On Institutional Loyalty and Bias

Short post today - just a personal gripe.  One of the most common "popular" arguments against religion in general is to complain that no "free thinking" person would believe in it.  The insinuation is that people of a religious bent are not free thinking, but are "indoctrinated" by institutions that "control" what they are allowed to say or believe.

In contrast, the "free thinker" is liberated from these institutional controls to pursue truth wherever reason or science or whatever truth-mechanism they follow would lead them.

This shows up in television (shows as different as House or Battlestar Galactica), and in real debates (it was forwarded as an argument against a Jesuit professor by an atheist scientist on "60 Minutes" just a few months ago).  The implication is that institutional bias compromises religious thinkers and therefore makes their beliefs (including their religious ones) untenable, at best, if not laughable.

Theism Part Four: The Arguments from Design and Consciousness

This post continues the prior post concerning teleology.  Having established that science, on its own, cannot be expected to answer the teleological question (why is there order in the universe?) or cosmological question (why is there something rather than nothing?) we are, by deduction, left with only two possible answers to these questions:

1) Things simply are the way they are.  No explanation exists.

2) Something made things to be the way they are.

As established with the Kalam argument and argument from a finite past in an earlier post, we cannot accept an infinite chain of causes extending backwards into an infinite past.  Rather, there must be a first or initial cause.  In other words, the order we observe in the universe is either caused or it is an occurance of blind chance.

This is the essential starting point of the argument from design.

Theism Part Three: Teleological Arguments

This will be a brief post, mostly to present a framework for a series of small posts I intend to do defending and applying the argument from design.  Despite the broad dismissal of this argument in pop-culture, it is alive and well.  When people say that "science has disproven God" (it hasn't - how could it?) what they most often mean is "science can explain the order of the universe, so we don't need God."  Indeed, gods have long been used as cop-out explanations for hard-to-explain phenomena (like lightning, earthquakes, or the rise and fall of empires).

Yet there are two critical things to observe at the outset when analyzing arguments from design.  The first: what sort of question are we asking here?  The second: Is it proper to think that science could answer it?

Theism Part Two: The Kalam Argument and the Argument for a Finite Past

This continues the arguments in favor of theism.  If you're interested in how these arguments proceed or why I'm providing them, take a look at the first post in this series (Theism Part One) where I explain that, or post in the comments and I can seek to justify why, in an Orthodox context that generally dislikes syllogistic argumentation, I'm providing a syllogistic argument.

The following two arguments work together as a sort of super-charged version of the argument for God as "first cause."  The first, the Kalam argument, is most likely the one people are familiar with.  Typically, people know it in its rhetorical (rather than philosophical) form: How do we know there's a God?  Well, who else could have created the universe?

In other words, there is an implied rhetorical question (called the question of "cosmology").  It goes like this: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?"  Ultimately, people fall into one of two camps on this question.  They either say "There just is" (sometimes called the "brute-force" or "materialist" viewpoint) or they say "Something willed that there be something rather than nothing."

Of course, if we answer the second way, people are rather proud to ask what they THINK is the nail in the coffin against belief in God: "Well, who made God then?  Who willed that GOD should exist?"  Put more philosophically, the theistic answer can appear to delay the question rather than answer it.  The statement "Something willed that there be something rather than nothing" pre-supposes a "something" doing the creating.  That just pushes the debate back one, doesn't it?

Not so.  And I'll use the Kalam and Finite-Past arguments to present the reasons why after the jump:

Theism Part One: The Argument from Change

Just as I'm doing a series on the papacy, examining a complex and multifaceted issue in "smaller" chunks, so I'd like to compose a cumulative case for the existence of God.  Note that, for the Orthodox, none of these are THE reason we believe in God.  We believe (both in the sense of "believing in existence of" and "trusting") in God because of the revelation of Jesus Christ and our direct experience of God's presence in prayer and sacrament.

However, there ARE some DECENT arguments pointing towards God's existence, and in a world like ours where secularism is assumed (and religion viewed as mere personal choice), an apologetic argument or series of arguments in favor of God's existence can be helpful.  In particular, it shows that belief in God is not mere mythology nor mere psychology, but ALSO intellectually probable and reasonible.  This will matter more for some than for others, but its good to have these arguments in your toolbox if the right situation happens to arise.

This post assumes basic familiarity with syllogistic argumentation (two or more premises leading to a logically necessary conclusion).  If someone doubts one of the two premises, then it becomes necessary to defend that premise with an additional syllogism or as an axiomatic necessity.

The argument from change comes after the jump:

An Analogy on the Value of Traditional, Organized Religion

Pop spirituality loves to reject organized religion - that way, it can avoid the new atheists' attacks on the "evils" of organized faiths (read: Christianity, Judaism, Islam) without having to answer them, while still maintaining a self-created spirituality that borrows more from existentialist self-discovery underpinings mixed with a mild dose of pseudo-mysticism.

In reality, though, this approach to the spiritual life makes no sense.  In fact, despite its alarming popularity (how many times has someone said to you: "Oh, I'm spiritual, just not religious.  I don't want a church telling me how to go about my spirituality), this position holds virtually no intellectual merit.

More after the jump:

Presenting the Faith to Non-Christians

Orthodox Christianity in the Americas has grown significantly in the last few decades.  We have, however, seemingly done so by primarily recruiting mature or near-mature Christians from other traditions.  Ex-Catholics and ex-Protestants abound in parishes today (alongside cradle Orthodox), but the ex-Pagans, ex-Muslims, ex-Atheists, etc. are a bit harder to find.  They ARE there, but are fewer in number than we would like.

In particular, Orthodox Christianity seems to have found a niche recruiting theological conservatives who have become disillusioned with liberalizedWestern mainline churches - in particular, we do well recruiting intellectuals who are willing (and capable) of questioning the normative terminology of the faith around them.  Given that we use a lot of the same words in slightly different ways (even with just slightly different connotations), this can be an intellectually demanding conversion process.  Those of us who are converts may then struggle to present the faith effectively to, as my spiritual father calls them, "Joe Lunchbox."  Given the intellectual gymnastics we had to undergo in our own conversion process, phrasing this stuff in ways accessible to someone who doesn't have the time or desire for that sort of thing becomes increasingly difficult.  It remains, however, necessary.

The ether of our society brims with ready-made cliches and simple language suited to presenting the Evangelical perspective on the Gospel.  We're saturated in it (to the point that even non-Christians in America will tend towards symbolic views of the Eucharist, iconoclasm, and assumptions that Christianity is about God forgiving our sins because we prayed a sinner's prayer).  Roman Catholics run into difficulty with explaining the nuanced differences between Catholicism and Evangelicalism - Orthodox even more so.

So when someone who is untrained in Christianity (i.e. casually secular agnostic) says to you, "So... tell me about this Orthodoxy thing," what do you say?