A Difference of Opinion: Prewired Knowledge

Part Two in a Three Part Series on C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud

We run into a problem here that Freud simply cannot mount. If the Christian claim is right, and God created us, it is impossible for us to reason ourselves beyond God, and therefore anything that we look at can be argued to be “tainted” by being only the creation looking at the creator. If God has created everything, including our reason, how can we ever presume anything we think is not influenced by God? Freud even noted, in defense of psychoanalysis, that those who disagreed with him would likely use his very own system of psychoanalysis to argue against his points (47), just as I have done above.

Unlike the case with the believer who can assert having experienced God calling at us and nagging at us until we finally come to belief, there can be no experience to validate the Freudian view for a person, much less in a way that everyone can accept. Therefore it might be good to turn back to Pascal’s wager for a moment and reflect on the truth of it. Unless we find ourselves completely unable to believe, why would one accept Freud’s argument of conjecture when Lewis can offer a system whereby we can authenticate his claims with personal experience? I can experience God and I can experience the absence of God, but I can only experience either if God exists for if God does not exist, what is it like for Him to be absent from me? Said another way, I cannot know God is not there unless I know what it is like for God to be there. This is a serious conundrum for a skeptic trying to prove religion an illusion.

Another key point of disagreement between Freud and Lewis is the origin of moral behavior. Freud makes the case that morality originates from evolutionary progress that leads to the need for civilization. To use his example, one might think it would be good to be able to kill off one’s rivals and then, with them out of the way, take their possessions for one’s own use (18). There is an obvious flaw in this idea that appears quite quickly, however: if I could do this, then so could everyone else, and they will likely do the same to me that I did to the person I killed. I would have to be a very strong person indeed to defend myself against this, and even then, I would likely be overpowered eventually (51-52). In a society without the standard trimmings of civilization, Freud notes that only one person can be happy, that person being the “tyrant,” and even he would want people to observe a prohibition on killing. Therefore it is not hard to make a case that people simply must act in specific ways, if only for the selfish reason of hoping others will return the favor. This makes reasonably good sense.

Lewis disagrees with this, not surprisingly, and suggests that we instead have an innate Moral Natural Law inside of us (4). Now, so far we are no further than we were before, since we have two authors presenting two polar viewpoints concerning the subject of morality. Lewis anticipates the critique from Freudian thinkers and answers it in its very own chapter. According to Lewis, it makes sense to assert that humans might have a type of herd instinct or other natural reasons linked to self-preservation to follow basic social conventions, but he then demonstrates a situation wherein this does not seem to apply all that well (9). According to Lewis, if I hear a person in danger cry for help, I will have two instincts come into play, a herd instinct and a self-preservation instinct. I want to help the fellow in trouble, but I do not want to die doing so. Despite this, I will likely feel that following the former instinct’s advice is the right thing to do, and may disregard the latter instinct’s warning.

Logically, if I have judged the two instincts and found one to be good and moral in contrast to the selfish and immoral behavior of the other, then I must have judged them both according to a higher standard (10). This, he asserts, is moral law; moral law, he explains, serves as the sheet music for the piano keys that are the instincts.

Moreover, Lewis brings in the example of judging Nazi morality against Allied morality (14). Perhaps a less well known example might be more suitable, since Nazi comparisons in present times often do little more than serve a technique for poisoning the well, but it does fit this example well. From purely a survival standpoint of the majority, we must question how we can prove that the Nazi’s morality was inherently bad compared to “Christian morality” (13). Yet we do want to assert that Nazi morality is indeed bad and the morality of the opposing forces was inherently better (regardless of the Allied nations’ goals of fighting the Nazi’s, at the very least, it can be said that we stopped the Nazis). Would it not have been easier for many to simply join the Nazis and not risk their lives fighting them?

Now, if things that go against my own self-preservation can be judged to be better, how can it be mere desire for a good society that leads me to act against my own interests? While we can explain away why I might agree not to steal, how do we deal with things that might end my own life for the benefit of others? Clearly, if I am going to be just plain dead, and not in an afterlife, I should have no reason to risk my life for others, since any benefits reaped will never be witnessed by me, should I die. It would therefore follow that I should be best off if I followed the example of Shakespeare’s Falstaff and “counterfeited” my death whenever danger arose, taking due note of the fact that honor is “insensible […] to the dead” (5.1.137-138).

In the third and final part of this series, we will look at one topic both men seem to use as a foundational core to projections on the future of humanity, albeit to extremely different ends: evolution. Finally, I shall conclude with a few final thoughts on issue of choosing sides.

Note: Works cited information will appear in the third part of this series.

Song Du Jour: Every Time it Rains

This song caught my attention the other day when I first heard it. The words are pretty good, although you really need to hear it to appreciate it. It is available via iTunes Music Store if anyone interested.

Every time it rains I listen to the sky
And wonder what's so great about sunshine
Everybody lives and everybody dies
And no one's gonna love you like I do

When it was getting dark
I didn't need a match
I never needed light to see you
You thought I disappeared
But I was always here
I could never get that far from you

Though I misunderstand
And been misunderstood
So love me 'cause you can
And not because you should

Every time it rains
I know it's good to be alive
Every time it rains
I know I'm trying to survive

—Charlotte Martin, Every Time it Rains

So what are you listening to right now?

The Second Questioning

A fellow Timothy who also happens to live in my neck of the woods gave me the following excellent questions to answer as part of the Interview Game. I now “owe” interviews to seven people. Would you like to be interviewed and receive your own question set of five questions? If so, please say so in the comments. You can see my answers to the last round of the game, here. Without further ado…

1) When and how did you become a Christian?
I became a Christian when I was 14. I grew up in a Christian family, although I had adopted a Pluralist viewpoint and really didn't “get” the Gospel. I equated good deeds with admission to heaven and therefore doubted my own eternal destination at times (the realization that I wasn't “mostly good” was probably one of the few orthodox ideas I had at the time).

I did not want to go to Confirmation, but my mother insisted, and that is where I first really came to an understanding of the Gospel. Within the first few weeks of the program, the students were asked if they had been “born again.” I didn't understand what they were talking about. But, I did soon learn what this meant, and shortly thereafter I prayed to ask Jesus into my heart. Over the years, there have been times that I felt like I've slipped away a bit from that initial plunge, and at those times I've prayed to recommit myself to Christ, but that time during confirmation is definitely when I would pick out as when I was “saved.” (Note: I do affirm the believe in the perseverance of the saints, so I do not believe I ever backslid out of my faith, but I still do see the value in renewing my commitment to Christ at times.)

Like many people I've talked to who grew up in a church but were theologically off-base, I did not have a dramatic conversion experience that makes for a “great testimony.” Much of the process was a gradual change rather than one experience I can point to. I'm not sure one could really have discerned a difference in me on the day before I prayed the sinners prayer and the day after, but God has slowly molded me into a much different person than I was before.

2) What tools do you use for blogging and why do you think they are better than other tools available to do the job?

I use my own blogging tool, known as SAFARI 2, which I hope to release under a Free Software license at some point. It does not have a lot of distinct advantages for blogging, but I have spent a lot of time trying to shoot for efficiency concerning database querying with an eye to making this a tool that can hold up to Slashdotting-like loads of traffic (and therefore, be usable for my company's online publication, OfB). I've also tried to avoid some of the mistakes in WordPress that makes it easy for spammers to post spam, added a “forum-like” view of comment activity and I am working on a new system of categorizing posts that I think will be advantageous for proper archiving of old content.

3) What hobbies do you have that have not yet made an appearance in your blog?

Hobbies that haven't appeared on my blog? I think now that I'm entering into my fourth year of blogging, I've pretty much touched on all of my hobbies at one point or another. Let's just go over a quick list of my hobbies, eh?

• Theology and Philosophy — primarily theology, but that's only because I've lacked the time to immerse myself in both to the same extent. I love these two fields perhaps too much though — they both should be the means, the windows, to the truth of God, not the end itself. Right now, I'm on a Karl Barth kick (who was repeatedly recommended to me by my professor Dr. Meyers over the past few years). Next up is a book on the “historical Jesus,” pitting evangelical N.T. Wright against Jesus Seminar scholar Marcus Borg.
• Politics — I enjoy political theory almost as much as the above mentioned subjects of philosophy and theology. Yes, I like abstract subjects that aren't suppose to be discussed in polite company. So sue me.
• Other readings — I do a lot of reading on the topics above, but I also enjoy good fiction, be it literature (Go Aeschylus!) or a modern novel, such as the Da Vinci Code.
• Creative writing — I'm the better part of 20 sonnets into my first sonnet sequence. I've written a bunch of haiku and one tanka, one villanelle, and various other poetry, some of which is posted here. I also have a novel and a play in progress at the moment.
• Photography — I love playing around with my camera, and it shows. I have over 10,000 digital photos in my iPhoto album.

Notice the conspicuous absence of computer related hobbies. I'm burnt out on computers at the moment, so they've been banned from the list. In reality, this really is the case: these days computers the things I work on as a job and I simply don't find it all that amusing fighting with them “after hours” anymore.

4) What one blog do you read on a regular basis that people who read your blog might be surprised about?

I may be proving rather unexciting now. There are only a handful of blogs I read that are not presently in my blogroll. Yours, Sparkle, Mysterium Tremendum (to which I add: et fascinans!), Celerate, the Book of Confusion…

5) If I had responded last time you did the Interview meme, what would have been one of your five questions?

“What would you say are the most surprising similarities and differences of living in the U.K. and St. Charles County, Missouri?”

Back Tomorrow

I didn't get any of my in-process entries finished for tonight.

Sola Two: Sola Gratia

This is part two in a series considering “the five solas,” the key cries of the Reformation. You can find part one here. Please feel free to discuss, disagree and posit your own thoughts in the comments.

The solas are a series of stepping-stones. Imagine I want to get to point B from point A and a rushing stream runs between those points. Now, I could try to swim across, but the current would likely move me down the river so I'd land at point C rather than B. Let's say point A is the new Christian who wants to come to understand the key doctrines of the Church so as to be able to reach B, a point where one is giving everything that is God's to God (Matt. 22.21). The first stepping-stone to get across the stream is to understand where we ought to get our idea of God from, and we answer that Sola Scriptura, from Scripture alone.

So, we read the Bible and we are told that one must be “born anew” (John 3.3), that is, we must be “saved.” So then, how are we saved? Certainly, this is a key stepping-stone to recognizing what God is really doing, a stepping stone upon which everything afterward hinges. The answer is Sola Gratia, by grace alone.

“And if by grace, then it is no longer of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace. But if it is of works, it is no longer grace; otherwise work is no longer work. “

—Romans 11.6 (WEB)

This is a difficult idea. We do not tend to like it. Salvation by grace alone. Here's the bad news: I cannot save myself! Instead, I must receive the grace provided only by Christ in order to be saved.

We don't like to be told that we cannot do something ourselves, and the idea of being told that one is only going to succeed because an authority is going to extend an exception to us would generally make us feel upset. “I'll just do it myself, thankyouverymuch.” Sure, I do not mind if a few violations are overlooked for me, but the idea that I'm dependent on someone doing me a favor to proceed at all is uncomfortable.

But here we are requiring just that kind of exception, that kind of, well, grace:

“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

—Romans 6.23 (WEB)

Now that is exactly what I did not want to hear! But since we are told that no one is sinless (Romans 3.10) and the cost for my sin — even just one teeny tiny one — is death, suddenly maybe an exception sounds pretty good. I may be proud, but when I am being led to the electric chair, am I really going to refuse a pardon just so that I can say I did not need to depend on anyone's help? Clearly, I will accept it, unless I just have some kind of perverted death wish.

And so it is with Grace. “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!”

Next time in my sola series, I shall consider the third motto, which is essential to understanding Sola Gratia: Sola Fide.

Taxes and Economic Profits

Well, everyone knows it is tax time right now. Normally that doesn't bother me much, but this year it was a bit depressing since it forced me to revisit how my business performed last year. Due to some “capital investments” and changes in the services Universal Networks provides, the business was barely in the black in the services segment. Ad revenues helped out, but if I was speaking as an economist, I'd probably say I had an “economic loss” last year (i.e. when I add in non-monetary costs, such as my time, on top of the monetary ones). Note that I am not complaining, I'm not hurting from this, just observing how things went and thinking about how to improve this year.

The past few years have been pretty good, even during the dot-bomb times, so having one bad year isn't all that bad in the big scheme of things. Essentially what I need to do is use this revisiting of the year 2004 to remind me of where I need to focus my energy, where I need to improve and what parts of the business really aren't worth messing around with.

On the other hand, it reinforces my general feeling that unless I want to spend my days cleaning off adware and similar maintenance tasks, my eventual transition out of the computer services industry is probably a good idea from a business standpoint as well as from a personal one.

Mostly Here

Pastor: Are you still alive?

Me: I think so…

That was at 9:00 tonight after a very intense day… the Great Big Move™ of the church office across the street. I got all of the computers running, although our new WAP isn't working quite as well as I hoped. I need to work on that (the high powered antenna I bought seems to decrease the signal).

Anyway, more tomorrow. I'm glad yesterday turned out to be such a nice day to get me prepared for today…

An Unplanned Day

Life comes in moments,
As the bold lightening flashes.
Enjoy the moment,
Savoring the occurrence,
Refreshing as post storm air.

Some days just work out much better than expected. Today was one of those days. I was walking out of my Shakespeare class, planning on doing some network (as in ethernet) planning, when I happened to run into my cousin. She's a high school senior who is planning to come to LU for a BA in Education next year, and today was the day she was suppose to register. I knew that; in fact, I helped her plan her schedule last week, but I did not expect to run into her. She wanted a tour of the campus, which I provided; what a week to do so — the various flowering trees were all in bloom and a warm breeze flowed through the air. Talking a stroll on a spring day like today just makes one feel better. I'm now wishing I had worn my “good” sandals (standard Birkenstocks' with the cork footbed) instead of my less supportive ones (rubber, washable Birkenstocks) today, for my legs are a bit sore, but it was nice.

Then this afternoon, I had an appointment to which the professor I was meeting was about a half hour late. No, this was not a bad thing. A friend of mine works in an office just down the hall, and happened to come in while I was waiting for my appointment. It turned out to be a nice opportunity to chat with her for awhile, something that would not have happened if the meeting had occurred on schedule. She's the type of person that always has something interesting to say, and today was no exception.

At the end of the day, I have not accomplished what I was hoping to (I was hoping to get some web design work done for clients and I needed to return some phone calls), but it worked out as a sort of “accidental vacation day,” which was just what I needed. It wasn't what I planned, but I couldn't have planned it to work out as well as it did had I aimed to.

A Difference of Opinion: Foundations of Religion

Part One in a Three Part Series on C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud

To an extent, Schemer may be correct in reference as to why a lot of people come to believe or disbelieve. Few of us are willing to give up the time necessary to do a thorough rational analysis of whether we should believe, instead choosing to simply build up arguments after the fact to support where we stand. However, the cases of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud are not typical cases at all. In these two men we see two of the most brilliant minds of the late nineteenth through the middle twentieth centuries who did more than simply follow an emotional appeal to their positions, and once there, they did not continue to sit idly on a sandy foundation, but continued to build a strong, systematic defense of their respective beliefs. Both grew up in religious homes and both became skeptics in their youth, but one returned to faith and one did not.

The two books under consideration, Mere Christianity and Future of an Illusion, demonstrate the opposite sides that these two men fall on, but with a distinct difference worth mentioning early on. C.S. Lewis builds up to his deeper chapters by first demonstrating the reasonableness of believing in the divine origin of Biblical teachings in a manner that can be judged by the individual, but Freud’s polar theory on the origins of religious teachings does not have a method to verify itself by. As Lewis notes early on, most people will agree that Jesus was a “great moral teacher” (52). The rub is that a man who was just a good teacher would never say the things Jesus said; to the contrary, Lewis asserts, a mere human saying what Jesus did would not be a “great moral teacher” at all. As Lewis put it, that is “patronizing nonsense.”

We must therefore choose one of the following options concerning such a person: that person was an evil liar, an insane person or was exactly what he claimed to be. Now, of course, the case could be made that the early Christians distorted what Jesus said to fit their needs, but it seems that the claim of the deity of Christ was so ingrained in the early church, it is hard to imagine that Jesus did not accept that attribute being applied to him.

Given this, we receive an easy way of testing Jesus’ claims. We should read the words of Christ and, it is likely we will find that these do not sound like the words of a liar or a lunatic. If he was not a liar or a madman, then we have but one choice: we must accept the claims that Jesus gave. Now, someone could argue that Jesus was sincerely mistaken about this issue, but that takes us back to the state of being mad; I might be misguided on my understanding of a certain mathematical formula without being mad, but if I claim to be the God of all the universe and am not, I must be either mad or lying – I cannot just be sincerely mistaken. Lewis says the choice is obvious to him; Jesus was not a liar or a madman (53). If we can say this, then we have established that the origin of Christianity is God Himself.

Freud on the other hand begins by demonstrating his theories on the origin of religion, namely, of the primal horde (53-54) and wish fulfillment projection (21). In this text, Freud concentrates primarily on the latter, but he asserts they are not different theories, but rather two parts of the same puzzle (28-29). Therefore, since Freud sees the projection ideas explained in Future of an Illusion as simply adding to his earlier statements, it makes sense to consider the problem of the “son-father relationship” (primal horde) theory of the origin of religion before looking at Freud’s primary theory in the book. There is one problem with the primal horde theory that causes a significant impairment to what he assumes based on it: the historicity of this theory’s occurrence is generally rejected today by experts such as anthropologists (“Freud’s theory”). That is, it would appear that Freud did not properly examine the evidence before positing the theory (Hick 34, Scupin 30) and therefore his own suggestion appears to fit his definition of an illusion (Freud 40). Moreover, as Lewis notes, when wandering away from the area of curing neuroses, as he does when discussing theories of the origin of religions, Freud is merely speaking “as an amateur” (89). The issue of evidence presents a serious difficulty in boosting this theory, needless to say. This is not to say that Freud should be written off wholesale. If we substitute his primal horde for Emile Durkheim’s view on the origin of religion, we end up with a bit more stable theory, and in fact, Freud spends a significant amount of time discussing religion in terms of keeping people civilized (Freud 17), something that sounds a lot like what Durkheim had to say. Freud also posits religion as a calming agent for keeping the status quo of society, rather like Marx (62).

However, the theory of religion as an abstraction of society has serious flaws too. Many religions, especially the ones that command the majority of adherents today, have at sometime, past or present, been destructive to the status quo of society rather than helpful in keeping it unified (Hick 32). Christianity may have helped unify the Roman Empire, but before that, it was a schismatic movement that was divisive to the ideas of the Jews and the Romans. Likewise, we can look throughout history and find cases concerning Islam, Buddhism and so on, wherein the religious sentiment did anything but aid in the status quo of society. This is a theory on shaky ground, to say the least.

Now, so far, it has been demonstrated that Freud’s attempt to get his foot in the door of arguing against religion can be quickly rebuffed, but C.S. Lewis’s argument, while not able to convince everyone who reads it, is much harder to dismiss wholesale as a flawed argument. Generally people do like to think that we can tell the difference between the writings of a “great teacher” and a madman, and C.S. Lewis puts the reader to the challenge of doing just that. In other words, the foundation of Freud’s assumptions, the “horde” and “civilization” theories, both seem to be less easily testable than what Lewis uses to base his rationale for arguing for Christ.

In the next part of this three part series, I shall consider the implications and counter-arguments concerning Freud's second theory on the origin of religion and consider the issue of moral law and where it originates.

Note: Works cited information will appear in the third part of this series.

Brain on Vacation

My brain is presently on vacation.

Today, I visited the local CompUSA, which is about a 30 minute drive away, to pick up some networking equipment for the Great Big Office Move™ at Church. In the process of moving, I'm installing a new wi-fi access point (an Airport Extreme), an extra switch (Linksys 5-Port), a WDS range extender (Airport Express) and, after all of this, I am suppose to get all eight computers back on the network. Did I mention all of this is suppose to happen on Saturday?

Anyway… back to my story. Two days ago I set a copy of the church tax ID certificate on my desk so that I'd remember to bring it to the store. Did I remember to do this? Yes, I did remember it… once I was in the CompUSA parking lot. The story worked out well enough, they still had a copy on file in the commercial sales department from the last time I was there, but it could have been a major hassle otherwise.

My brain has also been MIA the last two nights while trying to write papers. Last night, I tried to write up a 2.5-3 page paper on the problems inherent in Theravada Buddhism (i.e. most people aren't satisfied with a religion without a Supreme Being). This was an easy topic that I've written on a lot before, but it took me an hour to get two and a half measly pages written.

Tonight, I tried to wrap up a paper comparing some key points about Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis. Another topic of interest to me, and one I've spent a lot of time on lately. It has been a really big struggle. I've spent the better part of ten hours on it just to get together a rough draft nine pages in length (3000 words). That's terrible for me.

I'm not sure if its daylight savings time (likely) or something else, but whatever the case, I do hope my brain comes home soon. Or at least sends a post card. If you see a brain sneaking through your neck of the woods, let me know, it might be mine.

How's your week going?