Couldn't Help Noticing

Not playing fair

Imagine a group of young boys playing with marbles together on a sunny Saturday morning. (Yes, I know children don't play with marbles these days; I said ‘imagine’.) One of the boys—Joe—pulls out a particularly beautiful marble. Fred spots it and has this conversation with Joe:

Fred: Hey Joe, I want to buy that big shiny green marble you have there. I need it so I can get on with the job of becoming king of the marble-playing world.

Joe: I'm not sure I want to sell it to you.

Fred: Why not?

Joe: Because I'm not sure you'll play fairly with it. And playing fairly is important to me. Tell you what: I'll sell it to you for $5, as long as you promise you'll always play fairly with it.

Now, Fred's not a bad kid, but he's never had a problem with a bit of harmless rule-bending when it comes to playing marbles. He thinks for a bit, then continues the conversation.

Fred: Come on Joe, what's the big deal? I'll pay you the $5, but I can't agree to your condition.

Joe: That's okay. You don't have to. You can buy another green marble from someone else. I don't mind if you don't want to buy mine.

Fred: What's so important about playing marbles fairly? Who really cares? I should be able to play however I want to.

Joe: I just believe that playing fairly is the right way to play marbles. You don't have to agree with me. But it's my marble and I can sell it on any condition I like.

Fred thinks for a minute longer, and decides the marble is too important to give up. Playing marbles honestly might not be such a bad thing after all. He agrees to Joe's price, and promises to play honestly whenever he is using it.

But then one of the other boys (Simon) pipes up: “Wait a second! You can't put conditions like that on the sale of your green marble. That's an ideological attack on the principles of freedom of marble-playing. Marble-playing should be as independent and rigorous as possible.” (Oh, all right, what he actually says is, “Hey! That's not fair!”)

Sam, a boy from another neighbourhood, pipes up in support of Simon: “Yeah. Restricting the way Fred plays marbles is not only an attack on marble-playing independence, it also establishes an unacceptable precedent” (i.e. “Yeah! You can't tell Fred what to do!”)

Fred and Joe look at each other in astonishment. They're not sure what the problem is, since they're both happy with their arrangement.

This is exactly what happened at the University of Sydney earlier this year (as reported in The Sydney Morning Herald). Except that, instead of a shiny green marble, it's a residential college, and the central issue isn't how you play marbles, it's what kind of stem cell research you do.

The university (Fred) has come to an agreement with one of its residential colleges, St Johns College (Joe). The university will buy some land from St Johns so it can build a medical research centre. St Johns—a Catholic college—has placed a condition on the sale of the land: the university must never use the land or the medical centre to carry out “human foetal stem cell research or any other procedures involving the termination or the artificial creation of human life”. The president of Sydney University's Student Representative Council, Angus McFarland (Simon), has objected to this condition, as has the Greens candidate, John Kaye (Sam). Their objections are as profound as “That's not fair!” and “You can't tell the university what to do”.

Firstly, the land belongs to St Johns College. They can sell it under whatever conditions they like. The university doesn't have to buy the land if they don't want to agree to the conditions of sale. What that has to do with Mr McFarland, Mr Kaye, or anyone else, is beyond me.

Secondly, as the article points out, The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital—only a short walk from St Johns College—does carry out foetal stem cell research. People who want to do that kind of research can go to the hospital and do it there.

Thirdly, notice how it's now unacceptable for people at St Johns College to hold to and act in accordance with their beliefs. Their belief in the value of human life has been labelled by Mr McFarland as “an ideological attack on the principles of freedom of academic research”. One man's religious freedom is obviously now another man's ideological attack. 12 months ago, Mr McFarland couldn't have dreamed of making such an argument, since foetal stem cell research was still illegal in Australia then.

Fourthly, what are these so-called “principles of freedom of academic research”? The very legislation that recently legalized foetal stem cell research in Australia places its own restrictions on the research. Medical researchers aren't free to do what they like, whenever and wherever they like, and nor should they be.

Fifthly, Mr Kaye's comment implies that he sees this as an attempt by St Johns College to “bias research to meet their prejudices”. But it's not; that's what would happen if St Johns did the foetal stem cell research themselves, and then deliberately skewed the results to cover up any medical benefits they had discovered. At the moment, they are simply practising what they preach.

St Johns College should have taken their marbles and gone home, pausing briefly to tell Mr McFarland and Mr Kaye to mind their own business.

The limitations of apologetics

A Briefing reader has kindly pointed me to a very interesting article in The Washington Post which perhaps explains the uphill battle Christian apologists have to fight.

The article is an exploration of the implications for public policy of new research which shows how difficult it is to overcome public perception which is based on factual errors (i.e. how to dispel unhelpful myths):

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

and:

The research is painting a broad new understanding of how the mind works. Contrary to the conventional notion that people absorb information in a deliberate manner, the studies show that the brain uses subconscious “rules of thumb” that can bias it into thinking that false information is true.

The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if that were true, everyone would believe the myths. But the mind's bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.

The research also highlights the disturbing reality that once an idea has been implanted in people's minds, it can be difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce it.

Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.

So where does that leave the role of Christian apologetics? Is it possible that the more we publicly defend, for example, the reliability of the Scriptures as historically accurate, the more entrenched many people become in their skepticism of the Bible? Or the more we publicly counter the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the more damage we do to the Christian cause? The human wisdom seems to suggest this is a strong possibility.

But then again, silence is also not advisable:

Another recent study found that when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true, said Peter Kim, an organizational psychologist at the University of Southern California. He published his study in the Journal of Applied Psychology ... Myth-busters, in other words, have the odds against them.

Perhaps the article ultimately points the way forward. It suggests that “rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth”. Maybe the new assertion we need to keep making is that ‘Jesus is Lord’. By all means, let's help individuals to find answers to their genuine questions, but perhaps we ought to just get on with proclaiming Christ publicly, and see what happens.

Trinity and biblical inerrancy

If you don't have biblical inerrancy, you don't have Christianity:

The doctrine of the Trinity is the glory of the Christian faith. It is drawn entirely from revelation. It depends on the absolute truth of the sentences through which the Scriptures teach us about God and his nature, his character, his purposes, his actions and promises. The doctrine depends, for example, on the infallibility and inerrancy of the teaching in St John's Gospel, or the Epistle to the Ephesians or the last paragraph of St Matthew's Gospel, because the doctrine of the Trinity is not enunciated fully in any one passage but is gathered from many statements of the Scriptures. If we cannot rely on the verbal inspiration of Scripture, the doctrine of the Trinity has no basis.

D Broughton Knox, ‘The Implications of the Doctrine of the Trinity for Theology and for Ordinary Life’, Appendix B, Selected Works Volume I: The Doctrine of God, Matthias Media, 2000, p. 153.

Here Broughton insists on both the infallibility and the inerrancy of Scripture—neither confounding their meanings nor dividing their substance.

New Briefing web site

I couldn’t help noticing that we’ve now launched a new web site for The Briefing with a fantastic new look and loads of new features. One new feature that I’m sure will prove very popular is the new Briefing podcast.

If you are reading this CHN at the Matthias Media site, just click on ‘The Briefing’ in the top menu bar to take a look at the new Briefing site. Of course, if you are reading this CHN over at the Briefing site, well, obviously you’ve discovered the new site already.

We’d love to hear your feedback on the new site. So send your bouquets and brickbats on through to us.