Reply to Mariottini

(Cross posted at God is for Suckers!)

Claude Mariottini has replied to my criticism of him--sort of. While the reply is addressed to me, most of it ignores what I actually wrote, with the exception of one patently false statement:

Hallquist already begins with the false assumption that the Iliad and the Bible are identical in purpose and message. They are not! The intent and message of the two books are completely different. The only similarity between both books is that they are literary works of individuals who lived hundreds of years ago.

Here go similarities two and three:

2) They both report the actions of superhuman beings which we don't observe acting in cthe modern world as they are alleged to have acted in ancient times.
3) They both present heroes doing things which, in the modern world, would get them hauled before a war crimes tribunal.

The entire rest of the post is a generic rant against atheists. Mariottini presents three points which are supposed to be a problem for atheism:

1. The Test of History. Judaism and Christianity claim a historical basis for their faith. Judaism says there is a God because of the work of God in the history of ancient Israel. Christianity says there is a God because of the existence of a historical Jesus. Atheism does not have any historical claim to prove that there is no God. Atheists only have their own statement that says there is no God. Since atheists do not have history on their side, they deny the historicity of events in Judaism and Christianity.

Was this intended as a rebuttal to the charge that there is a lack of evidence for the truth of Christianity? My guess is no. Read as arguments, the reasoning is vacuous, so bad that I think the most charitable reading is that Mariottini was intending to make baseless assertions. Consider the Judaism half of the statement: whether God worked in the history of Israel is precisely one of the points in dispute, so read as an argument, he's committing the fallacy of begging the question. On the Christianity half, there's no reason to jump from the claim that Jesus was a historical figure to the claim that God exists, so it's a blatant non sequitur. Might Mariottini be taking the position that a claim can become reasonable simply because people say it's true (Judaism says... Christianity says...)? I can only wonder.

2. The Test of Witnesses. Judaism and Christianity believe there is a God because they believe the words of witnesses who saw God at work. The people in Israel claimed they heard the voice of God. Christianity claims that after the resurrection, Jesus "appeared to more than five hundred people at the same time" (1 Corinthians 15:6). It is possible to say that these people were delusional or that they were unreliable witnesses but atheism does not have one witness who was there to say that there was no God. Since atheism does not have one single witness who has seen the evidence that there is no God, they reject the reliability of the biblical witnesses and deny the validity of their testimony.

The talk of witnesses implies Mariottini maybe does care about evidence after all. Notice that even here, though the statement is phrased in terms of what Christians claim, not what's objectively correct. In any case, the witnesses he refers to aren't witnesses in the usual sense of people who's testimony you have, they're the subject of a second hand report that isn't even so good as second hand reports go. Paul doesn't name his witnesses, say when or where the event happened, or even say where he got his information from. Contrary to what many apologists (Mariottini included, it would appear from the comments) would like to believe, irresponsible, poorly-checked claims get made all the time, so we cannot just assume Paul was telling the truth based on so little information. It's also clear that groups of people can fall under collective delusions (I've previously listed some examples here).

The complaint about lack of a witness to prove their is no God is one of those things that sounds good until you think about it for a moment. There are probably a few hundred people in the world willing to claim they've had personal contact with extraterrestrials. I've read things written by such people. I suspect that in Mariotinni's sense of the phrase, there are no witnesses to prove extraterrestrials have never visited Earth. Does this mean the UFO nuts are actually the reasonable ones? No. There are other explanations for why people would claim extraterrestrial contact, and the evidence really isn't as good as we'd expect if ETs were really visiting earth. As Carl Sagan once said, with so many people allegedly being abducted, why haven't the neighbors noticed? The situation is similar with Christianity: there are other explanations, and there's nowhere near the kind of evidence a god could give us if he were really intent on revealing himself.

3. The Test of Written Records. Judaism and Christianity claim that God exists because they have ancient written records that report the work of God in their history. Atheism has no written records that can prove that God does not exist, therefore they deny the claims of the written records of Judaism and Christianity.

Now we're back to baseless assertion territory. All kinds of extraordinary claims have been committed to paper. The mere existence of the writings is no reason at all to think the claims are true. This paragraph suggests to me that the apparent concern for evidence under (2) was a fluke, an illusion.

He makes a big deal of the claim that atheists cannot prove that there is no God, and cites Dawkins in support of this point. If "proof" is taken in the sense of logically demonstrative proof, Dawkins is right. However, as Dawkins points out in the very passage of his book that Mariotinni cites, there are lots of things which we justly regard as improbable in spite of the lack of logically demonstrative disproof (and, I would add, there are lots of things we regard as nearly certain in spite of the lack of logically demonstrative proof). Mariotinni's response to this point is to simply pretend Dawkins never made it.

Though I never said anything about the problem of evil in my original post, a paragraph is devoted to it. There's one weird aspect of it that's worth highlighting: all he says about proposed theodicies is that atheists don't accept them, as if that's the end of the debate. To simply whine that "I made this claim, and people who disagree with me didn't accept it" shows a sort of contempt for rational discourse, a refusal to recognize it's worth trying to carefully assess the validity of claims.

It's worth reading the comments thread, since Scott nails how silly the "culture of denial" business is:

That said, Atheism is not a even religion or philosophy but merely a position held with regard a particular truth claim: God exists. That position accepted, atheists can hold world views informed by skepticism, humanism or even mysticism. I assume that you yourself are an denier of the claims of Buddhism. Welcome to the Fellowship of Deniers.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Finally, in the comments Mariottini repeatedly says things like:

The primary intent of my post was to declare that atheists and Christians will never agree on several issues because they begin their discussion of the Bible with different presuppositions. Christians approach the Bible from the perspective of faith; atheists deny the possibility of faith.

Again, this smacks of a contempt for rational discourse. He's totally uninterested in asking whether an assumption is correct. I'm also curious by what he means by "faith." If he means the popular conception of believing things without evidence, the statement may be true, but it is not exactly a good commentary on his side. If group of scientists A did their best to figure out what theory was best supported by the evidence, and group B made a commitment to believing their pet theory independently of evidence, it might be true that they would never agree, but this would hardly be damaging to group A.

As with the last post in this exchange, I find myself moving further into the Hector Avalos camp.

Tags: Bible, Biblical scholarship, Hector Avalos, mythology

The outsider test to the rescue, again

(Cross posted at God is for Suckers)

Longtime readers of The Uncredible Hallq will know about the outsider test, a phrase coined by John Loftus for the idea that religious believers ought to be willing to examine their beliefs from the point of view of an outsider. Recently, I was taking a look at the recent Biblical studies carnival and found an excellent target for it. The host of the carnival, Claude Mariottini, had claimed in an interview that "Atheists cannot be good interpreters of the Bible." He then tried to defend himself.

Let's see if I can start with the most charitable statement of his position: atheists will misinterpret the Bible because they begin with false assumptions. I think he says a lot more than that, and the other stuff is far harder to defend, but let's start there. It has to be admitted that false assumptions are bad, and then, it would seem, we're just back to a debate about what view of the Bible is correct. Still, there's a wrinkle here: letting broad theories guide interpretations of specific data, rather than the other way around, can give awful results when taken too far. Witness the case of Biblical inerrantists who are forced to make up silly rules to guarantee nothing can ever count as an error in the Bible.

Even this position doesn't do all that well against the outsider test. Here, the outsider test would suggest that when we first look at an ancient text, we should treat like any other ancient text until we find real evidence that it really is the sort of super-special text which believers claim to have. Faith, or religious experiences no more impressive than those claimed by adherents of other religions, doesn't cut it here. It seems Mariottini is falling into this trap here, given that he never claims evidence for the Bible's special status, he just claims some mysterious edge in interpretation because he is a believer.

That was the best I could make out of his position. From here, it's all downhill for him.

First example: in his original interview, Mariottini justified his claim on the grounds that atheists "they already begin with the assumption that the Bible is a bunch of nothing." Roll that one around in your mind. Will classical scholars have difficulty understanding the Illiad because "they already begin with the assumption that the Illiad is a bunch of nothing"? No. Not believing the myths is different than believing they are "nothing." In a literal sense, myths are "something," therefore not nothing. More significantly, one can think an ancient text is fascinating, worth of serious study, without believing everything it says.

Moving on to the longer defense of the initial short comment, the first thing to notice is that he admits what he said wasn't exactly true:

It is possible that I made a mistake by putting all atheists in one group. Duane classifies himself “as a secular student with an interest in the Hebrew Bible.” Thus, his position on the Bible makes him different from the strident atheist whose sole aim is to ridicule the Bible.

Ooops, but what about these other atheists?:

Duane is a secular person who believes “that the Bible has had a tremendous influence on Western civilization.” His view is completely different from Bertrand Russell who believed that every bit of human progress in law, morality, and science has been opposed because of the teaching of the Bible. In his lecture “Why I Am Not A Christian,” Russell wrote: “A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”

Uh, sounds like Russell thought the Bible had a big influence on Western civilization too. More to the point, would Mariottini draw the same conclusions had Russell's remark been about some other mythological text? Of course one can think that we shouldn't be slaves to ancient mythology and still study it seriously. Russell's remark could even be defensibly applied to some ancient philosophers; the ancients often did say foolish things and Russell does occasionally point them out in his writings. Does that disqualify him from doing good writing about the history of philosophy? Of course not.

Or, consider this argument:

Atheists like Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens approach the Bible with such a negative view that for them, the Bible is a book of lies and contradictions and the work of a demon.

Obviously, none of these guys think that the Bible is literally the work of a demon. I can't say for sure that any of them have actually said anything to suggest that position; the quote Mariottini has in mind is from Thomas Paine (a deist, by the way). The demon comment is rather obviously true if it means that the Bible presents hideously amoral actions in a glowing light, though that standard would classify an awful lot of human production as demonaic. I've previously written about how Biblical attrocities were par for the course in the ancient world. Or, look at the Illiad again: the plot of the book revolves around the question of which military commander gets to have a particular woman as a sex slave. The part about lies and contradictions is similarly off-the-wall: of course ancient writers sometimes lied, of course a diverse collection of texts written over several centuries will not be totally harmonious with itself. In the case of contradictions, the only reason anybody cares about most of the Biblical contradictions that get talked about is because so many people are convinced that the Bible is 100% error free.

Bottom line: there's nothing wrong with scholars recognizing attrocities, contradictions, and deceit in the text they study. Beyond that, anybody who find such things inconceivable really shouldn't be teaching college studets how to do scholarship and shouldn't be claiming to have produced serious scholarly work.

Finally, check this one out:

So, how can strident atheists interpret the Bible when they do not believe in God, deny the possibility of revelation, reject the concept of inspiration, do not believe in divine intervention, faith, prayer, the possibility of miracles, or the concept of divine justice?

This is the sort of rhetorical question that's annoying because it's meant to look like an argument, but contains no logical content. Fans of this approach like it because their opponents have difficulty answering the question, but the difficulty comes from the total lack of substance in it. How can strident a-Olympians interpret the Illiad when they do not believe in the Olympians, deny the possibility of Oracles, reject the concept of inspiration by Muses... these are questions for where I'm not holding my breath for an answer.

Recently, I took the position that Hector Avalos' "End of Biblical Studies" thesis is overblown. People like Mariottini make me wonder if maybe Avalos is right, though.

Tags: Bible, Biblical scholarship, Hector Avalos. mythology

The end of Biblical studies?

Higgaion is doing a series reviewing Hector Avalos' book The End of Biblical Studies. Many readers may already know Avalos as a professor who led a petition drive against Ingelligent Design, and provoked some rather silly attacks because of it. From what it sounds like, Avalos' new book makes plenty of good points, but the thesis seems over stated. Liberal scholarship has its share of crap, just as much as Evangelicalism, really, but that doesn't mean the field should be abandoned all together.

Tags: Bible, Biblical scholarship, Hector Avalos

The perks of reading Asimov's

I was a fairly big sf&f reader in high school, but in college I decided I no longer had time to regularly read long novels, so I switched to short stories and got myself a subscription to the magazine Asimov's. I've discovered one of the cooler features of the magazine is the the "reflections" essay, which presents information on all kinds of random subjects. I suppose in theory it's supposed to be the sort of stuff a science fiction writer might work into a story, but almost anything can fit under that heading. One particularly memorable one talked about the author's fantasy of becoming Pope Sixtus the Sixth (there have been five popes named Sixtus thus far).

The most recent issue (September 2007, featuring "The Good Ship Lollypop") contains a piece that makes the entire issue worth buying just for it. Really, go out and buy it. It discusses ancient Assyrian texts in which kings brag about their slaughters of enemy citizens. The writer connects it with the present situation in Iraq and imagines Saddam reading these texts and idolizing the kings, but it has other applications. Readings of such texts are the best antidote to the popular delusion that human nature became suddenly depraved in the 20th century. They're also good context for Biblical accounts of divinely ordered slaughters: it makes clear that the reason for the slaughters was not because God really had a good reason for them, nor, on the other hand, because the Israelites were especially depraved, but rather simply because that was how war was done at the time.

Tags: science fiction, Asimov's, Saddam, Bible, Old Testament