Via 1gm again, Newseek/Washington Post has a collaborative “blog” for interfaith discussions, and at first glance, it is quite an ambitious project. It is called On Faith, and includes about 60 different contributors… you have Southern Baptists, pagans, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons, Muslims, Catholics, charismatics, freethinkers… you have movement leaders, political pundits, academics of all stripes, journalists, a biologist, internet gurus, all manner of folk. Lest you think at first glance that Muslims are overrepresented, remember that Muslims with names beginning with vowels are overrepresented… From what I can tell Unitarian Universalism is severely underrepresented – something which should be brought to the management’s attention.
I’ll be surprised if it lasts a month.
Sally Quinn’s question elicited a number of responses.
If some religious people believe they have a monopoly on truth, then are conversation and common ground possible? If so, what would be the difficulties and benefits of such a conversation?
So far, I have read responses only from Sam Harris (as recommended by Norm) and from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., to whose entry I posted a lengthy comment.
Seriously, a lot of good could come from something like this… which is reason enough to think it won’t last long.
Amen brother.
If they were over there shooting at each other the only question would be, “How can we make it last longer?”
Hi Smijer. I followed you here from your comment on Albert Mohler’s answer. I share your hope that some good will come of this.
I’m curious about something. You said something to him about his “stated intent to hold your view of the Bible as God’s ‘unique… absolute, universal, and timeless revelation’ beyond contention and above debate”.
Where do you think he stated the intent to hold it beyond contention and above debate? I see him say that “Evangelicals must show up ready to speak and ready to listen, ready to respect others who hold radically divergent views even as we would ask for respect in return,” and “We should not be afraid to disagree, nor to risk the conversation. So, let the conversation begin . . . and let us show up as who we are, beliefs and all.” I don’t see him say that the inspiration and authority of the Bible is to be held beyond debate. That would be a rather odd thing for the president of a Southern Baptist seminary to say. On the contrary, I expect that if you wanted to enter a cordial discussion about whether or why the Bible should be trusted, he would be happy to oblige.
Hi Tim, & welcome.
The words that I took to mean that from him were these:
Honestly, I grew up in the SBC tradition, and it was generally impressed upon me that compromise on this position – whether arrived at through reasoned debate or any other means, was tantamount to a sin against God, if not blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and might place one in jeopardy of hell.
Someone from such a tradition may be willing to debate the issue, but I think it will be unusual that they will be open to persuasion on the issue – making debate a somewhat one-sided proposition.
Of course, I may have misunderstood and/or underestimated Dr. Mohler, and remain open to any discussion or dialogue that may unfold. As you may have noticed in the post to which you replied here, I do think this sort of dialogue can be fruitful, even if there are areas of concern that are outside the scope of an interfaith conversation.
Hi Smijer,
I thought you might refer to one of his introductory sentences, “As evangelical Christians, we must be honest about the kind of claims we are making and the kind of conversation we are ready to enter.” There, I can see how you would get the impression that you did.
In the section you quote, though, I really see a significant disconnect between the words he used and the meaning you took from it. With what you say about your SBC background, I can understand how you took it that way, and I agree that it would be outside the norm for someone who believes in biblical inerrancy & authority to be genuinely, deeply open to changing their mind on it. But that goes to psychology, not a stated conscious intent, which is what you took from his words.
On “any problem lies with us”, his point there is to stress that his belief in the authority of the Bible does not imply he thinks his theological views are infallible. He’s saying that even with inerrancy of scripture, he could easily be wrong.
On “we will claim a biblical authority that is absolute”, he did not say anything about whether that is a fundamental premise or a conclusion that can be reached (or at least adequately defended) through rational consideration of the historical and archaeological evidence. He did not say he holds that point above debate; he said that it’s part of the view he espouses when he comes to the table.
I think you’re right about how unusual it would be for people from such traditions to be open to persuasion on the issue. If we limit the pool to well-educated seminarians (instead of the general laity), I don’t know what the trend would be. Regardless, I don’t think this lack of openness is more widespread on “my side”. I’ve met one non-believing person in my life who seemed genuinely open to the possibility that the Bible really is revelation.
But as you say, this sort of dialogue can still be fruitful.
Tim,
It is difficult to “seem” genuinely open to the possibility that the Bible really is revelation, even if one is – in principle – open to the possibility.
The reason for this is that such a possibility is extremely remote from any perspective other than that of the Christian culture. It is just as difficult for me (and probably you) to “seem” genuinely open to the possibility that the position of the planets influences our day-to-day life experiences and choices, or our psychological profile.
The fact is that I am open to both of these possibilities. In fact, I have spent time in subcultures where both of these possibilities were treated as live, and unexceptional. And, to my later embarrassment, I accepted them both at one time or another as truths – or at least likelihoods – despite a passing understanding of how critical thinking *should* work.
However, these ideas are far more parsimoniously explained by invoking natural errors in human reasoning about the world than by postulating their truth and suggesting that faith in opposition to evidence – in one of these particular cases, though not generally speaking – happened to correctly find the truth.
In fact, something akin to “faith”, even in opposition to contrary evidence, can sometimes reveal correct notions on matters where there is an immediate survival benefit, where the issue is unextraordinary, and/or where there is the majority of the evidence is unavailable for us. At least I think this is the case.
For instance, selection or confirmation bias will produce a lot of “false positives” that have little impact on overall fitness, but will sometimes save a life when these biases are regularly employed in an uncontrolled environment because they may pick up a real positive more quickly than a reasoned thought process would. I’m thinking of a paranoic soldier who sees the enemy behind every tree. This will enhance his ability to survive in hostile territory because it really isn’t all that improbable that an enemy lurks, but it will cause him grave social disability when he returns to friendly territory where it is much more likely that a kid with a string of firecrackers is lurking than an enemy.
But, to understand the nature of the Bible, where one is faced with a spectrum of hypotheses that depend on ordinary human literary impulses on the one end and the extraordinary idea of a disembodied superintelligence on the other, the approach of faith-like impulses is similar to the approach of the soldier suffering post traumatic stress disorder after returning from a long stay in a hostile environment.
Human inclinations bias us toward explanations involving human or animal agency, and in a culture where such agencies are assigned to disembodied actors, the disembodied superintelligence may seem unextraordinary. However, our modern and scientific understanding of how intelligence functions creates real difficulties for the notion that intelligence can exist without a biological mechanism to produce it. If one compares the difficulties with the idea of a disembodied intelligence with the rather mundane notion of human literary impulses, it is far more parsimonious to cite the latter over the former, even in the absence of qualifying evidence. If one goes farther still, and weighs all the evidence available to a modern person, the notion of Divine Inspiration becomes far more problematic still.
So, for one who is not emotionally attached to the ideas associated with “faith”, and who has spent time reasoning and investigating by methods similar to the ones scientists have used to increase our understanding of nature by several orders of magnitude over a very short period of history, the possibility that the Bible is what Dr. Mohler says it seems vanishingly remote. And while I may be “open” to the idea in the sense of “not ruling it out, depending on the evidence”, I will not seem to the observer any more open to that idea than you might be to the idea that there is a ceramic teacup (h/t Richard Dawkins) in distant solar orbit, which has been there since the beginning of our solar system. You may acknowledge that it is a physical possibility, but if I should begin citing apologetics in favor of it, you would most likely respond by giving me a lesson in reasoning rather than trying to answer my apologetics one by one. And, you would “seem” just as closed to that possibility as I “seem” to the possibility that the Bible is God’s revelation.
All this said, I’m not sure what “your side” is in the debate over the fundamental dogma of the Christian religion – and I may have just spent a couple of paragraphs preaching to the choir. I think it is essential that this fundamental debate be pursued to a conclusion agreeable to all, so that some of the more important ethical questions can be approached from a common ground that does not truly exist now. But, in the meantime, I think there are plenty of ethical questions that can and should – but are not being – discussed from the areas where we all do hold common ground. And, a continuation of those discussions is at least as important.