Matt’s Marvelous Mailbag seeks to provide marginally adequate answers to much better questions about politics, economics, social life, theology, or any potpourri you see fit to have answered. Send questions to mailbag.bereans@gmail.com.  

While I was not originally cheering for them, I do think it’s sort of cool to see Virginia in the championship this year. Team gets humiliated by a 16-seed for the first time in history and then storms back the next year to the championship game? That’s pretty Cinderella-ish to me. But enough about basketball; it’s baseball season now, and we’ve got mailbag questions to get to.

Q: Robert A. Lovett asks: “Sometimes it seems that Christians only consider science in opposition to religion. As a political scientist yourself, what do you think a Christian philosophy of science should look like, and how do you think about your integration of work and faith?”

A: A philosophy of science in 800 words…sure, no problem. But yes, I do understand where the issue stems from. Let’s start with the area where this most obviously and often comes into play: the origins debate. This may be a particularly hot take, but I think this may be one of the all-time ridiculous debates in history. You literally have two camps looking at each other from the trenches throwing grenades back and forth over an issue that neither of them was there to witness, neither of them has the scientific wherewithal to replicate, and neither of them can possibly know absent the invention of time travel. The debate usually ends up going something akin to this interaction*:

• Child: “God made my baby brother.”
• Scientist: “Don’t be ridiculous, your parents made your baby brother through the reproductive cycle.”
• Child’s parent: “You godless societal usurper; you’re trying to destroy the foundations of our moral society.”
• Scientist: You four-legged, ignorant rube. I’m going to expose you to my academic community.”

Alright class, who’s right? Exactly, they’re both knuckleheads. Yes, God is the ultimate cause, but he has processes in place in which we participate. The presence of one doesn’t negate the activity of the other. Now, what do Christians do about Genesis? Read it, hopefully, but do understand that Genesis 1-11 is primarily written as a polemic against other nations’ theologians, and if you don’t believe me, I will send you the scholarly articles written by textual critics and biblical scholars to prove it. The points the authors of that passage are making are theological in nature. They’re saying, “Hey, you see all this stuff around us? Yahweh made that, not [insert other god of choosing]. He’s the one ultimately responsible for this, and you should worship him instead.” The point is that I don’t really care what the technical process of the earth’s creation is (beyond a morbid curiosity and sense of wonder), and the biblical authors probably didn’t either because that’s not what Genesis 1-11 is aiming at. In all honesty, I find strengths and weaknesses with both standard evolution and creation theories of origin (not ‘was God behind it’ mind you, more process related), and that’s perfectly fine. The point is that you need not get your tails in a collective knot over this.

Now, that being said, let’s all gather round the atheist fish barrel and take some pressure out on a couple of carp. There is a body of thought from many atheists that if you don’t believe in standard evolutionary theory, you are incapable of doing good science. Yes, anyone who believes in something other than molecules-to-man, big bang theory must obviously be shrouded by a haunting apparition of scientific dissonance and thus be incapable of even basic math. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you happy heathens, but I just so happen to know plenty of evolution apostates who know plenty well how to do physics and chemistry and math and engineering and any other good, wholesome science you please. You have to be suffering from the most monstrous of mental disconnects if you believe all of science — which is fundamentally repeatable, observable, and current — is predicated upon belief in an unrepeatable, unobservable, historical event.

In truth, there is no reason why religion and science need to be enemies. You don’t have to compromise biblical truth to do science, and you don’t need to reject science to accept the Bible. Moreover, once you move past the origins debate, the supposed conflicts between science and religion seem to fall away pretty quickly. I don’t really know of some great struggle between the book of Isaiah and a K-truss bridge, but I suppose there could something there. Past the origins debate, the question really becomes one of ethics, but I think we’ll save that for a later time.

Q: Daniel asks: “Do you believe for a professing Christian there is any reason (logic) for not believing in the inerrancy of Scripture?”

A: I don’t know how many of you feel the same, but I’ve always thought there are phrases we throw around as Christians without possessing a solid understanding of what we really mean when we say it. “Inerrancy” is one of those words, so let’s see how much trouble we can get into by picking apart what we mean. I should say at the outset that, no, there’s no reason to doubt Scripture, but we have some things that we need to clear up.

Let’s recall from the previous question what the primary purpose of the Bible is. That purpose is preeminently theological. Does the Bible have historical, moral, and other elements to it? Absolutely, but those are not foremost in the authors’ minds, and it shows in some of their writing. For example, one of the classic problems posed by skeptics is the large numbers issue like what is found when the Israelites leave Egypt, and the numbers seem way too big for the events described. Well, there’s a perfectly reasonable answer available, namely that if you study the literature from that time period you’ll find that everybody inflated their numbers for one reason or another; it was standard practice, and no one really thought twice about it. “Oh, but doesn’t that mean we can’t trust the accuracy of the events.” No, it means that people wrote differently back then, and you need to go “get inside their head,” so to speak, before you start spouting off one way or another. “Aww, but that takes a long time to do.” Wow, imagine that; in order to be highly informed about something you have to spend significant time learning about it and remain humble along the way. The novelty of it all…. (note: that bit is for all of us, myself included).

I have said once before, and I’ll keep saying that if you want to fully understand the ‘what, how, and why’ of the biblical authors, you need to approach the Bible from an Ancient Near Eastern context. Why must you do this? Because that’s when they lived, bucko. It’s not like you’re going to find an alternate theory of salvation or a new Christology by taking that route, but when it comes to the inerrancy issue, it is critical that you understand what the authors are and are not saying. If you’re asking me whether everything in the Bible is 100% literally, scientifically accurate then of course I’m going to answer ‘no.’ The biblical authors lived in a largely pre-scientific era, and that shows in some of their writing. So why do we get so uppity when something seems scientifically off in the Bible? Because we’re moderns, and we filter everything through a strict, fact-gathering filter. We want to know exactly how a thing happened; the biblical authors are far more interested in theological messaging. Again, does that mean the events never happened? No, that’s not a necessary or even logical implication. It just means they have different purposes from us.

One other way this question usually gets interpreted is in regards to the intelligibility of Scripture. How do we know we are interpreting its words correctly? Getting the context correct is king here, but more broadly I think we can find correct interpretations simply because we do it all the time with literally every other form of communication in existence. It is honestly one of the most astonishing things to me to watch people try to twist their way out of accepting the Bible’s words. It is practically axiomatic that we can communicate intelligibly to one another, be it through the written or spoken word. Even when we use satire or sarcasm, people are fairly adept at catching the meaning. But when some people come to Scripture, you would think they had just had their cerebrum removed the way they hem and haw about, “well, I mean, we just can’t know, I mean how can any of us know, blah, blah, hem, hem, haw, haw, blah, blah, blithering on.” The correct response to those people is to treat them like the postmodern stooge or raging cynic that they are. Yes, there are difficult passages in Scripture, but that is no excuse for the deliberate obfuscation these people create. At some level, I often wonder if it’s just a ploy to avoid the reality being presented to them.

In the end, the problem we find is that both sides often substitute accurate Bible study with something else. Christians do it because they have a preferred system they’d like to twist the Bible to (i.e. – they really love John Calvin, or they have an undying adherence to what the Catholic church says), and atheists do it because it’s much easier to take out a strawman than a coherent masterpiece of literature assembled by multiple authors into a single, unifying message (you can see where my own biases obviously lie). God knew the context in which He was delivering His word, and He is quite fine with the final product: an intelligible, inspired book written by a myriad of human authors to lead humanity back to Himself.

Consequently, if you’re willing to put in some effort, here’s a good book to start with on this topic.

Q: Robert also asks: “Gary Johnson won nearly 5 million votes as a Libertarian candidate in 2016. Any thoughts on what happens to those voters in 2020?”

A: I think he loses a good deal of them, apologies in advance to all my libertarian acquaintances. I can’t help but think that a good number of Johnson’s voters were disillusioned Republicans and Democrats alike, owing to the candidates involved. With 2020, however, I find it difficult to believe that people will be quite as willing to stand to the sidelines with the narrative that is being built around the stakes. In short, I’d be shocked if Johnson replicates those kinds of results.

Q: Robert finally asks: “When you wake up to President John Hickenlooper in a year and a half, your first thought will be what?”

A: “Huh…the multiverse does exist…”

A Final Reflection (new thing I’m trying, hopefully this doesn’t break the flow too much):

About a week ago, I was riding back from a Nationals game on the metro listening to a podcast called Pints with Aquinas with local Aussie Matt Fradd as host. The topic in play was whether or not the US should have dropped the atomic bombs on Japan in WWII, and Matt’s guest host for the day made the argument against having dropped the bomb. Now I’ve pondered this question before, both by myself and in group discussion, and I’ve always come down on the ‘yes’ side of the equation. I walked away from that episode still on the ‘yes’ side, but Matt’s guest did say something that gave me significant pause and is still prompting personal reflection. He said, “One of the common arguments for dropping the bomb is the sheer cost of life that it would have taken to invade Japan. But I ask you brothers and sisters, is it better that we be efficient or that we learn to love?”

Now with respect particularly to the bombing of Japan, I don’t think this argument applies quite as neatly as the guest would prefer, but I have started wondering about this question in application to other areas of life. One such area I’ve always struggled with is giving to those who beg on the streets, and I think this is a good place to pose that question: “Is it better that we be efficient or that we learn to love?” I acknowledge the arguments against giving wantonly to beggar: they’ll use the money for alcohol or drugs, it incentivizes them to be bums, they really ought to go to the homeless shelter. But is the onus for their behavior on us? Could we not offer food and water to them? May it perhaps be wiser for the bettering of our own natures to give and learn to love? Do we not so often justify our actions on other grounds to ignore the very real and present needs around us?

The challenge has plenty of other areas for application, but it remains the same at all times at its core. So as you go through your week and see the brokenness and hurt of this world, I would simply challenge you as one believer to another: “Is it better that we be efficient or that we learn to love?”

*Credit to Mike Heiser for this example.