Reaction to Capturing Christianity on Rhett

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9xVN-5qLCs

 

I left the following comment on Capturing Christianity's reaction to Rhett's interview with Alex O'Connor. I saw that interview and I think Rhett has the spirit of a truthseeker, cares about deeply important things, and isn't willing to just believe at face value. So Cameron Bertuzzi's response, which fails to acknowledge Rhett's intellectual virtue, is frustrating.

 

In Islam, Allah mistakes the doctrine of the Trinity to be the Father, the Son, and Mary. If Allah were all-knowing, he wouldn't make such a silly mistake. So Christians should point to this and say: If Islam were true, would we expect these kinds of mistakes?

Christians being confidently incorrect about evolution gives us some reason to think that Christians are confidently incorrect about other things. Absolutely naturalism predicts that Christians would be confidently incorrect about things that are deeply important. Christianity does not, and even if it did then this wouldn't be evidence for Christianity over naturalism as the data would be predicted by both worldviews. Why think Christianity predicts that Christians would not be confidently wrong about important things?

Because 1) God, knowing human psychology, would know that this would make Christians and Christianity look bad, and God doesn't want that.

2) If the Holy Spirit is meant to be efficacious at all in guiding Christians to the truth, including the truth about important doctrines, then we would expect Christians to be supernaturally accurate in their articulation, convergence, and truth about important doctrines (maybe Christians can be wrong about the small stuff. But even that comes at a cost: See previous point).

But Christians cannot articulate what they believe and why (without running into contradictions and challenges to their belief), they do not converge onto doctrines (instead splitting into denominations), and they have to give up the truth of previously held doctrines, demonstrating their own tradition to be an unreliable source of truth, even the kinds of truths that they should have an authority on, which are biblical and theological truths.

So when non-Christians are confidently incorrect, that's because their worldviews are false and unreliable, but when Christians are confidently incorrect, that's because Christianity is true and reliable?? This is epistemic hypocrisy, where you apply epistemic standards to others and not yourself.

Case in point, Protestants laugh at Mormons and Catholics for their silly beliefs (proverbially speaking; practically speaking they may take a respectful stance). Catholics laugh at Protestants and Mormons for their silly beliefs (again proverbially speaking; practically speaking they may take a respectful stance). This proverbial laughter explains why Protestants hate the idea of being Catholic ("how could I ever believe such silly things as purgatory, transubstantiationism...etc?"), Catholics hate the idea of being Protestant ("how could I ever believe such silly things as sui-magisteria, sola scriptura...etc?")

They're all right; it's all silly. Christianity would be dead overnight if Christians scrutinized their own brand of Christianity in the same way as other brands of Christianity. When Christians are at their most intellectually honest, they admit that they want it to be true more than anything. (Confession: I do too; why wouldn't I want there to be ultimate love, justice, and eternal life? I totally get it. In a strange way, I am still a Christian, in the sense that I retain affective and conative attitudes of faith, if not so much the cognitive attitude of faith.)

But to admit you want something to be true more than anything is to admit enormous bias; you will do whatever it takes to believe, which is why trying to shake Christians awake is nearly impossible. In my case, my extreme bias to believe what is true barely won out against my extreme bias to believe in Christianity.

React: William Lane Craig on Christianity and assurance of salvation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcoXaNy3QIQ

"This is a very common Christian experience, that persons who have come to know Christ and experienced His life-changing power have an assurance, deep down, that their sins are forgiven, that they have eternal life, that they are quote-unquote 'saved' and going to be with God in heaven for eternity. That doesn't mean they don't have doubts, but they do have this deep-seated fundamental assurance, and I think that that is borne by the witness of the Holy Spirit to you."

What on earth could this "deep-seated fundamental assurance" be if not certainty? How can you have this assurance and yet have doubts too?

Craig has claimed that the Christian can know Christianity to be true by the self-authenticating inner witness of the Holy Spirit. This immediately runs into the challenge of epistemic hypocrisy. The Christian would never accept that the Muslim or Mormon has a self-authenticating inner knowledge of the truth of their religion. So how can the Christian make such a claim for themselves without being a hypocrite?

Craig's answer:

"Now certainly, Mormons will speak of something similar, a burning of the bosom when the Book of Mormon is read, but I would say that whereas we do not have defeaters for the witness of the Holy Spirit, in the New Testament sense, we have overwhelming defeaters for the truth of Mormon belief. For anyone interested, read a book on Mormonism, its history, doctrine, and Joseph Smith -- I think that there is just no chance that Mormonism could be true."

But then it follows that not only should the Christian believe that there are no defeaters for Christianity, but that they should be certain that there are no defeaters for Christianity. But surely such certainty is irrational, as there are a host of potential defeaters for Christianity, from problems of evil, divine hiddenness, disturbing Bible passages, the lack of supernatural verification of Christian doctrines, and so on.

 

I would argue that these are real defeaters. But the point is it's not enough for a Christian to merely believe that there are no defeaters for Christianity, which is bad enough. For the Christian to have an assurance of salvation, and assurance that they are not committing epistemic hypocrisy when they reject the assurances of members of competing religions, then they must have certainty that all of the potential defeaters for Christian belief are really not defeaters after all.

 

But surely the defeaters for Christian belief are issues to be investigated, not decided beforehand. The Christian would never accept a Muslim or a Mormon having a similar certainty, prior to investigation, that all potential defeaters against their religion are not defeaters after all. So again, the Christian falls into hypocrisy.

Challenges to Christian Belief: Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMeNSG9dSjs

I've heard it said that blasphemy of the Holy Spirit was only possible when Jesus was on Earth, which is what the context is meant to suggest. Accusing Jesus of demonic activity is unforgivable, because what kind of a person could be within the very presence of Jesus, and witness works of God, and in full knowledge of the holiness of these things tell a bald-faced lie and call Jesus evil, when they know full well that this isn't true?

But this doesn't make sense. That sounds like blasphemy against the Son, not of the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself says that the reason he must ascend is so that the Holy Spirit can come to Earth, suggesting the Holy Spirit was not already on Earth when Jesus was there. (Why couldn't Jesus stay and the Holy Spirit come, I have no idea.)

And if God is three in one, then why isn't blasphemy against one as bad as against the other?

Moreover, the Holy Spirit is meant to be a person separate from the Son, per the doctrine of the Trinity. So for someone to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit per se, they couldn't be blaspheming Jesus. They would have to single out the Holy Spirit somehow. How would they do this, unless they believed the Holy Spirit to be a real, separate person in the first place? A non-believer wouldn't believe this. Only someone who had experienced the "inner witness of the Holy Spirit" would be in a position, it would seem, to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. But there are cases where people think God is speaking to them, or they think that the Holy Spirit is moving within them, but this turns out to not be the case. So how is someone supposed to tell whether this "inner witness" is legitimate or just a product of their imagination?

What must this blasphemy amount to? Could it be something as innocuous as reinterpreting a previous experience of the "inner witness of the Holy Spirit" as nothing more than one's imagination? Or does it require something more dramatic?

If God is perfectly forgiving, then how could there be any unforgivable sin?

For there to be an unforgivable sin, that's some serious stuff. So serious in fact, it would be a profound failure of love for God to give us just enough knowledge of the unforgivable sin to cause us great spiritual anxiety, but not enough knowledge to even know what it is. What kind of God would communicate such an important idea so poorly?

Then there's the obvious ethical problem. Genocide? Perfectly forgivable. Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, whatever that even means? Unforgivable. This makes no sense!

And if blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is a "lifetime thing" as they suggest in the video, then why doesn't the text say that?

And if the unforgivable sin is not forgivable because forgiveness always requires repentance, and the person who blasphemes the Holy Spirit is necessarily unrepentant, then that means blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is unforgivable in a trivial sense. By that definition of forgiveness, then anyone who is unrepentant is unforgivable, which means there is nothing special about blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. But again, why wouldn't the text say this if this were the case? Instead, the text suggests that there is something special, not trivial, about blasphemy of the Holy Spirit that makes it a uniquely unforgivable offense. Put another way, the text suggests that someone who commits blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is directly unforgivable, while the above suggests that blasphemy of the Holy Spirit makes someone indirectly unforgivable.

But even if it were true that there is this kind of 'indirectly unforgivable' status, it's totally misleading to call such a person unforgivable. Instead, you should call the person unrepentant. It would be misleading to say "A lack of repentance is an unforgivable sin" when the truth is "Forgiveness requires repentance." One has to do with the quality of the sin itself and the other has to do with the meaning of 'forgiveness.'

If Jesus wanted to make things clear, he could simply say: "Those who do not repent cannot be forgiven" and leave it at that. But instead Jesus singles out a specific kind of evil that he labels "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit" and says this sin, and only this sin, will not be forgiven. That's very different from saying "Forgiveness requires repentance and those who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit are unrepentant." 

And yet, even if Jesus said this, it would still be confusing. Is a 'blasphemer of the Holy Spirit' just another term for an unrepentant person? Or is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit a specific kind of sin that only an unrepentant person would commit?

If the latter, then even that makes no sense, because what determines whether a person is unrepentant is their attitude and behavior after they have committed a sin, not the sin itself. Case in point, Jesus says blasphemy against the Son or the Father will be forgiven, but not the Holy Spirit. So even the sin of blaspheming the Father or the Son needn't come from someone who is permanently unrepentant. Committing that sin doesn't tell us that this person is necessarily unrepentant. But why would blasphemy against the Holy Spirit have this quality when other sins do not?

Again, this suggests that the only kind of person capable of blaspheming the Holy Spirit would be someone who has direct contact with the Holy Spirit in an unmistakable kind of way. But no one has that contact, because there is always the possibility that what you perceive to be the Holy Spirit could be your imagination or something else. Putting all your faith in what you perceive to be the Holy Spirit speaking to you leads to what I call epistemic hypocrisy. Imagine a Muslim says to the Christian, "Allah has told me that Jesus did not die on the cross." The Muslim has a deep gut feeling that this is true. The Christian has a deep gut feeling (that they attribute to the Holy Spirit) that Jesus did die on the cross. So we have clashing certainties, and the Christian has to say that the Muslim can be wrong in their certainty, but hypocritically does not apply this same risk to their own certainty.

"My certainty is better than yours because it's mine," the Christian has to say. Or, "Someone (the Muslim) can have religious certainty and yet be wrong."

But the Christian either applies this to himself or not. If he does, then his certainty is destroyed, as he admits it's possible that his certainty is wrong. If he does not, then he's committing special pleading, making his own certainty an exception to the rule when there is no principled reason for doing so.

For all the Christian knows, the phenomenology of Muslim certainty is identical to the phenomenology of Christian certainty, and that there is a secular explanation that uniformly explains the misplaced Muslim certainty and the misplaced Christian certainty (only a naturalist gets to take advantage of this beautifully uniform explanation).

If your epistemology leads to epistemic hypocrisy, then your epistemology is bad.

But again, this is a moot point, because it assumes an 'indirectly unforgivable' status of the unforgivable sin that the text strongly suggests against.

At some point I will look into biblical commentaries and bring receipts to these questions.