Is there a word for "encouraged and depressed"?

Reading Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason has left me with a slightly uneasy feeling about the current state of affairs, a state which was epitomized in a vigorous discussion that I overheard and eventually had to get in on this evening at a local coffee shop.

I had just settled down with a large coffee (yet another) book about conspiracy theories, when I heard one of the maybe-just-out-of-college-aged workers behind the register say to the other, "I just don't understand how you can believe in creationism." My ears perked up.

What I then witnessed was...an intellectual cripple fight. The girl, who I will call "Red" and the guy, who I will call "Spike" (I judge people by their hairstyles), had one of the least communicative, utterly uninformed discussions that I had ever witnessed.

Neither of them knew what the fuck of which they spoke. It was utterly depressing.

I...can't even describe their depths of the mutual ignorance. She was asking a lot of really interesting questions of Spike, the Bible-believer, however, these would have best remained rhetorical, since her answers were usually almost completely useless.

Bing needed to intervene. I took off my sunglasses so they knew that I was actually paying attention to them; eventually the girl looked at me, and I said, "This is one of the most interesting conversations that I have overheard in a long time!"

"Really? Why?"

"It's nice to see people talking about this in a friendly way. Usually people get so hostile about it."

"Well, hop on in."

You asked for it, toots.

"OK," I said to Spike, "Do you believe that the Bible is literally true?"

"Yes."

"The creation story, Noah and the ark, and everything?"

Affirmative.

"OK," I posed my old standby: "Genesis 1, people are created after the animals. In Genesis 2, people are created before the animals. How is this possible? How can man be literally created both before and after the animals?"

"Well, I think that Genesis 1 is a narrative account of what happened, and Genesis 2 is a poetic account."

"I'd disagree," and I explained how 1 Genesis was set up like a song and was probably originally the product of a non-literate society. When I finished, a smoking hot chick who was waiting for her order gave me a big smile. That gave me a huge...ego.

"So, well, one is poetic and the other is literal. Now if you look at the evidence for the historical truth of the Bible..."

"Wait a sec, but you just said that you said the Bible was literally true. You can't just walk away from the question."

"Er, ah..."

"Ok, so we've established that you are not, then, a biblical literalist."

I think this bothered him. For like a second.

Then I let him lead the conversation into discussion of the historical truth of the Resurrection.

"How do you know it's true?" I asked.

"Well, the accounts line up. And have you heard of Josephus?"

"Yes."

"Well, he confirmed what happened."

"Actually, he only says that he heard, and he's writing long after the fact, that people believe that this Jesus guy rose from the dead. I mean, a local news reporter reporting on, I don't know, dog washing would not stoop to taking hearsay as the basis for a news story."

That bothered him. For like a second.

Now the entire time, Red was jumping in. She was more passionate than informed. Her description of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was...damned unique. She conceded points (out of habit? politeness?) that any self-respecting atheist would not concede. "Yes, you need faith for science." "Well, Einstein believed that there was a god." "Well, I don't think that we'll ever know how life began..."

This dude was all about moral certainty. If Red would have shut her mouth for a second (and she was getting more agitated the entire time), I would have been able to ask him why being certain was such a virtue and then explain how uncertainty leads to inquiry, which leads to discovery, which leads to FUCKING PENICILLIN.

Damn it.

But in the end, the pressure of a fairly steady stream of customers overwhelmed the conversation and broke it up. As I got ready to leave, I asked Spike, "Hey, what was that book you mentioned?" I was getting an "in" to recommend a book to him.

"The Case for the Resurrection, by N.T. Wright."

"Oh, is he the guy at the University of Michigan?"

"Uh, I don't know."

Actually, I didn't know either. I mean, I'm sure someone at Michigan has at some point written about the Resurrection. I just wanted, you know, to give the impression that I was up on the field. Which I guess I kind of am, by normal standards, anyway.

The book he recommends does not exist, but you can get close to it on Wright's website:

The chapter/article starts like this, and remember, this was put to me as the argument for the historical veracity of the Resurrection.

1. Introduction

The question of Jesus’ resurrection continues to haunt the thinking and writing of many scholars. I shall not debate in detail with them here; there are other places for that. I want instead to sketch, in broad strokes, a historical argument about what happened three days after Jesus’ crucifixion.

The question divides into four. First, what did people in the first century, both pagans and Jews, hope for? What did they believe about life after death, and particularly about resurrection? Second, what did the early Christians believe on the same subjects? What did they hope for? Third, what reasons did the early Christians give for their hope and belief, and what did they mean by the key word ‘resurrection’ which they used of Jesus? Finally, what can the historian say by way of comment on this early Christian claim?

The first three questions that Wright asks, while interesting, have no bearing on whether or not a guy named Jesus got over his thoroughly fatal crucifixion. So I skip ahead to the answer of the fourth question.

5. From Story to Event

This brings us, finally, to our fourth question. What can the historian say that will account for the early Christians’ claim that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead, the explanation they themselves offer for their drastic modification of the Jewish hope?

There has been no shortage of hypotheses designed to explain why the early Christians really did believe that Jesus really had been raised from the dead. These come in many shapes and sizes, but most of them feature one of three types of explanation. (1) Jesus did not really die; he somehow survived. (2) The tomb was empty, but nothing else happened. (3) The disciples had visions of Jesus, but without there being an empty tomb.

(1) The first can be disposed of swiftly. Roman soldiers knew how to kill people especially rebel kings. First-century Jews knew the difference between a survivor and someone newly alive.

(2) The second is only a little more complicated. Faced with an empty tomb, but with no other evidence, the disciples would have known the answer; the body had been stolen by someone. These things happened. They were not expecting Jesus to rise again; by itself, an empty tomb would prove as little to them as it would to us.

(3) Visions were frequent and well known — including visions of someone recently dead. We did not have to wait for modem medicine, psychology and pastoral records to tell us that these things happen. Faced with Peter knocking on the door when they thought he was about to be killed, the praying church assumed he had died and was paying them a post-mortem visit; ‘it must be his angel’, they said. Even lifelike visions would not prevent people conducting a funeral, continuing to mourn, and venerating the tomb.

To cut a long story very short: to explain why the early Christians really did believe that Jesus really had been raised from the dead, we must postulate three things: Jesus really had been dead; the tomb really was empty, and it really was his tomb; they really did see, meet and talk with a figure who was not only demonstrably the crucified Jesus but who seemed to be in some ways different — though not in the ways one would have imagined from reading Isaiah, Ezekiel or Daniel.

Can we go beyond this? What then can and must be said?

Please, do tell! And this is where he craps down his pant leg:

If we attempt to argue for the historical truth of the resurrection on standard historical grounds, have we not allowed historical method, perhaps including its hidden Enlightenment roots, to become lord, to set the bounds of what we know, rather than allowing God himself, Jesus himself, and indeed the resurrection itself, to establish not only what we know but how we can know it?

Yes. That's called doing history. What Wright is basically saying is that we must toss out the unsatisfactory historical standards (in this particular case), which are tainted with the legacy of 'teh Enlightmentz". A positively underwhelming argument. But maybe there is something here...

History proceeds, not just by deduction from each individual piece of evidence, but by abduction, by inference to the best explanation. We must not be browbeaten by an over-cautious epistemology. [...]

"Fuck standards." In which case, if I could offer an explanation for the story of the Resurrection that we have that did not depend on postulating an amazingly unprobable event, Wright would embrace it. Cool. How can we get such a strong tradition of Resurrection? Look to cargo cults to see a religion developing into a longstanding tradition in real time. The associated rituals are rooted in a belief that someone who apparently did not exist is going to come back one day. Why can't this have happened in the case of Christianity? This is far more elegant and apparently has the benefit of having a precedent, unlike Resurrection.

The other book that Spike recommended was Tim Keller's The Reason for God. I purposely held back from recommending The God Delusion. He would not have been ready for it and would have rejected it out of hand. Keller's book attempts to be a counter to similar recent defenses of atheism.

I am looking at the reviews of the book right now at Amazon. In the reviews, someone does me the immense favor of listing the arguments against faith that Keller attacks:

In the first seven chapters Keller looks at seven of the most common objections and doubts about Christianity and discerns the alternate beliefs underlying each of them. This section is titled "The Leap of Doubt" and answers these seven common critiques:

1. There can't be just one true religion
2. A good God could not allow suffering
3. Christianity is a straitjacket
4. The church is responsible for so much injustice
5. A loving God would not send people to hell
6. Science has disproved Christianity
7. You can't take the Bible literally

I see straw men lining up here:

1. Atheists don't say that. They say there is no god.
2. That seems to be rather self-explanatory. I might read that chapter, because that connundrum has always reeked to me.
3. No, Christians should be put in straightjackets. Haha. I've not yet heard that as an argument that Xianity is false, so addressing the question is...moot at best, a distraction at worst.
4. So? (Can you hear him warming up the Stalin-Hitler retort?)
5. I might read that one too, for much the same reason as the other. But you still have to establish a god's existence before you start futzing with his nature.
6. No, the argument is "Science has found no evidence for a lot of shit that Christians believe is true." And I can see the argument from ignorance popping up here: "Science can't prove Christianity wrong." Again, so what?
7. There are innumerable contradictions. Are you going to explain away all those?

You know what scares me the most about the book? Not that it seems like it will be a powerful and original defense of Chirstianity that will send me to church, rather, the beginning of the first line of the above review: "In the first seven chapters..." Yeah. Hm. Yeah.

As I left the coffee shop, I gave Spike a slip of paper that had "The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins" written on it. I said, "If you want to argue against evolution, you need to know exactly what it is you are arguing against." "Absolutely," he agreed. I hope he at least looks into it. I'm not too hopeful.

The most disturbing aspect of the whole evening was not Spike's belief, rather Red's inability to coherently argue on behalf of skepticism, intellectual caution and the value and standards of evidence. In hindsight, I should have recommended the book to her--she might read it, enjoy it, and really benefit from it. She needs to be able to articulate her objections and understand the concepts behind the science she is defending.

HJ