and evidence as the surest and most reliable method to discover truth. In his 1996 book, A Primer on Postmodernism, Stanley Grenz used Spock from the late 1960s science fiction show Star Trek as the paragon of modernism. [5] Think carefully before you argue with him because he is almost perfectly objective and he forms all his conclusions strictly on the basis of reason and evidence.
But Grenz notes a change in Star Trek's approach to Spock (and reason) in the decades that followed. In Star Trek 2, Spock dies. Then he comes back to life in Star Trek 3. But he's not quite the same Spock, and the "epistemology" of Star Trek is not quite the same either. Spock is somehow more human. He has spent his life up to that point trying to subdue emotion, trying to keep it from tainting his thinking. Now, he recognizes the limits of logic.
In Star Trek, the Next Generation, Grenz notes, there is also a Spock-like figure, Data. Data is not human. He is an android. If Spock spent his life trying to control emotion, to purge emotion, Data is headed in the opposite direction. As an android, he doesn't have emotion, but he is very curious about human ways. The series culminates in him receiving an "emotion chip." Far from emotion being something to purge, it is something that turns out to be desirable.
Grenz and others saw this cultural shift of the late 1900s as a move into "post" modernism. In the early 2000s, it was trendy to be postmodern. It was the latest thing that all the cool kids were doing. We got over it. Unsurprisingly, many were tauting postmodernism as the new era of enlightened thought. It fit well with the fact that we were changing millennia in 2000, a change of the calendar that only happens every 1000 years.
4. In those days, I always distinguished between the cultural trend of postmodernism that was all the rage and philosophical postmodernism. Trendy postmodernism was really hype, a pop movement that hardly understood the philosophical school of thought. The pop version was interestingly very trendy in youth ministry and other Christian circles. There was the "Emergent Village" with popular writers and speakers like Rob Bell and Brian McLaren. Many from the millennial generation of Christians were strongly influenced by these voices in their formative years.
And there was the predictable push back of the binary machine. Groups like The Gospel Coalition arose to push back on some of these cultural forces. A good deal of rhetoric emerged against postmodernism as a movement, especially postmodernism in the church. In my own circles, Asbury Seminary underwent somewhat of a crisis during the decade of the 2000s. Part of this crisis was a bit of a snap back from a friendliness toward postmodernism to a somewhat more conservative approach.
I was never very interested in the pop version of postmodernism. I chuckled that a philosophy whose point is "we can't do philosophy" had become the latest trendy philosophy. The philosophical version of post-modernism was anti-philosophy. It said, reason is not reliable, and the evidence doesn't demand a verdict.
Postmodernism basically said that we could never be objective like Descartes and Bacon supposed. We always have biases that are clouding our thought processes. Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) argued that science was far from some Spock-like enterprise of inevitable progress. Rather, he initially argued, science was just an endless wandering from paradigm to paradigm. [6] Paul Feyerabend (1924-94) went even further, seeing science as a mere example of human sociology at work. [7]
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) argued that language didn't have any stable meaning -- which made his writing task particularly difficult. How do you use language to argue that language doesn't have meaning? I used to have quite a bit of fun mocking him in class. Richard Rorty (1931-2007) argued that truth was simply a matter of what works within communities, not a matter of what's truly true or what corresponds to reality. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) argued that "power is knowledge" far more than "knowledge is power."
I found these voices more as a warning sign than a destination. In fact, postmodernism can't be a destination. It's an anti-destination that says, "There is no destination." That was part of what I found so funny about the popular versions of postmodernism in Christian circles, thinking that we had finally arrived in our thinking.
As we will explore later in the book, I took from Kuhn that we all operate with paradigms. From Derrida I took that language is often far more ambiguous than we suppose. Rather than go full-Rorty, I came to agree with the critical realists -- truth and the world is real even though our apprehension of it is inevitably finite and flawed. And Foucault was not saying anything new when he showed example after example of how the forces of society shape our thinking on key issues.
5. As a person in my late-50s, it is interesting to look back and observe how the church rides these waves without hardly realizing it. One moment, we feel so strongly about certain issues. We are itching to fight over them. Then they pass. "Should we go to war with Iraq?" the question arises in 2003. Our respective riders on our tribal elephants gear up to defend our herd. Perhaps we could have a more rational conversation about it now, 20 years later -- especially with younger people who weren't around back then. But as usual, it was quite polarized at the time.
We seem to forget. And we usually don't change sides. We come up with reasons and arguments to defend whatever positions our group feels strongly about at the moment -- whichever group it is. In the early 2000s, I used to joke that my mother supported the NRA because she was against abortion. She was against abortion, so she was a Republican. Republicans supported the NRA. Therefore, by the transitive property of equality, she supported the NRA. [8]
In the case of the Iraq War, it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction -- the pretext for going to war. [9] There was no connection between Iraq and 9-11. The Iraqis did not greet us as liberators -- a naive sense some had that everyone would love democracy if we brought it to them. [10] Following just war theory, it seems difficult to say we were really justified in invading their country. It seems more possible to have that conversation rationally now.
It wasn't so easy at the time. We were so sure we were right and righteous, whatever our side. I personally hoped at the time that the Bush administration had more information than they were sharing. They didn't. I was open but unsure at first. Obama would win in a landslide in 2008 in large part as a rejection of that unprovoked war. You think of all the people on both sides who died in that war. You think of the incredible mental impact that war had on a generation of soldiers. And in the end, it's hard now not to conclude that it was a mistake.
Yet our ways of thinking have not changed. The same political tribes ride whatever the latest political waves are, defending similar positions that history will abandon in a decade without realizing that we are simply playing out the same basic scenario over and over again. My group is right and the other group is either stupid or demonic.
At this present time, it has gotten incredibly hot. We're not at the level of a Civil War, but the sides are drawn more sharply than ever before in my lifetime. And I would argue we are more irrational than ever. I hope in twenty years we can have a rational conversation about these days...
[1] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage, 2013.
[2] Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict. Thomas Nelson, 1972.
[3] See Descartes' work, Discourse on Method.
[4] See Bacon's work, Novum Organum.
[5] Stanley Grenz. A Primer on Post-Modernism. Eerdmans, 1996.
[6] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago, 1970.
[7] Paul Feyerabend. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. New Left, 1975.
[8] If we get real serious, it is a legitimate question whether I have it slightly wrong even here. Was my mother a Republican because she was against abortion, or was she ultimately against abortion because she was a Republican? After all, she was a diehard Republican long before the issue of abortion came to the fore in American society.
[9] Even now, you will occasionally hear someone say, "No, no, no. There were weapons found. They're just not talking about it." You can always find some webpage, some rumor somewhere on social media, some conspiracy theory whispered off to the side saying, "I have secret information. The overwhelming majority is wrong. You were right all along." These voices whisper to us from the corners of the internet, "Let me give you secret knowledge so that your elephant can be happy against what reason and evidence are saying."
[10] 43 days after invading, President Bush stood on an aircraft carrier with a sign behind him saying, "Mission Accomplished." The war would last almost 9 more years.