So, in my last post, I promised that with the end of schoolwork, I’d be posting more here. That was 3 months ago, and I’ve been revealed as a liar. I spent this summer, for the most part, preparing for the dreaded GREs, and spent the rest of the time enjoying the green and quiet of Richmond, which, after the urine-soaked madness of Manhattan, I clung to with a nearly religious vigor. School will be starting again in about a week, and I will try to learn from my previous hubris and make no promises to post more often. Part of the problem is that, whereas in the past, theological musings would often lead to a post on here, now I immediately wonder if such musings should be turned into an academic paper. So being a (wannabe) academic ends up nipping my blogging impulse in the bud.

However, after coming across Paul Burkhart’s blog, I’ve been blog-invigorated, and want to “enter the conversation” (to use a trite but useful expression). Although my guess is that Paul and I may not see eye to eye on everything, I’ve found his posts extraordinarily thoughtful and thought-provoking, and am glad to see another Christian who is simultaneously concerned with orthodoxy and systematic thought. It was some comments on a joint post he did with an atheist writer that have prompted me to write here and now. A somewhat trollish commenter dismissed Paul’s faith and defense of it, rather summarily. The comments (by the user “meat”, whose gender is unclear, so I will refer to them with “they” and “them”) can be seen at the bottom of this post (I should note that I don’t particularly agree with much of what Paul had to say in the post itself, but that’s immaterial to what I want to talk about here).

Essentially, meat argued that Christianity was a priori indefensible. He seems to think that, if one simply analyzes Christianity according to a given set of historical, metaphysical, and existential methodologies, one should conclude without controversy that the faith is false. Fair enough, there’s nothing irrational about this. Perhaps Christianity is false. But  meat went a step further, and suggested that such an approach is akin to “set[ting one’s presuppositions] aside and then make [one’s] determination from naught”. In other words, meat seems to think that his preferred methodology rests on no biases or presuppositions, that s/he is operating from pure reason alone, like some 21st century Kant. So, according to meat Christians assume a host of problematic presuppositions, but meat does not; their approach is Reason Manifest.

Of course, the reality is that such a hermeneutic of pure reason is impossible; human beings always process data according to some pre-arrived-at set of assumptions. And this isn’t a bad thing, because otherwise, we could never draw any conclusions from given data or experiences. Each new moment would be completely unique, a new instance of pure becoming, which we could not link to any previous data or experience. In order to make sense of existence, we have to draw connections between past and present, and that means emphasizing some data over others, and making assumptions about how the world functions. I don’t doubt that if I am holding a brick in my hand, and then release it, that it will fall. I assume gravity will function–and such an assumption seems well-validated! But it’s an assumption, nonetheless. There is always a chance, however slim, that gravity might not function in this new moment. Yet few (if any) of us actually live our lives open to the practical possibility of such unpredictable world-states.

Such an assumption about gravity probably seems rather innocuous, but we engage in a similar sort of assuming in all of our critical reflection. Whenever we evaluate a historical claim, for example, we try to fit that claim into an already-existing body of historical knowledge and assumptions. Critiques of Christianity are keen on pointing out that Christians certainly do this–and they are quite right, we certainly do. However, they are often not so willing to admit this about themselves. So, meat is adamant that Paul should be aware of his having been brainwashed as a child: “I’m being serious when I discuss childhood brainwashing, it takes a lot to overcome and yet you seem fully aware of your being affected and simultaneously unable to set it, which is the reason for your presuppositions, aside.” Paul has assumptions that he should question, but meat doesn’t seem to think that they have assumptions they might need to put aside.

A great example of how this functions is the Historical Jesus Movement, which indeed Paul mentions by way of a Russ Douthat column (I’m generally not a fan of Douthat, but I think he hits the nail squarely on the head on this). The Historical Jesus crowd assumes a boatload of foundational ideas about how history works, what is possible, and what Jesus’ life could or should mean, and then crafts a version of Jesus’ history that fits these pre-arrived-at (and ideologically-entangled) views. Of course, this in and of itself is fine, but what’s problematic is that they seem to think that their image of Jesus is just the correct, historical one, not an ideologically and methodologically-tinged one. My opponents have biases, but not me! I’m honest and open-minded!

Now, I want to be clear: I am not arguing that while meat, Reza Aslan, and DF Strauss are chock-full of bias, I am some bias-free machine of logic. We all have biases and worldviews, and, as I suggested above, this is good! Worldviews are our attempts to make sense of the world; without them, our experience would be a disorganized jumble of sensations. Seeking truth means taking the risk of ordering, and often times being wrong. We have to order, even while admitting that our ordering will likely be wrong, and therefore be prepared to correct our ordering, to try again. This entails constant risk-taking, constant vulnerability to past positions being revealed as erroneous. We are always ready, indeed gleefully so, to point out when our opponents fall into error. We seem less prepared for our own eventual failures on this score.

In other words, everyone in any debate has entered with presuppositions, assumptions, biases, ideologies, and worldviews. Someone who tries to argue that they are working from no presuppositions but just reason and logic is lying either to themselves or to you, quite possibly both. Human knowledge always implies some system of ordering information, a complex set of rules for how knowledge can be received and validated. Theologians can’t deny this about themselves, but neither can their critics. We are all biased. Indeed, even the reliance on reason itself reveals a bias: that the world is indeed an orderly place governed by a strict causality, laws that are fully laws (not just rules) that are wholly consistent and homogeneous through space and time, and that humans possess the capacity to discern all necessary truths about the world to understand it. This is actually an incredibly credulous package of assumptions, which not only theologians but indeed the whole of continental philosophy (and Hume, and classical skeptics and the Cynics…) has called into question. So even reasonability itself implies a very specific worldview, a set of assumptions and commitments which should be open to question, not relied on as a prima facie foundation for all thought.

Indeed, humans are not just logical agents, but beings-in-the-world who are constantly affected by their emotional and physical needs and urges as well as by their capacity for reason. Indeed, this capacity is often overwhelmed by the two former sets of motivations. Even people who value reason highly still have to navigate their own existential, emotional reality. And so, now having discussed the ridiculousness of any debater ignoring their own biases and worldviews while pointing out their opponents’, I’d like to discuss one of the most fundamental worldview-determinants. The post that spawned meat‘s comments was a sort of back-and-forth between Paul and an atheist friend, Dan. Dan seemed interested in plumbing Paul’s reasons for maintaining his Christian faith, and Paul presented a number of scenarios which would cause him to question that faith.

For me, the whole premise of this debate/discussion, though, is deeply problematic. I don’t think it gets at the fundamental set of assumptions that I think really fuels people’s belief or non-belief. Ultimately, physical or historical evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection, or metaphysical reason applied to the Event in the abstract, are not the foundational causes for belief or non-belief. We enter this debate, as we do in all debates, as stressed above, already with a set of presumptions, assumptions, biases, ideologies, and worldviews. The critical issue when it comes to our existential e/valuation of a claim like the Resurrection is extremely fundamental to us as persons. It is, in an important sense, pre-rational (on the personal level).

Developing into a person–not just a human being, but a full person–is, above all else, the process of developing self-consciousness. We have been thinking, feeling beings for years before we begin to have any awareness of the fact that we think. I can feel hungry without being aware that there is a process of feeling hungry. There comes a point when a thinking being recognizes that it is not just a detached subject taking in sensory data about an alien world, but actually also an object-body in that world. My thinking is something that my brain/body complex does. I am an object in the world. And this means I am vulnerable. I can die. I can be harmed. I can experience pain. These possibilities, I come to realize, are not just events that might occur in the process of my thoughts and feelings–they will or will not occur depending on what happens to my mind/body complex. I don’t have control over my own future, at least not in a final sense. I am contingent.

Such a realization is the beginning of existential reflection. It is the occasion of a sense of self. I have to navigate my own existence in the world; I am not just a sovereign consciousness sensing things. My future is tied up with the future of the world: my world. An awareness of my vulnerability introduces a new dialectic to human thought. Though it may have existed in embryonic form before, the rise of self-conscious realization forces it fully into our awareness. I have taken to calling this the Dialectic of Hope. Once we recognize ourselves as beings-in-the-world, we recognize that we have a future, that we will (or at least might) experience new thoughts and feelings in the future, and that what we will experience is largely going to be determined by forces out of our control. We, at this point, cannot help but feel hope: we hope that our future will be pleasant, pleasurable, peaceful, fulfilling. And we fear that it will not be, that we will die, that we will suffer, that we will be unfulfilled, that we will experience ugliness. This is the Dialectic of Hope. And our expectations along this dialectic–whether we are more likely to trust in hope or not–will greatly influence our credulity vis-a-vis claims like the Resurrection.

An essentially hopeful person will find the story of the Resurrection, at least some tiny kernel of it, reasonable, possible, and meaningful. The Resurrection is the vindication of self over other, of life over death, of subject over a deterministic object-order. Conversely, someone who is predisposed towards non-hope or fear will likely find the event unreasonable, impossible, and meaningless or even deceitful. What’s important here is that such a stance of hopefulness or non-hopefulness is brought to the event prima facie. In other words, no one simply evaluates the historical data about the Resurrection in a cool, detached fashion. Everyone has an axe to grind, a dog in the fight, because everyone is already committed, I believe, to a stance of hopefulness or non-hopefulness (I don’t think this is a binary, but rather a spectrum strung upon the dialectic; two people could both be hopeful in general, with one more, and the other somewhat less, hopeful).

Being or not being hopeful is, in and of itself, not some totally independent position. Obviously, our previous life experiences, our understanding of our family’s, ethnicity’s, nation’s, and species’ history will help to form our sense of hopefulness or non-hopefulness. But, that said, in each moment of evaluation of a given event, our stance of non/hopefulness is a prima facie stance that will color our evaluation. So, in an important sense, faith in Christianity is, even before faith in the Resurrection, a willingness to hope, in general.

Of course, this neither proves or disproves the Resurrection; I am not making any objective claim about the truthfulness or lack thereof of the Resurrection claim. I am pointing to the hermeneutical and epistemological bases from which all of us–believers and non-believers alike–make our evaluations. There is no neutral ground, there is no pure reason. There are only living, self-aware beings with complex histories struggling to understand, to live, and to thrive. Too often, modernism’s static, lifeless, narrow epistemology is asserted as some sort of necessary starting-ground for serious thought. But such a starting-ground already rests on a mountain of assumptions. It may turn out that such assumptions are correct–but serious philosophical, historical, and metaphysical reflection demands a willingness to analyze, critique, and deconstruct them. The idea that only those thoughts consonant with a given framework of modern thought are even worth considering is itself intellectually naive and embarrassingly credulous.