Most New Testament scholars agree nowadays that Mark 16:9ff. is not the original ending of Mark. Either it ended with v.8, or there was an original ending that’s been lost (sometimes thought to be something like Matthew’s ending but with differences similar to how Mark normally is different from Matthew). A certain breed of skeptic often found on History Channel or Discovery Channel Easter specials will sometimes use this to claim that Mark doesn’t actually report the resurrection, with the insinuation that Mark is the earliest gospel and therefore the most reliable reporting of events. Therefore, we might be expected to include, Christians invented the resurrection after Mark’s gospel was fully composed.

Mark Heath nicely presents several reasons why such skeptics have to be ignoring what the Gospel of Mark really says and what else is in the New Testament. According to standard dating of Mark (by scholars across the theological spectrum), Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians church is earlier than Mark, and chapter 15 of that letter is the lengthiest discussion of the resurrection in the entire New Testament. Furthermore, the entire gospel of Mark forecasts the resurrection and leads to its expectation, even explaining elements of it long before it gets to the actual events. But most importantly, the resurrection is the very last event reported in the section of Mark 16 that most scholars consider authentic. The disciples are told that he has been raised and told that they will see him. There aren’t chronicles of what Jesus did after the resurrection, as there are in all three other gospels and in the book of Acts, but the resurrection is very clearly reported right there in the section that no one questions.

I’m less convinced on the fourth reason, so I’m not mentioning that here, but you can see Mark’s post for it and my comment for my response.

[cross-posted at Parableman]

There’s a relatively new movement in the communities of people who deal regularly with autism and related conditions that’s assigned themselves the term “neurodiversity” as a shorthand reference to their commitment to affirming atypical neurological conditions as equally legitimate. This movement shuns the terms ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ and instead prefers to speak of those who are neurotypical and those who are not. The neurodiversity movement seeks to identify various traits common with autism as neither better nor worse but simply different.

This movement should be praised for its recognition that respecting people with autism requires taking into account how differently they take in information, process it, use it, and produce various responses. They rightly emphasize that an atypical neurological state need not be thought of as a disease that needs a medical cure or treatment or a disability that requires taking the person to be deficient. They recommend supporting a person for who they are rather than trying to “fix” them to conform to the standards everyone else has. Some autism advocates on the autistic spectrum insist that they wouldn’t want to be made “normal” if a “cure” were ever found. They like being the way they are.

There’s something obviously right about most of that. The more I read stuff from this movement, however, the more disturbed I get that there’s something they’re just not seeing, and the good in what I just wrote is blinding a lot of well-meaning people to a serious philosophical error lying behind much of what the neurodiversity movement produces. Consider this story by Karen Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times. She is right to point out that, just because autistic people do badly on certain standardized tests, it doesn’t mean they’re cognitively deficient. It may well be that the reason a certain person scores low on a certain test is because the test is relying on typical patterns of language use, and someone with autism may be using a different pattern of language use. The underlying cognitive ability being tested for may be stronger than the test shows. That’s all correct. But in her rush to make this point, Kaplan completely ignores the fact that the reason someone is scoring low on the test is because of a genuine deficiency in the kind of language use that most people are much better able to engage in. That means there is a lack of ability that comes with autism, even if its manifestation will be different from person to person. (more…)

Russell Moore has a nice post about how, although there’s generally a moral mandate upon Christians to adopt, there are plenty of people who ought not to be the ones to fulfill that mandate [ht: Justin Taylor]. In particular, certain kinds of issues tend to come up with adoptions that most people, because of the reasons they’re interested in adopting are not well prepared for and do not have the commitment to see those problems through, which leaves kids twice orphaned in too many cases.

I think this is a nice example of what I’ve elsewhere called a secondary moral obligation, an obligation you incur because you fail at a prior moral obligation. You ought not to have the attitude toward children that you see them as fulfilling your needs, but if you do then it’s immoral to adopt, even if it’s generally a moral mandate to adopt when such immoral attitudes are not present (and they shouldn’t be present) and when there aren’t other extenuating circumstances making it a less good idea to adopt (whatever those might be, and I’m open to their being lots of them).

What Moore does not mention is that the same is true of having children naturally. If you have the attitude that children are to meet your needs, then you shouldn’t have children, even if (and I know not all Christians agree on this) it’s Christian teaching that we ought to seek to have children or at least be very open to it (as many believe it is; whether it is is irrelevant to my point here, but assume it is for the sake of argument). My suspicion is that many new parents who were seeking to have children were doing so for completely selfish reasons. It strikes me as a thoroughly immoral reason to want to have children, and it seems to me that it’s just as immoral to go ahead and have children if your desire is for them to fulfill your needs. That’s so even if there is a moral mandate upon Christians to seek to have children, as many Christians do believe.

What makes this a nice case of a secondary moral obligation is that you have two obligations that conflict, one of which only appears if you violate the other one. It’s wrong to have this selfish kid-possessing attitude, and those who have it ought not to have children. But you ought to seek to have children (on the premise I’ve been assuming, at least for the sake of argument). There’s no inconsistency in such a position, despite the initial surface-level appearance of two contrary obligations. You do have an obligation to seek to have children (at least certain people do, anyway, on this view), and you do have an obligation not to want children for the wrong reasons, but if you do have the wrong reasons for wanting children then you simply ought not to have children, even if that means failing in the first obligation. It’s worse to seek to meet the first obligation but violate the second than it is to fail the first because you’re meeting the second.

But it becomes a fairly messy question if children come along anyway unintentionally when someone has this attitude. The original obligation still remains in such a case, and you simply ought not to have this attitude, even though most people do before they have children. Once they appear, you ought not to rid yourself of them unless your situation is so bad that they’ll have a much better home without you than with you (and this selfish desire isn’t usually so bad as to generate that situation; other conditions need to be met for that). I would argue that someone with the selfish attitude toward children does conceive a child, they ought (barring other considerations) to raise that child and to remove that selfish attitude. But that’s compatible with thinking they ought not to seek to have children until they can rid themselves of that attitude, especially when it comes to great expense as with adoption.

[cross-posted at Parableman]

I’ve determined that there’s a political faction out there that needs a name, because it’s a group of conspiracy theorists with a particular agenda that’s becoming somewhat influential, and it’s achieving its agenda fairly well. Its agenda is to discredit mainstream evangelicalism by confusing it with extremist figures who have nearly zero influence on much of any importance. I’m going to call this group the Dominionismists, because their whole agenda depends on this fictional line of thought called Dominionism [sic].

Dominionismism begins, as far as I can tell, with a sociology Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley, by a woman named Sara Diamond. Diamond’s dissertation sought to expose a group of Christians she was calling Dominionists [sic], who held the view “that Christians alone are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns”. Dominionismists like to lump together such diverse figures as Abraham Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer, R.J. Rushdoony, James Dobson, Gary North, Greg Bahnsen, D. James Kennedy, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Randall Terry, Pat Robertson, Charles Colson, and Nancy Pearcey as influential figures in the development of Dominionism [sic]. (more…)

Philosophy TV posted several reflections on issues related to Christmas during Christmas week last year. Jason Brennan’s contribution presents the Christmas story (i.e. the gospel) as a bad story about an immoral divinity.

I chose not to post this actually near Christmas, but when I saw this I thought it would be a great exercise to identify exactly where Brennan gets the gospel message wrong (and Brennan’s final question actually invites that).

In particular, there seem to be two general kinds of responses to a criticism like Brennan’s. You might disagree with his portrayal of what the gospel message actually says, or you might think he gets the message right but applies a problematic moral framework. (And you might think he makes mistakes in both arenas). But if you’re a Christian, you ought to think he does at least one of the two. The question is exactly which elements does he get wrong in what the gospel says or in the moral theory he applies to it, and I’m curious what people would say about that. What do you think?

[cross-posted at Parableman and Prosblogion]

I posted this a week ago to my personal blog and intended to cross-post it here without too much delay, but I’ve just realized that I never got around to it.

Justin Taylor has reposted David Powlison’s critique of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Powlison is the author of the so-called Biblical Counseling chapter of the IVP Five Views book on psychology and Christianity.

I’m not going to worry about the issue, pointed out several times in the comments, that the Bob Newhart video has pretty much nothing to do with CBT. I have two main things to contribute to the discussion, (1) as a philosopher and (2) as a parent of a child who has taken part in cognitive behavioral methods.

Powlison bases a lot of his critique on the fact that CBT uses (sometimes consciously) methods that can rightly be described as Stoic in that they do have a strong enough similiarity to key ideas of the ancient Stoics that I don’t think the comparison is inapt. Stoicism, at least on the issues relevant here, involves one key claim. The Stoics didn’t think it’s worth worrying about something outside your control. The reason is that your life is made worse off by your worrying, but you can do something about the worry. You can’t do anything about the fact that George W. Bush won the presidential election in 2004 or Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008. You can’t change the fact that lots of people died recently in China from landslides. You can do something to help those who remain, and you can do something to change people’s minds on policy issues and perhaps help elect a different sort of person next time, but there’s no point in worrying about something you can’t do anything about.

(more…)

In this discussion, one of the commenters makes the following argument against Reformed views of divine providence:

On a related topic, I still don’t quite get Reformed theology. God desires all to repent, but He doesn’t desire all to repent. How does one believe something one is incapable of understanding? It’s like saying I “believe” that the round plate before me is also a square, as if my saying it makes it so.

What follows is an expansion of my response in the comments there.

What the commenter has hit on is a formal contradiction, at least if no fallacious equivocation is going on. If the word “desire” is being used in the same sense, then the statement that God desires all to repent and the statement that God does not desire all to repent do indeed result in a formal contradictiom. But there’s no problem if the two uses of “desire” are in fact different senses in which God desires. (more…)

I think I’ve hit on one of the things that’s been lurking in the background in my resistance to the idea of an age of accountability. Now this post will largely be assuming some things many here will not grant, e.g. exclusivism about who gets saved, Christian particularism about how they get saved, perhaps Protestant soteriology, and traditional or classical models of divine knowledge (as opposed to open theism). One reason I assume these is because I think they’re all true, but it’s more important for this post that most people who hold to the age of accountability as I’m about to explicate it do in fact assume all these things. Perhaps denying any of them, or at least certain ways of denying them, will get around the problems I’m about to raise. I think it might still take some work to do so, however.

1. At some age (which may not be the same for everyone), each person becomes morally responsible.
2. Before that point, (a) it would be unjust for God to hold the person responsible for their sins, or (b) they aren’t really sins until that point, or (c) God would always be merciful in such cases when justice might still be deserved.
3. After that point, the gospel message applies, and those who repent and follow Christ are saved, while those who don’t are not.

Now there’s an unspecified fourth issue that an age-of-accountability view might go either way on. What criteria determine what the age of accountability is, and do the criteria admit of vagueness such that there isn’t a clear line between being morally responsible and not being morally responsible? So we get the following two views: (more…)

Pro-choice activists are making a big deal about a new study claiming to show that human beings feel no pain until about 24 weeks into their fetal life. Lots of studies have appeared contradicting each other on this, so this is hardly news. There’s been lots of debate on this for several decades now, and this doesn’t seem to me to have acquired some special status above all the other studies yet. Science doesn’t work that way. As Ken Miller is fond of stating, you need established confirmation by further studies by people with different methodology before you accept something as established science. You need consensus. This is one study among many, and they don’t all agree with each other.

I’m still not sure how it’s relevant, anyway. I know of no fully pro-life argument claiming that it’s the consciousness of the fetus that makes abortion wrong. There are some moderate pro-choice arguments that restrict the period of abortion to early term that use this claim as part of their basis. But those who base their opposition to abortion on the fact that it’s a human organism with its own DNA and thus a full human being with full moral status will be unmoved by this, and those who base their opposition to abortion on the fact that abortion robs the fetal human organism of a future life like our lives will also be untouched.

[cross-posted at Parableman]

My post on slaves and sons reminded me of a point I’ve been thinking that I don’t think I’ve ever discussed with anyone or written anything about. The term “gender-inclusive” has come to be associated with a certain translation philosophy in Bible translation, namely the translation philosophy that considers it accurate to translate terms referring to multiple genders only with terms that in contemporary English can apply to multiple genders. In other words, using “he” to refer to a gender-unknown or gender-unspecified person or using “sons” to refer to a gender-mixed group would not be gender-inclusive.

It strikes me, however, that the term “gender-inclusive” is actually ambiguous, and the translations that use “sons” for a gender-mixed group or “he” to refer to a gender-unspecified or gender-unknown person are actually the gender-inclusive ones in one sense of the term. After all, they’re using usually-masculine terms in a gender-inclusive way, right? They’re using a sometimes gender-specific term in a gender-inclusive way. So why is it the opposite approach that always gets to be called gender-inclusive?

My post on slaves and sons reminded me of a point I’ve been thinking that I don’t think I’ve ever discussed with anyone or written anything about. The term “gender-inclusive” has come to be associated with a certain translation philosophy in Bible translation, namely the translation philosophy that considers it accurate to translate terms referring to multiple genders only with terms that in contemporary English can apply to multiple genders. In other words, using “he” to refer to a gender-unknown or gender-unspecified person or using “sons” to refer to a gender-mixed group would not be gender-inclusive.

It strikes me, however, that the term “gender-inclusive” is actually ambiguous, and the translations that use “sons” for a gender-mixed group or “he” to refer to a gender-unspecified or gender-unknown person are actually the gender-inclusive ones in one sense of the term. After all, they’re using usually-masculine terms in a gender-inclusive way, right? They’re using a sometimes gender-specific term in a gender-inclusive way. So why is it the opposite approach that always gets to be called gender-inclusive?

[cross-posted at Parableman]

A study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine concludes that 40% of diagnoses of brain disorders are misdiagnoses. These are people diagnosed with conditions such as being in a persistent vegetative state, which is often taken as sufficient for removal of life support because of the assumption that no person remains.

This study finds that a significant percentage of people who are diagnosed as being in such a state are not only conscious but can even be made to communicate simple “yes” or “no” by being told to think about some concrete thing if they mean “yes” and a different concrete thing if they mean “no”. Different parts of their brain would be active if they were conscious and given these instructions, and that could be detected, A number of these patients were thus able to communicate after being declared to have brains of jello with no possibility of consciousness.

This calls for a massive rethinking of how we should interpret what’s going on in persistent vegetative state diagnoses. Either there are different conditions that look the same for all that can be detected (prior to this new method of detecting consciousness, anyway), or the one state that’s been called a persistent vegetative state is fully compatible with consciousness, despite what doctors have assumed. Our courts have relied on that judgment to excuse what turns out to be the killing of a conscious human being. This new research raises the standards pretty steeply for when we should make life-or-death decisions based on such diagnoses.

The LifeNews article about this study includes a suggestion in the opposite direction. If these patients can indicate, consent, can’t they be asked if they want to die? The doctor the article quotes as being interested in this does acknowledge that there are still problems with consent. I don’t think the article shows much awareness of how significant such problems are. It’s notoriously difficult to know when someone has rationally consented even if they can communicate in complete sentences, and this doctor thinks he can get patients who can only use this roundabout method to give legal consent to being killed? How will they determine whether the person is being rational in consenting? Congress prohibited the selling of organs, because it’s too easy for people at the lower end in terms of income to be manipulated into giving up their organs. Shouldn’t we extend at least as much courtesy to those who might be manipulated into giving up their lives?

[cross-posted at Parableman]

Matt Flanagan’s Inerrancy and Biblical Authority discussed Glenn Peoples’ Inerrantly Assuming Inerrancy in History. There are so many things I disagree with in the latter post that it was very hard to pull myself away from my desire to write a detailed response, but I didn’t have the time.

I actually agree with much of what Matt says, if you frame it as a hypothetical, which he does: If Peoples is right that inerrancy as currently held by contemporary interrantists is not the historical doctrine of scripture throughout church history, then it’s still possible to claim that the Bible is true in all God intended it to teach us. I think you lose much of what God actually did intend the Bible to teach us, but you can hold a view that God intended it to teach us less than that and still think the Bible teaches all those things.

I’ve written before about historical figures’ attitudes toward scripture, including the biblical authors’ own attitudes, and I’ve concluded that the mainstream Christian attitude toward scripture throughout church history has not been mere inerrancy but the stronger claim that scripture is infallible. [There are those historical revisionists today who claim that they hold to infallibility but not inerrancy, but that's logically impossible without contradiction given what these terms have historically meant. What such people are calling infallibility is not infallibility of scripture but infallibility of certain claims of scripture and not others. Inerrantists hold to the infallibility of all scripture, which entails the inerrancy of all scripture on all matters that it speaks of.] (more…)

FYI (and for your prayers): Evangel contributor David Wayne has been hospitalized again, this time due to complications from some medication he’s just begun for his cancer treatments. Details here.

I wanted to make one observation about John Mark Reynolds’ recent posts on torture. One of the things that has struck me over several years of considering this question from a Christian point of view is that arguments against torture are either (a) implausible and conflicting with actual biblical allowances and endorsements or (b) non-absolutist and allowing for some exceptions, even if the burden of proof and extremely strong cause for hesitation should always be present. (By absolutism, I mean the view that something is always wrong with no possible exceptions.)

For ease of reference, here are the posts:

One Bad Argument in Favor of Torture
Cicero not Nero!
On Pacifism and Torture
A Conservative and Pragmatic Argument Against Torture

Arguments Against Torture

Consider the image of God argument. This is the same reasoning used against killing, and yet the scriptures make it very clear that capital punishment is not just allowable but mandated by God, at least in a certain context. (I’ll leave it open whether it should be used today. What matters for my point here is that God not just allowed it the way he allowed divocrce in the Mosaic law. He commanded it in the Torah, and Paul seems to affirm the use of the sword in carrying out justice in Romans 13, so there’s not even a plausible argument that the new covenant removes this allowance.) So I don’t think the fact that we’re made in the image of God is going to rule out all torture, since it doesn’t rule out all killing and it’s the explicit biblical reason not to kill people. (more…)

Mike Almeida has an interesting argument against abortion that assumes nothing about the moral status of the fetus. It relies on two commonsense claims:

1. We should remove a benign tumor that will eventually become malignant.
2. If we should remove something that’s not yet harmful because it will become harmful, then other things being equal we should not remove something not yet good that will become good.

Some will surely resist the second claim, which is what the parallel reasoning relies on. But it does seem to me to be a generally true principle. It’s why we shouldn’t pull up flowers before they finish growing.

Darrell Bock reviews Bart Ehrman’s book Jesus, Interrupted. I especially liked this paragraph, which captures very well my own concern about what I’ve read by Ehrman:

I think what is most bothersome in this book is the way it sets up discussions. It pursues a topic for several pages, often noting in one or two quick and embedded sentences that the point is not as devastating as the impression given by the rhetoric of the whole section. Such qualification involves a quick almost aside that qualifies things so the author has cover. But it becomes a faint cry in light of the more skeptical thrust of the whole work. The result is to launch a discussion in a direction that implies more than the evidence really gives, leaving a greater impression about what is said than the author claims in the qualification. More than that, by excluding other key factors, the discussion leaves the impression of making a point clear that actually is not as cut and dried as the presentation suggests.

It does strike me as a rhetorically-successful but intellectually-illegitimate methodology. It even seems a little intellectually dishonest, because it shows that he does know that his point doesn’t show as much as he’s using it to show, but he goes ahead and emphasizes it well beyond its significance in order to maximize the effect among those whose trust in the text might therefore be undermined.