Audio only:
Joe looks at three takeaways from Rhett McLaughlin’s deconstruction.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to do something a little bit different today. If you are like me, there’s a good chance that in the good old days of YouTube you watched a fair amount of Rhett and link, and one of the things about Rhett and Link is that both of them, they kind of oozed evangelical Christianity. It was pretty obvious even though they weren’t super open about it, that these were people who came from a Christian background. And sure enough, they not only were evangelicals, they’re former missionaries,
CLIP:
We were all in, we were on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ, we were missionaries for a couple of years. We trained people in evangelism.
Joe:
But today, neither of those gentlemen identify with Christianity at all. They’re both Christians and they’ve been pretty open about their deconversion and a lot of people have responded within the broader Christian YouTube world of pointing out areas that we disagree. And understandably, I think there are plenty of things that you could critique in their stories, but I want to do something different today. I want to focus on three areas that I agree with, three areas that I think we as Christians need to actually take to heart and need to actually learn from. So what kind of things I would start with this. This is a broad point I’ll kind of explained as we go. Number one, we need to stop binding heavy burdens. Now, in the particular case of Rhett and his is the journey I’m going to focus on. He talks a lot about the role of evolution for both himself and by extension also for his wife in sort of the crisis of faith that this caused as they came to see the evolution was true
CLIP:
When I told my wife that I thought evolution had happened, she burst into tears. I just want to give you an idea of where we come from.
Joe:
So yes, he is talking to Howie Mandela from Bobby’s World again if you’re of the right age to get those references. But what is it about evolution that is making her cry? What is a bit about this that’s leading to this crisis of faith? Well, I want to talk about this. I’m going to let him talk about this. I’m going to respond to that, but I also want to recognize this as something much bigger than the particular question of evolution, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. But first, here’s his explanation for why his wife was crying and for why this was a crisis of faith For both of them,
CLIP:
She just starts crying because this represented, she knew what this represented right? This was the seismic shift. And I think a lot of people that I tell this story to are like, what do you mean? There’s all these Christians that believe in evolution. I can’t believe that this was so significant for you. But I think the reason it was is because at that point I realized how wrong I could be about something so fundamental and I never ever considered that I might be wrong about something so fundamental. And then not only was I wrong, but all of these Christian apologists who were so sure about their critiques of evolution, they had missed the boat so significantly on this that suddenly I was like, can I trust anything else they’ve got to say about this? So that was the first big domino.
Joe:
Now even in his explanation there, you’ll notice that he acknowledges, look, this is somewhat specific to the form of Christianity that he was brought up in the form of Christianity he kind of inhabited at this time in his life. And if he’d not come from this background, if he’d come from a different Christian background, he might still be a Christian today and particularly as a Catholic, we would look at that and say, what’s the problem with just saying evolution could also be true? I’ll get into this a little bit. I’m not trying to persuade you here of evolution, but just to show that this idea that evolution and Christianity are incompatible is not an idea that most of the world’s Christians actually accept. This is pretty specifically American and pretty specifically evangelical Protestant. Benedict the 16th back when he was Pope in 2007, talked about how he saw in Germany, but also in the us this somewhat fierce debate raging between creationism and evolutionism as if they were mutually exclusive.
It has to be one or the other. And that if you believe in the creator, you wouldn’t be able to conceive of evolution and those who support evolution would have to exclude God. And of this contrast, Benedict called it absurd that it’s absurd to suggest you have to choose one side or the other in that question. Those are strong words from the Pope to be like, what’s the problem? Where’s the issue here? And he gave this explanation. On the one hand, there’s so many scientific proofs in favor of evolution, which appears to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such. But on the other hand, the doctrine of evolution doesn’t answer the deeper philosophical questions of life. Where does everything come from? How did everything start which ultimately led to man? And that these are these questions of utmost importance.
In fact, this is one of the points that Benedict talks about of the relationship between faith and reason that one thing we can see from reason is that reason without faith isn’t able to answer the deeper questions of life. It can explain how things happen, but it doesn’t really have the mechanism by which to explain why things happen. And he says Though our reason is broader and can see that our reason is not basically something irrational, a product of irrationality, but that reason creative reason precedes everything and we’re truly the reflection of creative reason. In other words, the answer here isn’t to treat reason as the enemy of saying, well, don’t do any scientific investigation. Don’t look into the research on evolution. Don’t use your reason, just have faith. But rather the existence of reason should point to a belief that not only my own individual’s subjective self has reason, but that there is reason behind the whole cosmos and that this should lead us into a belief in a personal and reasonable God, not a reason to reject reason that with reason.
In other words, you can hit a point where you realize somebody is smarter than you or you can use reason to determine something was created with reason. I’ll give you a couple examples. Anytime somebody says, trust the science and they haven’t done the science for themselves, whatever you may think of that what they’re doing is saying, my reason has taken me far enough to believe there are experts in this field and I’m going to defer to their superior knowledge and authority because I can’t run every test myself. And whatever you think in the particular cases that comes up, that is a normal reaction of reason. It’s not an abandonment of reason. One of the things you come up against in reason is you can’t possibly investigate everything for yourself individually. So there are these areas where you just have to say, okay, I have to take this thing on faith because I don’t have direct access to the evidence or I don’t have the skills to figure these things out.
And so in all these areas, history, science, whatever, there are many things that we accept on faith. And I don’t mean here the theological virtue of faith. I just mean the natural disposition to trust people who’ve proved themselves trustworthy. And there’s something a little bit analogous when it comes to the relationship of reason and faith. We have enough evidence from reason to say this is a reasonable act of trust to place in Jesus. This is a reasonable act of trust to place in the revelation of God. Now we are aided by divine grace. You can get a lot deeper into the weeds theologically with that. But the point there is that reason recognizes its own limits, but that doesn’t mean reason is bad. The other thing is that reason points to reason that you as a rational person can tell if you are reading something, if it’s just a random assortment of letters or whether it’s arranged in a meaningful way, you’re able to read it and decipher it and understand the meaning.
You’re able to draw all of that out and you can thus say, okay, I don’t see the name of the author on this book, but it clearly is authored by someone who has intelligence and this is a work of reason and so on. So you can use reason to recognize the working of reason. And so the cosmos themselves appear to be the reflection of creative reason as a rational being who uses creativity and reason to make things. I know what it looks like when things are made with creativity and reason and the cosmos, they reflect that. In fact they are that in a way we can’t even replicate. We can’t make anything as amazing as the universe. And that’s a good evidence that the universe isn’t just random chance, it’s also the result of creative reason. But the point there is notice Benedict’s position on evolution is that yeah, this is just one of those things we know from reason and that’s not a threat to faith.
That’s one of the reasons we have faith is because we recognize that reason itself needs an explanation. Now, there’s a cool argument you could make here, but I don’t want to get too in the weeds. I’ll save this for another time, but CS Lewis talks about how if reason is itself merely the productive evolution, merely the product of purely natural forces with no outside intelligence at all, then you would have reason to doubt your reason. But I’ll leave that for a deeper explanation at another time. Benedict says, though we were thought of and desired, thus there is an idea that preceded me, a feeling that preceded me, that I must discover that I must follow because it will at last give meaning to my life. This seems to be the first point to discover that my being is truly reasonable. It was thought of, it has meaning, and I give this here not to convince you of Benedict’s brilliance or of evolution or anything like that, but just to say if you are a Catholic, you don’t have any need to choose Christianity or evolution because we would say they’re not answering the same questions.
You can believe both that God created the heavens and the earth and that he used natural means to do so in the same way that you can believe God created you and your neighbor and he might’ve still used natural means to do so like your mom and dad. So it’s not an either or. And when you insist that everyone has to agree with a certain view of creation, not just in terms of the theological answer, but in terms of what mechanism did God use, it can’t have been evolution. When you start making those claims, you’re binding people with this burden that they shouldn’t be bound with for now, I’m really just trying to stress this point that not all Christians feel the weight of that burden, but many people come from an evangelical background of a certain type where this was taught as this non-negotiable, fundamental part of Christianity where if evolution is true, that would disprove Christianity. And that’s why Rhett’s wife is crying. And so Rhett is able to even say if he’d come from a different background, he might still be a Christian.
CLIP:
I don’t know. I can only guess as to where I might be if I came from a different Christian background or if I had a different set of beliefs or I approach this differently. There’s definitely, if multiple world theory is true, there’s definitely a lot of ratts out there who are still Christians. It could have gone a different way when the evidence for common ancestry became indisputable and overwhelming. I couldn’t reconcile it with the view that I had of the special creation of animals and especially people. And that was only a problem because I was an evangelical Christian. If I had been Catholic, then I would’ve been like, oh, the Pope already said that evolution happened, so this isn’t a problem for me. This doesn’t change anything, right?
Joe:
So that’s what I mean about binding heavy burdens. Now I’m drawing that language from Jesus in Matthew 23 where he is accuses of Pharisees of sitting on Moses’ seat. So they have a seat of authority, but they’re misusing it. They don’t practice what they’re preaching, and he says that they bind heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on men’s shoulders. When you set the bar too high, you’re doing real damage to people. Now, that’s true in a lot of different ways. If your moral standard is impractically high, then you can have people who get just incredibly discouraged. This is true in all these contexts. If your approach to parenting is I demand perfection of my kids all the time and I make them feel bad when they fall. Short of that, you’re binding a heavy burden hard to carry. And if your approach to Christianity is you have to agree with me on all of these things that I read the Bible this way and you have to agree with my reading of it, or you’re not a true Christian that’s binding a heavy burden.
But on the flip side to that, the answer can’t just be to have no standards. That’s true. Whether we’re talking about parenting or Christianity or whatever it is, you can’t just say, that’s just my read. You do whatever. We intuitively recognize that there are parts of Christianity that we actually need to agree on. There are essential doctrines in other words. And so here the question becomes, well, who has the authority to determine what is and what is not an essential doctrine? Now, this is a question I’ve asked before I can link to it at the end, but that question is one that many people struggle to answer because you might have your own list of doctrines you think are essential. Your list might be shorter or longer than your neighbors. But the question becomes, well, how do you know that those are the essentials just because it seems clear to you or is there something deeper?
And so here I would say that this question of well, what is or isn’t essential is something that you need an actual authority to answer and that you and I don’t have the authority to do this. So as I said, the question can’t just be answered with saying nothing is essential, and red actually points this out that evolution is one part of the story. But then you say, well, what about Adam and Eve? What does this mean for original sin? And so can you write off the whole thing as just a fable? The answer to that would be no. He’s right to recognize the bar for him as an evangelical Christian in the particular kind, that he was unreasonably high, and if he’d not been an evangelical Christian of that variety, it wouldn’t have been there. He’s also right that you can’t just set the bar at the ground.
You can’t just say none of this matters. It’s all just a fictional story that rather some things need to be bound, some things need to be loose. And the point I would just draw is that St. Peter and the church, collectively we find Jesus giving that authority first to Peter in Matthew 16, and then to the church collectively Matthew 18, not to you and me. And so that’s not my place to draw those boundaries. So this is something I always try to avoid and that I encourage other Christians to avoid too. It’s a lot to get someone to accept the gospel. It’s a lot to get someone to accept Jesus Christ. Don’t also make them accept your particular readings of the Bible in order to be a true Christian because now you’re imposing not only the gospel, but also you and the gospel is inspired and without error and you’re neither of those.
So you need an actual standard. The standard cannot be yourself. And I think Rhett’s deconstruction shows you the danger of what happens when Christians just start willy-nilly putting the standards wherever they want them to be. Some Christians put them way too high. Some Christians put them way too low, but that’s a problem either way. But as I said, this is actually just scratching the surface. While this is ostensibly about evolution, this really gets to this deeper issue about trustworthiness. Now it turns out what I thought would be a good take and oh, we should talk about the danger of young earth creationism being too doctrinaire. And I’m not arguing. You can’t believe in a young earth. I’m not arguing. You can’t believe in creationism and you can’t reject evolution. I’m not imposing that burden on you. That would be the opposite of what I’m trying to do. What I am saying is don’t impose your own reading of Genesis as if you have the ability to make everyone else agree with you. And that’s true across the board on issues that aren’t settled dogma.
But when I went to make this video, I found out that a gazillion other Christian apologists had already made somewhat similar points, although maybe not in that exact way, and Paolo Gia argued that they were missing the point. And I think that he’s right that there is more to re’s point than just evolution. Although evolution is a particular issue, he comes back to a lot that I think something deeper is at play and that something deeper needs to be addressed directly. So here’s kind of Paolo’s apologist roundup, and then we’ll look at what that deeper thing is.
CLIP:
I think we can all agree that younger earth creationism is goofy. This issue of evolution played a key role in rets deconstruction.
I don’t like the idea of being related to apes. I think they’re gross, but I think it’s true because the science supports it. But nine times out of 10, I’m talking to people like this because they have gone through this kind of stuff and they have been told by young Earth creationists evolution is of the devil. It’s evil, it’s incompatible with the scriptures.
I want us to feel the psychological and social effects that it has when we make the issue of evolution, a kind of Christianity versus unbelief issue.
Certain young earth creationists, like apparently RET himself at one time have a distorted understanding of the web of beliefs. They think that right at the center of the web is belief in special young earth creationism, and therefore if that’s given up, it has enormous repercussions throughout the web of belief.
Don’t let this kind of stuff deconstruct you just because these apologists who were not experts in evolutionary biology got evolution wrong. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong on everything.
Joe:
So in Red’s telling though, the issue isn’t just, oh, I was wrong about evolution or, oh, these people who I had trusted about evolution or about the age of the earth, they were wrong. The point there is if I can be wrong about all these things and if Christian apologists can be wrong about all these things, what does that mean for everything else that they’ve been telling me is true? And what does this mean about the basic relationship with the truth?
CLIP:
Learning that there was all this evidence that kind of pointed pretty clearly to the earth being old and then realizing that there was a really large contingent of Christians who just denied that and didn’t believe that it was alarming. It was alarming for a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, maintaining that young earth view, it requires sort of dismissing or reinterpreting a lot of evidence that has been gathered and you got this big umbrella of Christianity and the whole idea is that we’ve got the truth. The whole point is we have the ultimate truth, right? As Christians, God has revealed the ultimate truth to us. This is what I believed, but yet within that camp, there are these two wildly different perspectives on basically the entire natural world. And I was like, something about this is alarming because this isn’t as clean as I thought it was.
Joe:
So one final point about faith and reason, and then I want to actually make it a much broader point because I think red is keyed in on something that we need to be a lot more keyed in on ourselves. First, we should take the approach that St. John Paul II talks about in Fetus Aio, that faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises the contemplation of truth and that God is placed in the human heart or desire to know the truth in a word, to know himself so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves. Now, this is a point that Rett makes in slightly different words in his recent interview with Alex O’Connor where he talks about how we need to have a greater fidelity to and love for the truth that we shouldn’t treat truth whether we know it by faith or by reason with suspicion or derision or be threatened by it, that the truth is something we should be lovers of.
But there’s this corollary point, and he’s talked about this as well in the recent Alex O’Connor interview, and I want to just make sure we have it central in frame. If you associate Christianity too much with anything, and that can be a doctrine, that can also be things like a political view. If it’s not something that is actually central to Christianity, if it is your own idiosyncratic view and you say, everyone should agree with me on X, you can quickly associate Christianity with this heavy burden that I have to accept both Jesus Christ and your preferred political candidate. I’ve got to accept Jesus Christ and your political platform. I’ve got to accept Jesus Christ and your conspiracy theory or your view of the world on whatever issue. And so I think we do tremendous damage in this way. I quoted this earlier, but when he talks about how as Christians we’re supposed to have the fullness of truth, then if you see Christians living in non-reality, that’s not just an issue of faith.
First reason. If you live in this world where you’re completely detached from the goings on of what’s actually happening in society that undercuts the claim that you’ve got the truth now on this channel largely steer away from politics for precisely this reason. My political takes are probably not that intelligent, and I say that because when I watch other people talk about politics, when that’s not their full-time job and they just throw in their political views the number of times I’m like, oh, wow, that was a thoughtful and reason take is dwarfed by the number of times where I’m just aggravated that they inserted politics where it didn’t belong or how stupid and simple their view of the world is, regardless of which side they’re on, regardless of what the topic is, it usually isn’t something where I’m impressed by the thoughtfulness of the person. Instead, it often undercuts their expertise in the actual area that they’re meant to be speaking on.
I’ll give you an example just because it’s an area where I don’t even in t Wright, the Anglican bishop back in some of his earlier books would include these potshots about the Iraq war, and I agreed with him that the Iraq war was unjust. I agreed with him that we shouldn’t be in the Iraq war. I think we’re far enough away from that that there aren’t a ton of people still defending that as a good idea. And it was still an absolute distraction from a book about St. Paul or whatever it was that it was in where it just was so tonally off it so did not belong in the proclamation of the gospel and the way that he was doing it, it just didn’t fit. And now Wright has done things like weighted into the abortion to debate, to defend abortion, and it just completely undercuts his Christian witness.
So maybe your political views aren’t that bad, and again, I agreed with him on a rock. I disagree with him on abortion, but it isn’t even chiefly a question of just agree or disagree. The question is, does it belong? And you can do this with anything, these non-essential issues. If you become really doctrinaire about things that are not doctrinaire issues, that are not doctrinal issues, even then I think you run a real risk, a real damage. And I think we see this in other people and maybe don’t see it in ourselves because our own views just feel like, well, that’s just intuitively the correct answer. But I think what red is pointing to here is that if we aren’t just lovers of the truth, if we just start putting forward our own particular variation of things that we know is not as trustworthy as the gospel, you can start binding more and more and more stuff in the gospel package that doesn’t belong.
This is ironically one of the impulses I think the reformers had. They had this view like, oh, the Catholic church has too much stuff you have to accept. And I think they’re wrong substantially in a lot of those things, but I think they’re right to want to make sure we aren’t binding people to things that they don’t need to be bound to. And the danger is, I think we’re often oblivious that we’re doing that in areas that aren’t explicitly theological. Like if somebody is in your church but they view political and prudential questions differently than you, do they still belong? Are they still your brother or your sister in Christ? And if you can’t say yes to that, I would suggest that this might be an area where things that shouldn’t be binding are binding. Now, having said that, there are issues where it’s just black and white.
There is an actual Christian position on this. Ironically, the examples I gave before with just war and with abortion, I think they actually have Christian answers, but I think that the way we approach even those issues, we have to do it with the gospel first and not just through the lens of partisan politics, et cetera. Okay? So that’s the first issue. We need to be very careful about binding heavy burdens. I wish we would just radically be gospel centric, Christ centric people without getting all of the other stuff that doesn’t belong in center frame in the middle of things, the number of people I’ve seen compromise their effectiveness because of their obnoxious politics or whatever it is, is just too high. Okay, enough about that. The second point I think we need to take him seriously on is on the resurrection and other miracles. Now, this one, it’s a point of agreement in a way because he’s going to say, well, look, all the evidence that Christians normally cite to prove the resurrection would logically lead to believing in other things like Arian apparitions to which I would say absolutely right on brother.
CLIP:
You can choose to believe it is an explanation of the beginning of the church, but there are natural explanations that can explain everything that we know about the church and the course. They’re more plausible from a just reason and logic standpoint. And if you think about any other religious claims, I always find it really interesting the way Protestants don’t give any time to the Marian Apparitions, right? When I was a Christian, basically kind of a Baptist, like a non-denominational Baptist, I heard about these Marian apparitions that had happened throughout history some very recently and some very well attested some with newspaper. You can
Read about press interviews. Is that the
One in Zune
With people who were there, Zune? I think so, yeah. There’s one in particular that I’m thinking of, but I can’t remember where it was Egypt. It was like three years that it kept happening someplace, and groups would show up and you’d have newspaper reporters and they’d all claim to tell you exactly what they’d seen. And even with those firsthand written accounts,
Protestants are like, well, and it’s not that Protestants examine those and then say they’re not true. They don’t even give them the time of day. I knew that they existed, but it wasn’t even worth my time.
Oh yeah, to consider stuff.
Well, yeah, I mean Catholics believe something, but it’s not true. And in that moment where you’re dismissing that Catholic belief, you are resting on human reason because you’re like, you may not articulate this, but what you’re saying is that, well, there’s obviously a natural explanation for this.
Joe:
So there’s two ways of thinking about this issue. One is to say, oh yeah, I knee-jerk reject the validity of Marian apparitions, and so therefore I should knee-jerk reject the claims about the resurrection and eyewitnesses. And the other is to say, well, if we’re going to take these things seriously, we should seriously consider, then maybe they’re both true, but obviously not every supernatural claim can be true because some of them contradict that. Some of them where you’ve got group X over here that says, God revealed this, and group Y over here says, no, God revealed that, and there’s no way of harmonizing the two. Well, obviously those two things can’t both be true, so we need some principle, some standard. It’s not the case that where there are alleged eyewitnesses is automatically true, but we do want to look at the normal evidence for things and make an evaluative judgment.
Now, we’re going to think about all the evidence in a moment here, but I’m reminded of GK Chesterton. The position we don’t want to take is that position of just, well, there must be a natural explanation if we have no deeper reason to believe in a natural explanation and the natural explanation cannot just be, well, a lot of times there is, that might give us a little bit of skepticism that might give us a little bit of cynicism, but I think we can push that too far and that we do push that too far. So GK Chesterton says, if he’s talking about interacting with someone who takes that doctrinaire position of there must be a natural explanation. He said, well, if I say medieval documents attest certain miracles, as much as they attest certain battles, they answer, but medievals were superstitious. If I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in miracles and chesterton points out this is absurd.
It’d be like if he said peasants saw a ghost and you said, but peasants are also credulous. Why are they credulous? Well, they see ghosts. It’d be like saying Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it, and the sailors are only stupid because they say they’ve seen Iceland, that that cannot be your argument. You need something deeper than you would have to be a credulous idiot to believe in the supernatural because only credulous idiots believe in the supernatural. That whole argument is a circular rejection without deeply analyzing the evidence. And as he said when he was a Protestant rt just out of hand, dismissed these marine apparitions. I believe him, I accept that. I’ve seen a lot of people do that, and I think that the answer is that this is like saying only idiot sailors have seen Iceland, that it’s not actually a sound conclusion to draw in reason. So I accept the connection that he’s making there, but I think we want to go the opposite direction with it and say, yes, Marian Apparitions should be believed on the same kind of evidence as the resurrection or neither, and the result there would be, yeah, we should believe in Marian Apparitions.
Chesterton also talks about this, that this doesn’t mean we have to believe in everything. We actually have a great deal more freedom than someone who takes the opposite position. A naturalist who says there must be some other explanation for all of this actually has limited their intellectual options pretty radically. This is the philosophy that he calls materialism, that everything is just mattered. There’s no spiritual or supernatural principle at all. He says it’s actually much more limiting than any religion. Now, Chesterton is not going to argue we want anything to be completely unlimited, and specifically he would say all intelligent ideas are narrow in one sense that they can’t be broader than themselves. And so a Christian or an atheist is going to be restricted in the same sense in one way, namely, you can’t think Christianity is false and continue to be a Christian. You can’t think atheism is false and continue to be an atheist.
So you can’t believe two contradictory things. If somebody claimed there’s a supernatural sighting that just contradicts Christianity, I have a non prejudiced reason to believe that thing to be false. Namely, I’ve seen sufficient evidence to believe in the truth of Christianity. I have additionally the virtue of faith by which I believe in the truth of Christianity. And therefore, if you’re going to tell me something that’s incompatible with that, I have a good reason to reject it already. If you tell me you discovered some formula that proves two plus two is five, everything I know, proving two plus two is four. Disposes me to believe that you are wrong before I’ve heard your argument. But this is not strictly speaking prejudicial because you’re judging on the basis of a wealth of contrary evidence. You might claim you have some new evidence, but I’ve got all this evidence that two plus two is four, and if two plus two is four, it can’t be five.
There’s an actual contradiction. The naturalist might say, well, look, here’s a thousand cases where somebody claimed something was a miracle and it wasn’t. That might be a reason for skepticism, but that doesn’t actually disprove that the next claimant is wrong because there’s no contradiction between saying person number one was wrong about their miracle, and person number two is right. That’s not a contradiction. So even if person number one claimed someone was a miracle and it wasn’t, that doesn’t disprove miracles. If person one through a thousand all claim something was a miracle and it wasn’t, that doesn’t disprove miracles. People will occasionally claim that some drug helped them recover from a disease, and we actually know that it didn’t. It was psychosomatic or the disease went away on its own or any number of reasons. But because of that, we don’t conclude drugs don’t actually help treat disease.
That would be an irrational conclusion. The fact that there are a bunch of white swans doesn’t disprove that there’s a black swan. This is what’s called the black swan problem. Every white swan Europeans had ever seen for centuries was white, and so they believed swans definitionally were white, and then they discovered a place killed Australia where all manner of abnormal beasts exist, and amongst them were black swans. So even if centuries of evidence had led you to believe that there were no supernatural events, that doesn’t prove there are no supernatural events. It could be a black swan problem. What would disprove it is if you had some clear contrary thing that had proved, oh, we’ve definitively proved the impossibility of miracles because of X, Y, Z, that thing doesn’t exist. But if it did exist, that would discount the possibility of miracles. The mere fact you haven’t seen a miracle or don’t believe in a miracle doesn’t disprove miracles.
The Christian then is actually in a better position to make an evaluative judgment in a certain sense because if you tell me there’s a miracle out there that would actually contradict Christianity, I have better grounds to reject it than an atheist does because I don’t just have a bias against the supernatural. I have an actual supernatural reason to reject the thing you’re claiming is supernatural. I hope that’s clear. I want to return to Chesterton’s argument because as we saw, he’s going to say in one sense the Christian can’t accept anything incompatible with Christianity and remain Christian. The atheist can’t accept anything incompatible with atheism and remain atheist on that score where on basically equal footing. But there’s this other score where we are free to accept or reject individual miracle claims as long as they don’t contradict Christianity and an atheist can’t accept any of them.
In chesterton’s words, the Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe, but the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle that we can reject 99.999% of miracle claims, or we could accept 99.999% of miracle claims. We have a great deal of freedom to evaluate the evidence on a kind of case by case basis. And I think Rhett is right that many Christians don’t employ that actual reasoning discerning faculty. And if they did, there are a lot of eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions that they would probably accept. Now, that doesn’t mean all purported eucharistic miracles or Marion apparitions are true. There are some fake ones as well, but it wouldn’t be a zero or a hundred percent sort of answer. So I take re’s point that the same weight you give the resurrection would naturally believe to accepting other miracles as well.
And I simply accept the premise and say, yeah, so we should do that. Not we should reject the resurrection and everything else kind of out of hand because I think that is that knee jerk sort of reaction that isn’t reasonably evaluating the evidence. That’s not a good working of the human faculty of reason to say there must be some explanation with no further evidence or evaluation. Alright, the third and final point that I think we as Christians really need to listen to Rhett on is to always be prepared to give our defense. Now, he doesn’t say that as such, but one thing does say is basically that he cannot shut up about Jesus.
CLIP:
Why can’t I shut up about Jesus? I get this question a lot.
Joe:
I’m reminded here of Jeremiah chapter 20 where the prophet Jeremiah actually says pretty similarly that he can’t shut up about God. He says, if I say I will not mention him or speak anymore in his name, there is in my heart as it were, a burning fire shut up in my bones and I’m weary with holding it in and I cannot. And he talks about it. He’ll even speak about God when it makes him a laughing stock and people mock him for it. And I wish more Christians had the boldness to live out their convictions in this way. I respect the fact that Rhett spoke out on his deconversion knowing it would alienate a lot of people and make a lot of people angry and people would stop following him and it would be bad in some way for his YouTube career. I think that is a stand on principle, and I wish more Christians were willing to be that bold speaking about their faith as he was and speaking about his loss of faith. But there’s more, not just the fact that he’s able to speak about it, but the way that he speaks about it. I think there’s a lot we can learn from. Let me give a couple examples. First, he approaches it as what he calls a three point talk, and he’s actually pretty explicit that he’s getting this from his background as a missionary,
CLIP:
Because I come from this background, it’s just like there’s a good three point talk, good three point sermon. It kind of hit me that there are three things, three pieces of advice that I would give to Christians that they want to hold on to these people. I see it as sort of three points. I would say they need to embrace faith, they need to embrace truth, and they need to embrace Jesus.
Joe:
So he’s presenting the case in this case against Christianity, but in this systematic way or presenting three things that he hopes Christians will come away from to embrace faith, to embrace truth, and to embrace Jesus. Very memorable, very catchy. And because it’s ordered, we’re able to take things away more readily from it. But he also presents it in this way that is really radically personal, and I think this is something we should stick with because making these very logical orderly points, but he’s also sharing his own story, his own journey, and that’s going to be persuasive to a lot of people, but it also means that it’s impervious to certain kinds of attacks. You can do things like say, well, there’s no reason the disbelief in evolution or belief in evolution should be the make or break issue and whether you’re a Christian or not. And that’s logically sound, and he would admit that’s logically sound, but his own journey was such that this is what was subjectively for him. And so as Christians, we have to learn to do this as well. So here’s him kind of sharing, if you think about it, sort of the personal witness aspect of what he’s saying, where he’ll present these points while sharing his own personal journey.
CLIP:
I’m trying to be descriptive and not prescriptive, but I think a lot of times, obviously if you’re talking about, well, I’m not a Christian anymore and here’s a couple of reasons why I’m not going into some really well articulated case against the resurrection, but it’s implicit that I’m critiquing or I have something against Christianity or if I don’t believe in it.
Joe:
So without falling into a radical subjectivism, this is what I would suggest. We need to get really good at doing, talking about Jesus, talking about Jesus in an orderly way, but sharing the hope that it is in you. That is you don’t have to tell me why I should be Christian. You have to tell me why you are Christian. Now, that’s going to include a lot of reasons. I should be Christian and there’s a place for an apologetic or an polemic that tells other people why they should be Christian. But first, let’s just get good at sharing in a clean, orderly way why we have this hope. Why are we Christians? Why can we not shut up about Jesus Christ? So if that’s not something you’re currently doing, I want to leave you with that as kind of a challenge. If someone asked you, why are you Christian, how would you answer that question and be able to present it in a short, clean, clear, orderly sort of way so that you can be as effective in giving your witness for Christ as Rhett or Link or someone else is in sharing why they don’t believe ham?
I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.