I was led to realize how numberless were the things I believed without seeing them, and others which had transpired when I was not there to witness them: so many events in the history of mankind; so much that I believed on the word of friends or doctors or various others. Unless we accepted such things on trust, we would accomplish absolutely nothing in this life. And finally, I realized how firmly and unshakably I accepted on faith that I had been born of precisely these parents: something I could not possibly know, unless I believed it on the word of others. In this way, Lord, You made me understand that I ought not find fault with those who believed in Your Bible, which You have established with such great authority among almost all the nations of the earth; but find fault, rather, with those who did not believe it.
I like Augustine. I enjoyed many a peaceful evening in bed reading a biography about him by Peter Brown. Reading about Augustine’s life and thought and reading quotations from his works is not merely interesting–it’s inspiring. Whether I’m feeling restless or feeling mellow, reading a good intellectual biography puts me in a better mood: the little cultural practices that are alien to me can range from exotic and intriguing to endearing and attractive; the thoughts and struggles that are similar to our own make me feel connected to people in a totally different era and continent; and all in all, I feel like I know another soul. And I think to myself, “Wow, I’d like to appreciate all of the great literature he appreciated.” Or, “Hey, what if I could be a cultured, real intellectual like him? And truly devoted to truth, or art, or… God.” It makes me appreciate life more, and even when I get down on myself for knowing I will never “go down in history” like these lights, I turn around and say, “No–I am an appreciator–what they have to offer me is as splendid as a sunset, and I am given the privilege to admire such brilliance.”
Besides this great and thorough biography, I have really enjoyed a much shorter presentation of Augustine’s life and thought, an audio book in a series called The Giants of Philosophy. But the purpose of this post is not to praise Augustine and to bask in the glory of his eloquence and his innovative contributions to Western philosophy and Christian theology. The nice stuff was so you wouldn’t write me off immediately as just another polemicist ;-). The point of this post is to point out Augustine’s extremely problematic foundation for concluding that the Bible is God’s Word.
- How do ideas reproduce?
- How does knowledge reproduce?
- How do organisms reproduce?
Let’s begin with the end, and end with the beginning.
Organisms reproduce, passing biological information from one generation to the next.
Okay, that’s quite enough! 😦
I should have phrased the question: “What mechanisms control an organism’s reproductive success.” Not quite as sexy, but occasionally “sexy” when you score a cheetah vs gazelle chase scene with the latest grunge techno club hit: natural selection!
How does knowledge reproduce: well, natural selection is at play here as well. Consider the innovations of Galileo, then Newton, then Einstein, then BOOM!!!
That was an atomic bomb.
At the risk of levity: if you do great physics, when a total war breaks out, you blow the other guys up before they blow you up. Such knowledge, which needs to be more or less correct in order to reproduce itself, is not limited to weaponry: agricultural science, economic science, political science, chemistry science, botany science, athlete’s foot science, math science, navigation science, and last but not least, science science. All of these forms of knowledge must be more or less correct in order to reproduce over the long term! This truth applies to we privileged homo Sapiens and to all animals. Spiders “know” how to make a web. Regardless of any consciousness, or lack thereof, there is some sort of “intelligence” embedded into their DNA that instructs them to make a bad ass web and catch poor little insects and wrap em up and eat em and save a little for leftovers. The same basic principle that “persuades” a less cerebral organism to make an amazing bug catching device also “persuades” the physics community to let go of the idea that heavier objects fall to the ground faster than lighter objects. Galileo demonstrated that that idea was false in 1589, by dropping balls off of the not-yet-leaning Tower of Pisa, and that was following over two millennia of Catholic devotion to the great Aristotle–great thinker… not-so-great experimentalist.
And this brings us to the point I’m trying to make, and the polemic you’ve all been waiting for: ideas reproduce with less selective pressures than knowledge. For the sake of argument, an idea here is considered to be a metaphysical proposition which may or may not overlap and interact with more “earthly” matters. So here, an “idea” is effectively a religious idea. Did God declare Jesus his beloved Son? Did Muhammad ascend to heaven with Gabriel and speak with Adam, John the Baptist and Jesus, Joseph, Idris, Aaron, Moses, and Abraham? Did God tell Joseph Smith to resuscitate the long lost art of polygamy? Hard to say, but as Salt Lake City, Utah will testify to, whether or not you believe the latter, you can still make a good living and pass on enough seed to make an impact (any impact will do, I’m told) on the world.
The point I’m trying to make is that some propositions don’t carry with them the same selective pressures as other propositions. The “natural” selection of our competitive field of academia, not unrelated to our “survival of the fittest” capitalistic society, pushes us toward more and more refined understandings of the human genome. But if a brilliant geneticist believes that God raised Jesus from the dead, and another brilliant geneticist believes that the Trinity is a polytheistic corruption of Allah’s true faith, they’re still going to be brilliant geneticists with well-paying jobs, social prestige, and plenty of resources to pass down their work ethics, their big brains, and their mutually exclusive ideas about God.
Now to the problems with Augustine’s argument quoted at the top of this post: not all ideas are created equal. The wisdom of the doctor is akin to the wisdom of the cat licking his wounds: it’s closely related to survival and reproduction. Moreover, the field itself contains within it a guard against incorrectness: if enough patients die under the care of a particular physician, he may find himself enjoying more and more the prospect of an idyllic early retirement tending to his vineyards in the Tuscan sun. The wisdom of the mother telling her child to study and obey her teacher is of the same category. “Honor thy father and mother” is not a religious idea. It’s like a mother monkey communicating to her son “watch and learn how to not plummet one hundred feet to your death”. The young monk can disobey, but his children can’t.
What if the North African Augustine, with an equally deep soul and analytically gifted mind, would have been born in the 9th century instead of the 4th century. Would he have made the exact argument about Islam as he did here about Christianity?
Food for thought.
“Don’t look at me like that! You buttered your bread, now sleep in it!”
Jiminy Cricket