Deconstructionism

I was reading reviews of an academic deconstructionist's lectures when I suddenly realized that this was a word that described my philosophical approach to God, religion and everyday life.

Deconstructionist.

While taking a class at my church that teaches the basics of what the church fundamentally believes, I was informed that if I could not get behind their core doctrines, then becoming a member of the church would not be right for me.

Why couldn't I get behind their core doctrines? Well, it was not because I was diametrically opposed to them in my own beliefs. I did not hold beliefs that were opposite those of the church. Rather, I just found that they were certain of "truths" I knew I could not share their certainty about. I saw holes in their arguments and in the presentation of their beliefs. I was looking at those things they were dancing around and avoiding. I was looking at them honestly, and looking at them left me with a lot of questions, including, "Does this really matter at all?"

In these reviews of the academic lecturer, one critic said that deconstructionism was empty, that it tore apart the beliefs of others while not offering any authoritative beliefs of its own. Deconstructionists, this reviewer argued, shoot arrows at others from the safely of their empty towers.

I disagree with that reviewer, but I was intrigued by his argument. I disagree with him because my deconstructionism and agnosticism have been building blocks for my spiritual journey and personal relationship with both God and this life. I like what it has given me, and the fullness it has contributed to my life.

I do not pretend to be confident of those things I am not confident about. I see this level of honesty with myself and others as an asset, not a hinderance. Plus, it is reasonable, common sense, not to lie to yourself about what you really know or are confident about.

If you are interested, I contribute to Mornings with Jesus everyday, and you can see here how my doubt and deconstructionism fruitfully contributes to my relationship with God.

Truth

In a conversation with a fundamentalist Christian, I reminded him that the Bible says, in 1 John 4:1, "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world."

In response to this, he said, "Of course we need to do that to everyone else's claims. But, it is heresy to suggest that we apply that same criticism to the Bible."

I have heard Christians claim that it is their god-given duty to protect the Truth.

In a forum, I met a man who believed it was his duty, in spite of his own desires, to sit in that forum all day of everyday and argue with people, insisting on the truth, and pointing out where others got it wrong.

I have been exposed to the attitude that Christians can see the truth that the rest of the world is too distracted, or too sinful, or just too unwilling to see.

This has left me asking: What is truth?

The question is not about what is true. It is not about the subject of truth. It is a question about the nature of truth itself.

Is truth a rare gem that must be hidden or protected? Is it something sacred that can be damaged or desecrated? Is it something that can somehow go unexperienced? Is it a possession of any one person or group of people?

In church as a teenager, I was taught to look critically at the beliefs of other religious groups and at the claims of the sciences. The holes in their claims and practices were pointed out to me. I learned that other people have a profound capacity to be bamboozled by attractive ideas.

In this way, I learned how to critically and objectively observe the truth.

I learned that truth was something we could see when we honestly and critically looked at the evidence available to us. I could pick out the truth if I was willing to dissect and test the ideas of a group, not as an insistent proponent of those ideas, but as a ruthless skeptic and critic of them.

Truth, I learned, is the evidence left when I have stripped away the biases, expectations and beliefs I carried with me.

Then, after learning that lesson well, I turned around. I applied the same scrutiny to my own religion. I looked at Christianity with the same skeptical lens I had learned to use on other people's beliefs.

I absolutely appreciate that observation can be wrong. I believe there are optical illusions that can easily deceive us. That is precisely why determined criticism and skepticism are important in discovering truth. More often than not, our own beliefs and expectations create the blind spots in our observations.

I continue to wonder what truth is, and how best to observe it. It is a wonder that keeps me looking.

Creationism

There is a standing conflict between Creationists and the evidence for evolution.

The conflict Creationists have with evolution is that the evidence points to the random development of life, rather than pointing to the specific methodology of creation described in the Bible.

In other words, there is a contradiction between the opening chapter of the Bible and the evidence collected and observed about our own existence.

In one argument against the random development of life on Earth, a pastor put computer parts in a plastic bid on stage, shook it around for a minute, and noted that these computer parts did not become a functioning computer. Therefore, he concluded, there is no way that randomness led to the complexity of life as we know it.

However, a single bin with parts for a single computer being shaken for only one minute is in no way indicative of what the evidence suggests.

What if the bin was quite a bit larger, containing enough parts to make several trillion computers that, once created, could then reproduce in their likeness, and whose parts would not be damaged by all the colliding? What if that bin were shaken for several billion years? Is there really an argument that such an experiments would never, beyond a shadow of a doubt, yield at least one configuration of a fully functional computer?

Whenever observers watch species change over many generations, they are observing evidence of potentially predictable changes.

The observable evidence favoring a young-earth Creationist's perspective must be taken at the face value of the Bible that reports it. It is, let's say for the sake of argument, equivalent to an eye-witness testimony.

The observable evidence for evolution, however, is all around us, repeatable to this day, and confirmed by a number of sources committed to keeping one another accountable through determined skepticism. It is, let's say for the sake of argument, equivalent to multiple video recordings of the events.

My dilemma, though, is not whether there is sufficient evidence to believe in Creationism over evolution. My dilemma is whether the application of one theory over another results in a better understanding of what to expect when I interact with the world as it exists today.

In this case of the two competing theories, I have one that represents the potentially unpredictable behaviors of a deity, and another that is based on observable patterns that can be reproduced and can empower me to make predictions about how things in the world might behave in the future. So, the questions I find myself asking are these:

Is my well-being and the well-being of others helped or hindered by favoring one theory over the other?

Have the sciences and mathematics (including biology and statistics) developed and widely accepted over the last few millennia led mankind into an unpredictable dark age in which we are far worse off in understanding how the world behaves than we had been when we started?

Would it have been better if we committed ourselves to the explanations provided in the Bible, and never entertained the questions that led us to develop the sciences we have today, including biology and statistics?

Am I better off with theories like evolution, or adhering to doctrines like Creationism?

Resurrection

At the end of the Gospels, Jesus is reported to be dead and buried, following his crucifixion. Then, on a morning a few days later, witnesses arrive at an empty tomb. Jesus makes several appearances, reportedly showing himself to something like 500 people. Then, when all that is said and done, he starts flying upward, disappearing into the distant sky.

This return from the dead, never to die again, is a significant theme in Christianity. Christians refer to it as the resurrection. And, the promise of Christianity is that all people, or at least all Christians, will share in this same resurrection one day.

What is resurrected?

Some Christians emphasize a physical resurrection, and insist that the resurrection ascribed to by Christians must be a physical resurrection. However, I have three major doubts about a physical resurrection.

1) If Jesus was physically resurrected, and never again physically died, then to where did he ascend? From the story of the Tower of Babel, I have been taught to scoff at the idea that heaven is a physically reachable place. From the findings of astronomers , I have learned that there is not an observable heaven-like place out there in the universe. So, the question of where a physical, flying Jesus would have gone remains a mystery.

2) Growing up, I was taught that there was no sanctity to preserving my human form in anticipation of a physical resurrection. The Christian leaders I spoke to on the subject saw no fundamental issue with cremating a person and spreading his or her ashes in the constantly churning ocean. This destruction of a body makes the notion of a physical resurrection implausible.

3) Physically, most of me has died and recycled through the course of my life, and will continue to do so through the rest of it. If my physical body, as the organism it is today, is scheduled to be resurrected, then I could make the argument that these cells don't need to be involved in that process. Any cells that are coded to serve the same function would serve the purpose just as well. That being said, there is not any reason why god would not simply encode an entirely different life form's brain to perfectly resemble my consciousness, thus picking up my conscious existence right where I left off. This perception makes me wonder what value could be derived from a physical resurrection of my cells specifically.

Maybe the resurrection is not physical. Maybe it is strictly a spiritual experience. In that case, the physical resurrection of Jesus was nothing more than a depiction, or model, for the upcoming event that applies to us.

If that is the case, then what Christians are looking forward to is not to share in what happened to Jesus, but to experience something that was merely suggested by the experience of Jesus. I am not sure how the Christians I know would feel about that.

What is the resurrection?

I don't know the answer, so I'll keep asking.

Prayer

When an event occurs in the past, evidence is usually available. Diagnosticians will determine if identifying a cause is relevant to the current situation. If they determine that the root cause of the event is not relevant, they will not look into it, and they will admittedly move on without an explanation for the event's occurrence. If the root cause is relevant, they will investigate, test to produce more evidence, and hopefully diagnose the root cause accurately. Whether the root cause is ever identified or not has no bearing on whether the event was explainable or not. Also, considering the probability of error, the explanation given may not necessarily be accurate.

In other words, lack of an explanation does not equate to the event being unexplainable. Likewise, the certainty of the explanation given is in no way equal to the validity of that explanation.

The only answers to prayers I have ever heard about all have alternate explanations that can be derived from the evidence available from the event.

In other words, I have been unable to differentiate any answer god has given to prayer from the other potential causes for the event that followed the prayers.

The argument provided by some Christians in favor of believing god answers prayer goes something like this: A scientist producing accurate results in a lab is a trained and qualified expert of her field. Her senses are finely tuned to observe and find what she is looking for. Likewise, it is important that we thoroughly train spiritual sense to observe the work of god in and around our lives. Only then can we expect to differentiate his loving kindness from among all the other possible explanations.

This argue contains an important misrepresentation of the scientist, however. Revealing this distinction presents a significant contrast between the scientist and the believer. The scientistic, if she really is a qualified expert, has not trained herself to see what she is looking for, but has been trained to account for all of the available evidence, and to consider the explanation that best fits that evidence, whether or not she expected or desired that explanation.

Maybe god is answering prayers. I can not refute the claim that he is answering prayers for precisely the same reason that I cannot confirm that he is answering prayers. There is simply no evidence that can be objectively differentiated from other causes of the event.

So, in spite of evidence lending to a natural cause, and in the absence of any distinct evidence pointing to a supernatural cause, I must decide for myself whether or not to put my faith and confidence in god as the root cause of any event that follows a prayer.

God's Love

The attraction of the Gospel is that god loves you. He loves everyone. His love is immeasurably infinite. He will never leave you nor abandon you. When everyone else dies, or fails, or flees, god will be right there, loving you.

God is love.

I'm not kidding or being sarcastic. That is an attractive proposition, and particularly so for anyone struggling to love themselves, or struggling with the loss of love in any aspect of their lives.

There is one crux to all this love that stands out to me, though.

It is not measurable. It is not detectable. It's effects cannot be differentiated from any other definable and measurable causes.

It is a fair and honest question I ask when I ask: How do I know that god loves me?

…

If I appeal to something in the Bible, I am appealing to events that occurred long before I existed. While that is attractive to some, it leaves me curious above the present tense of the statement that god loves me today.

And, even if I appeal to events that are described in the Bible; namely the Gospel story of Jesus dying on his cross for the sins of the world, which includes me, I am left with an uncertainty about my role in any of that. I can confirm the historical consistency of the story until I am blue in the face, and apologists seek to do exactly that. However, what no one can measure or confirm is whether or not Jesus' life or death was in any way associated with me.

The concept of faith dictates that the inability to actually measure any of the claims made by Christianity actually somehow confirms the legitimacy of such claims. In other words, while we can be historically confident that Jesus existed, it is strictly a matter of faith that Jesus had any concept of me, and that his death had anything at all to do with me.

Okay. For those who choose to take ancient claims of supernatural phenomenon at face value, I fully understand this line of reasoning. However, from my point of view, that is like saying that the warning label on herbal remedies that their claims have not been officially confirmed is actually a promotion that such claims must be true and accurate.

The counter-argument against observation and measurement I've often heard involves the wind. I can't see the wind, and I can't capture it in a little bottle. However, that is where the comparison ends for me, mainly because I can measure the wind, reproduce the wind, and different the affects of the wind from the effects of other causes.

God's love is not like the wind. I can't see it, and I can't capture it. But, I also can't measure it or differentiate its effects from other possible causes.

So, I'm still left asking: How do I know that god loves me?

I'm not saying he doesn't love me. I'm not denying any claim made by Christianity on this subject. After all, I cannot measure god's love, so I can neither confirm nor deny its existence. 

I'm just saying it is easy to make claims that cannot be measured, confirmed nor refuted. Its easy precisely because it is inconsequential whether I am right or wrong about this, as no one who is alive to make or present measurements of these claims can actually make such measurements.

So, I am left with an uncertainty that cannot be resolved. 

God's love is best compared to herbal remedies whose claims have not been officially confirmed or refuted. Their claims must be true on no other premise than that they were claimed.

It is up to me whether I want to believe those claims or not.

The Gospel

This is the Gospel in a nutshell:
1. God instituted a legal system that condemns all humans.
2. God submitted Jesus Christ as the only mechanism of salvation from this condemnation.

In 2 Peter 3:9, the author writes, "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is long-suffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance."

I want to emphasize that one line that reads: "not willing that any should perish." God doesn't want anyone to be condemned. At least, that is what I understand that line to mean.

I believe this is true about god. I believe he does not want anyone to be condemned.

The paradox is this: If god does not want anyone to be condemned, then instituting a legal system by which they are condemned is a contradiction. If he did not want anyone to be condemned, they why institute the system that condemns people?

This is not a new issue. The problem of evil is closely tied to this paradox, because the problem of evil runs up against similar logic. I can most simply express the problem by asking: If god can and wants to do something, why doesn't he do it? If he can't do something, then he is not all-powerful.

Any legal system between us and god, such as the legal system described in the Bible that leaves all humans condemned on arrival, must be god's doing. Because god is the all-powerful one in the relationship, the assumption must be that if anything happens in the relationship, he either made it happen or allowed it to happen.

So, if there is a system that makes us separate from god, I recognize god as all-powerful and thus able to nullify the system if he so chooses. Since the Bible tells me that he does not want the result of the system, then I believe it is legitimate to ask why he instituted it in the first place, and why he has not nullified it.

An answer to this question seems to point at Jesus. This answer results in logic like this:
1. God originally instituted the system for reasons I don't understand.
2. God changed his mind, but he did not want to nullify the law he already instituted.
3. God also did not want the inevitable results of the system.

Therefore, god fulfilled his own legal system in place of all mankind instead of nullifying it, thereby liberating everyone from the consequences of that legal system that he instituted in the first place.

So, in short, I must conclude that the good news, or Gospel, is that god saved us from himself.

I appreciate that.