The Motte and Bailey Trap

Social media has been especially stressful lately, with COVID-19 taking a back seat or at least riding shotgun to societal and racial contemplation and debates on the nature of corrupt and sinful power systems and corrupt and sinful revolutions, and at which point the extreme corruption of one is announced to have ceded the moral high (or less-low) ground to the other.

To say that I see a lot of logically invalid arguments on instagram and facebook would be like complaining that summer is hot and rain is wet, and certainly not worth writing a blog post about. But I have recently run across an insightful set of articles/blog posts which explains a logical fallacy/argument tactic I'm seeing all over social media now, and I wanted to provide a summary of that tactic.

1. The Motte and Bailey Defense

Around the time the children of Viking raiders were settling into Northeastern France and establishing Normandy, a new type of defensive structure had been developed. The fortification consisted of a strong tower on a hill, called a Motte, overlooking a flat, walled-in area called a Bailey surrounded by a ditch. The walled-in area was where people lived and worked, but in times of trouble they could retreat to the higher tower.

Sometimes a would-be attacker could be held off at the ditch/dike of the Bailey, but stronger assaults might overrun the Bailey and force the defenders back up onto the Motte, from which they could more easily resist their attackers, as it is difficult to charge up a hill and attack a stronghold which is free to attack you back as you do so, especially without strong siege engines. (Which grew more common after the early Middle Ages, as castles grew to be larger and more impressive structures)

So with the Motte-and-Bailey structure we have the basic idea of a less-easily defended but desirable piece of land, marked with a wall and/or ditch, and a strong tower to which one can retreat and be safe from an attacker when necessary.

A very basic version of the Motte and Bailey fortification which illustrates the concept well

2. The Motte and Bailey Doctrine/Informal Fallacy

That brings us to the argument tactic which uses the same name. The idea of a "Motte and Bailey Doctrine" was coined by Nicholas Shackel, who recognized that it could be used as a logical fallacy when arguing. Another thoughtful analysis of the idea can be found both linked to from his own article or directly here.)

Rather than get bogged down in the difference of the Motte and Bailey "Doctrine" vs. how it is used as an informal logical fallacy, which is explained by Shackel in the link above, I am going to mostly refer to it as a "tactic" from now on, since that is how I see it being used, as a way to "win" arguments easily without having an actual debate between contrasting ideas.

The Motte and Bailey tactic involves making a bold and controversial claim (metaphorically, the piece of land you want to secure within your Bailey), then if pressed hard on it, pulling back to say "you only meant" some commonly-held truism which few people will be willing to argue with (a retreat to the defensive Motte).

One can frequently see Motte-and-Bailey tactics being employed on controversial social topics.

1. Bailey position: "I think anyone who wants to get into America that badly should be allowed in."
2. (Someone argues against this, starts to gain ground)
3. Retreating to the Motte: "Well I just can't agree with the government tearing children away from their parents and treating people like animals."
4. (Argument stalls as others say they don't agree with that part either)

1. Bailey: "Defund the police!"
2. (Someone argues that this is a horrifically bad idea)
3. Retreat to Motte: "We don't mean totally defunding the police, we just mean some of the overburden of policework should be shifted to qualified social workers, along with some of their  budget."
4. (Discussion turns to whether this is actually a decent idea or not)
5. Returning to Bailey later... Next posted meme: "Stop police oppression! Defund the police!"

Very few people are going to argue that the government should be tearing children away from their parents or that the numerous examples of wrongful deadly force by police are not indeed more than merely tragedies but indicative of a bigger problem that requires more than official apologies and a few officers laid off. But the point of the Motte-and-Bailey tactic is that this is not the primary assertion being made, merely a strong back-up position to retreat to temporarily until you leave them alone and they can continue pushing controversial positions that shift the Overton window in the direction they desire.

An example of the tactic mentioned by one of the bloggers I linked to at the beginning of this section, and used in one of my examples above, is how many attack labels used by SJW's are explained in much more neutral or reasonable-sounding terms if you push back against them, but the weaponized labels continue in every other case.

E.g. "Tear down their privilege!" when fought back against becomes "We don't mean you are intentionally a bad person, but that you have unconsciously profited from systemic power structures which favor you at the expense of others, and we are demanding with joyful vehemence that those systems be renegotiated." (Then they post another meme saying anyone who disagrees with looting should be silenced by force)

By contrast, the nicest version of this that I've personally encountered is LDS missionaries. They have a set of things they are instructed to tell you to persuade you to get involved with Mormonism. If you engage them regarding some of the odd sci-fi-esque beliefs the Mormons teach which are utterly at odds with the Bible, they will often retreat to claiming that they are Jesus followers who believe the Bible too, but then as quickly as possible return to suggesting you take a first step down the road towards joining Mormonism.

(Christians are not immune to falling into this tactic either. I give a couple examples in the last section of this post but you can probably come up with various others from your own experience)

Perhaps the easiest way to recognize someone employing the Motte-and-Bailey tactic is that you can think you've reached some kind of conclusion or concession through dialogue, or reached some kind of common ground that they will honor, but they quickly return to making the same statements they made previously as if your conversation/debate never occurred. They only retreated to a non-controversial position as a tactic to endure a probing line of thought or challenge that they had no interest in actually pursuing, so that they could resume promoting their position later.

Just as the villagers do not want to live in the cramped Motte defense tower, but will come down from the Motte and resume their productive activity in the Bailey area as soon as possible, so someone using the Motte-and-Bailey tactic will typically go back to making the same claims they had been making before being challenged as soon as they can. It's an effective tactic, since they can continue trying to push controversial positions with relative impunity, and it's not likely that someone will challenge them every single time. (Medieval peasants did not have the "block" option)

People using various versions of "all I'm saying is" or "I'm just saying" or "I can't believe you don't agree that [basic thing that 95% of people agree on]" are also a strong clue that the Motte and Bailey tactic is being employed.

3. Why People Like This Tactic

When people push back against our opinion, even with a cogent argument, it often does not convince us that we are wrong (humans are avid rationalizers), but makes us hold onto it more firmly than before. Thus we seek a way to not be forced to defend through argumentation a position that we did not arrive at through argumentation, yet feel inclined to hold onto anyway.

On the other hand, for those who are already involved in political movements or actively promoting certain ideologies, real arguments are usually a waste of their time, since they are not seeking information but busy convincing others to join them (or refrain from interfering).

The Motte and Bailey fallacy can be used intentionally as a clever tactic for ideologues, but it's also a handy work-around for this information-overloaded world we live in. With so many thoughts and assertions and memes flying around, we want to stake out a piece of opinion real estate (our Bailey) too, but we haven't necessarily crash-tested the idea. In many cases we're merely reacting to the tsunami of information that we're encouraged, even commanded, to express an opinion and take a stance on. Then along comes someone who feels differently and furthermore has an argument prepared against your opinion. Rather than reformulate your stance, or worse, admit defeat and give in to theirs, it's easier to retreat to a defensive position that can hardly be disagreed with then return to the opinion-giving and stance-taking.

It's easy to see that trying to convince a politician on the campaign trail to join the other party instead is almost certainly going to be fruitless effort. The Motte and Bailey tactic, which politicians do indeed often employ in their "debates," is a way to deflect opposing viewpoints, in view of your social media following, while minimizing the possibility that your opponent can score points on you or peel away any followers. Yes it's boring to retreat to truisms and slogans, but it's safer than risking a real defeat at the game of ideas, and it requires your opponent to either do the same or run the risk of looking unreasonable, confirming the stereotype of "the other side."

Imagine a way to end a chess game in a stalemate at any point in the game within two moves. If your goal is to win 1000 games as soon as possible and be dealt as few checkmates as possible, using the fast stalemate to tie up all the hardest games will vastly increase your progress.

4. Motte and Bailey Tactics -- Real Life Examples

To provide some real life examples by way of illustration, Wikipedia's article on the Motte and Bailey fallacy mentions Trump's campaign slogan of "Make American Great Again" as a rhetorical Motte which protects a more controversial Bailey such as building border walls (ironically, a literal attempt to strengthen America's geographical "Bailey").

That probably isn't the greatest example because that slogan itself was the subject of considerable controversy throughout the campaign, whereas the best Motte and Bailey defenses are not "preaching to the choir" but retreating to a Motte which people on the opposite side of the argument from you would also hasten to agree with. ("Make America Better" would be a true Motte and Bailey slogan)

One historical example would be the Temperance Movement in the United States, which eventually led to the Prohibition. Condemning drunkenness and the debauchery that surrounded that lifestyle and the establishments which catered to it was a strong Motte, from which the controversial Bailey of supporting a ban on alcohol sales across the nation could be defended. Thus if you opposed a ban on the sale of alcohol, you could be accused of supporting all the problems alcoholism can bring about. And it worked, though the same cannot really be said for the Prohibition itself.

(I will note in passing that in a very similar fashion, both sides have continually used this tactic on the abortion legality debate)

A very skillful current example of this tactic is the brilliantly-named Black Lives Matter movement. Led by avowed Marxists dedicated to social revolution, it would ordinarily not have gained much traction or support. However their chosen name invokes the Motte and Bailey defense automatically, since the Bailey of "Black Lives Matter" (the movement) has the Motte of "Black lives matter" (the principle).

Those involved with Black Lives Matter can thus automatically respond that any people condemning their Marxist agenda or use of rioting, etc., are taking a stand against agreeing that Black lives matter. And with such a strong Motte, even those unaware of that agenda will respond to defense of the Bailey when it is attacked. (To extend the metaphor, one could say their Motte is made much stronger, its moral high ground made much higher, by the true premises on which it is founded. America's history provides innumerable examples of how Black lives have not been treated as valuable. By linking themselves to such a strong and important Motte, their Bailey of latter-day Bolsheviks is very difficult to assail)

5. Responding to the Motte and Bailey Defense

How would one respond to such a tactic? First, by observing that it is indeed a fallacy. It is not true that opposing the prohibition of selling alcohol is equivalent to promoting alcoholism. It is not true that opposing the BLM movement is equivalent to denying that Black lives matter. The argument may frequently come to a standstill at that point, or devolve into other informal fallacies like ad hominem or false dilemmas, but most real progress will be made by strongly pointing out the invalid linkage between Bailey and Motte. This is particularly important when the Motte is a statement which is actually important and worth defending.

A globally notable example of a Motte and Bailey tactic is how honest fear about the danger of COVID-19 has been used to justify a great number of very controversial decisions. While the pandemic by necessity required controversial and costly decisions--and every mistake in dealing a pandemic has its own death toll, even the right decisions have them--it is the reasoning used to justify those decisions in which we can see this fallacy.

As the debate continues to rage in the US over decisions made and currently being made about how to deal with COVID, social distancing, mask wearing, etc., let's consider a hypothetical argument between two people who disagreed a few months ago on whether the government had the right to close churches:

A: "We need to close churches until further notice" (Bailey)
B: "That sounds like prohibiting the free exercise of religion" (Attack on Bailey)
A: "We all need to make some sacrifices to save lives" (Retreat to Motte)
B: "..." (Breaks off attack)

B probably doesn't want to deny the Motte's premise or even disagree with it, but may feel that there is still an argument to be made for continuing church attendance. Very frequently, the Motte can call in Imperial backup troops in the form of "expert opinion" or "scholarly findings." Let's see what would happen if B persists:

A: "We need to close churches until further notice" (Bailey)
B: "That sounds like prohibiting the free exercise of religion" (Attack on Bailey)
A: "We all need to make some sacrifices to save lives" (Retreat to Motte)
B: "Our church is going to take precautions" (Attack on Motte)
A: "The CDC says it's too dangerous" (Reinforcing troops for Motte)
B: "I don't think the CDC fully understands this yet" (Attacking reinforcements)
A: "They are looking at the numbers and that's their expert conclusion." (Reinforcing troops stand firm)
B: "Then why have they already contradicted their previous statements multiple times?" (Pressing back the reinforcing troops into the tower)
A: "Oh, are you one of those COVID-conspiracy theorists? Do you believe in flat earth too?" (Dumping boiling oil from tower windows)
B: "What? No...[defensive argument]" (Burned by oil, breaks siege and driven down from Motte)

What could B have done differently? Once the argument got to whether the CDC could be trusted or not, there was probably no helpful outcome to the discussion. One other option would be to "stalemate" the argument by finding his own Motte:

A: "We need to close churches until further notice" (Bailey)
B: "That sounds like prohibiting the free exercise of religion" (Attack on Bailey)
A: "We all need to make some sacrifices to save lives" (Retreat to Motte)
B: "Churches save lives too, and provide hope and assurance for people who need it desperately right now." (Retreat to a different Motte which claims the same Bailey)
A: "..."

At that point the argument might keep going, but it can't continue as a Motte-and-Bailey fallacy because now both people are sitting on positions it's difficult to attack. Either someone runs up the other's hill to attack their strong position, or the argument proceeds along different lines.

Disclaimer: This example does not represent my own views on the right thing for churches to do or have done during this confusing season. I have been in Taiwan for the duration of the pandemic thus far and so I don't believe I could offer any helpful opinion from afar on it except regarding what things have been like in Taiwan.

6. So in Conclusion

The Motte and Bailey tactic is a cheap but effective tactic, frequently seen in these days of ideological turmoil. An intellectually honest person will avoid it in their own arguments (though lazy thinking can help it creep in) though if it's used against you, sometimes the best strategy is to fight fire with fire. Better though, to see it for what it is, and consistently work to separate the Bailey from the Motte, if the Motte itself doesn't turn out to be a paper castle.

In the best cases, a retreat to the Motte can be a retreat to premises and presuppositions, and those are what we should be comparing now anyway, since those are where the real differences between us lie, or else where we will find we are not really on different sides at all.

7. A Reminder to the Church

When Christians don't deeply understand God's word, or feel impelled to "impress the world" by trying to do apologetics based on the world's own epistemology, they can fall into this fallacy as well, as described in an example from the blog I linked to above:

"The religious group that acts for all the world like God is a supernatural creator who builds universes, creates people out of other people’s ribs, parts seas, and heals the sick when asked very nicely (bailey). Then when atheists come around and say maybe there’s no God, the religious group objects “But God is just another name for the beauty and order in the Universe! You’re not denying that there’s beauty and order in the Universe, are you?” (motte). Then when the atheists go away they get back to making people out of other people’s ribs and stuff."

The criticism may sting, or it may not because you've never done that, but it should remind us of the danger of trying to win arguments instead of souls. Our apologetics should not ever fall into the lazy habit of the Motte and Bailey doctrine, and we should never fall into the trap of treating God like an abstract concept. (Yet another reason why the fact of the historical incarnation of Jesus is so crucially important for our faith) We believe in a God who did build (and sustains) this universe, created men and women out of earth, and of flesh and bone, and sometimes responds with miracles today when we ask Him.

For a real life example of Motte and Bailey doctrine in the Church, we could consider certain proponents of Young Earth Creationism. Since the beginnings of the Modern Era, it's been tough for anyone raised outside of certain branches of the Church to swallow the concept that the whole earth, or even the universe itself, could be much younger than the theorized beginnings of Egyptian civilization. Yet I have encountered YECs who insist that if you don't believe this, you don't "really" believe the Bible. In this case, the infallibility of holy scripture itself is the Motte, and it's a very strong one, one in which I happen to live and find refuge without identifying with every Bailey established in its shadow.

What makes this a Motte and Bailey fallacy is that there are different ways to interpret the Hebrew of Genesis 1. As we wrap up this post I am not at all interested in going into a discussion of which interpretation I believe and why, but I can say that for anyone who understands there are multiple interpretations, has researched them, and in the end firmly believes the correct interpretation of the Hebrew is 6 sequential days of creation, where a day was 24 hours, even before the sun was created, I have no quarrel with that person whatsoever. God could have done it that way as easily as any other of the theories. The point here is that the Bailey of 6000ish years can be debated, and should stand on other merits beyond insisting that its defense is the veracity of scripture itself, since other well-known interpretations exist which do not contradict scripture. (We are not here speaking of those that do; their Motte is likely to be "Science," which involves its own Motte and Bailey dance since the term "Science" invoked as an authority really means many more things than the dictionary definition, but that is the one they will retreat to if pushed)

I am not picking on Young Earthers here. I was raised one and I have no way of knowing for sure which interpretation of the Hebrew of Genesis 1 is correct, though it's clear that many parts of the creation narrative of current secular science cannot be reconciled with what we find there, and so I am comfortable with regarding the secular science tale of a uncaused expansion of non-created energy as a creation myth by the Modernists, only one level above the Pangu story of ancient Chinese myth or Norse tales of Muspellheim and Niflheim. Science has thrown out various old narratives as new facts render them obsolete, and it is inevitable that they will do so with their current model as well, if Christ tarries. Meanwhile God remains God. Whether 6 24-hour days, 6 poetically described epochs, a literary structure of forming and filling, or something else, Genesis 1 is a true account of how He did it. We can debate which interpretation is right, and it's okay to choose one, but not okay to Motte-and-Bailey and claim you are the only one who really believes the Bible is true and not metaphorical any time someone wants to propose another interpretation based on the text.

What we all--regardless of our chosen Genesis interpretations--must be wary of, and graciously reprimand any believers we catch doing it, is fencing out the Bailey of our own pet or denominational or flavor-of-post-evangelicalism interpretation, then retreating immediately to the infallibility of scripture when questioned. Positions are not Doctrines are not Dogmas, and we must understand the difference. What's worse is when these Bailey walls are made into a hurdle that believers must first jump as a condition of believing in God, when it's belief in God that gives authority to scripture itself.

Christian denominations have carved out their own historic Baileys, which they vigorously defend, yet many still retreat to God's word and the Faith as their Motte. Some do no longer, and they are typically those which are most rapidly imploding as Millennials and Gen Z forsake the habit of cultural church attendance along with many of their elders. But so long as Christ crucified and risen according to the scriptures is indeed their strong tower, then when a denominational bailiwick is imperiled, let them find shelter in that feste Burg.

And it is directly to that mighty Keep of grace and redemption that we should be inviting those who do not yet know Christ, not to first pass the ditches and gates of our lovingly-cultivated Baileys, whether denominational or personal.

Introduce them to Christ through God's word, and let them be transformed by the renewing of their mind by the Spirit to the point that when it comes to choosing between the narratives of secular science (or of marxist dialectic) and God's truth, they will both choose the latter and be discerning enough that they can tell the difference. It has become all too clear these months that many long-time Christians cannot.

Hurricanes and the Goodness of God

For my American readers, this hurricane season will be one that many people remember for decades after the unprecedented flooding that Hurricane Harvey brought to the Houston area. Hopefully, it will also be remembered how people came together to help each other in the midst of a tense period in our national mood, when scenes of cooperation, relief, and unselfish neighbor-love are like balm to a frenzied social soul.

Now with Irma shredding through Caribbean islands and barreling down on Florida, we seem poised to be dealt another heavy blow from weather conditions not under our control. Only time will tell the scale of the damage there. Almost certainly there will be many billions of dollars of damage, countless lives disrupted, and a few ended. For Christians, not only in America but in all the world, we do believe there is One who has power over the weather, a God without whose permission nothing can occur, blessings or tragedies alike. So why does He allow these things to occur?

No Humansplaining

It is always ill-advised and futile to attempt to give narrowly specific reasons that large-scale natural disasters occur. Was Houston being judged for its sins like many claimed or implied New Orleans was in Katrina? Were the 16,000+ killed in the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami disaster more sinful than the rest of Japan or the rest of East Asia? Were the people whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices or who were crushed by a falling tower in Siloam more guilty than the rest of Jerusalem? (Luke 13:1-5, Hint: Jesus says "No!")

In the whatever'th-wave of the feminist movement we're in now, "man-splaining" is criticized as men offering unnecessary or patronizing explanations to which they expect women to listen respectfully. Or something like that. These things tend to be flexibly defined by those who wish to claim victim status, whether they have a legitimate cause for complaint or not. (They might as well lock up all the INTPs now, we love to explain things to anyone willing to listen to that much excited detail.)

But there is another kind of mansplaining, or humansplaining, which I would love to see end, and that is when people with positions of spiritual authority start trying to explain things they don't understand because they feel people expect them to have an explanation. Like the occasional situation in Chinese culture where courtesy demands a response to tourist inquiries of how to get to a place even if the local being asked has no idea, it's not so much about knowing, as feeling that you are in a position where giving an answer is expected and so you come up with a good-sounding one.

As a missionary with a seminary degree, I am sometimes put in this position. While I am not a very worthy example, at least I do try to always say when I don't know something off the top of my head but will go research it and have a better answer later, or else that the Bible doesn't actually give us an answer, so I neither have one nor should you trust anyone who says they do. It may be less satisfying than a pithy response you can copy and paste onto a picture and pass around social media, but I don't dare put words in the Bible's mouth. (If you feel I have done so with this post, feel free to let me know)

When a pastor or prominent Christian or anyone else stands up and says that a disaster happened for positive or negative reasons--as judgment for sin, or to bring everyone together--they are choosing from various possibilities, hopefully biblical-based ones, but they have no possible way of knowing the real reason or combinations. We are not privy to an explanation from God, and be very cautious about anyone claiming that they are.

But if we can't known the specific reason, then on a more basic level, why would a good God allow disasters like Katrina, like the Tohoku Quake, like the flooding in Houston, like the crises which you didn't even know were claiming lives every day in less-reported areas of the world, to happen? And can we answer that question without "humansplaining" or adding purely speculative ideas to scripture?
I think we can, and this is my attempt to do so.

A hurricane season that will be long remembered...

Why God Lets Hurricanes Strike Major Cities

I. Because when ocean water reaches a certain temperature, and seasonal wind patterns...

We know this reason, or at least learned it in high school or saw it on the weather channel at some point. This is what people call the scientific reason, and what atheists tiresomely pretend makes God unnecessary until you bring up that this is not the Why at all, but the How. Personally I find it fascinating, how the unbelievable amount of energy representing in a raging hurricane is all the result of a positive feedback loop that can emerge from the tranquil, sun-warmed ocean when conditions are right. But that's wandering from the thrust of our topic.

As I have blogged previously, the ancient Greeks spent some time thinking about why things happen, and came up with the brilliant idea that every event had multiple causes, as seen from different perspectives.

For a simple example, a crystal goblet dropped on a stone floor shatters into scintillating shards. Why? Well, 1) because someone dropped it. But also 2) because it's crystal. If it was rubber or wood, it mostly likely would have survived the fall. Also 3) because the floor is stone. If it had been thick shag carpet, the goblet probably also would have been fine, though my allergies might not. Also 4) because in some humanly incomprehensible way, the shattered goblet fits into the vast and mysterious unfolding of all things, under God's authority and obeying His will. When we ask "why did this happen" we are usually speaking more to the that last category. What was the ultimate purpose?

I am not here suggesting the Greek causal categories are comprehensive or even correct. But their reminder to us that there is not merely one reason for things to occur is important.

So for our damaging hurricane, we could come up with a similar set of explanations. "Why did a massive hurricane strike a populated area with lethal results?":

1) Because of a set of natural phenomenon which to some extent can be traced back in chains of cause and effect to the beginning of the universe. Energy was transferred and the earth went around the sun and the ocean sloshed around for millennia and the hurricane was always going to happen at that time, unless you want to go really deep into arguments about human free will and chaos theory, and suggest the sinking of some Carthaginian trireme during the Punic Wars was just enough energy disruption to butterfly effect the hurricane into being thousands of years later. Perhaps so, but even that can be described precisely by physics, if we had access to the data.

2) Because people decided to build a city there. Actually there are lots of big coastal cities, and hurricanes have a very wide track. Sooner or later every city near the coast will be hit, it's just a matter of time. If we didn't build any major cities within 50 miles of the coast, hurricanes would rarely ever threaten them seriously.

3) Because people build communities out of materials which can be affected by storms. I live in Taiwan, where cities are dense and built mostly out of concrete and steel. Here in the capital metro area, even supertyphoons are mostly just a day of missed work or school, while eating instant noodles you bought at 7-11 before the storm got too intense to carry an umbrella, and listening to the wind howling past the windows. People who live in the mountains are at greater risk of mudslides and flash flooding, however, because of the nature of their environment. Our choice of living space and way of life does render us more or less vulnerable to nature's occasional fury, and like New Orleans, deciding to live in low-lying coastal areas is simply accepting the risk that sooner or later there will be tragedy.

4) Because God did not prevent it. I say it in this way, because when people ask the question in other way (If God is good, why does He send hurricanes) they are implying that a hurricane wasn't going to happen, and God "incited" it. But it was, as we explained above. Given scientific superpowers, we could trace the unbroken chain of cause and effect and energy transfer and weather patterns all the way back to the Creation event. This is important. God's creation is real. It is broken by sin, but it still functions according to knowable and consistent physical laws. Now the Bible certainly does speak of God causing disasters specifically as punishment for sin, but it also certainly does not say that every natural phenomenon which humans are caught up in and suffer is a punishment from God.

So we live in the kind of world where hurricanes happen, we have built cities in their path, and we haven't built those cities to be hurricane-resistant. Yet knowing all this, God doesn't stop them. Why? This brings us to the second part of what we mean when we ask why a disaster occurred:

II. Because God did not interfere in the Natural Order on this occasion

We spoke of the unbroken chain of cause and effect which proceeds forth from the creation event: God can and does interfere with this when He decides to, but this is a specific and special event, what we call a miracle. Even in the Bible, which being concerned with God's salvation plan for humanity and interactions with us mentions miracles and direct acts of God very frequently, we still read of a natural world that is God's creation and functions more or less as it was designed to, a world where the sun is a light-emitting object that God placed in the high heavens for the benefit of earth (a different kind of geocentrism -- the sun doesn't revolve around us, but it's there for us and not we for it), yet not a world where the sun is a little god in a chariot that rides around the sky every day but might choose not to do so tomorrow, or might be caught by a hungry sky wolf instead. The very existence and persistence of creation is itself a miracle, to be sure, but to speak as though every single thing that happens each moment is an arbitrary supernatural intervention risks ignoring a default reality the Bible itself assumes, the blessing of being able to take reality for granted, a core component of a scriptural worldview that all modern science is based on and to which it testifies.

So science is true and godly in the sense that it measures this physical world God established to function according to the laws of physics, neither arbitrary nor pantheistic. Yet if we believed only in this, we would be deists and not followers of Christ. As Christians we understand additionally that the One who set those parameters is present and active, and can always make the call to intervene directly, and does so both unprompted for His own reasons and in answer to our prayers.

So then under what conditions does God intervene? The Bible gives us some general categories:

1) Salvation history - God's interactions with the Patriarchs, miracles on behalf of Israel, through His prophets, in the person of Jesus Christ, etc. The Bible is mostly about this--God's special interactions with individuals and nations in His eternal plan for our redemption, and what happened in history as a result.

2) Judgment for Sin - Both the Old and New Testaments mention specific occasions not directly related to the progression of salvation history, which show God specifically acting to punish special sin. In the Old Testament we famously have Sodom and Gomorrah, but in the New Testament we also have Herod, receiving the crowds' adulation in a blasphemous way (Knowing who the LORD was, he still welcomed the crowds' praising him as divine) and being struck down for it. This is mentioned almost parenthetically as a direct punishment by God, and not as the Spirit-empowered act of any apostle, like the blindness of Elymas. We can assume if God punished both individuals and cities/nations directly, in both Old and New Testaments, for sins other than causing harm to Israel (as in the case of Egypt), then He may still do so today.

3)  As an Answer to Prayer - Whether it is the healings and exorcisms performed by the disciples, or the miraculous answers to prayer the Church has seen from its inception until today, Christians know that God is sometimes willing to intervene dramatically. Testimonies to medical "mystery" cases where tumors vanish and doctors are confused by inexplicable recoveries are so common (even discounting the made-up, "share this post for a blessing" ones) that if modern scientists were as inquisitive as their forebearers we'd have whole fields of research trying to figure out by what means these things are occurring. (expect some kind of quantum energy/power of positive thinking explanations to crop up eventually as a way to get around a Biblical explanation if they haven't already, East Asia is way ahead of the West on that front)
Another specific example pertinent to our topic today: After a particularly severe typhoon here in Taiwan a few years ago, cleanup had just begun and rescue crews were still trying to get to people trapped in the mountains, when another typhoon headed for the island. Many people prayed earnestly, and the typhoon made an abrupt u-turn and headed straight back into the Pacific Ocean where it dissipated. I've heard similar stories in other places, and can't speak to their veracity, but at least I've witnessed it happen once myself in this case.

All this has prepared us to answer the central question: If a hurricane was going to hit a city through natural processes, yet God could directly intervene if He so desired, why didn't He do so?

Let's check our categories of Divine intervention mentioned above:

1) Is the hurricane part of salvation history? By definition, no.

2) Is the hurricane judgment for sin? Possibly. As I said above, it's foolish for us humans to pronounce this without knowing the mind of God (let alone start listing out which sins we guess God is punishing or why it was these people and not other people), but with Biblical precedent we also can't rule it out. I personally don't like this explanation because a hurricane is not really a "black swan" event; they happen every year, some are always more powerful than others, and it's only a matter of time before a large city is affected.

3) Did people earnestly pray in faith for God to send the hurricane somewhere else but He answered no? That's complicated, isn't it? Who would you pray for the storm to hit instead of you? As a Christian I fully believe that if many churches gathered together and prayed for God to make the storm do a 180 degree turn and head back out into the Atlantic, He could and might do that. I've seen a similar thing happen once, as I noted above. Obviously I have no way of knowing if those prayers occurred, though I think people tend to not pray with that kind of real urgency unless there's a special emergency. Sometimes we blame God for things we never really petitioned Him to change, but both scripture and the church's experience of great acts of God suggest that there is power in many people humbly petitioning God that a single person's earnest request does not have. To investigate how that works would both take a longer blog than this, but it can be said that prayer is never a means to manipulate God; we can never discover a formula by which to get consistent affirmative answers to our various requests, the Bible only touches on the topic of which prayers are pleasing to God, while telling us that there are some requests to which we will get consistent affirmative answers (Like James 1:5). (Note: This isn't a question of sovereignty--if God has ordained a thing, He has ordained the means, for example the prayers of many, by which it shall occur.)

III. Because Suffering and Pain is the Default of our World, not the Exception

Perhaps I was the only person who hadn't figured that out, but growing up this was not clear. Life wasn't perfect, but it was alright, and events like serious sickness or car accidents or job loss or natural disasters were tragic intrusions in how life ought to be. Much of the developed world seeks to make this perspective as much a reality as possible--that through use of resources and wise decision making, the suffering of this life may be minimized for as many people as possible. This is not a biblical perspective, but it's a natural human one, that leads to evils as well as good. (Trying to minimize suffering leads to acts of mercy and the alleviation of need, but also to abortion and euthanasia)
Scripture does not describe the world exactly in this way. Rather, a peaceful life free from tragic incidents or societal chaos is a blessing from God, a manifestation of Shalom, something to be sought after not because it is "normal" but because it's what people want and how the world was initially supposed to be. We are all longing after Eden, but sin has turned our quest for it into the welfare state, or even communist regimes.

When man fell, he dragged creation down with him. we have no idea if the world had hurricanes before the fall; although people do like to take one verse and run with it, on this question at least there is biblical evidence to suggest that before Noah's flood the climate didn't allow for that kind of thing. By the time of Noah's flood, not only had the fall taken place, but mankind was so wicked that God initiated a pan-disaster that dwarfs the most furious hurricane the world has ever known. To run the risk of the "humansplaining" I mentioned above, my understanding ("I, not the Lord") is that hurricanes and many other potentially lethal weather events began in the post-flood world as an inevitable result of changed climatic factors. (There is also some biblical evidence to suggest "climate change" in terms not of global warming, which an increasingly small number of people cling to in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, but of the increasing instability of the climate is also an inevitable result of the fall, and will only get worse until the end.)

I have mentioned in a previous blog how, just as you cannot get the tin out of a bronze-alloy sword without destroying it, our post-fall world is alloyed with sin. God will remove it one day, but in doing so "the heavens will perish with fire" and the "earth shall melt like wax." He delays so that more will know Him, more will fill His tables at the feast and enter His dwellings, before the end comes and the door is closed.

Hurricanes are an inevitable phenomenon in our sin-alloyed world. God does not, except in special cases, intervene to prevent the natural consequences of sin. That is the reality of the messed-up world we inhabit. Yet through common grace, by wisdom and understanding the nature of creation (effective city planning and disaster preparation, science that understands the weather and also stronger building materials, etc), we are free to develop ways to mitigate the destructive power of natural phenomenon, and indeed we have done so to a large degree.

So pray for recovery in Houston, pray for mercy in Florida and the Caribbean, and indeed for western wildfires, violence in Syria and Yemen and Nigeria and Sudan and American inner cities and elsewhere, tensions on the Korean peninsula, and a whole host of situations. But if you are simply praying that God will make all the bad things and the hurting stop, that prayer may arise out of the heart's distress, but it does not correspond to biblical reality. The consequences of human sin will wreak havoc as they do, until the final judgment.

Then, what should we do?

God has entrusted the task of letting the world hear the gospel to us. While movements of the Spirit are bringing millions to His kingdom, they are doing so alongside and through the faithful service of brothers and sisters around the world. We are His witnesses, and that is our constant and joyful responsibility whether or not we see God specifically intervening to do miracles on His own. "He's not a tame lion," but we are no longer languishing in the endless winter of frozen Narnia--Christmas has come, and Aslan has died, defeated death, and opened the way.

Now should we sit and question God for letting nature take its course, a course we chose ourselves in Eden by deciding we had better options than trusting obedience? Not as believers. We are on this earth to proclaim Christ to a world that desperately needs hope beyond this world. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. When confronted with disaster, we have two necessary options:

1. Pray, but don't do it alone. God does listen to our requests made in faith. If He chooses to let nature take its course, that is not being mean or unjust, that is in fact exactly justice. He may rather choose to show special mercy in a specific situation, even in a miraculous way, but my experience at least is that He rarely does so when we are casual about asking. And I don't mean prayer memes on FB, but roomfuls of people on their knees.

2. Go. Help. If you are burdened by a disaster, demanding the government or somebody do something on your behalf earns you zero points. (maybe even negative points, by encouraging a culture of shifting Christian responsibility up the secular ladder) Also you can earnestly request, but are unable to demand God do anything. But you are quite capable of being the body of Christ and bringing love and joy to a broken world. If people need help, you go help them.

And some people already are, as we watched in Houston. But what if, like Paul and his race, the Church was excited and even competitive about this? What if the government complained that so many Christians were already responding that they couldn't get state and federal aid in there? (I'm not talking about interfering with professionals doing their jobs, I'm saying a) that's an excuse when there's so much that can be done, and b) Christians can get access to that training too, yeah?) What if we decided no one would outdo us in showing charitable love and being first on the scene to bring mercy and relief in times of disaster and hurting?

I guess, in that situation, the Church might even look like salt and light to a hungry and darkened world. Pray for Florida, pray for Houston, pray for God's mercy on those involved in these and other disasters nationally and globally. Then recognize that God might be prompting you to be one of those expressions of His mercy that you were praying for, and go help someone.

Stranger than Fiction: Strange Faith for a Strange Reality

Black Hole Sun: Life is Weird Sometimes

10 weeks ago, I was flying back to the US for a mission conference. I was exhausted before I left, but found myself unable to sleep more than a few minutes at a time on the 14-hour flight, and tried to pass the time with in-flight movies. The plane was a 787 "Dreamliner," impressively new with a well-designed interior and auto-dimming windows. Those windows turned into a problem when they didn't dim quite enough, and the sun just happened to rise directly outside my window. I was at first confused at the alien, blue sun which rose, until I realized the windows had auto-dimmed and the manual controls were disabled. The best I could do to avoid this piercing cyan orb, dimmer than it would have been but still painful to tired eyes, was to shift in my seat and pull my hat down low. I had already watched a couple of movies and nothing looked interesting, but an old classic-era movie about Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel caught my eye, partly because it starred both Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston. (Title: The Agony and the Ecstasy)

I don't remember if I watched Total Recall before or after that one.
Either way, Ginger Ale is the best choice on flights, always.

Growing up on old movies, I knew both of these men tended to play strong-willed protagonists, and thought perhaps the two of them theatrically butting heads would be entertaining in a way that yet another trope-filled recent Hollywood production would not be. The movie itself was quite unique, beginning with a long introduction about Michelangelo and his art (which brought back memories of Francis Schaeffer's old but legit video series – with his impressively non-ironic goatee and knickerbockers), before moving into the story of how a warrior pope got a capricious sculptor to spend years painting a ceiling on his back, and how the perfectionist artist convinced the tight-fisted pope to keep extending the project until he was finished.

It occurred to me what a weird, existential sort of moment this was—flying in thousands of feet over Alaska, awash in the weird, blue glow of an auto-dimmed sun, watching an old technicolor period film about Michelangelo and Pope Julius II starring the Professor from My Fair Lady and also Moses/the NRA guy, while eating Japanese snack mix.

Life is full of these weird, surreal moments, and they strengthen my faith.

They strengthen it because recognizing those weird moments is a defense against a subtle but strong temptation to doubt, which is that believing the Bible explicitly and worshiping the God it describes in 2016 can sometimes feel a little weird, a little unreal.

The Strangeness of Faith (Mirrors the Strangeness of Life)

Maybe you have never felt this particular temptation, but I often have. "This is the era of instantaneous global communication, of metamaterials, of Facebook, of satire-as-news and social upheaval. Isn't bowing over your Chinese dumplings to thank a 1^st Century Jewish Savior-King a little... weird?"

Let's be honest with ourselves, from the world's perspective, it's quaint at best. It doesn't always feel weird to us, of course: belief in God can feel entirely natural while we can see answers to prayer, the testimony of changed lives, those times we especially feel God's presence, etc. Rationally the evidence for God is there as well, both historically and logically. So it's right and good that our faith should seem as real and instinctive to us as it often does.

It's obvious, however, that there is much about believing the contents of a canon of books closed almost 2000 years ago and making life decisions based on the will of God, the Creator of our universe that we cannot ever directly observe, that will necessarily seem weird in a culture that calls movies that came out 10 years ago "old," and which struggles to explain even the obvious existence of the human soul or mind. To our modern, cynical world, sincere faith is weird.

But—real life is weird. Even if you've chosen to stay inside a zone of life that has become comfortable and familiar, there are those really bizarre moments where you just have to shake your head. For those of us who have left what was comfortable and familiar, those moments occur much more frequently.

So when your faith seems weird, remember that reality is weird too. In some ways, in this modern era where we live immersed in fiction—TV shows, movies, books, etc.--we come to expect reality, contrasted to all that fiction, shouldn't have that weird feeling. But that's a little misguided, because fiction is usually strange in a way that makes sense to people, a consistent weird, if you will, because it's coming from the minds of people. Most fiction is either seeking a balance of fictional but plausible events, or occurs in an alternate world where nothing has to conform to our perception of what normal is.

But reality is both real and yet also stranger than human-devised fiction. Things happen in real life that no one would find plausible in a novel or movie. One of those things is that, once, among a people who for hundreds of years had expected a Messiah from God, a man declared he was that Messiah, and furthermore the Son of God, and that the proof of this was that He would be killed, and then be raised back to life again. He was in fact executed by the colonial government, yet on the third day the tomb was empty and he was seen alive by hundreds of people, and those who knew him and wrote about it suggested that if you didn't believe them, you could ask any of those people. A very falsifiable claim, then, yet instead of being proved false, its proponents willingly went to their deaths for the sake of it, and the faith spread across the entire world. Clearly something happened which cannot be accounted for by the banal theories of skeptics, and for those of us who have experienced God in our lives, there is no reason to doubt the Biblical account, as we have encountered the One of whom it speaks.

Messy Reality vs. Fragile Atheism

So then, for believers in God, a weird world makes sense.
There are rules by which things are supposed to work, to be sure: the laws of physics are the equations that describe God's order. He called it good, and He doesn't randomly violate them. There are commonsense laws about our world as well. (I love the poem by Rudyard Kipling called "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" which cleverly illustrates how the basic principles of humanity, society, and life don't change, even when we manage to convince ourselves we've finally escaped them.)

But believers are free to acknowledge that, at times, weird things happen, which cannot be explained via the laws which explain how things operate by default, and we have an exception, what we call a supernatural event. If God is real, this makes perfect sense: that the One who set up the system and pronounced it good could still occasionally choose to make changes here or there as the situation requires, or in answer to the fervent requests of His people.

Materialists are forced to either explain away every single inexplicable event by natural means, or else shrug (Sometimes Christians forget.. under modernism you were forced to answer, but postmodernism lets you shrug. It's a nihilistic shrug, though). The only other way out is to deny the inexplicable thing happened at all, regardless of whatever evidence exists (as an atheist once said/unconciously admitted to me: Of course that couldn't be true. If it were, there would have to be a God) and at other times they simply come up with some other complicated explanation which they claim is much simpler or less crazy than "invoking a divine being" as the explanation (because they have already rejected that explanation for personal reasons) as if disbelief is the default normal (actually belief in God is by far the historical norm). It is as if color-blind people insisted color did not exist, and claimed any other explanation for people's claims of seeing color was preferable to the crazy, outmoded idea that things had a magical property they couldn't personally observe.

But preferring a very complicated explanation which does not involve God to one that does involve God is merely a sign that one has made up one's mind regardless of the evidence. If you don't want to believe in God, you'll find other explanations more appealing. If you already believe in God, whether weird things turn out to be less-common application of natural laws, or something more, it's equally reasonable in both cases.

In other words, Theists have much the less fragile position. Atheists tend to rebuff all challenges to their position with indignation and/or mockery, because without turning the burden of proof back on the other person, it becomes apparent just how narrow is the ledge to which they cling. (Polite atheists certainly do exist, but they typically will not debate the question either.)

Stranger than Fiction: The Implausibly Real God

In the end, a view of our world that excludes the strange and inexplicable is insufficiently broad to describe the real world. So when you are tempted to find the truths of scripture, the concept of God, or any aspects of our faith to be fundamentally strange (and if you haven't ever thought that, you might have a different problem...), don't feel bad about it, but recognize that it is because they are not plausible fiction, but part of messy reality. If the animals on an alphabet chart were hypothetical, I would consider U's unicorn to be quite plausible, but E's elephant to be a bizarre fantasy (Tusks coming out of its face on both sides of a skinny hose-like trunk and fan-like ears, all stuck on the front of a fat, bulky body? What was this artist smoking?). Yet the elephant is real and the unicorn is mythical. So there is no point in insisting that reality conform to what is theoretically plausible, in fact one of the marks of reality is that it never fits neatly into its own apparent cliches, and goes in directions we couldn't have expected if we were allowed to guess first.

We see this in our own walks of faith: Hypothetical faith is a nice pleasing continuity; real faith has odd corners and rough patches, even bits that seem missing. Fictional God is plausible: Allah—a simple, inexorable Unity, or the million specialized gods of Hinduism, one for everything. The Biblical God is not something we'd have ever imagined: One, but Triune; internally diverse in a way that defies human description, a Divine being who starts on the edge of what we can grasp conceptually and goes far past it. Prophets are more or less plausible—specially chosen people to communicate the ideas of Heaven to mortal men—but a suffering Messiah is so implausible that His own disciples didn't see Him happening under their own noses.

As C.S.Lewis has famously stated, a real God would be something we couldn't guess, versus something humans would come up with themselves. Reality is stranger and more wonderful than fiction, and that makes perfect sense in a Christian worldview (because reality is what the mind of God has come up with, whereas fiction is what the minds of humans come up with), unlike overly simplistic materialist explanations. Christianity is the one faith that can accommodate rigorous logic and inexplicable miracles, that doesn't only make claims to mysterious and inaccessible truth, but actually introduces concepts of reality that you can grasp at but not succeed in comprehending, that are grounded in the concrete and not merely mystical hand-waving, yet range far into the mystical realm in that they exceed our ability to comprehend and have no perfect analogues in the material world.

All this is exactly as it should be, and clashes with our expectations yet "rings true" with reality in exactly the way that real things do. So, rather than retreating to fictional conceptions that are less mentally tiring, that seem to make more sense precisely because they were conceived by humans for human consumption, let's continue to forge ahead into the weirdness of reality, and of our faith, and be comforted that the mutual correspondence between the two is simply more evidence that our faith is indeed real.

3 Things I Wish Christians would Stop Doing

In this post I want to talk about 3 things I've noticed a lot of Christians doing (and of which I've certainly been guilty at times as well) which I submit aren't doing us any favors. I believe noticing them and trying to reign them in would strengthen the Church and our witness.

1. Being Careless with the Truth in our "Edifying Anecdotes"

Many of you have doubtless heard the story about the church in a persecuted part of the world where one day masked men broke in brandishing guns and demanded that anyone who wasn't a true believer and ready to meet their God should leave. Once a large portion of the worshippers had fled in panic, the leader removed his mask and said to the preacher something along the lines of "Ok, all the fakers are gone, you can keep going," and he and his team of not-actual-terrorists then joined the worship service.

This very well may be based on an original true story. (If you know the source, feel free to share) The problem is that I've heard it told as a true story many times, and the location seems to wander around. Africa, China, Russia, etc. Did anyone bother to verify the origins of the story before sharing it as true? "Oh, don't be such a stickler," you might think. "the important thing is that it's making a point."
But the same thing happens with miraculous stories...

Recently it has been in the news that a boy who told an amazing story about a trip to heaven while in a coma, having grown up a bit, recanted the story and chided Christians for believing his account which does not adhere to scripture. Lifeway has since pulled the book from its shelves. But these "trip to heaven," "trip to hell" stories which so many people marvel over and find edifying can usually be dismissed offhand early on, not because heaven or hell aren't real places, but because the stories in question describe a creative take on the pop culture version of heaven or hell. That's usually quite different from what we find in scripture, which is that upon dying one goes either into the presence of God or away from His presence to Sheol (Hebrew, "the grave"), and that the fiery place of torment of Matt 25 and pearl-gated golden city of Rev 21 are both descriptions of post-final-judgment destinations, not the immediate destinations of the departed.

(Another common mistake: while we don't know much about Sheol -the waiting place until judgment for those who die without Christ- from scripture, we do know the lake of fire was created for the punishment of satan and his fallen angelic allies (Matt 25:41), and they will suffer there too. Satan is not the ruler of hell, hell was created as his punishment. According to the book of Job, he is not enthroned in some fiery realm like Surt in the Muspelheim of Norse mythology, but apparently roams around the earth itself, which I find in some ways to be a more unnerving image.)

And speaking of angels, fallen or otherwise, there are innumerable stories about angels out there. Some are doubtless true. I've seen a weird thing or two myself. But note that the Bible is not very talkative about angels, at least not in the systematic way that would satisfy our curiosity (and lead to idolatry...). Angels are not the point- God is, and they are God's messengers. Scripture also describes angels as guarding us, though not to the extent that the "guardian angel" idea has been developed in popular thinking. (Psalm 91:11 is very general, Matt 18:10 is very interesting statement by Jesus but leaves us with more questions than answers, and it is unclear whether Hebrews 13:2's "some" is talking about people among his readership or referring to Old Testament accounts like Lot's angelic guests) 

How angels feel when you share questionable anecdotes about them...
("DespondentAngelMetCemHead" by Infrogmation -
Own work. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.)

I like the story about the guy in the jungle being protected by angels from the people who were going to attack him, who said he was surrounded by armed guards (who were invisible to him), but it turns out that may not be true either.


I say "may not" because the writers at Snopes dot com (urban legend debunking site) are quite obviously antagonistic towards Christianity (even for faith-inspired stories they had to verify as true due to factual evidence, they feel necessary to interject that they don't think anything supernatural occurred). At the bottom of that article, for example, they include stories of missionaries receiving help just as someone far away felt led to pray for them as supposedly obvious fabrications. I don't know about those particular incidents, but I happen to know that does sometimes happen, because it's happened to me before. On the other hand, they raise some reasonable doubts about the details of the story as presented in print, based on multiple printed versions. My guess would be that the earlier Billy Graham book account is closer to whatever true event inspired the story. Of course it's possible the story is entirely made up, but these things definitely do happen on the mission field, and my guess would be it was in someone's prayer letter and unfortunately things proceeded loosely from there.

However, just because "these things happen" doesn't mean that particular story is true, or should be repeated as a true story, details being altered as time goes on. The snopes article itself ends like this:

Moreover, it's sadly ironic that so many tales contrived to display a particular belief system as The One True Way include fabrications tossed in to better carry the message.

While their sarcasm is unwarranted, there is an important point we can take from it- our willingness to accept and pass along any story because we live in a world where supernatural events can occur is not a good witness, making faith seem like mere credulity. And it's dangerous for us too, a little like building our faith not on the solid rock of God's faithfulness and work in our lives but on the shifting sand of anecdotes that "seem likely."

So should we be finding inspiration in unverifiable stories just because the content is beautiful or motivational? Should we be scared to share any story at all? At least, let's treat them as just that: inspirational but unverifiable stories, and be very, very careful what we pass along as "true." Truth should hold special value to those who believe in the Truth of God's word.

Supernatural events do occur in this world (I have fun stories), and we have real evidence for what we take on faith, but assuming every story, whether miracles, angels, trips to heaven, etc., you hear is true (or not bothering to consider whether it is or not) and passing it along, slowly but surely weakens our habit of testing what we hear. We have to be neither cynical nor naive, like the Bereans who were praised by Paul for not taking his words for granted, but searching the scriptures before accepting them.

2. Confusing Apologetics with Evangelism

(Yes, I know apologetics can be used in an evangelistic way, first hear me out:)

A. Evangelism is not arguing until the other side admits you're right

I think we all know this already, and I'm reminding myself as much as any of you reading this, but we can't debate anyone into the kingdom. So as a method of evangelism, a good debate, beloved by so many educated believers in the Western tradition (me too), serves at best either as a transition for sharing the gospel directly/sharing one's testimony, or to remove the false facades which people claim prevent them from believing, which are really smokescreens and excuses. Having removed those, someone will typically say something like "well I still just don't think God exists." Now they're being honest- all that other stuff was not the basis for their unbelief, it was the other way around. The assumption is "no God," and all the other stuff proceeds from that assumption. Which is why...

B. It is typically not helpful to argue with scientists about evolution

It pains me to say that, having been raised in the proud homeschooled evangelical tradition of "creationism vs. evolution" debates, and have years of experience doing so online and occasionally in person. Sometimes I've "won" the discussion and sometimes I've "lost" (at least, I did my best to learn from each discussion, so they were profitable in that sense), but what I would say is that unless you have a pretty good grasp of the scientific principles involved and some basic understanding of what the modern set of theories collectively described as evolution are in 2015, you may actually do more harm than good in trying to jump into the fray. One thing you have to realize is that the average non-believing scientist (or worse, 'science groupie') considers questioning evolution to be about as viable as proposing the earth really is flat. It doesn't matter if that's an unfair comparison, that's what it's going to sound like to them.

You may quickly discover you are at a home field disadvantage, because for decades most scientists have taken evolution as a given and worked from that basis. So if you do something like claim there is no evidence for evolution, they can just laugh and bury you under decades of scientific papers that all assume evolution. No one not coming from a religious background is going to question evolution at this point except real experts in those fields where it becomes obvious that evolution lacks some basic mechanisms to explain very specific phenomena they are qualified to speak up about.

In short, if you really can't help yourself, realize that you're going both against popular trends and against more or less the entire scientific community. Also recognize this is typically someone who has "there is no God" as their premise. You'd better have a pretty airtight logical case, be familiar with the normal counterarguments (the Socratic method of asking more and more difficult questions is a good way to learn these, and doesn't put you in the position of being the antagonist) and be prepared to explain exactly why you feel you can challenge the underlying theoretical assumptions of entire fields of research. And hopefully, you are praying for them and that the conversation will be edifying, not a triumph of your finely honed reasoning skills. As an INTP I face a frequent temptation to bring the logical smackdown on those who are clearly out of their league, forgetting that we are called first to be evangelists of Christ, not knights of reason.

Most actual arguments for evolution go like this: [In the chart above, let's say that "Some birds can't fly" = "God did it." Therefore, since "that's crazy" or "highly unlikely" (claims entirely outside the realm of science) all birds -must- be able to fly. Therefore, since Science can demonstrate with total confidence that penguins are birds, penguins -must- be able to fly, and you are just another naive believer in outdated superstitions who doesn't understand logic.] Ignoring the insults and countering this valid structure but invalid premise means you have to show them that their underlying assumption of "no God" is baseless. Therefore the rigorous science which demonstrates that penguins are birds is great and no problem for us either, but it has no bearing on the assumption that there are no birds that can't fly. But we believe, and have quite a bit of evidence that points to the fact that there are birds that can't fly. (That "God did it")
The argument then rests on whether you can demonstrate that convincingly.

Note: You can challenge their premises, with the method I outlined in the picture caption there. But I pick that kind of battle carefully these days. Only a few will be fruitful, and a good conversation about the gospel is so much better than lots of arguing which half the time ends up being over how you're using the same word in two different ways. I usually try to get the discussion over to my testimony, if I can.

A sad excuse for preparation:

(I rarely rant on this blog, so please excuse me while I do so for just a moment.) Back when I was in high school, we were taught as Christian students to challenge future college professors with "unanswerable questions" that would stump them. Personally I studied engineering which didn't require biology at my school, so topics like evolution only came up once or twice in chemistry class, and I didn't have any of those antagonistic sort of professors I read about.

But I submit that part of the reason so many students raised in the church get disillusioned and their faith shaken while in college is that some people are doing them the disservice of sending them into college thinking a) they will encounter Richard Dawkins-like antagonists who rant against God and use logical-fallacy-riddled arguments to promote evolution and other anti-scriptural ideas, and b) that their duty was to publicly call out these educated, experienced authority figures who could wipe the floor with them rhetorically, with the idea that this is "defending the faith" and their responsibility.

Instead they find that a) often their professors are of the shrugging agnostic or "I grew up in church but decided religion wasn't for me" variety, are sometimes even charismatic and dignified, and can make a student feel not that the gospel is false, but simply that they've lived their entire life in a broom closet, and the gospel might apply in there, but this is the big, wide world, and they're being invited to grow up and join it. Or, b) they do run into one of those antagonistic atheist professors, and trying to be a good witness, stand up to him/her in class, are then subjected to a good drubbing and public humiliation by the professor who has years of education and life experience to his advantage, and has perhaps polished his craft on the few unfortunate students who do this from time to time. At that point a crisis in confidence is almost certain, and without the right support a student will start to question what seemed so certain and straightforward "back in church."

And that "back in church" is where a lot of the trouble starts anyway. Getting plugged in both to a good local church and to a Christian fellowship at school can go very far to mitigate both of these dangers. Far from being bowled over and questioning their faith, students can come out of college strengthened in their faith and with some valuable ministry experience if they are active in a (good) Christian campus fellowship of some kind. (Be aware that there are one or two cult-ish groups that operate under this disguise)


So hopefully we can avoid the problem of setting students up for possible failure by making sure they'll have good spiritual fellowship and growth opportunities during their time at school, and not teaching them a vastly oversimplified version of what they're likely to encounter out in the world. Which leads me to my third plea, which is to please stop...

3. Simplistically Stereotyping other Belief Systems

I sometimes wondered, as a young Christian, how anyone could not be a Christian. It made so much sense, and none of the other religions I'd heard of seemed to make any sense at all. How could those people keep believing something so weird and nonsensical and obviously false?

But I found, around the time I started doing mission trips, that the beliefs of people I encountered overseas seemed fully developed too. Of course, many adherents of Chinese religion here in Taiwan don't even claim to believe the various major and minor gods to be real in the way we believe God to be real (more like "they might be out there, and if so it's better to be on their good side"), but developed in the sense that they had a worldview which explained things around them to a degree they found to be satisfactory. If a gap does occur, if a time comes when their religious system becomes unsatisfactory to them or their worldview can no longer adequately explain the reality they live in, then there is an increasing openness to new worldviews and metanarratives (which are something I'll discuss in my next post), and often a special spiritual hunger and the potential for gospel movements as well, like what happened in China during the turbulent years of communism when it was closed to outside missionaries and is happening in some other places as we speak.

But when reading about those other religions, in non-academic Christian materials, I have often found a strictly polemic attitude. That is to say, the main purpose was not to explain what other people believe, but to demonstrate the flaws and weaknesses in those belief systems, and perhaps reassure readers/listeners that only our own faith makes any sense at all. On the other hand, some explanations are not antagonistic but are simply such a watered-down, simplified version of those beliefs that one is left wondering how any adult could really believe that. Yes, some localized religions have degraded to more or less that point, and any contact with outside religions results in the locals hastening to drop their "old ways" and embrace what is clearly a more impressive belief system. But any major world religion has survived long enough that it's got to have some qualities which people find attractive, especially if it's spreading, like Buddhism or Islam. Prior to encountering the Perspectives course materials and then attending seminary with some great books on the required reading lists, the resources regarding other religions never mentioned what those might be.

Let me be blunt. That's bowling with the lane guards up. If we truly have faith, and if we are grown-ups, or even teenagers bumping into classmates with other belief systems, we need to recognize that people have reasons for what they believe, and if they're going to stop believing that and accept Christ, they're going to need reasons for doing that. That could be as simple as someone having grown up in a non-religious family and being curious about what you believe and asking you to explain, or as challenging as a need for deliverance from demonic oppression which only the power of Christ can effect through the prayer and fasting of His saints. But either way, if we're afraid that merely reading or hearing accurate depictions of earthly religions is going to tempt us away from the Living God, the effects of whose Incarnation changed not only our lives and the destiny of our souls but all of modern world history, then the problem lies not in those descriptions but in our own lack of faith.

Now obviously, I'm not suggesting you send a bunch of grade schoolers to Buddhist summer camp. And in the States, when teaching younger students about world religions I have always pointed out the differences between those and God's revelation to us. Anyone who feels their faith is weakened by exposure to other beliefs should pray for their faith to be strengthened, and take heart from the evidence that abounds, showing that though not seeing, we have believed, yet our faith is not blind.
But students who are mature enough, and certainly adults who are mature in their faith, should have a basic understanding of what other people in this world believe, especially if they intend to witness to them.

 For example: Paul was upset by all the idols in Athens, but he observed them carefully and when sharing the gospel before the Areopagus he used the example of one idol dedicated to an unknown god, and also quoted a Greek poet. He was not respectful of their beliefs (he got very quickly to attacking the idea of idolatry itself), but he made careful observations and tried to share the gospel in a way that had some connections to their worldview. He wanted to share the gospel in a way that would make sense, and used what he knew about Greek culture and had observed about their religion to do so.

A Taiwanese altar to an unknown god

Why does it matter?

It matters not only because if you don't understand what someone else believes, you will have more difficult sharing the gospel with them, but because when we are always surrounded by other believers it's easy to fall into the idea that the gospel is inherently reasonable or self-evidently true. Don't forget what Paul said:

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:22-24)

The gospel is not going to sound inherently reasonable either to people of other religions, or to people who think that a modern education puts them above "organized religion." But understanding that following another religion or belief system doesn't make them stupid or naive, but merely in need of the gospel that will sound a little strange to them, we can speak God's truth into their own context in an effective way. Some will never accept it, but "to those who are called," of all nations, tribes, peoples, and languages, it will be the saving message of Christ, the power and wisdom of God.

That's it for today. I hope by understanding these issues a little better, we can be a stronger Church and more effective disciples of Christ.