Bad Faith Spoils a Good Gift

A few months ago, my mother sent me a gift of the New Living Translation Life Application Study Bible to read. It's a bulky thing, very lovingly-designed, and I leave it in the cardboard box it arrived in for safekeeping; newsprint is incredibly fragile. I haven't had time to sit down and check it out with how committed I've been to catching up on classical literature and my own writing career, but I have been meaning to. As someone interested in philosophy, I'd like to see more of the alleged principles of American society straight from the source, and annotations that help clarify the context and history of the passages would be invaluable.

This was a heartfelt gift from my mother, and I value it highly because of that, so I was very disappointed to sit down and open it up to find the same subpar Christian apologia I've seen throughout my life. I'm upset that the authors fell back on tired circular reasoning that gave me no new insight into the text instead of doing actual research to make the experience more meaningful. Their lack of diligence has tarnished a thoughtful gift.

I may use this book as a jumping off point for more rhetorical analysis later on, but this was just something I needed to get out of my head and onto the page. If I can't learn from the book, I will turn it into a learning opportunity. For now, I just want to talk about this one annotation specifically, from page 5, about the creation of the universe as depicted in Genesis.

It has been said that the number of stars in the universe is more than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. Yet this complex sea of spinning stars functions with remarkable order and efficiency. To say that the universe "just happened" or "evolved" requires more faith than to believe that God is behind these amazing statistics. God truly did create a wonderful universe, and he is worthy of our praise.

Page 5 Tyndale. NLT Life Application Study Bible, Third Edition. Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2019.

The secular instinct is to interject and point out that this isn't sound, that an undirected universe requires less faith to believe in, but let's take this at face value for a moment and follow to its logical conclusion. If believing that God created the universe is a more reasonable conclusion because it requires a smaller leap of faith, then conclusions that require less faith must be preferable. If the argument against believing in an undirected universe is that it requires more faith than believing in a directed universe, then relying on faith is less desirable than relying on evidence.

To be fair to the authors, I may have done you the smallest white lie. The person writing this doesn't actually believe faith is bad (or do they?). Rather, this sheds light on the true purpose of this book: to give good, believing Christians ammo with which to counter-attack nonbelievers. "You say it's bad to take something on faith instead of evidence, but you have faith in science." It reads as hypocritical because it's reactionary, pretending to not understand science in order to then pretend like secular people are disingenuous hypocrites. Classic bad faith fundamentalist rhetoric.

That's the surface-level debunking, at least, but I believe this passage is actually more revealing than it intends to be. A lot of bad faith (ha!) arguments come from using the same word as your opponent but slightly tweaking its definition without telling them, creating the illusion that you're discussing the same thing without actually engaging with their argument at all. The average person uses the word "faith" to mean a belief in something without sufficient evidence to back it up; it's often called a "leap of faith" in order to evoke the imagery of making a risky decision and simply trusting that things will turn out well, but it is fitting that a leap of faith also necessarily requires a leap of logic. To the average person, the Bible is a terrible source of factual information because you must take everything on faith alone, even when it contradicts recorded history, whereas scientific evidence is generally far more reliable because it must be falsifiable to be credible.

But in this Page 5 argument (and a lot of Christian apologia) faith means "the belief in something you have not personally seen happen." On it's own, that feels like a meaningless distinction. But many people are also taught from a young age (when they're still learning how the world works and aren't prone to dismissing things as impossible) that the Bible is ineffable--100% true an accurate and literal (except for the metaphors, but it's up to someone else to decide which is which). This is treated as an observable fact with centuries of supportive evidence rather than a belief that must be taken on faith, and that perspective is critical to how Christian apologia splits hairs when it comes to the word. Through this worldview, the Bible is actually more reliable than scientific evidence, which is prone to bias and has a limited ability to draw meaningful conclusions from evidence; the Bible can just tell you what is and isn't true about the world. If "faith" is a belief in something you haven't personally seen and the Bible is 100% accurate, then it does indeed take less faith to believe in the simplified worldview of the Bible than Darwinian evolution, the big bang theory, or the geological timescale.

To Christian fundamentalists, faith is a virtue, but taking something on faith is undesirable. This sounds counter-intuitive but is pretty transparent from how they act. There's a drive for "proof" of God, angels, and the afterlife that feels out of place when compared to other modern religions. Stories about near-death experiences where someone (especially a child) claims to have seen heaven or met God are venerated as proof, while such claims from other religions are dismissed as lies or devilry. Pastors who claim to literally hear the voice of God in their ear are celebrated and lavished with financial success even when they are are proven liars, like Peter Popoff. Thomas Aquinas' five "logical proofs" for God's existence are still parroted today alongside newer, even more fallacious arguments despite how easy it is to spot the unspoken assumptions that undermine their validity.

Fundamentalists don't want to have strong faith as much as they want to enforce their beliefs through rule of law, so they will manufacture proof of God by any means necessary to create the impression of objective truth. And why not? If lying means more people will be converted in the long run, their souls saved even if their rights are infringed on in the process, then it can't be a bad thing to do.

The LORD detests lying lips, but he delights in those who tell the truth. Proverbs 12:22

The godly hate lies; the wicked cause shame and disgrace. Proverbs 13:5

Page 1361, 1362 Tyndale. NLT Life Application Study Bible, Third Edition. Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2019.

Interestingly enough, the authors didn't feel the need to annotate these passages. Maybe they shared insight about lying in other annotations. Perhaps they thought these ideas were simple enough to speak for themselves. It's possible they just didn't understand the concept of not lying.

The fact that we see the same fallacious arguments over and over again isn't actually a flaw in apologia. Like the Nigerian Prince scam, red flags serve a function by filtering out people who aren't as trusting. Though Christian rhetoric has changed dramatically with the rise of "Christian scientists" who insist that scientific discovery supports the Bible, the core of Christian apologia remains the same as ever.

It's not hard to understand that you cannot logically or scientifically prove the existence of God or the ineffability of the Bible; if it were possible, it would have been done before now. I have incredible respect for any Christian who understands this and still maintains their faith as a personal decision rather than a rational one. That respect does not extend to people who demand you praise the emperor's new clothes if you don't want to go to Hell; my gut tells me that those people are more interested in personal gain than my spiritual well-being.

The desperate evangelical nature of American Christianity and it's worldly political aspirations, the commitment to reactionary slop in place of spiritual nourishment, is driving out people who take the moral philosophy seriously. The people left remaining in these church-turned-businesses find themselves in increasingly-insular high-control groups where obedience to authority is considered a show of faith in place of following Jesus' teachings. There's so much interesting spiritual philosophy in Christianity and many valuable lessons on what it means to be a good person, including the rejection of earthly authorities that seek to mislead and control people. Frankly, it's a problem that so many people can't see the devils standing between a podium and the cross.