Craig describes SSM as 'a sort of legal fiction'

William Lane Craig has revealed some homophobia in the latest Q&A on his Reasonable Faith site, as well as recommending some seditious behaviour. In answer to someone questioning the Supreme Court's decision on SSM, and what Christians should do about it, he says:

[Same sex] marriages are a sort of legal fiction which we must respect.

He thinks there is an essence to marriage that resists legal re-definitions, just as horses and chairs could not be re-defined. This shows a curious blindness to the complexity of social institutions, which, by their very nature (one may say 'essence'), are defined by their social milieu. Simply perusing the Wikipedia article on marriage presents a bewildering variety of types, many of which do not feature just one man and one woman (WLC's preferred flavour). Of course, to describe the marriage of two people in love as any sort of fiction is deeply offensive to those involved.

Craig says:

The Supreme Court did not legalize, nor is anyone advocating for, gay marriage. What it legalized was same-sex marriage, regardless of sexual orientation.

...and he is right, strictly speaking. But let's not pretend that Craig is railing against two heterosexual men getting married; it is the homosexuality he is prejudiced against, and his language shows his prejudice:

Suppose you are a baker who is approached to make a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding or that you are a wedding photographer who is hired to photograph a same-sex ceremony. It’s hard to see how you can justifiably resist legal authority here and refuse to comply, regardless of how distasteful it may be to you, since your activity is not sin on your part.

Craig supposes it may be 'distasteful' to provide a service for a same-sex marriage; why 'distasteful'? Sin is not a matter of taste, after all. Plainly it's the homosexuality that is not to Craig's taste, rather than some contravention of his definition of marriage. If somebody redefined a horse as a chair, no-one would find that 'distasteful'; simply incorrect.

As for government authority, he says:

...we should and must resist authority if it requires us to act contrary to God’s will. 

So, he thinks it's necessary for Christians to impose God's will over and above the law of the land. As at least one study suggests, what God wants tends to be the same as what the individual believer wants. This is a recipe for insurrection, or at least civil disobedience à la Kim Davis, even if one has some sympathy for conscientious objectors in general.

It's nice to see that Craig can see the way the wind is blowing, though:

As our secular culture becomes more and more accommodating to same-sex marriage, the pressure upon Christians to compromise and conform will be heavy and unrelenting.

Yes, the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws delivered legal justice and, as a consequence, generated social pressure on racists to drop their prejudices; so too, now, will the pressure build upon the homophobic to drop their prejudices now that equality before the law has been granted to those of every sexual orientation.

Craig's response reveals the problem with a morality embedded in the aspic of ancient mores; they give the prejudiced ammunition in their fight against overwhelming reason and evidence. Just as many sensible practices and beliefs have arisen through our genetic and cultural history, so too has prejudice. We need the freedom to challenge our practices and beliefs to sort the sensible from the insensible, and religion, amongst other things, hinders that process.

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Source of Faith

I've previously discussed John Locke's irrationality argument against religious persecution: that it's irrational to persecute non-believers because it's simply not possible to make people believe something they think is untrue. Jeremy Waldron successfully counters this by pointing out that beliefs can be affected indirectly, by, for example, restricting a person's access to material:

A man may be compelled to learn a catechism on pain of death or to read the gospels every day to avoid discrimination.The effect of such threats and such discrimination may be to increase the number of people who eventually end up believing the orthodox faith. Since coercion may therefore be applied to religious ends by this indirect means, it can no longer be condemned as in all circumstances irrational.

By the same token, religious indoctrination can be achieved (without such threats!) through childhood education; this is plain when we consider how religious belief varies according to geography. Climate is not the causative factor, but indoctrination is; simply teaching that the prevailing faith is true. From birth, what we believe grows, bottom up, through interaction with our environment, and with those we mix, and with those who teach us. These foundational beliefs are difficult, sometimes impossible, maybe, to unpick.

Churches and the religious understand this, so expend much effort on early years education to ensure a supply of adult tithers in the future. One such initiative is Test of Faith. This is run by the Faraday Institute of Science and Religion, an institute that is based, sadly, at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. No-one will be surprised to hear, given its pre-occupation with the reconciliation of science and faith, that it is Templeton funded.

It's important to appreciate that this is not some secular approach to education, looking to make space for all faiths and none in our education systems; it specifically pushes Christianity. An illustration of this has just been released by them: a homeschoolers' course in Science and Christianity which 'aims to equip US-based homeschooled high school (and advanced junior high) students to think clearly and biblically about science and faith'. Here's the complete course.

Check out the graphic for chapter 1:

It starts with the old canard that because some scientists have faith, there is therefore no conflict between science and faith. In fact, it says, any conflict is a result of Victorian scientists with an anti-clerical bent! This is slack. Certainly the so-called 'conflict thesis' originated with Draper and co. in the nineteenth century, but to say that any modern day media interest is mainly stirred up by him and his fellows is bizarre.

Here's a graphic for chapter 2:

This is promising, in that it cautions against the God of the Gaps argument, but only applies this to primary explanations; and it does this not because God of the Gaps is just a bad argument, which it is, but because it's not a good apologetic tactic. It then brazenly uses a God of the Gaps argument for the ultimate explanation.

A discussion and questions section follows:

They ask 'How do I know what I know?' and amongst the answers they slip in 'Divine revelation (the Bible)'. There is no evidence that anyone has ever had a divine revelation, and there is no evidence that the Bible, as opposed to the Koran, or the book of Mormon, is divinely revealed; quite the opposite, in fact.

This is the sort of misinformation that Jeremy Waldron might point to if he wanted to justify his counter argument to Locke. Templeton want kids to accept that the Bible tells the truth. There's no mention of the myriad holy texts that claim similar, but contradictory, 'facts' to those that the Bible claims.

These three propositions are not equivalent. The first two are supported by the weight of facts and the last one isn't. But the course material wants to put them on a level footing. This really isn't a fair thing to do to kids, particularly home-schooled ones who are already more closeted than normally-schooled kids.

There's lots more of the same; on evolution, for example, they say:

Some evolutionary biologists say that the world is without design or purpose. They think that it came into being through a meaningless process, ruled by random chance.

Evolutionary biologists aren't the ones to ask about the origin of the world, so the implication here is that they think that evolution by natural selection is ruled by random chance, which is the opposite of the truth. This, in fact, is a standard creationist meme.

It's disappointing to me that this poorly thought out apologia is being marketed to US home-schoolers by an organisation based at a major British university. 

Francis Spufford, in the Guardian and elsewhere, has tried to defend an emotional, rather than a fact-based, faith: 

The point is that from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don't talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, think that it is. I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don't have the feelings because I've assented to the ideas.

"I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings". But where do the ideas come from in the first place, for the feelings to attach to? What has planted the seed? Divine revelation, or religiously-motivated schooling? Anyone, from anywhere, could say the same thing, in defence of a faith that contradicts Spufford's. What should someone 'from outside' conclude from that? Surely that the ideas are arbitrary and mostly not true, even if they appeal to those who, like Spufford, let their feelings ride roughshod over precautionary principles.

So Spufford ignores the overwhelming amount of disinformation to which we are all subjected as we grow up in these theistic societies, of which the Test of Faith course is just a drop in the well-funded ocean. Do we have an antidote to this? Yes, to a degree; we've discovered a method that provides some objectivity. A method that sees feelings as a potentially corrupting influence on its conclusions, not a reason to affirm them. 

The Test of Faith course and Spufford's article are more evidence of the incompatibility of science and religion.

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Notpologetics

This has really got to stop, says Eric Macdonald, about believers arguing for particular views without admitting their real, religious based, grounding. This is something I've noticed frequently; believers will say they are arguing on prudential grounds, for example, when arguing for abstinence in combating AIDS. It's legitimate to point out these arguments, but by using them believers are not arguing in good faith if they don't make it clear that those arguments do not bind them. Since, if the prudential argument went against them, they would not change their mind, because of their moral (religious) views. Eric also mentions Andrew Brown's latest humiliation, after a particular clueless article, denying the pope was being homophobic in a recent speech which was reported as anti-gay.

Brown's original piece said that the pope "didn't say gay marriage threatens humanity". This was in response to some reporting of the speech, in which the pope said:

In addition to a clear goal, that of leading young people to a full knowledge of reality and thus of truth, education needs settings. Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.

Now, to me, and surely anyone with half an eye on modern mores and the ways of the Catholic Church, this is clearly linking gay marriage to a threat to human dignity and the future of humanity itself, so Philip Pullella's headline is not an unreasonable contraction. Despite this, Brown insisted, about Pullella's headline:

So far as I can see, Pope Benedict just didn't [say gay marriage threatens humanity]. He did speak in favour of the family "based on the marriage of a man and woman". He did say that "policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself". But there was no suggestion that gay marriage was the most important of these and he didn't mention it at all, whereas he did take up several other sexual issues.

The pope has to actually say "gay marriage" for Andrew Brown to consider it a mention of gay marriage, presumably. In fact, he practically confirms this in a comment:

But the point is that there are lots of things which the Vatican regards as being "an attack on the family" and Benedict deliberately mentioned two, neither of which had anything to do with gay people, or with marriage. He also mentions the economic crisis as damaging to families. That was all. And when you're dealing with a rather Kremlin-esque bureaucracy like the Vatican, these shifts of emphasis really matter. The Pope's speeches are an expression of coherent policy. And, if this one means anything, it means a shift away from seeing gay marriage as a threat comparable to all the ones he did mention.

Yikes; he thinks the pope is saying practically the opposite of what he is in fact saying. Commenters were unimpressed. Muscleguy said:

For goodness sake Andrew, do you have to be so dense and obtuse? If he was so unconcerned with the gay marriage issue then why did he feel the need to insert the apparently redundant words "between a man and a woman" into the bit about marriage? Since the church recognises no other forms of marriage, it would normally have not been necessary to define something twice.
By using that phrasing he is dog whistling to the faithful while trying desperately to Jesuitically claim that 'he said nothing about gays'. I never took you for a Jesuit Andrew, I may now have to reassess that.
If you truly do not understand about dog whistle politics then you are too clueless to be a journalist, so I can only conclude that you are being deliberately obtuse. To what end I'm not sure. I would have thought that as an avowed agnostic you would not hold a candle for pontifical bigotry, but I may be wrong.

Of course it's obvious to non-believers and, more importantly, believers, what the pope means when he says "between a man and a woman". Anthropoid Ape said:

This is an unambiguous reference to gay marriage. What other policy undermining "the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman" could have been exercising the pope's religiously demented brain here, i.e. other than the current world-wide trend to legalise gay marriage which the Vatican has been resolutely opposing? Are you seriously suggesting that the pope was not intending to allude to gay marriage as one of the policies undermining "the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman"?

Quite. AB responded:

No. He does believe that it is one of the policies which threaten the family. But I don't think he is such a fool as to suppose it is the most important threat, and nor was it one he selected for explicit mention. I might be wrong about this. Perhaps he does lie awake at night thinking that the elimination of gay rights is a necessary step on the way to setting everything else right that's wrong in the world. But I doubt it.

Yes, the pope is famously philanthropic and not at all concerned with Catholic dogma! We should be grateful that at least Brown shows some doubt in his own judgement here, but he still is not conceding the obvious, and he didn't in his remaining comments on the thread, despite many people pointing out what was staring him in the face.

Now, suddenly, when Philip Pullella himself writes to him and points out the obvious, the penny drops, sort of: he titles the piece "Why I shouldn't have been upset about the reporting on the pope's speech", but offers no apology for his apologetics. Pullella simply states what most the commenters said:

As one of your own readers (metalvendetta) points out in one of the comments ("Seems pretty clear to me"), when the Vatican uses the phrase "marriage based on the union between a man and a woman" it refers to gay marriage. It has used it many, many times before, particularly in cases where countries were preparing legislation allowing gay marriage (Spain, the Netherlands). Otherwise, it would have just said marriage is under threat, and the connotation there would have been heterosexual cohabitation or divorce.

Brown has admitted he was wrong (good), but not apologised for the bone-headedness of his original piece (bad!). Why does he misrepresent the pope to his readers? Perhaps because he is in denial about what the pope really believes and preaches? He cannot be ignorant of it, surely.

We must all examine our motives, but the motives that lead decent human beings, believers and non-believers like Brown, to cover up the evils of the Catholic Church really need to be exposed. Some self-examination of AB's motives might help us all to understand this damaging notpologetic phenomenon.

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