New Testament canon — a boat that must not be rocked

Craig L. Blomberg continues his exposition of scriptural arbitrariness with "What Should We Think About the Coptic Gospel of Thomas?" — chapter 48 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God.

The answer appears to be, "Whatever you'd like to think." Again Blomberg demonstrates the circularity of deciding what is or is not canonical. The Gospel of Thomas is taken to be "true" where it exhibits a measure of agreement with the so-called canonical gospels, and contentious where it disagrees. This inevitably makes the Gospel of Thomas not much use to anybody, because if it's only true where it agrees with the other gospels, and false otherwise, it doesn't add anything. If biblical scholars have already made up their minds, why should they give any attention to something that contradicts what they already know? This is the very essence of confirmation-bias and cherry-picking. It's as if the scholars know what the story in the New Testament is supposed to say, and therefore anything that doesn't agree with that story is excluded. If you cut out the stuff you disagree with, you will by definition be left with things you agree with. This is scholarship? Whatever else it might achieve, this doesn't inspire confidence in the Bible as a historical document.

The Bible says some outlandish things, to be sure. It may have been merely politic, therefore, to reject Thomas as a gospel that might push the entire collection over the edge of credibility:

Thomas, or Gnosticism more generally, can at first glance appear more "enlightened" from a modern (or postmodern) perspective than parts of the New Testament. But if one is going to accept a Gnostic world view, one has to take all of it. And the final saying of this enigmatic Gospel has Peter telling Jesus and the other disciples, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus replies, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Modern appropriations of Thomas seldom incorporate this perspective! Indeed, Thomas can appear superior to the canonical Gospels only by highly selective usage of its teachings. Despite what some may claim, it does not open any significant window into first-century Christian history and origins, only into its later corruption.

At the very least, I can't see that running well with the "women bishops" faction.

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbbible.aspx?pageid=8589952748

Burnee links for Thursday

Mostly Ophelia and PZ today...

Bullying is healthy | Butterflies and Wheels
What?! Bullying by definition is a bad thing. It should be stamped out at source instantly. It's unbelievable that there are people and organisations that condone bullying in any circumstances.

Who needs a $30,000 watch? | Pharyngula
Liars.

Sunday Sacrilege: Bad without god | Pharyngula
PZ Myers expands on his Reason Rally peroration.

What you need to know | Butterflies and Wheels
"A reader sent me a link...." That was me.

Catholic church urges pupils to sign anti-gay marriage petition | World news | The Guardian
Disgraceful. Are there no depths to which this corrupt organisation will not sink?

A CES spokeswoman said: "We said that schools might like to consider using this [letter] in assemblies or in class teaching. We said people might want to consider asking pupils and parents if they might want to sign the petition. It's really important that no school discriminates against any member of the school community.

"Schools with a religious character are allowed to teach sex and relationships – and conduct assemblies – in accordance with the religious views of the school. The Catholic view of marriage is not a political view; it's a religious view."

I suggest that the "CES spokewoman" might want to go boil her head. Claiming your prejudice is your "religious view" doesn't give you any kind of exemption from the law. Do you get that? Yet?

Heard the one about sharks not getting cancer?

Back in March Ben Hardwidge gave an excellent talk on shark conversation at Portsmouth Skeptics in the Pub. The audio is now available:

http://www.skepticule.co.uk/2012/04/skeprec-010-20120308.html

The "Sharks Don't Get Cancer" Myth

(For copyright reasons the videos — or rather the audio thereof — is not included in the recording, so if you get the chance to see Ben give this talk at your local SitP I'd recommend it.)

Burnee links for Thursday

Morality, meaning, hopelessness | Andrew Copson
Andrew's point about a shared definition of morality is relevant to the "moral argument for the existence of God" that's trotted out with monotonous regularity by certain religionists who accept only one definition. We need to make the alternative, humanist, definition more well known.

Victor J. Stenger: Nuthin’ To Explain | Talking Philosophy
I'm with Stenger (and Krauss) on the matter of "nothing". Some have objected to Krauss's book A Universe from Nothing on the basis that the "nothing" he talks about isn't really nothing. But the "nothing" his detractors talk about isn't actually possible — their "nothing" is entirely conceptual like "infinity", and of little practical use. Krauss's "nothing" is therefore the one we should be investigating.

Publication Day | Professor Bruce M. Hood
I shall definitely buy The Self Illusion — I just haven't decided yet on the Kindle version or the paperback.

Speaking truth to apologists | Pharyngula
This is about Jerry Coyne's new paper,"Science, religion, and society: the problem of evolution in America" — not freely downloadable yet, but PZ Myers obviously has access and is therefore able to comment on it.

Dear daughter… | The Murverse
Mur Lafferty writes to her daughter. It strikes a chord as I'm currently reading Does God Hate Women? by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom.

An arbitrary collection of texts becomes "canonical"

The New Testament is a collection of books written at different times by apparently different people. (As such, by modern literary definitions it's actually part "collection" and part "anthology".) The collection has not always contained the same books, and in "The New Testament Canon" — chapter 47 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God — Craig L. Blomberg explains how things have changed since it was first "collected".

What he writes may be a fair account of the changes over two millennia, but it's not of much consequence. None of what he writes says anything about whether on not any particular book should or should not be included. None of it is evidence. The whole enterprise seems to be no more than a series of arbitrary assertions — if not by Blomberg then by those he cites.

An arbitrary assertion begins Blomberg's second paragraph:

It is true that God's law and God's word last forever.

Aside from the irrelevance of such an unsubstantiated statement, it illustrates a mindset that's not geared towards persuading an unbeliever. Later on in this three-page chapter — after discussing why the books are in a particular order (again mostly arbitrary, it seems) — Blomberg gives criteria for deciding what's in and what's out:

Indeed, three criteria prevailed for sifting the canonical from the non-canonical. First and foremost was apostolicity—authorship by an apostle or a close associate of an apostle—which thus, for all practical purposes, limited the works to the first hundred years or so of Christian history. Second was orthodoxy or non-contradiction with previously revealed Scripture, beginning with the Hebrew Scriptures that Christians came to call the Old Testament. Finally, the early church used the criterion of catholicity—universal (or at least extremely widespread) usage and relevance throughout the church. This excluded, for example, the Gnostic writings, which were accepted only in the sects from which they emanated.

Here we see the rôle of tradition contributing to arbitrariness. "Second was orthodoxy or non-contradiction with previously revealed Scripture..." So it's an accident of chronology that determines the running here. The problem is that it's begging the question: trying to decide what should be in scripture by referring to scripture itself.

While Catholics and Protestants to this day disagree on the canon of the Old Testament, both branches of Christianity along with Eastern Orthodoxy agree on the contents of the New. For sixteen centuries there has been no significant controversy within Christianity regarding the extent of the New Testament canon. Christians are on solid ground in affirming that these twenty-seven books belong in the New Testament and that other ancient writings were excluded for good reason.

Depends what you mean by good, I suppose — not that it really matters.

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbbible.aspx?pageid=8589952773

Engage with PA BS? No thanks.

There's a reason practitioners of presuppositional apologetics (PA) use the word "presupposition". They presuppose not only the existence of the Christian God (which to an unbeliever is a frankly laughable methodology), but also that logic and reason are in some sense supernatural or "transcendent". That's why PA is based on the TAG — the transcendental argument for God.

The presuppers admit their argument is circular, but claim everyone else's is circular too, challenging people to account for their ability to reason, but without using reason to do so. Another ploy is to demand people explain how it is possible for them to know anything, if they don't claim to have absolute certainty: "Is it possible that you could be wrong about everything you claim to know?" Any claim that absolute certainty is impossible is met with "Are you absolutely certain of that?" — to which the answer, logically, is no. It all boils down to basic epistemology: how do you know anything?

At bottom, the only thing that anyone can claim to know with anything approaching certainty is that "thinking" is going on somewhere, somehow — because the acknowledgement of that fact is simultaneously its demonstration. Beyond that, we have only inferences from our perceptions to guide us in assessing the reality of the external world.

We could indeed be wrong about the external world, and it seems likely that we have been wrong about it in the past and to a certain extent remain wrong about it in the present. But we use our perceptions to build mental models of reality that appear to be largely self-consistent. This doesn't of itself make the models "true" — in the sense of being accurate representations — but Okham's razor demands that we do not multiply entities unnecessarily. Okham's razor is also why we do not unnecessarily posit supernatural agency in the absence of evidence for such agency.

Similarly, if we hypothesize that we are living in the Matrix — which is a possibility that cannot be definitively refuted — we have multiplied entities unnecessarily in order to explain our perceptions: we have the world as we perceive it (which gives us the illusion of reality) plus the world of the Matrix in which our reality is but a simulation. Our mental models fit both these "realities", and Ockham's razor should encourage us to discard the one that includes the superfluous entity. (It doesn't stop with the Matrix — the world of the Matrix could itself be a simulation within another world, which could be a simulation within yet another ... and so on. Ockham is our essential friend here.)

Parallels can be drawn with the Christian theistic worldview, in which we have the world as we perceive it, plus the world containing such additional entities as God, the Devil, angels, demons, miracles, Heaven and Hell. The world "as we perceive it" does not include these additional entities, because they don't actually impinge on our senses (that is, there's no evidence for them), and so positing them as part of a worldview is a gratuitous violation of parsimony — to which Ockham shall apply his blade.

The central foundation of PA, and its fundamental misconception, is the matter of absolutes. The TAG is based on absolutes and that's why it fails. Logic and reason are not absolute, objective entities existing "outside" of the Universe — they are intrinsic to existence, to cause and effect, and therefore to ask someone to "account" for logic and reason without "using" logic and reason is like asking someone to describe something without using adjectives, or to speak without speaking, or to think without thinking. The point here is not that these things can't be done — the point is that they're not necessary.

Control your nocturnal fictions? Dream on...

I tried it. The instructions say it may not work first time, and you might need a few nights for it to kick in. Is five nights enough? I've no idea, because the app — whatever it's actually supposed to do — doesn't do what it claims. Whether this is because the app is buggy, or because the developers and promoters are being less than honest about its purpose, I've no way to tell. But given that it's promoted by Professor Richard Wiseman, well known for conducting psycho-social mass experiments that aren't entirely what they seem, I feel justified in being a little bit suspicious.

The idea of controlling your dreams using a free iPhone app is a pretty cool one. Dream:ON is claimed to monitor your movements while you're asleep in order to assess what type of sleep you're having, and 20 minutes before the time you've already told it you want to wake up, it will play a "soundscape" at a volume low enough not to wake you but loud enough to influence your dreaming — assuming it has already verified that you are still in the type of sleep when dreaming takes place. It claims that if you begin to wake up during the playing of the soundscape it will lower the volume. An alarm will sound at your preset time and you can then type in some notes to describe your dream. You can also review your sleep pattern for that night.

Great idea — poor implementation. By which I mean, it doesn't work.

I tried it for five nights, and each morning I was awakened by the soundscape itself, and a minute later the alarm sounding, all 20 minutes before the preset time. The app seemed to successfully graph my movements, to show me how long it took me to fall asleep, and the times I was in light sleep as opposed to deep sleep during the night, though it appeared oblivious to the times I actually awoke and got out of bed. As for influencing my dreams — nope, it didn't.

Here's the video:
http://youtu.be/rpeL-xub-_4


I quite like the idea of being an experimental subject for a project of this kind, but I'm less enamoured of being used as test subject for obviously buggy software. So I won't be using this app again, unless or until the bugs are ironed out.