The Religious Foundation of Groundhog Day

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Groundhogs and their connection with ChristianityWe’re all familiar with the major astronomical milestones in the year—the summer and winter solstices, when our hemisphere is tipped maximally toward or away from the sun, and the spring and fall equinoxes, when each day worldwide has roughly 12 hours of sunlight and 12 of darkness. These dates separate the seasons—the spring equinox marks the beginning of spring, and so on. They are to the calendar what north, south, east, and west are to the compass.
In the same way that the angles between the four cardinal compass points are divided by four ordinal points (northeast, southeast, and so on), the seasons defined by the four astronomical dates are divided by four cross-quarter days. These were Gaelic festivals in medieval times. They are Imbolc (February 2), Beltane (May 1), Lughnasadh (August 1), and Samhain (October 31). Imbolc (pronounced i-molk’) lines up with our Groundhog Day.
Most of us are familiar with the idea that on Halloween (All Hallows’ Eve, or Gaelic Samhain), spirits from the next world could enter ours, which is why ghosts and the dead are associated with Halloween. In Gaelic mythology, the veil between our world and the next became thinner not only on Samhain but for each of the cross-quarter days. These days provided opportunities for divining the future using information from beyond.
In the same way that Christmas subsumed pagan holidays on the winter solstice like Saturnalia and Yule, the Christian holiday of Candlemas subsumed Imbolc (February 2). Candlemas celebrates the presentation of Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem 40 days after his birth.
The Celtic goddess Brigid (or Brigit) was associated with Imbolc, but she too was subsumed into Christianity as Saint Brigid.
Both pagans and the Christians who followed them observed nature on Imbolc/Candlemas to glean clues to how much longer winter would last. Would it go the full six-and-a-half weeks until the spring equinox or would it be a more gentle winter?
German immigrants to America had used hedgehogs to help predict the weather. If it was sunny and the hedgehog could see its shadow, winter would go the distance. But if it was cloudy, winter would be shorter. With no hedgehogs in America, they switched to groundhogs. (The two animals are not closely related, but their habitats are similar.)
This Imbolc, whether you follow Punxsutawney Phil (the center of the biggest Groundhog Day celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania) or some lesser-known groundhog prognosticator, keep in mind the spiritual origins of the tradition.

That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut.
Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut
than you have in your head?
You can look it up.
I know some of you are going to say,
“I did look it up, and that’s not true.”
That’s because you looked it up in a book.
Next time, look it up in your gut.
I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works.
— Stephen Colbert

(This is a modified version of a post originally posted 2/1/12)
Photo credit: wvholst

It’s a Pro-Slavery Free-For-All!

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Our little friend William Lane Craig is up to his old shenanigans. God apparently can’t defend himself against charges that he condones slavery, so Craig steps into the breach to do it for him.

We need to help [skeptics] come to grips with the fact that they have not studied the Hebrew text carefully and in many cases simply have a misunderstanding of the text. So-called “slavery” in the Old Testament is a prime example.

Why, I do believe I’m being condescended to! But Craig isn’t alone in his view. This idea that biblical slavery was very different from American slavery—indeed, that it was a good thing—is common within many Christian blogs.

The slavery referred to in the Bible was a fundamentally different practice [than that practiced in the West]. Some translations try to indicate this by using the word “bondservant.” … Biblical “slavery” was not race-based (Stand to Reason blog).
The “New Testament Slavery” of the Ancient Near East … has little in common with the “New World Slavery” … of our American ancestors (Please Convince Me blog).

Let’s compare these two approaches to slavery. They’re a lot more similar than the apologists will admit.
During U.S. history, we had two kinds of servitude. There was indentured servitude, where Europeans would come to America to work for fellow Europeans in return for payment of their transportation. This servitude would typically last for five years or so.
And, of course, we had slavery. Slaves were almost always not Europeans. They were slaves for life, as were their children.
The Old Testament outlines the very same categories of servitude. Fellows Jews could be slaves, but only for a limited time:

[God said:] If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free … (Exodus 21:2).

That’s pretty much indentured servitude, and that’s the “slavery” that many Christians like to point to. They often ignore the other kind:

[God said:] Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. … You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life … (Lev. 25:44–6).

Slavery in the Old Testament was regulated, just like commerce. And, like commerce, slavery was kosher from God’s standpoint.
Granted, slavery was common in this part of the world. During New Testament times, as many as a third of the population of Italy were slaves. We can see the Bible as just a product of its times, but wouldn’t a book inspired by the omniscient and holy creator of the universe be better than that? And why were the Greek Stoics the first to condemn slavery and not God’s chosen people?
Now, back to Craig. Determined to force-fit slavery into a godly world, he says:

I think that [the point of the book Is God a Moral Monster? is] that our understanding of [slavery] is shaped by the experience of the American South prior to the Civil War and that what is described in the Old Testament is actually a sort of anti-poverty program designed to help the poor in the absence of a strong national government.

That’s an interesting spin. But is this so called “anti-poverty program” a moral institution? It must be, since God defines the rules for slavery and so obviously approves of it. But Craig has dug himself into a hole—either indentured servitude is moral for society today, or morality changes over time and we discard the idea of objective morality. Neither can be a pleasing option for Craig.
The problem is worse with slavery for life. Surely we can agree that this biblical institution is wrong today. Either it was wrong in Old Testament times, and God made a mistake in giving rules for it, or it was right then and morality changes with time. Here again Craig finds himself in a difficult spot.
How do Christians rationalize the fact that the Ten Commandments have “Don’t covet” but not “Don’t enslave anyone”? When we read the Bible, we see the work of Man, not the hand of God. The Bible was simply a reflection of their society.
Christians who justify slavery in the Bible are determined to shoehorn an ancient religion into modern society, but the result is as out of place as a Neanderthal in a tuxedo. My advice: they should stop embarrassing themselves.

None are more hopelessly enslaved
than those who falsely believe they are free.
— Johann Wolfgang van Goethe

Photo credit: Wikimedia

A Deist Argument Is Inadequate

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Do the Christian apologetics point to God any more than Zeus?The arguments for God in vogue among the Christian apologists that I listen to have a curious flaw. I’m surprised when they take little notice of this.
Consider the following popular arguments and see if you can find the common feature. In-depth discussions of these arguments deserve their own posts, but I’ve added brief (and incomplete) summaries to remind you what these arguments claim.
Popular Christian Apologetics

  • Cosmological Argument: “Someone had to get everything started, therefore God”
  • Moral Argument: “Objective morals exist, and who but God could create them?”
  • Transcendental Argument: “What grounds logic? God does.”
  • Ontological Argument: “If ‘God’ is the greatest possible being that we can imagine, and a being existing is greater than being imaginary, then this greatest being must exist.”
  • Design Argument: “Just look around you and you’ll see the marvelously complex design of a Designer.”
  • Fine Tuning Argument: “The constants that define the universe are fine-tuned for life, therefore God.”
  • Argument from Incredulity: “It’s all just so … so incredibly complex! Therefore, God.”

What’s the common feature? It’s that these are all deist arguments. If I bought into any one of them, I’d only be agreeing that some deity (or deities) created the universe. But which one? These arguments are as good for Islam or Shintoism as Christianity and Judaism.
(This reminds me of the famous Sidney Harris cartoon with the punch line “I think you should be more explicit here in step 2.”)
And yet the apologists are often unaware of the problem. They finish their deist argument with a “Ta-dah!” and a sweep of the hand and think that they’ve made a sale, but they’ve got a long way to go to convince me that their particular deity is the real one and it’s actually all those other ones that are mere human inventions.
Maybe they count on ambiguity to help. They conclude that God created everything and—whaddya know?—their god is named “God.” I’ve written before about this odd confusion of names. It’s like a cat named “Cat.”
One noteworthy exception is John Warwick Montgomery, an apologist from an earlier generation. He takes the opposite approach and first uses the New Testament to argue the resurrection of Jesus. From there, he tries to build the rest of the Christian worldview. This approach is no more convincing, but at least it avoids this problem with deist arguments.
How Can We Access the Supernatural?
If we explain the world in a Christian way, God is active in our natural world, and we can see his hand in Nature. This runs into a problem that (IMO) is for Christians at least as big a problem as the Problem of Evil: the Problem of Divine Hiddenness. If God enters into our world and is eager for a relationship, why the mystery? Why make things so difficult? Why make our world look exactly like a world without a god?
And if we imagine the opposite, that God isn’t particularly eager for a relationship or isn’t motivated to provide compelling evidence that he exists, then we’re back in the deist camp. We have a deity who indeed exists, but we’re on our own to show that he exists anywhere but in our minds. And if the deity hasn’t provided a conduit between the Natural and the Supernatural, why imagine that natural techniques (prayer, meditation, or logic, say) could prove the existence of the supernatural? If God is just sitting there and not helping us out, how can we show that he exists?
Christians sometimes argue that science is incapable of detecting the supernatural. But keep in mind that the boundary of “natural” expands with time. Seeing through opaque objects was supernatural before X-rays, for example. And even if science can’t detect supernatural beings, what makes those Christians imagine that they can?
A couple of analogies come to mind. Imagine using integers (1, 2, 3, …) with addition and subtraction and trying to creating anything but more integers. You couldn’t reach 7.65, the square root of 2, or pi, for example. Or, imagine a two-dimensional Flatlander trying to prove the existence of three-dimensional space. Sure, he can imagine it, but that’s hardly a proof.
It seems to me that our pointing to evidence of the supernatural with a deist argument is like creating all real numbers using addition and subtraction on integers, or a Flatlander proving the existence of 3-space. Sure, we can imagine something more, but that’s no proof and not particularly compelling evidence.

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?  
— William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, act III, scene i

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Pushback on Abortion

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More on the abortion questionIn my recent pro-choice post, I argued that personhood during gestation is a spectrum—a newborn is a person, but the single cell at the other end of the spectrum is not. (Feel free to substitute a different word for “person.”)
This seems to be an obvious argument, but there are many who insist (1) that there is no meaningful difference and that the spectrum doesn’t exist and (2) their interpretation should be imposed on the rest of the country by law.
I got a prompt rebuttal by fellow Patheos blogger Tara Edelschick at the Homeschool Chronicles blog, and I’d like to go through Tara’s points. She begins with, “I’m an evangelical, homeschooling, anti-choice woman” and then adds, “I’m also a feminist who is against the death penalty, voted for Ralph Nader every time that was an option, and supported Obama in each of the last two elections.”
Looks like Tara doesn’t fit into the typical evangelical box—in fact, her post was titled “The Constraining Abortion Box.” Let a thousand flowers bloom!
I didn’t have much to object to in her first point, so we’re off to a good start.
When Does Life Begin?
In point two, she responds to my saying that, as a father who has helped raise two children from babies to adults, I’m an expert on “babies” and reject that idea that a single invisible cell is one. She said:

Is he really claiming to be an expert on when life begins because he is a father?

Perhaps we’re talking past each other. First, I said that I’m an expert just on what a “baby” is, and something you need a microscope to see isn’t a baby. In other words, if you want to see both ends of the spectrum as a baby, that’s fine, but don’t impose that conclusion on the rest of us.
Second, when life begins was never the subject, but I doubt that we have much disagreement here. The new life with its unique DNA obviously begins at conception, though you could argue that, since fertilization isn’t abiogenesis, it isn’t a beginning but a continuation of life.
Freedom to Choose
She said, “I want to hear the voice of God. I understand that many fellow citizens have no such desire. I respect that….” And I respect that she wants to hear the voice of God. The United States Constitution establishes many important freedoms, and she has the right to that. Back to the topic, she can choose whether an abortion is right or wrong for her, and she can encourage her opinion on others. Where I object is when she wants to impose her conclusion that abortion is wrong on all of us. (It seems that she wants Roe overturned because in her subsequent post she says, “In general, women should not be able to choose to end their pregnancies.”)
Back to the subject of what “baby” means, she says, “Even a clear scientific definition of what constitutes a baby will not bring us to consensus.” It may well be that nothing will bring us to consensus, but as for what “baby” means, the relevant Merriam-Webster definition is pretty straightforward: “an extremely young child; especially: infant.”
Given this definition, you can see why I object to the spectrum-collapsing approach of calling the single cell a baby.
Back to the Spectrum Argument
On to point three. In my post, I listed a number of familiar before-and-after situations and culminated with “[and] a single fertilized human egg cell is very different from a one-trillion-cell newborn baby.” Her response:

Yup. That’s true. And I don’t know a single person who disagrees.

She should read the comments at my blog! Accepting the significant differences between the two ends of the spectrum is impossible to most of my Christian commenters.

Acknowledging that there is a spectrum of meaning between zygote and college graduate does not mean, as Bob suggests, that one would need to be pro-choice.

Let me back up and note that the goal of my spectrum argument is modest. I simply want to attack the argument: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is wrong to kill a human life; therefore (3) abortion is wrong. We need to think of a word (“person,” for example) that can be applied to the newborn but can’t be applied to the single cell.
It sounds like Tara and I are on the same page, which is a point of agreement worth celebrating, and yet she still thinks that killing that single cell is wrong. Fair enough—that she consider my argument is all I can ask. What I have a problem with is her wanting to impose her conclusions on the rest of us.
So We Agree on the Spectrum—What’s Next?
She moves on to the question of where pro-choicers would draw the line.

Is [the line] at birth? Why? Why not a day before birth? Or three months before birth? What about after birth but before the umbilical cord is cut? Why not a couple weeks after birth? What’s the difference? And who are you to decide?

I sense that Tara sees these questions as some sort of show stopper, but how does society decide any tough moral issue? For example: what should the prison term be for robbery? For attempted robbery where nothing was stolen? For robbery with a gun? For robbery with an injury? For robbery with a death? Is the death penalty a possibility? Are extenuating circumstances relevant and, if so, how are they factored in? And on and on.
We have law-making bodies at various levels through the country, and one hopes that the relevant laws are decided with expert input and measured deliberation. Law making does its imperfect best to answer questions like these and thousands more.
Indeed, Tara’s questions have already been answered many times. In each state, a combination of state law and federal law defines when an abortion is legal and the various exceptions that might apply.
Who’s to Decide?
The most insightful comment I’ve gotten on my many posts in support of abortion was this one:

Have no illusions, if abortion really were murder, it would come as an instinctive reaction from women. It would come with such force that men would be confused by the average woman’s revulsion towards abortion.

In the same way that society trusts parents to raise their children properly, stepping in only when it’s clear that something has gone wrong, I want to trust the instincts of the pregnant woman. These instincts come from the front lines of the issue, from the person who understands both the importance of the potential person inside her as well as any reasons why a new life many not be a good idea.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion
will legislate its creed into law
if it acquires the political power to do so.
— Robert A. Heinlein

Photo credit: Wikimedia

A Defense of Abortion Rights: The Spectrum Argument

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Today is the 40th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade. In honor of this important support for fundamental rights, here is a reposting of my primary pro-choice argument.
abortion and the spectrum of personhoodThe pro-life position is often stated this way: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is murder to take a human life; therefore (3) abortion is murder and should be considered immoral.
We’ll return to that idea shortly, but first let’s look more closely at human life. I argue that there is a spectrum of personhood during gestation.
Consider a continuous spectrum from blue to green. Where’s the dividing line? Where does blue end and green begin? We can argue about this, but we agree that blue is not green. The two ends are very different.
What age is the dividing line between child and adult? Twelve years? Eighteen? Twenty-one? It’s a spectrum, and there is no objectively correct line. Again, the line is debatable but no one doubts that a child and an adult are quite different.
An acorn is not a tree, a silkworm is not a dress, a water molecule is not a whirlpool, a piece of hay is not a haystack, and 20 chicken eggs are not a henhouse of chickens. Similarly, a single fertilized human egg cell is very different from a one-trillion-cell newborn baby.
But the vast difference in the number of cells only begins to define the vast difference between the two ends of the spectrum. At one end, we have arms and legs, fingers and fingernails, liver and pancreas, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, stomach and digestive system—in fact, every body part that a healthy person has. And at the other, we have none of this. We have … a single cell. In between is a smooth progression over time, with individual components developing and maturing. That’s the spectrum we’re talking about.
Let’s approach this another way. Consider a brain with 100 billion neurons versus a single neuron. The single neuron doesn’t think 10–11 times as fast. It doesn’t think at all. The differentiation of the cells into different cell types and their interconnections in the newborn may count for even more than the enormous difference in the number of cells.
Note also that the difference between a newborn and an adult is trivial compared to the difference between the cell and the 1,000,000,000,000-cell newborn.
Some pro-life advocates argue that the humans at either end of this spectrum are identical in every meaningful way and use the term “baby” for every point along the spectrum. I’ve raised babies (with help, of course), and that makes me something of an expert in identifying babies. As an expert, let me assure you that a single invisible cell isn’t a baby.
If eager expectant parents want to use the term “baby,” not a problem. It’s when pro-lifers want to impose that term on others to constrain their rights that we have a problem.
This inept attempt to collapse the spectrum by using the term “baby” for both ends is like the slogan used by the animal rights group PETA: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” In other words, there is no spectrum here: vermin are the same as livestock, which are the same as pets, which are the same as people.
No, a rat is not a boy, blue is not green, and a single cell is not a newborn baby.
A lot revolves around what we call this spectrum. Do we call it Homo sapiens? With this term, there is no spectrum, because the species is the same—the single cell is Homo sapiens, as is the newborn baby.
What about “human”? That seems a good name for the spectrum—that is, we would call the newborn human but not the cell. Or, we might call the cell human but not a human. Keep in mind that live tissue samples are cells with human DNA and they’re not “humans.” Would they suddenly become humans if, through technological magic, they were made totipotent so that they could grow into a fetus? Pro-lifers would likely insist on using “human” for both ends of the spectrum.
All right, can we all agree on “person”? No, I’ve heard pro-lifers reject this as well.
This game where pro-lifers deny names to the spectrum quickly gets tiring. I really don’t care what the spectrum is called—humanity, personhood, human development, like-me-ness, whatever—call it what you want as long as the naming acknowledges the stark difference between the newborn (with arms and legs and a circulatory system and a nervous system and eyes and ears and so on) and the single fertilized human egg cell.
Speaking of games, the pro-life argument does seem a bit like a game, despite the serious consequences. The Slactivist blog and Valerie Tarico’s blog have shown that today’s foaming-at-the-mouth pro-life stance by evangelicals was not held by their predecessors 30 years ago.
Now, back to the original pro-life argument: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is murder to take a human life; therefore (3) abortion is murder and should be considered immoral. This argument fails because it is oblivious to the spectrum.
Pro-lifers claim to be celebrating life, but equating a newborn baby with a single cell and demanding that everyone else be bound by their beliefs doesn’t celebrate life, it denigrates it.

To be forced to give birth to a child against her will
is a peculiarly personal violation of [a woman’s] freedom.
— Disciples of Christ, 1978

Human life develops on a continuum from conception to birth.
— United Church of Christ, 1978

The fetus is not reckoned as a soul.
— Bruce Waltke, Dallas Theological Seminary, 1968

(source of quotes)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

The Perplexing Monty Hall Problem and How It Undercuts Christianity

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In keeping with the Bayes Theorem dose of probability theory last week, here’s a very approachable probability problem.
how the Monty Hall Problem relates to ChristianityI first came across the fascinating Monty Hall Problem 20 years ago:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?”
Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Most people think that it doesn’t matter and that there’s no benefit to switching. They’re wrong, but more on that in a moment.
Humans have a hard time with probability problems like this one. You’d think that we’d be fairly comfortable with basic probability, but apparently not.
Here’s another popular probability problem: how many people must you have in a group before it becomes more likely than not that any two of them have the same birthday?
The surprising answer is 23. In other words, imagine two football teams on the field (11 per team) and then throw in a referee, and it’s more than likely that you’ll find a shared birthday. If your mind balks at this, test it at your next large gathering.
Now, back to the Monty Hall Problem. A good way to understand problems like this is to push them to an extreme. Imagine, for example, that there are not three doors but 300. There’s still just one good prize, with the rest being goats (the bad prize).
So you pick a door—say number #274. There’s a 1/300 chance you’re right. This needs to be emphasized: you’re almost certainly wrong. Then the game show host opens 298 of the remaining doors: 1, 2, 3, and so on. He skips door #59 and your door, #274. Every open door shows a goat.
Now: should you switch? Of course you should—your initial pick is still almost surely wrong. The probabilities are 1/300 for #274 and 299/300 for #59.
Another way to look at the problem: do you want to stick with your initial door or do you want all the other doors? Switching is simply choosing all the other doors, because (thanks to the open doors) you know the only door within that set that could be the winner.
One lesson from this is that our innate understanding of probability is poor, and a corollary is that there’s a big difference between confidence and accuracy. That is, just because one’s confidence in a belief is high doesn’t mean that the belief is accurate. This little puzzle does a great job of illustrating this.
Perhaps you’ve already anticipated the connection with choosing a religion. Imagine you’ve picked your religion—religion #274, let’s say. For most people, their adoption of a religion is like picking a door in this game show. In the game show, you don’t weigh evidence before selecting your door; you pick it randomly. And most people adopt the dominant religion of their upbringing. As with the game show, the religion in which you grew up is also assigned to you at random.
Now imagine an analogous game, the Game of Religion, with Truth as host. Out of 300 doors (behind each of which is a religion), the believer picks door #274. Truth flings open door after door and we see nothing but goats. Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Mormonism—all goats. As you suspected, they’re just amalgams of legend, myth, tradition, and wishful thinking.
Few of us seriously consider or even understand the religions Winti, Candomblé, Mandaeism, or the ancient religions of Central America, for example. Luckily for the believer, Truth gets around to those doors too and opens them to reveal goats.
Here’s where the analogy between the two games fails. First, Truth opens all the other doors. Only the believer’s pick, door #274, is still closed. Second, there was never a guarantee that any door contained a true religion! Since the believer likely came to his beliefs randomly, why imagine that his choice is any more likely than the others to hold anything of value?
Every believer plays the Game of Religion, and every believer believes that his religion is the one true religion, with goats behind all the hundreds of other doors. But maybe there’s a goat behind every door. And given that the lesson from the 300-door Monty Hall game is that the door you randomly picked at first is almost certainly wrong, why imagine that yours is the only religion that’s not mythology?

For reason is not just a debater’s tool
for idly refracting arguments into premises,
but a lens for bringing into focus the features of human flourishing.
— “What Is Marriage?” by Girgis, George, and Anderson

This is a modified version of a post originally published 11/28/11.