Thank you for this excellent piece. I have read Larry Shapiro’s book. He begins by admitting that he is not all that familiar with the New Testament - and then goes on to prove it!
"Indeed, he cannot, but the reason for that inability lies not in any deficiency in the evidence but rather in an immovable philosophical determination not to allow a divine foot in the door. "
that is a really nice way of stating that They cannot believe, because they will not believe. It is also very prevelent among the unbeliever's reasoning.
Thank you, Bethel, for sharing your father’s voice. Assuming that he was was a teacher, I would have loved to listen in on some of his classes.
I copied this part just because. (And I probably won’t return to reread the whole thing.)
“... that inability lies not in any deficiency in the evidence but rather in an immovable philosophical determination not to allow a divine foot in the door.”
What follows it, from Berlinski, is a zinger of a finish , but too over the top for me to want to share with friends or family ( most of whom are in the Shapiro frame of mind)
P.S. So you “make a living” through your writing. Well, this one, and many other posts of yours make my living better with each read. Thanks for your work.
I had to sleep on this one. I woke up at 3 am and jotted down some notes about what emerged from my sleep, in my dreams, but it was a whole lot of stuff and so I had to do some awake thinking this morning. I do not really think my musings are directly relevant to your train of thought but they have been triggered by this essay and I'm sending them.
(I am going to throw away the part where my dream took the form of a web page and I was having to hit a mouse to pick a dream topic. I wasn't wearing my glasses in my sleep so I couldn't actually see what I was choosing. And then the dream fell apart when I was supposed to type in a response but I could not find the letter "B").
There's not sufficient space in a substack comment but I wanted to write here about my dreams, which are an important part of my own Christian faith--not all of them but the utterly stunning "heavenly" dreams I have had six or eight times over the past fifteen or so years. I am going to include a little about them. These dreams remind me that I know a lot more than I normally think I know, but something about my human condition causes me much of the time to overlook the breadth and depth of my knowledge and to stay hunkered down in what Iain McGilchrist says is, in general, my "left" brain. I do want to say I do not ascribe the dream itself to a "supernatural" cause; it is coming from my "natural" brain and I suspect in my case severe sleep apnea is complicit. The dreams started around the same time I started having health problems that turned out to be caused by apneas. But that was also around the time I converted to the Catholic faith (from, of all things, Quakerism). So I don't know, really, what triggered their onset. In any event I just have come to understand my entire "natural" self to be embedded in something that is "supernatural" and so of course when I go to sleep and catch that rational faculty off guard--especially maybe when I quit breathing for a minute--I have no way of verifying this--sometimes amazing stuff pops up. These glorious dreams at first reminded me of reports of near-death experiences, especially one related to me first hand when I was working as a chaplain down in the Rio Grande Valley, and for a while I was anxious about this but I am now reconciled to it. In fact in the last visitation of the dream I heard a voice telling me I had to go back and I heard myself saying, I don't want to go back. But I am an obedient sort and so I did. All too long a story for a substack comment, like I said, but I just need to say that I have learned to trust that I often do my best thinking when I am asleep (and also sort of the worst, I suppose). I just have to figure out what is what and what it might mean after I wake up.
The main part of last night's sleep-thought that I am going to share here was the reemergence of a Kazanzakis story that I had not thought about in years. The takeaway line goes something like "I used to wrestle with the devil and hope to win; now I wrestle with God and hope to lose."
Now, the devil is a relentless foe that never seems to run out of stamina; wrestling with him seems to be a hopeless cause, but somebody has to keep trying to push him back, and that is why your dad's work is so important for all of us. We need somebody to do it. We all need to try, to the extent we are capable, to carry some of the load. But, at least when the devil chooses the realm of rationality as its ground, the fight requires a level of intellectual sophistication that most of us lack, and in any event wrestling with the devil is always a thankless job that sooner or later wears you down.
From what I surmise from your previous essay both your parents and you are at the same time engaged in the far more rewarding work of wrestling with God. Your style of writing reflects a lot more than good manners and a good upbringing. It reflects the joy that faith brings even to the most difficult circumstances.
I had a "devilish" i.e. "egocentric" angry response to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali article. Your response really helped me recalibrate. The absence of any reference to Jesus Christ just floored me. Strait is the gate and narrow is the way and it is unkind even to appear to endorse anything else. It is tantamount to encouraging somebody to build a house of straw. But the entire Christian world these days seems to have been overtaken by folks who want to keep all gates open to encourage exploration; love means encouraging carte blanche any journey the Self chooses. Those roads do not go anywhere and it seems criminal not to put up a warning sign at the very least. Anyway, after having read your essay I went back and was able to hear what Ayaan was trying to say, and then, albeit with an important asterisk, her essay took on a new and more humbling light for me. She says has seen that those other roads don't go anywhere and has also felt a bit of the spark of hope and joy that the faith she has seen in others reveals when it really spreads its wings. I can endorse all that and still cherish her effort and pray for her to find her way to the right gate.
I had one other thought, rather undeveloped, a bit even more tangential, floating this morning in the dregs of my dreams, I'll throw it out here: the devil has probably won the battle of rationality, at least for now. He's now working mainly at another level far more primal that involves (highly irrational) mob mentality. While for our own sakes Christians importantly need to maintain a sense of self respect with respect to the rationality of our beliefs, this is basically an internal conversation now. What the secular world right now really needs are some mirrors reflecting the goodness and the sheer joy of faith, along with some reassurance that it is never too late to open your eyes and start seeing what has been there all the time.
Thanks so much for reading and subscribing and for taking the time to share your thoughts here. I'm never quite sure what to make of dreams but they can reveal a lot that lies deeply buried. I'm glad that my work is providing such rich food for thought as you turn it over! On Ali's testimony, I do agree with you that Christians shouldn't exactly "take a victory lap" over what she wrote, as she seems to be careful about what she reveals to a huge public audience for now, and so far it seems limited to a budding intuition or curiosity. But buds can still open and flower later!
I certainly agree about not taking a victory lap. My great fear with such conversions these days is that there seems to be an epidemic of people converting to religions for ideological reasons. I think Andrew Tate is the most famous example of this. He converted to Islam not because he believes Islam is true, but because he thinks Islam is tough and misogynistic. If someone converts to Christianity to oppose the left, or because he believes it is necessary to preserve society, he is not converting to Christianity. Christ will not be used as a tool, he will never accept being half of a pair:-, there can be no "Christ and", as I think C.S. Lewis says somewhere. The second part of the essay is better, and gives one more hope that her faith is or can become real. We cannot in the end live with the despair which atheism offers us. We should all pray for her.
Thank you for this excellent piece. I have read Larry Shapiro’s book. He begins by admitting that he is not all that familiar with the New Testament - and then goes on to prove it!
I read the whole thing a few years ago...for my sins...
"Indeed, he cannot, but the reason for that inability lies not in any deficiency in the evidence but rather in an immovable philosophical determination not to allow a divine foot in the door. "
that is a really nice way of stating that They cannot believe, because they will not believe. It is also very prevelent among the unbeliever's reasoning.
"They will not believe, though one were to rise from the dead."
Thank you, Bethel, for sharing your father’s voice. Assuming that he was was a teacher, I would have loved to listen in on some of his classes.
I copied this part just because. (And I probably won’t return to reread the whole thing.)
“... that inability lies not in any deficiency in the evidence but rather in an immovable philosophical determination not to allow a divine foot in the door.”
What follows it, from Berlinski, is a zinger of a finish , but too over the top for me to want to share with friends or family ( most of whom are in the Shapiro frame of mind)
P.S. So you “make a living” through your writing. Well, this one, and many other posts of yours make my living better with each read. Thanks for your work.
Thank you Albert. A very small living, but it is...livable! Thank you so much for consistently reading and leaving thoughtful comments.
I had to sleep on this one. I woke up at 3 am and jotted down some notes about what emerged from my sleep, in my dreams, but it was a whole lot of stuff and so I had to do some awake thinking this morning. I do not really think my musings are directly relevant to your train of thought but they have been triggered by this essay and I'm sending them.
(I am going to throw away the part where my dream took the form of a web page and I was having to hit a mouse to pick a dream topic. I wasn't wearing my glasses in my sleep so I couldn't actually see what I was choosing. And then the dream fell apart when I was supposed to type in a response but I could not find the letter "B").
There's not sufficient space in a substack comment but I wanted to write here about my dreams, which are an important part of my own Christian faith--not all of them but the utterly stunning "heavenly" dreams I have had six or eight times over the past fifteen or so years. I am going to include a little about them. These dreams remind me that I know a lot more than I normally think I know, but something about my human condition causes me much of the time to overlook the breadth and depth of my knowledge and to stay hunkered down in what Iain McGilchrist says is, in general, my "left" brain. I do want to say I do not ascribe the dream itself to a "supernatural" cause; it is coming from my "natural" brain and I suspect in my case severe sleep apnea is complicit. The dreams started around the same time I started having health problems that turned out to be caused by apneas. But that was also around the time I converted to the Catholic faith (from, of all things, Quakerism). So I don't know, really, what triggered their onset. In any event I just have come to understand my entire "natural" self to be embedded in something that is "supernatural" and so of course when I go to sleep and catch that rational faculty off guard--especially maybe when I quit breathing for a minute--I have no way of verifying this--sometimes amazing stuff pops up. These glorious dreams at first reminded me of reports of near-death experiences, especially one related to me first hand when I was working as a chaplain down in the Rio Grande Valley, and for a while I was anxious about this but I am now reconciled to it. In fact in the last visitation of the dream I heard a voice telling me I had to go back and I heard myself saying, I don't want to go back. But I am an obedient sort and so I did. All too long a story for a substack comment, like I said, but I just need to say that I have learned to trust that I often do my best thinking when I am asleep (and also sort of the worst, I suppose). I just have to figure out what is what and what it might mean after I wake up.
The main part of last night's sleep-thought that I am going to share here was the reemergence of a Kazanzakis story that I had not thought about in years. The takeaway line goes something like "I used to wrestle with the devil and hope to win; now I wrestle with God and hope to lose."
Now, the devil is a relentless foe that never seems to run out of stamina; wrestling with him seems to be a hopeless cause, but somebody has to keep trying to push him back, and that is why your dad's work is so important for all of us. We need somebody to do it. We all need to try, to the extent we are capable, to carry some of the load. But, at least when the devil chooses the realm of rationality as its ground, the fight requires a level of intellectual sophistication that most of us lack, and in any event wrestling with the devil is always a thankless job that sooner or later wears you down.
From what I surmise from your previous essay both your parents and you are at the same time engaged in the far more rewarding work of wrestling with God. Your style of writing reflects a lot more than good manners and a good upbringing. It reflects the joy that faith brings even to the most difficult circumstances.
I had a "devilish" i.e. "egocentric" angry response to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali article. Your response really helped me recalibrate. The absence of any reference to Jesus Christ just floored me. Strait is the gate and narrow is the way and it is unkind even to appear to endorse anything else. It is tantamount to encouraging somebody to build a house of straw. But the entire Christian world these days seems to have been overtaken by folks who want to keep all gates open to encourage exploration; love means encouraging carte blanche any journey the Self chooses. Those roads do not go anywhere and it seems criminal not to put up a warning sign at the very least. Anyway, after having read your essay I went back and was able to hear what Ayaan was trying to say, and then, albeit with an important asterisk, her essay took on a new and more humbling light for me. She says has seen that those other roads don't go anywhere and has also felt a bit of the spark of hope and joy that the faith she has seen in others reveals when it really spreads its wings. I can endorse all that and still cherish her effort and pray for her to find her way to the right gate.
I had one other thought, rather undeveloped, a bit even more tangential, floating this morning in the dregs of my dreams, I'll throw it out here: the devil has probably won the battle of rationality, at least for now. He's now working mainly at another level far more primal that involves (highly irrational) mob mentality. While for our own sakes Christians importantly need to maintain a sense of self respect with respect to the rationality of our beliefs, this is basically an internal conversation now. What the secular world right now really needs are some mirrors reflecting the goodness and the sheer joy of faith, along with some reassurance that it is never too late to open your eyes and start seeing what has been there all the time.
Thanks so much for reading and subscribing and for taking the time to share your thoughts here. I'm never quite sure what to make of dreams but they can reveal a lot that lies deeply buried. I'm glad that my work is providing such rich food for thought as you turn it over! On Ali's testimony, I do agree with you that Christians shouldn't exactly "take a victory lap" over what she wrote, as she seems to be careful about what she reveals to a huge public audience for now, and so far it seems limited to a budding intuition or curiosity. But buds can still open and flower later!
I certainly agree about not taking a victory lap. My great fear with such conversions these days is that there seems to be an epidemic of people converting to religions for ideological reasons. I think Andrew Tate is the most famous example of this. He converted to Islam not because he believes Islam is true, but because he thinks Islam is tough and misogynistic. If someone converts to Christianity to oppose the left, or because he believes it is necessary to preserve society, he is not converting to Christianity. Christ will not be used as a tool, he will never accept being half of a pair:-, there can be no "Christ and", as I think C.S. Lewis says somewhere. The second part of the essay is better, and gives one more hope that her faith is or can become real. We cannot in the end live with the despair which atheism offers us. We should all pray for her.