Philosophy Is Not Dead, and We Have Not Killed Her

Perhaps the most galling feature of the resurgence of "scientific" materialists is how truly terrible the science itself is. Take this passage from an interview with neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky:

A muscle did something. Meaning a neuron in your motor cortex commanded your muscle to do that. That neuron fired only because it got inputs from umpteen other neurons milliseconds before. And those neurons only fired because they got inputs milliseconds before and back and back and back. Show me one neuron anywhere in this pathway that, from out of nowhere, decided to say something that activated in ways that are not explained by the laws of the physical universe, and ions, and channels, and all that sort of stuff. Show me one neuron that has some cellular semblance of free will. And there is no such neuron.

Not to put too fine a point of it, but the reductionism here simply doesn't reflect the state of the field, even ignoring that question-begging word "decide". But it doesn't hurt to start there: on some level, "decide" is exactly what each neuron does. His description of a game-of-Moustrap-like chain from stimulus to response is, as a rule, the exception: the typical neuron in the brain is taking in a complex of inputs to which it responds in a manner over which there is a great deal of argument, including models that are frankly probabilistic, beyond the feedback which is part of so many neural circuits. Likewise, the implicit reduction of a thought to a single neuron firing is laughably simplistic, even without considering that we don't have any substantial idea of how anything beyond a fairly limited set of sensory impressions are realized in the brain, and certainly nothing as abstracted as a rational thought, or even an emotion.

The truth is that even the computers to whom analogy is often made are beginning to exceed our comprehension as their complexity grows. When the top go-playing program is set against itself, for example, the result is play that has been described by experts as "Amazing. Strange. Alien." Some of this appears to rise from limits of human ability to process the board as a whole, but other peculiarities of its play in these matches have resisted analysis. And the game of go, it should be remembered, had up to this time resisted computational attack by sheer combinatorial depth, not because of any complexity of its rules. The brain is hardly so symmetrical.

It is not unreasonable to hold this doctrine (for that is what is) subject to the demands of scientific proof. I do not accept that one can argue free will out of existence in this way: that the brain is mechanically deterministic is a hypothesis which needs explicit experimental proof, which we certainly do not have and which is certainly not going to be produced without a huge advance along several fronts of neurology and cellular biology. But beyond that, anyone is welcome to ask of these dogmatic skeptics, "what exactly do you mean by the will, anyway?" And at that point, we plunge headlong into the discomforting domain of the philosophers.

And it certainly discomforts them, at least if statements from the likes of the popularizers are any sign. If Stephen Hawking claimed that philosophy has become irrelevant because its practitioners haven't kept up with scientific developments (which he did), if Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson can, between the two of them, ridicule philosophers as concerned with irrelevancies, it is a sign of how insular and self-inflated the voices of secular materialism have become. Or rather, it points, philosophically, to the intellectual impoverishment of their own, well, philosophy. To turn to Philosophia's spurned sister, the theologians have not in fact been particularly discomforted by scientific advance; it is self-doubt that has proven their greatest threat. If we are reduced to a "god of the gaps", well, that's an aesthetic objection, to which reality need not conform.

And if humans created philosophy, as Nye claims, well, natural science is of the same ilk. He is hardly a model of intellectual rigor, and one would really consider the guardianship of that rigor to belong to philosophy; but even by standards about which there is no real controversy, these statements don't withstand even casual scrutiny. They have the same quality of rationalization about them that they attribute to others.

The Gospel of Jesus' Brother-in-Law

So, in the last few days the whole "Jesus Wife Fragment"/"Gospel of Jesus' Wife" episode has taken another twist. Christian Askeland's article title this time is a bit too not nice to use but I had to come up with something. Anyway, here's the story: the mainstream press articles haven't said much about the context of the JWF, but those who have followed the story more closely know that it arrived with several other fragmentary texts supposedly from the same collector. Well, one of those has been now shown to the world, and it is a bit of the Coptic Gospel of John, in what looks like the same hand as the JWF, and on papyrus of comparable age.

And according to some scholars, it looks to be forged, in the same manner that the JWF is thought to be forged.

The problem is this: the text matches that of the Qau Codex. But not only does it match, it even follows the set of line breaks of a specific modern edition in an eccentric manner, to the point of having a glitch at a page break, and this edition is (like the Gospel of Thomas edition thought to have been used to compose the JWF) available on-line. This, however, presents another problem: the Qau Codex is in a dialect of Coptic which, by the date this appears to have been written, had died out.

So why should a churchman care? Well, on one level, all of this fuss ought to be immaterial. Whether the JWF represents a modern forgery or an ancient gnostic text, it stands well outside the orthodox canon; in a sense, the question is whether it is a modern or ancient forgery. It's all about the world-changing hype. King, whose baby this is, has connections to the Elaine Pagels/Jesus Seminar/"we can learn about early Christianity through the gnostic material" people. But this fragment has now been cut loose from this because of its late date, to the point where its importance in that wise would be indicating a significant survival into a time around Charlemagne's reign. The mainstream media is looking, for whatever reason, for another Coluphidist "well, that just about wraps it up for Christendom" wildly overstated story, and Harvard and Company played off this desire and got an endorsement of King's claims that was emphatically undeserved.

If you want a non-hyperventilating mainstream story reviewing the whole thing you can try this one from the Weekly Standard. And if you want a larger perspective on the novelty of these claims, you can see this column by David Jenkins that came out after the first round of JWF stories. But you can just as well ignore the whole thing, and dismiss anyone who tells you that this or that find challenges orthodox doctrine. Sure, you'll get called a traditionalist (as if that were a bad thing) and accused of burying your head in the sand, but you'll save yourself a lot of grief sorting through the nonsense.

Syncretic-Crazy Christmas

Those nuts at Lutheran Satire take on various December 25th bogus legends in their own inimitable way:

Shreds and Noise

You may or may not have heard the publicity noise over a supposed gospel fragment which may or may not suggest that Jesus had a wife. Well, the upshot is this:

• Karen King of the Harvard Divinity School announced that she had examined a papyrus fragment from a private collector, and had determined it to be genuine. The recto side of the papyrus was translated from the Coptic to read "Jesus said to them, 'my wife'..." at one point. The fragment, which she dubbed the "Gospel of Jesus’s Wife", was dated to the 4th century, and claimed to translate some lost 2nd century Greek version.
• Not surprisingly, the MSM jumped on this, and not at all surprisingly, Laurie Goldstein of the New York Times was first in line. Others followed, all with the usual breathless "will this change everyone's understand of early Christianity" pseudoquestion.
• Surprisingly, though, there was a major pushback the next day, which also appeared in the some mainstream publications. The most prominent story was this AP wire story, in which there seemed to be almost a line of other early text types queued up to cast doubt upon the text. It seems that the lack of provenance of the fragment is a problem in itself, but many of the scholars quoted were dubious about its authenticity.
• Also making a "day after" appearance was this NBC news blog post, which stepped up to deal with some of the historical and theological context familiar to those of us with at least a passing knowledge of the field.

It's clear that, if it be genuine, we're looking at a gnostic text: that it is in Coptic is a warning bell to begin with, and one of the phrases in the text parallels a portion of the Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the best known gnostic text. And as such it fits the type pretty well: these texts say a lot of odd things about sexuality and Jesus, and it isn't clear that any of them are to be taken literally. These texts are all, as a rule, pretty late (typically 4th century), so their relationship to ante-Nicene patristic Christian is controversial. For a long time the picture of gnosticism we had was largely formed out of patristic condemnations; it wasn't until the Nag Hammadi discoveries in 1945 that we could really begin to pull together a solid picture of gnostic writings.

And this is the point at which the plot thickens, because Dr. King does not come into this with clean hands. She is part of a group who doubt gnosticism as a category, which is not entirely bad. Far more problematic is her willingness to sit as part of the Jesus Seminar, which is anathema to real scholarship as far as I am concerned. And there is a far more damning problem, beyond the doubts about the paleography. Here is Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica:

[T]his fragment is exactly, exactly, what the Zeitgeist of 2012 would want us to find in an ancient gospel. To my mind that weighs heavily against its authenticity. Of course I hope I'm wrong and that it is genuine, and that is certainly a possibility, but this is equivalent to winning big in the lottery and that should make us nervous. It is too perfect. As Larry Schiffman put it, "The most exciting things are the things most likely to be forged."

It is far too reminiscent of letter to Harry Potter's mother that he finds in the last book, which has been truncated at a point which allows a reading wildly divergent from the text read as a whole: how convenient that we get this tantalizing phrase, cut free (literally) from any context, which fits so nicely into the restorationist tropes of mainline liberalism with their vision of a purer faith captured by those, well, patriarchs and then enslaved by the Constantinian state.

If I were a betting man, I could put my money on this coming to nothing. Orthodox theologians are not going to be disturbed that the corpus of gnostic writings has gotten one text larger anyway, but I would lean towards counting it as a fake. What is more significant is the will to believe it, and possibly to create it. If you want a snarky read of this, you'll prefer Thomas McDonald's analysis, but I would also recommend this longer and more dispassionate take from Smithsonian magazine. But one should also consider, on one's own, the rush toward any text which stands outside the particularity of orthodox Christian faith. Where is the need to have faith in these scraps coming from?

Oolon, Call Your Office

Bryan Owen has put himself through the torment of reading the drivel coming out of another Jesus Seminar event. I personally can't bring myself to do it any more; the smugness and the intellectual bankruptcy of it all got to me years ago. But then Douglas Adams did the heavy lifting in the ridicule department years ago:

Now [the babelfish] is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing".
"But," says man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist and so therefore you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys. But this did not stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme for his best selling book, Well That About Wraps It Up for God.

Robert Munday's characterization of it as "an intellectual Ponzi scheme" is more or less on the mark as well. In that regard it's a testament to the gullibility of journalists who write about it as if it were something novel and challenging, when in fact it has been grinding along for over twenty-five years. I suppose there could be some point to this sort of critical study, but the conspicuous biases of this group and the manner in which it has sold the souls of its members to publicity make it mostly useful as an object example of what not to do. If this is the alternative to traditional faith, then it makes traditional faith easy to swallow.