How Human Reason Surpasses the Bible
I have mentioned before how much I enjoy reading National Review as a representation of conservative views. The publication has been frequently critical of the Trump administration and has published articles and op-ed pieces featuring more moderate candidates. But, its attempt to articulate the perspective of what I would call "Eisenhower Republicans" is nevertheless housed in a regressive mindset, as is the nature of conservatism. Which is fine, I like to consider issues from all points of view. Conservatives generally try to preserve policies and institutions. Conservatism is not inherently innovative. It is, in fact, the antithesis of innovation.
The distinction between preservation and innovation is a topic I think deserves more attention in the future. It can go a long way toward better framing the polarity in American politics today. But, for this post, I want to focus simply on an example of how regressive thinking works. A case in point is the recent article "Why the Left Mocks the Bible" written by Dennis Prager, a prominent Christian thinker and apologist. Fundamentally, the article states: "The Bible tells of a greater source of truth than human reasoning. The Left can't handle that."
While it is true that the Left is inherently more skeptical about religion than the Right, the claim that the Bible is the "greater source of truth than human reasoning" is, of course, absurd. For one thing, it discounts the majority of religious people on the planet who have never read the Bible and, indeed, hold other texts such as the Koran or the Bhagavad-gita to be (for them) more valid forms of truth than the Bible. For another, Prager's simplistic diatribe is not so much an advocacy of Biblical teaching as it an attack on human reason and the Age of Enlightenment itself.
The innovators of the Left are not a collection of mindless, chaotic, ill-conceived freaks. These people (I am more libertarian yet I count myself more Left than Right) would hold the Enlightenment as, at worst, a compliment to Christian thought and, at best, as more applicable to the world today than Biblical thought.
Let me start by addressing the statement quoted above. I'm not interested in convincing any practicing Bible-thumper that human reason is a greater form of the truth than the alleged "word of God." That is pretty much impossible. But, Mr. Prager will readily acknowledge that he frames the Bible as something that surpasses any truth or accomplishment that can be achieved via human reason.
As Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari have pointed out, it is human reason and the Enlightenment that has constructed the modern world. Prager sees this world as inherently godless and immoral. Well, it might be the former but it clearly and factually is not the latter. The historical truth is that human reason has eliminated the world's most deadly diseases. It has eliminated war between nations, reducing it instead to a few civil wars and terrorist actions. Though malnutrition still persists, mass famines that killed millions of people as recently as 50 years ago are gone. Despite misinformation most of humanity has more knowledge available to them than ever before, enabling dynamic decision-making processes on a myriad of challenges across the globe. This is not the hallmark of immorality.
Overall, the world is better today than it was in 1959, the year I was born. No generation in human history could make that claim before the end of World War Two. All of this has occurred in a remarkably short span of time. Given that the Bible has influenced human civilization for more than 2,000 years and has been the inspiration for all sorts of acts of love and compassion, it is an undeniable historical fact that none of this truly epic improvement in the human condition has happened from a strictly Biblical approach to the world. None of it. Every single instance of massive human improvement has its roots in the Enlightenment, not the Bible. If the Bible were going to make the world a better place it had ample opportunity to do so ever since Constantine accepted Jesus as his personal savior.
(Of course, Christian discourse has no interest in making the world as a whole a better place. Rather, it is centered around gathering as many individuals under the banner of Christianity as possible. The world is full of sin and is, therefore, to be damned. Christian thought only applies to individual "souls." So part of the disconnect between the Bible and the Left can be found in the fact that the Left is inclusive and the Bible is clearly exclusive. But I digress.)
While the Bible obviously has tangible individual human benefit (it can sooth certain persons in times of distress, uncertainty, and death), it has failed miserably in improving the human condition as whole. Why is this? For precisely the same reason Prager attacks human reason, which I will get to in turn. For now, it is a historical fact that the betterment of humanity over the last five decades has not been driven by the Bible at all. Though there is certainly a religious component to the Enlightenment, it is science, not religion, that has most pervasively improved the world.
On the contrary, religion, specifically Christianity but other religions as well, has led to countless wars, disruption of food and medical supplies to "heathens", and the burning, hanging and torture of many human beings. Look at the violence in the Middle East and in Africa for examples of wars and misery directly caused by the "greater truth" of the Bible. Look to Myanmar as an example of how the usually peaceful religion of Buddhism is also contributing to mass human misery. Throughout recorded history and into today, religion has inspired as much misery as it has comfort. This isn't even something that we can be skeptical about. It is fact.
I know facts don't matter where the Bible is concerned. This source of "greater truth" is, in fact, not even original for the most part. The story of the flood, for example, was a common myth throughout multiple cultures at the time it was written. The Bible simply appropriated the story from other cultures and put its own spin on it, calling that new spin "truth." In fact, the truth is there might have been some sort of flood but it had little to do with how the Bible tells it. It is a borrowed story. It is the same with the creation myth as told in Genesis; same with the story of Jesus' virgin birth and resurrection. It was all told before and the Bible is not the original source of any of it.
Regardless of that, it could still be argued that the Bible contains wisdom whether it is original or not. And I can accept this. I am not saying the Bible is without "spiritual" merit on a personal or even community level. What I am saying is that that merit has not translated into a better world, whereas the works of the Enlightenment most clearly have produced a world with less overall human suffering through reasoned breakthroughs in medicine, education, ethics, and food production and distribution.
But let's get to a point-by-point review of Prager's perspective in the article.
1) "The biblical view is that people are not basically good. Evil therefore comes from within human nature. For the Left, human nature is not the source of evil. Capitalism, patriarchy, poverty, religion, nationalism, or some other external cause is the source of evil."
I am beyond good and evil. I possess no concept of "guilt" or "sin." Human beings are not inherently one way or another. If institutions are evil then the Church itself is no less evil with its swindling of people's money, its instigation of war, and its battle with contemporary ethics. I see all truth as a competition of value judgments. "Good" and "evil" are outmoded concepts, but they will be around as long as the Bible regressively preserves them. Institutions are a reflection of those who build them. But then, due to the nature of function, most institutions take on a life of their own almost completely beyond human control.
Moreover, long before the Enlightenment, the Bible had its chance to do as much collective good in the world as any force in history. But the burden of history behooves us to admit that the Bible caused as much misery as betterment during its time of monopoly, prior to the rise of the Enlightenment's secular humanism. If we take away the concept of good and evil then both the preservers and the innovators are just expressions of humanity as whole dynamically finding its way. Nothing more.
2) "The biblical view is that nature was created for man. The left-wing view is that man is just another part of nature."
I touched on this recently. In brief, humans are products of evolution and, therefore, a part of nature. The only thing special about us is that we have developed the ability to reason beyond belief. And that has led to better things in the world. The Biblical thinking that man has "dominion" over nature is demonstrably crazy. We have practically destroyed the earth mostly through our belief in our own dominion. We are now correcting that mass behavioral flaw through reasoned action, not belief.
3) "The biblical view is that man is created in the image of God and, therefore, formed with a transcendent, immaterial soul. The left-wing view — indeed, the view of all secular ideologies — is that man is purely material, another assemblage of stellar dust."
Yeah, well there is no evidence of a soul. We believe there is a soul but that belief has not historically led to a better world. The fact that the Earth is made of stardust and we ourselves are components of the same process is really not even legitimately questionable. The "image of God" is a belief the meaning of which even Christianity itself can't agree on anyway. If true, then God is a twisted dude - for all manner of "evil" has been perpetuated on others who don't believe as we believe. Wars, persecutions, psychology harm through concepts like "sin" and "guilt" are abundant. In all likelihood what we believe to be our "self" is a multiplicity. The "soul" is a collection of habits and instincts which are in many ways beyond our control regardless of either belief or science.
4) "The biblical view is that the human being has free will. The left-wing view — again, the view of all secular outlooks — is that human beings have no free will. Everything we do is determined by environment, genes, and the matter of which we are composed. Firing neurons, not free will, explain both murders and kindness."
Here's a good sentence explaining why, yet again, the Bible is wrong. It isn't wrong because it is a sacred text of wisdom. It is wrong because the people who wrote it were unenlightened and used folk psychology that is no longer tenable. We now know that there is no such thing as "free will." This is a fundamental blow to Christianity and all religions teaching that there is a sinful soul to be "saved" or some substance to be reincarnated. Again, facts over mere beliefs.
5) "The biblical view is that God made order out of chaos. Order is defined by distinctions. One such example is male and female — the only inherent human distinction that matters to God. There are no racial or ethnic distinctions in God’s order; there is only the human sex distinction. The Left loathes this concept of a divine order. That is the primary driver of its current attempt to obliterate the male-female distinction."
Let's lump this with this...
6) "The biblical view is that the nuclear family is the basic unit of society — a married father and mother and their children. This is the biblical ideal. All good people of faith recognize that the reality of this world is such that many people do not or cannot live that ideal. And such people often merit our support. But that does not change the fact that the nuclear family is the one best suited to create thriving individuals and a healthy society, and we who take the Bible seriously must continue to advocate the ideal family structure as the Bible defines it. And for that, perhaps more than anything, we are mocked."
Okay. Historically the Bible does not reflect order. It reflects chaos. Look at all the wrath and war and dissension and even mockery as told in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. It is full of violence and famine and misery. Once again, all this misery did not get better because of the Bible. It improved because of the Enlightenment. The Bible had 2,000 years to make a better world and it failed completely. The world has only become better from a global perspective with the application of the Enlightenment. It is the elimination of wars between nations and the reduction of mass disease and starvation that has brought order to the world. The world is today more peaceful than it has ever been before in human history. The historical fact is that human beings created order out of chaos - not God. That process obviously continues today, there is still much work to be done. But clearly there is a more ordered world today than there was when Jesus was crucified.
Part of the Biblical order is the order of the husband being the head of the household, the wife being subservient to him, and the children to both parents. This is a regressive perspective, reflective of pre-Enlightenment thinking. Mr. Prager tries to make his point more palatable by couching it in the concept of the "nuclear family." But this is a family where patriarchy is clearly the rule. This is more specifically what the Bible teaches. It is clearly antiquated. Moreover, ample evidence factually proves that, say, homosexual parents are as capable of raising their children as the traditional definition of the nuclear family. Facts show that it isn't the father and mother who rear their children well so much as two responsible parents regardless of their gender. Again, belief is regressive here, facts innovatively show that kids are perfectly fine raised in any loving home between two loving people. God isn't necessary in any of this.
7) "The biblical view holds that wisdom begins with acknowledging God. The secular view is that God is unnecessary for wisdom, and the left-wing view is that God is destructive to wisdom. But if you want to know which view is more accurate, look at the most godless and Bible-less institution in our society: the universities. They are, without competition, the most foolish institutions in our society."
Bullshit. "Wisdom" is not the product of the Bible, although, once again, wisdom can be found there. There were wise humans before the Bible was written. There are wise people across all cultures and religions and even without religion. Wisdom does not begin with belief. Wisdom begins with learning from your mistakes. Beliefs are often mistaken and unwise. Look at the state of the Christian Church today - so many followers fractured into a multitude of disagreeing factions, all proclaiming the "truth of God Almighty" when, in fact, they disagree on how to interpret the Bible.
As for the "godless" academic institutions, these are the source of our Enlightenment. They produce the science and the medicine that heals and feeds and lessens the misery of humanity as a whole. They produce the ethics by which human beings have more individual liberty than ever before. Contrary to Mr. Prager's best intentions, if you want to know which "view" is more "accurate" look at all the "thought and prayers" that inevitably follow each of America's ever-increasing instances of gunfire mass murder. The most "foolish institutions" in America are the Bible-thumping NRA and KKK; the so-called "God, Guns and Gold" crowd.
Human beings are not inherently evil. What they are is inherently ignorant. But the Enlightenment is changing this far more than any wisdom of the Bible did over the course two millennia. A coherent discussion of historical facts over mere beliefs might be taken by Mr. Prager as "mocking" but if that is the case then so be it. I do not "mock" the Bible. I disagree with it. Mocking is actually what Mr. Prager does with his insistence that human reason has had a lesser impact on the betterment of the world than the Bible. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The distinction between preservation and innovation is a topic I think deserves more attention in the future. It can go a long way toward better framing the polarity in American politics today. But, for this post, I want to focus simply on an example of how regressive thinking works. A case in point is the recent article "Why the Left Mocks the Bible" written by Dennis Prager, a prominent Christian thinker and apologist. Fundamentally, the article states: "The Bible tells of a greater source of truth than human reasoning. The Left can't handle that."
While it is true that the Left is inherently more skeptical about religion than the Right, the claim that the Bible is the "greater source of truth than human reasoning" is, of course, absurd. For one thing, it discounts the majority of religious people on the planet who have never read the Bible and, indeed, hold other texts such as the Koran or the Bhagavad-gita to be (for them) more valid forms of truth than the Bible. For another, Prager's simplistic diatribe is not so much an advocacy of Biblical teaching as it an attack on human reason and the Age of Enlightenment itself.
The innovators of the Left are not a collection of mindless, chaotic, ill-conceived freaks. These people (I am more libertarian yet I count myself more Left than Right) would hold the Enlightenment as, at worst, a compliment to Christian thought and, at best, as more applicable to the world today than Biblical thought.
Let me start by addressing the statement quoted above. I'm not interested in convincing any practicing Bible-thumper that human reason is a greater form of the truth than the alleged "word of God." That is pretty much impossible. But, Mr. Prager will readily acknowledge that he frames the Bible as something that surpasses any truth or accomplishment that can be achieved via human reason.
As Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari have pointed out, it is human reason and the Enlightenment that has constructed the modern world. Prager sees this world as inherently godless and immoral. Well, it might be the former but it clearly and factually is not the latter. The historical truth is that human reason has eliminated the world's most deadly diseases. It has eliminated war between nations, reducing it instead to a few civil wars and terrorist actions. Though malnutrition still persists, mass famines that killed millions of people as recently as 50 years ago are gone. Despite misinformation most of humanity has more knowledge available to them than ever before, enabling dynamic decision-making processes on a myriad of challenges across the globe. This is not the hallmark of immorality.
Overall, the world is better today than it was in 1959, the year I was born. No generation in human history could make that claim before the end of World War Two. All of this has occurred in a remarkably short span of time. Given that the Bible has influenced human civilization for more than 2,000 years and has been the inspiration for all sorts of acts of love and compassion, it is an undeniable historical fact that none of this truly epic improvement in the human condition has happened from a strictly Biblical approach to the world. None of it. Every single instance of massive human improvement has its roots in the Enlightenment, not the Bible. If the Bible were going to make the world a better place it had ample opportunity to do so ever since Constantine accepted Jesus as his personal savior.
(Of course, Christian discourse has no interest in making the world as a whole a better place. Rather, it is centered around gathering as many individuals under the banner of Christianity as possible. The world is full of sin and is, therefore, to be damned. Christian thought only applies to individual "souls." So part of the disconnect between the Bible and the Left can be found in the fact that the Left is inclusive and the Bible is clearly exclusive. But I digress.)
While the Bible obviously has tangible individual human benefit (it can sooth certain persons in times of distress, uncertainty, and death), it has failed miserably in improving the human condition as whole. Why is this? For precisely the same reason Prager attacks human reason, which I will get to in turn. For now, it is a historical fact that the betterment of humanity over the last five decades has not been driven by the Bible at all. Though there is certainly a religious component to the Enlightenment, it is science, not religion, that has most pervasively improved the world.
On the contrary, religion, specifically Christianity but other religions as well, has led to countless wars, disruption of food and medical supplies to "heathens", and the burning, hanging and torture of many human beings. Look at the violence in the Middle East and in Africa for examples of wars and misery directly caused by the "greater truth" of the Bible. Look to Myanmar as an example of how the usually peaceful religion of Buddhism is also contributing to mass human misery. Throughout recorded history and into today, religion has inspired as much misery as it has comfort. This isn't even something that we can be skeptical about. It is fact.
I know facts don't matter where the Bible is concerned. This source of "greater truth" is, in fact, not even original for the most part. The story of the flood, for example, was a common myth throughout multiple cultures at the time it was written. The Bible simply appropriated the story from other cultures and put its own spin on it, calling that new spin "truth." In fact, the truth is there might have been some sort of flood but it had little to do with how the Bible tells it. It is a borrowed story. It is the same with the creation myth as told in Genesis; same with the story of Jesus' virgin birth and resurrection. It was all told before and the Bible is not the original source of any of it.
Regardless of that, it could still be argued that the Bible contains wisdom whether it is original or not. And I can accept this. I am not saying the Bible is without "spiritual" merit on a personal or even community level. What I am saying is that that merit has not translated into a better world, whereas the works of the Enlightenment most clearly have produced a world with less overall human suffering through reasoned breakthroughs in medicine, education, ethics, and food production and distribution.
But let's get to a point-by-point review of Prager's perspective in the article.
1) "The biblical view is that people are not basically good. Evil therefore comes from within human nature. For the Left, human nature is not the source of evil. Capitalism, patriarchy, poverty, religion, nationalism, or some other external cause is the source of evil."
I am beyond good and evil. I possess no concept of "guilt" or "sin." Human beings are not inherently one way or another. If institutions are evil then the Church itself is no less evil with its swindling of people's money, its instigation of war, and its battle with contemporary ethics. I see all truth as a competition of value judgments. "Good" and "evil" are outmoded concepts, but they will be around as long as the Bible regressively preserves them. Institutions are a reflection of those who build them. But then, due to the nature of function, most institutions take on a life of their own almost completely beyond human control.
Moreover, long before the Enlightenment, the Bible had its chance to do as much collective good in the world as any force in history. But the burden of history behooves us to admit that the Bible caused as much misery as betterment during its time of monopoly, prior to the rise of the Enlightenment's secular humanism. If we take away the concept of good and evil then both the preservers and the innovators are just expressions of humanity as whole dynamically finding its way. Nothing more.
2) "The biblical view is that nature was created for man. The left-wing view is that man is just another part of nature."
I touched on this recently. In brief, humans are products of evolution and, therefore, a part of nature. The only thing special about us is that we have developed the ability to reason beyond belief. And that has led to better things in the world. The Biblical thinking that man has "dominion" over nature is demonstrably crazy. We have practically destroyed the earth mostly through our belief in our own dominion. We are now correcting that mass behavioral flaw through reasoned action, not belief.
3) "The biblical view is that man is created in the image of God and, therefore, formed with a transcendent, immaterial soul. The left-wing view — indeed, the view of all secular ideologies — is that man is purely material, another assemblage of stellar dust."
Yeah, well there is no evidence of a soul. We believe there is a soul but that belief has not historically led to a better world. The fact that the Earth is made of stardust and we ourselves are components of the same process is really not even legitimately questionable. The "image of God" is a belief the meaning of which even Christianity itself can't agree on anyway. If true, then God is a twisted dude - for all manner of "evil" has been perpetuated on others who don't believe as we believe. Wars, persecutions, psychology harm through concepts like "sin" and "guilt" are abundant. In all likelihood what we believe to be our "self" is a multiplicity. The "soul" is a collection of habits and instincts which are in many ways beyond our control regardless of either belief or science.
4) "The biblical view is that the human being has free will. The left-wing view — again, the view of all secular outlooks — is that human beings have no free will. Everything we do is determined by environment, genes, and the matter of which we are composed. Firing neurons, not free will, explain both murders and kindness."
Here's a good sentence explaining why, yet again, the Bible is wrong. It isn't wrong because it is a sacred text of wisdom. It is wrong because the people who wrote it were unenlightened and used folk psychology that is no longer tenable. We now know that there is no such thing as "free will." This is a fundamental blow to Christianity and all religions teaching that there is a sinful soul to be "saved" or some substance to be reincarnated. Again, facts over mere beliefs.
5) "The biblical view is that God made order out of chaos. Order is defined by distinctions. One such example is male and female — the only inherent human distinction that matters to God. There are no racial or ethnic distinctions in God’s order; there is only the human sex distinction. The Left loathes this concept of a divine order. That is the primary driver of its current attempt to obliterate the male-female distinction."
Let's lump this with this...
6) "The biblical view is that the nuclear family is the basic unit of society — a married father and mother and their children. This is the biblical ideal. All good people of faith recognize that the reality of this world is such that many people do not or cannot live that ideal. And such people often merit our support. But that does not change the fact that the nuclear family is the one best suited to create thriving individuals and a healthy society, and we who take the Bible seriously must continue to advocate the ideal family structure as the Bible defines it. And for that, perhaps more than anything, we are mocked."
Okay. Historically the Bible does not reflect order. It reflects chaos. Look at all the wrath and war and dissension and even mockery as told in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. It is full of violence and famine and misery. Once again, all this misery did not get better because of the Bible. It improved because of the Enlightenment. The Bible had 2,000 years to make a better world and it failed completely. The world has only become better from a global perspective with the application of the Enlightenment. It is the elimination of wars between nations and the reduction of mass disease and starvation that has brought order to the world. The world is today more peaceful than it has ever been before in human history. The historical fact is that human beings created order out of chaos - not God. That process obviously continues today, there is still much work to be done. But clearly there is a more ordered world today than there was when Jesus was crucified.
Part of the Biblical order is the order of the husband being the head of the household, the wife being subservient to him, and the children to both parents. This is a regressive perspective, reflective of pre-Enlightenment thinking. Mr. Prager tries to make his point more palatable by couching it in the concept of the "nuclear family." But this is a family where patriarchy is clearly the rule. This is more specifically what the Bible teaches. It is clearly antiquated. Moreover, ample evidence factually proves that, say, homosexual parents are as capable of raising their children as the traditional definition of the nuclear family. Facts show that it isn't the father and mother who rear their children well so much as two responsible parents regardless of their gender. Again, belief is regressive here, facts innovatively show that kids are perfectly fine raised in any loving home between two loving people. God isn't necessary in any of this.
7) "The biblical view holds that wisdom begins with acknowledging God. The secular view is that God is unnecessary for wisdom, and the left-wing view is that God is destructive to wisdom. But if you want to know which view is more accurate, look at the most godless and Bible-less institution in our society: the universities. They are, without competition, the most foolish institutions in our society."
Bullshit. "Wisdom" is not the product of the Bible, although, once again, wisdom can be found there. There were wise humans before the Bible was written. There are wise people across all cultures and religions and even without religion. Wisdom does not begin with belief. Wisdom begins with learning from your mistakes. Beliefs are often mistaken and unwise. Look at the state of the Christian Church today - so many followers fractured into a multitude of disagreeing factions, all proclaiming the "truth of God Almighty" when, in fact, they disagree on how to interpret the Bible.
As for the "godless" academic institutions, these are the source of our Enlightenment. They produce the science and the medicine that heals and feeds and lessens the misery of humanity as a whole. They produce the ethics by which human beings have more individual liberty than ever before. Contrary to Mr. Prager's best intentions, if you want to know which "view" is more "accurate" look at all the "thought and prayers" that inevitably follow each of America's ever-increasing instances of gunfire mass murder. The most "foolish institutions" in America are the Bible-thumping NRA and KKK; the so-called "God, Guns and Gold" crowd.
Human beings are not inherently evil. What they are is inherently ignorant. But the Enlightenment is changing this far more than any wisdom of the Bible did over the course two millennia. A coherent discussion of historical facts over mere beliefs might be taken by Mr. Prager as "mocking" but if that is the case then so be it. I do not "mock" the Bible. I disagree with it. Mocking is actually what Mr. Prager does with his insistence that human reason has had a lesser impact on the betterment of the world than the Bible. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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