The wisdom of Karl Marx applied to school shootings

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Karl Marx gives us an insight that reveals a new response to school shootings. When Marx called religion “the opium of the masses,” he wasn’t saying that religion puts its adherents in a stupor or gets them high. He was paying religion a compliment. He was acknowledging opium’s value in pain relief. Religion helps people deal with the pain of life.

But here’s Marx’s point: that’s not a good thing when it masks the underlying problem. Opium isn’t doing you any favors if, by reducing the pain of a broken leg, you’re no longer motivated to see a doctor. And religion isn’t doing you any favors if, by reducing the misery of life, you don’t take steps to correct the problems in your life.

Step back to take in all of society, and religion’s soothing the misery of injustice, poverty, and hunger is doing the people no favors if it reduces their drive to fix the root causes of those social problems.

Now see this applied to catastrophes like school shootings. Our habit is to fall back on easy platitudes. These might be Christian, such as, “Trust that God has a plan” or “We’ll have to ask God when we get to heaven.” Maybe it’s struggling to find something positive: “I’m grateful for our heroic first responders.” And there’s the conservative politician’s favorite, “We’re sending thoughts and prayers,” which has a perfect track record of producing zero good. How about sending us some useful legislation instead?

The Uvalde shootings didn’t happen in my neighborhood, so the last thing I’ll do is scold someone who did lose a loved one for finding solace in whatever way works for them.

Call to action

It’s a priority to focus on the grieving families, but—and here’s the delicate balance—platitudes and time contain the feelings of outrage, and that’s an opportunity lost.

To politicians, those who can help fix this, I say, stop offering comfort. Don’t share your thoughts and prayers. You’re in the rare position of being able to address this crisis.

To politicians, those who can help fix this, I say, stop offering comfort. Don’t share your thoughts and prayers. Stop thanking the heroic first responders—leave that to someone else, someone not holding the reins of power. You’re in the rare position of being able to address this crisis. Don’t release the emotion but build it up. Channel that grief and emotion into justified rage. Create a firestorm and use it to make positive change.

This is the 27th school shooting in the U.S., and this makes 212 mass shootings, just this year. What the hell? Is it not obvious that something major is wrong here? I appreciate that gun control is a political third rail for some politicians, but why is their job security more important than doing the right thing? Wouldn’t it be admirable to see a politician tell us that they knew that gun control legislation (say) would be politically unpopular, but, damn it, it’s simply the morally correct action? How can politicians live with themselves if they know that their inaction on useful legislation—or their loosening of gun laws—has led to the deaths of children and anguish in their families?

For a tangible first step, let me suggest a federal legislative committee titled One Month to Common Sense that would hear from the experts what research tells us is effective and practical. With its sunset clause in its name, it could harness the outrage from Uvalde. No, its recommendations won’t fix the problem by reducing the incidence of mass shootings to zero, but a comparison of U.S. statistics with other Western countries’ embarrassingly lower incidents of gun violence shows there is much room for improvement.

What Would Karl Marx Do? Marx got a lot wrong, but his observation about opium dulling the drive for change was right. Comfort after a crisis is the opium, but we’ve become addicted and have ignored how its short-term effectiveness is its long-term weakness. To make real change, let’s channel that grief into justified rage.

Never doubt that a small group
of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the world;
indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
— Margaret Mead

The Holy Spirit’s odd role in evangelism

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Christian evangelism is supposed to be a partnership between the Holy Spirit and a Christian, but this is like a partnership between Superman and Jimmy Olsen. If God wants to spread the word, he’s more than able to do it solo.

The Holy Spirit’s job description

Here are some Christian explanations of how it’s supposed to work.

It is the job of believers to communicate the gospel. It is the job of the Holy Spirit to convert the heart. (David Souther)

Apologetics is great in bringing a person to the point where they can say it’s reasonable, but when it comes to surrendering their heart and will, that’s the part of the Holy Spirit. (Pat Zukeran podcast @12:42)

Ultimately, converting someone to Christianity is the work of the Holy Spirit. (Grace Ruiter)

So ultimately it’s the Holy Spirit, but it won’t work unless a Christian is involved as well? What could a human possibly contribute to the process that an all-knowing god couldn’t do better?

Let’s think this through. Imagine the Holy Spirit being a billion times smarter and more capable than the human evangelist. The Christian is the junior partner—a very junior partner. It’s as if this unlikely team is charged with building a Boeing 747, and the Holy Spirit provides all the parts and assembly work except for a single cotter pin or washer or fastener—some small but essential part without which the plane is useless—and that’s what the Christian provides. Similarly, the intellectual component the Christian brings to evangelism is negligible by comparison.

Can this be God’s plan? A long-discarded, overly optimistic early draft, maybe, but his final plan? It’s almost as if God wanted the winnowing process to be more of a challenge, for the sport.

(And no, Jesus didn’t insist that today’s Christians evangelize. That charge was given to the original apostles, not today’s Christians.)

How to salvage this

But see Christianity as a manmade belief and this makes sense. A god could make converts reliably, but that’s not what we see. So Christianity groped for plan B, and this Holy Spirit/Christian partnership is it. You need to have a human in the loop to take the blame when the result looks only as good as a human could do. When there’s a conversion, it’s due to the Holy Spirit, and when there’s a failure, it’s due to the human. In practice, the perfectly reliable Holy Spirit is useless, and the imperfect human is the one who delivers the new parishioners to the church.

This explains why, when we lay our problems at the feet of Jesus, they’re still there when we go back to check.

It also sheds some light on the current furor to get rid of the Roe protections on abortion. It’s one thing for Christians to impose constraints on themselves but quite another for them to impose constraints on others. Why be a busybody about someone else’s body when God is the ultimate judge? “Let go and let God,” right?

The truth is that all-powerful God never acts in our world. God doesn’t even make an unambiguous statement against abortion in the Bible. On some level, Christians understand this, because they know that if they want social change, they must make it themselves.

The Holy Spirit’s role in evangelism is also just make-work. The partnership isn’t Superman and Jimmy Olsen, it’s a timid human in a frightening world making hand shadows by firelight.

Apparently, the god of the entire universe
desperately needs his puny human followers
to help him out—a lot, and often,
and at great personal cost to themselves.
— OnlySky columnist Captain Cassidy

Faith statements suffocate academic freedom

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Physicists and sociologists don’t use the same tools, but they don’t need to be kept in separate universities with incompatible ideas about academic freedom. What does that say about Christianity that many Christian colleges have faith requirements for students and faculty?

This is the third and final article in a series responding to William Lane Craig’s response to my attack on faith statements (part 1).

Bias? That’s not a problem. We’re all biased!

Dr. Craig (WLC) has an interesting response to the problem of bias.

Finally, and most importantly, the allegation of bias is ultimately irrelevant…. Every historian approaches a topic with his biases and point of view…. As the history is supported by the weight of the evidence, the historian’s personal biases become irrelevant.

This is the “So what if I’m biased? Everyone’s biased!” argument. I guess I’m old-fashioned on this subject because I’d like to think that bias isn’t binary (you’re biased or you’re not) but is measured on a scale, and we can and should strive to be as unbiased as possible.

The point can be generalized. We all have our biases, including atheists. (If Christian scholars need to attach a disclaimer to their work, so do atheists!)

When I subordinate myself to an unchanging statement, I’ll do just that. Until then, I’m free to reach any conclusion the evidence leads me to, and I only have fear of embarrassment keeping me from changing my mind. No job rides on this. The situation for the professional Christian scholar is quite different.

[WLC] is part of a church in which a perfect God made a clear statement of his unchanging rules that unaccountably is so ambiguous that new Christian denominations are splintering off at a rate of two per day.

I agree with WLC on a point

WLC does make one important point, so let me take the opportunity to clarify my position. He said:

But our work is to be judged by the soundness of our arguments, not by our biases. So you’ll never find me dismissing the work of an atheist philosopher on the grounds that he is biased, even though it may be blatantly obvious. Rather I seek to expose the fallacy in his reasoning or the false or unjustified premiss in his argument.

So the answer to your question, How do we know if the work of a Christian scholar is to be trusted? is easy: you assess it by the arguments and evidence he offers in support of his conclusions. Ultimately, that’s all that matters.

Yes, it would be an ad hominem fallacy to reject the work out of hand solely because it came from a Christian scholar. “That article came from a Christian scholar bound by a doctrinal statement; therefore, it’s garbage” would be an example of this error.

Here’s what I’m saying.

1. Christian institutions hurt themselves with doctrinal statements because those statements put a cloud of doubt over their scholars’ work. Signing such a statement binds the scholars to never reach a contrary conclusion on any of its points of dogma. They can never agree with one of those points without our dismissing the work as an inevitable conclusion rather than the result of honest research. It’s a disservice to the scholars, and it’s a disservice to their work.

2. WLC is right that I can analyze the arguments in an article and judge for myself, but this is my only option. I can’t accept or reject the conclusion without that analysis because the doctrinal statement means the author and their institution have no inherent reputation.

I can’t say, “Well, this article comes from MIT, and their physics department has a great reputation, so I’ll initially assume that it’s reliable.” Instead, I’ll be thinking, “This Christian author is has no initial reputation. He is bound by his doctrinal statement to come to this conclusion, so he has an uphill climb to show me that his conclusion is well founded.”

3. Nonexpert readers will often be unable to do the analysis. Let me illustrate with an example. A few years ago, I had lunch with three Christians from the local Reasons to Believe chapter (RTB is an old-earth Creationist group). We were talking about whether Daniel accurately prophesied Jesus (it didn’t). I summarized the evidence that Daniel was written in the 160s BCE. One of my antagonists replied that that was impossible since the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) was written around 300 BCE. How could Daniel have been written in the 160s if it was included in the Septuagint? The answer, which I had to research afterwards to find out, is that only the Pentateuch (the first five books) were included in the original Septuagint, so that 300 BCE date of authorship doesn’t apply to Daniel.

Expert readers might be able to provide the devil’s advocate challenges to test the work, as WLC suggests, but not all readers are experts. WLC’s response becomes, “So you think that their conclusion is flawed? Prove it!” but that’s an unreasonable burden on the reader and a handicap to the author’s reputation.

4. This option isn’t available beyond a single paper. Take this actual headline as an example: “12 Historical Facts About The Resurrection Of Jesus Most Scholars Agree Upon.” If these “scholars” are bound by doctrinal statements, WLC’s solution would be to just read their work and evaluate it. But that’s not available to us when there’s an appeal to the consensus of an entire discipline as in this case. If these scholars are constrained in their work, this appeal is meaningless.

Academic freedom at a Christian college

WLC brings up Ivy League schools as exemplars but never addresses the elephant in the room: that they don’t use doctrinal statements. Indeed, they are world class institutions in part because they don’t use them. Doctrinal statements are incompatible with free inquiry.

WLC is a professor at Biola’s Talbot School of Theology, and Talbot gets its accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). This makes Talbot answerable to the ATS policy guidelines on “Academic Freedom and Tenure.” While this policy accepts doctrinal statements (“specific confessional adherence”), it also demands, “No confessional standard obviates the requirement for responsible liberty of conscience in the Jewish or the Christian community or the practice of the highest ideals of academic freedom.”

It also provides for tenure to protect scholars: “The provision for appointment on indefinite tenure is one way in which institutions safeguard their faculties’ freedom to teach, to inquire, and to organize their academic programs.”

Given that this is an accreditation association for theology schools, there are presumably interpretations or loopholes that allow binding doctrinal statements. Nevertheless, this is a lot more respect for academic freedom than WLC seemed interested in defending or even acknowledging.

Conclusion

Freedom to change one’s mind is an essential right in any institution. It’s a foundational concept in the academic freedom that reigns within the Ivy League colleges that WLC says he admires.

WLC’s unhelpful response is to say that it doesn’t bother him that there are constraints. They don’t get in his way. He doesn’t need to change his mind. But if they hobble your life … well, then it sucks to be you.

I can perhaps see WLC’s position. He is part of a church in which a perfect God made a clear statement of his unchanging rules that unaccountably are so ambiguous that new Christian denominations are splintering off at a rate of two per day. The doctrinal statement could be his finger in the dike, though that’s a futile gesture when he wants to simultaneously carve out a safe space for Christian thought while polishing the image of Christianity as a field able to hold its own in the marketplace of ideas.

He can’t have both.

The Bible:
The Goatherder’s Guide to the Universe
— Seth Andrews, Thinking Atheist podcast

Harvard doesn’t require faith statements. What does that tell you?

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Christian philosopher William Lane Craig takes a Pollyanna approach to faith statements—they don’t bother him, so there’s no problem.

But there is a problem. In part 1 I responded to WLC’s claim that they help create community. Let’s continue with more of his concerns.

Cause and effect

WLC moves on to misunderstand the problem. He says that a doctrinal statement doesn’t determine a scholar’s views; rather, scholars will have formed their views beforehand and only then seek an institution that fits their views.

That’s correct, as far as it goes. When you join, the doctrinal statement fits you like a just-right sweater since you picked an institution that shared your views. The problem comes when your thinking progresses, and the sweater becomes a straitjacket.

WLC is confident that this won’t be a problem—for him, at least:

Thus, it is naïve on your part to imagine that [Houston Baptist University’s] doctrinal statement, for example, imposes some sort of restraint upon me with respect to belief in the virgin birth or the deity of Christ or the resurrection of Jesus. I held these beliefs long before affiliating with HBU, and I would believe them no matter where I taught.

Craig tells us that if he hasn’t felt constrained by a doctrinal statement, then it’s all good.

But he isn’t completely clueless, and he can imagine the problem—though his solution is unsympathetic.

It can happen that one’s doctrinal views can change in the course of one’s career, with the result that one can no longer sign the doctrinal statement in good faith. In that case, the professor should seek employment elsewhere.

Oh, so it’s as easy as that? If you’ve grown so that you can’t accept the outmoded doctrinal statement, just quit.

This gets back to the original problem. Sure, you can quit your job. Maybe you’ll lose your tenure or even your career, depending on how far your views have changed. But you might have other obligations than that to the university. Can you quit if there’s a family to feed? Or do you convince yourself to muddle through by not thinking about the problem too hard?

We can humanize this issue by moving from an abstract hypothetical to the concrete problems of hundreds of actual Christian clergy with failing faith by looking at the Clergy Project. Some of these clergy members have walked away from their careers in the church as atheists, while others keep their head down as long as they can, preferring an uncomfortable present to an unknown future.

WLC seems to appreciate the problem, but Christian compassion isn’t where he goes for an answer:

The danger is that because such a move can be so gut-wrenching, the professor may be tempted to continue in his present position, even though he no longer believes the doctrinal statement. In that case, he compromises his own integrity and the integrity of the institution. If the institution does not take the difficult step of dismissing him, the seed of corruption is planted which may derail the institution in coming generations.

In other words, it’s the scholar’s fault that the straitjacket is too tight. I’m sure that’s comforting. Notice that this is just a problem within religious institutions. Scholars in public and Ivy League universities are encouraged to follow the facts where they lead.

And “the seed of corruption”? Really? Christian dogma is so uncompromising that it can’t tolerate any challenges? This is medieval thinking. Again, try to imagine this criticism coming back to a physicist or geologist in response to a paper submitted for peer review.

People change. Doctrinal statements are too brittle to accept this, but this is the fault of the institutions that demand them, not of the people.

The problem comes when your thinking progresses, and the comfortable sweater becomes a straitjacket.

Consequences of a doctrinal statement

It is false, then, as you allege, that by signing a doctrinal statement [that includes the claim that Jesus was born of a virgin], “a professor has publicly stated, ‘I promise to never conclude that the virgin birth was just a myth’.” He has made no such promise.

He has. Your point is simply that he can break his promise and quit. Yes, he can, but the original point stands: we can’t treat his conclusions at his Christian college as useful new information when he was bound to reach them. (I have more to say about this—see the link to the final part below.)

You say that he can just quit? Sure, but why have this cumbersome and punitive policy? Harvard isn’t bothered by what its scholars conclude. As long as the facts support them, their professors can build their conclusions. They’re not constrained by a prior commitment to a conclusion. What does it say about doctrinal statements that Harvard’s view of academic freedom wouldn’t tolerate them?

Mike Licona’s crime

In my original post, I discussed one cautionary tale: “Might the scholar simply have come to an unbiased conclusion? That’s possible, but how would we know? Mike Licona is a Christian scholar who found out the hard way that faith statements have teeth. In 2011, he lost two jobs because, in a 700-page book, he questioned the inerrancy of a single Bible verse.” WLC responded:

The case of Mike Licona is a good example. Licona has never denied biblical inerrancy, nor was he fired because of it.

The point about Licona is that he’s an example of someone who ran afoul of a doctrinal statement and lost his job. I don’t want to split hairs over the theological validity of the charges against him, but let me respond to the two points WLC made.

In one of his public attacks on Licona at the time, Norm Geisler (co-founder of Southern Evangelical Seminary) wrote, “Mike Licona on Inerrancy: It’s Worse than We Originally Thought.” You’re free to disagree with Geisler’s conclusion, but, yeah, it’s about inerrancy.

And I didn’t say that Licona was fired from his jobs, just that he lost them.

WLC’s point was to vaguely defend Licona against the charges and note that he’s still “a member in good standing of the Evangelical Theological Society.” That’s nice, but it still turned the guy’s life upside down. Can Craig still ignore the collateral damage of faith statements?

I agree with WLC on one important point in the conclusion, next time.

All those who persistently reject Jesus Christ in the present life
shall be raised from the dead
and throughout eternity exist in the state
of conscious, unutterable, endless torment of anguish.
— part of the Biola doctrinal statement
that WLC is obliged to believe

E Pluribus Unum: It’s time to bring back our motto

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In God We Trust. This unconstitutional motto has been imposed on the United States, but perhaps we can revert to the motto that was a much better choice.

Do we really trust God?

One might pray to God for comfort when things are bad, but who would pray instead of using evidence? Who would trust God for safe passage across a busy street rather than looking and using good judgment? Or trust God for a good grade rather than studying? Or trust God for food rather than earning money to buy it?

Sometimes people do actually trust God, putting everything in his hands and not presuming he needs any help, like reject medical treatment and instead pray for their child to be made well, but the state rejects that. It steps in and insists on proper medical care. No, trusting in God might sound nice, but when it comes to something important, we take the approach that works.

Like government. The U.S. Constitution begins, “We the people of the United States.” We the people work together to build roads, educate our children, and defend our country. It’s not perfect, but we do a pretty good job. We have a trustworthy government, which is why it’s ridiculous to have that government declare that it’s actually God that we trust. Remember the words of the Declaration of Independence: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The buck stops with us.

What’s good about “In God We Trust”?

Let’s consider this from another angle. What’s the point of this motto? How is God supposed to react? Does it make him happy? Does it tell him anything new? Does it remind him that we care, just in case he’s sad? Is it a magic charm or a spell? Are we sweet-talking God so that he does nice things for America?

I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s not me who’s offensive—it’s this motto and those who are behind it. Naturally, Christians take very seriously their relationship with God, but how shallow do politicians think Christians’ faith is, when they put this motto on money or on buildings? If they must steal the prestige of the U.S. government to bolster Christians’ faith?

Or maybe this motto has nothing to do with heaven but is firmly grounded here on earth. It’s pretty clearly a gift given by politicians to their Christian supporters, the solution to an invented problem, and a subversion of the First Amendment.

Ceremonial deism

To see how shallow the motivation behind this motto is, consider a similar problem, the “under God” phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance. Think about how that part of the Pledge goes: “one nation, under God indivisible!” Right before the word “indivisible” was inserted the very divisive phrase “under God.”

In court challenges, those in favor of these religious phrases have tipped their hand. “Oh, c’mon,” they say. “This isn’t an imposition of Christianity! These tired phrases have been used so much that they amount to nothing more than ‘ceremonial deism.’ ”

That’s the retreat that advocates for these godly phrases have taken—they dismiss them as merely “ceremonial deism.” They see the problem, so they say that “In God We Trust” is just something you say, without any real meaning, like “How do you do?”

Think about how this inverts things. Those who want “In God We Trust” say that it has only a ceremonial meaning, while others must point out the very obvious Christian claim in this divisive phrase. But if Christians see this as a relatively meaningless phrase with no significant Christian content, then drop it!

“In God We Trust” in Clark County

About five years ago, I attended a public meeting in Vancouver, Washington, the county seat of Clark County. The Clark County Board of Councilors had decided that, among their many pressing matters of business, they should spend most of a day deciding if “In God We Trust” should go up on the wall in their public hearing room.

For hours, the councilors heard comments, first in favor of the slogan and then against it. Each was given applause by partisans of that viewpoint. Anyone who thought this was not a divisive issue left that meeting with no doubt.

Since I live in a different county in Washington, you might say that it wasn’t my business to challenge the wishes of the good people of Clark County, but that’s not who was pushing for this. There was no groundswell of local demand. Instead, an organization from California was pushing local governments nationwide to put “In God We Trust” on the walls in government buildings.

Imagine attending a council meeting as a non-Christian and seeing “In God We Trust” glaring down at you. How welcome would that citizen feel? Imagine instead it was a Muslim slogan in Arabic. Or a Hindu slogan in Sanskrit. Or a Satanic slogan or 666. If “Allahu Akbar” is offensive on the wall, if it violates the First Amendment, why is “In God We Trust” appropriate?

We’ve been here before

We’ve seen this in our annual celebration of the War on Christmas. You’ll have a city hall that puts up a manger display every year. Then a freethought group says that this is fine on private property but not city property; please take it down. So the next year, the city allows all groups to have holiday displays, and you get Festivus poles, freethought slogans, and celebrations of Roman Saturnalia or Norse Yule plus seasonal displays from other religions. Predictably, Christian groups complain, and the next year you have nothing on public property, and the Christian focus turns to where it belongs, Christmas displays on private property like churches.

Why is this always so hard? Why not admit that the government elevating Christianity over other religions is against the rules and just stay out of religion? Can elected officials just get it right the first time? And, to the point at hand, why is it not obvious that with “In God We Trust,” government is unfairly benefitting Christianity?

What’s the solution?

Consider the motto that we discarded, E Pluribus Unum, which means, “Out of Many, One.” This has been the motto on the Great Seal since 1782. America is composed of people who came from all over the world to pull in the same direction to make one great country. “Out of Many, One” was tailor-made for the United States, but we flushed it down the toilet in favor of “In God We Trust,” a baggy one-size-fits-all suit that could be worn by a hundred countries.

Politicians often seem deaf to reason, and this issue can seem like an uphill battle, but let me suggest one small bit of civil disobedience: cross out the “God” on your money. Let people see you do it. Tell them why if they ask.

“In God We Trust” is divisive, but that’s what some politicians live for. They invent problems that they can solve (or better: not solve). “God will be annoyed unless we tell him how much we love him, so vote for me so I can support a godly motto!”

Or, we could respect the First Amendment, the friend of every citizen, Christian and non-Christian.

In this election year, we’ve seen the problems with divisive politics (as if we needed a reminder). “In God We Trust” is ceremonial and meaningless, God doesn’t need it, and it’s divisive. It’s the solution to no problem.

Bring back our motto. Let’s return to E Pluribus Unum, a motto for all.

.

William Lane Craig replies to my attack on faith statements

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A few months ago, I wrote “Faith statements and a call for honesty in Christian scholarship,” an expansion of my earlier criticism about faith statements. I sent a shortened version to Christian apologist William Lane Craig (WLC), and he replied.

As you might imagine, I have quite a bit to say in response to Craig’s article, but first let me remind you of my position. Faith statements hurt Christian institutions because they constrain their staff. Scholars at the Discovery Institute or Answers in Genesis or a Christian university who sign a statement that includes the virgin birth claim (to take just one Christian claim) is publicly stating that they will never write a paper that concludes otherwise. If they ever do tell us, “And that’s why the virgin birth is history, not just a story,” there’s no point in believing it since we knew beforehand that that’s what they would conclude before they began any research. Was that their conclusion after an honest evaluation of the evidence, or did they cherry pick their data? In short, is that the researcher or the faith statement talking?

Other professions have resolved this problem of constraints on scholars’ freedom. Conflicts like this must be disclosed according to the professional standards of journalists, medical researchers, historians, scientists, and those in the legal profession. If religious scholars want to sit at the adults’ table, they need similar professional standards. I’d like to see, “The author of this paper is bound by the faith statement of [Institution], which can be found at [URL].”

This would be a simple statement of fact, but if it looks embarrassing, then you begin to see the problem.

Freedom of speech demands that scholars be able to say what they want, but professional standards demand that they disclose constraints on their research such as faith statements.

Harvard changed [their motto]. They wouldn’t be where they are now if they hadn’t.

WLC strikes back

WLC began his response with a clarification.

Notice that I speak of “doctrinal statements,” not “faith statements,” as you do. Characterizing such doctrinal statements as “faith statements” carries the connotation that such doctrinal affirmations are made by faith alone, without a reasoned basis.

This sounds like someone agrees with me that “faith” = “belief poorly grounded in evidence”! He needs to tell his fellow evangelicals.

I don’t see how this avoids the problem. If “faith statements” might be held without a reasoned basis, why think that “doctrinal statements” are any different? You’d need to first show that doctrine is more grounded in evidence than faith is.

They seem to be synonyms, but “doctrinal statement” is more popular on the internet than “faith statement.” I’ll try to use the former.

This can’t be that big an issue for WLC, because at his own site, you’ll find a statement of faith! (h/t commenter richard)

Doctrinal statements create community?

WLC said that I don’t understand the value in doctrinal statements.

The primary purpose of such statements is to help build a community of scholars that has a certain ethos founded on a common worldview. Those of us who teach at such institutions value a Christian community in which problems can be explored from within a shared worldview and in which students can be provided an education which reflects a Christian worldview.

You want a worldview? How about Veritas (“truth”)? That’s what Harvard uses.

As for having a worldview shared among the faculty, try a job interview, or read some of the candidate’s published work. That’s what conventional universities do.

And think of what this says about the strength of the Christian worldview that students at a Christian college need to be protected from contrary opinions. This admits that Christianity can’t compete. People can be indoctrinated as children, but they very rarely convert in to the faith as adults, and that’s the reason for the Christian cocoon.

WLC again:

Doctrinal statements are especially important in maintaining such an ethos intergenerationally. We all know that universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were founded as Christian institutions dedicated to training men for the ministry or for missionary service. But as they have drifted over the generations far from their Christian moorings, they have become secularized and lost their Christian identity.

Oops—you don’t want to go there. Ivy League schools are stellar institutions now, but they weren’t in their early days. They’re at the top because they embraced evidence and reason and followed it where it went.

Let’s look more closely at that list. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton rank first, ninth, and eighth in Nobel Prizes. One ranking puts them as the second, ninth, and seventh universities in the world. Do you think they’d be there if they were still Christian colleges?

WLC’s alma mater Wheaton College has “For Christ and His Kingdom” as its motto, which is very similar to Harvard’s original motto, “For Christ and Church.” Harvard changed theirs. They wouldn’t be where they are now if they hadn’t.

Continued in part 2.

It is better to debate a question without settling it
than to settle a question without debating it.
— Jeseph Joubert