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J. L. Schellenberg, "What God Would Have Known: How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian Doctrine" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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This is Carrie Lynn Evans welcoming you back to New Books and Secularism, a podcast channel on the New Books Network today. I'm looking forward to sharing with you what God Would have How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian doctrine by Professor J.L. shellenberg. This book links facts about human intellectual and moral development to what any God who existed at the time of Jesus would have known, and on the basis of that connection it crafts 20 new arguments for the conclusion that classical Christian doctrine is false. These arguments represent what Schellenberg calls the problem of contrary development, human origins in deep time, human religion, the formation of the New Testament, human psychology, violence, sex and gender. Advances in our understanding on all these fronts are brought into interaction with the doctrines of sin, spiritual helplessness, salvation, the divinity of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and revelation, with the result that the latter are shown to be vulnerable to refutation in new ways. The book concludes by developing in connection with its results two Christian versions of the problem of divine hiddenness and an argument against the existence of God from the historical success but salvific failure of Christianity. By taking account of all these things, philosophers can bring a better balance to work on Christianity in philosophy, negotiating a shift from Christian philosophy to the philosophy of Christianity J.L. shellenberg is professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University and adjunct professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He did his doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, resulting in the book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, which introduced a new argument against the existence of a personal God known as the Hiddenness Argument. He joins me today to talk about his latest book. Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books and Secularism. John, thanks so much for being here.
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Thank you for having me.
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So I want to begin by asking you about your background because I believe you started life as a practicing Mennonite Christian. So how did you end up as an irreligious philosopher?
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Well, I grew up in a fervently evangelical household. We were ethnically Mennonite, but being Mennonite is a bit like being Jewish. There's an ethnic side, there's a religious side. At any rate, for many people there's that sort of division. And it was only after I left home that I learned what was involved in the religious side of being a Mennonite, which includes, for example, a strong emphasis on non violence spoken into Mennonite spirituality in a variety of ways. And then I was a practicing Mennonite Christian for a time. But when I grew up I Also encountered the books that eventually changed my mind about religious matters. All kinds of books that I hadn't been exposed to within the narrow parameters of my childhood. Books including things like biblical criticism and philosophical arguments. And then I went to university and started producing some philosophical arguments of my own and even wrote some books. So I guess you could say, long story short, that books are to blame. And isn't that appropriate for this venue?
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It is indeed, all that pesky knowledge. So next I want to ask you about how this particular book came to be.
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Yeah, fast forward about 40 years. Actually, it's probably more than that by now. But in those 40 years, I developed a whole variety of ideas and arguments. And most recently, these included the stage sensitivity idea and the idea of stage sensitivity, that's what I call it, sensitivity to our stage of development as a species, which I regard as a pretty early stage. And I saw that there was a way of applying this idea which I had been working on outside of this context of Christianity. There was a way of applying this idea to Christian issues. And I thought also that by developing it in this way, by applying it in this way, I might produce something that's not yet available in the philosophy of religion, which is a detailed and careful criticism of Christian doctrines. There are a lot of Christian philosophers in the philosophy of religion, and they're working on the basis of Christian claims. But it would be a sad thing if philosophical treatment of Christianity were restricted to. That seems to me to be big enough, open enough to include also the criticism of Christian ideas and perhaps discussion of alternatives, including perhaps Christian alternatives to classical Christian ideas. So it occurred to me that perhaps I could help in some small way to promote a shift, a shift from this emphasis that we see today in the philosophy of religion on Christian philosophy to what I call the philosophy of Christianity, which is quite different.
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B
Yeah. So let's start by defining terms. You characterize your debate as challenging what you call the classical claims of Christianity by focusing on examples of human development. So what do you mean precisely by both classical Christianity and human development?
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Okay, let's take those one at a time. I'm going to grab my glasses. There's a footnote in the introduction to my book, Page one, footnote one, where I address your first question. So I'll just read a little bit from this footnote. I say that I use the word classical to indicate that the Christian claims about reality at issue here are those that have been with us the longest and that have been most influential in Christian history. Claims mentioned or suggested in the Christian New Testament, given official formulations in the Church councils of the 4th and 5th centuries, and interpreted and reinterpreted by Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant theologians for Christian communities around the world in all the centuries thereafter. I use classical in preference to traditional. And now I'm coming back from that footnote. Traditional can have a pejorative connotation, and I don't want to include any such thing in this book. And so I've opted to use the word classical instead. And that's what I mean by it. I guess I could also, at the same time say something about what I mean by the classical Christian doctrines. This is starting on page five in the book at the bottom, where I say that here I'm content to follow one of those Christian philosophers I was referring to before, a fairly influential guy named Alvin Plantinga, who now I'm quoting again, affording God the classical attributes involving unsurpassable knowledge, power, love and creative responsibility, has this to say. Now, quoting from planting a classical Christian belief includes in the first place, the belief that there is such a person as God. This is the theistic component of Christian belief. But there's also the uniquely Christian component, that we human beings are somehow mired in rebellion or sin, that we consequently require deliverance and salvation, and that God has arranged for that deliverance through the sacrificial suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who was both a man and also the second member of the Trinity, a uniquely divine son of God. So packed into that sentence, you see quite a number of the Christian doctrines that I focus on in my book, as you can see, going from chapter to chapter, talking about sin, salvation, the Incarnation, Trinity and so on. These I regard as the classical Christian doctrines, central Christian doctrines. And now the second question was about human development, right, the term human development. Yeah. This is more than just evolution, more than just evolution, which just means change. I'm thinking about improving change. So improvement, human improvement over time, improvement at the large scale when thinking about our species, Homo sapiens, across time. And of course, there's a deep time, so you have to zoom out and get an imaginative picture of our species from beginning to end, starting out about 300,000 years ago, coming towards the present. And my focus is especially on intellectual and moral improvements that have been witnessed in the last few hundred years. So coming right close to the present in that picture. And still more specifically, I'm focused on improving changes involving things like biological evolution, human religion, the nature of religion, the Bible, the formation of the Bible criticism, biblical criticism, especially the New Testament, and then Everything we've learned in human psychology, what we have learned about violence and also about gender and sexuality. Now, as you can see from the last item on that list, one could be thought to be entering controversial territory here. But I stick to improvements that most of us will by now regard to be improvements. For example, an emphasis on the full equality of men and women. Now, in connection with these improvements, it's important to see something that is central to the book but seems generally unnoticed outside the book, or at least unnoted, and that is that all of these things that we've worked so hard to learn to discover, that we've had to labor to discover over much time, all of these things, God, if there were a God, would always have known. And so that's the connection to the title of the book. God would always have known these things. And so we can think about how any God there may be would have been disposed at the time of Jesus, knowing all these things that we've just come to know through great difficulty because of human development. God would have known all these things way back when Jesus was walking the earth and when Christian doctrines were being promulgated. And this is the point, that God would have known all these things. This is a point on which each of the arguments in the book turns.
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And to be honest, that's why I was really attracted to your book when I first saw mention of its publication, is because these types of arguments have always been the most persuasive to me in my own thinking about why disbelief makes more sense to me personally. And so that leads me into my question about context, because I was really interested to hear what you had to say about how this book in particular and these ideas fit into the larger context of the scholarly discussion around these ideas. Because you say that so much of the skepticism of Christian claims that you've found focus possibly too narrowly on arguments from science or from a broader disbelief in the supernatural, and you engage more specifically with dogma, like you've already been alluding to, like, these are the claims of Christianity. This is compared to what we know now. This is what God should have known if we accept the idea that he's omniscient, knowing the future and fully understanding human nature, et cetera. So, yeah. Could you say a little bit more about. Yeah. How you fit in with the discourse?
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Yeah. It's a somewhat different focus from what you commonly find among critics of Christianity or of religion generally, or coming to grips with the details in this case of classical Christian doctrine. Critics are often more concerned with what they happen to find important, which is often science or concerned with that than with what Christians find important. And this is a natural disposition. But I think the approach is less effective than it would be if we think about things like human development more generally. I mean, just thinking about science, I remember reading about how Darwin, Charles Darwin would go for walks with the local vicar. They were good friends. The local vicar had no trouble adapting to evolution. So Christians have much less trouble getting along with science than people who are enamored of science. Often supposed to be the case. But I think with the right sort of attention to human development and now I mean moral as well as intellectual development, I think we can show the Christian doctrine may fail intellectually in its own terms. On its own terms, I myself in, in my history have defended more general claims which entail the Christian doctrine is false. I mean, if you develop, as I've done, arguments against the existence of God, arguments for atheism as it's commonly understood, disbelief in God. Well, if there's no God, then there's no Christian God. So, you know, you can just infer from the conclusion of such general arguments the Christian doctrine is false. But it's interesting to consider problems. I've recently come to think it interesting to consider problems that more directly affect Christian claims per se. In any case, I wanted to see what arguments are lurking here, set them out carefully, and so gain a new level of understanding in this domain. I remember giving a paper once in Toronto, I believe it was not far from where you are, I think, And I was talking to some graduate students, and these were themselves budding Christian philosophers. And they knew that I had developed arguments against the existence of God. And for that reason, if for no other, you know, would not be a Christian believer. But they were quite interested in learning what I might have to say in criticism of Christian ideas per se. And I realized I hadn't thought a whole lot about the specifics of Christian doctrine. And so that was one of the things that motivated me to have a more careful look at what's going on in the details of Christian ideas. And then especially when thinking about human development and thinking about how God would have known everything that we've come to know through human development, a spark was lit and things went from there.
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That's really interesting that they wouldn't have thought about it that much.
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Well, they, these young. Now, these young graduate students have thought quite a bit, I expect, about how to defend Christian doctrine. Maybe not as much as they might have about critiques. But then I've had to go away and think harder about that myself in order to give them something to feed on possibly in the future. And the Christian philosophers they're often emulating haven't given any attention at all to detailed criticism of their own views, which is really not exactly what one might hope for from philosophers. So I'm trying to prod people to maybe have a better look at all sides of the question of whether Christian claims are true.
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Well, I'm glad you are. Yeah. Okay, let's get into it, then. So your first chapter sets the groundwork by elaborating on the explosion in human intellectual development over the last 200 years, like you mentioned. So in addition to science about the natural world and the universe, this development includes insights from the study of religion and specifically the study of Christianity as an evolving social phenomenon contingent on texts and their imperfect preservation and influenced by prevailing contemporaneous ideas and trends. So let's start there. Can you tell us about that?
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Sure. In chapter one, I have this imaginary character. I call him Ernest, who lives in Cambridge, England, in 1820, so 200 years ago. And I have him stumble on a book. I mean, this shows exactly how imaginary this is. Stumbles on a book in which are recorded all of the improving changes to come in the following 200 years. Huge changes. And this, you know, blows his mind. And so we can think, given what you've emphasized in your question, we can think about what would surprise Ernest about Christianity specifically, but what changes occur in human thinking about Christianity in the 200 years to come, 200 years between 1820 and our own day. And so I mentioned a few points here. One is about what we could call equalization. Equalization between Christianity and other religious traditions as they're studied, the context of religious studies in our university. Of course, there wouldn't have been anything like our religious studies in 1820. There would have been lots of theology, not religious studies as we know it today. And in religious studies as we know it today, Christianity is studied alongside other religious traditions, which, by the way, contradict its claims with the same kinds of explanatory factors coming into play developed by social scientists, anthropologists, all kinds of thinkers. Explanatory factors involving things like the gradual refinement of a certain kind of belief in what anthropologists would call a big God. There are various religious traditions that have evolved from big God thinking, and Christianity is just one of them. And also the exposure of, for example, fractious disputes about details of doctrine as the doctrine was developed involving not just religious figures, but political figures too. In the Christian case, it's the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea who is most often referenced. But there are plenty of other examples. So in this context, Christianity doesn't maybe seem quite so special, quite so distinctively significant as it would have appeared to Ernest in 1820. So that's the first point about equalization. The second point that might seem surprising to Ernest would have to do with the New Testament. You mentioned something about the development of texts, religious texts. The New Testament is the main text here or collection of texts. Ernest would learn that, for example, the Gospels were not written by the disciples of Jesus, they were written by some unknown Greek speaking writers. Several decades after the death of Jesus, he would learn that some of the epistles, some of the letters in the New Testament attributed to the apostle Paul, weren't actually written by Paul. Interesting facts like that, which might also seem somewhat disconcerting. And thirdly, about the character of Jesus, the person of Jesus, things like this, that Jesus and his first followers may very well have been illiterate. A good number of biblical scholars would go further and say that's quite probable given what we know today about the culture of the time, the situation that Jesus and his followers would have been in living in that part of the world, and that Jesus himself as a thinker, starting at the end of Ernest century, end of the 19th century, a guy named Johannes Weiss, a German thinker, and then at the Beginning of the 20th century, another German thinker named Albert Schweitzer developing the idea that Jesus himself was an apocalyptic prophet. And this idea has been hugely influential in the 20th and 21st century today. There's probably a near consensus. Well, there is a near consensus among biblical scholars on this point that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. What does that mean? That means that Jesus of Nazareth was expecting imminently an in breaking of God into history, that God would dramatically, radically break into history and change things enormously. You know, things had got pretty bad and so God would break into history and do some dramatic things to change everything, to produce a renewed earth and a renewed heaven. But in particular there was an emphasis on a renewed earth where God would reign. An emphasis on the kingdom of God, taken quite literally with Jesus perhaps having a special position in this kingdom of God. So not the sort of thing that Ernest with his placid, no doubt Anglican Christianity would be thinking about in 1820, you know, eternity in a supernatural heaven, but rather a renewed earth, renewed in a very fiery fashion, a renewed earth where God would reign, the kingdom of God. So ideas like that, I Expect would also surprise Ernest.
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So another extremely important development, in my view, is our discovery and continued understanding of psychology, mental illness and biological factors in human behavior, all of which necessarily dramatically affects our understanding of morality and what Christians would call sin. This would, I'm sure, deeply affect Ernest. And other insights emerge from our developing understandings of psychology and biology relating to issues of sex, gender and sexual behavior. Finally, humanity has evolved on the notion of contextually appropriate violence. So these work together, as you point out, to pose a number of enormous problems, it seems to us anyways, for many important tenets of classical Christian thinking.
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Yeah, those problems that you mentioned are set out one at a time in subsequent chapters of the book. What I might highlight here is a point that emerges more than once in the book, that a great deal of Christian thought rests on the assumption of a certain kind of free will that's related to everything you were talking about when mentioning sin psychology and what we learned from biology and so on. The assumption of a special kind of free will which humans allegedly possess, which in philosophers call a libertarian, anti deterministic sort of free will, the sort of free will you only have if determinism is false. Determinism is the belief that everything that happens, including all of our choices, are made to be what they are by prior states of the world past, and the laws of nature determine whatever we do. That's determinism. And the kind of free will that's required for us to have the sort of moral responsibility goes with, for example, the doctrine of sin as opposed to determinism. And yet one of the things that's happened because of human development in the last hundreds of years is that we've got a whole lot of new evidence for precisely for determinism from science, including especially the evolutionary and social sciences, which have a direct bearing on human choices. And interestingly, you don't have to go. This is a strategic move on my part, I suppose. You don't need to go all the way to determinism, just noticing that even if you're not a determinist these days, you're going to have to accept that an awful lot of what we do clearly is explained fully by what we learn from the sciences. Even just saying that, which is to concede, even if we don't have determinism, we have what I call near determinism. Even that's enough to cause some serious problems for doctrines of Christianity that are related to the idea of free will. A great many of our choices and actions, if there is a God, result from how God set up the world, which is part of what we're coming to know. Christians too would have to say the Word through human development, coming to see a great deal more as time goes on about how God set up the world. So if that's the case, then God is very often morally responsible for our choices and actions, not us, because they result from how God set up the world. And this has consequences for how we should think about doctrines like the doctrine of sin.
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Yeah, so let's move to thinking about sin. The Christian definition of sin involves, and I'll quote you here, a disruption or disordering of relationships between humans and God. And according to doctrine, sin is the root cause of human suffering. So perhaps I'm oversimplifying here, but it seems to me that you're basically pointing out that the worst pain and evils, so to speak, I'm not 100% sure I love that word that people actually endure. Do not line up with this notion of sin that we get from classical Christianity. And that sin simplistically ignores realities of human psychology, which we can see with our own eyes. Thus, following the Christian prescription for eradicating sin won't necessarily improve human lives, as classical Christianity promises. So do I have that right? Am I characterizing that the way you would.
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Well, what it takes to remove sin and the sorts of improvement for our lives promised by classical Christianity which you were mentioning there. These are subjects for future chapters. In this one, the focus is on whether what Christianity says about sin per se, that it exists at all and that it is the worst thing in human life, the focus is on whether that's true. I argue, among other things, that the doctrine of sin assigns to us a far greater degree of responsibility for bad actions than the facts of human life will support, including those involving the near determinism I was mentioning a moment ago. The doctrine of sin also entails that all humans are dominated by a certain kind of desire, self oriented desire, when there appeared to be all kinds of exceptions to that rule. And part of what we're getting from human development is more and more examples. Even what we've learned about the hunter gatherers is relevant in here. Some of them survived into the present or close to the present. You could take the San people groups of the Kalahari Desert in Africa who are or were. I mean, they've been more and more assimilated into the wider population recently, but they were very content with very little. They regarded themselves as affluent when they had really not an awful lot at all point. Egalitarian community and so an example of ways in which human beings often seem not to be dominated by self oriented desire. We can multiply examples like that. And finally, although the doctrine says that sin is the worst human problem and exhibited in all of us, I mean all of us are supposed to be sinners, according to this view. Doesn't seem to me that it stands up very well alongside what we know, but other really bad things. And the list gets longer and longer from what we learn about the details of human life. Not just naturally caused pain. Also the extent of our ignorance, ordinary ignorance, sort of a side effect of human development. Learning about how much we don't know and maybe didn't know for great stretches of time, so naturally cause pain, ordinary ignorance, tribalism. We've been learning a lot more about the influences of that. Cognitive biases, that's a fairly recent discovery. Mental illnesses and disorders, we're learning a lot about the details of that and there's a lot of bad stuff there. And we've also been learning about or can provide evidence for claims about big disparities, differences between some human beings and others. It's not as though there's this equalization in this case, an equalization that Christianity seems to have to insist upon, that everyone, as sin is sinful, is dominated by this self oriented desire. It seems that most of us are morally mediocre rather than really bad. Certainly there are bad things going on and people doing them. But it's illuminating to consider that around the world less than half of 1% of the population is in prison and more than 90% of prisoners are male. So those are examples of what I call disparities, disparities between some human beings and others. When the relevant sort of badness, according to the Christian doctrine of sin is supposed to be hunkered down in all of us. Long and the short of it is that Christians have been believing misinformation about sin. God of course, would have known the truth all along, so we shouldn't imagine that God believes the doctrine of sin.
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B
I think part of my issue with the concept of sin as well is that I always understood it growing up in church that it was kind of synonymous with immorality. And yet there's a lot of things that get swept up into the Christian notion of sin that have nothing to do with morality. Like the Ten Commandments about preparing your sacrifices in the correct way and, you know, not working on Sunday, which some religious folks do have such ideas, but the version of Christianity I grew up with didn't. And so there's all of these extra things that it seemed to me that sin was this different classification of things that were just against Christian doctrine, but so many Christians seem to equate it with immorality and that doesn't seem to fit to me.
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Well, certain kinds of immorality, what would generally be regarded perhaps, or at least regarded by many of us is immorality would give you examples of the domination of self oriented desire. Right. When you look at bad things that people do, things that we regard as immoral, many of them do involve a kind of self orientation. So that probably is the connection between immorality and the doctrine of sin. Or at least it's one that Christians could insist upon when it comes to the rules that you mentioned. I guess we could make a distinction between sin and the kinds of behavior that Christians might prompt us to observe in order to overcome sin. So all kinds of rules may be developed because people think, well, if you follow these rules then maybe you'll be able to avoid sin, or maybe you can internalize the following of such rules and in that way you may be able to overcome sin. I think perhaps that's a good way of thinking about the presence of rules in the context you described.
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Mm, I think you're right. I agree with you. Yeah. So let's move on to Christianity's proposed solutions to the problem of sin like we were talking about. This is termed spiritual helplessness because the idea is that within Christianity anyways, that the only way to overcome sin and all its attendant problems is through Christianity. The obvious rebuttal, at least in today's context, would seem to be that anyone can look around to find examples of both non Christians who are not mired in sin in their terms and of people overcoming so called sin in non Christian ways. So yeah, so let's talk about this idea.
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A
Sure. It's the overcoming point, alternative ways of overcoming that's central here. Suppose we all start out as sinners, and I do in this chapter, I just say let's assume for the sake of argument that the doctrine of sin is correct and that we all start out as sinners. I do this in part to ensure that all of my arguments are independent arguments, that they can work on their own, that they don't depend on other arguments. So it's not as though I start off by arguing against sin and then build on that coming to the next chapter. No, I start all over again and say, let's suppose that I was mistaken. Suppose that there is such a thing as sin is the way that Christianity sets out the only way of overcoming sin. And so now we get to a new doctrine, the idea that that's the case, the idea that we're spiritually helpless, helpless to overcome sin without the kind of help that Christianity offers through Jesus. And so we can look for examples, as you've suggested. Don't we know various non Christian ways of overcoming the domination of self oriented desire? And this chapter I discuss a number of different ways. One example is activist ethics. These days you find people who are putting forward very strenuous views about how we should live about morality and immorality. And this is leading some people who are clearly non Christians, non religious, to, for example, give away most of their income to help others. They're donating that to all kinds of important causes around the world. And so that's an example of someone in whom it would be very hard to discern the domination of self oriented desire. Another sort of thing to think about in this context would be the power of psychological therapy. That's something that Ernest didn't know much about. But through the development of psychology and therapy based on psychology, we've learned a lot about how we can overcome problems that are related to self oriented desire. Often they're bound up with emotions in some way. And through psychological therapy we can make some headway with that. And it doesn't have to be Christian therapy either. And there's a kind of selflessness that is promoted and found in completely non Christian religious contexts. So if you want to talk about contexts that are non Christian, these will include a whole variety of religious contexts around the world, for example, Hindu or Buddhist contexts. But also at the end of the chapter, I talk a bit about what we could call Jewish salvation without Christ. So thinking about the milieu in which Jesus arose and developed his teaching, there were a number of other options within that milieu. And some of these too might have been regarded as potentially effective in dealing with the domination of self oriented desire. I mean, for one thing, the idea of sin predates Christianity. It's there in Judaism long before Jesus of Nazareth came alone. Christians after Jesus have spread a certain falsehood, not always knowingly, at least I hope that's the case, but a certain falsehood that Judaism is a legalistic system of works, righteousness, which exhibits sin rather than conquering it. That's a falsehood that has also been exploded by recent development, human development. On the intellectual side of things, there's a very important recent biblical scholar named A.P. sanders, who in his studies of Rabbinic Judaism around the time of Jesus, managed to show how wrong that idea is. There are all kinds of venues within Judaism, or the experience of the grace of God, experience of forgiveness and so on, all kinds of things that rather overlap with the teaching of Jesus when it comes to the sorts of behavior and dispositions that would help us to overcome sin. So even in the context of non Christian Judaism, you see examples of alternative ways of overcoming sin, assuming that there is such a thing. And again, God would always have known about the fact that there are these alternative ways of overcoming sin, and so presumably would not have been on side with the idea that only through Christianity is it possible God would always have known that that was false.
- [37:31]
B
So another related topic is the Christian notion of salvation, which involves not only resolving the disorder brought by sin, but also bringing the value added of eternal life after death made possible by Jesus. So you set aside the necessary presuppositions here about believing in the reality of the afterlife and the supernatural, because like you said before, you don't want to get sidetracked by that. You want to just accept those premises, and you find that even granting those, there are not grounds to accept classical Christianity's claims that salvation is available through Christ in particular. So tell us about how you arrive at that conclusion.
- [38:10]
A
Right. Well, in this connection, it's important to see that Christian salvation isn't all about the afterlife getting to heaven. If sin involves disordered relations between us and God and also with each other in this life. And that's what I actually emphasize in this chapter. It's not just the disordered relations between us and God, but also between us and other human beings. In that case, salvation means, and it's been taken to mean by theologians, Christian theologians, that through Jesus a way of fixing all this, everything necessary for fixing it, has been made available to humans. I mean, it's not as though the thought is that we'll be able to overcome sin and achieve salvation fully in this life. But it does seem clearly to be the case that if the doctrine of salvation is true, as promulgated by mainstream Christian theology, then everything necessary for fixing these problems has been made available through Jesus. And in this chapter I argue that that's not the case. Focus first on some pretty ordinary kinds of missing information. That's actually the central concept of the chapter, missing information. The first kind of information I look at is ordinary factual information. We've learned an awful lot about a whole lot of things that just weren't known at the time of Jesus and for a good long time thereafter. Things that have a barrier on whether we're going to be able to fix disordered relations between ourselves and other people in the way that the doctrine of salvation requires. And so, first of all, as I said, there's this basic factual information, for example, information about what we call epilepsy. There's been an enormous amount of fear, stigma, isolation, exclusion suffered by people who have epilepsy over long periods of time. And Christians haven't been any better than others in this regard. Indeed, Christianity has often made it worse because Christianity is often interpreted because of the limited factual information available, interpreted ex epilepsy in terms of demon possession. And so the idea was that we need exorcism in order to get rid of the demons. And an awful lot of suffering came along with this for people with epilepsy. Just didn't understand what it was all about. Only in 1983 was the band on men with epilepsy studying in Catholic seminaries lifted. So it's, you know, stretched right through almost to the present. So it's some basic factual information that has a bearing on fixing disordered relations between people. Just missing basic factual information. Other examples include the behaviors that are thought to signal witchcraft, or the idea that torture should be efficacious, produce good results, or the causes of same sex attraction. Basic facts. But secondly, and this is the second sort of argument developed in this chapter, we can argue for missing moral information. Not basic facts now, but moral information. For example, the deep wrongness of Christian behavior down many centuries in connection with the status of women and also of gay sex. Christian practice is often. Christian teaching and practice has often contributed to disordered relations between human beings because of missing moral information like this often contributed to it instead of healing it. And it's not just that Christians were falling down on the job as though they knew what to do, but they just weren't doing it, which we could think of as just more sin, which they'd have to ask forgiveness for. No, they just had no knowledge of how to do it in the first place. Given that the missing information was indeed missing because the necessary cultural development had not yet occurred. And interestingly, even when it did occur, it wasn't due to Christianity, but as a result of non religious factors that this information came to us, such as, for example, people traveling more around the world, interacting more with people quite unlike themselves. The upshot of all this is that something needed for salvation, in particular for the healing of disordered relations among human beings, something which would have been made available through Christ if Christian salvation is real, apparently was not made available through Christ. Not back in the first century and not more recently either.
- [43:08]
B
So let's continue. In the theme of evaluating Christianity's claims about the historical person of Jesus, you argue it's impossible to accept their arguments that he was God in human flesh, especially as that is necessary to what you call the big narrative about God's persistent yet unsuccessful attempts to make humans collectively live right. Again, you sidestep rebuttals from disbelief in the supernatural entirely and instead focus on arguments from human intellectual development. So let's go through these ideas.
- [43:42]
A
The big, what I call the big narrative is the story. You see it all through the Bible about God's interactions with human beings, first with the people of Israel and then through Jesus, with both Jews and Gentiles. When you look at this story, the big narrative, you see some disconcerting elements, at least after having absorbed moral and spiritual development of the last few hundred years, you may see some disconcerting elements, important moral or morally relevant falsehoods and distortions, such as an oversimplified understanding of human psychology. I mean, you had the good guys and the bad guys most of the time, the arduous guys, the righteous and the unrighteous. Whereas through a lens of human, you know, psychology, the recent developments in psychology, you're going to say that human psychology, the psychology of individuals, whether good or bad, is going to be much more complicated than that. So an oversimplified understanding of human psychology, but also an inappropriate response to wrongdoing, which is always punishment, punishment, punishment, punishment, and the condoning of violence. Violence is often exercised in. In the production of punishment. And any God who existed at the time would have known. There it is again, that theme would have known that these things are false, bad, unhelpful. So what I argue is that we should expect God to be opposed to the big narrative and distanced from it rather than, as it were, participating in it. That's the basic point in this chapter, and it obviously includes participation through incarnation in Jesus. I mean, the followers of Jesus were just developing the big narrative when they developed their ideas about Jesus being an incarnation of God and Jesus being raised from the dead and all of that. This is just, you know, the latest development of the big narrative. And so for God to actually have participated in the big narrative through incarnation in Jesus, this would have been much more consistent with favoring the big narrative rather than opposing it, as we can see God would have done. More specific points can be made too, and I develop quite a number of them in this chapter. For example, if God would be opposed to the big narrative, then God incarnate would be opposed to the big. And yet Jesus was not. So we have reason to think that Jesus was not God incarnate. It's an example of the specific sort of reasoning that's developed in this chapter. Jesus, while advocating peaceable behavior among those waiting for the kingdom, appears to have been fully on board with such things as the eventual saving of the righteous and the destruction of the wicked. So maybe not a very good candidate were God incarnate, given what we know today, God would have known at the time.
- [46:45]
B
So next, let's move on to considering the Holy Spirit, which admittedly is a notion that is often difficult to pin down, or at least it's always seemed that way to me. You discuss it in terms of the work of the Holy Spirit, which Christians typically expect to experience as, quote, truth related guidance and character related support. Which is clarifying. So accepting this, as you point out, means that evaluating the truth of Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit comes down to figuring out whether or not its ghostly presence has a track record of providing Christians throughout history with useful insights about themselves and the world. Put like that, it seems pretty easy to conclude that the Holy Spirit falls short. Spoiler alert for our listeners. This chapter isn't very long.
- [47:36]
A
Yeah, I suppose it's good every once in a while to have a short chapter in a book like this. Well, truth related guidance would include guidance towards some of that missing information we've already talked about. So there's a link there to previous chapters. The missing information we've already talked about Truth religion guidance would include guidance toward it instead of away from it. And character related support we've got here is what the New Testament refers to as the fruit of the Spirit. These are dispositions or character traits of love, joy, peace. These are the terms used also forbearance, gentleness, self control, that sort of thing. But even today we can see how often these are absent in Christians. Not always, of course, but often and in important contexts and circumstances. Just absent. And it's important to note that the Christians we're looking at, if we're inclined to say that, are generally committed Christians who are listening for the direction of the Spirit and are disposed to respond positively to it. So it's, you know, it's not as though they're lukewarm Christians or not very good Christians in the terms of the Christian tradition to which they happen to belong, the sub tradition. These are committed people who think they're hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit and certainly listening for it disposed to respond positively to it. So what I conclude from that is that if they were getting it, if indeed the Spirit existed and was active in these ways, truth related guidance, character related support, we'd be seeing different behavior from a great many Christians.
- [49:24]
B
Yeah. Both on the level of individuals and also on the level of demographics. You know, if Christianity was effective in making people's lives happier or making people better people, it would be pretty easy to measure on the broad scale. And of course that's not what we see at all.
- [49:40]
A
So yeah, at any rate, at the very least we can say that it's quite variable in context where we would expect it to be otherwise.
- [49:50]
B
Right, exactly. So your next couple of chapters examine Christian claims about revelation or the ways in which God reveals his ideas, knowledge and instructions to people, whether that be through the Bible, visions, images on toast, whatever. It seems to me that there would be many entry points to dismantling these claims. But interestingly, you choose to start with untimeliness. Really interesting way in. You make a devastating argument here that in my opinion, poses enormous problems for Christian theology. So let's get into this.
- [50:27]
A
Let me clarify first that the part of the doctrine of revelation that I'm focused on, there are other parts too, is the idea that the other doctrines were revealed by God. So you've got a whole lot of particular doctrines. We've already discussed a number of them. Sin, doctrine of salvation, spiritual helplessness, incarnation, and so on, a number of particular doctrines. And the doctrine of revelation in part says that those other doctrines were revealed by God. So that's the specific claim that I'm addressing in this chapter. And that means, of course, that those other doctrines must be not just true, but must be the case that God would want us, would want us in our time to believe those doctrines. And it seems to me that there are strong reasons to deny this. And these are the reasons that I develop in this chapter, or at least in part of the chapter. And this is especially the case for certain particular doctrines. And I'm thinking about the doctrine of the incarnation of God in Jesus and the doctrine of the Trinity. These are heavy duty metaphysical doctrines. God would have known that an emphasis at the time of Jesus and for centuries after on the importance of right belief in relation to big metaphysical ideas about Incarnation and Trinity. God would have known that that would only lead to trouble for the kinds of people with the kinds of dispositions we see at the time. Immature people, still the case today, mostly men, as it happens. God would have known that people like this would interpret these big heavy doctrines variously and would fall into conflict with each other over the correct interpretation of such heavy duty ideas. I mean, we can imagine a competent contemporary historian, imagine somebody who knows everything that a competent contemporary historian might know about what happened in history, human history, before Jesus. And so imagine a person like that set back into that time, the time of Jesus. That person, just a humble human being with that knowledge, would be able to predict that things are going to go badly if a lot of people come to believe these heavy duty ideas about Trinity and incarnation. So if that's true for an historian, a fallible human being, surely God, an omission being, would have been able to predict all of the horrors that came afterward. I mean, if you look at the history of Christianity, there's an awful lot of conflict over claims like this, how they're to be interpreted, how they're to be embraced and taught, and so on. People have been inordinately concerned about such things over long stretches of Christian history. And so that's why I suggest in this untimeliness argument that even if true, these heavy metaphysical doctrines would not have been revealed by God at or around the time of Jesus in the way that the doctrine of revelation requires. Remember that it says that all the other doctrines were revealed by God, intended by God for us to believe, and were revealed at the time or around the time of Jesus. And just seems that that wouldn't make a lot of sense given what God would have known about the combination of human beings with the dispositions we have and the nature of those doctrines. Interestingly, you can make this argument even while conceding that the doctrines are true, you can say even if true, it's a separate thing to think about God revealing them. You know, maybe if they're true, God, if there were a God, would reveal these sorts of ideas later on when human beings are more mature, even that could be left open. The question is whether we should expect that to be happening at the time of Jesus in the way that the doctrine of revelation requires. And that's what the untimeliness argument suggests is not the case.
- [54:41]
B
So this takes me to a Christian rebuttal that I've encountered before, which is their argument that God's plan all along was, and I'm putting this in modern terms, but God's plan all along was to release updates to human knowledge over time, as if there was a planned obsolescence to the first version, like circa Jesus, that contained obvious flaws in its truth and values claims. But for some reason, part of God's mysterious plan was to, you know, just drop parts of truth along the way, to anticipate the types of things you're talking about where, you know, humans at that stage of development just couldn't handle the truth or whatever. I mean, that involves a lot of, in my opinion, mental gymnastics. Because what you're pointing out is this doesn't make sense for what God would have known. And then they're coming up with like, well, we're playing three dimensional chess here with what we reveal at different times. But yeah, how would you answer that kind of rebuttal?
- [55:44]
A
I like your way of putting it. The phrase planned obsolescence in reference to updates. Yeah, this is an idea that sometimes talked about by Christian theologians. They call it progressive revelation. And I do deal with it in the book here. I'd make a couple of points, two main points to be made about it. I would first of all distinguish between updating, gradually revealing, progressively revealing factual information and progressively revealing moral and spiritual information. I mean, we saw earlier that, you know, even some factual information is going to be relevant to moral and spiritual development. But a great deal of factual information might fall outside the scope of what a revealing deity would consider terribly important. I mean, perhaps for example, the facts about the nature of the universe we today talk about the Big Bang theory and there's physics and all the rest. I mean, maybe God wouldn't need to tell us about all of that. Maybe God would even countenance mistakes about things like that, factual issues of that sort. But I think that moral and spiritual information is another thing altogether. The whole idea of revelation is to help us get that right. And so we shouldn't expect that if God is revealing important truths to us or information that's going to help us along morally and spiritually, that God would countenance falsehoods, that falsehoods would be part of the revelation. Factual falsehoods maybe, but moral and spiritual falsehoods, that's another thing altogether. Doesn't seem nearly as plausible. The second point I'd make is that we should notice that the idea of progressive revelation entails that where moral and spiritual updating has occurred in our history, God was responsible, perhaps conveying the update through Christianity. Right. So here, here we again have a way of reasoning that allows us to say, well, let's suppose for the sake of argument that there is such a thing as progressive revelation. Well, then it would have to have come through God. And Christians of course would think it's through Christianity. But that's not at all what's happened where we have been forced to update our thinking, both morally and spiritually relevant matters. It's generally not been because of Christianity. It's had purely secular sources. I was suggesting before very, you know, mundane things like the fact that we're traveling around the world a whole lot more, we're able to do that, encountering people very different from ourselves. And indeed the most obvious thing about Christianity in this connection is how new thinking about, let's say, female, male relations, sexuality, gender, new thinking about such things has so often just been resisted. So it's not as though, even if we allow for they're having then updates, it's not as though they've come from God, as would have to be the case if the idea of progressive revelation is to make sense.
- [59:01]
B
I think those are really good distinctions. So let's move on to the topic of God's revelation through the Bible's Book of Revelation itself. You argue it's impossible to accept that an actual omniscient God would have planned for such a book to be disseminated on the basis that it contained so much false or at least misleading information. So again, this strikes me as a devastating point for Christian belief. Please tell us more.
- [59:29]
A
Yeah, I call this the argument against revelation from revelation. That is revelation, capital R, right? Yeah. I do have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this book, so I have to be careful not to overdo it. But it's pretty hard to overdo it when you get a good look at what this book of the New Testament, the last book of the New Testament, contains. And let's go back to the idea of revelation and the part of this idea that I'm focused on, the propositional side of revelation. This would have it that God is the source of Christian doctrine, having transmitted it in part through the Bible. So we can say that if the Christian doctrine of revelation is true, then God chose to use the New Testament, including of course the Book of Revelation, as a way to communicate the relevant doctrines. And so if you think that's not the case, as I argue in this chapter, then you have a reason to deny the Christian doctrine of revelation is true. The main point in this connection is that we can think about the standards that a perfect personal being might wish a textual vehicle of revelation to satisfy. And of course there are all kinds of complexities here, but we can arrive at at any rate a necessary condition. And after chiseling away at this issue for a while, I land on the following as a standard that should seem quite minimal and uncontroversial. And this is in the book on page 148. Just going to read a little bit from the book. And if God chose to use the books of the New Testament as a way to communicate the revealed propositions, then the books of the New Testament do not contain any normative content. This is the condition that I'm developing in the book. Do not contain any normative content that is important moral or spiritual content that on some interpretation both natural and likely to be accepted by many Christians in subsequent generations, transmits false information likely to produce regrettable results if acted upon. End quote. Now, that's a mouthful. I'll grant that it's a big condition with a lot of parts, but this feature is actually important. I'm making a rather minimal suggestion. That's when we've got all of these parts in place, we can say we've got trouble, and of course, we might not have them all. And so, you know, it was a big job for me in this chapter to show that we do have them all. And I argue that we do have them all in the Book of Revelation. In this book, we have normative content. We're focusing not just on any content at all, but on normative content, important moral or spiritual content, that on some interpretation both natural and likely to be accepted. Okay, so not some interpretation that nobody's going to accept, but the natural interpretation that's likely to be accepted by many Christians in subsequent generations who read the Book of Revelation, taking it quite literally, and then also it transmits false information likely to produce regrettable results they've acted upon. And here I need to take you a little bit further in the next page of the book to substantiate that point specifically with reference to the Book of Revelation. You can say this, and I'm quoting myself here. First, all manner of divine acts involving violence and torture, killing and utter destruction are presented as perfectly appropriate and just. Second, people are presented as being either for God, righteous and good, or against God, wicked and evil, and the latter are identified entirely with their bad acts. And these two points are obviously related. Viewing people in the latter way, one may more easily view as appropriate and just a former sort of behavior toward them. And there's also a third point. The punishment of the wicked is repeatedly presented quite explicitly in the Book of Revelation as vengeance. And this vengeance is proper and good. It's not hard to see how this content could be influential among readers convinced that they're reading the Word of God. With the reactive attitudes deposited by evolution, we're ready to see people this way and to feel resentful and vindictive anyway. And if we have the moral luxury of thinking that we're resisting oppression or bringing about a divinely mandated state of affairs, it'll be all the easier. And of course, we now know that this content was behaviorally influential across the centuries of Christian history, and that it was so in regrettable ways here, the Crusades provide the most obvious examples. But there are other examples too. People after the time when the Book of Revelation came to form part of the New Testament, we're taking it literally, we're influenced by it, and we're influenced to get into all kinds of highly regrettable behavior which involved copying really what they took to be the example of God in the Book of Revelation. And now if we think about what God would have known, right, for us, as we saw earlier, we need updates. We've needed updates. We needed to learn. And it's been a long learning process. We've learned a lot of things, long way to go, but we've learned some pretty important things about violence and destruction and vengeance and all the rest. God would have known all of that right from the beginning. So how could we possibly imagine God using the Book of Revelation, which all of that's denied, as a vehicle of God's revelation? So there you see in a nutshell. It's a pretty big nutshell, I suppose, but nonetheless, I hope it's clear what the argument is.
- [65:25]
B
It seems clear to me. Yeah, I want to talk now about the Christian hiddenness problem. So I was really excited to see you address this angle of critique because this is another one that strikes me personally as an obvious and central obstacle. Obstacle to believing Christian doctrine. And the terms I've used before to describe this is basically Christians assert that God is hugely emotionally invested in every individual coming through free will to know him, to choose Christianity and thus end up in heaven for eternity. So the stakes of ending up in the eternal fire and torture of hell, by contrast, are obviously pretty high. And so this combination of high stakes and God's motivation would lead us to expect God would offer every precious individual at least the opportunity to both receive and clearly understand the choice on offer. But instead, we see the vast majority of humanity through history never actually encounter Christianity. And those who do get a muddled, self contradictory message, highly open to interpretation, including flaws, as you find pointed out. So in your terms, if I have this right, it is this clear message and choice that is hidden. I think that's not a term that I have been familiar with before. So I just kind of put Things, in my terms, to hear your response to that characterization, and if I've got that right, in comparing it to your argument about the hiddenness problem and all of these types of issues.
- [67:02]
A
Okay, sure. Let's step back for a second and think about religion. It's quite possible for a religious believer to say that critical religious information is hidden from us. After all, we have religions that are called esoteric religions. But Christianity does the opposite. It's called a revealed religion. It has a salvation message that's supposed to get propagated around the world. And so we're led to expect that everyone who understands the message and who doesn't resist it will believe it to be true. And this is another place where Christian ideas are stopped short by facts about human development. For even if it might have seemed otherwise a few hundred years ago, 200 years ago when Ernest was around, maybe today we have every reason to believe that many who have understood Christianity's salvation message and even would like it to be true, many of these people aren't resistant to it at all, and they still don't believe it because of all the doubts that are raised by careful investigation. And so it's in that sense hidden from them. But it wouldn't be if the salvation message were true. It's supposed to be revealed. The whole idea of a salvation message is that God has made it a priority to get the word out, and so we can infer that the salvation message isn't true. That's the way at least one of the arguments in this chapter goes.
- [68:27]
B
I've heard the argument made that. So I grew up in a church where sort of like you're talking about, the idea is that anyone who hears the message will automatically love it, I guess, to put it in crude terms. And. And I've encountered other Christians who have told me that that was not what they were taught. I was taught that if anybody makes even one step towards God, God will make up the gap. And I've encountered Christians who say, no, no, that's not what I was taught in my church. I don't know if you have a reaction to that or not, but it seemed to me like you were getting at the doctrinal backing to that claim that I encountered in Sunday school.
- [69:16]
A
Yeah, well, I think there's an interesting overlap between my starting point and pretty standard Christian belief. I mean, it might not percolate through all the churches, but here's the basic idea. It's a conditional proposition that if Christian doctrine is true, then everyone is properly informed about that fact. I mean, that's compatible with people who are informed not liking it very much. So even if that were the case, you might still have Christians saying if our doctrine is true, I mean, God wants everybody to come to know God, so everybody's going to be properly informed about that fact. So I think it's a pretty standard Christian belief and it's also my starting point. So there's this interesting overlap in this chapter between my starting point and standard Christian belief. Christians believe it too, which is why it makes a useful premise. You can start from something that Christians already believe. And what I'm arguing is that not everybody is properly informed and so Christian doctrine isn't true. The proposition was if Christian doctrine is true, then everybody's properly informed. So if it's not the case, is everyone properly informed? You can infer that the doctrine isn't true. The Christian, from the same starting point that if Christian doctrine is true, everyone's properly informed, argues that since Christian doctrine is true, everybody must be properly informed. It's the difference between modus tollens and modus ponents in logic. I won't get into the details about that, but these different things you can do with conditional propositions. One sort of argument gets you one sort of conclusion and another a very different one. But if you accept the starting point here and think Christian doctrine is true, then really with modus ponens, you've got to infer that those non believers who look non resistant are really rejecting God in some way. And the thing is that human development is making it harder and harder to believe this. So even Christians can feel the pressure to move in the other direction, which is quite radically different and generates a very different result. And of course my arguments are intended to push us even further in that direction.
- [71:24]
B
Okay, that helps clarify for me. My second question was going to be exactly about this kind of question, about the category of people who do understand Christian doctrine and yet reject it. And I guess you're saying that like the Christian would assume that maybe they have like the attitude of rejection assumes that that person would have a bad attitude towards God, never mind why somebody would be motivated to do that out of the blue. But accepting this kind of idea, actively sinning in terms of Christian belief, and.
- [72:02]
A
Notice that you can't have a bad attitude toward God without believing that God exists. And so Christians tend to assume that everyone believes that God exists and probably also believes that God has been revealed through Christianity, because most of the people who are talking about this are Christians and they think that that's how God is known. So I think it's true that Christians by and large have assumed that if their doctrine is true, then everybody's going to believe it. And so if somebody doesn't believe, must be the case that they're really rejecting God in some way. And that, I think, is what you've been noticing.
- [72:42]
B
Yes, because this, this pops up, this idea pops up over and over again in a lot of Christian movies and Christian media where, where kind of the. These beliefs become clear to the outsider, I guess, where there is this constant assumption that there's no such thing as an atheist, as in a person who just doesn't believe these extreme claims about an invisible sky God. It's more that individuals are angry at God. You'll see atheists are portrayed as people who are devastated that their mom died of cancer and so turned their back on God instead of like, well, no, there's people who just don't believe in this magic. Right. And so from my perspective, it's bewildering and frustrating, but I guess you've really keyed into where this comes from. Classical Christian thinking or the dogma that, that I was not able to figure out before.
- [73:42]
A
Yeah, it's because Christianity is a revealed religion. And so Christians believe that God has indeed been revealed to human beings, perhaps quite recently, through their own teaching and preaching. And so everybody who hears them is being met by God and God is inviting them to Christian faith. And so if they don't have Christian faith, it must be because they rejected the invitation. That sort of thinking is, I think, quite prevalent. But it's also, and this is central to my reasoning in this chapter, it's also more and more being challenged by, again, what we're learning from human development. Because more and more Christians are bumping into people who don't quite fit that narrative. People who may have thought long and hard about Christian doctrine, who may have been Christians originally, who've left Christian faith, perhaps quite unwillingly, those things can become quite evident to people. And then what I'm suggesting is at the same starting point, the belief that if Christian doctrine is true, then everybody's properly informed about that fact will lead you in a very different direction because of the different sort of reasoning that you can do, starting from there with that conditional proposition, if Christian doctrine is true, then everybody is properly informed about that fact. So if you conclude that not everyone is properly informed about that fact, it just follows that Christian doctrine isn't true. And so that's the radically different conclusion that people might be led to if they Pay attention to what's available to us now through human development.
- [75:24]
B
How do they work into that worldview? The existence of so many different denominations and splits among Christians themselves about what is the right way to interpret the Bible. Again, if Christian doctrine is true and everybody understands it, you wouldn't see hundreds of different denominations sometimes warring amongst each other about differences in understanding these ideas.
- [75:55]
A
You mentioned all of the religious traditions of the world that aren't Christian in the first place. Yeah. You're just talking about splits among Christians themselves within the Christian tradition. And I think quite a lot of people who would reflect on the difference between themselves and people in other denominations, I mean, some of them are quite willing to go along and get along more and more. That's the case recently, actually, and precisely because of human development, Christians are starting to look. Each generation, Christians are starting to look a little milder in that regard. But in the past, certainly Christians who've split off from others would make use of the doctrine of sin again and think that, you know, they've. They've got the right picture of things and other people are somehow just resisting the right picture of things. The doctrine of sin, the emphasis on immorality, on wanting to have things your own way and so on, has been very, very influential in Christian thinking. And so it's useful when people disagree with others within the Christian tradition. They say that others just aren't listening to God properly. I'm listening to God properly, so follow me. I mean, that's a caricature to some extent. It's sad how small an extent. But, yeah, I think that's at least a good part of what's going on. When we see these splits, people are thinking that they've got the truth and others just are resisting the truth on that issue.
- [77:25]
B
It's also the no true Scotsman fallacy, like when another Christian has the wrong idea. Well, they're not a real Christian. You shouldn't take them as an example. And on and on and on.
- [77:35]
A
Yeah, especially if you think that some particular sort of belief is required for being Christian. And there's been a great deal of emphasis on that. This feeds right back into my untimeliness argument, where Christians, because of the relatively early stage of development we're all in as human beings, have emphasized very strongly how important it is to believe certain things, have not noticed all the other things you might emphasize in connection with Christian religion, they've emphasized the importance of belief. And so people believe differently. That might be disqualified. Indeed.
- [78:11]
B
All right, so let me throw another potential rebuttal at you that might come from the Christian side. And that is, what if Christians said, yeah, God did know all that, all the flaws, all the negative outcomes of the path we have wrought with the aid of this Bible. He saw all its shortcomings and was like, meh, that's fine. It's my mysterious ways. How would you address such a rebuttal?
- [78:37]
A
Well, I think quite briefly, I would say that if any being did that, you would be able to infer immediately that it wasn't the Christian's God. All right. I mean, the Christian's God has certain characteristics, as we saw at the very beginning, all good as well as all knowing and salvific, concerned for the salvation of human beings. I would say it's impossible in the strongest sense, metaphysically impossible for this God, the Christian God, not to care about how things go in human life. So here, Christians, you just have to appeal to them, to live up to what it is that they're committed to. And here their belief is important that they believe in a divine being, a personal divine being who has all these omni attributes, omnipotent, all power, omniscient, all knowing. And that's of course, what I've focused on in much of our discussion today. But also all good. And a being who satisfies the description of Christians. God wouldn't be able to behave in this way. It's impossible. Other beings might. You know, you can give to the idea of God a different description, but it wouldn't be the Christian God.
- [79:55]
B
That seems fair. So I want to turn now to some concluding thoughts. First of all, I want to give you the opportunity to bring up any ideas from this book that we've not yet been able to get to, but that you'd like to discuss. And I'm also curious about your conception of your readership. How do you imagine readers might feel or what might they think after reading your book?
- [80:18]
A
Well, I'm sure there'll be quite a variety of reactions, or maybe not. Maybe everybody, for different reasons, will reject everything I say. Who knows? But I'd suggest that anyone interested in whether Christian doctrine is true might want to read the book. The book has a lot of arguments, 20 main ones, clearly and carefully developed. And I hope that the book will be read by Christian philosophers so they make up at least a part of my projected audience. You're asking about people's response. Reaction. It's been interesting to discover that even among philosophers, there can be a healthy emotional component to the response. I was recently at a conference in America where somebody was giving a paper that defended my views in this book, and people seemed indignant that criticisms like this were even being discussed, which to my mind, just displays the problem. And again, perhaps we can think about our early stage of development to illuminate what's going on here. In any case, I would say that we need something. And elsewhere I've called passionate indifference. Passionate indifference. It's passionate because it's a desire to know the truth. It's indifference because if you have it, you want to know the truth regardless of what it may be. So I was saying at the beginning, evangelical Christians often had a strong love of truth, but they also are pretty sure they know what the truth is. If you have passionate indifference, which I think the best philosophy would have to have, you certainly want to know what the truth is, but you also want to know the truth, regardless of what it may be. I mean, the very name philosophy has a relationship to this. Philia Sophia, the love of wisdom. I sometimes tell my students philosophy is more about love than it is about logic. Love of understanding, passionate desire to know what the truth is regardless of what it is. And there's the indifference. And of course, I need this, too. I need to be open to changing my mind about some of the arguments we've discussed as a result of future discussion. Maybe it's a good thing I've got 20 of them. But if. If you can summon that openness, that passionate indifference, I think you'll enjoy the book regardless of the orientation that you bring to it.
- [82:37]
B
Well, I'm glad you brought the conversation back around to the reaction of philosophers and what other philosophers are doing or not doing, because when I encountered. Right. In the introduction, I think it was your discussion of how you found that these particular topics or questions are not as often addressed among professional philosophers. I was surprised because I move more in the circles of popular media around secularism and atheistic ideas and so forth and so on podcasts and just other types of content creators. And I find that exactly the arguments that are in your book is what they focus on a lot, elaborating these in a lot of different ways and through a lot of different personal experiences and encounters with Christians and so forth. So the idea. So your book made me think that there's this big gap between popular atheistic discussion and what's happening in philosophy. And so if it's not happening in philosophy, I'm really, really glad that your book is hopefully bringing these ideas more into that area, because these strike me as just foundational, incredibly important, logically based rebuttals to Christian thinking. And philosophers should be paying attention to this.
- [84:01]
A
Yeah, well, hopefully I'm taking some of the things that you've suggested you see out there, you know, and put them into an argumentative shape, a shape that will potentially do some work intellectually. Now, when it comes to philosophy, I think I can illuminate this to some extent by pointing out that philosophers tend to be concerned with some of the most general, most fundamental questions it's possible to ask. And so when it comes to religion, philosophers, including atheistic philosophers, are often preoccupied with quite general matters. For example, is there a transcendent reality at all or is there a God at all? Does God exist or is naturalism true? Instead, questions like that, quite general questions, and questions about whether Christianity is true or false, Christian doctrine, true or false, are more specific. And so they have often not been addressed for that reason. And I mean, as I mentioned earlier, if you're an atheist in philosophy, you can of course infer that Christian doctrine is false. It just follows logically from the claim that God does not exist. And so many atheists in philosophy will think that's quite enough. They don't have to get into the details. But what's been happening as I've observed it over the last few decades is that we've had more and more philosophers in the philosopher's religion who are themselves Christians. And the influence of their Christian belief has, as we've been flying under the radar precisely because most of the critics of religion are working at a much more general level. And so they've been able to get away with just working on the basis of their Christian ideas without anybody really coming to grips critically with the details of their Christian ideas. And that's what I'm trying to do. That's some of the missing work that I'm trying to fill in. I also have more work to do in this connection. My project is, is larger than just this particular book that we've talked about today. I'm starting to work on a companion to this book. My Christianity project includes two books. So we'll kind of a duology, I guess we could call it. The second book will be quite different from the first. I'm calling it Incipient Christianities. So not as a Christian of any kind, I'm not a Christian of any kind, but just with intellectual curiosity and I hope with the passionate indifference I was talking about before, I want to see whether there are ways of being Christian that might survive and thrive far into the future, perhaps aiding us with future human development, even if all the conclusions of the first book are true. And some of these, I think, are already starting to make some progress in human culture. And so that's why I speak of incipient Christianities. But I think that one of the things that philosophers can do is they can discern the shapes of new ways of being Christian that haven't really been discussed. And that's also going to form part of this second book. So the setup is, let's suppose the first book is right. Is there any way that Christianity could survive and thrive? Even so, what changes would be required for that to be the case? And starting to look to me as though there could be as many new and potentially interesting ways of being Christian that fill the bill as there were arguments against classical Christian doctrine in the first book. But we'll see. We'll see how it goes.
- [87:33]
B
Wouldn't that have to entail letting go of the idea of an omniscient God? And doesn't that, like, what do you have left?
- [87:40]
A
Yes, and it requires a good deal of imagination and ingenuity to get past some of these things. But I'm pretty convinced that it can be done even today in Christianity and also in thinking about Christianity and religion more generally, you have forms of practice that don't require no belief in a personal God. Indeed. And you find this in the philosophy of religion. This is one way in which, in the philosophy of religion, also in the work of some people who would regard it as atheists, you find ideas that are relevant to what I'm going to be doing in the second book. You have a defense of. This is perhaps the most radical example of something called religious fictionalism. I'll bet that's not something you've heard of before. Christian fictionalism or religious fictionalism, which could take the form of Christian fictionalism. In short, it would involve taking Christian ideas, Christian narratives, and so on, and treating them the way you might a very, very powerful and absorbing novel. You know how sometimes you can really get into a novel and you can live within the world of the novel, and you might say you want to stay there and you want to. Perhaps, if it's a good, illuminating, intellectually, morally powerful novel, you might even find some sustenance in it for living a different kind of life in the future. So you could live, as it were, in the world of the novel. And that's sort of like what religious fictionalists are saying one might do with religious ideas. They represent a kind of world, a kind of imaginative world, which even if you don't regard the propositions as true. Might. Might give you a story that. That you could use to guide your. Your life. So at least some of the ways of being Christian that I'll be talking about. Not all of them, but some of them, some of the incipient Christianities I'll be talking about involve that kind of fictionalism which is itself part of a broader sort of religiousness which would be called non realist by philosophers, not involving any claims about a transcendent divine reality or any of the sorts of truths that go along with that that you find in classical Christianity. But this, given one of my starting points, which I mentioned at the very beginning today, the idea that we're still at an early stage of human development makes perfectly good sense. Could be that even after 2,000 years, we're still just seeing the beginning of Christianity. And so perhaps it's time to think about some of these seemingly radical ways of being Christian. Perhaps we'll find many more of them in the future of Christianity.
- [90:30]
B
Do you know, I actually have come across that idea before. Not with the term religious fictionalism, which I'm really happy to have heard about, but I've actually encountered this idea within Afrofuturism and science fiction. The idea that some of the ways that people inhabiting inspirational philosophical novels like you're alluding to, can create a foundation upon which people can elaborate their own spiritualism and meet some of those spiritual needs, while acknowledging that it's coming from a fictional source. Like, I've seen people propose this with regard to Octavia Butler's novels. There's another scholar that I've done an interview with actually, who proposes this for science fiction in general, for proposing new ways of. Yeah. Meeting spiritual needs for the black community, the African American community. Super interesting.
- [91:35]
A
So, yeah, what I'm talking about would be analogous to that. Yeah, I mean, philosophers have talked about fictionalism in the context of a variety of different areas of philosophy, quite different areas, including mathematics, interpreting how we speak about mathematics. There is a view that is a fictionless view. It's just that now some philosophers are thinking about fictionalism, possibly having application to religion as well.
- [92:02]
B
Oh, I see. Oh, this is cool. All right, I'm gonna have to look into this. Well, John, I've taken up a lot of your time. Thank you so, so much. It's been wonderful chatting with you today about your, in my opinion, very important book. So, yeah, I'm really happy you were able to join me today and that the weather worked out for both of us so well.
- [92:25]
A
It was great to be here. Thank you for having me.
- [92:27]
B
Wonderful. So goodbye. I'll talk to you next time. I want to thank you for listening to New Books and Secularism, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Lynn Evans and once again I've been speaking with Professor J.L. shellenberg about his latest book, what God Would have How Human Intellectual and Moral Development Undermines Christian doctrine, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. If you'd like to find out more about John and what he's working on, you can Visit his website, jlshellenberg.com and if you enjoyed this podcast, please write us a positive review in your podcast player. Post about us on social media or tell a friend. I'm also interested in hearing from you about your thoughts on this podcast and the material we cover. Tell me about it. You can find me on bluesky at Carrie Lynnland. That's C A R R I E L Y N N l a n d.bsky.social do you have a book you'd like covered on one of our shows? Contact us through our website, newbooksnetwork.com also, be sure to follow us on all the socials and in your favorite place for podcasts, where you'll see every time we post a new interview. In the meantime, I'll wish you an A la prochain from Quebec until my next conversation about New books.