The Emperor's New Clothes

The fable of the emperor's new clothes has never made any sense to me. Supposedly this guy has these new clothes that nobody cans see. Somehow because he is an emperor nobody dares tell him the clothes don't exist. I can't understand how that is in any way plausible to anyone. So much so that by the time we get to the climax the story is too detached from any possible reality to have anything to say about anything.

Yet somehow modern culture loves this story. Why? Modern thinkers are like little children. They inherit a great western intellectual tradition. Yet they love to thumb their nose at centuries of serious scholarship without even trying to understand it. Saying, "The emperor has no clothes!" is just a great way to do that. It asserts a completely implausible stupidity on the part of everyone else. Somehow because there is an implausible fable to illustrate your implausible theory then you can get away with it.

Of course this line of reasoning has been used to write off religion quite frequently. I would say it is a mistake even if you are not inclined to believe in God. I tend to think the foundational teachings of Islam are false. Does that mean everything a Muslim writes can be ignored? Not at all. You assume people are not crazy. The Emperor story has the implicit assumption that everyone else is crazy. So crazy that they cannot even recognize a naked man when they see one.

So when you come to a modern skeptic and talk about God they don't consider in the plausibility factor the reality of so many people throughout history have believed in God. In fact, many would be more willing to accept the idea of God if you were the first one ever to advance such a notion. New ideas are inherently more plausible because ... well just because.

Now it occurs to me that this post could be turned around. I am saying modern skepticism has no clothes. So I don't want to assume all modern skeptics are just crazy. That would be committing the same fallacy I am accusing them of.

In modern times we are more aware of the many different ideas around religion and morality. We can see biases and unquestioned assumptions have led to some problems. So we try and question our own belief system more intensely. But there is a difference between questioning and expecting an answer and simply assuming nobody asks this question and just dismissing the whole thing.

There is an idea out there that people of faith don't ask questions. True faith, at least for Catholics, does not fear questions. If you really believe it is true then the questions should have answers. So assuming people only believe because they have never really asked the hard questions, that is one of those assumptions we should question.

The other assumption we should question is whether skepticism is the best approach. We need some way of arriving at truth. Is demanding rigorous proof of everything the right answer? Can you prove it is?

Humanism And Nihilism

There is a bit of controversy about the Yale Humanist Community. One of the things that really surprised me about the group was the rejection of Nihilism. From their website:

Morality vs Nihilism.  Who knows what reasoned experience ultimately leads to.  But whatever the result, the Humanist believes that the jury comes back concluding that there is morality and purpose in our lives.  So while the universe may be aimless, our own lives are no less meaningful and compassion, honesty and other virtues have no less value.  Ethics and purpose then becomes a human centered enterprise which we must work together on.

The makes remarkably little sense. It is trendy to be a humanist at places like Yale so a lot of smart people are signing onto this. OK, maybe not that smart because they misspelled "nihilism."  (I fixed it). Actually I am going to skip over the morality bits and focus more on purpose.

It starts by saying "there is morality and purpose in our lives." Great. But then it says "while the universe may be aimless, our own lives are no less meaningful." How does that work? No less meaningful than what? Than the meaning life would have if we were here for a purpose? How can that not make a difference? 

It talks about a "human centered enterprise." What does that mean? Which human is in the center? I am guessing it is yourself. But there is an obvious problem. In terms of purpose the problem is death. If purpose is a human-centered enterprise then how do you deal with the issue of human death? 
The trouble is that when you leave everything up to human reason all bets are off. How do you know reason will not lead people to Nihilism? You don't. Many will end up there because that is where the logic goes. If you take the skepticism you applied to God and apply it to meaning and purpose then you can conclude they don't exists either. The same problem of a lack of material evidence applies. 

So why assert that we will follow our reason wherever it goes except we are sure it won't go here? It is not because reason cannot go there but rather than reason has gone there. There would be no fear of Nihilism if it had not already happened to more than a few humanists. It is like when the church condemns a heresy. It is not because it is impossible to reason your way there from the scriptures. It is precisely because people have. Arianism was condemned because there were Arians. 

Really you have all the problems of protestantism present here in just a slightly different form. You can really see Bl John Newman's idea that orthodox Catholicism and strict atheism are the only two logical positions on each end of the spectrum. Stopping anywhere in the middle leaves you open to the questions. Why not go further this way? Why not go further that way? There is no logical reason. It is just an arbitrary place to stop.

God And The Pope

The secular world has been predicting the end of Catholicism for a long time. Some might date such predictions back centuries and maybe even back into the middle ages. Still when all the mainline protestant churches caved in on contraception, on abortion, on divorce, on homosexuality, etc. then it seemed like a safe bet the Catholic church would follow suit eventually. It didn't. It has held to its traditional doctrines despite the public opinion even among Catholics.

Why has that happened? It is not because we are so smart. It is by grace. God protects the Catholic church from error because He promised to do so. Other churches enjoy no such protection so they are vulnerable to cultural forces. Catholics are not completely immune to them but they can't damage the core teachings of the church. The key is that this is a God thing and not some property of us as Catholics.

So what happens when Pope Francis makes some statements about this or that? People panic. Why? Because they don't get that it is a God thing and not a human thing. They really worry about the secular predictions of the church inevitably succumbing to cultural pressure.  But if it was God protecting the church through the past few decades and centuries and millennia then why would God stop protecting the church now? It does not make a lot of sense.

One thing was that the conservative wing of the church had its own inevitability narrative. That is that the conservatives would gain in church political power over time and the liberals would go down in humiliating defeat. That seemed to be coming true over the last decade or two. Now it is all in doubt. So what? God's presence in the church does not depend on this one political faction.

It comes down to pride. We cannot boast in ourselves but we can boast in Christ. So we can be proud to be Catholic because that is a God thing. We don't earn it. It is a gift. But when we are proud to be a member of this group within the church that is saving the church from ... well ... the rest of the church. That gives us problems. When God shows us that He does not view things quite that way then we get confused.

So what is God doing? I don't know but I have a guess. There is an old saying that only Nixon can go to China. That is the most anti-communist politician can get away with negotiating with the communists. The same might be said for more conservative doctrines. I think Pope Benedict was useless as a teacher to progressive Catholics. He was just written off as a conservative and  no matter how good his arguments were they were never seriously interacted with by liberals.

Pope Francis might change that. He might put a better face on traditional Catholicism that can get secular people both inside and outside the church to reconsider the Catholic position. How many will do that? Hard to know. In other mainline churches there were not that many. Maybe he will do better. The truth is that often God makes big effort even when few or even zero people respond. He keeps sending messengers. He is not ready to give up on those people.

So far step one is working. Liberals are falling in love with Pope Francis. But do they love him enough to accept any teaching from him? That will be seen over time. They certainly love to point out stuff he says that they agree with. The question is will they rethink their position when he says something they disagree with? That is when it gets hard. I suspect most will balk at that point but even if a few are drawn into the fullness of the faith it will be worth it. At the very least it should be fun. The man is just such a joy to read about.

Pope Francis

Cardinal George makes a great point about Pope Francis.

Before his election, Cardinal Bergoglio warned his brother cardinals about the danger of a “self-referential” church, a self-absorbed church that speaks more about itself than about Christ. Today, ironically, it seems that many are speaking more about the pope than about either the church or Christ!

What is going on is that papal interviews are coming so fast and furious that they are consuming a lot of attention. The trouble is that when we talk about Pope Francis we are actually doing exactly what he does not want us to do. We are focusing on the political dynamics of the church and not focusing on being Christ to the unchurched the way he wants us to.

The trouble is Pope Francis' way of speaking makes hard to ignore. He says a lot of things that need to be clarified. People take things out of context and intentionally or accidentally trumpet this great new papal teaching that is actually not what he is saying at all.

Sometimes it is a person who is panicked that the pope might be destroying the church. There really is not need to panic. Pope Francis is a solid Catholic. Besides, it is God's job to preserve His church. It is not ours. So if Pope Francis is taking the barque of Peter off course the Holy Spirit will correct it back. Of course there is also the chance you could be wrong and his course turns out to be exactly right for the church. We always tend to underestimate how likely that is!

So what do we do? Don't fight about what he said. Just do what he does. Try and interact with people who are on the edge of the church or completely lost. Be yourself. Don't be overly focused on theological precision. Just love people and let your love for Jesus show. Don't worry about the details. Don't worry about looking foolish. You are a new creation. Show yourself off!

Reasons 1-5 Why Contraception Is Bad

Over a year ago I wrote 50 Reasons Why Contraception Is Bad. The post was quite popular and that the #1 complaint about it was not enough detail. So I thought I would add more detail. I didn't really want to commit to writing 50 posts so I thought I would try 10 posts that would each expand on 5 of my quick points. We shall see how it goes.

1. It prevents you from glimpsing the beatific vision in your sex life. That is what sex was meant to be. A foretaste of heaven. It can't be that if you distort it.


God wants to do something awesome in your life through sex. We all know that but we think way too small. God is, at His very core, a love relationship. God is love. That is the most basic truth about Him. The Father loves the Son. The Son loves the Father. The Holy Spirit is the life that proceeds from that love. CS Lewis describes God as a dance. Not something static but constant action and reaction. But God's love is more than a dance. It is fruitful. So God's love by its very nature is not closed in on itself. It is always overflowing to bless something outside itself.

You can see how sex is like that. It draws us into a love relationship. Yet sex is by its nature not just something between a man and a woman. It naturally becomes fruitful. It overflows and blesses the world with children.

Now the physical reality of this is obvious. The important thing to know is it also happens spiritually. When our bodies join together our souls join together and we become spiritually fruitful. This dynamic is the closest thing to heaven on earth because it is parallel with what happens in the interior life of the trinity. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The husband loves the wife and the wife loves the husband and the child proceeds from the husband and the wife.

The highest human good is to become a partaker of the divine nature. Embracing marital love in its full fruitfulness does precisely that. Conversely, rejecting marital love in its full fruitfulness becomes a huge desecration of such an amazing gift. We trade a slice of heaven for a few cheap thrills.

2. It makes Christian sexual morality incoherent. Why wait until marriage if sex is not about children anyway? Experience has shown that it takes time but eventually premarital sex becomes the norm. It is even happening among evangelicals. 

Why is sex outside marriage wrong? It is the traditional Christian position and it is right. Only few protestant denominations question it. Yet most protestants say contraception is OK. So then why should a couple that is not ready for marriage not have sex? You can come up with some reasons like the potential for any couple to break up but the reasons can sound pretty lame to a young couple in love. A lot of the arguments focus on immaturity. They apply to teens OK but not so much to young adults.

What happens is people start having sex early. At first it is just a little bit early. Couples engaged and maybe just a few months from marriage. But it begins to creep up earlier and earlier. Studies show this is a big problem. Single evangelicals aged 18-30 are almost as likely as unchurched people to have had sex in the last year. It is just a whole lot harder to obey a command that does not make sense.

This is a progressive thing. If sex can become common among evangelical young adult singles then why not among teens? Everything that happened to the unchurched a few decades ago is happening to evangelicals now. More slowly but just as surely things are becoming unraveled. An illogical teaching cannot stand up over time.

3. It can make you marry the wrong person. Dating becomes more about who would I like to have sex with rather than who would I want as a life partner. So you make bad choices. 

Once Christian sexual morality breaks down we get the next phase. Sex becomes part of the dating culture. Guess what? It completely messes up dating. Dating becomes more and more short term focused. The possibility of having sex with this person sometime soon becomes way more relevant than whether or not I am being smart in my search for a life partner.

People get locked in serial monogamy. That is they commit enough to get sex but not permanently.  So they move from one sexual relationship to another. They get scarred and cynical. It is good preparation for divorce. It is lousy preparation for marriage and lousy preparation for religious life.

4. It reduces marriage from a commitment to spend your life populating the world with people like your fiancee to simply committing to live with that person.

Living with someone and sleeping with them are kind of mild sacrifices. For those waiting for marriage the alternative is sleeping with nobody. For those not waiting the alternative is finding a new partner every once in a while as you get older. Either way you can see a permanent arrangement being attractive even if you didn't really love the person. You get something and you give something but it is limited.

Children are unlimited. Especially if you have the notion that marriage is about children. That you  should accept as many as practical. Then you are talking about an endeavor that will consume much of your life. What is more, the children involved will be a lot like the person you are going to marry. So that person had better be quite something. If you don't believe your spouse is a true blessing to the world then it is not going to make sense to put out so much effort to make more people like him or her.

5. It opens the door to gay marriage because marriage is no longer about children.

We talk a lot about redefining marriage. Really when artificial contraception came along marriage was redefined. It changed the focus from children to sex. But even the nature of sex was redefined. It is now something that can be manipulated. So if you can manipulate sex a bit then why can't you manipulate it a bit more? That is all homosexuality really is. It changes the nature of sex but all those lines were already crossed in contraception. So the argument against homosexuality becomes incoherent. Really the biggest difference does become the number of people involved. There are more people who want to contracept then who want to have homosex but that is a pretty weak difference. It held up for a while but it isn't making sense anymore.

Sam Harris And The Science Of Morality

Sam Harris has made a challenge around his book The Moral Landscape. Lots of internet talk about it. Leah Libresco. Ross Douthat. The challenge is to write an essay that convinces Harris he is wrong. Good luck with that. He is wrong of course. The trouble is he can't see it. The problem is not that he is not smart enough or that he is dishonest. The problem is assumptions he has made and cannot question because he does not know they exist.

What he starts with is the idea that humans seem to have some moral impulses embedded in them. He has noticed that moral thinking has not really focused on those impulses over the centuries. It has not ignored them but the focus of moral reasoning has been around other moral inputs. Around revelations from God, around attempts to construct a rational model for morality, around duties and virtues and utility and on and on. There has been very little study around our moral selves.

Harris thinks that if we really understood our moral impulses and where they come from then what is moral or immoral would become obvious. This gives another reason why it is hard to prove him wrong. How can you know something won't become obvious after much study? I think we can know that but only because I accept some things about morality that Sam Harris does not. So I can prove it if he gives me a premise or two but my expectation is he won't do that. In fact, he has explicitly denied some of the premises I would assert.

First of all, morality has to have some foundation that points to goodness. He wants to use the human person as a foundation. That is not always bad. The trouble comes when you couple that with evolution. Actually even evolution is not a problem. It is evolution that lacks teleology. That is evolution that is not ordered towards something good but just happens to go where it goes.

If you find something in the human person. Say they love life and hate death. How did that thing get there?  Now if you say man was created in God's image then you know that got there because God loves life and hates death. That makes it a moral principle. If you believe in an evolution without a goal then that means a lot less. It means sometime in the history of our species there was a survival advantage to loving life and hating death. It does not mean it is good for us now. It just means it is easy for us. We are equipped to do it. It does not even mean it was ever good for us in an absolute sense. It just means it helped in survival in some situations. Not that it was the best thing or even a noble thing. Just that it was a useful thing at some point in time. 

But what happens when somebody says he has discerned some higher good and we need to kill people in the service of that higher good? We know we have an impulse not to kill. So what? People have always had that impulse and still many killings happen. We know where our impulse comes from? We are assuming greater scientific knowledge so say we know what gene it is associated with and what  brain dynamics are going on when we feel this impulse. Does that help? Maybe a little. We might be able to see that killing permanently damages the brain. That we can't just put the soldier or the torturer back into society and expect all to go well. So that science might give us something to think about.

What science will not be able to construct is a firm moral principle. A simple principle like, "Thou shalt not kill" can't be the result. Science can only describe cause and effect. It cannot say the effect is wrong. Something else needs to tell us that. It can make us understand the consequences of killing better and that is a good thing. Still it can never tell us the impulse not to kill is right and we should trust it more than we should trust these guys who promise us a better society if we just kill a few people.

So what Sam Harris calls  the science of morality isn't really morality at all. It is simply saying that moral issues will go away if we understand the brain a little better and understand other cause and effects a little better. Salvation through science.

Behind that we have an assumption that moral feelings don't point to some bigger reality of moral goodness. That moral feelings point to nothing at all. They just are. If we manipulate them we don't have to worry about making sure they lead you into what is right. We just have to worry about the feelings themselves bothering you.

So if you feel bad because you lied the problem is not that lying is inherently bad. The problem is the feeling itself. Telling the truth is one way to feel better. What if science could give you a pill that made you stop feeling guilty after lying? Would that make lying OK? I don't know if Harris would say Yes but under his understanding of he should say Yes. The human moral impulse is gone so the moral issue is gone.

It is a bit like people have tried to do with sexual morality. If you can deaden you conscience on sexual matters then the moral issue is just gone. They call it getting over your hangups or just growing up. But what you have done is the same thing as taking a pill to make you stop feeling guilty about lying. You have not changed the moral nature of the act. You have just changed your feelings.

Jesus And History

Just reflecting on how remarkable it is that Christianity didn't begin its rapid growth until after Jesus had died. It is remarkable even if you believe in the resurrection and the apostles as eye witnesses of the resurrection. But what if you don't? What if you believe Christianity is false and started from completely natural phenomenon? How does Jesus end up in the center of it? When He dies the movement is small and localized in Galilee. Some would even suggest He never lived. This is hugely different from founders of other movements. Islam was a major force before Mohammad died. Joseph Smith led a community of Mormons for a long time. Jesus is alone among religious leaders in many ways but this is a big one. He never established a strong following during His life. The book of Acts suggests even after the resurrection all His followers could fit in one room. They had almost no political power or organization.

The other thing that Jesus did not do was write. Again, the classic parallels with Mohammad and Joseph Smith break down. They wrote a lot. Their writings still take a central place in the religions they started. As far as we know Jesus wrote nothing. There is one reference to him writing on the ground in John 8. That is the only evidence we have that He knew how to write. St Paul was the first Christian to really write anything serious and that was not until maybe two decades after Jesus' death.

So how does Jesus end up as the center of this religion? Why are they not called Paulians rather than  Christians? Paul was doing the most serious work. He was writing. He was evangelizing. Planting churches all over the Roman empire. In fact, it is not clear why he needed Peter and John and the rest of the apostles. If you believe his story of his road to Damascus experience then it is clear. But what if you don't? What if you think that story was made up too?

If you believe in a Jesus who made a few nice sermons and died then you have to believe in an early church that really played fast and loose with history and theology. The idea that Jesus did miracles, Jesus claimed to be God, and rose from the dead, those became standard talking points pretty quickly. But changes didn't continue to happen. In fact, Christianity resisted changes proposed by gnosticism. It was criticized and persecuted by Rome for some other things yet they didn't just change. This is the same religious community that accepted these massive changes to their belief system about the resurrection of Jesus, the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, the feeding of the 5000, etc. Really not one community because the many churches across the empire were basically independent because of the state of transportation and communication. So we have many churches independently exhibiting this schizophrenic phenomenon of being totally open to some ideas and totally closed to others.

Yet somehow when we get to the 4th century we get a fairly unified church. When they hold a council at Nicea they know who to invite. Those who are legitimate successors of the apostles. They know who they are. How does that happen? We know about schisms in the church. We know how easily they happen and how hard they are to fix. Once you have schism one thing you cannot agree on is who are the legitimate leaders of the church for the purposes of resolving doctrinal disputes. So the church's ability to convene the council of Nicea shows there is no significant schism. Why not? They all share the same faith that came down from Jesus and taught by the apostles and their successors. That makes perfect sense if you believe that story is true. But what if you don't? How does that kind of thing get started? We know it can start with a charismatic man who truly believes it. But if Jesus was not that then how does it start?

You don't see these questions addressed in modern historical scholarship. Whether from a liberal Christian perspective or a secular perspective historians just duck these questions. They look at the source documents and argue that they are not reliable. Then they go into a big hand waving exercise to say the Christian story just grew up over time. When were the 4 gospels written? You get different answers. But the question of how someone writes such a thing and it is just accepted by the church as authentic while other gospels are rejected as forgeries. The church does not divide over which ones to believe. They know. Again, makes sense if it is based on fact. It is hard to envision if it is not.