False choices - faith or science

Faith & Science Conversation
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Hi Phil,

Yes, the situation is very comparable. Any major paradigm shift in our thinking about the Bible is going to be difficult. And I think this should help us be cognizant and patient. It might even cause us to have a bit of humility. How many of us were strongly convinced of something in life we no longer believe? Dare I say almost everyone. I research a lot and my views change as I encounter new evidence. Its frustrating at times but if they didn’t I don’t think I would be an honest researcher.

I am not sure. Labels in today’s world are difficult because evangelicals are increasingly becoming open to Biblical criticism and are more and more a mixed bag. My comments are almost always against the “inerrancy” variety. I think it is the conservative apologists, who are just awful at history and critical thinking, arguing for canonization, that mess things up. How many conservatives are there that will argue the notion Paul didn’t write all 13 letters is very bad on historical grounds but at the same time claim they can historically prove the resurrection or claim a man rising from the dead is more historically probably than not based on the surviving record? It’s clear the blinders are on and confirmation bias rules the day with this crowd.

I think the authorship question is tied in because most of critical scholarship squarely believes the gospels were anonymous. The evidence for affirming traditional authorship just isn’t there and there and to be quite honest, most of it speaks against it.

My thoughts on this whole situatiuon would be as follows. I don’t think the Bible is inerrant. It’s good enough to serve God’s purposes. I don’t think the textual preservation of the Bible was perfect. It is very uncertain in places and very much altered in others. I think it’s good enough to serve God’s purposes. The extant canonical version may be the inspired form anyways, not the original work. I don’t think the canonization process was perfect. Some books got in under false pretenses and that means some others that didn’t make it might need to be rethought. I think Didache, 1 Clement and the Sheperd of Hermas should be appended to our Bibles as at least deuterocanonical Christian writings given how much the church got wrong. Some of these books were very widely used by the early church and 1 Clement is probably a first century work pre-dating a few NT works.

At the end of the day the Bible we have is good enough to serve God’s purposes. That is all I have. My faith in the Bible is not faith in the human preservation or historical arguments, just belief that God would not have let the church go entirely astray.

I ditch inerrancy across every spectrum of scripture (including textual preservation and canonization). I don’t see it anywhere and I think the evidence is vastly against it. God is just not even remotely concerned with the inerrancy of scripture on any level. Genesis starting off with two mutually exclusive stories of creation should have given that away at the jump. Unfortunately, it does not. How many Christians have been reading the flood stories for centuries not realizing they are two stories with conflicting details intertwined?

The best argument I can muster is God moved the Chruch to preserve what he wanted them to have. I think Sparks is correct in that scripture is part of the fallen (whatever that means), sinful process of humans. That includes authorship, preservation and canonization to me. Let me use an example from church. The story of Jacob. I believe as it goes God promised Jacob to be the father of a great nation or some stuff. As our pastor tells it, Jacob decided to steal Esau’s blessings because he wanted to make God’s promises come true on his own terms. Maybe God inspired an author to write in a Pauline community ca 110CE and maybe that author took it upon himself to write in Paul’s name, deceptively or otherwise. Even if he contradicted Paul on a few thoughts, I think this is still possible as beliefs evolved (especially when Jesus was late!) and ancients were not fact-literal westerners like us. But it that what God would have wanted? Maybe, maybe not? Is dying on the Cross what God would have wanted from the beginning or is He just working with what He has and accommodating humans? Maybe the same process is at work in Scripture. I think the problem with evangelicals is their model of inspiration and thinking every word or sentence of the Bible must be true.

I think the entire approach to the Bible in Christianity needs reorientation while preserving its sacred and authoritative role in the church. I believe Catholicism really got the ball rolling with Dei Verbum at Vatican II back in the 60s.

At the end of the day, I think we are meant more to wrestle with scripture than derive theological facts from it.

Vinnie

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Every Christian takes the Bible to bits. We all proof-text hunt. I can’t see how your highlighted text is little more than a platitude existing in the clouds on one level. On another I agree with it.

All of the words in the Bible don’t seem to fit that category. That is the problem. God speaks to us through the Bible, but our method of inspiration dictates our hermeneutical approach to scripture. We can have the words of a loved one but does the Bible literally represent the words of God? The actual words on the page? Or does God communicate through these stories when we read them?

I agree we need to wrestle with scripture in the manner suggested but how does one come up with any sort of doctrine doing that? Wrestling with a poem doesn’t yield a Nicene creed and even if it did, it would not make it correct, authoritative or binding. Just a shared communal statement that may be true for the community as a statement of belief, but possibly have no bearing on the truth of the statement per the external world. How to we walk the line between drowning in minutiae and relativism?

Vinnie

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I have not seen you once quote and steel man an actual methodology from a critical scholar arguing for stylistic differences. I understand full well some critical scholars or at least those who think certain texts in the Pauline corpus are pseudepigraphic can use bad arguments. But if you want to overthrow the consensus, you need to dialogue with the stronger arguments. Critical scholars understand all the excuses conservatives come up with:

Ramond Brown writes:

Letters could be written in different ways, sometimes by the sender’s own hand and sometimes dictated. In the latter case each syllable might be copied by a recording secretary,4 with an editor introduced to correct infelicities; or after the sender had indicated only the broad lines of the message, more authority to formulate might be given to a scribe, who was almost a co­ author, to create the final form. As for Paul, he may have written a short letter like Phlm entirely with his own hand (v. 19). References to lines written by Paul’s own hand in a longer letter (I Cor 16:21; Gal 6: 11; II Thess 3: 17; Col 4: 1 8), however, suggest that the rest of the letter was penned by another writer; and explicitly Rom 1 6:22 has greetings from “Tertius who wrote the letter.” (See also I Pet 5 : 1 2 for Peter writing “through Silvanus.”) In all this, however, we do not know how literally Paul would have supplied wording to scribes (and thus whether he was working with secretaries or co-authors). He may have dictated some letters exactly and allowed freedom in others, e.g., in Col, which has a style very different from the protoPauline letters.5

Bart Ehrman writes:

The first is that the question is never whether Paul was capable of writing in one style or another. He was an educated author, and like all educated authors he could vary his style, to some degree at least, as he saw fit. But everyone does in fact typically write in a certain style, often without putting a great deal of thought into questions such as how to effect subordination, whether to prefer subordination to coordination, how to choose which conjunctions to prefer over others, how to construct participial clauses, how to employ the infinitive, and so on. Most authors, unless they are overwhelmingly conscious of being involved in a rhetorical exercise (for example, trained rhetoricians working on an oratorical production), simply write the way they write. No one can plausibly claim that Paul could not have written in the style of, say, Luke or the author of Hebrews, if he had really wanted to. At the same time, no one can plausibly claim that Paul did write that way.”

Good critical scholars understand the same author could have a different style. But they formulate specific arguments that require specific answers. Some are good and some are dismissible. Here is what Ehrman wrote in Forged and Forgery, the scholarly version of Forged on 2 Thessalonians. Please note what I put in bold:

“The most directed study of the style of 2 Thessalonians was undertaken by Darryl Schmidt, who showed on the basis of several unrelated but significant grounds that the letter differs, stylistically, from the undisputed Pauline letters.16 Schmidt’s essay does not engage in bland generalities about long sentences and strange style, but provides a detailed demonstration that 2 Thessalonians (and Colossians and Ephesians) are not written in Paul’s typical style. Among his criteria, three are especially striking. First, he considers sentences as measured by the numbers of embedded clauses and levels of embedding. 2 Thess. 1:3–12 is often pointed to as a long and complex sentence. It is true, as Schmidt points out, that there are other sentences in the undisputed letters that are nearly as long (2 Cor. 6:3–10, 11:24–31). ”

“But these letters do not match the complexity of the sentences in 2 Thessalonians. Specifically, Schmidt takes the longest sentence in the opening thanksgiving section of each of the Pauline letters and measures how many embedded clauses there are and how many layers of embeddedness. The results are quite telling: in Romans there are five embedded clauses at four layers of embeddedness; 1 Corinthians: six clauses at four layers; 2 Corinthians: five clauses at three levels; Philippians: six clauses at one level; 1 Thessalonians: ten clauses at five levels. Contrast these figures with the Deutero-Paulines: Colossians: twelve clauses at eight levels; Ephesians: eighteen clauses at thirteen levels; and most striking, 2 Thessalonians: a whopping twenty-two clauses at fifteen levels of embeddedness. The point, again, is not that this is an impossibly more complex style (it is not nearly as complex as that found in numerous other authors); the point is that it is an uncharacteristically Pauline style.

“Schmidt then considers a different stylistic feature, the patterns of genitive constructions in nonphrase strings, of which there are three kinds: (1) article + noun + article + noun (genitive); (2) a genitive pronoun added to a string; (c) anarthrous nouns in the same kind of string. When calculated for every 1,000 words in the text, one finds the following frequencies of these kinds of strings (Appendix 2): Romans 12.8 strings per thousand words; 1 Corinthians 8.8 strings; 2 Corinthians 13.1 strings; Galatians 15.2 strings; Philippians 7.4 strings; 1 Thessalonians 10.8 strings; Philemon 11.9 strings. Again, the contrast with the Deutero-Paulines, and especially 2 Thessalonians is stark: Colossians 29.7 strings; Ephesians 31.7 strings; and 2 Thessalonians 26.7 strings.

Third, Schmidt considers the frequency with which a writing uses coordinating and subordinating constructions. Leaving out the ubiquitous καí, he finds the relative frequency of coordination versus subordination (per hundred words) to work out as follows: Romans 68:34; 1 Corinthians 77:47; 2 Corinthians 59:42; Galatians 65:44; 1 Thessalonians 49:38; Philippians 53:36; Philemon 50:38. Once again there is a contrast with the Deutero-Paulines, where subordination is far more relatively common: Colossians 18:25; Ephesians 27:26; 2 Thessalonians 41:37.

“The ultimate payoff of these three measurements is that the general sense that scholars have had for many decades that 2 Thessalonians (and the other two Deutero-Paulines) contains a more complex style than the undisputed letters—including the author’s model, 1 Thessalonians—is in fact borne out. It is indeed a more complex style. In isolation this kind of stylistic demonstration can carry little weight. Authors can and do vary their style, and statistical models are constantly challenged on grounds related both to the statistics and the models. But when taken in tandem with the earlier consideration, that the author of 2 Thessalonians has followed the structure and borrowed the words, phrases, and even sentences of 1 Thessalonians, the fact that the nonborrowed materials appear in a non-Pauline “style appears far more formidable. Remaining doubts can be removed by the most complex of the three main arguments against Pauline authorship, the theology of the letter.
”
Excerpt From: Ehrman, Bart D. “Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics.” Apple Books.

If you want to argue with a critical scholar, bland parallels talking about orcs in Tolkien will not do it. Address the actual critical arguments they present. These stylistic arguments in 2 Thessalonians are dismissible in pure isolation but critical scholars don’t do this divide and conquer apologetics. They evaluate all he evidence in tandem. 2 Thessalonians borrows from 1 Thessalonians and where it does, it appears much more Pauline than the sections that don’t. These stylistic differences are embedded within that context and then when you look at the theology of each epistle (e.g. eschatological outlook) this point is further hammered home.

You have not shown how this methodology is comparable to Tolkien’s work or Lewis. In fact, it is not because it is precisely the borrowing between 1 and 2 Thessalonians that prompted it this discussion. Can you point out something comparable in your comparisons? There are competent scholars who think Paul wrote 1 and 2 Thessalonians but if you want to argue with critical scholarship, please read and dialogue with their actual arguments. Not some straw man caricature you find on the internet.

Good luck overthrowing the scholarly consensus.

Vinnie

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This is something which I feel a real interest for. Whereas Peter is more optimistic about the last days, Paul can be said to be more cautious.

How helpful would it be if the apparent discrepancies in eschatology are run through the interpretative grid of the kingdom being now and not yet?

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I’ve often wondered what will happen to this consensus, as well as the science fiction that will be written, when atheism is found to be as impossible as an infinite number of objects in space.

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There you go then.
 

I think yes to the latter, but by reading thoughtfully, submissively and repetitively, recognizing that there are some things that don’t seem to fit or make sense but above all not fretting about them or throwing them out just because they’re difficult or hard to understand, elevating the reader too high. Paying attention to science and scholarship is certainly allowed, but they shouldn’t be allowed to be excessively distracting, remembering that it’s a love letter that needs to be read devotionally before it’s picked apart academically. Bonhoeffer is to be emulated.

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I am not interested in what I would deem force-fitting all the eschatology throughout the New Testament into a cohesive whole. I am all about finding a cohesive interpretation of the diversity, but I hav no desire in denying it exists on a priori grounds and imagining it away through mental gymnastics and harmonization. IMO, Paul thought Jesus was the start of the general resurrection. Since Jesus had been resurrected he thought the end was really imminent. Many Christians thought the same. We see it in the redaction of John (ch 21), the scoffers 2 Peter mentions and even for me in 2 Thessalonians. Paul believed Jesus was the first-fruits. Interesting choice of a harvest metaphor for a return that still hasn’t happened still after 2,000 years. Paul has a very urgent eschatology. It was wrong. Doesn’t mean verses teaching us to be prepared for God’s return lose their zest. They are as true today as they were 2,000 years ago and as true as they would be 10,000 years from now on our AI infused planet.

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I see a bit of a contradiction there. There is still urgency, wouldn’t you think? We shouldn’t be leaning back and folding our hands.

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When I read his writings they don’t suggest preparedness for some vague future event to me.

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Our respective deaths (and everyone else’s) are pretty imminent and not so vague, was my point. The Great Commission?

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Irregardless of the questions surrounding the authorship of 2 Thessalonians, this verse has a terrifying sense to it, as if a believer could commit an unpardonable sin:

“The son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.”

Or as Hegel said, the goal of history (or this life), is for reason to become conscious of itself.

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And I have not seen you once answer my actual questions. I’m sorry Vinnie, but you’re still throwing out cheap shots and insults about questions and challenges to your position as being “conservative” and “straw man caricatures that you find on the Internet.”

Look, I get it that scholars are aware that people can write in different ways at different times depending on the context. I get it that the authorship of the Epistles was more complex and nuanced than Paul writing down everything single-handedly as it was dictated to him word for word. I get it that we have to address what they teach in reality and not a straw man caricature of it. I get it that theologians have good arguments as well as bad ones. I get it that it’s the good ones we need to address and not just the weak ones.

But we need to differentiate between the good arguments and the bad ones. We also need to figure out whether their conclusions from those arguments are justified or whether they are overstating their case. If I have specific questions or objections, those specific points need to be addressed. If I am “attacking straw men,” that means that I must have some kind of misunderstanding of what theologians actually do, and you need to correct those misconceptions by pointing out what they are, and providing me with links to the original research so that I can review it. Just dismissing my objections as “conservative” as if “conservative” were some sort of magic shibboleth, or “some straw man caricature that you find on the Internet” are just shouting and tell me nothing.

So, coming back to Bart Ehrman’s argument here:

Okay, so he has stated that just using a single metric is not sufficient to try to distinguish between Paul and pseudo-Paul. I get it. In response to that, he has given five. If there are more than five, please provide me a link to the original source.

Now five metrics would be impressive if there were just nine or ten to choose from in total. But when there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands to choose from it’s a completely different matter. On top of that, the greater number of metrics would only be impressive if they were all independent of each other, and if they are all indicators of the same underlying factor (in this case, complexity of style), then they are almost certainly not. In such a case, you need to provide additional evidence that those specific metrics are particularly effective at distinguishing between two different individuals, otherwise you’ve got a Texas sharp-shooter on your hands.

For that, you need a corpus of data of known provenance to test them against. And this brings me to my next point.

And if you want to dismiss the point that I am making by bringing up Tolkien, hand-waving it away as “bland parallels talking about orcs” will not do it. You need to address the specific reason why I made the point, and if the point that I have made about Tolkien does not address that particular reason, you need to point me to something else that does.

The whole point – my central point which you have not addressed – is that in order to establish that your methodology is fit for purpose, you need to test it against a control. You need to be able to establish confidence levels, and rates of false positives and false negatives. That is simply how data science works. I bring up Tolkien simply to illustrate the point here. If Tolkien is not sufficient to act as a control, due to the fact that it is a different language and a different genre (and I get that too), you need to be able to provide an alternative that is, otherwise your methodology is nothing but pseudoscience.

Now another point. It may still be the case that despite what I’ve said here, the differences between Romans and Colossians/Ephesians are too great to allow for one person to have written both of them. But in order to dismiss Colossians and Ephesians as a forgery, you need to establish that Paul had nothing whatsoever to do with them. They would still be perfectly legitimately Pauline if they were written collaboratively (as in fact they claim to be), or even if they were ghost-written and he just reviewed them afterwards and gave his imprimatur to them. To make an unjustified leap from “written collaboratively” to “an outright forgery” is overstating their conclusions and simply not warranted.

Is “scholarly consensus” some kind of magic shibboleth intended to shut down questions and demand that I be spoon-fed? I’ve no doubt that theologians are competent at the study of theology, but what Bart Ehrman is trying to do here is data science, and to be quite honest he would be better off leaving that to data scientists.

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Hi Dave and also welcome to the forum

Looks like your thread has already mutated well beyond the subject. Attached a link to the invention of the science vs faith conflict debate on premier unbelievable
The 2 men who invented the science vs faith conflict - Tim O'Neill, Dave Hutchings & James Ungureanu - YouTube.
You can get the book Of Popes and Unicorns from Amazon, but in the Shownotes of the podcast https://unbelievable.podbean.com/e/the-2-men-who-invented-the-war-between-science-faith-tim-o-neill-dave-hutchings-james-ungureanu/shownotes you find a promo code for a 30% price reduction for the book from the publisher.

I have to admit not having read it all the way to the end, but in the light of the pandemic and the publishing date, evolution is perhaps not the biggest clash between the science and religion any more but vaccines are. https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/2022/08/28/book-review-of-popes-and-unicorns-by-david-hutchings-and-james-ungureanu/. Whist it is easy to show that evolution is neither random, nor without purpose, thus destroying its claim to fame by atheists as a God defeater, quite the opposite, to defuse the issue of demonization of the opposition for the benefit of creating group cohesion is a general problem of social behaviour harder to weed out.

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