Abasing atheists and crazy Christians

In a recent blog post right here in Food for the Soul a fellow blogger described a radio segment where a caller dared to explain the diversity of languages in terms of the confounding of tongues at the Tower of Babel. This received short-shrift from the host who then lapsed into snickers, mockery, and contempt. This response strikes the blogger as most unfortunate since it was inconsistent with the rules of decorum set up by the hosts, and also because appealing to the Tower of Babel was clearly the right answer. The blogger concludes: "We shouldn't expect the world to believe what God says. We should expect the snickering, the mockery and the contempt."

Interestingly, this post was then answered in a scathing fashion by a number of skeptics and atheists, many of which have the same names that fill my posts. And, perhaps predictably, their comments consisted of more snickers, mockery and contempt, albeit directed now at the blogger rather than the radio caller.

The whole exchange -- if it can be called that -- strikes me as unfortunate.

On the one hand we have a blog post which accepts the Tower of Babel Story as fact, even though this story strikes many people as myth. Nor is there any recognition that it also strikes many Christians as myth, let alone that a historical narratival hermeneutic of this text has absolutely nothing to do with the ecumenical creeds or even with evangelicalism by any conventional definition. So that's unfortunate.

In addition, the blogger sets herself up for ridicule by stating that those who find this position absurd are simply manifesting unbelief. Of course people will ridicule that. If a Native American chief insisted that the world was literally birthed by an eagle laying an egg, and that any dissent from this opinion was mere rebellion, well many people would ridicule that too.

But the fault lies not only with the blogger. The atheists and skeptics did not even attempt to explain how, from their view, this appeared to be exceedingly implausible. They didn't attempt to articulate hermeneutical inconsistencies or an unchallenged confirmation bias. They simply ridiculed. What's the point of that? To demonstrate how clever we are? Why not restrain oneself from yet more cheap jabs and actually get down in the trenches to engage in serious intellectual exchange?

In addition to the standard plea for intellectual civility, there just might be another lesson to be drawn here. I believe that the whole abortive conversation illustrates the essential place of plausibility frameworks in our reasoning.

From with a conservative Christian tradition, the Tower of Babel Story appears obviously true as a straightforward, historical narrative. From without that tradition it appears as absurd as an eagle laying an egg that created the world.

Likewise the naturalistic worldview that is the home of many self-described atheists and skeptics has its implausibilities. And this is helpfully identified in Richard Lewontin's oft-cited review of Carl Sagan's naive pro-scientism book The Demon-Haunted World. As Lewontin, himself an unabashed naturalist, put it:

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

Now I admire that kind of piercing intellectual self-instrospection. But it leaves us with this conclusion: from the conservative Christian view, naturalism appears absurd. From the naturalistic view conservative Christianity appears absurd.

Okay, we agree on that. Now let's set aside the mocking jabs and get down to some serious intellectual exchanges.