Linguistics

I heard an interesting paper today read by Dr. Doug Moo, a leader in the field of biblical translation and New Testament studies. I heard a term I'd never heard before- "computational linguistics."

It means the process of using search engines to see what sorts of words and phrases are in common usage, what they mean, and how those meanings have evolved over time. Search Google for a word's meaning to see an example- it'll have a chart showing the word's usage over the last two hundred years.

I was also gratified personally to hear such a distinguished scholar express a view that I've held privately for a while now- namely, that linguistics is a descriptive enterprise, rather than a prescriptive one.

My education came, primarily, at the hands of prescriptivists, who, I think, suspect any decoupling of words and meaning as leading to the postmodern morass of subjectivity that any sane person rightly fears. However, language is an ever-changing thing because it's practiced by living, breathing people, and "proper English" is always elusive. Whose English is proper?

My dad ran an inner city ministry, and as a result I grew up hearing and occasionally speaking what I've come to know as African American Vernacular English. While recognizing that it's grammar and syntax differed from the English I learned in school, sometimes significantly, I could also recognize, even as a kid, that it's grammar and syntax were internally consistent. And that seemed to me to dispel the notion that it was "bad English." Rather, it was English that played by different rules- but rules there were.

Then as I got older and studied German in college, I began to realize that the German spoken in my house by my parents was decidedly Hessian in accent and pronunciation. German speakers can place me around Frankfurt am Main pretty quickly, the way someone could identify a Texan or Jersey Shore resident here.

These two experiences have led me to take a descriptivist view of language.

Now, This sort of thing can sound downright Continental, and therefore heretical, in some precincts. After all, the last generation of intellectuals witnessed firsthand the depredations by the krauts of Scripture (Boltmann, et al) and of art and morality by the frogs (Derrida, Foucault, etc). But I hope to dispel that notion by saying that objective meaning obviously exists. It is, in my view, a priori, or as Dr. Plantinga would say, "properly basic." And that objective reality can be known and communicated.

It's my belief that our amazing ability to take the language that we receive, both formally through school and informally by swimming through this melting pot of ours, and add to it shades and layers of meaning heretofore unknown, is a reflection of the Imago Dei within us.

After all, what determines the brilliance of a diamond is its ability to reflect light. What reflects the light of our Creator better than weaving a tapestry of words that we'll continue to enjoy and offer up for all eternity?

God's Word is so comprehensive and beautiful that He exists as a person within the Holy Trinity. As bearers of the divine image, our language also possesses the quality of dynamic personhood.

As we create and discard words and phrases through the process of interacting with people and the world, we would do well to remember the words of the apostle-

"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

And of the psalmist-

"May the words of my mouth,
And the meditations of my heart,
Be acceptable in your sight, O Lord,
My strength and my redeemer."

Reflections on Philosophy

Philosophers, like most college students, spend a lot of time contemplating busts, but unlike most college students, the busts they contemplate are marble, and resemble old men.

A philosopher is someone whose brain stays in all-time 4-wheel drive. They make a lot of noise on the highway, but they can pull you out if you’re stuck in the mud.

-You’re probably a philosopher if you can’t stop thinking about why you think stuff. Your core assumptions about the world and how it works are constantly under scrutiny, none more withering than your own, and you live with the deep-seated arrogance of only believing things that really make sense and also the constant paranoia that comes from your intimate knowledge of how fragile anyone’s grasp on reality really is. You’ve seen firsthand a strong foundation crumble, and you’ve seen a supple twig break- so you’re either humble before the abyss of ignorance over which every human being is suspended and the vast gulf between us and truth, or you’re whistling in the graveyard, tooting your own horn to stave off the silence- or worse, the music- of a mysterious universe. It’s probably a little of both.

J.D. Salinger wrote that “The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.” He might have been talking about philosophers, as well.

Philosophy is like a hydroelectric dam. Ideas flow in, and are transformed by complex and powerful machinery into usable energy. When the river runs dry, the generators fall silent. When it overflows, they do the best they can to contain and process the flow, worrying all the while that the dam will break.

Philosophers are like 911 operators or ER nurses coming off a long and difficult shift. After having been confronted face to face with the fragility, agony and ecstasy of the human experience, they stumble into a diner to eat a quick meal before they go home to crash, and all around them are people just going about their lives, oblivious to the life-and-death struggles going on all around them. They want to grab the people by the shoulders and shake them. “Don’t you see? Aren’t you afraid that there might not be any meaning to our lives? Don’t you realize that we might not be free at all? Haven’t you been thinking?”

Sharing ideas is a way to exercise courage. The risk you take is that your ideas will be rejected, either because they don’t make sense, challenge people’s assumptions and make them uncomfortable, or both.

Why Theology Matters

J.S. Mill wrote at the end of the 19th century that, since religious claims cannot be empirically verified, the best public policy option is one of agnosticism and pluralism in public, with piety and conviction being relegated to private life. This has become the prevailing notion in contemporary America.

Alongside Mill's idea has arisen the postmodern idea that truth is relative, and that truth claims are power plays meant to subjugate people. Throughout history, people who claim to know the truth tend to follow Al Capone's famous maxim: "you can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word." Theology, then, on a postmodern account, is just a power play, designed to give an elite class privileged status, or else merely an exposition of one's subjective ideas.

Standing over against this view is the orthodox Christian belief that Truth exists, is knowable, and is communicable. If Truth exists, and if God exists, then Theology is a category of non-fiction; that is, it describes, and attempts to describe accurately, something that actually exists. 

Suppose you were writing a travel guide to a fantasy world. If the world was a product of your own imagination, then by definition whatever you said about it would be true. But if you're describing an actual place, like London, then your descriptions of it are either true or false. The statement "Piccadilly square is painted green" either accurately described Piccadilly square or it doesn't. 

But now suppose that there are no boats capable of bearing us across the Atlantic and so nobody we know has ever been to London. Who can tell us what it's like? 

The book of Job, the earliest book of the Bible, records what mankind has been wondering about God ever since the beginning:

"If only I knew where to find him;
if only I could go to his dwelling!"

"If only there were someone to mediate between us,
someone to bring us together..."

But the gospel of John tell us that even though no one can travel to where God is, there is One who came to tell us everything we need to know:

"No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known."

"No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father."

And in 1 John it all comes together:

"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God...this is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins...no one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." (1 John 4:7-16) 

Jesus claims to bring a firsthand account of London. Should we believe his claims? What should we make of them if we do?

That's Theology, the Queen of the Sciences. And if you've ever caught yourself wondering, "What's the point?" then nothing could be more relevant, or more timely. 

Christian Philosophy

In this post and the next few to come I'd like to share a few thoughts on Christian Philosophy. 

Let me begin with this caveat- I was not a stellar student. For one, I came into the Philosophy department having spent the first two years of my college experience as a History major, and so I didn't have as deep or wide a foundation as a student would have who had taken philosophy courses from the word go. For another, I was working full time, and often neglected my studies in favor of my career. Finally, I was an angry young man, and the chip on my shoulder was so large as to sometimes obstruct my view of the page I was reading. Let me also say that, as a mere undergraduate, one ought to read what I'm writing with a grain of salt, at least until I get a few more impressive letters after my name. 

At any rate, I studied Philosophy at UNCG, where I think it's safe to say that there was a majority of professors who were not Christian believers. I didn't get a lot of hostility toward the gospel, aside from the normal antipathy toward the Jerry Falwell/moral majority types that liberal intellectuals love to hate, but I did get a lot of indifference. Where it was discussed in detail, it was recalled as something one struggled with while one was being raised in a Christian home, and which one finally heaved off one's shoulders as he ascended the airy heights of intellectual endeavor. 

Professors being educated in the 1950's, 60's, and 70's have two things going against them in terms of Christian belief, in my opinion: the intellectual climate, and the Christian alternative.

The first is the prevailing intellectual wind at the time, being saturated with the behaviorism of Skinner and Watson on the psychological front and the verificationism (and resulting scientism) of contemporary epistemology and the sciences. 

Behaviorism is the theory that people learn by being conditioned. The most famous instance of this principle comes from Pavlov's experiments on his dogs. Every time he fed them, he would ring a bell. He did this for a length of time and then, one day, rang the bell without feeding them. The dogs had so closely associated the bell with lunch that their mouths began to water without there even being food present. It was taken from this that the brain forms associations between two things, and that what cements that association is pleasure and pain. The result is something called "Conditioning." 

Everyone accepts this, but some people thought that it accounted for EVERYTHING we learn. These people were called Behaviorists. "Give me a child", Skinner famously boasted, "and I'll turn him into a doctor, a lawyer, or whatever you want." One merely had to carefully control the input- after all, garbage in, garbage out.

This view caught on because we had just beaten the Nazi's, who thought that people's value came from their lineage. The intellectuals of the 50's and 60's were still reeling from the horrors of the Holocaust, and the theory that people could be in charge of their own development was a welcome alternative- and so the pendulum swung from nature to nurture (There was a lot of Marxist dialectical materialism in there too, but let's not go there for now).

Verificationism is the belief that it only makes sense to believe something if you can prove it beyond doubt, and the only way to prove something beyond doubt is to prove it by science- that is, using the five senses to do experiments which produce predictable and reproducible results. Since religious claims can't be submitted to scientific testing, people thought that not only were they wrong, but meaningless.

Just as the parable of the sower illustrates, it would be difficult to believe in the gospel surrounded by such thick brambles as these. But now consider the Christian alternative.

During the 60's, 70's, and 80's, evangelical Christianity was largely confined to fundamentalist circles. An anti-intellectual strain has always existed in the Church and has been combated since the early fathers, but as the academy became not only increasingly secularized, which had been happening since the enlightenment and especially since Darwin, but also more and more hostile to theistic belief, the American community of believers became increasingly reactionary, aiming to produce "Christian versions" of the sciences and largely withdrawing from the Philosophical community. Intellectual rigor is often lacking in these separate versions, and many fail to pass what good old Dr. Terrence McConnell called "the straight face test."

The mid-20th century intellectual, therefore, looked at a Christianity which emphatically insisted that to be a good Christian meant puppy-like devotion to things like six literal, twenty-four hour days and a young Earth, and found it profoundly intellectually dissatisfying. 

Consider this exchange between Christian philosopher Dr. William Lane Craig and a questioner. It's a bit long, so bear with me:

The question:

"I really can't see how God would punish me, if I lead a good, honest, a compassionate life but just feel that [naturalism] is the only position that makes sense of the world around me and what I understand about it. This does not seem to me to be worthy of condemnation when I compare my attitude to standards of evidence and investigation to those of some Christians, especially those who hold extremely unreasonably dogmatic positions. If I accept the findings of science, will God punish me but reward those people who reject all scientific evidence and adhere only to scientifically insupportable positions, such as a literal interpretation of Genesis whereby the entire universe was created between 6 and 10 thousand years ago?

I would add to this by saying that many of the advocates of this position, so called Young Earth Creationists, disseminate outright falsehoods and misinformation and everything from astronomy, to geology and biology, any field of science which disagrees with their reading of what they regard as divinely inspired scripture."

To which Dr. Craig responds:

"...at the heart of the Christian doctrine of salvation is God's unmerited grace.

This teaching is obscured today by a sort of cultural Christianity which has shaped American culture. Cultural Christianity teaches that if your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds, then God will forgive your bad deeds and reward you with eternal life in heaven. (How Jesus Christ fits into this picture is unclear—maybe as a living illustration to us of what God is like.) By contrast biblical Christianity teaches that no one is good enough to merit heaven. To be judged on the basis of our deeds would be the worst possible thing that could happen to us, for none of us measures up to God's moral law (perfection)...

So forget about the Young Earth Creationists! Why let them stand between you and God? Why not receive God's transforming grace yourself and then be better than the Young Earthers? You know that I don't hold their views about the age of the universe. Neither do most evangelical Christians, despite the high profile of their movement in churches. So why not become a Christian and then be a better thinker than they are? (In fact, you just might find that God will do a transforming work in your own heart, replacing what seems to be hatred and resentment toward these folks with a genuine compassion for them.)"

So much for the prevalence of atheistic philosophy on contemporary college campuses. I'll follow up soon with some thoughts on my own experience of Christian Philosophy, and how it didn't come together for me until I read the existentialists. 






For the masochists among you who actually want to read further about the subjects I've mentioned, find here some useful links:


The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on the subjects:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/


The exchange between Dr. Craig and the skeptic in its entirety:

Will God's Judgement be more Tolerable for Atheists than for Young Earth Creationists?