Work In Progress

As any Christian can testify, faith is a very difficult virtue. When my faith has flagged, it has sometimes consoled me to think about how unbelievable most of the world is.

The thought experiment which I typically use is to pick something around me and try to think of it not as an everyday object, but as science tells me that it is. Let's take the wooden table in front of me. Ordinarily, the table is just a flat piece of wood resting on some long pieces of wood on the ground, wood being a hard substance with a grainy pattern to it. But what is it really?

Anyone with a cheap microscope can tell you that would is actually a collection of stiff fibers running parallel to each other. Someone with a moderately powerful microscope will tell you that the fibers are actually made up of a collection of cells with stiff cell walls. These cells stick to each other for some reason or other. The reason is some mystery called Van der Waals forces, or something like that.

If we now talk to a chemist, he'll tell us that the cells are actually made up of millions of molecules, which have various amounts of attraction to each other based on their charge. Their charge we can determine because the molecules are made up of atoms, and the atoms in the molecules have a charge, and we can (roughly) look at how the atoms distribute their charge to figure out how various parts of the molecules behave. Where does their charge come from, though? Well, that's because of a nucleas composed of positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons, orbited by negatively charged electrons. Well, not quite orbited, precisely, so much as within a probability cloud of, or something. Let's leave quantum mechanics out of things for the moment, though only for the moment.

So what looks like a table is actually a mass of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons bumping around. Some of the protons, neutrons, and orbiting electrons gather rather closely together as they bump about (molecules), some of which gather closely together as they bump about (various parts of cell aparatus), which then gather together (cells) and then gather together again (fibers), which stick to each other to form the wood that we see. The reason that this collection of atoms madly bouncing about doesn't go through the floor is that the atoms in the wood stick to each other so tightly that they can't find their way through the atoms in the floor, which are also sticking to each other very tightly.

Now, to bring quantum mechanics back into it, those electrons which look like they're neatly orbiting the protons and neutrons are actually doing no such thing. We can't really pin them down, we can only say where they're likely to be if we try to interact with them. And it turns out that we can't give any boundary to where they are; we can only say that it gets less likely that you'll interact with them the farther away from the nucleas which they orbit. And the same is true of the protons and neutrons — the further away from where we think that they are, the less likely we are to bump into them. But there's no stoppping point; nowhere can we say "no further; here thy proud waves shall break!" And indeed there's a very slight chance that wander around somewhere in mexico you might actually bump into my table here in upstate New York. And it's just possible that I might try to set my glass of water down on the table and it fall to the floor because it didn't encounter any of the atoms of the table. It's not very likely, but it's possible.

So, looking at the table, don't see the familiar old object. See instead the whorling mass of protons, electrons, and neutrons which might at any moment suddenly be in Mexico, or on Venus, or drifting through space thirteen galaxies over. Try to really believe it, as if the table that you see is the illusion and the teleporting mass of madly dashing particles is the reality. Try to believe it not in the dry sense of intellectually assenting to the words, but actually try to comport your mind around that reality.

No? Well, I can't believe it either.

But that's what science tells us is the reality underneath the illusion that we take for granted. This wild tale is more real than the beverage rest we've taken for granted a thousand times.

Now, it's very difficult to really believe that God picked an insignificant people to be his people, and then became flesh in a dirty stable in a cave that this insignificant people held to be insignificant, was crucified, died, and was buried, and on the third day rose again according to the scriptures (which he previously inspired).

Is it more difficult to believe in this than in the coffee table? It's hard for me to say. I can't really believe in either, and you can't have a zero which is less than another zero.

And yet the coffee table is there. Rather than concluding that there's something wrong with the coffee table and God-in-the-cave, it's an easier explanation that there's something wrong with me. I have a hard time believing in things which are true. That means that when I have a hard time believing something, it's not necessarily a good reason to doubt it.

(These thoughts have been brought to you by G.K. Chesterton's introduction to the book of Job.)

As a post script, I would like to point out how ludicrous it is when some atheists try to describe science and Christianity as being in opposition. As the post above indicates, science is actually one of the best friends of Christianity.

I was just watching a Simon and Garfunkle concernt, when I started looking at the guitar and thinking how strange it is that plucking metal strings can produce such emotions in people listening. Steven Den Beste wrote an essay trying to explain, from a materialist perspective, why human beings find music to be beautiful. It's not an easy problem, since enjoying music has no obvious (or even concievable) evolutionary advantage. My recollection is that Den Beste concluded it was a by-product of the way our intelligence organized, and left it at that.

This is something of an encapsulation of the problem that modern american christians face when trying to do apologetics. Materialism, which is something of the default belief in much of America, while technically a positive belief, is really a negative belief. If materialism is true, then nothing in the universe needs to make sense, first because there was noone to make the sense, and secondly because there's no one for it to make sense to. Materialism denies not only God, but also man. For if your brain is just deterministically firing off, there's not the least reason to believe that anything that you think corresponds to reality. That doesn't make what you believe false, as C.S. Lewis sometimes tried to maintain, but it does make it completely unreliable. It's true that this brings you to the very weird circle that if you believe, upon the evidence, that materialism is true, you then have no reason to believe the evidence that you used. This isn't a logical contradiction, so it doesn't make materialism false. It's only a practical problem — if Steven Den Beste tried to convince someone of materialism (which to his credit, I believe that he never tried), the person that he's conversing with might reasonably ask him, "if any of what you said is true, why should I believe you?" And all that he could truthfully answer is, "it doesn't matter if you do."

Because if materialism slits its own throat, it's only after slitting the throat of every other belief first. Materialism is one of those final question — if you answer it in the positive, you can't honestly ask any other questions. You can ask them for fun, of course, which is why materialists don't literally slit their throats. But it's a bizarre sort of game that they play, because they're asking and answering other questions all the while believing that their answers are completely unreliable. But this is a digression.

What's relevant to christian apologetics is that materialism thus has the same sort of imperviousness to objections that Budhism does. When your theory is that nothing makes any sense, no one can object to it by pointing out how it doesn't make any sense. There's nothing in this world that either a Materialist or a Budhist needs to explain. Perhaps a materialist would have to explain it if everything in the universe made sense, but the human intellect is far too limited for any materialist to have to worry about that possibility — even if the universe did all make sense, there's no reason to suppose that any human being could understand it. It's not that materialism can't be disproved theoretically, it's just that it can't be disproven practically.

So that means that an apologist can never argue a materialist into that state of agnosticism where he can give Christianity a fair hearing. What, then are we to do? The answer, I think, lies in awakening the senses which are dulled in the modern world. I don't think that one can argue a materialist out of materialism by pointing to what's wrong with materialism. I do hope that we can argue materialists into Christianity by showing them what's right in Christianity. (Chesterton is right that the way to deal with a skeptic is to lead him to doubt greater and greater things until one day he doubts himself, but materialists are not skeptics.) How to do this is, I think, the great question of our age.

(Incidentally, it never fails to amuse me that Descartes' proof of God was merely a corollary in his attempt to prove his neighbor; I can't help but notice that those who disagree with his proof of God never replace Descartes' argument for the existence of his neighbor with anything. They attack him for his credulity and then assume what he was trying to prove.)

Until very recently in history, it was generally acknowledged by both sexes that men and women are very different sorts of creatures. Some time around the 1900s, some women (and some men) began the strange expedition of disagreeing with this — until then — self-evident proposition. In the very late 1900s, the differences between the sexes became fairly widely questioned, and in the early 2000s it looks like the idea of gender is in genuine jeopardy.

I propose to evaluate this trend, starting with the history of gender, addressing the question of gender, and concluding with what must be done in light of these changes.

It is difficult to date when western culture stopped being intellectually Christian. The most probable date is the Enlightenment, though not because of any of the prominent atheists of the day such as Voltaire or Hume. Atheism has never been a threat to Christianity; it is too esoteric for people who are not interested in their religion, and too inhuman for people who are. The enlightenment was, rather, the first major intellectual wave following the earthquake of the reformation.

Like an earthquake the reformation was a great shattering, and for the first time several religions took hold within christendom. Even if all of the protestant faiths had accepted reason, rather than making war with it as most of them did, the strain of so many religions vying for the minds of europeans (and later Americans) inevitably tired them of thinking about religion. The Enlightenment was the first symptom of this great exhaustion. When people lack the energy for religion, religion leaves the public sphere and becomes private. When religion becomes private it becomes varied. There's nothing new in this; the world has had many cosmopolitan cultures before Christianity where private religions grew like wildflowers. What's strange about the modern flowering of private religions is that none of them shake Christianity, however little they believe in it.

C.S. Lewis once said that Jesus was rather unremarkable as a moralist, and so far as he meant it, this is true. Jesus espoused a moral theory that you might find almost anywhere. But morality is principles applied to circumstances. Christians do not differ much in their theory of justice. Christians do differ greatly in what they believe the circumstances are. But to make this clear, I first have to explain what justice and mercy are, and what christianity is all about, since ideas of these things are very muddled in modern discussions.

Justice consists of giving to a man what he is owed, and him giving what he owes. A man who's had his ox stolen is owed his ox by the theif, and a man who kills his brother owes his life to his brother. Justice is balance. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is the very essence of justice.

Mercy, by contrast, is a man forgiving debts that are owed to him. Mercy is imbalance.

Nearly everyone everywhere has always approved of justice. Few people have thought meanly of mercy, but the problem with mercy is that there's rarely a practical case to be made for it. Mercy contains within itself no reward. Indeed, mercy often seems like rewarding evil. If a man rapes a woman and she forgives him rather than prosecutes him as is her right, it is not obvious how this will discourage him from raping her again.

Before moving on, I should probably qualify how this is different from the forgiveableness of crimes. It is obvious that some crimes are so small that the cost of punishing the malefactor is greater than the crime; some crimes are so small that, punishment being the blunt tool that it is, any punishment would be excessive. When a child steals a piece of candy or some other very small thing, this is forgiveable because the hurt is so small. This isn't a matter of mercy but of practicality. Some sins are so venial that they're not worth much human time or concern. That's a different thing entirely than forgiving an offense for which one has the time and energy to prosecute

Christianity is of course too rich and complex to be described simply, but for all that the point of Christianity is Jesus, the annointed one of God. The Son of God became a man, lived among us, was tortured to death unjustly, and rose from the dead like he will raise us after death as well.

There are more implications to Jesus death than a lifetime of study can comprehend, but relevant to the moment is that Jesus, by suffering terribly, paid a debt that he didn't owe. Much is made of how all sin drives a wedge between us and God, and how Jesus paid the price to reconcile us with God. But he also paid the price to reconcile us with each other. Everyone who kills a person, Jesus offers his death as the price for. In a way Jesus death is God's apology to us for the injustices we suffer in his creation. Equally, Jesus death is our own apology to our fellow creatures for the injustices we inflict on them, because Jesus has offered to pay what we owe on our behalf.

This offer, freely given by God, is given on God's terms. When Jesus says, "judge not, lest you be judged also," he explains the deal. God will show us the mercy we show to others. This makes mercy not just Godly, but highly practical. Forgiving a man for stealing my wallet buys my forgiveness for when I was mean to my neighbor who wanted a ride to the supermarket. I might forgive a theif for better reasons, but if I forgive him because God paid the price for him, we will still be reconciled. And the central theme of Christianity is that all is well that ends well.

(I should note in passing that forgiving a thief for stealing is not the same thing as keeping one's door unlocked at night.)

The result is that within a christian framework, it makes sense to forgive everyone for everything, and to withhold judging anyone. We withold judgment in an exchange — we barter for our own forgiveness. This may perhaps sound a bit crass. We are taught to be good for goodness' sake. Yet this isn't a question of goodness. God is offering us a deal. Whether we accept it is not a moral question but a practical question. We would be within our rights to reject God's offer, just as we'd be within our rights to reject an offer to purchase a posession of ours for a thousand times what we paid for it. It would be very foolish, but it would not be wrong.

The trade of infinite forgiveness and withholding judgment don't make sense outside of a Christian framework because there's nobody to make the trade with. If you are an agnostic and I've killed your brother, you don't believe that anyone has offered to pay for my crime in my place. As a murderer, I'd obviously be an evil man, and no one has offered to keep from calling you bad for your misdeeds if you keep from calling me bad for mine. (In case there's any chance of confusion, I don't mean that God is concerned with name-calling, but with categorization; if you judge me that I'm evil, you won't admit me into your society, nor help me when I need help.) The agnostic and the christian both hold the same theory of justice. They different only about what's already been paid.

The strange thing is that the modern agnostic will still likely believe in forgiveness and withholding judgement, because he grew up in the Christian tradition and was raised to believe in them. He cannot account for them — he could not talk another agnostic who doesn't believe in these things into believing in them. But it is human nature to try to make sense of what we believe, and modern agnostics' attempts to make their beliefs understandable produce a very great confusion of thought.

Attempting to make sense of mercy, modern agnostics tend to either minimize crimes, or ignore punishments. The simplest expedient to simulating mercy is to expand as far as possible the list of crimes which are forgiven because they are small. The anonymity created by the modern population sizes, wealth, large corporations, and beautocratic systems allows a great many crimes to have no obvious victim, and thus to be excusable in an imitation of mercy. For those crimes which are not forgiveable, your typical agnostic simply doesn't think about punishments. They talk about what should be illegal without any reference to what actually happens to people who are convicted of crimes; making something a crime with a large punishment is only a way of expressing great dissaproval of the crime. The criminal is altogether forgotten. Whether this is better for the criminal, it at least keeps the person outlawing his crime from passing any judgement on him as a person.

Another example of this muddled mis-application is the idea of tolerance. Jesus ate with tax collectors and with sinners because his love overflowed so fully that he loved all people despite their sins. Tax collectors collaborated with the roman government to, in essence, steal a lot of money from poor people. They were despised with good reason, because they were powerful thieves who preyed on the weak. Yet Jesus at and drank with them, knowing full well of their wicked ways. Jesus could forgive them, because he was going to made amends for all of their wickedness. Their sins were not forgiveable, but they were, because their sins were to be paid for, and Jesus loved them enough to pay for their sins, and call them to reconciliation with their fellow creatures. If tolerance was ever a virtue, this was the virtue of tolerance.

Modern agnostics still believe that tolerance is a virtue, but since they don't believe that wickedness has been paid for, they can't actually tolerate anything that they disapprove of. Their method, instead, is to pretend that everyone is good. They tolerate people who are different by the simple expedient of disbelieving in differences. If you point out that some cultures don't believe in helping strangers, they'll call you intolerant, because by their definition you are. You're trying to claim something which must necessarily lead them to think ill of the people in those cultures, and thinking ill of people is bad.

The same is true of a great many of the christian virtues as they're practiced in western culture today. Not believing in the same set of circumstances as christians, they can't apply basic moral principles to come to the same conclusions. Yet the feel both the principles and the conclusions so strongly that they are forced to invent a set of circumstances which allow them to come to this conclusion. They're upside down, and so to keep their heard in the right place, they have to twist their head into great contortions.

And this is perhaps to their credit. After all, only a few saints were also philosophers. But the main problem with this setup is that it's unstable. If one's mercy depends on pretending that most crimes are forgiveable and tolerance depends on pretending that all people are the same, these things will not long outlast contact with the real world.

Even that may be for the best, eventually. It's easier to convert pagans to Christianity than it is to convert muddled pseudo-christians who can't understand Jesus' sacrifice because they won't understand anyone's sin. It was Chesterton ,I think, who said that most vices are just virtues practiced monomanaically. That is, vices are just virtues practiced without understanding. That at least characterises the vices of our own age: it's the age of misunderstood virtues.

If my memory serves, that happens to be the name of a TV show which is currently running, but that's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the concept of the "bored housewife".

Perhaps the funniest thing about modern life is its speed; everything keeps changing faster than people can really adapt their opinions of life (people adapt quickly enough, but opinion always lag reality). Sometimes this manifests itself as a hearkening back to a time which never existed; people get partially caught up in the present but haven't come to like it yet, so they imagine that the past was different from the parts of the present that they haven't figured out, and want that. There is, of course, the obvious manifestation of simply not noticing that the world has changed. It's not just generals who are always fighting the last battle, not the current one.

And then there's a special way in which it manifests itself related to another odd human tendency. Specifically, many very bad ideas which have come along were really just ideas in advance of their time, which is to say, ideas which weren't workable when they were introduced but for whatever reason (probably technological), they are workable now. And as is not uncommon, people eventually found out that the ideas were bad ones, and now don't notice that the ideas aren't so bad any more.

In particular, throughout most of human life, not counting certain very rich people, most human beings were either a husband or a wife, and as either was very dependent on the other. There is an awful lot of work involved in keeping up human beings, especially when it comes to growing/getting food ingredients, cooking food, making clothing, etc. Less if you're a hunter/gatherer, more if you're a farmer, but there was still an awful lot to do and men and women tended to become partners (to say nothing of families sticking together to help each other out too). Then some time around the 1930s/1940s the lot traditionally falling to women dropped off drastically, and women (being human) began looking for other things to do. That there no longer were traditional gender roles wasn't much noticed, and so this revolution spawned a counter-revolution, which was the house-wife of the 1950s. That in turn spawned another revolution, which was called the "women's lib movement". This revolution was people finally noticing the present, though largely at the expense of the past — far too many feminists acted as if gender roles never had any sense behind them.

Now, one of the biggest issues that feminists had was one of the biggest problems with the 1950s idealized gender roles — there was nothing to do. Trying to be a traditional wife with new technology resulted in a lot of depressed women. It wasn't just that they had nothing to do, it was that they also were extremely isolated from other adults (in large part due to housing situations making socializing difficult). (It should probably be noted, at this point, that these problems were by no means universal, as people who couldn't afford the new technology didn't face them, and plenty of women also adapted to being quite social during the time technology freed them from the drudgery of work.)

Anyhow, it's recently occurred to me that The Internet will probably spawn another such revolution, as spending all day at home can actually be quite stimulating and enjoyable. The Internet puts a wealth of people, information, and activities at one's fingertips. Not to be overly blog-centric, but blogs are perhaps the best expression yet of what IRC and usenet started. People can be producers and consumers all day long without spending money in activities which can be time-shifted (with scheduled posting and reading at your own convenience) and interrupted at will. With child-raising being a time intensive task, it would not surprise me much if some reasonable number of men and women chose to stay at home and do it while their partner goes off to work. Providing that people will be able to con their partners into it, of course. I suspect that many will, though. Raising children is rather difficult and time-consuming work, at least for the first few years.

I was thinking about irreducible complexity and the mouse trap recently, and I realized how you can reduce the complexity of the system. The key to this (as it is to a lot of biology) is that there are going to be a LOT of intermediate stages; you've really got to imagine the previous stage and work forwards, not try to work backwards.

In particular, make the hammer heavier and heaver. Then also keep the set position higher and higher. Eventually, have the hammer very slightly forward of vertical, and pretty heavy. Now the spring only functions to make the hammer, which otherwise would fall on its own, go faster. Now keep making the spring lighter until it ceases to exist. Now you've removed the spring keeping plausible intermediate stages. You can't do it in 1 step, but you can do it in 1000 steps. (Going in the correct order, the spring would first serve as an augmentation, then when it was powerful enough bringing the hammer backwords would serve as an augmentation, then eventually the weight isn't needed so the hammer and spring get lighter.)

This is the rough idea of how biological systems evolve, as well. Lots of little changes that don't look like they're actually accomplishing anything, but eventually do.

Now, I don't think that this means anything; it doesn't signify to Christianity one way or the other how everything was made. As Chesterton once observed, A God might as well choose to make things slowly as to make them quickly, especially if is, like the Christian God, outside of time. The main proof of Christianity is not science, but Christ. I think that we need to go into a little background:

Originally, no one thought that the world was made in steps*; atheists in particular figured that it always existed just like it was now, and theists generally seemed to think that it was made (in steps) just like it is now. Eventually came along the big bang, which sounded ridiculous, but eventually was accepted, which more or less held that whatever of the living stuff, the inanimate stuff was made a long time ago, and pretty slowly. Then Darwin postulated his famous idea that the living stuff came about slowly, too, by gradual changes directed by the environment.

Now, what's so radical about this notion is that all of the things which looked awfully like they had been custom built from scratch weren't — they were assembled very slowly not by tools but by pressures. While tools can only be applied by an intelligence, pressures can be applied by anything, and often are. It became possible that there was no intelligence behind the origin of species. That's not to say that it was any less likely, only less necessary; those not inclined to believe in God finally found a way not to, but that's not the same as saying that they finally found a reason not to. It should be remembered that human tools are just things which apply specific pressures quickly; tools in general are just things which apply pressures. That is, evolutionary pressure can be just as much a tool as a scalpel can be a tool. Braces on teeth do nothing but apply pressure slowly, but they're always applied by an intelligence.

Anyhow, the point is that a belief in God was no longer (essentially) required, and so some people stopped. It became a heated topic of debate whether God really existed, and so the topic of proving his existence arose.

Now, human beings really hate doubt. Some might tell you that they embrace doubt, but 99 times out of 100 they just mean that they embrace doubts of the things which they don't believe. Anyhow, one of the ways that this manifests itself is that people rarely accuse each other of being mistaken. No, everyone who disagrees is not just wrong about the facts. They're illogical. Their argument is full of fallacies. It's simply not even possible to believe it. And of course, conversely, it's impossible to believe anyone else's argument.

In discussions of the existence of God, this generally means one of

1. the universe inherently proves the existence of God

2. human intuition proves the existence of God (and the only reason that people doubt it is lust, greed, or pride)

3. the universe inherently disproves the existence of God

4. the non-existence of God is the default position, and it will take some really extraordinary evidence to prove otherwise, where extraordinary mostly means "impossible"

Now, the problem with all of these is that they're wrong. The universe neither proves nor disproves the existence of an intelligent creator; it neither makes it likely nor unlikely. We can only determine what's likely or unlikely from our experience and reason, and none of us knows the first thing about how to create universes.

What we do have, however, is records of the Creator of Everything actually telling us about it. I don't believe for a moment that the bible is literally true because it (1) never claims to be and (2) obviously isn't meant to be. However, there are parts in it that just as obvious are meant to be real records. The parts where God talks out of burning bushes, and the part where God became man and dwelt among people, come to mind. The Jesus parts especially.

Now, if you're a creature, it's very hard to know anything about your creator. Certainly your creator is no less than you are (unless you believe that nothing can create something), but that's about it. The only way to find out more about your creator than you can tell from knowing his creations is for him to tell you. And that's one of the aspects of Christianity. Now, the whole sin and redemption and living a perfect life aspects of Christianity are far more important than the parts which satisfy intellectual curiosity, but I've always been struck by this line (John 15:15):

I shall not call you servants any more, because a servant does not know his master's business; I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have learnt from my Father.

Now, people can still disbelieve the records we have of God coming and telling us that he created the world, but the main reason to believe that God created the world is not the particulars of a few objects in it, but that he told us so himself.

*Yeah, yeah, except for all of the people with creation myths. Atheists generally didn't have creation myths.