I’ve been asked to put this in terms a bright juvenile can follow. Apparently there is at least one who sees some of my blog posts. I’ve done a lot of teaching to that age group (teaching in both public and private high schools), so I am comfortable writing up a review on their level.
Typical philosophical or theological debates presume a certain common ground, a set of rules, precedents, and so forth. The most common form of such debate takes place in courtrooms. To some degree, the stuff dramatized on TV and in movies is more entertaining than the real thing, but tends to reflect all the kinds of arguments people make and how they win or lose. In most debates here this blog, the judge is whomever pays attention, and their decision affects only themselves and their actions.
So the objective is to prove and persuade, to sway opinion in one way or another. On a blog like this one, you don’t have all of the gesturing and tone of voice, and whatever human charisma there might be is very hard to discern. One reader sees a set of arguments as abusive and angry, while another reader sees careful reasoning. Only a fool pretends that charisma has no bearing on the results. That’s what charisma means in our society, and people are frequently moved more by style than by substance. We see the same thing in politics.
So it’s not just a matter of convincing people your side is correct or better, but you have to convince them to listen in the first place. Do they even care about the issue? Then, you have to encourage them to keep listening. If the issue is connected to religious belief in any way, you also have the added factor of morality. Not just whether something is reasonable and consistent, but you have a question of righteousness and holiness. One man’s good idea becomes another man’s blasphemy. It gets really nasty, really fast, when you put up religious ideas for debate. It’s just too important to treat as a common intellectual query.
All of this assumes a common ground of legal proof. That is, we have a whole raft of assumptions about what constitutes proof and what sort of things are allowed to enter the debate. Too often the people involved may have radically different ideas about what constitutes proof and valid evidence. Some debates quickly become absurd political demonstrations simply because there is an awful lot of unspoken assumptions, things which haven’t been agreed upon by both sides. Even if they start off using the same words and phrases, it’s not too hard to realize the underlying meaning is quite different. So religious debate is often nothing more than politics in disguise.
Sometimes people will try to engage me in debate here and present some kind of argument. Most of the time, such debate starts with a large body of assumptions and I do my best to point out that we need to discuss those assumptions first. Too often, that is rejected by the other person. Maybe they aren’t used to dealing with people who think differently. The motives vary with the people, so I can’t characterize them all, not even with a simple list. Indeed, there are a lot of people who aren’t entirely conscious of their own motives, which can make things very confused.
When we discuss things like Creation and the doctrine of The Fall, we have yet another complication in our discussion: Such things took place before our current human existence. And if you want to argue about God and His choices, you really are outside the realm of things we can debate as if in a courtroom. Law courts in particular are using what we call “historical proof” — we are trying to prove this or that happened. You cannot use the logic of historical proof when discussing Creation and anything in the first few chapters of Genesis because those events are before human awareness existed, at least awareness as we think of it. And once we have humans in the story, almost everything else in the Bible tells us it was a different situation than we have now, radically different. There is no sensible way to use historical proof for things that took place in Eden.
It is reasonable to argue about what the Bible has to say about such things, but you most certainly cannot pin God down as you would a historical character. You cannot apply courtroom logic and arguments to Him and His actions. You cannot define God; that is, you cannot use human language to precisely limit His character. We can characterize Him in various ways, but it’s always a contextual figure of speech. This isn’t suitable for building legal arguments.
The question of whether or not the doctrine of The Fall is valid is a very old argument. The Bible itself doesn’t use that term in that way. Instead, it refers to being kicked out of Eden, of having a sinful nature from birth, of having a dire need of redemption from sin. The Apostle Paul wrote a good bit about how human death became a fact of our existence because of sin in the Garden of Eden, because the Eden story in Genesis talks about the Tree of Life and how we lost access to it.
I take the position that the language of the story of Eden is mostly symbolic. That’s not to say things didn’t happen precisely as described, but it’s unlikely. That’s because such precision was never the intent of Moses when he wrote it down. Such a concept would never have occurred to Moses because nobody else in his day and time thought like that. Nobody. Of course, proving that takes an awful lot of study and combing through huge collections of ancient literature and artifacts and all the stuff people wrote about those things. You and I are hardly expert enough to study those things on our own; it requires many years of study just to get started. And while it’s possible all the people who are experts might be wrong about some of it, or even most of it, we don’t have anything else to work with. Their work is something we can debate legally, though. Most of what is written about it is in form of debate over what it means.
Since this is a matter of our religious belief in the first place, you get to the point where legal proof simply isn’t all that important. Your life isn’t going to last forever, and if the call of God is on your soul, there are priorities that may not include years of study about some issues. You go as far as you can in that direction, but in the final analysis, you simply have to have a sense of where you believe God wants you to go with it. Without that, none of it really means very much in the first place. I tend to avoid debate in the first place, because it’s not a matter of proving my case, but a matter of letting God take care of that. You are the judge and it doesn’t require someone arguing with me for something I say to be useful.
