Geoff Arnold's Blog

There’s a fascinating thesis advanced in Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’ in today’s NYT. Far from being a celebration of the Christmas season, it seems that Handel’s Messiah was intended as a Lenten attack on deists, as well as the Jews who supposedly inspired them. The research seems thorough, and the conclusion inescapable:

To create the “Messiah” libretto Charles Jennens, a formidable scholar and a friend of Handel’s, compiled a series of scriptural passages adapted from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible. As a traditionalist Christian, Jennens was deeply troubled by the spread of deism, the notion that God had simply created the cosmos and let it run its course without divine intervention. Christianity then as now rested on the belief that God broke into history by taking human form in Jesus. For Jennens and others, deism represented a serious menace.
Deists argued that Jesus was neither the son of God nor the Messiah. Since Christian writers had habitually considered Jews the most grievous enemies of their religion, they came to suppose that deists obtained anti-Christian ammunition from rabbinical scholars. The Anglican bishop Richard Kidder, for example, claimed in his huge 1690s treatise on Jesus as the Messiah that “the deists among us, who would run down our revealed religion, are but underworkmen to the Jews.”

I imagine that I will continue to enjoy The Messiah just for its music; the religious content has been largely irrelevant to me for nearly 50 years. But who knows? Will I find myself paying attention to certain passages, and will that affect my experience? It’s hard to tell….
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[Via Robert Elisberg in HuffPo.]

While his predecessor was fairly restrained and sensible about the subject, Pope Benedict is starting to sound unfortunately stupid, claiming that “the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”. Of course this simply reveals that he doesn’t understand what a scientific theory is. One could argue that he’s just abusing the concept of “proof”; a lot of philosophers and theologians expect science to be like (pre-Gödel) mathematics or logic, proving theorems rather than testing hypotheses against data. From this standpoint, one could substitute any scientific theory for “evolution” in his statement – gravity, relativity, thermodynamics, whatever. Sloppy, uneducated, but not necessarily malicious.
But that’s too charitable an interpretation:

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory. “We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said.

So not only does he really not understand science, but he’s using the kind of fallacious argument beloved of the ID crowd. Or perhaps he understands this stuff really well, but wants to pander to the gullible. Either way, it’s a load of Papal bull…….

An unusually clueless creationist (i.e. really low on a scale that runs from moronic to barely sentient) showed up at Pharyngula’s today, spouting reams of nonsense cut-and pasted from various places. PZ gave him one warning, and then disemvowelled him. Delightful! I wonder if there’s a “disemvowel comment” plugin available for WordPress?

Jason Rosenhouse takes on the “village atheist” criticism of Dawkins et al that Pagels and others are fond of using. (I personally encountered it several times in the last month.) In Wilkins vs. Myers, he lets John Wilkins erect the strawman:

Of course there are people who have a simplistic and literal view of God and religion. That is not at issue and never has been. But what Pagels is saying is something that the uppity atheists always seem to slide over – that there is a more sophisticated view of God that is not so easily knocked down as the idea that God has a backside. And what is more, there always has been (which is the point of studying the Gnostics)….

Rosenhouse’s rejoinder:

Of course, the more sophisticated view to which Wilkins refers is harder to knock down only because it asserts almost nothing in the way of empirical claims…. We uppity atheists do not slide over the possibility of such a God, we merely find it vacuous and irrelevant, and not the kind of God the large majority of Christians profess to believe.

In fact, Elaine Pagels herself (in the Salon interview in which she sneered at Dawkins) provides an excellent example of “sophisticated” beliefs that don’t really say anything:

So when you think about the God that you believe in, how would you describe that God?
Well, I’ve learned from the texts I work on that there really aren’t words to describe God. You spoke earlier about a transcendent reality. I think it’s certainly true that these are not just fictions that we arbitrarily invent.

WTF? Exactly how does Pagels expect an atheist (village or otherwise) to “engage with” this kind of vague handwaving? But she’s not alone. Here’s Terry Eagleton, as quoted by Sean Carroll:

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or “existent”: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves.

Feels like classic Spinoza. But where did the “he” come from? Anthropomorphism alert…. As Carroll puts it:

The problematic nature of this transition — from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth — is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.”

(I’m quoting from a mammoth posting which does a wonderful job of analyzing the history of these two distinct conceptions of God.)
I’d like to see one of this Pagels/Eagleton/Wilkins/Collins/Jeffries crowd point us “uppity atheists” at one or two books that present the “sophisticated” arguments that we’re supposed to be addressing. While I personally agree with Rosenhouse that such arguments are unlikely to be recognizable by the average Christian in Kansas, I’ll be happy to spend some time on them. I’d prefer to see something that actually “connected the dots”, rather than jumping straight from the Kalam cosmological argument (or a “condition of possibility”) to the Nicene Creed, but whatever….
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[Via PZ.]