Alex’s Heresies – embracing a physical reality

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Comment: Limits of History

Historians tell stories about events in the past, events occurring in actual times and places. All historical stories are reconstructions of events from physical evidence and oral histories set within interpreted causal frameworks. Though answering ‘why’ is popular by historians today, this is controversial with some (David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies : Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, 1971) and sometimes challenged as going too far, being too speculative. Ultimately the cautionary note for readers is to be aware that these stories are products of the particular historians as well as the events they seek to cover. So we must consider the historical accounts as probabilistic by nature rather than declarations of certainty. Frustratingly for those seeking the ‘truth’, we can have two or more quite contradictory and but plausible explanations for the same series of events from equally respected historians. Perhaps the first ban in history should be on the word ‘truth’ and its associated question ‘what really happened?’ Or, at least, give them nuanced understandings different to our everyday usages. If we can never know in any absolute or definitive sense, what keeps us separate from the past?

Consider the search for the historical Jesus, a person living some 2000 years ago in the Middle East. We can only reconstruct Jesus as the man of history from physical evidence – surviving texts and archaeological finds, and our reconstructions must necessarily be schematic at best. Historians talk of primary sources, those most closely connected to the events in question. We could use written texts from participants or observers even physical remains, such as the gun used in an assassination. Closely related secondary sources like newspaper reports of the time or official reports from investigations can add depth with more immediate interpretations. In the case of Jesus we have no contemporaneous sources. Jesus left no writings: his literacy is still an area of dispute. For many Christians, it’s hard to imagine that the Jesus of faith – the only Son of God – could have been illiterate. We have found no writings by his immediate followers, those who knew him directly. We have found no government records of Jesus, execution records, birth records, and so on. The earliest writings about Jesus that we have are later copies of Paul’s letters to his fledgling Christian communities written some thirty years after his death. Paul acknowledged that he never met the historical Jesus. In fact, Paul offered only a passing reference to Jesus as a man: his interest was with Jesus as Christ, the risen lord. Even when the sayings of Jesus were relevant to his argument with his communities, Paul was silent, preferring to use earlier Jewish scripture. He showed little interest in or knowledge of the historical Jesus. Our earliest full copies of Paul’s writings are some 400 years later from manuscripts like Codex Alexandrinus, fifth century document.
Our only real evidence for the historical Jesus comes from our scholarly reconstructions of the first four books of the New Testament, the gospels, supplemented by some non-canonical writings like the Gospel of Thomas. Again our fullest physical sources, mostly complete texts, are from some 400 years after his death. Unfortunately the gospels are of unknown authorship written in unknown locations some forty and eighty years after his death. For the record, the New Testament gospels are considered by virtually all scholars as anonymous with apostolic attributions given later for authority.Though broadly biographical in style they were really proclamations of faith – essentially Christian propaganda – for local Christian communities. Today most scholarly effort is with dissecting these texts in light of the archaeological finds from the Middle East. Not surprisingly, the question ‘who was Jesus’ needs to be replaced by many plausible Jesus reconstructions derived (creatively) from a paucity of physical evidence. Not surprisingly, critics – conservative and skeptical – argue that Jesus scholars find the Jesus of their liking, a man from personal speculation as much as from historical research.
So are all historical reconstructions of equal value? I am not taking a post-modernist view of value equality. Like the sciences, historians argue out the relative merits of their different analyses. Internal coherence of the arguments; correspondence to the physical evidence; and reasonableness of the model presented of human capability and motivations in the constructed historical context are argued. Historical evidence is often in the footnotes.
What about miracles? This is a vexed question for people dominated by religious faith. Unfortunately, for them, historical research is a naturalistic process and as such most historians reject miracle claims even if they can find no other explanations. Typically three reasons are sighted. Firstly, people today cannot walk on water unaided so there is no reason to believe they could have done that in the past: that’s the argument from analogy. Secondly, if you accept one miracle claim, you really need to accept them all as there is no ‘physical’ test to differentiate one miracle claim from another, by definition. So Christians who readily accept the virgin birth would also need to accept the miracle claims associated with the birth of Caesar Augustus, Emperor of Rome. Finally, historical research can already be problematic, weighing the possibilities of sparse evidence without including the possibility of improbable or physically impossible acts. Most historians prefer to leave that to the theologians.
Historical research has produced powerful and controversial conclusions. But like all human intellectual endeavour it is limited by our human capabilities and perceptions. We are locked on our own world-views. A god-like view of truth must necessarily restricted to the divine.

Alex McCullie

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Comment: 58% daily prayer – US Pew Forum

US continues to confound Western outsiders – Australians, Kiwis, Brits, and Europeans. In response to a recent Federal Court ruling of  National Day of Prayer as unconstitutional the Pew Forum quoted a 2007/2008 religious survey, showing that 58% of the US over 18 population pray on a daily basis. Equally interesting is the spread across different faiths and denominations with the lowest faith being Jewish at 26%. The ‘unaffiliated’ are still 22%. I suppose the question for that group is ‘what is meant by the activity of prayer?’ and implicitly to whom or what. Alex McCullie Pew Forum

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Comment: Atheism and Losing God

At the conclusion of my atheism course I was challenged by one attendee to respond to the loss of the fundamentals of religious faith, those common aspirations that sit beneath all rituals and texts of religions. He and others saw comfort and hope being fundamental to religious offerings.
 
Our everyday experience can be frightening with its apparent pointlessness – contingent nature of our existence, daily routine work, familial deaths, regular disappointments, and relationship heartaches. Even Plato, some 2,500 years ago and prior to Christianity, sought to imagine something eternal and perfect, separate from the transitory existence of our world and our lives. He saw extant physical things as imperfect and transitory copies of eternal templates or forms: all trees are imperfect copies of the ideal perfect tree. Augustine of Hippo, many years later, christianised this thinking with us as imperfect and fallen copies of God. Most atheists would see these as implausible ploys for offering certainty in an uncertain, transient world; we call them religions. So, what are the common ‘losses’ for atheists?

 

Hope for a future ‘beyond’

Let’s start with the big one. The mundane and short nature of our lives, some eighty years if lucky, seems a cruel trick of nature to play on self-aware beings. And worse, we soon realise that once dead we shall fade into the forgotten mists of time, lucky to be remembered one generation later. Believing in a caring, eternal god with an after-life offer some comfort;  ’see you again in another life’ at a funeral epitomises this hope.

Atheists who reject an afterlife, and some don’t, see the life ‘here and now’ being the main game in town: building families, cultivating friendships, pursuing meaningful activities, engaging in personal reflections, and seeking general well-being of others to name a few concerns. Seeing this life as a mere staging post for some sort of imaginary future eternal existence – constant blissful or torturous – seems an abdication of life. Life is winning the most improbable lottery of all and one to be seen as offering promise and hope; that’s an atheist response to our existential absurdity, not religious delusion.

 

Assigned purpose in life
‘Make your own purpose’ is a common response from an atheist. The idea that a God has ordained a purpose for individuals and for humans in general – a linear (or Eastern cyclical) pathway to enlightenment or salvation – seems contrary of all our experiences, as atheists see no necessary or automatic progression to an ‘ideal’. Our lives are bound up with family and friends, as we have evolved as strongly social creatures, seeking the company of others. These interactions provide genuine meaning and purpose, not ancient scriptural interpretations of a Christian god or an Islamic god or a Jewish god or tribal gods.

 

Given moral compass
Without gods and religions we would not know good from bad; we could do bad things unknowingly; and without god’s carrot and stick we would want to do bad things. The faithful need religion to be good, to do the ‘right’ thing. Atheists must rely on their own moral sense without god’s help; they see moral sensibilities coming from some combination of biological evolution shaped by culture. And, guess what, religious faith makes little difference for doing good and bad things. Other factors seem far more important.
 
We evolved the biological structures to co-exist and cultures shaped the behaviours. Sharing, fairness, others reactions, and tit-for-tat all seem wired in as common denominators throughout all people. Cultures – different social groupings – then produce a bewildering array of acceptable and unacceptable moral behaviours, varying across cultures and over time. Today’s immoral racism replaces yesterday’s moral and often religiously-justified racism. Was that a change of God’s mind or better communication from God some 1500 to 2500 years after Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sacred texts were written? Atheists look to secular principles like ‘minimising harm’ when deciding moral disputes and, in reality, so would most religious people in a Western country like Australia. In practice even many religious people give lip-service to religious authorities when deciding most moral issues. Thank god!

 

Final Comments
Atheists argue that we should be mature enough to stand upright in our world without a prop from a god belief (or delusion). Engaging with life,  family, and friends gives genuine fulfillment “here and now” with a sense of continuity. Guilt-provoking though comforting religions are too high a price for most atheists to pay. Religious hope equates to a lotto-style dream with a high price tag. It’s a poor substitute for the reality of living.

 
Alex McCullie
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Comment: History and the Christian Resurrection

Easter weekend featured a plethora of Jesus and Bible documentaries on cable and free-to-air television: I watched Decoding the Past: the Resurrection on the History Channel. The documentary, colourfully illustrated as History docos tend to be, presented Christian Theology interleaved with limited doses of historical skepticism. It featured two of the most prominent Christian apologists – Lee Strobel and William Lane Craig. In general historians have problems accepting miracle claims and typically exclude them from historical analyses much to the chagrin of Christian scholars. So, why should historians exclude miracle claims like Jesus’ post-death appearances?

Historical research and analysis are all about the probability of past events combined with interpretation. People should ban questions like “what really happened?”. Expressions like “best evidence suggests…” and “little support for…” are more realistic characterisations. Not surprisingly well-qualified historians, using exactly the same sources, can quite commonly draw different though equally well-argued conclusions. This can be very frustrating for outsiders seeking definite answers.

Historical research, like that of the sciences, is essentially a secular activity, independent of any religious faiths. Historians assume that the world and its people behaved in the past as it does today. So claims from the past of people flying unaided would be seen as highly improbable, if not impossible, as that cannot be done today. We have no reason to accept “supernatural” occurrences of the past that we would not accept today. Historical research assumes a predictable, natural world and miracles are rejected as making historical probabilities to historical impossibilities. Historians have little choice to do this as they are trying to make sense of considerable uncertainties without the acceptance of (highly improbable or impossible) miracles.

So what interests historians with claims of Jesus’ post-death appearances? It is the followers who make the claims. Scholars will so attempt to understand the nature and likelihood of his execution within the Jewish social context of early first century. The voracity of the claims themselves are not part of the historical analysis.

Historians work with physical evidence, written documents and artifacts – tax records, commercial documents, household items, artworks, and so on. The primary written sources for Jesus’ execution are the Christian texts – canonical and apocryphal. Here are the earliest:

Letters of Paul, dated around 50CE, were occasional letters written to early Christian communities as instructions and advice. Surprisingly, Paul mentioned nothing of the historical Jesus, only concentrating of the risen Christ, the one of later Christian faith. Even when discussing a moral point with one of his communities Paul argued without referring to a pertinent Jesus saying (later quoted in a gospel). Some scholars see that omission as evidence against the existence of the historical Jesus. Either if not the case Paul provides no useful evidence for Jesus, the man.

The “Q” document, hypothetically constructed by scholars from the common text of Matthew and Luke that is not in Mark. “Q” contains sayings of Jesus only without any narratives about his life; his execution is unmentioned. “Q” is dated around 50CE or earlier.

The gospel of Mark, dated around 70CE, is considered to be the first New Testament gospel and the basis for Jesus ministry of Matthew and Luke. Like the other gospels the authorship is unknown. Mark makes no mention of Jesus’ life prior to his baptism by John and he ends the gospel with an empty tomb after his execution. Post-death appearances of Jesus are unmentioned. As an aside we need to remember that the gospels are Christian propaganda, documents of faith, that give a narrative structure to the Jesus stories and sayings circulating amongst the Christian communities. They were written by urbanised, Greek-educated Jews some 40 to 70 years after the death of Jesus. By contrast most scholars characterise Jesus as an Aramaic-speaking, itinerant Jew, preaching in rural Galilee.

The gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John dated between 80-100CE and again are of unknown authorship, offer vastly differing accounts of Jesus after his death. Their stories are difficult to reconcile. Similarly their infancy stories differ markedly.

The gospel of Thomas, a non-canonical or apocryphal gospel, is like “Q”, a collection of sayings though overlaid with Gnostic traditions. Variously dated before and after 100CE, Thomas makes no mention of Jesus’ death or any post-death appearances.

Given their theological intent, separation in time from the events portrayed, and inconsistent coverage of Jesus’s death, these early texts seem problematic as the basis for historical research. The precise nature of his execution and subsequent events appear more an area for religious faith than independent historical research.

Alex McCullie

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Comment: Science – the Future of the Hypothesis

Excellent joint article by a scientist and a philosopher on limitations of the hypothesis in the doing of science and some practical alternatives.

http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(08)00953-7

Alex McCullie

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Comment: Doing science

Here is an interesting link on doing science – writing a hypothesis, designing a testing testing regime, and so on

http://www.experiment-resources.com/steps-of-the-scientific-method.html

Alex McCullie

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Comment: God’s ‘End of Age’ Prophecies

The logic is familiar. There are an extraordinary number of personally stressful experiences combined with selected recalling of natural occurrences meshed with biblical quotations, written some 2000-3000 years ago, to provide incontrovertible evidence that the God’s end of age is upon us and only the faithful (our type of faithful) will survive. Here is the latest of this sort of tripe from the website http://www.worthydevotions.com/. I have highlighted the apocalyptic messages in case you missed the subtlety.

Alex McCullie
Storms are raging!

Psalms 112:6-7 Surely he shall not be moved for ever: the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance. He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the LORD.

This past weekend we celebrated the festival of Purim, the holiday which commemorates Israel’s amazing reversal in Persia during the reign of King Xerxes (Ahasuerus), when queen Esther and her uncle Mordecai together gained victory for the Jews and protected them from annihilation at the hands of the evil Haman.
Coincidentally” we experienced our own personal drama on Friday as the holiday was getting underway. A bolt of lightening struck just outside our house destroying the neighborhood’s transformer and cutting off our electric power. Then, later that day, as I was driving to the Dead Sea region to pick up a package, a river from the desert suddenly exploded out of nowhere, sideswiped my car, and nearly washed me into the Dead Sea. The force of the river was so powerful that it lifted the rear end of my car off the road, ripping off most of the bumper, while the front wheels struggled to maintain traction as I desperately maneuvered out of the cataract and forward to safety. For the next 7 hours I was stuck between two rivers as the rains that came down over Israel the night before inundated numerous valleys leading to the Dead Sea. I later spoke with a police officer who informed me that last month a driver in similar circumstances was carried into the Dead Sea and drowned!
I do NOT actually see these experiences as “coincidences” but as signs and portents of things to come. We will soon be facing serious unexpected storms which will shock and possibly dislodge us from the roads we are traveling on. But we are under Divine protection as our focus is on the Lord, and our devotion rests in Him. We may be badly shaken — but He will rescue and restore us!

The message in these days of earthquakes and tsunamis is clear: “Do not fear, for I am with you, even unto the end of the age”.
This devotional was provided by Worthy Devotions.
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Quote: Galileo

Nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages.
Galileo Galilei 1564 – 1642

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Comment: Sam Harris rejects ‘atheism’, the word

Atheism, the word, is problematic for many atheists and so historical and colourful alternatives are proposed for fellow-travellers – brights, free-thinkers, non-believers, disbelievers, and the like. Harris in a 2007 address to an Atheist Alliance conference argued against all such words: the concept as a label is inherently flawed. See http://richarddawkins.net/articles/1702 for an on-line video and edited transcript.
 
Harris sees any non-belief label as hopefully anachronistic and unneeded as non-slavery or non-astrology are today. In Harris’ ideal future the religious would be the categorised ones with the normality of atheism making it “scarcely intelligible as a concept”.
 
Harris addresses more immediate problems with terms ‘atheism’ and ‘atheist’, the crass marginalisation of genuine criticisms of religious attitudes and the bluntness of simple rejection of all religions. Demands for evidence and reason to support religious claims are often sidelined by accusations of ‘militant atheism’ or ‘new atheism’. Also Harris advises that critics of religion to be more nuanced in their attitudes and attacks. They need to be aware of religious differences and the different threats they pose for a secular society. Harris sees extreme forms of Islam as being more dangerous (and popular) than their Christian equivalents.  He quotes a poll showing that 30% of British Muslims support death for apostasy, leaving the faith, and 68% support criminal prosecution for Islamic insults. Most problems with Christian fundamentalists are with child-abuse through narrow faith education. Again Harris returns to the need for critics to reject atheist labels and demand for evidence, reason and free thought to characterise our society.
 
Harris rightly comments that atheism is wrongly characterised as an alternative worldview to religion. That is simply not true. Atheism is a position on what exists (and not exists) in our reality - metaphysics in philosopher-speak. Atheism says nothing about origins of the universe, life, and human morality. It says nothing about moral or immoral behaviour. An atheist can live an upstanding life – many do – without any reference to his or her metaphysical position, or alternatively atheists like many Christians, Muslims, whites, blacks, Democrats, liberals, conversatives, and Jews may inflict considerable pain on others.
 
Finally Harris highlights the need for atheists (whomever they are) to recognise that people can have genuine contemplative experiences, ‘spiritual’ experiences in lieu of a better term. This does not mean accepting any notion of a soul but seeing spiritual, a horizontal version, coming from within us and our responses to the physical world – not mysterious but special.

Alex McCullie

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Comment: What Is Religion?

For Australians like most in developed Western countries the traditional symbols come to mind: special places like churches; crucifixes, alters, and other special objects; groups praying and singing; biblical texts and hymn books; special rituals; and priests and ministers preaching. These represent the practices and beliefs we associate with religions or, at least, the ones we see or participate. On further reflection or after overseas travel we realise the narrowness of these conceptions. I am reminded on Mencken’s warning about seeking a simple answer to a complex issue as quoted on this page.

Theologians, sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, biologists, and psychologists have studied religions to identify the illusive essence. Each have, not surprisingly, approached from the perspectives of their disciplines – the theological, social, philosophical, biological, and psychological. 

Here are a few definitions to broaden the thinking:
 
 

“Belief in spiritual beings” Edward Tylor, 1871
 
A propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which is believed to direct and control the course of Nature and of human life.” James Frazer of The Golden Bough fame late nineteenth century.
 

 
a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community, called a church, all those who adhere to them.” Émile Durkheim, 1912
 

 
religion is a system of beliefs and behaviours that formulates and answers questions that are important, recurrent, and must be answered.” Susan A. Johnston, The George Washington University, 2009, adapted from Arjun Appadurai. This definition appears in an recommended audio course on the anthropology of religion from the Modern Scholar series at http://audible.com.

 

 From the last definition a religion consists of beliefs and behaviours to varying degrees. We easily forget that Christianity is a very ‘bookish’ religion with an emphasis on correct belief, even from the early days of Christian history. Other religions often emphasise rituals ahead of doctrine. Religion is also a system embedded in culture often with a strong interdependence. For example Christian churches reflected and influenced their surrounding hierarchical political structures during development.
 
Religions not only answer the fundamental questions of life – our purpose, origin, and destination -, but also formulate the questions to be answered, a surprising, though not unreasonable, aspect of this definition.

Finally how does science compare with this definition of religion? Interesting!

Alex McCullie

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