Humility 2: Follow Your Nose?

I said last time that the common view of humility is false: humility does not deny itself, and it does not decrease our self-knowledge so we only have humility when we don't realize it. So what is real humility, and how does it work?

I'll tell you a secret: I can see my nose.

Not the whole thing, of course, but most of it. And I doubt I'm especially blessed in this regard. You don't need a long or large nose to see it. And all going well, you can see past the end of your nose, which is like seeing the forest for the trees.

So what?

Simply this: again, no doubt like you, I am humble about my nose. Some people may be obsessed with the protuberance, thinking it either beautiful or ugly, but most of us probably don't think much about it.

That's the point.

I can go for amazingly long periods without noticing the thing, usually because I'm looking at something else--words on a page, vehicles on the road, and so forth. But it's there, and I know it. I can shift my attention to or from it at will.

That's humility. I've had a few moments when I realized, to my surprise, that I was being humble. Now, I often ruined it by wanting to advertise the fact. But sometimes I would just think, "Huh. That's interesting." Then I returned to the matter at hand.

If you are humble, you do not lack self-knowledge but self-absorption. A humble person can be aware of his own humility without feeling any urge to publicize it. "Look at me--I'm humble!" is wrong not because of the last clause but because of the first. A humble Christian will always say, "Look at Jesus!"

But then, a humble Christian will always be looking at Jesus, not at his own nose.

Humility 1: False Humility

I recently heard a gentleman talking about humility. He mentioned asking people at a retreat whether they were humble. Some sucker bit and raised her hand--Ha! She isn't humble, or she wouldn't raise her hand!

How droll!

How totally, almost damnably false.

This peculiar view of humility is common, unfortunately: it is the Virtue That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The first (and perhaps still the only) writer I've seen get this right is C. S. Lewis. Unfortunately, many of his "fans" have never read his writings. Pity, that.

Anyway--it doesn't take much examination to locate the problem. Suppose there is a truly humble person. You ask him, "Are you humble?" What does he--can he--answer?

1. If he says "Yes," we automatically dismiss his claim: it's a trick question for which an affirmative answer is impossible even though we have already stipulated that it would be true. That is, we have excluded truth as a possibility.

2. If he says, "No," then he is at best mistaken or deluded and at worst lying. So the only answer we will accept is a mistake, a delusion, or an outright lie. And this is a virtue?

Note that real virtues do not cost us self-knowledge: it's the vices that numb us to reality. That's why we like them. We drink to forget, in other words, though we get drunk on Pride, Wrath, Lust, and so forth. If we concentrate on vices, they will blind us to the guy on the cross and to the same guy not in the tomb but enthroned at his Father's right hand. If you fight vices and exercise virtue, you'll know as much about yourself as your friends and enemies do.

So the fact that this so-called humility at best calls for loss of self-knowledge tells us that it's really a vice. Its patron sinner is of course Uriah Heep.

Someone will probably claim that my thought experiment assumes an impossibility: no one is truly humble. Untrue: at least One was truly humble--and he said so in Matt 11:29! So by the usual reasoning, Jesus himself was guilty of the sin of pride, which would interfere with his being our Savior. Drat.

Next time, I'll explain what real humility is, and why it's as plain as the nose on your face.

Sciolism, Scientism, and Theology

So what does it matter if people go off half-cocked? We've been making decisions based on incomplete and faulty information since the Garden of Eden, which I guess helps answer the question. But now, in addition to mere ignorance parading as knowledge, we add the tendency toward a falsely scientific view of life.

I noticed some time ago that in Christian circles (especially Fundamentalist Protestant ones, but you can easily find it elsewhere) there was a tendency to reduce everything to a formula. Most of the supposedly non-fiction books in a Christian bookstore have a formula for success, effective prayer, weight loss, or whatever else. Even theologically we tend toward formulas, though that's been around for centuries.

It's curious that the Bible is low on formulas. About the closest you get is in the Law, and even it isn't truly formulaic. But the formula mindset can be found quite easily: it's the attempt to reduce God and our interactions with him to scripts. Push the right buttons, and you get what you want.

It should be obvious that this is magic: an attempt to manipulate God into doing our will. But there's more to it than that--something even more damnable. Not only is it an attempt to get our own way and assert our will over God's, it also implies rejecting grace.

Earning your own salvation is thoroughly formula-based: do the right works, and you are saved. From the standpoint of scientism, earning your salvation is a good idea, because there's a clear cause-effect relationship. Good deeds eventually outweigh bad ones, so you just keep going until you're saved.

But what of grace? Grace is a miracle: it upsets the cause-effect chain, saying that bad deeds may simply be forgiven, and without our somehow earning that forgiveness. Is it any wonder that when Creation Science writers wander into theology they tend to reduce it to simplistic formulas?

They also like to sanitize messy people: Noah didn't mean to get drunk; in the antediluvian world, grape juice didn't ferment. They have quite a long presentation with the sole point of getting Noah off the hook. But why? Why not just admit that he was yet another sinner and goofed up? (For that matter, why make drinking wine a sin? It isn't one in the Bible.)

The annoyingly obvious answer is that they don't really believe in grace. They believe in excuses, even far-fetched ones, to avoid admitting that God used and blessed a sinner. Admitting it would violate the tidy cause-effect sequence and acknowledge a miracle—which the Creation Science people are no more eager to do than atheists.

God does miracles; get over it. And salvation is a walk, not a formula.

Scientific Sciolism

Oh, look it up.

I talked about syncretism last time, and I don't think anyone can deny that at least in the West, having "science" on one's side pretty much guarantees intellectual respectability and superiority. This is why most of the global warming debate hinges on who is actually scientific, the believers or deniers, and why some people think they must have a scientific basis for accepting Genesis. Not having a scientific basis for one's views is intellectually untenable.

But together with this deification of "science" (often misunderstood and incorrectly identified) we have normal human sciolism: the tendency to think we know it all (or at least enough to pontificate) based on only a shallow acquaintance with a topic. So in the global warming debate we see people on both sides who are merely parroting arguments and putative facts they agree with but probably don't understand. I was amazed and impressed a while back when a columnist for a local newspaper admitted that he hadn't done enough research on the topic to have a worthwhile opinion--and he also claimed that such research would amount to setting aside a few years to master the topic. Reading a few blogs and newspaper articles isn't enough.

Years ago, there was a man named Immanuel Velikovsky who tried to explain various historical and legendary events (including some from the Exodus) by invoking a kind of celestial pinball game in which the earth got nailed a few times. Back in the sixties and seventies there was a noticeable Velikovskyist contingent in the Creation Science ranks, because he believed in catastrophism and was ostracized from mainline scientific circles, much like the Creation Science crowd itself.

But the interesting point is that Velikovsky was a psychiatrist, not a physicist, astronomer, biologist, or archeologist: he was pontificating well outside his field of competence, and doing so quite convincingly. An astronomer and a biologist read Worlds in Collision and came to opposite conclusions: the astronomer thought the astronomy was nonsense but the biochemistry brilliant, while the biologist laughed at the biochemistry but found the astronomy impressive.

Sciolism times three: an author who was out of his depth yet persuasive, and two men who were safe from the hoax in their respective areas of expertise but gullible elsewhere. If you've ever read Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, you get the impression that there were few pseudoscientific scams of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that did not snooker at least one of the Huxleys--a very intelligent and well-educated group. But they, too, were willing to gamble on their sometimes shallow knowledge--and sometimes they lost.

The relevant moral here involves a point I've made before concerning what I call "scientific apologetics": we read a book (or several) making a number of scientific claims we haven't the background to appraise intelligently and feel that we understand more about the topic than those who do have the requisite background.

This is why I largely ignore the putative science of Creation Science: I don't have the background required to assess it. In the same way, evolution is a sprawling concern, touching a number of different fields. I strongly doubt anyone knows enough about it to understand it and assess it, pro or con. I certainly don't. I can, however, comment on the philosophical and theological implications of Creation Science, just as I can spot an evolutionist with a scientific background going outside his field to pontificate on theology or philosophy.

Avoid sciolists lest you become one yourself.

I'll conclude this series next time with a post about how sciolism and scientism combine to corrupt popular theology.

Science, Faith, and Syncretism

Syncretism means mixing belief systems. In the Old Testament we read of people worshipping both God and Baal, for example. These days we do much the same thing, only the other "god" is usually Money, Popularity, Respectability, or something like that. The idea I mentioned last time, that there must be a scientific explanation to support Genesis, is such a case. Unless God jumps through the hoop of our personal expectations, we just won't believe in him.

So there!

I still don't see why Creation is any different from the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection, neither of which gets the imprimatur of science. If God wants to commit a miracle now and then, we can either rely on him to be telling the truth or rely on our amazing fallen minds to find an alternative explanation. This is the major reason I consider Creation Science dangerous on theological grounds: since the goal is to find a cause-and-effect sequence to explain miracles, it tends to deny or minimize miracles on the one hand and support a mechanistic view of God on the other.

Case in point: the Flood. In order to explain where all the water came from, proponents of Creation Science usually conjure up a vapor canopy nowhere attested in scripture and have the earth's crust upthrust, downthrust, and sidewaysthrust without ever generating a really good dance step. I, on the other hand, just figure that if God wants enough water to flood the whole planet, he can just call it into existence. It's called a miracle, and no, I can't make a science out of it.

So what if the science happens to be right anyway--what if God used a vapor canopy without mentioning it? Occam's razor, friend: the vapor-canopy explanation is complex; a miracle is simple. Nor is that always true: quite often positing a miracle is a needless complication. Just not here.

This need for an acceptable mechanism leads in worse directions, though. For example, it is Law-oriented rather than Grace-oriented. Earning your salvation by good works is simple cause and effect; it's a kind of science. Accepting salvation by faith that has been granted by grace is miraculous thinking: it's simply not good cause and effect, because it doesn't provide a good way to manipulate God.

C. S. Lewis talked about this in The Abolition Of Man: science and magic tend to be different ways of gaining power over nature (and thus God) by reducing it to rules you can manipulate. This is the reason the Creation Science crowd doesn't like miracles (beyond the fact they aren't acceptable to the scientific establishment): miracles confer no manipulative power. We can't use them to get what we want; we can't make them happen whenever we feel like it.

That's also why I don't really care about the scientific claims of Creation Science: if they were presented with proper rigor, I couldn't understand them, much less judge their validity, but if they are presented in a looser, more popular style, even a scientist in relevant field couldn't assess the data. So I stick with the theological ramifications--a topic friends and enemies both seem to ignore.

Next up: sciolism.

Science, Faith, and Miracles

I'm currently involved in yet another vigorous exchange of views with a friend who apparently has no choice other than Creation Science on the one hand and loss of faith on the other. Creation Science, he says, allows him to disbelieve evolution and thus to believe Genesis.

I admit I don't get it myself.

We agree that evolution and Genesis don't get on well together. I've seen attempts to harmonize them, and those attempts amount to wishful thinking. They also usually involve effectively dismissing those parts of Genesis that seem inconvenient.

But I disagree that cobbling together a "science" is the only way to "save" Genesis. Bear in mind that science is a system of generalizations about what usually happens and why. And consider that science (indeed, the humbler Everyday Experience) tells us that virgins don't get pregnant without changing their status and that dead people don't get better after a few days in a tomb.

In other words, if we must have a scientific alternative (Creation Science) to evolution, we must have a scientific alternative (Virgin Birth Science) to conception and another (Resurrection Science) to postmortem decay. For without such alternatives, we must follow science rather than scripture, apparently, and these doctrines will be lost.

But science is about what usually happens--pretty much always, in fact. And the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection were one-time events, though to be sure the latter presages a much more widespread repeat. In other words, they were miracles, and because miracles are abnormal, they can't be generalized into science.

So what about Creation? Does the opening of Genesis happen a lot? Not so far as we can tell. It's characterized by God speaking and things happening. In other words, it's a miracle. But that means it can't be made into a science.

And that should be okay. The alternative is to say that there are no miracles, which is not something a Christian can agree with. But it suggests a syncretism--a mixture of proper belief with outside views--that is common and troubling. I'll hit that next, all going well.

Return of the Judaizers

The recent comment about Jesus' so-called original teaching is a matter for concern, though I'd rather not spend much time on it just now. C. S. Lewis said that human nature is constantly moving from one extreme to the other, and having spent far too long despising anything Jewish, some people have gone the other way and now worship anything Jewish.

The middle ground isn't that hard to find. The Old Testament remains vital reading for Christians, because it gives the context of the New Testament. Without it, the New Testament is meaningless and without foundation. Further, much that we find in the early Church, including the term for church itself, ekklesia (= "assembly"), has Jewish origins. Ignoring these facts leads to folly.

On the other hand, Judaism itself has changed considerably since the time of Christ. I have seen references to Jesus wearing a tallit, for example, which is a neat trick considering that they didn't arise until centuries later. From an OT perspective, covering the head was a sign of mourning--David fleeing Absalom (2 Sam 15:30--13:19 may also be an example) and Est 6:12 (though here it's Haman[!] who is our example). In the NT, Paul says that a man who is praying or prophesying should not cover his head (1 Cor 11:4, 7), and he seems to consider this obvious: there is no hint that he is disagreeing with the normal Jewish practice of the day. So some people back-read a modern practice into biblical times and misunderstandings arise.

Then there's the matter of considering non-Christian Jewish sources authoritative. In 2 Cor 3:13–16, Paul deals with this: when an unsaved Jew (probably anyone unsaved—2 Cor 4:3–4) reads the Law, he can't understand it properly; only in Christ is truth revealed. You can learn a lot from unsaved experts, but you must always remember that you're dealing with someone at least partly blind.

But the recent comment goes beyond such incautious blunders: the group in question effectively believes that Jesus did not come to establish a new covenant, because the old laws remain in place. Indeed, they ignore the argument of Heb 7:12--there has come a change of priesthood and therefore of law. They may bring up Mat 5:17-19, where Jesus claims that he has come to fulfill the Law rather than destroy it, and that the Law will remain until everything has been fulfilled. But since he came to fulfill it, he either did so or failed; and if he fulfilled the Law, its purpose has been accomplished, and a new covenant may be introduced. Rejecting the new covenant robs Jesus' life, death, and resurrection of their meaning; it marks a return to the first major heresy in Christianity: the Judaizers.

That's about all I'll say on the topic at the moment, though I'm sure I'll have to revisit it. Just indulge some healthy skepticism about wild (and often contentious) claims. You can usually pick up what kind of spirit and wisdom (Jam 3:13–17) they're using. Also remember what C. S. Lewis said about those who attack Christianity: they usually claim to accept what Jesus said while attacking Paul's teaching, but if you look carefully, it's really Jesus' teaching they're attacking. They just think Paul is a safer target. That's cowardice—and hypocrisy. Such people refute themselves.

If all goes well, I should resume some overdue reviews and get back to Dark World in short order—in fact, I'll probably intersperse them a bit.

Quantum of Solace

Not the Bond movie; this has more to do with the original short story upon whose title the movie is based. The idea is that there is a bare minimum of solace or comfort required to keep going, to keep life bearable.

I would suggest that this applies to fiction as well. I doubt anyone wants a story where everyone is happy and life is wonderful all the time. But sometimes the reaction against the high-fructose sweetener plot leads to something equally emetic. I don't think I've ever actually encountered the totally wonderful bit in a book, not even in Pollyanna, which is actually an above-average story, better than the Disney version. I suspect that the Pollyanna defense is really just a poor excuse for putting syrup of ipecac in story form.

In any case, if you have enough negative elements, the story turns ugly. There's enough ugliness in the world without our adding to it; there is enough darkness without our dwelling on it. I would suggest that the negative elements in a Christian story be largely allusive: I already know what ugly looks like and would rather not spend page after page refreshing my memory. But if you can show me beauty, real beauty that isn't just photoshopped ugliness, that is an accomplishment. Or if you're going to stick something ugly in my face, at least do not do so at every turn. Like violence in splatter films, ugliness--be it moral or aesthetic--soon palls, and you have to increase the dosage to get the desired effect. That's called desensitization, and we have more than enough of that as well. In fact, this shows why, even from the standpoint of justifying darkness and ugliness, it's a bad idea.

Supposedly, highlighting such things is simply realistic. But courtesy of desensitization, the highlighting has to be more and more extreme to get the point across, taking us further and further away from that all-important "real life." I was surprised, for example, that no one seemed to notice the character flaws in the guys from League of Superheroes; I kept reading reviews that they were unrealistically good. Yet Tom is sarcastic, condescending, sanctimonious, proud, and a bit cowardly. Even Charlie tends to appease more than he should. But no one noticed these things. Why? Because they weren't exaggerated, and people only notice what's stuck in their face.

Do you call that Art? Then why is it Art to push exaggeration further and further and make reality harder and harder to spot?

Anyway...

Chawna Scroeder posted on the moral and spiritual side of this problem a while back, and I've found her analysis helpful; perhaps you will too.