Discussion Grounds

Tom,

I have no aversion to being flowery. And as flowers go, Pensées is a lovely one. I just don’t know how to argue with a flower.

I’m glad you did not try to respond to everything I said in my last letter. But let me assure you it did not represent everything I think is wrong with Christianity! Not even close.

I did not want to open arguments over every theological point I raised. Rather, I wanted to give you a hint at why I think Christianity is a terrible explanation for the world as it is. Christianity is a tangled mess of horribly implausible and extremely ad-hoc hypotheses, and as such Christianity fails badly as an explanation for anything. So my letter was a direct response to your claim that Christianity offers a good explanation for the human condition.

Many of your fans complained that I offered “typical atheist misrepresentations of Christian theology.” However, nobody has yet told me precisely what was incorrect in my representation of Christian theology. Furthermore, let me remind everyone that the theological absurdities I drew attention to were not problems raised by atheists. They were first raised by Christian theologians – the ones I named in my previous letter. I specifically chose problems raised by earnest Christians, not atheists. These thinkers were believing, pious experts on Christian theology, but they saw the many contradictions and absurdities inherent to Christian theology (especially when they had scientific worldviews to compare Christianity to), and they devoted their lives to either reforming or abandoning the parts of Christian theology that make no sense.

Tom, we agree that humans experience what they call “dignity, moral purpose, goodness, destiny, value, beauty, and wonder, along with all of their opposites.” I think the natural explanations for these phenomena are plausible, while the Christian explanation is absurd. You think natural explanations for these phenomena are weak, while the Christian explanation for them is strong. Therefore I suspect we have very different ideas about what makes an explanation strong or weak, good or bad.

When you say that Christianity is a good explanation for the human condition, what do you mean? Do you mean that the Christian story for the human condition “feels” right for you? I hope you mean something more specific than that, because I will simply reply that the naturalistic story for the human condition feels right to me, and we will get nowhere.

So I’d like to suggest we sharpen our debate a bit. We are talking about explanation, but we seem to have very different ideas about what makes a good explanation. There are many models of explanation on offer. They each have particular strengths and weaknesses and applications. Personally, I tend to think of a good explanation as one that possesses many explanatory virtues: testability, consistency with background knowledge, simplicity, informativeness, and so on.

But perhaps you have something very different in mind when you use the word “explanation.” Maybe we can seek out some agreement about what makes an explanation good or bad, strong or weak. And then we will be equipped to argue about which of our worldviews offers the stronger explanation for the human condition.

How does that sound?

Cheers,

Luke