All truth is God’s truth. —Augustine
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. —David Hume
Bertrand Russell said, “Perhaps you may say that it would be rather a pity if Christian education were to cease, because you would then get no more Rationalists.” I concur (though I admit I can’t tell if he was being sarcastic). It was Christian ways of thinking about the world which brought me to where I am now. Not standard evangelical youth group or men’s prayer breakfast ways of thinking; but the hard thinking thought by great minds like Calvin, Edwards, Warfield, Piper.
Free Will is a Myth
One of the first Calvinist authors I read thoroughly was Jonathan Edwards. He was much derided in my high school American Lit class for the hellfire of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, but he wrote hundreds of other books and sermons as well. His Freedom of the Will is an epic logical tome of metaphysics, in which he explains that we do things because of our nature, and our wills are bound to that nature.
In Calvinist speak this deals with the Sovereignty of God and the depravity of man. In neuroscience speak it’s biology, the chemicals and neurons in our brains that cause us to do the things we do or think or say.
Science also shows us that we are a social species and have evolved ways to live in community with each other. This is morality. Don’t steal, don’t rape, don’t kill. Despite this fact, there are sociopaths who lack this instinct, and in addition, none of us complies with our instinctual morals perfectly (white lies, outbursts of rage in an otherwise gentle soul, etc.). Calvinists call this total depravity. And neuroscience says it’s biology. It raises the question in terms of the penal system: how strictly do we hold someone responsible for their own actions?
Natural Revelation
They had two foundations: one, the law of nature, and the other, the word of God. The protestants have endeavored to carry on this double process of reasoning, and the result has been a gradual increase of confidence in the law of nature, and a gradual decrease of confidence in the word of God. —Robert Green Ingersoll, Mistakes of Moses
God reveals himself in two ways: in Scripture, and in Nature. Nature does not lie. Rabbi Moses Maimonides taught that reason and science were not contrary to revelation; rather, if there is evidence that seems to contradict the Scriptures, the problem is with your interpretation.
Natural revelation teaches us that whatever we learn from nature is in fact not a deception, but is truth. You can look at a deer and an elk and figure out that they are more closely related to each other than a cat and a frog. You can sail around the world and figure out the earth is round. If there are bones in the ground, and if elements have a half-life, then if the half-life of the potassium in the bones indicates it’s 600 million years old, then that’s what it is. The devil didn’t manipulate the dirt to make it look older. And the paleontologists who analyzed the data aren’t devil-worshipers peddling lies in order to deceive the elect. If the speed of light is 1 light-year per year, and we can see a star that’s a billion light years away, then it means that the star was there a billion years ago.
More liberal theologians have been able to reconcile the age of the earth with the Genesis account through literary criticism, recognizing the creation story as a sort of poem rather than an eyewitness account. But the problem of religion is that scientists are always treated as heretics by the orthodox. So if the doctrine of natural revelation is true, then orthodox religion is therefore invalid and true religion is that which accepts science. But if one argues that the orthodox are not the true church and only the critically-thinking Christians are the true church, then you’re still left with the problem of theodicy: that the Holy Spirit has allowed the established church to deceive billions of people over the last 2000 years.
Natural Law
Natural Law teaches us that the moral law is not something that has to be imposed on mankind by an external force, but is something that is inherent to our nature. According to Reformed doctrine, the sin of Adam was a failure to obey the Moral Law.
Paul says it’s “written on our hearts.”
Sam Harris says this morality predates homo sapiens, and that our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, share the morals summarized in the second table of the 10 Commandments as well (apart from the prohibition of coveting).
In other words, we didn’t need Moses to go up Mount Sinai to figure out that killing and stealing are wrong.
Law and Gospel, Covenant Theology
The framework made famous by the Lutherans and adopted by the Reformed communions is a very helpful way to discern critically whether a given command from Scripture is binding or not. Basically it goes like this: God made a covenant “of works” with Adam which Adam broke. In his covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15 (the covenant of Grace), Yahweh explained that the onus was on himself to fulfill the terms of the covenant, unconditionally. (This is what was signified by Yahweh passing between the animal parts. The party making the oath is saying “Be it done so to me if I fail to keep it.”) But the covenant that Israel ratified at Sinai was the “covenant of works”. In fact, the entirety of the Mosaic Law is a man-made religion endeavoring to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
The Law consists of three parts: the ceremonial law, the civil law, and the moral law. The Moral Law is “summarized” in the Ten Commandments but is also “written on the hearts of men.” The civil law was particular to the kingdom of Israel (eye for an eye, etc.) and the ceremonial law (priestly duties, sacrificial system, etc.) was “fulfilled” in Christ as all the blood sacrifices were a foreshadowing of what was to come in his ultimate sacrifice in which the covenant of grace was fulfilled (as Jesus/Yeshua being Yahweh incarnate paid the ultimate price himself).
In the Lutheran view anything that is commanded for us to perform is law, and everything that scripture says God does for us is “gospel”. This is the case whether the verse being referenced is in the old or new testament. Moral law (as opposed to civil or ceremonial) is still binding, but it doesn’t elevate us in any way. Our salvation is wholly upon God’s grace in the gospel.
Reformed theologians have done a great job with this, and it’s probably the best way to make sense of Scripture. The problem is that mainline Presbyterians and Lutherans who believe these things make up only a tiny percentage of the number of Christians in this country. A whole lot of evangelical pastors reject the idea of going to seminary to learn things like this. This means that most who identify themselves as conservative Bible-believing Christians are not interpreting scripture through these lenses and take single verses (such as “homosexuals are an abomination”—Moses, covenant of works) as God’s holy word and somehow forget that Jesus said “he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Cessationism as a pathway towards skepticism
If you grow up in a Pentecostal, charismatic, or semi-charismatic church, you have likely had certain experiences which you perceived to be spiritual. You felt the “tug” of the Holy Spirit on your heart, or his prompting you to pray for somebody in a certain way out loud, after which the person you were praying for is like, “Wow, that was totally God!” Or speaking in tongues. Or when you fell on your back during afterglow and couldn’t get up because God was holding you down. When you give your testimony, you look for those personal “encounters” where you totally felt the Spirit move, because these experiences made it “real” to you. You felt like you had a firsthand encounter with an actual invisible spiritual realm.
If you start in charismania and then move to a more Reformed theology informed by scholarship and reason, you end up with rational and theologically sound arguments for what’s termed “cessationism”. This is the doctrine that the so-called “gifts of the Spirit” were only meant for a certain time and place: the first century, in the book of Acts when the gospel was spreading to new regions, and signs and wonders needed to accompany the message.
So, how then do you explain all those experiences you had?
On one hand, Reformed theology is probably the best way to make sense of the Scriptures. On the other hand, the “experiences” of the charismatic religions experiences are the biggest hindrance to unbelief, because without being informed by neuroscience, you were certain they were real.
Well, it turns out that neuroscientists can measure this with brain scans.
They’ve been able to determine that praying, speaking in tongues, meditating, etc., all have the same effect on the brain whether one is Christian or another religion. You can perform scientific experiments on your spiritual experiences and see that they’re not spiritual at all. There’s a perfectly rational explanation, involving neural pathways formed a million years ago in the minds of our ancestors as they dealt with the death of their loved ones—and they could point this all out to you with an MRI.
An English mentalist named Darren Brown did a show on Netflix called Miracle where he was able to recreate the experiences of faith-healing, tongues, falling on the floor, etc., using the power of suggestion. It’s really eye-opening. I hope that for someone who watches it, it might just end up being the last straw.