Category: Apologetics

Are You Smarter Than an Atheist?

QuizTitle

I am.

At least according to a quiz put out by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life.

The quiz has 32 questions, of which atheists in America who took the quiz got an average of 20.9 questions right. American Jews got 20.5 right, American Mormons 20.3 right, American Protestants 16 right, and American Catholics 14.7 right.

I got all of them, but that’s nothing special since this is the field I work in professionally. I’m expected to know my own field. Give me a comparable quiz on another topic and watch the number plummet. I can say with great confidence that if you gave me a 32-question quiz on sports—something very large numbers of people would do very well on—I would be lucky to get even a handful of questions right.

However that may be, what are we to make of the numbers regarding the different groups? Pretty dismal for Catholics, right?

Not necessarily, and it depends on what you mean.

This is not a case of “Catholics don’t know their own faith but other groups do know theirs.” The quiz is not religion-specific. It’s pan-religious. So the majority of questions on the quiz do not relate to the faith of the person taking the quiz, but to other people’s faiths. And therein lies a significant reason for why the numbers line up as they do.

What do the three high-scoring groups have in common? They are all religious minorities in America. That’s significant because a religious minority has special reason not only to understand its own religion (so as to reinforce its intra-group religious identity) but also to understand the religions of those around it (because of the need to understand how to interact with the majority religion that surrounds it). A person in a religious minority has special reason to understand both the basics of his own faith and the basics of the majority faith. A person in the majority faith has special reason only to understand the latter.

A Jew in Israel or an atheist in China would have less reason to know the basics of Christianity than a Jew or an atheist in America.

When you look at the two mainstream American religious groups—Protestants and Catholics—they score both less than the minorities and quite close to each other (only 1.3 questions separating them, which may well be within the poll’s margin of error).

Then there’s selection bias in who chose to take the poll. Perhaps atheists are more motivated to take a (rather long) 32-question quiz than Catholics. Who knows? This is a perennial problem of surveys.

The questions in the poll are also likely to distort results in other ways, too. I counted at least three questions that were Mormon-specific but only two that were Catholic-specific. Who is that going to advantage?

There were also three questions on what public school teachers are and aren’t allowed to do in America regarding religion. That is a subject that atheists will be far more focused on (and thus likely to get right) than ordinary Christians. (It’s also worth noting that Catholics have their own parallel school system and many do not even use the public schools, giving them less reason to be familiar with the details of what is allowed.)

These last questions also aren’t actually about religion but about American politics regarding religion. Something similar applies to another set of three questions regarding what the majority religion is in particular countries (India, Indonesia, Pakistan). Those aren’t questions about religion but about the demographics of other countries. (Hey, everybody! Quick! What’s the majority religion in Gambia? It sure tells you a lot about religion if you happen to know that the answer is Islam, doesn’t it? You’re much more informed about religion if you know that.)

So . . . it’s not the most informative quiz in terms of religious knowledge. Nor is the news for Catholics as bad as the raw numbers suggest. The quiz simply isn’t a test of how much Catholics know about their own faith.

That’s not to say that Catholic religious education hasn’t been a disaster in the last generation. It has been.

That’s not exclusively the fault of the clerical class. Parents in many families did not do their part to see to their children receiving a proper religious education. But when many elements of the clerical class have been actively and deliberately subverting the teaching of Catholic doctrine, it’s going to contribute to the poor state of religious knowledge among Catholics today.

One bit of sort-of-encouraging news from the Pew survey was that 55% of Catholics were able to correctly identify their Church’s teaching regarding the status of bread and wine in the Eucharist. That’s not nearly what it should be, but it’s at least better than the Gallup poll a number of years ago that started the false rumor that it was far less.

This quiz isn’t the greatest, but quizzes are fun, so have at it . . .

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN AN ATHEIST? (Be sure to write down your answers as you go; the answers are given at the end of the last question.)

MORE FROM THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR.

Oh, and as Columbo Would Say . . .

. . . "just one more thing."

Another thing I've been up to is setting up a blog on the Church Fathers in conjunction with my forthcoming book The Fathers Know Best.

CHECK IT OUT!

I've got a lot of cool stuff planned for it. In fact, just yesterday we taped a series of web videos with little-known facts and surprising stories about the Church Fathers. I'll let y'all know when they're out. Hope you enjoy them! (And the rest of the fascinating material I'm going to get into. :-D)

Here's a sneak peek of a near-final cover design for the book . . .

Frs 

Click to embiggen.
 

Stephen Hawking’s Cosmic Slot Machine (Part 2)

In their new book, The Grand Design, co-authors and physicists Stephen Hawking (pictured) and Leonard Mlodinow argue that God is not necessary to explain the existence of the universe as we experience it.

Why not?

After all, if you look at the universe it looks suspiciously like it has been deliberately designed with us in mind. This is something that Harking and Mlodinow go into in some depth. They point out, as have many theistic apologists, that the laws governing our universe seem finely tuned to allow the existence of life. There are any number of constants—the gravitational constant, the mass of the proton, etc.—that are set at just the value needed to allow life to exist. If any of these constants were off by even a small amount, life would not be possible. It therefore appears that our universe has been intelligently designed to allow for life, which implies the existence of an intelligent designer.

In apologetics, this argument is sometimes called the argument from design from cosmological constants.

In their book, the two authors try to provide an alternative account of the universe’s origin that does not require an intelligent designer.

In the account they sketch they claim that ours is not the only universe. In fact, ours is only one of a vast number of universes, all of which pop into existence out of nothing as spontaneous creations. What’s more, the laws of physics take on every possible permutation in these universes, so there are vast numbers of them out there where the cosmological constants are different. So there isn’t a single uni-verse but a multi-verse in which every possible flavor of individual universes occur.


KEEP READING

Stephen Hawking’s Cosmic Slot Machine (Part 1)

I’ve read a number of books by Stephen Hawking (pictured) and Leonard Mlodinow, writing both together and separately. I’ve enjoyed them. They’re informative and funny, and they make clear some pretty deep concepts of physics and mathematics—without burdening you with a bunch of equations (that’s some trick).

But their new book The Grand Design
was a disappointment.

It’s a short read, which is fine, though I was surprised when I discovered that the last 25% of the alredy-short book to be composed of back matter (an exotic form of matter discovered by publishers; it consists of glossaries, indexes, author bios, acknowledgements, and the like).

Despite its brevity, it does a good job making clear some pretty far-out physics concepts, many of which are also treated in similar works, including Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s previous books. It is also nicely laced with humor.

What is disappointing is the way the book treats philosophy and theology.


KEEP READING.

Why So Few Gospels?

A correspondent writes:

I’m just in need of a helping hand from you, because I’m in the middle of a debate with a muslim friend.

While we’re in the middle of discussion, he happen to addressed me with a question that blew me away, because I don’t have any idea on how I could tackle his question.

This is what he said, “Could you also tell me that there are hundreds of Gospels, then how come only four made it through the New Testament?”

I know that the “Books or Gospels” contained in the New Testament are all inspired by the Holy Spirit, but I think there are much more broader explanation regarding this matter.

I hope you could give me a helping hand regarding this subject Sir. I would really appreciate it if you could give me at least a brief explanation and answer regarding this.

The correspondent is correct that the canonical gospels are inspired by the Holy Spirit and false gospels aren’t. The question is how the Holy Spirit guided the Church into a recognition of which were inspired and which weren’t.

Here’s how that happened . . .

I don’t know that there are literally hundreds of gospels (that would mean 200 or more), but there are a large number of purported gospels that were written between A.D. 100 and A.D. 400. There may have been hundreds written back then (and people continue to crank out false gospels even today, like the Aquarian Gospel of Levi), but only a few dozen survive from those centuries.

The reason that they are not in the New Testament is that they are all fakes. The Church recognized them as such because (1) they often theologically contradicted the canonical gospels that had been passed down from the apostles and their associates and (2) they showed up out of nowhere, with no history of having been read in the churches down through the years.

The canonical gospels, by contrast, all date from the first century, they were written by the apostles or their associates, they were given to the first churches to read, and the churches read them all the way down through history. Also, the doctrine contained in them agreed with the doctrine passed down by the apostles to the bishops and handed on by them.

The later-written “gospels” thus were spotted as phonies because they had not been passed down like the others and they contained bad doctrine.

Eventually, as a warning to the faithful who might be confused by the new gospels, some of the early Church councils—like Rome in 382, Hippo in 393, and Carthage in 397 (among others)—published official canon lists naming the specific books of Scripture that had been handed down as sacred from the time of the apostles.

Incidentally, the image is Matthew 23:3-15 from an Arabic New Testament. (Note also that it reads from right to left.)

Hope this helps!

Remember This Post 10 Years From Now

Lemaitre_University It may come in handy.

Here's why . . .

The gentleman on the left is Fr. Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, physicist, and astronomer who happens to be "the father of the Big Bang." He was one of the first to publish in support of the idea of an expanding cosmos that took its start in a highly compressed state that Lemaitre referred to as a "primeval atom."

Einstein at first dismissed Lemaitre's hypothesis, which radically departed from the intuitions of physicists and cosmologists back then. But then Edwin Hubble's work backed up Lemaitre and Einstein reversed himself.


So why am I writing about this?


Partly just because I like science but also because there is an apologetic issue here.


Ever since the Big Bang theory has become widely accepted, it has been easy for Christians to point to the event as the start of everything and the moment of God's creation. It could be taken as a scientific validation of one part of the Kalaam cosmological argument for God's existence and thus as evidence for the Creator.


And maybe it is.


But maybe it's not.


For a time there was an alternative hypothesis that had a great deal of currency in scientific circles that maybe we lived in a gravitationally closed universe that oscillated between Big Bangs and Big Crunches and that the event that happened 13.5 billion years ago was just one of the cusps in an endless series of them, so that there was no ultimate beginning.


That view's stock fell precipitously a few years ago with the discovery that the universe is not just expanding but that it's expansion is accellerating due to what is now called dark energy, which actually makes up three quarters of all the mass-energy in the universe. 


Because the universal rate of expansion is increasing, it does not appear that gravity can close our universe and cause a Big Crunch, without which one leg of the oscillation cycle wouldn't be there.


Since the discovery of dark energy, Christian apologists have felt on particularly safe ground pointing to the Big Bang as the plausible moment of creation.


And even in the decades before we knew about dark energy, the idea of the Big Bang had so permeated modern Christian thought that it became very easy to read Genesis 1 and identify the Big Bang with the moment that God said, "Fiat Lux"–"Let There Be Light."


Though that's not actually the way Genesis depicts the beginning. 


Here's the way Genesis 1:1-3 reads:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 
2 The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. 
3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.

See what I mean?

Light gets created in verse 3, but we already have a darkened universe–complete with waters–in verse 2. Then, as part of making the world a suitable place for habitation, God turns on the lights and starts making other changes, until everything is ready for man.

Either way, we shouldn't be too quick to try to fit the Big Bang into the framework of Genesis 1. As I've written before, Genesis 1 is best taken not as a chronological account of God's work but as a topical organization of God's work that structures the different categories of what God did around the framework of a week.

I think that's what the ancient author meant the original audience to understand by the text, as a careful reading of it shows.

But if we shouldn't try to fit the Big Bang into Genesis 1, can we at least point to it as the moment of creation from a scientific point of view?

T
here has certainly been a strong inclination on the part of many to do so. Pius XII had such an inclination, which caused Lemaitre to have kittens, afraid that the pontiff would try to do too much theologically with the concept. (HERE and HERE.)

Hypothetically, we could identify the Big Bang as the moment of creation.

But hypotheses can have rival hypotheses, and we should try to test to see which hypotheses are more likely correct.

That's what the folks behind LISA are planning to do.

LISA–the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (INFO HERE)–is a set of satellites to be launched in the next decade or so. They will be placed in a massive triangular formation in space and connected by laser beams which will allow LISA to detect gravitational waves.

This will make LISA the largest gravitational wave detector in existence, powerful enough to detect events within a microscopically small fraction of a second after the Big Bang–far closer than we've been able to measure before.

Now here's the thing . . .

LISA is hypothetically able to find evidence that would allow scientists to distinguish between different pre-Big Bang cosmologies.

In other words, LISA may allow us to "look" beyond the Big Bang and "see" something there. For example, LISA might detect signs that the Big Bang occurred when two of the branes postulated by brane cosmology collided with each other. Or it might reveal evidence of a parallel universe that our universe budded off of.

Or it might reveal nothing of the kind, leaving the appearance that the Big Bang was, itself, Event One.

If the latter is the case then the apologetic use of the Big Bang will be strengthened, just like it was strengthened when dark energy was discovered, as competing hypotheses will be made less likely.

But the opposite could happen, too. The apologetic value of the Big Bang would be diminished if evidence emerges of a pre-Big Bang universe.

That's no threat to the Christian faith. The faith holds that God created the universe in the past but it does not require that the Big Bang represent the moment of creation. Christians held that there was a moment of creation for ages before the Big Bang emerged as a scientific hypothesis, and if it is later shown that the Big Bang was not the moment of creation then we can simply infer that the moment of creation was father back in time than that.

Christian faith is more than capable of surviving any such discovery.

However, in the short run it would shake some people up, just as it shook people up when modern paleontology and biology started to provide support for the theory of evolution.

It certainly helped, at that time, to point out that some authors had been writing about the compatibility of evolution and the Christian faith for quite a while. This wasn't a threat to the faith because it didn't contradict the faith.

The same thing is true for the idea that the Big Bang is not the moment of creation.

So remember this post ten or so years from now when LISA gets launched.

It may come in handy for someone you know.

Prayer for the Dead

A reader writes:

I was wondering if you have any article about prayer for the dead?

People are asking me different questions, because of the Evangelicals who say: What is the biblical basis to pray for the dead? As you know, bringing proofs from the book Maccabees is not enough,

Another connected issue, those in purgatory needs prayer to go to heaven, right?

The question was: What if two different people go to purgatory, one has a rich family, so they will keep praying and offering Masses for him, while the other is poor, and no body will -pay- and pray for him, so the poor man can stay -longer- in the purgatory, while the rich man can pass quickly to heaven.

How you answer these questions? What are our biblical grounds?   

Not all questions can be answered in a way that offers Bible verses as evidence. In fact, not all questions can be answered at all. There are many things we human simply don’t know the answer to, because God hasn’t told them to us, and there are also many things in life that have answers that don’t involve the Bible at all, like how to solve the quadratic equation or where to find the gas station with the cheapest gas or how to make chop suey.

I think it is important to point these things out when dealing with the "Where is that in the Bible?" mentality.

It is also important to point out that, even when dealing with questions that do involve theology, we are Catholics and therefore do not need to provide answers within the confines of sola Scriptura.

As Catholics, we draw information from and our theology is shaped by not only Scripture but also Tradition, the formulations of the Magisterium, philosophy, human nature (i.e., natural law) reasoning, etc.

So, if you are dealing with Catholics who are being pestered by Evangelicals who are demanding that questions be answered on Evangelicals’ terms, it is important to remind the Catholics that they are not Evangelicals and should not slide into the mindset of Evangelicals of trying to answer everything from the Bible. That would cut them off from the other sources of information they have, and it would be as foolish as trying to do theology with just a quarter of what the Bible says rather than what the whole of the Bible says.

Just as we want to accept all of the Bible when we do theology, we also should accept everything that God has revealed to us for these purposes, and that goes beyond what is in the Bible.

An Evangelical might not accept that, but even he should agree to the principle of accepting all of God’s revelation, even if he disagrees about the extent of God’s revelation.

I therefore would question whether citing Maccabees is "not enough" as proof of prayer for the dead. It may not be enough for Protestants, because this book was removed from their Old Testament precisely in order to get rid of the passage dealing with prayer for the dead, but since this passage remains in the Catholic Bible, it should be enough for Catholics.

A Catholic thus might say to an Evangelical, "This passage is in my Bible. I accept it. So it is enough for me. It may not be enough for you because you do not find it in your Bible, but you should think about why that is: The reason is that your religious forebears took this passage out of the Protestant Old Testament precisely because they didn’t like what it said."

A Catolic might continue by pointing out that prayer for the dead was a practice rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition even before the time of Christ, as witnessed by the passage in 2 Maccabees, that Jews still pray for the dead today, and that the vast majority of Christians (i.e., Catholic plus Orthodox and other Eastern Christians) pray for the dead. It is only Protestants who do not.

Therefore, one could argue that if we accept that the Judeo-Christian tradition represents the line of religious belief that, in its broad outlines, is true and that God has worked with to shape, and if a particular practice is acknowledged by the great majority of this tradition, then it would seem that it should be those who do not accept the practice in question should have to argue for why it should not be accepted.

Thus ask the Evangelical: "What is your biblical argument that we should not pray for the dead? In particular, in view of St. Paul’s emphasis on Christian liberty, where is your biblical proof that Christians should not have the liberty to pray for their departed loved ones?"

They may respond by arguing that Jesus paid everything, that the saved are justified and have had their sins removed, etc.–all the standard stuff.

The standard stuff that Evangelicals say here is all true–God has provided salvation to the uttermost to the saved–but it ignores the question of how God has chosen to implement that salvation.

Human experience (along with the Bible) shows that when God saves someone, he does not instantly give the person all the benefits of eschatological salvation, including perfect sinlessness, freedom from concupiscence, the Beatific Vision, an augmented nature that will let us pass thru sealed tombs and enter locked rooms, etc.

It is clear, instead, that while God may have forgiven and justified us, he has chosen to implement the other benefits of salvation as a process. We see part of this process over the course of our lives, as he leads us to grow in holiness. We also have to deal with the consequences of our sins, even when they have been forgiven and will no longer cause us to be damned, as when we must pay back money we have stolen or repair harm that we have done.

This is part of God’s will for the process by which he brings us to heaven, even though it was his Son’s death on the Cross that paid for all of this.

We see part of the process by which God implements our salvation in this life. We do not see what he does in the next, where he may continue to implement it by a process or where he may implement the rest of it all at once (except for the resurrected body part, which we know is later on).

Either way, it is still rational for us to pray for our departed. We love them, and it is natural for us to ask God to help them and be kind to them. If there is a process that they must still undergo as their salvation is implemented, God can help them with that process. If it all happens in an instant, God can help them in that instant–even if the instant is already in the past from our perspective since God is outside of time.

Either way, it is natural for us to ask God to help those we love who have died, and if we do not do so then we either do not really love them or we are in the grip of a theology that asks us to do the unnatural rather than the natural.

It is the Evangelical’s theology that asks us to do something unnatural and to restrain our feelings of love and affection for our departed loved ones by not asking God to help them, and there is no solid basis in the Bible, or anywhere else, for asking this of us.

The reader also wrote: "Another connected issue, those in purgatory needs prayer to go to heaven, right?"

Actually, I wouldn’t put it that way. They don’t "need" prayers to go to heaven. They will go to heaven whether we pray for them or not. We merely ask that God help them as they do this, either by making the implementation of their salvation quicker or easier or in whatever way God knows that they need help. Our prayers thus may help them, but they don’t "need" them.

As to the case of a person with a rich family, this plays off anti-Catholic stereotyping that dates back to the Protestant Reformation whereby Catholic priests are depicted as trying to extort money out of the faithful by saying Masses for the dead.

Well, when a Mass stipend is $5 or $10 (or whatever the local limit is in the diocese), nobody is going to get rich off that. This is a red herring.

But let’s turn the question around and take money and death out of the picture: Suppose that there are two people who are sick, one of whom has a big family to pray for them and one of whom has nobody to pray for them. Which person will God heal more quickly, and if he does heal one more quickly than the other, how can that be fair?

The answer to the first question is that we don’t know who God will heal first. Prayer is not a magical incantation that produces results mechanically, the more it is done. Answers to our prayers are based on God’s choice, and God can choose to answer one more quickly than another. Our job is to do our part by building love for other and love and trust for God by praying.

We also know that God has special care for those who are in hard circumstances–like having nobody to pray for them–and thus he may heal this person first in spite of the fact that nobody was praying for them.

We also know that, ultimately, all healing is a gift of God and thus it is fair for him to give it to whomever he wants, so even if he does first heal the person with a big family praying for them, that’s his choice and the appropriate response on our part is to thank him for the healing.

All of this answers the parallel questions about purgatory: We don’t know who would have their purification completed first, it’s a matter of God’s choice; God has a special care for those with no one to pray for them; and being purified is a gift of God’s grace to begin with, for which our response should be thankfulness.