Friday 28 June 2013

The Road From Unbelief


In the British TV show Blackadder Goes Forth, Baldrick asks:

"The way I see it, these days there is a war on, and ages ago there wasn't a war on, right? So, there must have been a moment where there not being a war on went away, right? And there being a war on came along. So what I want to know is, how did we get from one case of affairs to the other case of affairs?"


 That is a very long way of asking how the war started, but in some ways, it's making a more accurate question: because "how did we change states of affairs?" sounds like a process. And a question about the process is exactly the right question for how WWI began.

Similarly, I cannot conceive of my becoming a Christian as anything other than a process. "When and how did you become a Christian?" is a misleading question, since no precise time or methodology can be named, whereas "what process led to your conversion?" is much more answerable.

I was raised atheist in England and Spain, mainly, in a lower middle class household to a Chilean dad and English-Australian mother. The only times religious things that were brought up in my family were a couple of comments made by my dad about some Jehovah Witnesses
[1] that he coached tennis for, some other comments made by him around Christmas time about how Christmas should not be about presents, bringing up how Jesus was humble and not materialistic (which led to going to a midnight church service a couple of times, but I do not remember anything from there), a storybook of David and Goliath[2], and probably a few other times that have slipped my memory. The point is, it was not a religious, or anti-religious, upbringing. It was a caring, secular environment.

Having never been taught or told anything religious, I nonetheless developed into quite the atheist. Particularly in Spain, my friends were all atheists with two exceptions (perhaps three, but the third was an atheist in terms of daily life and attitudes), even though many of them had been through confirmation and first communion, and all except for one had been baptized. I knew there were religious people around, I just didn't have any contact with them. I thought religion was a childish thing that humankind had inherited from its history. In my diary from when I was fifteen I wrote (this is dated 13-XI-2009 (Friday) at 8:52 AM in my Lengua or Language and Literature class):

"God. The idea of god is as old as mankind. Since the beginning, God or Gods have been used to explain things without explanation.


For example, the Ancient Greek and Roman Gods. Zeus was the god of lightening and thunder. Storms of this kind were chalked up to divine intervention.


Monotheism is far newer. Most religions practiced in modern times have only one God, although by different names:
In Islam, it's Allah.

In Christianity, it's just "God."
In Judaism, it's God, or Yahweh, the Hebrew word.

All these religions have a lot more in common than commonly thought.


The Holy book of the Jews, the Torah, and other scriptures (they have 5 books) makes up the old Testament of the Bible, which is the Christian Holy Book. What does that mean? It means that Jews abide by the same rules as Christians do.

In fact, Christianity proceeds from Judaism. It was formed by a break-away from Jewish beleifs, and Christ himself, prophet of Christianity, was a Jew.


So how did Christianity develop to almost "rival" Judaism, when All The Bible comes from the Jews.


Well, I think it's for the same reason the Church of England, and the Protestant ways, broke from the Roman-Catholic Church.


It brings power and individuality to a religion. If you follow a certain idea, you are bound by it. However, if you create your own ideals, based on another, you are free to develop it, and that means power.


..."

I went on in that entry in my diary to articulate some of the differences in ideology between Christianity and Islam, and how it reflects in the judicial practice of the culture. There are factual errors (the Torah has 5 books, but the Old Testament has more), theologically dubious claims (that Jews and Christians have the same rules) and errors in spelling, but this was my understanding of religion: that God was originally an explanation for phenomena and the newer monotheism was more sophisticated (though still nonsense) where people believed some particular book was holy. I also thought it was weird that people fought so much when they mostly believed the same thing. In general, by the time I turned sixteen, I was decidedly anti-religion.

So how I became a theist, and then a Christian, seems like a very important question to me. What led to my conversion?

The reasons why I suddenly became more critical of my beliefs - which I assumed to be the rational ones, as so many still believe unquestioningly (see here for more on that) - and think about reality, as well as my place in it, is unclear. The usual story I tell has to do with how I enjoyed physics so much that I couldn't explain it, and found my love for it unreasonable, leading me to question whether there was any value in studying physics, but I think that's just an illustration of various things that were bubbling under the surface. The reality is, I'm not quite sure why I decided to think more. But I did.

To avoid being accused of falling into the cultural religion, I explored Islam first. Though some of the ideas seemed reasonable, I did not find the system of belief compelling, the manner in which it arose to be endearing or the treatment of aspects of reality as illuminating, that is, that it seemed more like man-made theological philosophy with a holy book than the divine revelation to man. At some point during this time, however, I began to find it reasonably tenable that God should exist. A prime-mover God, but God nonetheless. I still find the first-cause argument compelling, and the ontological (modal) argument to be a very interesting one for agnostics, though I am unsure whether I should believe in modality or not, and the first premise has the potential for a fallacy of equivocation between two ideas of possibility (known sometimes as epistemic possibility and broadly logical possibility).

It may never cease to amuse me how I got on to the Christian faith. I was told that to completely disprove the biggest religion in the world, and be able to ridicule all the adherents I had ever known and would meet, I just had to look into history and show that the resurrection never happened. Christianity hinges on this one fact, so my first thought was "brilliant, that will be quick, people do not come back from the dead." Which is mostly true, but as I trawled scholarship and the evidence, I became convinced that Jesus had in fact risen from the dead.


Now, may I point out something important: it is not proven historically that Jesus rose from the dead. Ancient historical studies do not work in terms of proof - only mathematics and logic do that. Newly found belief in God meant that I did not think such an occurrence was impossible, though indeed, to assume it is impossible for someone to be raised from the dead would be to beg the question on the matter of the historicity of the resurrection. I find the resurrection to be the most rationally compelling explanation for the facts, and I have not got philosophical barriers to considering it an option.

To end, there are notable but rare examples of people who believe in the resurrection but are not Christians, but for the most part, to believe in the resurrection is to be Christian of some sort. Essentially, this was the beginning of my being Christian: believing in the resurrection from the dead, heeding therefore what I thought Jesus would have said (which meant applying historical criticism to the gospel accounts), and finally ending up believing that the Scriptures were a reasonably solid thing, at least the New Testament, which I had then read. It can be said that I at least believed the first part of the Apostle's creed (the part in bold):

"I believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell and on the third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty. He shall come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting."


The second part of this four part series can be found here.


[1] Perhaps because of this, my dad does not quite believe me when I say that virtually all Christians believe Jesus is fully God.
[2] In my memory of this book, it was a completely secular story about how underdogs can win - but since we still own it, I checked and it does in fact reflect the faith of David coming against the Philistine Goliath.

8 comments:

  1. Why exactly do you think he rose from the dead? Just because you can't find anything that says otherwise, and there are (biased) accounts of him appearing after "death"?

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    1. I recommend "The Resurrection of the Son of God" by NT Wright. Even if you don't agree with the argument, it's a solid read and an interesting account of first century Judaism.

      I would note that all sources are biased, specially in ancient history. But there are at least three independent (though yes, Christian) sources claiming to be eyewitness and pointing to other eyewitnesses of the risen Jesus. The task of ancient history is to try and see past the bias to what actually happened.

      What do you mean by "death"? The crucifixion is probably the most solid claim in historical Jesus research - it has Christian, Jewish and Roman sources testifying to it.

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    2. Well, without reading this book, I find that ancient history is simply far too imprecise to provide exact birth and death-dates in most circumstances (Jesus was almost certainly not born on Christmas, for example).

      I'm not going to debate whether or not the crucifixion happened, I'm simply suggesting that dates are often falsely reproduced/lost in translation.

      Even the fact that our calendar begins roughly when Jesus was born means that every notable event around that time period has an element of uncertainty in terms of sequence. The Bible has centuries of human error in terms of transcription, copying and even authorship working against its credibility.

      Without concrete evidence, I can't see any reason to believe in holy resurrection, and as such, no reason to believe in the rest of the bible's teachings (especially those of the Old Testament)

      To make a fully informed decision, I would have to read multiple valid versions of the Christian Bible, preferably in different languages as well, from start to finish, in addition to the other sacred texts (Koran, Buddhist texts, etc. hell even the book of Mormon). Then I would have to compare their versions and viewpoints on the actual event, and on resurrection itself, in contrast to more independent secular writings of the time (I'm sure there must be some?). I would then read other historians and religious scholars' takes on the matter, and finally reach a balanced conclusion, after reflection and discussion.

      And that's simply far too much effort in order to disprove something that logically couldn't occur within our current knowledge of physics and mathematics.

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    3. Yes, there is a lot of difficulty for things in ancient history, although some things are more certain than others. Dates for the crucifixion and birth of Jesus are relatively uncertain (to within a few years - so perhaps not too bad all things considered).

      I don't see how you claim that the Bible has centuries of error in transcription and copying. Yes, there are uncertainties, and sometimes they are in unfortunate places theologically (I'm thinking particularly of the extended ending of Mark 16 and its implications for baptism), but there is nonetheless a rather large manuscript depository and those uncertainties are relatively few. Most, if not all, of the uncertainties are centred around manuscripts that are relatively early - so not too many centuries, perhaps two, at most three.

      Mmm, there is that difficulty in approaching these issues rationally; one would have to do a great deal of work to have a properly informed position, and it would be rather difficult to do that for even a few of the world's religions, let alone all of them.

      I'm not sure why you bring up physics and mathematics though. Surely the relevant discipline is biology? Being a student of both physics and mathematics, I fail to see the connection to the resurrection. But even so, the resurrection has never been claimed to be something that occurred naturally, so irrespective of what field is relevant, the issue is slightly more thorny to come at. Resurrections do not occur in daily life, nor even in rare circumstances - but this one did, is the claim.

      I think history points to it happening, though as you note, it's very difficult to establish something like that too conclusively, and there are all sorts of philosophical issues entangled with whether or not one could really establish that a miracle has occurred - David Hume, for instance, would claim that an argument from history could never establish such a claim as factual.

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    4. I think the point that the previous person was making was the laws of thermodynamics. That energy simply cannot be created nor destroyed, so there would be no possible mechanism for any supernatural occurrences to happen.

      And think you will find (if you take a critical look at the works of history) that there is extremely little evidence for a) christs resurrection and b) christs physical, and not theological existence. Outside of middle east, there were literally no writings of Christ at all. If such a superhero existed on earth, why then, was it not for hundreds of years later that word of him left the middle east?

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    5. The laws of thermodynamics are natural laws, empirical ones, not logical ones. So I see no reason why God, who is not constrained by empirical laws, cannot bypass them. If thermodynamics (and here you're referring specifically to the conservation of energy) were a logical law, then he could not. Having said that, supernatural occurrences need not involve increases or decreases in the total energy of the system (in our case, the universe).

      Interestingly, though, we know of at least one time when energy was created: when everything was created. So if the law of conservation of energy is to hold, then creation ex nihilo must be said to be something which cannot occur by natural means, pointing to supernatural means. I would not argue myself on the basis of conservation of energy, but it's your premise!

      Well, I think you have your history wrong, my friend. Jesus' existence is undoubted in mainstream secular history, and word of him left the Middle East very quickly, if only because of the missionary efforts of Jesus' disciples. It was not even a hundred years when word had gotten to Rome! Can I recommend you do a little more study in this area? Not on the internet, but with proper, university press and/or peer-reviewed scholarship?

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  2. we dont know if energy was created at the start of the universe. Thats a big assumption to make.

    I also think you may have your history wrong. Jesus' existence is certainly no more factual than the existence of Horus. There is an overwhelming majority of doubt against Jesus' life (at face value, the over 2/3 of the population not following your religion should be a start).
    Not even a hundred years you say? well i dont know about you, but that sounds like about the time it takes for a forgery of a religion to take root over a large area. I dont know about you, but if the super powered son of god came to say hi, id probably give him my full attention and get that word around just a smidge faster than that.

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    1. In a very technical sense, it is *perhaps* true that energy was not created - but even if it was not, energy somehow separated, and since nothing (by definition) has no properties, that is all that needs explaining. If the beginning of the universe is merely the separation of negative from positive energy, it is just as much a beginning of the universe as if there were a net positive energy.

      Jesus' existence qua divine, or his historical, human existence? A naturalist would agree with the first one, but no credible historian (barring one, but even he isn't a clear mythicist, and and it's a very big field for there to be only one historian who has that position) would agree that Jesus of Nazareth, a human in Galilee, never existed. People who are not Christians do not necessarily deny that he existed (indeed, Jews, by and large, think he existed, though was not divine, Muslims think he was a prophet, and most Hindus seem to believe Jesus was God, although not a unique manifestation, nor the primary manifestation, of God).

      I didn't say it took a hundred years to get to Rome, I said it was less than a hundred years - I would say that in the same decade, the message had got to Rome. I was responding to the historically absurd idea that Christianity did not leave the Middle East for hundreds of years, not giving a time-line for its spread.

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