Dishonesty and 'T'ruth vs real truth

For decades (possibly even centuries) Christians have been champions of possessing Truth -- capital T -- which clashes with truth -- little t -- the knowledge of humans and their real world around them. The story told by Christians regarding evolution and creationism is the perfect and most clear example of this. Just look at the NYT article about the "strengths and weaknesses" debate in Texas. Much has been written about this article in science realms, so I need not go into that. I merely wish to point out this dualism of truth. The line in the article which shows this most starkly is this:

"Dr. McLeroy, the board chairman, sees the debate as being between “two systems of science.”
“You've got a creationist system and a naturalist system,” he said."

That is the reality of the difference of 'T'ruth and truth. Paul wrote in Romans, "For if the truth of God has increased through my lie to His glory, why am I also still judged as a sinner?" [Rom 3:7 NKJV]. So we see that dishonesty is part and staple of furthering Truth. This is because the Truth of God's kingdom may mean lying about the truth of this material world. This is an ingrained belief of Christianity since the days the New Testament was written. It is exactly why the reality of this world can be so easily discarded by fundamental Christians, because what is true in reality has no value in God's realm. Just look at the only source of evidence of this Truth; the bible. It was written and interpreted by humans, living in the material realm. Yet it is the only source of God's realm where Truth exists. Thus the contradiction, the only source of God's realm of truth is via a materialistic, humanistic, realm of truth. If Truth can only be learned via the material (the bible), and the material has no value when compared to the Truth of God's realm, then there can be no way to know the Truth. That is where faith steps in, in God's realm of Truth.

This contradiction means that the only thing in the material realm -- that realm which we all know and experience on a daily basis -- that can be True is the bible. All else can neither be trusted or even called true. We see this to be fact in relation to evolution and the stance of people like Dr McElroy. If this obvious contradiction were to be lived out to its fullest by believing Christians, then they should be even more reactionary than the Amish or Mennonites who reject modern technology. For all that is built upon the backs of science and materialistic fact. Yet they do not reject the reality of modern technology. That contradiction of Truth vs truth is laid bare and completely ignored.

If only Christians could step back and look at themselves; their beliefs and real world practices, then they would be ashamed. They would all move to reject literalism because of its disasterous realities and all embrace a more liberal form of Christianity. Not that I see that happening any time soon though. The blinders that keep the strictly materialistic Bible firmly ensconced in this supernatural ether of God's realm cannot be lifted by logic, reality or truth. The lie of Paul has already cemented that.

When it comes down to it, the real difference between fundamental Christians and atheists is simple, These Christians want to accept as true something which they cannot know in a materialistic sense, and atheists only accept those things which are knowable in the materialistic sense. This total lack of understanding between the two groups is founded on this basic lack of fundamental cooperation.

Christians will never take a step back and look at their beliefs from a fact-based and true perspective, and atheists will never give in to the idea that the completely unknowable (i.e. faith) has any merit whatsoever to determine what is True and what is true only in the material realm.

It becomes obvious that 'T'ruth is inherantly dishonest, in that it relies on materialism and humanity but claims to be the pure extraction of the exact opposite; the Godly realm. Paul and his 'lies for God' and the constant lying about the truth of this material world are inherant staples of the fundamental Christian psyche. There is no distinction between dishonesty about the real world and professed faith in the 'T'ruth of the bible. Anyone, even every single Christian, can know the truth of this world via our amassed knowledge, but no one, no even one single solitary Christian can know anything about the Truth of God's realm, without faith -- the simple act of merely believing it is true without any way to know it is true.

I am sure we will return to this philosophical and theological discussion again in the future.

Religion and Apologies

I have a simple question. Why must a Christian or a particulr Christian religious sect apologize for something they preach? That sounds like a simple enough question, doesn't it?



But when you look at the apology of Rev. Hagee regarding the Catholic Church, Barak Obama regarding Rev Wright, the Catholic Church regarding Jews and WWII; and I should add the non (missing) apologies of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell regarding their "blame America first" excuse for the 9/11 attacks. You see a pattern. That pattern is that the apologies ring hollow, and missing apologies ring sincere. There is no apology for Christian doctrine. There cannot be. Just like Rev. Wright meant what he said, so did Jerry Falwell (along with Pat Robertson's agreement), Rev. Hagee, etc. They were not just "spouting off" they were saying things which are central to their Christian beliefs. They believe that of course the gays and the abortionists are responisble for 9/11 and hurricane Katrina. They view those as sins. So how can they take them back and apologize? They cannot.


The same is true for Hagee and his comments about the Catholic Church. According to his religious beliefs, it is the "great whore."


So are these people denying their core Christian doctrines? That would certainly be hard to do and yet remain true to their faith. It must, therefore, be talking out of the side of their mouths -- lying. For you cannot claim that you believe something to be absolutely true and recorded as such in the bible, then turn around and claim that you misspoke or said something that is more emotionally charged than based upon biblical teachings. For that makes no sense. You cannot have it both ways, telling everyone that morality is clear and absolute and defined in the bible, then turn around and say that you said something that you claimed was in the bible, but now apologize for because it isn't true.

I think what we see in reality is this: Preachers (et al) believe that the bible is true and their teachings are correct, but that they must be kept within the confines of the faithful. Once they make it out into the larger public, they must be denied. In other words, the public cannot handle the truth.

This means that there is some sort of disconnect between reality and biblical Truth. To most anyone, that disconnect begins and ends with reality.

[The irony is that this whole situation is a deep-seated throwback to pre-Christian religion precursors known as the "Mystery Religions"; Religious sects amazingly similar to Christianity in their views and details and who held that their most sacred religious truths had to be kept secret except for those few initiated into the inner sanctum. Sound familiar?]

Nature of God is it Defined by Humans?

Jason Rosenhouse over at Evolutionblog has a very interesting post up regarding theistic evolution. I highly recommend that you read it. I'm not going to summarize it here. I am really only interested in his money-quote:

People like Ayala, Miller and Conway Morris are surely among the best theistic evolution has to offer, yet their arguments represent the crassest sort of desperation and special pleading. Ayala's argument for why evolution resolves the problem of evil is afflicted with obvious holes. (Lest you think that the Times article was too short for him to develop his argument seriously, let me assure you this is not the case. I have read his book, and he does not provide any additional illumination there.) Miller's argument is based on an obviously false premise, and even taken it at face value does not explain why Darwinian evolution specifically had to be the mechanism through which God created. Conway Morris' argument is almost certainly false biologically, but even leaving that aside it leaves us in no better position theologically than the ID folks. If we can not explain why God directly creates nasty creatures, we also can not
explain why he sets in motion a process that inevitably leads to nasty creatures. [Again, read Rosenhouse's article for this quote's context]

The tangent he presents here is what I am interested in. I rarely discuss theology here (I prefer the cold hard testimony found in the bible as the basis for my philosophical discussions and reasons to not believe in God.) But theology here is what is in question, and I think it is a very interesting question. The question is all about the nature of God. From the bible we are privy to many human-filtered aspects of God's nature; He is all-powerful, all-knowing, loving, jealous, vengeful, just, and above all perfectly moral (but only because he is defined that way -- or should I say that morality is solely defined against the background of what God considers moral). Thus when we come across passages in the bible such as this: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." [Isaiah 45:7 (KJV)]

If we define God to be all good and all moral, then it must be moral for God to create evil. This is the loophole that is used by all theistic evolutionists which Rosenhouse is discussing. He nails the root of the problem that whether God directly created nasty and vile things, or just set up the process which would lead to nasty and vile things is no different. In a weak analogy, it would be like a car designer actively causing a cars brakes to fail by cutting the brake lines, or passively causing the brakes to fail by designing the brakes to eventually wear out, but do nothing to inform the car-owner of this defect. In both cases the brakes fail and the driver is injured.

So what we really have here is a question about the nature of God. We have the creationists on one side who claim god created everything exactly as it is, and on the other we have theistic evolutionists who claim that God set in motion a process which would lead to humans and nasty and vile things. But both have the clear problem that God created evil and sin and nastiness and suffering. This was Rosenhouse's point.

I would like to build on that and step ever-so-lightly into the realm of theology. Clearly the bible and Christianity define the nature of God. Those are our only sources for what the nature of God is. We certainly cannot determine the nature of God from independent sources. Nature and our (humanity's) own personal experiences cannot ascertain God's nature, because of the simple fact that we can never intersect with God. The only way to know the nature of God is what He intentionally reveals to us through super-natural interactions. The only problem with this, is the we (humanity) and nature have no means with which to filter this information, for we have no access to the supernatural; we have no knowledge of the rules and "nature" of the supernatural. All we have is nature itself.

This leads inevitably to two possible conclusions. The first is that religion (Christianity) must, by default, re-interpret the nature of God via the nature of humanity. Thus God is defined by human terms and given human characteristics. The second is that if the supernatural is undefinable because its rules and nature are by definition, unknowable, then it cannot be determined in any sense to be real or imagined. That is the exact definition of agnosticism. (As a side note, then atheism would be defined as saying that anything that is unknowable is not real until it can be shown to be real -- in other words atheism is the simple rejection of the existence of anything that cannot be proven real.)

I am interested solely in the first proposition. That God is supernatural and His nature is defined in the only way possible, via human terms and knowledge and experience. Thus any conception of God is a product of the incomplete knowledge and experience of humanity. I think it is then obvious to say that God can only exist in the natural realm because of humans. Humans place upon god their very own qualities and characteristics. Humanity knows of power, knowledge, justice, compassion, hatred, violence, meekness, and fealty. Thus those are the very qualities that humanity bestows upon their god. Humanity's god(s) is (are) simply super-sized expressions of humanity's own characteristics. In fact there are no qualities bestowed upon God (any god) which are completely non-present within humanity.

This, to me, is the most fascinating (and shall I say, damning) aspect of God; either God is severely limiting only to humanistic qualities, or there exists no qualities beyond the grasp of humanity. In other words, God is nothing but a "super-sized" human. God's qualities are all the perfections of all human characteristics. God can kill in a more perfect way than humanity, God can save in a more perfect way than humans. god is more powerful, more knowing, etc. But then have we not defined just what the supernatural is?

If the supernatural realm in which God resides is simply a drastic expansion of the qualities of the natural, then we are left with a clear theological problem. The supernatural realm cannot possess qualities with which we have counterpart. For example, time must be drastically expanded in the supernatural. But this leads to a real problem. Just like the problem of God being all good, but by default God has to allow evil to exist, God is all-powerful, but he does not have the power to simple will the devil out of existence. There is a limit to God's infinite powers. There must also be a limit to time. Again, this is all because we have seen that everything in the natural realm is greatly expanded in the supernatural realm if there is to be a supernatural realm at all. Also there can be nothing in the supernatural which isn't also represented in the natural realm, because we would be helpless to grasp it at all. Thus time itself must exist in the supernatural. And like power and goodness, it has its limits as well.

This means one thing. Time had to begin in the supernatural just as it did in the natural. It also means that God is a slave to time just as we are.

Thus: If we attribute to God qualities which we have as humans, and we have to limit those powers of God because if the powers of God were unlimited, then the natural world would not look like it does (and that is our only possible evidence at all). Then all attributes we give over to God must be similarly limited. But this means God is also a slave to time as well. God cannot be infinitely old. God had to have a beginning. This is certainly true in the same way other qualities of God are so limited. But if God had a beginning, then he had a cause too. Maybe that is the super-supernatural realm. I.e. the god that God worships.

But here is the crux. God by godly-constraint, has to allow evil and nasty things to exist, and He had to create them because He is the creator of all. God had to do this because he had to give humans free-will to choose between good and evil. They could not have free will if there was no choice to make. Thus God is responsible directly and absolutely for all the nastiness and evil and vile things. This is the blight on the supernatural chacter of God. For that is not all-good. The alternative is that humans do not have free will. Then the case is that either all humans go to heaven becuase they had no freedom of will to do evil, or those that did evil were specifically designed by God to be evil humans condemned to eternity in hell. In the second case God is a monster who deserves no respect and is completely deviod of even the most basic morals of humanity. In the first case, God created beings who are irrelevant, their lives have no meaning whether they are mother Theresa or Adolf Hitler.

If God created evil and allows free will, then the morality of the will is dependant on humanity, not on God, because God is just as limited and flawed as all humanity, just on a magnified scale.

See how confusing that all is when you want to bring the supernatural into the natural, especially when you can only claim to know about the supernatural those things which you already know about the natural.

Isn't it all much simpler when you only pay attention to those things which you can know and determine? That being the purely natural world. And that world has no god.

[Update:] As an analogy, suppose you are an American. You live by all the rules of America. You are well informed of the culture and livelihood of America. Now you come across an obvious foreigner. That person also abides by all the rules and laws of America. You also learn that that person has lived in America since their onset of adulthood. But you are unconvinced. You want to research that person. You find that that person has never been arrested, and in fact, has been a part of catching the bad guys in America. You would judge that person to be just and moral by the rules and laws of America. But heres the thing, you do not know his country of origin, you do not know if that person is a criminal in that country at all. You have no idea what the laws and morality of that country is, so you has no means to judge or determine the goodness of that person based on the rules and laws of his country of origin. You only have the powers and knowledge of your own country. That is God. We can only judge him and evaluate him based on our own knowledge and experience. And that means that we have an independent means and method with which to judge God. Thus god is subject to our rules and knowledge and experience. Not the other way around. That means we have no need for a God in the first place. So not only do we have no way of knowing if he really exists, we do not need him in the first place.