Dumb Arguments Professors Make Against Christianity: Or the Ways of Knowing Class
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I know what you’re thinking: This is too big a topic for a single web page. And you’d be right about that; this topic is like Pi. There is literally no end to the stupid things professors will say against Christianity. As Chesterton said, “any stick seems good enough to beat Christianity with.”
What I want to do here is a little less ambitious than countering every dumb and uninformed argument that my fellow professors make about what I believe. I have two small goals: (1) I want to generally talk about the dangerous larger conclusion that I think some students form as a result of all these professorial epistemological shenanigans, and (2) I want to funnel you, my beloved reader, to a series of articles that I have written and/or will write on this topic. I’ll take the second goal first because it is easier.
If you want a direct link to articles I have written on this topic, click here.
Now, let’s talk about that first goal. When professors play fast and loose with the truth, Christians can of course counter each specific error with a better argument. If that only happened once or twice, the dangers would be minimal. However, when it happens a hundred times, there is a different problem. And I think that’s what’s happening to a lot of university students, at least here at the University of Montana. (Go Griz!)
And that leads us to…the Ways of Knowing class. The danger of this class doesn’t seem to me so much that the specific arguments are threatening to the Christian faith. They aren’t. At least, they aren’t to any thinking person. The real danger is much more subtle. It is that, after hearing multiple points of view all giving bad reasons to doubt Christianity, you may not necessarily believe the bad arguments…but you also won’t believe Christianity, either. In other words, the real danger is that you’ll just stop believing everyone entirely.
I’d like to point out that this is partially reasonable. I do it myself on domains I don’t know anything about, and even sometimes on ones I know a lot about. I’m very skeptical of essentially everyone. So when Fox News tells me that Obama stinks for reason X, I am inclined not to believe reason X. And when CNN tells me that Obama rocks for reason Y, I am inclined not to believe reason Y.
But this sort of reasonable skepticism can also turn very dangerous, if it becomes a complete and lazy prejudice. After all, not all of life is as hazy as listening to cable news opinion-mongers. Some things are true, or at least some things are truer than others. If Fox News told me that Obama was no longer president, and CNN told me he was still president, would it be wise for me to apply my complete skepticism in that case and say "well, shoot, I guess we'll never know if he is really still the president or not? After all, I can't trust anyone." Of course not. That would not be reasonable skepticism, but simply intellectual laziness.
Consider, too, the obvious fact that some sources, writ large, are more reliable than others. My wife is a reliable source -- she is smart, observant, and honest. When she says something, it is true almost all of the time, because she doesn't speak unless she is sure something is true. But the National Enquirer is not a trustworthy source. If you read the headline "Scientists find cure for cancer" in the paper, you would not be outside the bounds of reason to trust it more completely if it appeared in the Washington Post than if it appeared in the National Enquirer. (I've written a series of articles -- called "knowing you are on to something real" -- on how to separate out the good information from the bad. You can access them here.)
So there are reasons to be ironically skeptical of too much skepticism -- some things are clearly truer than others, and some sources are clearly more likely to tell the truth than others. And what I'd like to get you to think about a little is the following: If you merely believed your professor’s arguments in the Ways of Knowing class, life would be easier. Because then I could show you the flaws in those specific arguments. But if you disbelieve those arguments while becoming totally skeptical of everyone...well, how does one fight a general sense that no one on earth, Christian or un-Christian, knows what the %#$# they are talking about?
Here I merely want to point out a great danger – not so much to your mind, but to your soul – in this way of thinking about religion. And what I ultimately want to create in you is the courage to think. It is your anti-Christian professors who often want you to swallow whole the strange distortions of the faith that they present. What I want is the opposite: I want you to think, and think hard, about the truth.
Now, imagine a parable. Let’s assume that 2+2=4. And imagine that in every single class you went to, you had a professor offer a different challenge to 2+2=4. Some professors said 2+2=5, some 2+2=9, some 2+2=1. But some professors took a totally different angle: They said things like “2+2=4 isn’t even a meaningful statement, because one cannot make such assumptions about knowledge” and “while 2+2=4 is a beautiful metaphor of the great unknowable, it would be foolish to assume that abstract principles of mathematics have any relationships to the real world" and "2+2=4 clearly demonstrates the truth of Communism, but not Basic Math."
Now, to those of us who can clearly see the objective truth that 2+2=4 is based on real mathematical principles that correspond directly to rocks and Billy Ray Cyrus albums and Michael Bolton photos, this sort of thing is maddening. Because here's what tends to happen. Do students really believe their professors' specific arguments? No. They don't find the particular professor who argued that "2+2=4 is an invention of the rich to oppress the poor, as Marx predicted" to be especially convincing; they don't necessarily become a Marxist (or a Freudian or a what-have-you). The professors' arguments are rarely convincing enough for that. But they do begin to doubt the validity of Basic Math. Any human would in this parable. I mean, if so many reasons can be generated against it by so many people, how can I trust it? Yet, if we can get behind the parable, we can see that it is actually not rational to start disbelieving in a solid thing like 2+2=4 just because 100 professors generate 100 bad arguments against it.
Well, it may shock you to know how accurate I think this parable is to the Ways of Knowing class. Some of your professors will interpret the Book of Genesis as a Communistic treatise. Some of them will interpret it as a clear example of Freudianism. Some of them will interpret it as illustrating the beauty and truth of Darwinism. Meanwhile, I’m here believing that 2+2=4. While they are simply putting whatever fancy that happens to please them…while they are simply dressing the book up in any garment they think looks nice…I am engaging in the radical and ridiculous idea that a religious book, written by religious people to religious people for a religious purpose, is…fundamentally religious. I am not, you see, dressing it up in any garb at all. I am only trying to understand it for what it obviously is: A religious work about God.
Now you may disbelieve it as a religious work about God. I can respect that, even though I disagree with you about it. But I can’t really respect your belief if it is influenced by the intellectual sloppiness of hearing a hundred meaningless criticisms of Christianity based on clear misinterpretations of it, just because some of your professors (who mostly don’t know what they are talking about in the slightest, as far as I can tell) said so. That isn’t skepticism, which I respect; it is simply laziness. Are you sure you want to risk your soul because you were too lazy to think for yourself?
Of course, coming to accept Christ isn’t as simple as accepting that 2+2=4. God is invisible in a way that mathematics (for all its abstract glory) isn’t. My point here isn’t to get you to accept Christianity, but to get you to stop rejecting it out of intellectual laziness masked under a veneer of “Ways of Knowing-like” skepticism. I am a skeptic, too…that’s one of the reasons I am a Christian.
I know what you’re thinking: This is too big a topic for a single web page. And you’d be right about that; this topic is like Pi. There is literally no end to the stupid things professors will say against Christianity. As Chesterton said, “any stick seems good enough to beat Christianity with.”
What I want to do here is a little less ambitious than countering every dumb and uninformed argument that my fellow professors make about what I believe. I have two small goals: (1) I want to generally talk about the dangerous larger conclusion that I think some students form as a result of all these professorial epistemological shenanigans, and (2) I want to funnel you, my beloved reader, to a series of articles that I have written and/or will write on this topic. I’ll take the second goal first because it is easier.
If you want a direct link to articles I have written on this topic, click here.
Now, let’s talk about that first goal. When professors play fast and loose with the truth, Christians can of course counter each specific error with a better argument. If that only happened once or twice, the dangers would be minimal. However, when it happens a hundred times, there is a different problem. And I think that’s what’s happening to a lot of university students, at least here at the University of Montana. (Go Griz!)
And that leads us to…the Ways of Knowing class. The danger of this class doesn’t seem to me so much that the specific arguments are threatening to the Christian faith. They aren’t. At least, they aren’t to any thinking person. The real danger is much more subtle. It is that, after hearing multiple points of view all giving bad reasons to doubt Christianity, you may not necessarily believe the bad arguments…but you also won’t believe Christianity, either. In other words, the real danger is that you’ll just stop believing everyone entirely.
I’d like to point out that this is partially reasonable. I do it myself on domains I don’t know anything about, and even sometimes on ones I know a lot about. I’m very skeptical of essentially everyone. So when Fox News tells me that Obama stinks for reason X, I am inclined not to believe reason X. And when CNN tells me that Obama rocks for reason Y, I am inclined not to believe reason Y.
But this sort of reasonable skepticism can also turn very dangerous, if it becomes a complete and lazy prejudice. After all, not all of life is as hazy as listening to cable news opinion-mongers. Some things are true, or at least some things are truer than others. If Fox News told me that Obama was no longer president, and CNN told me he was still president, would it be wise for me to apply my complete skepticism in that case and say "well, shoot, I guess we'll never know if he is really still the president or not? After all, I can't trust anyone." Of course not. That would not be reasonable skepticism, but simply intellectual laziness.
Consider, too, the obvious fact that some sources, writ large, are more reliable than others. My wife is a reliable source -- she is smart, observant, and honest. When she says something, it is true almost all of the time, because she doesn't speak unless she is sure something is true. But the National Enquirer is not a trustworthy source. If you read the headline "Scientists find cure for cancer" in the paper, you would not be outside the bounds of reason to trust it more completely if it appeared in the Washington Post than if it appeared in the National Enquirer. (I've written a series of articles -- called "knowing you are on to something real" -- on how to separate out the good information from the bad. You can access them here.)
So there are reasons to be ironically skeptical of too much skepticism -- some things are clearly truer than others, and some sources are clearly more likely to tell the truth than others. And what I'd like to get you to think about a little is the following: If you merely believed your professor’s arguments in the Ways of Knowing class, life would be easier. Because then I could show you the flaws in those specific arguments. But if you disbelieve those arguments while becoming totally skeptical of everyone...well, how does one fight a general sense that no one on earth, Christian or un-Christian, knows what the %#$# they are talking about?
Here I merely want to point out a great danger – not so much to your mind, but to your soul – in this way of thinking about religion. And what I ultimately want to create in you is the courage to think. It is your anti-Christian professors who often want you to swallow whole the strange distortions of the faith that they present. What I want is the opposite: I want you to think, and think hard, about the truth.
Now, imagine a parable. Let’s assume that 2+2=4. And imagine that in every single class you went to, you had a professor offer a different challenge to 2+2=4. Some professors said 2+2=5, some 2+2=9, some 2+2=1. But some professors took a totally different angle: They said things like “2+2=4 isn’t even a meaningful statement, because one cannot make such assumptions about knowledge” and “while 2+2=4 is a beautiful metaphor of the great unknowable, it would be foolish to assume that abstract principles of mathematics have any relationships to the real world" and "2+2=4 clearly demonstrates the truth of Communism, but not Basic Math."
Now, to those of us who can clearly see the objective truth that 2+2=4 is based on real mathematical principles that correspond directly to rocks and Billy Ray Cyrus albums and Michael Bolton photos, this sort of thing is maddening. Because here's what tends to happen. Do students really believe their professors' specific arguments? No. They don't find the particular professor who argued that "2+2=4 is an invention of the rich to oppress the poor, as Marx predicted" to be especially convincing; they don't necessarily become a Marxist (or a Freudian or a what-have-you). The professors' arguments are rarely convincing enough for that. But they do begin to doubt the validity of Basic Math. Any human would in this parable. I mean, if so many reasons can be generated against it by so many people, how can I trust it? Yet, if we can get behind the parable, we can see that it is actually not rational to start disbelieving in a solid thing like 2+2=4 just because 100 professors generate 100 bad arguments against it.
Well, it may shock you to know how accurate I think this parable is to the Ways of Knowing class. Some of your professors will interpret the Book of Genesis as a Communistic treatise. Some of them will interpret it as a clear example of Freudianism. Some of them will interpret it as illustrating the beauty and truth of Darwinism. Meanwhile, I’m here believing that 2+2=4. While they are simply putting whatever fancy that happens to please them…while they are simply dressing the book up in any garment they think looks nice…I am engaging in the radical and ridiculous idea that a religious book, written by religious people to religious people for a religious purpose, is…fundamentally religious. I am not, you see, dressing it up in any garb at all. I am only trying to understand it for what it obviously is: A religious work about God.
Now you may disbelieve it as a religious work about God. I can respect that, even though I disagree with you about it. But I can’t really respect your belief if it is influenced by the intellectual sloppiness of hearing a hundred meaningless criticisms of Christianity based on clear misinterpretations of it, just because some of your professors (who mostly don’t know what they are talking about in the slightest, as far as I can tell) said so. That isn’t skepticism, which I respect; it is simply laziness. Are you sure you want to risk your soul because you were too lazy to think for yourself?
Of course, coming to accept Christ isn’t as simple as accepting that 2+2=4. God is invisible in a way that mathematics (for all its abstract glory) isn’t. My point here isn’t to get you to accept Christianity, but to get you to stop rejecting it out of intellectual laziness masked under a veneer of “Ways of Knowing-like” skepticism. I am a skeptic, too…that’s one of the reasons I am a Christian.