Outsider Test of Nothing

If you hang around John Loftus's blog long enough you will get his commentators (if not Loftus himself) badgering you about taking his Outsider Test for Faith. You get the feeling that they ascribe to it a nearly magical ability to wrest one away from one's faith. And if you are a believer and you haven't done undergone this mystical self-evaluation--it is because you are afraid.

So I bought the book (kindle edition) and started reading. And I am (thus far) very disappointed.

In chapter 1, Loftus asks a series of rhetorical questions. By not answering the questions, Loftus's tactic is evidently this: the answer he implies merely by asking the question in the manner he does is the obviously correct answer, and there is no conceivable Christian response.

Let me make a preemptive strike regarding Loftus's main, cultural-inheritence argument. He is stating something this simple. Suppose country A is 80% Christian, and country B is 5% Christian. Therefore if you are born in country A you are much more likely to be a Christian. You are a Christian, to first order, because you were born among Christians--so you should test your faith as if you were an outsider.

But what he should actually say is that you are born among self-identifying Christians you are more likely to self-identify as a Christian. This is a very different thing. Everyone would agree, I think, that in the U.S. there has been, historically, enormous peer, familial, and societal pressure to identify as a Christian. Most of the time when I was an atheist if you asked me I would have said I was a Christian. Everyone accepts that some of the Christians in Christianized countries are just cultural Christians. Thus in country A (the U.S.) the number of actual Christians could be much smaller.

Furthermore if we say that conversion (regeneration) precedes faith, then (in country B) there may be more than 5% converted, but they have no context to understand their conversion (hence the need for missionaries) and so, in country B, the number of actual Christians might be higher than the number of claimants. (Another factor might be fear of self-identifying).

The bottom line is that if country A self-identifies as 80% Christian and country B as 5%, there is no way of knowing if the actual conversion rates have anywhere near the same disparity. Maybe they are even  comparable. (I don't think so, but who knoes?)

This is mindful of the mileage attempted to be had from the oft-quoted statistic that only 7% of the members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences believe in God. Well, maybe that’s because they are so smart—but maybe it is because, being so smart, they are extremely self confident. This, along with the fact that they are in a discipline for which there is no stigma associated with atheism, may simply mean they are more honest—who knows, maybe only 7% of the population across the board is Christian!

Or maybe smart people really are less likely to be Christian. Again, who knows? The only thing we know for sure is that really smart scientists are less likely to self-identify as Christians.

So let's look at some of John's questions in chapter 1, giving what I think is his wink-nod implied answer, plus an alternative answer.

Q: Christians [say] that faith is a gift, but why is that gift mostly given to people who are raised in Christian households and Christianized cultures? 

Loftus’s implied answer: because we culturally inherit Christianity, so it is naturally clumpy.

Alternative answer: election is not a cosmic dice-roll in which you would expect to find a uniform frequency of believers. God has a plan for the elect, and part of that includes fellowship, and so it pleases God to place his elect in families and in proximity. God did not roll the dice with Isaac and say: “whew, he’ll be a believer. Lucky for Abraham.” No, God in his sovereignty purposely placed a covenant child in a covenant family. “Clumping” of Christians is not a problem—it is to be expected. Additionally, as pointed out above, there is certainly some and maybe a great deal of over-reporting in Christianized countries. The granularity may not be as coarse as it first appears.

Q: Does God dole out his gift of saving faith differently to individuals on different sides of geographical or national boundaries? 

Loftus’s implied answer: he surely would not, so this is a problem.

Alternative answer: we would expect so; the bible is consistent with the elect being in areas of critical mass from which they can launch their efforts concerning the Great Commission. It pleases God to have believers disciple converts--this is facilitated by a group of believers (a church) sending out a few (the missionaries) to the unreached.

Q: Why is it that other religious faiths are given “by other gods” to people separated into geographically distinct parts of the planet? 

Loftus’s implied answer: that is consistent with all religions being culturally based.

Alternative answer: Again, God has not spread the elect out uniformly, and so areas with few elect and little teaching will naturally adopt false religions until such time that they are evangelized.

Q: Since there are many religious faiths, how does one choose to be on the inside of any of them if from the outside they don’t have any plausibility? 

Loftus’s implied answer: again, you culturally inherit insider status.

Alternative answer: For Christianity you do not choose, you are chosen. This speaks to Luther’s often quote-mined argument about “reason is the devil’s whore.” Luther was not arguing (as so many atheists quote-mine him) against reason per se. He was arguing specifically that reason is useless in terms of coming to faith. One doesn’t uses reason to acquire faith—rather a very unreasonable process occurs: you are knocked off your horse and dragged, by overwhelming force and compulsion, to faith.

Q: Why do believers all seem to judge outsiders as ignorant, unenlightened, misguided, deceived and lacking in understanding? 

Loftus’s implied answer: because believers are the truly ignorant ones, plus the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Alternative answer: this is a strawman or very poorly worded. As it stands it is simply false. We do not judges outsiders as ignorant, unenlightened, misguided, deceived and lacking in understanding. Except for a very narrow, well-defined domain: We do judge outsiders as ignorant, unenlightened, misguided, deceived and lacking in understanding of the things of God.

Q: Why is it that different believers within their culturally inherited religions cannot settle their own differences? 

Loftus’s implied answer: because there is no “true” Christianity therefore you defend what sect you inherited.

Alternative answer: I am not sure what Loftus means by “we cannot settle our differences.” I am assuming he is not referring to violent disagreements, Roving gangs of Presbyterian thugs attacking unlucky Methodists is not something we hear a lot about. I am assuming that he means doctrinal differences. I would say it is probably because, for the most part, what we disagree about is not cardinal. I’m a Baptist. I can walk into a Presbyterian (PCA, not USA) church and feel completely at home. I may disagree with what they teach on baptism and covenant theology—but no biggie—we are in absolute agreement on the gospel. The different denominations seems to be more of an issue for unbelievers than for believers. I view them (at the 90%) level as groups of people who have reached different conclusions about a few things for which the scriptures, for whatever reason, are not perfectly clear. Calvinist? Arminian? Who cares? We both agree that you are saved by faith alone in Christ Jesus.

 Enough for know. I'll read more and see if it is worth blogging about.

Getting Ready

Technicians are building and testing equipment needed to support the Jefferson' Lab's newest (and fourth) experimental hall – Hall D. (My research is mostly in Hall B, a little in Hall D). Shown here are Hall D fADC250 readout electronics VXS crates (with blue pieces) and the high-voltage chassis (red). The Jefferson Lab-designed fADC250's are flash analog-to-digital converters. They take data at a rate of 250 million samples per second on each input signal (there are 16 inputs per board) simultaneously. Experiments in Hall D are scheduled to begin in 2015.

Um, um, "not so nice people" at the gates!

Poor, poor Richard Dawkins. He can't do anything right anymore! How he must long for the good old days when he was dukin’ it out with the likes of Bill Dembski and Ted Haggard. The world was so young, and the battle lines were drawn so clearly. He was everyone's hero. Man of the hour. The atheist's atheist. Sigh, no longer. Now he is constantly under attack from a former friendly flank.

Dawkins, as an opponent to Christianity, was a lightweight compared to the previous generation of atheists. He could not hold a candle to the likes of Bertrand Russell, for example. But at least he made some sort of sense. But now Dawkins’s time is past, and God help me, I miss him. Unfortunately though he cannot stay lockstep with the new gnu aka A+ atheists.

Case in point, Poor Clueless Dawkins tweeted:

Ruh roh. He said a bad word. Barbarians. O Richard, time to retire to a small cottage in Wales, with a nice little garden. You are soooo last millennium.

Don't know why? Here is an analysis that explains why. Trigger Warning: the link will take you so some of the most atrocious writing ever penned in what I think is supposed to be the English language. You will have to read most paragraphs more than once if you hope to discern what message the, um, "writer" is trying to convey. This may offend you if you have received any formal education at any level.

If you don't want to read (and trust me, you'll miss nothing by not clicking the link) here is a thumbnail: Barbarian is racist word. No excuses. Intent is irrelevant. The dictionary definition is irrelevant. It is racist via proof by assertion and incoherent ranting and raving ad nauseum that it is, in fact, racist.

Note to self: tell the hawt Asian wife that she needs to stop referring to white people (like her own husband, dammit!) as western barbarians, because, well, this is insulting to Africans.

There should be a certain measure of schadenfreude that the intellectual spawn of Dawkins has turned on him. But patricide is always ugly. This new wave of semi-illiterate postmodern jackasses are impossible to cheer for, even as they eat their own.

I wonder, though, if this use of barbarian is racist?

 They must change and the barbarians must back down.

You Must Obey The Law

North Korea is a wasteland with arguably the most batshit crazy head-of-state on the planet, Kim Jong-un, the Asian Pillsbury doughboy.

Now according to Wikipedia, North Korea is officially an atheist state.

Well that just won't do! No way, man. After all, we have:  

The Ipso Facto No Atheist Is That Bad Law: Stalin and Mao were not atheists. They were demigods of the religions Stalinism and Maoism. We know this because mass murder on such a scale can only be committed by religionists.

Clearly this should be amended:  

Additionally, Kim Jong-un is not an atheist. He is the demigod of the religion Jongism, noted for its Shrine of the Subway that Runs Once a Year for the Rare Visiting Foreign Barbarian.

Moved inexorably by this law, Jerry Coyne writes:

The state [North Korea] is in many ways a theocracy

Of course it is. All states run by lunatic atheists are theocracies. The Ipso Facto No Atheist Is That Bad Law can not be violated.

If you could have...

If you could have just one biblical passage explained to you, which one would it be? I don't necessarily mean in importance--just one that bugs you because you have no clue what it is about. One that leaves you scratching your head.

For me it would be this:

¹⁶If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life—to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should pray for that. ¹⁷All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death. (1 John 5:16-17) 

It doesn't matter how many commentaries I read. None give satisfaction on this passage. I don't get it. I don't get it at all. I do not buy the fairly common explanation that this is about sin that lead to immediate death, such as in the case of Ananias and his wife Sapphira (Acts 5:1-10). That explanation has the slimmest of purchase. Apart from somebody sinning and dying, it doesn't fit nor offer any help in understanding the passage as a whole. Not to mention that since Ananias and Sapphira were summarily terminated there has been an obvious paucity of people sinning and dropping dead on the spot. With nothing new under the sun, if there are sins leading to immediate departure, you would think it would not be a rare phenomenon.

No, I don't think that's it. It is not about Ananias and Sapphira.

Sigh. It's one of those instance were I am reminded that it is not what you don't understand about the bible that should keep you awake, but what you do understand.  I get that. But it's not helping. This passage has always been stuck in my craw.

Justification: Lesson 3/11

Justification

Lesson 3

Roman Catholic Justification, Part 1

I have completed an 11-part adult Sunday School on Justification. I will provide links to the pdf versions of my presentations.

Lesson 3: Roman Catholic Justification Part 1

FLASH: Science achieved nothing of note in Literary Fiction in 2012!

There is no disingenuous bastard quite like Jerry Coyne.

Today he posted the top ten scientific discoveries and accomplishments of 2012. An impressive list to be sure. He then posted the top ten religious discoveries and accomplishments of 2012 and, you guessed it, because Jerry is just about the most clever person this side of Richard Carrier, the list was empty!

Hah! That Jerry! Such a wit!

He neglected to mention, of course, that religion is not in the business of discoveries or accomplishments. Someone who tried to emulate Jerry’s rhetorical brilliance (tough, very tough) might post the top ten scientific artistic creations of 2012 and the list would be—empty! 

OMG, art is so much better than science!

Having a grad student finish...

Is always a good thing!

---

Thesis Defense • Master of Science

Candidate: Walter Eldridge Pierce IV

Advisor: David Heddle, Ph.D., Associate Professor, PCSE

April 12, 2013 • 11:00 am • Washington Room, DSU

Title: Chimera Grid: The geometry of intersecting 3-dimensional Cartesian and spherical grids

This thesis solves a computational physics and differential geometry problem mapping the intersection of a 3D Cartesian and 2D spherical grid using software written in C#. The grids are created from nonuniform arrays. When a Cartesian cell intersects the sphere, a pre-patch is created, defined by curves connecting the points of intersection. The pre-patch is spliced against the spherical grid, breaking it into smaller patches, each with a unique five-plet of indices. The patches were initially visualized with a Monte Carlo coloring and later compared with the computed patches. Area and perimeter measurements, necessary for potential use in magnetohydrodynamic calculations, are calculated using an analytic approach described here. The analytic patch covering is tested by how well it matches the Monte Carlo visualization and by assessing whether the sum of the patch areas matches the area of a sphere.

Patches generated and overlayed onto a Monte Carlo visualization after 400,000 data points were plotted. The projection is a simple θ, latitude: [0, π) and φ, longitude: [0, 2π) plot.

Ch ch ch changes

In a few weeks my term as chair of the math department will end. I’ll return to the physics (actually, PCSE, for Physics Computer Science and Engineering) department. I’ll still be teaching a course I developed for math, an introduction to Mathematica, but I will also be back to teaching physics, which I have greatly missed.

It was not fun being a department chair. Some people love it—I did not. I am not cut out to be an administrator. I have always been more of a follower than a leader. I would say the experience was interesting at times—but really horrible tasks (in my opinion) such as writing performance evaluations and annual reports and scheduling classes—those I will not miss. And my research time was reduced to a fraction of what it was before becoming a chair.

The job involves a lot of interaction with students, students looking for help, and that part I will miss.

And I will miss the chairs' meeting with the dean of the college, where we learned all the juicy stuff before everyone else!

It is what it is. Chair of a department is a stepping stone to higher administrative positions—of which I have no aspirations.

Also to look forward to: in May we are moving into our new building!

Women teach men

For a church that wants to follow the bible, the role of women in church is a tricky one. Looking at the New Testament for answers, the question always boils down to: when Paul was discussing worship conduct and church polity, what was cultural and what was intended as instruction for the ages?

This is one area where we are at great risk of living up to the charge, so often leveled at us from atheists, of cafeteria Christianity. Self-consistency is good. I love self-consistency. But it doesn't mean you are right, it just means you are not trivially wrong. The trivially self-consistent approach to this question is that all Paul’s teachings are normative for all times. Right down to the head coverings. That approach sidesteps all debate. If Paul said it, then it was for then and for now. And it is self-consistent. But I think it is wrong.

I try to live by one all-encompassing hermeneutical principle: the bible is supposed to be read intelligently. The simple approach described above, in my mind, violates this principle. I don’t think that Paul taught that, for now and evermore, women should cover their heads in church (just to take one example.) That one deviation sets the precedent—now we are forced to go case by case. And then we'll find, well, sometimes it is just plain difficult to read the bible intelligently. There seems to be no guiding principle as to how one command should be deemed to be cultural and temporal, while another is universal and eternal. It is beyond me, that’s for sure.

So what do I do? I sort of live with what seems reasonable. My church was deacon led, and the deacons were all men. I do not think that is the biblical model. We switched to a plurality of elders (men) and deacons (men and women). Men (primarily elders) teach adult Sunday School. On a scale of 1 to 10 at what level do I think I can defend this? I would say a 7. Not that great, but it is (in my opinion) the most defensible model. I’ll live with it. At least for now. But I couldn't prove it from scripture definitively. Contrast, say the idea of predestination. That I believe I could defend at 9.5 on a 10 point scale.

However, there is this: women not teaching men does not mean women can't teach men. They can and do, all the time. I once was in a church where an elder said something totally asinine. He related that if he turned on the radio to a Christian station when they were airing a bible lesson or devotion taught by a woman (think Elisabeth Elliott) he would turn it off, because a woman should not teach a man. Nonsense. Let us turn to the bible to see how silly his position is.

²⁴ Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man,competent in the Scriptures. ²⁵ He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. ²⁶ He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. (Acts 18:24-26)

Priscilla and Aquila (wife and husband) were this remarkable couple from Rome that Paul encountered in Corinth on his second missionary journey. The bible is silent on what must have floored Paul: at that time he was the world's most far-ranging missionary, and yet he encountered two Christians from Rome. No missionary of note had yet been anywhere near Rome. How delighted and flabbergasted he must have been. But that’s another story. The point here: in the nascent church, Priscilla (w) taught Apollos (m).

It is something I think about often.

Justification: Lesson 2/11

Justification

Lesson 2

What is Justification?

I have completed an 11-part adult Sunday School on Justification. I will provide links to the pdf versions of my presentations.

Lesson 2: What is Justification?

Justification: Lesson 1/11

Justification

Lesson 1

Introduction

I have completed an 11-part adult Sunday School on Justification. I will provide links to the pdf versions of my presentations.

Lesson 1: Introduction