Teaching About the Bible, Not Just Its Content

I've been thinking about writing more about apologetics, maybe book length.  One major topic, though, I'm thinking of working on is that of the Bible itself.  I'd like to see more education in churches about the Bible.  Not just what's in the Bible but its nature, origins and prehistory, ancient context, etc.  That is, we should have more that is not just about the content of the Bible but the Bible itself.  There are many, many myths and misconstruals floating around about the Bible among more moderate to conservate Christians, Evangelicals, and also Fundamentalists.  And I don't mean "secular" or "liberal" myths either - I mean myths perpetuated largely by traditional, orthodox-leaning Christians.  (To give a couple examples: the idea that every command in the Bible is a timeless moral imperative and the Bible is basically a life handbook; the idea that there cannot be any reasonable doubt about the exact text or meaning of a passage; the idea that absolutely everything ought to be taken as completely literally and describing exact historical, scientific reality and conforming to, say, modern scientific-writing genre conventions, etc.)

The trouble is that many take these myths to be integral to the Christian view of the Bible and to the faith as a whole and when these bubbles get popped, their world comes crashing down and they must either remake their views of the Bible or reject the faith entirely.  I have personally known several people who left the faith because of these myths when they could not handle their dismantlement.  And these were very intelligent people; they were simply dealing with the destruction of what they had believed and likely taught to believe for most of their time as Christians.

Now, most good Evangelical biblical scholars will reject most of these myths, and often explicitly, but that just doesn't often make its way down into the church pews.  Instead, most people's first brush with thinking about the Bible itself outside of these myths and outside well-worn cliches comes in the form of, say, the "facts" presented in the Da Vinci Code or some disturbing bit of modern biblical scholarship.  It's all very sad and, in my mind, completely unnecessary - there are people out there who are having serious doubts about the Bible and hence their faith precisely because of what we aren't (and, sadly, sometimes what we are) teaching them.

Why We Shouldn't Use the Word "Legalism"

Regarding my previous post, I'd like to make a qualification to my statement that Galatians 3 is not "about legalism".  The qualification would be that it really depends on what we mean by "legalism".  As it is normally used, "legalism" does not really have a strict definition - it is more a term of abuse - everyone says something different when asked to define what they mean by it.  In actuality, it is used of anything involving rules and which we do not like.  For instance: X says we should follow rule Y, but I don't like Y - legalism!  X applies Y in a way I do not like - legalism!  X applies Y in a way I do in fact like - ...NOT legalism....

The word therefore is not useful except to register one's disagreement and maybe to vilify what one disagrees with.  It does not tell us why you disagree with it - it's simply an easy way to condemn and scorn something by sticking it with a bad name, yet without actually giving any substantive reasons why we should think it is wrong.  This is argument through persuasive labeling, not actual reasoning.

But not only is using the word pretty useless, it can actually also be harmful (and, yes, I have in fact seen versions of what I'm about to describe - this isn't purely just made up).  Our preacher in a sermon we listen to might define the term as carefully as he can - say, in way W - and show that something A is legalistic in that sense and then go on to say some bad stuff P about A (or those who do A) because of W applying.  Now suppose we run across some new behavior B involving rules and we do not like it - we will not remember and use our "legalism" terms in way W like the preacher did but rather in the normal way as a term of abuse and will apply it to B even though, say, it doesn't fit with W.  So we will apply "legalism" to B and, because of the sermon, will associate P with B even though W doesn't apply as it did with A. 

Example: Suppose W has to do with trying to earn salvation apart from Christ through following certain pagan rules.  And suppose P is something like lacking true salvation in Christ.  We will remember, after the sermon, that "legalism" is associated with lack of salvation and, seeing someone, say, tell someone else that Christians shouldn't dance (a stance we don't like), we will be tempted to doubt that person's salvation since they are engaged in "legalism".  And then, of course, someone might disagree with us and think we are legalistic and in danger of not being saved.  And then someone else might disagree with them about that, and so on.  So we might have a mess.

In other words, let's stop using "legalism" and actually give reasons for what we disagree with instead of vilifying people and positions with that label.  (As an aside, in theology, I think "supersessionism" is another term like this - a term of vilification used for any view we don't like involving how Christians view Christian stuff in relation Jewish stuff and which puts Christian stuff in a good light)

Bad Responses

Here is one category of things that I see a lot in papers (or even in print) that annoys me. I also often here people say these things as well. Usually, people use these sayings as an excuse or escape hatch to avoid having to actually think about or critically evaluate the issues at hand or as a rationalization for avoiding having one's beliefs challenged. In these sorts of cases, it's really a kind of intellectual laziness that gives rise to these. Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that these are never the right things to say. There may very well be times where one of these actually is the appropriate response. But it takes a discerning, critical mind to tell when it is appropriate and it more often than not actually isn't. Indeed, to come to one of these as a conclusion about some matter ought in most cases to be a hard-fought, carefully won conclusion - not something that one should simply assume at the outset or use as an escape hatch from the conversation. I've written these up for my students in hopes that some of it will sink in and grouped them according to a few different types.

Lazy objections or responses to get out of having to actually think about the subject:

Gotta have faith - 'You just have to have faith', 'Everything they say is just based on faith', etc.

Who knows? - 'There's no way to prove either side', 'We'll never be able to figure this out', 'No one can understand this issue', 'No one has any evidence/proof either way', 'Not everyone agrees with this', etc.

Just obey - 'Don't question God', 'Who can understand why God does things?', etc.

I'm confused - 'What they say confuses me', 'What they say is vague/ambiguous/unclear', 'The other person's argument is easier to understand', etc.

Who died and made you king? - 'Who's to say/judge that p is the case?', 'What right have we to say that p?', etc.

Some Teacher's Proverbs: Thoughts Thought While Grading a Bunch of Papers

Never underestimate your students' ability to misunderstand, misinterpret and confuse.

If you want some awful papers, ask your students to write about the nature of morality.

If you want some awful, confused papers, ask your students to write about God or religion.

If you want some awful, confused, torture-to-read papers, ask your students to write about the nature of morality and God or religion.

Some Criteria for an Adequate Moral Theory

From some notes I made for tomorrow's Phil 1 class I teach (anything else I should add?):

The more plausible a moral theory is, the more it should…

1. Give plausible answers as to which actions are right and which are wrong.

2. Give the right reasons for why an action is right or wrong.

3. Make moral thinking rational in some sense.

4. Help guide us in doing the right thing.

5. Be the sort of thing that can be followed by a perfect human being leading a full human life – it shouldn’t require us to be omniscient or omnipotent.

6. It should be difficult – morality should not be too easy but should be stringent and should set a very high standard for us to achieve. If a moral theory says we aren’t very good people, we should take that as an impetus to improve ourselves not to reject the theory.

7. Allow for error – sometimes we go wrong.

Random Thoughts on Ethics, Society, Welfare, and Human Functioning

So in lecture today the vast majority of students thought doctors should perform amputations for the wannabes mentioned in my previous post, presumably in large part because they thought that having such amputations is morally permissible. Well in line with narrowly Utilitarian or Consequentialist thinking, they seemed to channel the oft-repeated mantras of our culture: "You can do whatever you want with your own body", "It's okay since it makes them happy", "It doesn't hurt anyone", etc. In discussion section tonight, however, I really pressed them and got to think of lots and lots of reasons against such amputations - reasons to think that they are in fact not morally permissible. At the end, the students were no longer so sure that such amputations were really as morally okay as they had initially thought. It's amazing what happens when you stop simply repeating the tired old lines of the overly-simplistic, feel-good pop morality that passes as public ethics these days and actually think about moral issues and moral reasons.

Some good reasons against that people came up with or that I came up with (some are just reiterations or slightly more nuanced versions of others):

It's being ungrateful for the body and abilities you have.
It's a very radical rejection of God's design of you in favor of your own.
It's a denial of the goodness of the whole of the healthy human body.
The benefits are outweighed by the risks.
It is harmful to the patient and reduces functionality.
It's medically unnecessary and doesn't help anyone else.
The desire for this sort of thing is just crazy or irrational.
It implants, encourages, and inflames other people's desires for similar things.
It leads to more of a burden on society's resources.
And so on.

Some of these are also good reasons against purely cosmetic surgery as well, which I'm okay with. I've always been bothered by cosmetic surgery and have long had a feeling that something just isn't right about it. It's not at all as bad (maybe) as voluntary amputation, but still has the feel of the frivolous, the ungrateful, the pseudo-gnostic denial of the goodness of the human body in its wholeness. It seems like a lot of the intuitions in favor of these sorts of things seems to involve the deep cultural influence of a kind of gnostic or extreme dualism. Gnosticism was an ancient heresy that taught that matter was evil and that spirit was good and thought of these are two completely separate, opposed realms. Unfortunately, the influence of this sort of view has survived to the present day.

Substance dualism is the view that there are two irreducibly distinct kinds of entities - material ones and immaterial ones - and the body is of the former kind whereas the mind or soul is of the latter. An extreme form takes it that I am simply my mind, a purely immaterial, nonphysical, spiritual object, and my body is just an instrument or tool that I happen to make use of for the time being. Both these views - gnosticism and extreme substance dualism - denigrate the body and make it somehow other than me and a mere possession to be used or disposed of as I see fit. Our society, I take it, has been profoundly influenced by such views, despite (or indeed sometimes precisely during) many people's protestations to the contrary.

One sees the influence of these sorts of views in many places. It's almost an orthodoxy, for instance, among many philosophers that human welfare is a purely mental affair - pleasure, desire satisfaction, or some other form of mental happy-crap. The body just doesn't matter - or at least it only does so insofar as it affects the mental stuff (which is the stuff, of course, which really matters). This sort of thing is simply a denial of our nature as physical beings - our design by God as living, material organisms. Plants and animals have welfare too, but it is implausible to say of them that their welfare is a purely psychological affair for them. This should be most obvious with plants since they really have no psychology in the first place. With them, our criteria revolve around the sorts of things they are and their abilities to function as designed - it revolves around a kind of health. I think we ought to say the same thing about human wellfare - my being well-off is a matter of my health, both physical and mental, and has to do with the sort of thing I am (a psychological subject yes, but also a living organism).

And of course relativism, overly cautious PC-tolerance of everybody and everything, the breakdown in moral education, and so on haven't helped matters as far as public ethical thought is concerned either. In the past disabled people were stigmatized, pitied, seen as less than human, etc. People thought their lives had to be less rich or full than "normal" people's and indeed less valuable. Most people probably still think that - consider Million Dollar Baby for instance. It could be the poster child for anti-disabled bias - the main character is an up and coming boxer and then becomes a parapalegic who ends her life with the help of her coach. Her life is portrayed as if it just wasn't worthwhile anymore and not valuable or worth keeping.

In response to this, people have, however, swung completely too far in the opposite direction. Disabled activists often won't even admit that the people they represent are disabled in the first place, that they have a hard time with anything, that there is anything whatsoever of disvalue about their condition, or that their functionality is impaired in any sense whatsoever (some among the deaf community are particularly guilty of this). It seems that we shouldn't go to either of these extremes - neither bigotry on the one hand nor blinded PC-fueled dogmatism on the other. Both of these, again, involve a denial in some way of our nature as living organisms. The bigoted side involves a denial that we can lead meaningful, valuable lives even when we are broken - even a broken body is a body designed by God and can be used for his glory. The PC side, on the other hand, involves a denial that we as humans have particular biological capabilities that are designed for us and which it is better for us to have than not. Both sides should be denied and we should break out of the assumption that both have nurtured that they are the only two options.

All of this is why I think it was wrong in the famous case for the two congenitally deaf lesbians to seek to have a congenitally deaf baby together (among other reasons) via genetic selection processes or genetic engineering - it involves a kind of intentional harm to the person so produced (though arguing that you can harm someone by creating them with deficits is a discussion for another day).

So anyways, that was a screenful. I'll stop now. I promise. Really.

A Large Portion of My Class Says They'd Push Someone in Front of a Runaway Train

...if that would stop the train in time so that it wouldn't hit five more people further along the track. I find that rather disturbing and I think it shows that a lot of college students aren't very reflective about moral issues (as if that wasn't obvious enough already given the number who think relativism is a reasonable or even obligatory position to take). This is classic consequentialist sort of thinking.

Classic consequentialism says that the right action to take is the one that produces the most good consequences. So if we want to decide between action A and action B, we look and see how much good stuff will result from doing A and compare that with the result from doing B. Nothing else matters - that action A is a rape, for instance, and action B is helping a little old lady across the street is completely irrelevant to determining the rightness or wrongness of the two actions. All that matters is the consequences.

Here, what the students seem to be doing is weighing lives against each other - five lives are worth more than one life, so doing something that results in five living and one dead is morally better than doing something that results in five dead and one living. But that just seems morally reprehensible - human beings aren't mere commodities whose relative values can be weighed or compared with one another or to see what a single human being's life is worth. Human lives aren't the sort of thing that you can just add together to get more value - human beings are of infinite valuable or at least not additive value. The students' approach here, however, ignores the inherent dignity and incomparability of human value and treats human lives as mere objects to be bought or sold with no regard to the personal wishes, rights, or integrity of the individual human person.

Why are students (and some philosophers) tempted by this sort of picture, though? One reason, I suspect is watching too much TV or too many movies or reading too many books where the hero engages in consequentialist-permitted (but seemingly wrong) actions all for the greater good and succeeds in doing so. Passing no judgment on the hero, this sort of story can influence people's moral perceptions. Stories can make us sympathize with or root for evil people or want them to engage in their evil acts (consider, for instance, the thrill and narrative satisfaction one gets at the end of The Godfather, for instance, when all of Michael Corleone's enemies are gunned down and killed).

Alternatively, we may be influenced by these things in the following sort of way: we want to see X to happen since X is better than the other alternatives, so we root for the person involved to do action Y to bring about X even though Y might be wrong - and (this is the crucial part) we mistake this approval of X with approval for the action, Y, that brings about X. Take the TV show 24, for instance - few episodes go by where you don't have the hero, Jack Bauer, or one of the other agents torturing someone to get some key information to help save a bunch of other people. We all, of course, prefer a world where there is one torture and no murders to a world where there is no torture and many murders, so we may want Jack to do the torture so that the first world is the one that we live in rather than the second. But that doesn't mean that what Jack does is morally permissible. It is a mistake to go from "the world ought to be such that it includes Jack doing such-and-such" to "Jack ought to do such-and-such", but it is a very easy mistake to make - one many people, many of my students included, seem to have fallen into.

Moral Relativism and Really Bad Papers

I'm in the middle of grading one of the worst batches of papers I've ever graded. Somehow, out of all the TAs I'm the one who ended up with most of the really bad ones - vast confusions and misunderstanding, gross failures to actually read the text they are writing on, neglect in actually following the directions given by the topic prompt, rambling and incoherent paragraphs (or pages) with little or no apparent point, incomprehensible prose, lack of critical thought, lack of arguing for their own opinions, use of obviously circular or question-begging arguments, treating this as a book report rather than a philosophy paper, ignoring what was actually said or argued in class, and so on. And all this on almost all my students' papers!

I was especially dissappointed with the papers on the first paper topic. The students were asked to take a look at the part of Russ Shafer-Landau's article on ethical subjectivism where he presents and then destroys arguments for NES - normative ethical subjectivism (the view that an action is right for me if and only if I approve of it/believe it is right). They were then supposed to turn one of the arguments for NES into an argument for Cultural Relativism (the view that an action is right for me if and only if my culture approves of it/believes it is right) and then see whether Shafer-Landau's objections to the analogous argument for NES work here as well and whether the argument for CR ends up showing CR is true. Over half of the students on this topic supported CR but half of them did not even take into account Shafer-Landau's devastating objections which would work against CR just as well as NES and the rest either misunderstood Shafer-Landau, made a reply to him that we explicitly showed in class did not actually work, or said basically that Shafer-Landau's replies don't work because CR is true. So basically these were awful papers. Unsurprisingly, those advocating CR didn't actually have any good reasons to believe CR and they basically said that it was true because CR is correct. Ugh!

It's awful that so many students buy into NES or CR when they have so many problems and there's really no good reason or argument in their favor. Here's one sort of argument against these kinds of moral relativism (MR):

(1) Morality is not arbitrary.

(2) If morality is not arbitrary then MR is false.

(3) Therefore, MR is false.

Evidence for 1: Morality is a fundamentally rational, reasoned thing. People reason and argue and deliberate about moral matters and there are certain patterns to moral reasoning and justification - it's not just willy-nilly or anything goes nor is it completely random. It has all the hallmarks of non-arbitrariness, unlike something like, say, norms of etiquette or whether one likes chocolate ice cream or not.

Evidence for 2: Since morality is based on patterns of reasons and reasoning and people and cultures do not simply arbitrarily approve or dissapprove of actions but do so for these very reasons, it seems that these reasons, which explain these patterns of approval and dissapproval are what make something right or wrong, not the approval or dissapproval itself. And so if approval and dissaproval are not what morality directly depends upon, then MR must be false since it claims the opposite. So good-bye, MR.

I'm quite fond of this sort of argument. Down with MR!