Slick’s Apostasy: Various Angles of the Issue

I heard about this first via Alpha & Omega Ministries: Yesterday on the Dividing Line.  I have not yet heard what Dr. White had to say about it, but other people have chimed in in written format, which I can access more easily.

Analysis from the redoubtable Steve Hays: Triablogue: Born to fail.

 

Another from Glenn Peoples (HT: Jason Engwer): How to exploit a family falling out for the sake of ideology.

 

Personally, in my reflections on the whole matter I was thinking more about the specifics of the stated reason for abandoning Christianity.  Without daring to put myself in the company of those commentators I will post those thoughts below, FWIW and as a possible indication of what others might be thinking

 

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From http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/07/15/the-atheist-daughter-of-a-notable-christian-apologist-shares-her-story/:

This changed one day during a conversation with my friend Alex. I had a habit of bouncing theological questions off him, and one particular day, I asked him this: If God was absolutely moral, because morality was absolute, and if the nature of “right” and “wrong” surpassed space, time, and existence, and if it was as much a fundamental property of reality as math, then why were some things a sin in the Old Testament but not a sin in the New Testament?

Four thoughts:

1) She was trained by Matt Slick.  Slick is cool, his ministry has stood the test of time, and he is probably one reason that I am a Calvinist today.  However, frankly his work has always been half-baked and over-reaching in some instances, and I fear that when it came to meta-ethics he may have trained his daughter poorly on account of possibly his own not having a solid grasp of certain issues.

2) Do the words “consequentialism” and “context” mean anything to either of the Slicks?  (Of course, I know that at least one of those matters to one of them.)  Or when did the Scriptures ever indicate that virtue ethics, or deontology, or divine command theory were the only possible correct paradigms by which to make sense of God’s law and God’s nature as revealed in the Scriptures?

Yes, Christians are sophisticated enough to reject divine command theory for reasons which are reflected in Euthyphro’s Dilemma.  Yet the Scriptures apparently never rule out consequentialism in toto and never rule out what we might call (gasp) situational ethics of a sort, and the whole of biblical ethics is best understood in considering both virtue ethics and these other ethical paradigms.

When and where is it appropriate in this country to walk around buck naked?  In a classroom at school?  No.  In worship services at church?  No.  At home?  Sure.

When and where is it appropriate to drive on the right side of the road?  In the U.S.?  Yes, but even then not if the driver is drunk and doing 100 mph on a crowded freeway.  In the U.K.?  No, unless suddenly it is good to cause needless head-on collisions with other vehicles.

Are circmstances or possible consequences relevant in the examples listed immediately above?  Yes, and that is exactly why there are exceptions to rules such as those to which we just alluded.

And is the range of permissible moral options dependent on the situation?  Yes, it is.  That is precisely how sex within the bond of marriage is permissible while your spouse’s cheating on you is not, or why harsh punishments are appropriate only for offenders who are culpable of the worst crimes, to cite two examples.

3) At some point the elder Slick may have got tripped up on issues of postmodern ethics or moral TAGs and passed a muddled, incomprehensible message down to his daughter--either that or the younger Slick just failed to grasp what she was being taught.  Similar language or similar terms appear in discussions of each, and this probably was a source of conflation or confusion at some point.

In any case, God is just (even essentially or transcendently so); in translation this means that God’s actions are just, for this is what the word “just” ultimately points to in terms of meaning and function.  Meanwhile, the words “just” and “moral” are more or less synonymous (though I  prefer “just” over the younger Slick’s “moral”), and those words ultimately mean either in accord with some ethical principle or in accord with what is good; and despite that the word “good” has many meanings--all of them dependent on what the metric or standard of measurement is--and despite anyone’s and everyone’s being capable of finding evil things to be favorable--i.e. “good”--or of prescribing evil conduct as though it were something just, God’s actions are just.

God has issued a body of ethical prescriptions and proscriptions of human behavior; each of these commandments are in accordance with both themselves and objective goodness: by definition, they are just.

Moreover, these commandments are “absolute” in the sense--and this is what people mean when they speak of moral rules which are “absolute”--that they are just regardless of whether Smith over here says, “Adultery?  Meh, that’s okay with me; there’s nothing wrong with it” or whether a society over there on the other side of the planet says, “Why not bow down before Baal?  Who else gives us rain for our crops or puts food on our table?”  That is the sense in which they are absolute.

However, this is not to be confused with the issues of divine command theory vs. rival meta-ethical theories.  There aren’t too many Christians who claim that if God suddenly decided one day to proscribe the consumption of turkey dinners then it would be evil to be turkey dinners in virtue of the proscription itself.  No, the claim would more or less be that if a divine proscription of turkey dinners came down the pike tomorrow then: a) it would be because the proscription did not have a favorable timing before then; and b) the proscription is done for a reason which is objectively good; c) rebellion against the Creator is not in accordance with what is objectively good; and d) guess what: God’s nature happens to be one of objective goodness, all such that it was never possible that an intuitively bad thing such as idolatry or sadistic torture or babies would have been prescribed at some point.

“...Why were some things a sin in the Old Testament but not a sin in the New Testament?” she asks.  Answer: if you can find an instance of such things, then stop to reconsider the matter and to ask yourself whether such things promoted the well-being of someone or something at one point in the past but later outlived their ability to do so.  Why is it a sin to issue orders to a someone of the rank of Sergeant First Class in one year whereas ten years later it is not a sin to do so?  Hmm, could it be that someone there in the Army got promoted such that legal and moral privileges which formerly were not theirs later rightly became theirs?  This is one example off the top of my head; you should be capable of doing the same.

4) How old is Rachael Slick again?  Oh yeah, that makes sense.

The Word "Christian" Means Whatever You Want It to Mean

We’ve already seen this, but here is more proof: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism

When Secular and Christian Philosophy Cross Paths (Providence)

“Things happen for a reason.” This is what some non-Christians will say, whether they speak of “unfortunate” events or events which seem to occur without a motivation or intention as a cause.

Of course, there is something to be said about the idea that all things happen for a reason. To be sure, a reason behind many actions and events is human foolishness or frailty. However, that all things happen because of a divine motivation or intention as a proximate cause* seems less clear. One thing that is clear is that God causes all events--and no, the verbs “cause” and non-auxiliary “do” are not semantically interchangeable--whether He brings about these things directly in some instances or by a diversity of means in other instances. For example:

36 To subvert a man in his cause, the LORD approveth not. 37 Who [is] he [that] saith, and it cometh to pass, [when] the Lord commandeth [it] not? 38 Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good? (Lamentations 3.36-38)

The LORD hath made all [things] for himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil. (Proverbs 16.4)

Man’s goings [are] of the LORD; how can a man then understand his own way? (Proverbs 20.24)

For of him, and through him, and to him, [are] all things: to whom [be] glory for ever. Amen. (Romans 11.36)

In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will: (Ephesians 1.11)

However, there seems to be ample reason to believe that not all of God’s causing all events is done in a recurrent, everyday, and case-by-case manner of his commanding, “Let the sun rise tomorrow morning” or “You electrons over here, continue to orbit this atomic nucleus” or something like this. Based on two different kinds of texts it seems safe to say that some events are brought about by natural law or natural laws which were given long ago and continue to act consistently in virtue of inherent properties of these laws.** First there are what appear to be “fire-and-forget” ordinances, decrees or laws:

Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? (Job 38.33)

When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: (Proverbs 8.29)

Fear ye not me? saith the LORD: will ye not tremble at my presence, which have placed the sand [for] the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it: and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it? (Jeremiah 5.22)

24 Considerest thou not what this people have spoken, saying, The two families which the LORD hath chosen, he hath even cast them off? thus they have despised my people, that they should be no more a nation before them. 25 Thus saith the LORD; If my covenant [be] not with day and night, [and if] I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth; 26 Then will I cast away the seed of Jacob and David my servant, [so] that I will not take [any] of his seed [to be] rulers over the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: for I will cause their captivity to return, and have mercy on them. (Jeremiah 33.24-26)

(Compare Job 38.8-13, Psalm 33.6-9, Psalm 148.2-6, Isaiah 45.12, 2 Peter 3.5, et al.)

With that said, it is possible to issue a ordinance, decree or law for precisely one particular reason while also willingly allowing such a thing to act otherwise indeterminately. If I were to command someone saying, “Go and buy a new car” there is no one particular object out there in the world which the name “car” denotes in this instance or which I have in mind; the name “car” here is non-referential and only connotative. Yet the command ultimately can still have the effect of causing someone to buy a particular and real automobile, as with a rich oil sheikh’s commanding a servant to buy him a new BMW, or something on that general order. The real and actual car which is eventually bought is not something which was particularly requested by this sheikh, yet there are inherent properties of the issuing of the command which go on to produce the effect of the purchase of a particular object.

Now imagine that there are inherent properties of both natural law and physical objects, ones which God uses as He will yet also are allowed to act indeterminately. Given that the apostles Paul and Peter use the word “flesh” to speak of evil inclinations of human nature, though everything which was created at the beginning the world was good, one can then go on to imagine that fallen human nature exists as such on account of inherent properties of natural law and/or physical objects--mix two chemicals together and you get one result from the combination; mix two other chemicals together and the combination produces still another result; etc. One is inclined to believe that these are concepts which make the best sense of Scriptures where someone is said to be “given over” or “given up” to evil as opposed to being “sent” or “caused to go,” as in the following:

41 And they made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice unto the idol, and rejoiced in the works of their own hands. 42 Then God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven; as it is written in the book of the prophets, O ye house of Israel, have ye offered to me slain beasts and sacrifices [by the space of] forty years in the wilderness? (Acts 7.41-42)

21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified [him] not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. 24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28 And even as they did not like to retain God in [their] knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; 29 Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. (Romans 1.21-32)

What this means, unless someone can explain otherwise, is that not every Scripture which speaks of God’s causing all events--both human events and events not involving human beings--is necessarily one which demonstrates that every event happens for a proximate reason. The spirit of the sentence “Things happen for a reason” seems to be one of proximate causes, and if this is so then it is questionable. On the other hand, if the purview of that sentence is unrestricted, then it is perfectly clear that everything does indeed happen for a reason. The clarity exists in virtue of the testimony of the Scriptures as opposed to what either believers or unbelievers will suppose to be intuition.

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* Proximate, as in not several hundred steps-removed in a causal nexus or a chain of causality from efficient cause, to medial causes to occasion--but rather a cause with only one step or a few steps between it and its effect.

** Of course, even if all instances of God’s working all things, to use the language of the apostle Paul in Ephesians 1, were theoretically reduced to nothing more than age-old natural laws of God that He issued once and never had to issue again, it would still be fair to say that God works (present tense) all things. This can be seen by analogy of a murderer who poisons and then leaves the state of California on Monday, and lounges in Nevada on Tuesday at which time the victim also dies back in California; only those who are dead have been murdered, and so the murderer becomes such a person not before Tuesday and in virtue of a remote past action.

"Christian": Another Meaningless Word

Suppose that there is someone whom you do not know and who tells you that he or she is “a Christian.” At first, you should make no assumptions about what they believe or how they conduct themselves in life. For the word “Christian” no longer means anything.

The word “Christian” does not tell you that that person is a social conservative. I can think of a rather large number of such individuals who either cuss like sailors, fornicate, support homosexuality, or are just plain liberal.

The word “Christian” does not tell you that that person is a trinitarian. Oneness Pentecostals somehow get the word “Christian” applied to them for sociological and pragmatic purposes, presumably in addition to their using the term for themselves. Likewise, modalism and mere semi-trinitarianism is so widespread among the mainstream rank and file of Christendom today that, again, not all so-called Christians can be assumed to be trinitarians.

The word “Christian” apparently also does not tell you that that person is even monotheistic. If Mormonism amounts to a cryptic form of polytheism, and if Mormons are also called Christians, then “Christians” are now polytheistic in addition to being monotheistic.

The problems continue from there. A lot of so-called Christians think they are smart when they reject biblical inerrantism, when they start blithely throwing out the word “allegorical” to explain certain textual problems without knowing what that word really means, when they adopt views which are outright Pelagian if not merely semi-Pelagian, and so on.

Yet the entire set of problems is, finally, rounded out by that which causes Christianity’s critics to charge “No True Scotsman fallacy!” if it is claimed that Christians never murdered anyone via Crusades, Inquisition, witch trials, or Klan racial violence. Many so-called Christians have a rather specific set of properties that they have in mind when they use the word “Christian” to denote someone, properties which include particular beliefs, dispositions, or actions. On the other hand, sociologists and the average Joe are more likely to look at how one person shows up for church services every week or says “I’m a Christian,” and therefore deem that person worthy of the lablel “Christian.” What this means is that not everyone is on the same page or speaking the same language: Not all Christians are in fact Christians after all.

Voilà tout.

For future reference

There is a reason that jargon and tediousness exists in various academic fields or fields of inquiry: necessity. I type this that I may never have to explain myself again.

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1. Words refer to things, without being those things.

If I type “Barry Obama,” the 44th President of the U.S. is not suddenly on your computer screen where the name “Barry Obama” appears. There is a difference between the sign and the signified.

2. Words do not necessarily mean any particular thing, or IOW, the meaning of words is not intrinsic.

That is, suppose you have a baby lying in a crib in America who uses the word “dada” to refer to his father. The fact that “dada” denotes and connotes his father here does not mean that the physical set of sounds [dada] now refers to someone’s dad and necessarily carries ideas of the same when someone in who lives in Ghana and speaks only Ewe uses that set of sounds. No, if that person in Ghana says “dada” to refer to his sister and everyone belonging to his speech-community thinks of qualities or properties of sisterhood when they hear that word, then that word does not absolutely refer to fathers or connote fatherhood. That physical set of sounds does not have an intrinsic meaning.

Notice that this has nothing to do with ideas of deconstructionism or postmodernism.

3. What a word means and refers to are not identical.

The classical demonstration goes more or less as follows; compare the following two sentences:

(A) Hesperus is Hesperus.
(B) Hesperus is Phosphorus.

Naively speaking, A is not informative since we all know that any given object is itself. However, B is informative as it tells those of us who may not have heard the name “Phosphorus” before that there are certain properties attendant to the name “Phosphorus.” So the two sentences do not “say” the same thing though there is only one object being named by them. Meaning and reference are not identical.

4. The word “connotation” is ambiguous, and there is a particular word that can be used in lieu of it.

What word refers to it denotes, and vice versa; in fact, reference and denotation are the same. Meanwhile, connotations in one sense are those things which mediate the denotation relation, or the relation that holds between the sign and the signified. So if I say “Obama’s mama” and you have never heard this phrase before you nevertheless know that I denote the mother of Obama; for the ideas which are commonly and conventionally attached to the word “mama” determine how we use the word to denote new objects.

However, a name like “Omar” sounds hopelessly Arabic; but that does not mean that any object denoted by that name is Arabic, for there are people called Omar who are not Arabs. In other words, in the vernacular sense of the word “connotations”the name “Omar” carries Arabic or maybe even negative connotations those these same ideas or concepts play no part in the denotation process.

For this reason, it is helpful to use jargon to avoid confusion. The denotation of a name can instead be its extension and the properties which one has in mind and which one uses to determine the appropriate/conventional use of a name in referring to something can be called its intensions, with an “s.”

5. Just as words denote objects without their being identical, sentences express propositions without their being identical.

The physical set of letters “La neige est blanche” and the physical set of letters “Snow is white” are not identical. They have different locations and different forms. However, both sets of letters commonly and conventionally express the very same idea: that snow is white.

So sentences express propositions without being identical with them. However, the relation of expression is not the only relation that obtains between sentences and propositions....

6. Some propositions are merely implicated by particular sentences.

Thanks to HP Grice we have the terms conventional implicature and nonconventional implicature. Both matter.

But first, the word “many” simply means a large number of. So if any one of us were to say “Many people didn’t show up for work” we would be asserting precisely that a large number of people did not show for work: nothing more, nothing less asserted. However, we also know in experience that such a sentence will virtually never be spoken unless some people nevertheless did show for work. In this case, implicature is at work. The sentence itself expresses one proposition as true while pragmatic rules accidentally suggest that another given proposition is true—the sentence “says” one thing and “implicates” another. In this case, the implicature is also conventional since words such as “many” and “some” are commonly employed where implicature is at work.

Finally, nonconventional implicature shows up in random exchanges such as the following:

Smith: You going fishing this weekend?
Jones: I’ve got something else I have to do.

Jones does not say “no,” but it is understood nonetheless that Jones expects that he won’t be fishing.

7. Grammar can be the study of the rules by which words and phrases are put together. Pragmatics can be the study of the rules by which some words and phrases are selected against other ones per context. Discourse analysis takes things to a third tier and looks at how sentences and surrounding sentences and paragraphs work together.

8. Lexemes are analogous to morphemes and phonemes in linguistics.

For example, allomorphs belong to morphemes and allophones belong to phonemes. Likewise, allolexes would belong to lexemes. An example of a lexeme would be “baptize” where the words “baptizes,” “baptized,” and “baptizing” could be thought of as variants of the parent word “baptize.”

9. The meaning of the word “intuition” varies with context.

In linguistics, it more or less speaks of knowledge that a speaker may have without necessarily being cognizant of it. In philosophy, it can refer to direct or basic knowledge, knowledge which one does not learn through lessons or anything of the sort, but rather more or less something had from the time of a person’s conception or birth.

10. Though we are all familiar with the probabilistic from of reasoning which is inductive reasoning, there is also abductive reasoning.

An abductive argument may go as follows:

(1) It sounds like Smith just insulted me.
(2) But it is extremely unlikely that Smith would ever do such a thing.
(3) So Smith (probably) did not insult me.

Note immediately that this form of reasoning is not necessarily based on repeated observations of data, as is the case with inductive reasoning.

11. Some noun phrases are adjectival in function.

This is pretty much the case with Saul Kripke’s “rigid designators.” If I stop to ask, “Who is the 44th President of the United States?” I am not asking who Barack Hussein Obama is, but rather am making an inquiry into who has certain properties at the present moment. This is not to suggest that such phrases are many. Just a point of reference; that’s all.

12. Some words are non-referential, including nouns.

The word “nothing” is non-referential. Likewise, the word “car” in “I need to buy a new car” apparently refers to nothing since, if one will be honest with himself, the car he now has is hardly an object which he did have in mind when he says this and goes looking for a new car. Sentences like this seem to function in virtue of connotations and not so much denotations.

13. “Just in case” and “iff” mean the same thing in philosophy.

They mean if, and only if.

14. Sums

A particulate object is not identical with any of its constituent parts. Again, an object is not its parts. Want proof? Take that coffee table in your living room that is five years old. The table is five years old, but the atoms which compose it are 16 billion years old, or rather thousands of years old if you are a YEC. Nevertheless....

15. Metonymy

People do and will speak of objects as if they were identical, and not necessarily of ignorance or subterfuge.

Some metonymy involves synecdochy: “All hands abandon ship!” where the part represents the whole. Other metonyms pertain to relations which do not obtain between an aggregate and its constituent parts: “Germany invaded Poland in 1939.” But there is always some close psychological or extrapsychological connection between the two objects which are treated as being identical.