Historical Jesus Is Here!

R. Joseph Hoffmann has issued the The Jesus Process, a series of essays (one by him) discussing the historicity and non-historicity of Jesus, and the processes of scholarship used to adjudicate between historical arguments on Jesus.

This is a moment of supernova-esque importance because, for the first time that I know, the public (indeed, the world) has quasi-direct access to academic scholars in the process of making scholarly arguments. This is not a journalist's report of an academic conference or paper. This is not a mass-market book made by an academic. This is not a non-academic book challenging academic scholarship.

This is the academy on the "home turf" of the public. This is the opportunity for the academy to show how and why its professionalism serves the world better than amateur scholarship in books and blogs. Now, alert readers may note that one of the three essay writers, Stephanie Louse Fischer, is a graduate student and not yet a professional academic.

Nevertheless, professionalism is what is at stake in this academic volley against prominent mythicist bloggers. This essay series puts professionalism at the center of its concerns. The facts, the knowledge, the inferences and interpretations all serve the application of professional methodologies and techniques. The final outcome of these essays and their aftermath will be both the definition of professionalism and the professional viability of mythicism. This is why the moment is so fascinating.

I am very excited about this moment and these essays. I plan to read and analyze every one. I encourage others to do so, too. From there, we on the sidelines will await what I am sure will be an equally momentous reply from Richard Carrier. There may be other mythicists, academic and non-academic, who chime in on The Jesus Process essays, but now that the essays are out, Carrier is the man. Initially, no reply will matter more than his.

Indeed, the credibility and reputation of non-academic scholarship may rest on what Carrier does with this opportunity. If Carrier can make a strong scholarly case in favor of both his use of Bayesian techniques and his mythicist position, he will have achieved something very significant and unique in modern scholarship.

But Hoffmann's essays are determined, make no mistake about it, to go after Carrier and expose his mythicism as less than professional grade. One of the essays of The Jesus Process is by Hoffmann, a long piece called "Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus." In it, he promises that the weight of history is "decisive" in favor of the historicity of Jesus. On this point, Hoffmann offers his thesis as follows:

It is my view, simply stated, that while facts concerning the Jesus of history were jeopardized from the start by a variety of salvation myths, by the credulity of early believers, by the historiographical tendencies of the era, and by the editorial tendencies of early writers, the gospels retain a stubbornly historical view of Jesus, preserve reliable information about his life and teachings, and are not engulfed by any of the conditions under which they were composed. Jesus “the Nazarene” did not originate as a myth or a story without historical coordinates, but as a teacher in first century Roman Palestine. Like dozens of other Hellenistic teachers, but lacking sophisticated “biographers” to preserve his accomplishments, Jesus is distinct only because the cult that formed around him perpetuated his memory in ritual, worship, and text, while the memory of other attested personalities of antiquity, even those who enjoyed brief cultic popularity like Antigonus I, Ptolemy I and Demetrius of Macedon are known to us mainly through literary artifacts.

You'll have to read the rest of the article to see how Hoffmann defends the thesis. Let me note, however, that Hoffmann's use of the gospels in his argument may have similarities with the narrative-based methodology employed by Joel S. Baden for the Pentateuch. Both Hoffmann and Baden are interested in immediate sources of religious texts. Hoffmann argues that a person, the subject of the texts, is probably a source for his texts; Baden argues that earlier, separate versions are the sources for his.

In addition to the positive case for the historical Jesus, Hoffmann holds the mythicist position "as fatally flawed and subject to a variety of objections." Here, Hoffmann's thesis is, well, devastating:

The attempt of “mythicists” to show that Jesus did not exist, on the other hand, has been largely incoherent, insufficiently scrupulous of historical detail, and based on improbable, bead-strung analogies.[1] The failure of the myth theory is not the consequence merely of methodological sloppiness with respect to the sources and their religious contexts; that has been demonstrated again and again from as early as Shirley Jackson Case’s (now dated) study, The Historicity of  Jesus (1912). It is a problem incipient in the task itself, which Morton Smith aptly summarized in 1986: The myth theory, he wrote, is almost entirely based on an argument from silence, especially the “silence” of Paul. “In order to explain just what it was that Paul and other early Christians believed, the mythicists are forced to manufacture unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth . . . about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified… [presenting us with] a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the Gospels.”[2]

As I said, Hoffmann's essay is long, yet it's well worth careful reading and re-reading.

So, grab your popcorn and read up. I won't say "This is gonna be good," because it already is good.

The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis

Joel S. Baden

I have talked before about source criticism of the Torah/Pentateuch, usually whenever the Kuzari Principle comes up. My 2011-12 series on biblical scholar James Kugel's How to Read the Bible dealt by necessity with source criticism, that is, with the Documentary Hypothesis (DH).

I once summarized the DH this way:

The modern form of [the DH] emerges from seven types of evidence: (1) the Hebrew language of different periods in the Torah, (2) the use and quantity of terms in the different sources, (3) consistent content (such as the revelation of God's name, (4) the narrative flow of each source, (5) the connection between parts of the Torah and other parts of the Bible, (6) the relationships of the sources to each other and to history, and (7) the convergence of the different lines of evidence. According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the Torah as we have it today develops from early oral and written sources that coagulated into four main sources--J, E, P, and D. Between 922 BCE and 400 BCE, the four sources were compiled and woven together to produce the Torah.

This summary, taken from Richard Elliott Friedman, does not discuss the divide between documentary and non-documentary pentateuchal scholars. Indeed, the summary doesn't indicate how much of the DH had been discarded because of the approach's methodological problems.

Joel Baden, an Assistant Professor at Yale Divinity School, writes about the transformation of the DH in the last four decades. This transformed DH is sufficiently new; he calls it a Neo-Documentary Hypothesis (NDH) and asserts that through it, revitalized source criticism "is regaining its place as a viable, productive, and current approach to the Pentateuch."

Baden's NDH is a narrative-based approach to the Pentateuch, interested in assessing literary phenomena against the source-critical position that the text was formed from the combination of previously independent documents, that is, essentially complete and self-contained sources.

I like Baden's framing of the DH/NDH:

The Documentary Hypothesis, it must always be remembered, is precisely that: a hypothesis. It is an attempt to explain the literary phenomena of the Pentateuch: clear narrative contradiction, repetition, and discontinuity. It posits that the best explanation for these features is the existence of four independent documents that were combined into a single text, basically the canonical Pentateuch as we now have it. It is the literary solution to a literary problem, no more and no less. Scholarly claims regarding stylistic criteria or similarity of narratives are not inherent parts of the theory; they are aspects of the methods used to argue for the theory. If they do not succeed, the theory does not of necessity fail; the methods do. The theory may simply need to be argued on different grounds. Thus the very correct criticisms of anti-documentary scholars from the earliest days of the theory until our own time are not necessarily grounds for dismissing the whole hypothesis; they are, rather, a call to refine and revise the methods employed by scholars when describing and applying the hypothesis. When such refinements and revisions are undertaken, as they have been recently, the Documentary Hypothesis regains its place as the most economical, comprehensive explanation for the literary phenomena of the canonical Pentateuch.

The last bit above boldly asserts the preeminence of the DH via the NDH. Below, Baden explains the literary focus of the NDH:

We place at the forefront of the analysis plot and narrative continuity—the events that occur, the sequence in which they occur, cause, and effect. The mark of an author is his creation of and adherence to a distinctive and definable set of narrative claims: who did what, when, where, and how. Where these claims are contradictory, we must consider that a different author is at work; where they are the same, there is no need to pursue any source division.

One key issue for the DH/NDH is separating it from at least some of the work of Julius Wellhausen (and followers):

For generations now, the Documentary Hypothesis has been considered synonymous with Wellhausen’s reconstruction of the evolutionary growth of ancient Israelite religion. The source division and the placement of the sources in a straight line of development from earliest to latest, from naturalistic to legalistic, has been taken as the fundamental claim of the hypothesis. This is demonstrated by the attempts in scholarship to debunk the Documentary Hypothesis by arguing against Wellhausen’s view of Israelite religion, as if the former is dependent on the latter. On the contrary, however, it was Wellhausen’s source division in his Composition that allowed for his historical reconstruction in the Prolegomena. In the first book, he addressed only the literary evidence; in the second, he addressed only the historical questions. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis returns to the first stage, and leaves the second unconsidered. The literary question is primary, and is in fact the only question that can be answered by the documentary theory. Even if one disagrees with or disproves the arguments of Wellhausen’s Prolegomena, the literary analysis of the Pentateuch stands on its own merits.

Separation and restriction are recurring themes in Baden's explanation of the NDH. Below, he discusses how the NDH becomes a better scholarly approach by being properly restricted in scope:

The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis is concerned only with the penultimate form of the text: what the compiler had at hand when he put the four documents together. This approach allows for far greater clarity in addressing the question of how the Pentateuch came to be this way, for it goes back only a single step. It is crucial to note, however, that the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis does not deny the internal growth of the sources; it is simply unconcerned with them. Like so much else, how each source came to look as it does is a secondary question. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis does not deny that each source has a history; nor does it deny that the Pentateuch itself has a history after the compilation of the documents. It is a restricted answer to a restricted question.

The next bit, below, presents the NDH as a kind of return or re-start of the DH model:

The classical theory began as a fairly simple proposition: four independent documents, combined into a single Pentateuch. Over time, however, it expanded dramatically, so that even within a generation or two of Wellhausen the analysis of the Pentateuch required innumerable sigla, regular divisions of the text into half-verses and even single words, and highly complex theories about redaction. The unwieldiness of this theory inevitably led in part to opposition, as it could no longer be said that the Documentary Hypothesis was a particularly simple or elegant solution to the problems of the pentateuchal text. Ironically, of course, the newer analyses coming out of Europe are, if anything, even more complex than the most tortuous classical source-critical work. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis restores the simplicity of the earlier scholarship. It requires precisely four sources and one compiler.

This is a tremendously interesting essay, and comments/objections from readers appearing below the article are also enlightening. I would be very interested to understand non-documentary hypotheses better.

To a Student in My Composition and Rhetoric Class (Introduction to Literature)

Dear Student,

I was very happy you recently emailed me about a research essay topic you want to pursue. That you felt strongly enough to ask a question is gratifying. You wouldn't know this, but I begin every semester hoping that students find plays, poems, and stories that move them profoundly, or at least profoundly enough to ask such questions as you have.

Unfortunately, after fifteen weeks of class this term, you alone have fulfilled this hope. Your classmates, though nice people and smart enough, have rarely shown the desire or self-motivation to vigorously explore the literary texts in our course. They have read, or skimmed. They have glibly opined. They have written papers. However, I feel they have not been taken by any of our texts. They were unimpressed by Hamlet's grief and by how severely he reckoned every possible course of action. They eschewed, or seemed to, the lonely and noble reflection of Jane Kenyon's "Let Evening Come." They saw no kinship between themselves and proud Sylvia in Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson." 

It takes passion to read anything, but especially drama, poetry, and fiction. It takes conviction to write, but especially to write an academic essay. What I have really been trying to tell and teach all of you is to be passionate, assertive, bold, and confident. If you can muster these attitudes for a class, you can muster them in your life. As much as any knowledge, skill, or wisdom that you take from school, these attitudes will serve you well in life and carry you far.

But there is more than utility to these attitudes. They have more value than getting you a job and helping you succeed in a career. No, these attitudes are the formula of emotional depth and perspective. The happiness literature offers is understanding happiness. From our best writing we learn that happiness is complex, fleeting, easily unrecognized, and surprisingly connected to outlook and effort. And the wisdom literature offers is that of adventure, for the worlds created in literature lead out to reality and to knowledge that spans centuries of human endeavor.

Just two examples of the happiness and wisdom I mean, and then I will close. Think on the rich, lasting happiness from the end of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind":

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Shelley describes a happiness greater, if less pure, than a child's. It's a lasting, hopeful happiness. It's the happiness of knowing life continues inexorably. To Shelley, we are instruments of a powerful universe in motion. Such happiness comes from being bound sonically and temperamentally to that universe. We readers, too, joyfully recognize the intertwining rhyme Shelley uses. We see it and connect with him, and his world. We hear the trumpet tones and know this sound calls just as well in our world.

We take from Shelley a wise happiness, a kind of knowledge not found in movies, television, games, or other activities--all of which possess their own wisdom. Yet we talk about wisdom and knowledge as if they were only about having facts and being able to recall them. Consider, then, the wisdom of the speaker in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues":

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. I just watched Sonny's face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn't with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing -- he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.

The man admits at the outset he is limited in his knowledge about music. Yet, like the improvising musicians he observes and hears, he builds on what he knows and tries to expand it. Baldwin's writing here focuses on hearing and watching--listening to Sonny play and watching him expend effort. Baldwin searches and finds in the music a dialogue between Creole and Sonny, a dialogue that turns into Sonny's musical exodus or perhaps a musical baptism.

This is the wisdom of hearing and observing, yes, but more the wisdom of sharing and connecting. What sings in this prose is how the speaker voices--attempts to articulate on the fly--how he understands Sonny and Creole. He wants to partake of their interplay. He learns by doing and by actively being.

The happiness and wisdom of literature are unfathomably rich. My student, I wanted you and all your classmates to learn this. Excepting you alone, I failed this semester. I failed because your classmates did not want to be reached and did not think it was worth their energy. I failed because I was not focused or skilled or apt enough to overcome their extraordinary apathy and complacence.

I will retire as a college teacher at the end of this semester. I cannot foresee teaching an Introduction to Literature course again. After 17 years of teaching, I have lost the drive to lead any more classes on the perilous journey through the language and stories of the past, and through the struggle of writing now. I have ceased to be an effective teacher, if ever I was one.

My student, your letter is a comfort to me as I depart. As you go your own way in life, I hope some of what we have read this term stays with you and grows with you. I bid you, as Tennyson's "Ulysses," to seek newer worlds beyond the sunset. That is my intent. Perhaps we will meet again.

Larry Tanner, a teacher

New Series: The Art of Strategy

Textuality's next series is another book walkthrough. This time, I will share thoughts and opinions on The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life. Written by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff, the book discusses many subjects meeting my natural interests: rational thinking, personal finance, professional success, and ethics.

Looking at the book's chapters, we can see how substantial this series promises to be:

Introduction: How Should People Behave in Society?

Part I
1. Ten Tales of Strategy
2. Games Solvable by Backward Reasoning
3. Prisoners' Dilemmas and How to Resolve Them
4. A Beautiful Equilibrium
Epilogue to Part I

Part II
5. Choice and Chance
6. Strategic Moves
7. Making Strategies Credible
Epilogue to Part II: A Nobel History

Part III
8. Interpreting and Manipulating Information
9. Cooperation and Coordination
10. Auctions, Bidding, and Contests
11. Bargaining
12. Voting
13. Incentives
14. Case Studies

Every series demands different responses from me as reader and blogger, so I don't yet know what structure my posts will take. I don't know how many posts or what the balance will be between chapter summary, commentary, and attempts to apply knowledge.

In other words, I will make it up as we go along, which probably seems strange for a book about strategy. Nevertheless, I have confidence this series will prove highly engaging and useful.

Burn My Books. I Won't Kill You in Retaliation.

You may have heard that copies of the Qur’an were incinerated by Americans at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. I don't know how many copies were burned or whether it was intentional, but I know that people have been killed in response.

Yes, whoever did the burning was stupid and wrong. However it happened, it is inexcusable. But to kill and threaten people with harm over it? I don't understand.

Listen, I own a copy of the Torah. If you have a copy, please feel free to burn it without fear of physical retribution from me. I think it's a waste of a book and a waste of fire, but go ahead.

I have a nice copy of the Tanakh. I have an interlinear version (Hebrew-English) of the Psalms. I have the Tanya. I have an English version of the Koran. I have the Analects by Confucius. I have the Tzo Te Ting. Burn your own copies, if you must.

I also have books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris--yes, atheist books. I have a Charles Darwin collection and Prothero's book on evolution and fossils. I have a Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Einstein's Ideas and Opinions, and several scientific and non-scientific works of Richard Feynman. Drive a hot spike through copies of these. You have my permission.

I have a complete Plato, a selected Aristotle, a full Shakespeare, and complete works of Chaucer and Milton. Incinerate your versions, accidentally or on purpose.

I have several novels by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Milan Kundera, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Mann, Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, Albert Camus, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Bronte, Marcel Proust, Cynthia Ozick, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and others. These works are yours for the flames.

I have poetry collections by Byron, Donne, Frost, Whitman, Olson, Oppen, Neruda, Homer, Keats, Yeats, Jabes, Machado, Rimbaud, Langland, Walcott, Williams, Zukofsky and more. Brand them, shred them, discard them.

I have books on Auschwitz and Anglo-Saxon England, on the history of ancient Israel and the history of Jews in America. I have books on wikinomics and personal finance; on German, Yiddish, Swedish, and Chinese; on reading, writing, visualizing, and decision-making; and on architecture, Picasso's art, Coltrane's jazz, and medieval illuminated manuscripts. Take them, take them.

I have books by Derrida and Foucault, Hume and Max, Marcus Aurelius and the Venerable Bede, Boethius and Churchill, Lincoln and Jefferson, Herodotus and Virgil, Aquinas and Augustine, Maimonides and Keith Richards. I would be heartbroken if you thought it was cool to burn these books, but you may do it if it gets your rocks off.

Destroy it all. I love all my books, but I won't call for your death. I won't threaten your family or your countrymen and countrywomen.

Whatever you do to books will not stop me from reading. You won't prevent me from learning. Whatever symbolic point you might be making does not affect me. You burn because you fear, because you are consumed. Your fire doesn't touch me.

Go on and incinerate books in full knowledge of your safety. Your burning only pollutes the environment and symbolizes your final impotence.

How I'm Writing the Dissertation

People may be interested to know how I intend to go about writing my dissertation this year. My topic is medieval English literature, and I will write a software program to do a special sort of parsing for several texts in the corpus. I have three different types of parsing I want to do, and most of the dissertation will concern recording and analyzing the results generated by the program.

The project is pretty exciting, which is not an unimportant point because one reason I didn't finish my first dissertation back in 2001 was that I fell out of love with the topic. Back then, I had written two decent chapters but couldn't do the research or find a focus for the remaining chapters. My prospectus and plan were hardly helpful and I eventually had to resign myself to the idea that the project was untenable.

As I see it, once the software program is sufficiently developed, the dissertation itself should be relatively easy to complete. Of course, herein lies the major technical challenge: my ability to write the program. Software developing has been much more difficult than I imagined, but I'm working it. My hope is to have the program ready for trial by the end of this month or middle of next month.

Another challenge is my lifestyle. After all, I am a professional with a full-time salaried position. I'm not a graduate student with a few classes to teach and chunks of time that can be dedicated to library work and writing. I also have a household to care for, which means my family and my home. My kids want attention from me. My wife needs me to help out around the house. Bills need to be paid, errands need to be run, neighbors and friends need to be connected with. Finally, I need to manage my health and fitness.

Given my technical and time constraints, here is how I have game-planned the dissertation:

• At least 15 minutes per day learning and doing software development.
• At least 15 minutes per day planning dissertation content.

Fifteen minutes may not sound like a lot of time, but it can be. Besides, I often work for much longer than that. The main thing is to dedicate some time every day to being productive on the main elements of the project. In this way, I'm approaching the project similarly to how I conduct an exercise program or business project.

Indeed, the formal 15 minutes are "executive sessions" and not necessarily the execution work of programming or writing. These execution activities can take place throughout the day, even while I'm at my day job. Although I am at work during the day and have a full schedule of meetings and tasks, I also have pockets of time where I can focus exclusively on some part of the dissertation. What's more, I often have opportunities to work the dissertation as part of a multi-task scenario. In fact, that's how I blog as much as I do. Beyond the execution work, the 15-minute executive sessions will allow me to develop and refine the big picture of the dissertation, its important arguments, lines of support and evidence, critical background and objections, and paths forward.

The innovation (for me) of my approach lies in how I'll actually write the chapters. In short: I won't write. Instead, I am going to spend most of my time, at least in the early stage, using a storyboard process. Storyboarding is a technique I use in my job to help our technical teams develop proposal content. It's like a very robust outline that accounts for what information customers have asked for, what knowledge we bring to the subject, and what features and benefits distinguish our offering from other companies competing for the same business.

The advantage of storyboarding for the dissertation is that it allows for capturing a lot of data in individual sections while also making it possible to find places in the large-scale outline for new information and arguments. My dissertation writing plan, to make it basic, is to storyboard the dissertation so completely that it's practically written when I put everything together.

I have a high degree of confidence in this process because I've used it dozens of times at work. Nevertheless, it doesn't make completing the dissertation any easier or less labor intensive. But it will help me work on all of the dissertation instead of on individual chapters in sequence.

I'm excited about the project and about how I intend to conduct it. All that's left is to do it!

Return of the Teacher

Somehow, I missed this afternoon's earthquake. I was probably too engrossed in finishing the syllabus for my introduction to literature course. Class begins next week, marking my return to the classroom after more than a year doing doctoral student stuff.

Students should find the class enjoyable and useful. See what you think. Here's the reading plan for the term, subject to further change:

Unit 1: Drama

An Introduction to Drama
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1

William Shakespeare, Life and Works
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2

Hamlet: Sources and Influence
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3

Hamlet: Texts and Authorship
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 4

The Shakespearean Stage
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5

Drama (Literature) as a Mirror, Part 1
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Act 1

Drama (Literature) as a Mirror, Part 2
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Act 2

Drama (Literature) as a Mirror, Part 3
Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Act 3

Drama (Literature) and Redemption, Part 1
Wilson, Fences, Act 1

Drama (Literature) and Redemption, Part 2
Wilson, Fences, Act 2

Unit 2: Poetry

Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry
Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
Kinnell, "The Bear"

Shakespearean Sonnet (and One Spenserian)
Shakespeare, Sonnets 73 and 130
Keats, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be"
McKay, “America"
Spenser, “One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand"

Petrarchan Sonnet
Donne, "Death, Be Not Proud"
Milton, "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"
Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us"
Browning, "How Do I Love Thee?"

Other Sonnets
Shelley, "Ozymandias"
Hopkins, "Pied Beauty"
Yeats, "Leda and the Swan"
cummings, "pity this busy monster,manunkind"

Blank Verse
Yeats, "The Second Coming"
Frost, "After Apple-Picking"
Frost, "Birches"
Stafford, "Traveling through the Dark"

Ode
Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind"
Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Villanelle (and a Pantoum)
Bishop, "One Art"
Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"
Hacker, "Villanelle"
Jeffers, "Outlandish Blues (The Movie)"

Open Form
Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider"
Moore, “Poetry"
Duncan, “The Torso"
Silko, “Prayer to the Pacific"

Elegy
Jonson, "On My First Son"
Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
Housman, "To An Athlete Dying Young"
Ransom, "Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter"
Hill, "In Memory of Jane Fraser"

Dramatic Monologue
Tennyson, “Ulysses"
Browning, “My Last Duchess"
Eliot, "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Faith and Doubt
Herbert, "Easter Wings"
Lowell, "Skunk Hour"
Kumin, "Credo"
Kenyon, "Let Evening Come"

Conformity and Rebellion
Dickinson, "Much Madness Is Divinest Sense"
Brooks, "We Real Cool"
Sanchez, "An Anthem"
McHugh, "What He Thought"

Fractured Fairy Tales
Sexton, "Cinderella"
Piercy, "Barbie Doll"
Fulton, "You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain"
Duhamel, "One Afternoon When Barbie Wanted to Join the Military"

Animals
Blake, "The Tyger"
Millay, "Wild Swans"
Bishop, "The Fish"
Hall, "Names of Horses"
Harjo, "She Had Some Horses"

Childhood
Roethke, "My Papa’s Waltz"
Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays"
Thomas, "Fern Hill"
Bukowski, "My Old Man"
Willard, "Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him"

Carpe Diem
Herrick, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"
Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
Housman, "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now"
O’Hara, "The Day Lady Died"

Unit 3: Short Fiction

Characters, Part 1
Bambara, "The Lesson"

Characters, Part 2
O’Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

Characters, Part 3
Carver, "Cathedral"

Characters, Part 4
Tan, "Two Kinds"

Plots, Part 1
Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado"

Plots, Part 2
Fitzgerald, "Winter Dreams"

Plots, Part 3
 Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants"

Plots, Part 4
Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

Settings, Part 1
Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown"

Settings, Part 2
Garcia Marquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"

Settings, Part 3
Atwood, "Death by Landscape"

Students should find the writing requirements manageable: five short essays, freewriting exercises, an annotated bibliography, and a research paper.

Let's go!

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There's Signs

Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind

Old friend GEM of TKI wonders why no one has challenged his post on signs and the design inference.

[T]his Jan 16 post was foundational, and the silence from objectors is interesting, especially given the significance of symbolic communication....

GEM leaves us to guess what he finds interesting in the “silence from objectors.” Perhaps he takes it as consent or befuddlement.  I rather think people simply shrugged their shoulders in apathy.

In the end, GEM justifies intelligent design creationism by arguing that "symbolic messages" and "physical media" for message encoding/transmitting/decoding appear in nature. Therefore, as these messages and tools support a "design inference" in human social contexts, so too do they warrant a design inference in biological and origins of life/universe contexts.

The central analogy that guides GEM's argument has been around long enough, at least in my experience. I don't share the opinion that it supports a strong case, and I'll have a bit more to say on this later. For now, however, I want to focus on some oddities in GEM's post, mostly as they relate to semiotics. One oddity is how GEM describes an observer’s actions with signs:

Signs: I observe one or more signs [in a pattern], and infer the signified object, on a warrant:

I: [si] –> O, on W

The oddity here is the term “infer," which is inappropriate to most signs. The usual term is “interpret,” and in Peircean semiotics--GEM states he is following Peirce--the interpretans is one of three fundamental parts of the sign: there’s the signifier (the sound or word), the signified object (the real-world thing), and the interpretans (the observer’s mental translation of how the object is represented by the signifier.

Now, Peirce did invoke a rule of inference for a special class of signs that he called delome signs, but the rule doesn't apply universally. Inference is a focused activity: to infer is to go from the known to the hidden or from the apparent to the latent. It is to reveal what’s implicit.

In the context of the sign, however, there’s typically no need for inference because by definition a sign already includes a signified object. The signified object is already “there,” not hidden or latent. The meaning of most signs is known and shared between speaker and auditor before communication takes place; indeed, it's an important condition that makes linguistic communication possible. This shared knowledge is the warrant that GEM mentions.

Thus, when one observes a sign or a set of signs, one normally does not need to infer the signified object. Rather, one understands or interprets the signified object--which is to say that one knows (of) the object to which the signifier is referring.

GEM's use of "infer" is most certainly rhetorical, a tactic to connect interpreting signs, on the one hand, with inferring design from the structure of living things, on the other hand. I don’t begrudge his attempt, but at this point the analogy does not hold. Interpreting the meaning of signs is not at all like reasoning that Thing ABC was created by a person or some other entity of person-like or above intelligence and capability.

But I should clarify some more because GEM’s argument has little concern with meaning per se. His real point rests on the premise that in interpreting signs, we infer that their ultimate source is a conscious being. This is, of course, proper and standard use of the term "infer." So too, in interpreting cells of living beings as machines (GEM equates cells with von Neumann self-replicators [VNSR]), we infer their ultimate source as a being of great skill and subtlety. For GEM, living cells have the added bonus of also being sign encoding, transmitting, and decoding machines. The genetic code and the processes of protein building are part of the larger cellular machine, adding further support to the idea that the ultimate source of life is an intelligent being, putatively the god of Christianity.

Now, GEM’s argument is obviously all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Cells are not actually machines, after all. People too are not machines. GEM is overly invested in his personal reading of the VNSR's significance for an inference to intelligent design creationism.

Let us remember that the VNSR is a human contrivance based on organic models. Human contraptions, generally, seek to emulate and simulate organic systems. And organic systems are often far more intricate and complex than their human-made counterparts. Thus, it does little good to point out banally that every watch has a watchmaker because watches are structurally and environmentally too unlike cells for a useful comparison. Make a watch that's more cell-like. Then we can talk.

The watchmaker analogy fails for another reason. Take a look at your own watch right now. Maybe it was assembled by a single person in China. Where did that person get the gears? Where did that person get the electronics? They each came, assembled by others, from elsewhere. And where did the raw materials come from? How were the metals obtained, smelted, forged, and shaped? Others did that, too. We might say more accurately, then, that every watch has many watchmakers and every watch has a history tied to those watchmakers and their particular environments and available resources.

I dare say that no Christian theologian is currently arguing that God and his Supernatural Friends are the designers of life and that they interacted over time to forge organic existence. Usually, the learned theologians postulate that there was only one Big Boss, one designer, who simply poofed life into existence at once. But if there was only one designer and one design moment, then the theologian needs a new analogy to use because in real life many different people in different contingent circumstances have a direct and indirect impact on the construction of machines.

---

We should return to the subject of oddities in GEM’s argument concerning signs.

I mentioned before that GEM departs from Peircean semiotics when he employs the loaded term “infer” and thereby both downplays and skews the role of the interpretans in sign operation.

GEM departs again from Peirce in another oddity: artificially separating symbolic signs from indexical and iconic signs. GEM previously had given us his analysis of signs, and in that analysis he discussed indexical (e.g., smoke as an index of fire) and iconic signs (e.g., a natural formation that resembles a human face). He then focuses on symbols specifically, and uses different language to discuss the semiotic operation:

Symbols: I observe a {set} of one or more symbols, and infer the/a signified meaning, on a warrant:

I: {sy} –> M, on W

But symbols are not a different species of sign. Rather, symbols lie on a continuum that encompasses indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs. As Albert Atkin reports, Peirce himself was aware of this continuity --

by 1903 Peirce was aware that it would be hard, if not impossible, to find any pure instances of icons and indices. Rather, he began to suspect that icons and indices were always partly symbolic or conventional.

Thus, it is not so easy to separate "naturally occurring" signs from "mind-made" signs. All signs are to some extent "mind made." The question is "Whose mind?"

The answer to this question is "The sign observer's mind." The observer of an indexical, iconic, or symbolic sign determines--through interpretation--the integrity of the sign and makes it meaningful. I cannot exaggerate the importance of this point: the observer makes meaning from the sign.

The idea that the observer’s understanding of signs is active and productive is critical to Peirce. His interpretans denotes how someone understands the signifier-signified relationship, and the interpretans is another sign. The interpretans is the observer's personal spin on the conventional association between the signifier and signified. As we discussed before, that association or meaning of signs is known and shared between speaker/writer and observer in advance of communication taking place. At the same time, individual observers translate signs in a way unique to their idiolect and to the situation. The idiosyncratic element of this translation is what made Peirce's interpretans so innovative in its time.

The point is, however, that part of making meaning from the sign includes making an idiosyncratic interpretation of the sign's "author." In other words: the author, the conscious mind that issues the sign, is partly a creation of the observer (cf. Michel Foucault). Thus, what GEM calls "an inference to intentionally and intelligently directed configuration"--whether the inference is made with regard to a text or an observation of the workings in a living cell--is always a personal mental construct of the observer.

From the observer's point of view, it's easy and helpful to assume an intelligent agency as a singular source of signs, messages, systems, and so on. But that assumption is interpretive, it's an interpretans. The assumption need not have any resemblance to the actual source(s), causes, and circumstances of transmission. We can therefore clearly see the error in GEM's concluding specification of a certain class of (biological) signs:

signs that are believed to warrant the conclusion that they are best explained on design rather than a spontaneous natural process tracing to undirected forces and circumstances of chance and/or mechanical necessity.

GEM here conflates two acts of interpretation. In the first act, an organic entity is taken as a sign or a set of signs. In the second, that sign or set of signs is taken to have a meaning bearing explanation. In both cases, we learn more about the observer making the interpretations than we do about the supposed "source" of the signs. Indeed, we never approach that "source" at all.

So, I personally am put off by GEM's "foundational" post. It abuses Peircean semiotics, and it fails to make its primary case. Quite simply, there is no inference to design that can be had--at least, not on a foundation of semiotics. At best, there's an interpretation of design, but we already knew that.

Around the Web

Lots of great news and information around today:

• A healthy proportion of students at American colleges and universities aren't gaining much knowledge in the first two years. Let the blame games begin. [But see here for another take.]
• The tree octopus fabrication shows that people may give too much credence to websites.
• Roger Rosenblatt gives four reasons to write.
• Jerry Coyne talks about the green heron, a tool-using bird.
• How to bind a 10,000 page book.
• The Shroud of Turin: Yes, it's a fucking fake. Don't miss the litigious commenter.
• On the Colbert Report, Sean Dorrance Kelly advises us to embrace "the polytheistic pantheon of Homeric literature."

Israel's God: A History

Tablets from the Enuma Elish, the ancient Babylonian creation myth.

I have been a long-time fan of Evid3nc3's video series on his de-conversion from evangelical Christianity.

His latest installment, derived from his reading of Karen Armstrong's A History of God, talks about the history of the monotheistic god, Israel's polytheistic past, and the ongoing construction and re-construction of the Bible.

The narrative here touches on several themes that have come up in my series on James Kugel's How to Read the Bible. One theme is that we can look outside the Bible and see how its contents have many historical connections and sources. Another theme that while the Bible on its own is fairly dry, its history and evolution is exceedingly interesting. A third theme goes to the question that Kugel asks, which I'll paraphrase as what do we do with the Bible once we know (and perhaps believe) the hypotheses about its origins and development? Do we use it as the basis of religious worship and daily living? Do we consider it alongside other religious works of other cultures, that is, as interesting and valued but not as communicating a special truth about the nature of the universe?

Like Evid3nc3, I felt the second path was probably correct. Once I realized and accepted that it was unreasonable to take the Bible seriously as an authority on the nature of the universe and my personal obligations in the world...well, it became impossible to look at Judaism or religious figures the same way as before.

Related to the above video is another from earlier in Evid3nc3's series.

Can Science Explain Art, Music, and Literature?

The people are revolting, Roger. Better get used to it. But it was good to be king, wasn't it?

At Big Questions Online, Philosopher Roger Scruton thinks science is out of its element when it attempts to explain art, music, literature, and human senses of beauty:

We don’t understand the plays of Shakespeare by conducting surveys and experiments. We don’t interpret The Art of Fugue with an acoustical analysis, or Michelangelo’s David with the chemistry of marble. Art, literature, music and history belong to the ‘human world’, the world that is shaped by our own consciousness, and we study them not by explaining how they arose but by interpreting what they mean. Explanation has a method, and it is the method of science. Interpretation goes in search of a method, but is never sure of finding one.

I am, of course, a humanities guy. But who says we can't understand  Shakespeare through surveys and experiments? Yes, certainly, one important way we engage art is by interpreting what a work means, but we can learn much by developing explanations of how works arise. I don't understand why Scruton wants to make humanities and science non-overlapping magisteria.

I am also puzzled by his picture of humanities interpretation as a humble discipline of "doubt and hesitation" and science as "certainty":

Over the last two decades, however, Darwinism has invaded the field of the humanities, in a way that Darwin himself would scarcely have predicted. Doubt and hesitation have given way to certainty, interpretation has been subsumed into explanation, and the whole realm of aesthetic experience and literary judgement has been brought to heel as an “adaptation,” a part of human biology which exists because of the benefit that it confers on our genes. No need now to puzzle over the meaning of music or the nature of beauty in art. The meaning of art and music reside in what they do for our genes. Once we see that these features of the human condition are “adaptations,” acquired perhaps many thousands of years ago, during the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we will be able to explain them. We will know what art and music essentially are by discovering what they do.

Whenever people want to criticize or denigrate science, they invariably characterize it with the flaw of certainty. They suggest it is hubristic, pronouncing to hold answers it does not really have. This criticism misses the mark. More often, the critics assert scientific certainty where the scientists themselves do not. For instance, in the quote above, Scruton presents Darwinism as claiming to offer definitive, over-arching explanations of works. Unfortunately, we find not one citation to examples of literary Darwinists making this claim in Scranton's entire article.

On the other hand, we can look at another article where we might expect to find scientific hubris. Here, for example, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker favorably reviews the book, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, edited by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Pinker seems quite interested in literary Darwinism, so does the following make a claim for certainty?

For its part, literary analysis would surely benefit from the latest scientific ideas on human thought, emotion, and social relations. Fiction has long been thought of as a means of exploring human nature, and the current stagnation of literary scholarship can be attributed, in part, to its denial of that truism. The field’s commitment to the dogma that the mind is a blank slate and that all human concerns are social constructions has led it to focus on cultural and historical particulars, banishing the deeper resonances of fiction that transcend time and place. And its distrust of science (and more generally, the search for testable hypotheses and cumulative objective knowledge) has left it, according to many accounts, mired in faddism, obscurantism, and parochialism. For all these reasons, evolutionary psychology and literary analysis seem to be natural companions.

Here's a second quote from Pinker (the entire review can be found here). Again, is he declaring literary Darwinism as an infallible and exclusive method for engaging or explaining literary works?

The essence of science is not a subject matter or a set of experimental techniques, but the conviction that our claims about the world are not matters of personal taste or conviction but can be evaluated for their degree of truth. A consilient literary analysis should thus pursue some of the methods of science as well as its theories, and two of the contributions argue that hypotheses in literary scholarship can be as testable as those in the sciences.

Apparently, Scruton is enamored with the idea that music, beauty, art, and similar terms are mysterious. Science fails with humanities disciplines, he says, because the scientists don't really know what the subject is that they are investigating. Scruton argues:

Until you define what music is, and how it differs from pitched sound, for example, you will not know what question you are asking, when you inquire into its origins. Until you recognize that the human sense of beauty is a completely different thing from the peahen’s sexual attraction, you won’t know what, if anything, is proved by the sparse similarities.

Yes, we need good, comprehensive definitions. We need a standard vocabulary that we can share in discussing phenomena. And understanding differences is important. No doubt, music is different than pitched sound. Music involves selection and arrangement of pitched sounds. But I question Scruton's completely different than. Whatever we make of the relationship between music and pitched sound or between a sense of beauty and sexual attraction, I see no warrant for blocking off music or beauty as phenomena of radical difference, as if they have no connection whatsoever with sound or sex--as if, in other words, they had been divinely wrought and bequeathed to humanity.

Scruton, as I see it, plots art and beauty on the same continuum with gods, free will, and souls. Defenders tell us we cannot explain the categories on the continuum. The categories are beyond our full comprehension, exceeding our language, and greater than the real things that are otherwise their material substance (e.g., religious writings and commentaries, neurons, cells and organelles).

What's more, Scruton and like-minded thinkers advise us not even to try explaining such categories:

The attempt to explain art, music, literature, and the sense of beauty as adaptations is both trivial as science and empty as a form of understanding. It tells us nothing of importance about its subject matter, and does huge intellectual damage in persuading ignorant people that after all there is nothing about the humanities to understand, since they have all been explained — and explained away.

This argument is deeply flawed. I don't accept Scruton as an authority to tell us what disciplines and methods to take seriously. Ultimately, the test of disciplines and methods is the knowledge they produce. In his given examples on music and sense of beauty, Scruton finds the Darwinist explanations "absurd." Fine. That's his opinion. But we need not accept those explanations fully to understand that they (1) are out in the public domain, (2) have some legitimacy, and (3) will ultimately stand or fall based on the collection of more data and the performance of more work in the area.

Another truly odious charge is that a Darwinist line of art or literary study obliterates any other modes of explaining and interpreting. The charge is simply untrue. Humanities studies can be interested in both biological explanations and cultural ones. The development of singing, to take an example from Scruton, seems to me very interesting. I want to know about the biological impulses and struggles that singing expresses, and I want to know about the arrangement of pitched sounds. Why that arrangement? What makes it as powerful as it is? What are its precursors? How has it spread and changed in culture?

We can, I submit, both learn about art and learn from it. And we can engage art (whether painting, literature, or a sense of beauty) productively without mystifying or aggrandizing it. Scruton's position betrays intellectual authoritarianism and parochialism. It's a position of entrenched power fearfully struggling to maintain hegemony.

The (Dubious) Authority of Scripture

Two questions that get to the heart of why one should be skeptical about scripture (in both the big-s and little-s senses).

Question 1: What method distinguishes words that have been divinely inspired from words that have not?

Question 2: What method reliably determines when a sacred text is speaking figuratively?


With the first question, I'm thinking that many religious traditions claim divine inspiration for their texts. For instance, some traditions hold that the deity even authored texts. But can we tell that a certain text--or parts of it--is the result of divine inspiration or authorship? And if so, how? Is it a matter of the words? The expression? Sophistication of ideas? Verbal and numerical patterns? Something else, as in a special experience while reading?

Regarding the second question, we know that some interpreters view elements of scripture as figurative. For example, they might say that the snake in Genesis didn't actually talk. Or they may say that the sun in Joshua did not really stand still. Yet, for thousands of years, people seem to have thought the Bible was speaking literally.

Our approach to scripture often rests on authority. Maybe you trust the authority of the rabbis--they have the right interpretation. Or maybe you trust the Church. Perhaps you have a study Bible and buy into the framing of the annotator. Heck, one can even get a completely different kind of commentary from Project Reason or Conservapedia.

What's more, the authority of these authorities seems to be based on granting ultimate authority to the holy texts themselves. However, this move appears to be more rhetorical than actual, since the preacher claims to speak the book and to speak for the book. He claims to be a conduit through which the book's intent becomes revealed to others. It's the mediation of the preacher or commentator that formulates the authority of the text and the justification that supposedly precedes the preacher/commentator.

It's a scam, in other words. You can't understand this book fully but I can. And this book reigns over both of us, so you better follow my reading and my book-based counsel. If you question or go against me, you betray the book, and you will be subject to divine wrath for your obstinacy.

I don't buy it, either the authority of the preachers and teachers or the authority of the texts themselves. Now, I do realize that we trust in authorities for all sorts of things and not just in the sphere of religion. Indeed, I am not certain we can get by without trusting some authorities at some time.

But to return to the two questions at the beginning: why should we trust religious authorities if there doesn't seem to be a clear method for unambiguously identifying the divine word and the literal or figurative registers of the sacred text? Really...why?

So, if a preacher enjoins you to follow your "calling" and turn to God, or to fight against what other consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom, or to feel guilty about your curiosity about the world--just remember that the preacher's authority is self-appointed and self-serving. You're better to do your own learning and your own decision-making.

Let the Dead Bury Jesus

[Jesus and Mo]

The last time I talked about historical Jesus, I concluded:

[W]e don’t know much of anything at all about the historical Jesus. All we can say for certain is that the New Testament reports on him as a teacher, executed rebel, and religious icon.

Biblical scholar R. Joseph Hoffmann, whom I admire, seems to be of the same opinion. His years of scholarship on the matter and involvement with the relevant sources lead him to conclude that --

[T]he sources we possess do not establish the conditions for a verdict on the historicity of Jesus.

This statement from Hoffmann's important essay on historical Jesus scholarship declares that there's not much we can know about the historical Jesus. But the picture gets even more complicated because what we know has often been wrapped tightly in what we believe. To Hoffmann, we need to reality check both the content of our knowledge and the emotional investment we often make in that knowledge:

I accept that most of what we have learned about Jesus is “wrong” in one sense or another. Almost all of what the churches have taught about him--the christology that undergirds the doctrines of the Christian traditions, for example--is wrong at a literal level. It has to be because it is based on doctrines derived from a naive supernaturalist reading of sacred texts whose critical assessment had not even been contemplated before the eighteenth century.

But so too, the critical assessment is wrong, because it has been motivated by a belief that by removing the husks of dogmatic accretion--a process initiated by Luther’s liberal scholastic predecessors, in fact--a level of actuality would eventually be reached. There would be an assured minimum of truth (often assumed by the end of the 19th century to be primarily ethical rather than Christological, as doctrines like ascension and virgin birth were sent to the attic) which some historians on both the Catholic modernist and Protestant side thought would be unassailable.

In both church and school, our understanding of the historical Jesus has traditionally had more to do with ideology than reality. But if I understand Hoffmann, the historical Jesus is also a decidedly modern phenomenon in the West:

Odd...that the historicity of Jesus should be of any concern at all in relation to a person whose humanity, in the letters of Paul and in the gospels (to a lesser extent, perhaps) is of no consequence to the core tradition. The battle of the post-New Testament period in the early Church, as Harnack recognized, was not to define the divinity of Jesus but to defend his humanity.

Hoffmann notes that in the formative centuries of Christianity, the humanity of Jesus (which is not quite the same thing as his historicity) was actually de-emphasized in favor of his divinity--so much so that keeping hold of the idea that he was a walking and talking person at one time was a struggle. By comparison Hoffmann discusses a bit of the Islamic tradition, in which the humanity (again, not the same as historicity) of Jesus was cherished:

Love, fear, joy, pleasure, mother-love, and compassion equally have their origins in emotion and human evolution and are nonetheless “real” in daily life–indeed, shape daily life–constantly expressing themselves in thought and action. Religion consolidates these aspects of existence in a way that simple curiosity and information does not. It roots them not in the self but in something external, like God, or incarnates them in messengers like Jesus and metaphors like sin, forgiveness and redemption. That is what is going on in the New Testament, not an episode of To Tell the Truth.

For this reason–starting with a certain lack of profundity—it is difficult not to find the musings of (many) myth-theorists frankly ridiculous. The early church found the historical Jesus all but unnecessary: that is the story. They found his humanity necessary as a theological premise, because they could not quite grasp the concept of disembodied divinity. Besides, a god without humanity could scarcely be expected to comprehend human suffering, or desire to do anything about it. History did not require Jesus; emotion did. It required as well the incredible and fantastic aspects of his personality. History required Muhammad and the non-divinity of Muhammad for other reasons. That is why the two traditions are different.

What Hoffmann is trying to do here is establish a positive space for religion and religiosity. That first paragraph above stakes out the battery of intense human passions for which religion allows such expressive power. Religion--not Christianity, Islam, or any other major religion--has never been about relaying information but rather about presenting all experience as holding overarching significance and connectedness. That second paragraph challenges mythicists who dismiss religion out of hand as superstition and fantasy. Hoffmann defends Jesus and religion against the mythicists: it's not entirely fair to crow about the lack of evidence for the historical Jesus, he says, because early Christianity didn't realize it would ever need it (assuming there was evidence).

Instead, Jesus-as-God-incarnated was very much shaped by early Christianity's battles among believers and believers-to-be:

Stuck with the Bible, the gospel, a growing body of doctrine, necessitated by struggles with heretics, and the religious demands of a growing community–a lot of weight to carry–Christianity could not very easily take the turn toward disembodied and denatured divinity. If, for the pagans, the resurrection of the flesh was a nauseating idea, for the Christians it became a useful absurdity and the prelude to two millennia of “paradoxical” theology.

Hoffmann thus seems to be heading toward an idea that we are captive today to the sources available, and those sources emphasized the divinity of Jesus while subduing his human aspect. We cannot know if there was a "real" Jesus, but we can perhaps filter out the semblance of a human being from early Christian beliefs about who Jesus was:

If, as I think, the church was largely successful in subduing the humanity of Jesus while insisting as a strictly dogmatic matter that he was both fully human and fully divine (historical and unhistorical, as in John 1.1-15?), why still bother to ask about whether he “really” existed. Shouldn’t the question really be who or what existed? It is not the same as asking whether Muhammad existed since nothing but one kind of reality has ever been claimed for him, and that is historical.

My defense of debates and discussion of the historical Jesus is not based on any confidence that something new is going to be discovered, or some persuasive “template” found that will decide for us a question that the early Christian obviously regarded as irrelevant. Still less is it based on some notion that the Church will retract the doctrine of the trinity or the hypostatic union, clearing the way for an impartial investigation into the life of Jesus. That is already possible, and as always before the journey gets us to the front door of the Church. Nothing has been more depressing than the search for the Jesus of history, and nothing more hollow than the shouts of scholars who have claimed to find him. Except the shouts of scholars who claim there is nothing to find.

Not that the shapers of the Jesus tradition, whatever their real names were, should have the final say, but they did draw the map and bury the treasure. We are the victims of their indifference to the question.

Hoffmann argues that just because early Christianity made Jesus a magical, fantastical being doesn't mean that Jesus was all magic and fantasy. So, he's calling for measured applications of skepticism--agnosticism, even.

As I said, Hoffmann is one of those scholars I admire. I like his knowledge and his application of reasoning. However, I only find a weak case here against the mythicist position. Hoffmann appears simply to dislike the attitude of mythicists--maybe they seem too biased or too gleeful at the prospect of what a 100% no-Jesus would mean. I see Hoffmann as suffering from the same problem that many smart people have when it comes to religion:

On the one hand, religious beliefs are false and wrapped up in so much of what has been both immoral and tyrannical in world history. On the other hand, many people--including those we love--have drawn strength from their religious beliefs and have powerful personal ties to religious celebrations and rituals.

The problem is one of how to let go of religious beliefs, how to finally release them into the air.

Hoffmann seems not to want traditional belief. Yet he also wants to retain some appreciation, veneration even, of religion. I agree that it's important to have a a clear and unfiltered understanding of both religion generally and religions specifically. It's important to know their beliefs, their history, and their impact on cultures and individuals.

But we also have to accept that so much in religion describes stories which rise to the level of the impossible: the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Exodus, the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Assumption, and so on.

It really is OK that these are just stories. It's alright that they did not actually occur as reported. We can appreciate the stories, and we can listen to them and even learn from them. They just aren't true, and they are not stable pillars of a life.

A Textual Debate at Uncommon Descent

I don't have time at the moment to comment on this (update, 9/2010: see the very end), but I want to flag an interesting discussion happening over at Uncommon Descent. I know, I know. But the discussion is worth having and studying because it's about text and about the problem of defining textual concepts.

Barry Arrington opens the thread with his usual brand of armchair philosophy:

The Medium is Not the Message

March madness is upon us. In that vein, I ask you to consider the following sentence: “A basketball is round and orange.”

You read this sentence through a medium, probably a computer screen. This means I had an idea, and I wrote out on my computer screen a representation of the idea in symbols (Latin letters forming English words arranged together into a sentence using the rules of English grammar and syntax). I uploaded these symbols onto the uncommondescent.com website. You downloaded the symbols to your computer and deciphered them. Now a representation of the idea that was once in my head is in your head. When you read my sentence you thought about a round orange basketball.

Now consider this. My computer, the UD server, and your computer all have physical properties that can be measured. These properties include mass, charge, etc. But the information in the sentence “A basketball is round and orange” is quite independent of the physical properties of the medium on which it is placed. Indeed, none of the physical properties of your computer changed when you downloaded the information. The physical properties of your computer were rearranged, but they did not change. Your computer had the same mass, the same charge, the same specific gravity, etc. after you downloaded the sentence that it did before you downloaded it.

Think of it this way. Suppose I wrote the same sentence (“A basketball is round and orange”) on a piece of paper and handed it to you and asked you to read and memorize it. You proceed to memorize the sentence. I take the paper back and burn it. Then I ask you to repeat the sentence into a tape recorder. You dictate “A basketball is round and orange” into the tape recorder. What just happened? The information was in my head. Then it was on the paper. Then it was in your head, but not the paper. Now it is on the tape of the tape recorder.

What is the point of all this? The point is that information may be transmitted on a physical medium, but it is not reducible to the medium on which it is carried, and it is independent of the medium upon which it is carried. Information has no mass. It has no charge. Indeed, it has no property that can be measured by the same means we measure matter and energy. We conclude, therefore, that information is not reducible to matter, and it is not reducible to energy, and it is not reducible to a combination of matter and energy. Yet we know that information exists in the universe. Therefore, we must conclude that the universe is more than matter and energy, that it is more than mere particles in motion.

If the existence of information cannot be reduced to the properties of matter and energy, where did it come from? Where indeed?

Let me be clear that I think Arrington has introduced a wonderful and complex topic and treated it with prejudice, smugness, and a resistance to exploring the underlying assumptions of his own reasoning. Here are some of the first comments, abridged:

1- Its what they call an abstract noun. Each of us creates it anew in our head. It doesnt ‘exist’ just as a circle, happiness etc dont exist.
They are concepts, not objects.

2- All information is an abstraction. It requires perception to exist.

3- I don’t get this. If information “has no property that can be measured by the same means we measure matter and energy,” what’s Dr. Dembski doing all that math for? Isn’t a lot of that about measuring information?

4- Actually, your example would have only been more demonstrative if the phrase passed about was “material is all there is”.

5- Re #1: So if all of a sudden all perception would, let’s say, die, then all information would suddenly disappear?

6- (by Barry A.) In [1] Graham uses information to deny the existence of information. Self refute much? In answer to composer’s question in [3], I did not say that information cannot be measured. I said it cannot be measured in the way matter and energy can be measured, because it has neither mass nor energy.

Returning to the original post, I think we need to clarify terms first. Arrington uses the word "information," but he really is talking about "meaning." The terms overlap in their senses, but when he says

The information was in my head. Then it was on the paper. Then it was in your head, but not the paper. Now it is on the tape of the tape recorder

he is probably referring to the meaning of the information string being "in his head," or "on the paper."

When we adjust our terminology a bit, we are better equipped to address the problem Arrington raises. We have a message encoded on the computer screen, just a configuration of photons and such. Or we have a message encoded on a piece of paper, just marks inscribed by a pen and ink. The meaning derives from a living mind associating the symbols (individually and collectively) with words in a mental vocabulary, with ideas in memory and thought banks, and with complete expressions in an internal grammar derived from native human capability and cultural instruction.

My point is that we can reasonably and cleanly get from the physical causes of the information strings (photons, marks) to the mental processes of meaning. Arrington is correct that the medium is not the message. He is right that meaning "is not reducible to the medium on which it is carried, and it is independent of the medium upon which it is carried." He is wrong, or perhaps misguided, to say that meaning is not reducible to matter and energy. It certainly is. It reduces to brain states, a brain of matter and working through energy. Our universe still holds a great many mysteries, but meaning--or information, as Arrington would have it--is not one of them.

Pointing the Way

A wonderful article by Roy Peter Clark that illustrates how to read with sensitivity and an eye towards rhetorical analysis.

And ... there's a great bit on the role of punctuation. Clark says -

When I took a close look at the punctuation, I marveled at its unobtrusive richness and variety. Without calling attention to itself, the punctuation helped organize and drive the meaning of the text. When you admire a cathedral, it's easy enough to see the rose windows, soaring steeples and flying buttresses. But it is often the little things -- a carving near a choir seat -- that reveal the true genius and attention to detail.

In my days as a literary scholar, I too marveled at the power of punctuation to influence the evolution of meaning in texts. Punctuation, done right, can have an awesome "ripple effect" in how meaning emerges.

G-d, Religion, Atheism - Textuality

Happy New Year.

I hope that 2007 turns out to be less tumultuous than 2006. Some very good moments – Emily’s birth; some very bad moments – the argument with Becky on Rosh Hashanah; some success – the APMP presidency; and some hope – studying Pirkei Avot with a Chabad rabbi.

I picked up a copy of Richard Dawkins’s The G-d Delusion. It’s a good way to test and define the faith I have been working to cultivate. I won’t give his precise argument – the title of his book does that, anyway. I appreciate the challenge offered by the book, even if the voice reminds me of everything that I associate, negatively, with British intellectualism. A kind of mean-spirited, elitist polemic presented to be wit.

Yet as a result of what I have read so far, I am more and more coming to conclude that, to twist a familiar saying, “The man who believes in G-d’s existence and the man who doesn’t are both right.” Maybe G-d, the One I hope will inhabit the place I am building in my heart, will exist only for me and only in the way I “construct” him. Hence, the “delusion” that Dawkins refers to, the self-reflecting belief, or fiction, that the constructed G-d preceded the constructor and, indeed, had constructed him instead.

But maybe that G-d, in that reality, my reality, exists precisely as He should, as He always has. There is no outside-text. The universe, even the one Dawkins imagines, is a text. It is created and expressed in/through language. The textual, textualized universe depends on the conception of an external creator. This universe only is if it is authored, if it is understood to be authored.

Once the universe, any universe, is understood to be authored or even understood to be understandable, we commune and communicate with transcendence (divinity, if you will) and its intimations. G-d exists, as do each and all of us, in the text(s) we create, review, revisit, revise, erase and supplement. He appears, and moves, through a mirror in and of language; He observes, intervenes in and comments on the quotidian fiction(s) we make from Shabbat to Shabbat.

Neither science nor religion is adequate by itself to explain the universe. It is textuality that provides the necessary language and concepts, the ones that animate the others.

Happy New Year, whatever year you make.

Morality and Text

Morality is an endlessly contentious and entangling issue. We can find several examples daily where the general concept of morality becomes critical in assessing a particular political issue. One current example of this is the inauguration ball expenses of George W. Bush, but the debate over a courthouse representation of the Ten Commandments and national discussions of providing values based teaching in public schools also illustrate the ubiquitous concern with morality – as well as how morality is communicated, by whom, and in what context.

Such concerns, debates, and discussions are by and large beneficial. Morality, ethics and values – as they apply to individual behavior, organizational activity, and societal conduct – are a proper focus for virtually any subject, so long as the discussion doesn’t deteriorate into self-righteous posturing and finger-wagging. Wouldn’t it be enlightening, and even entertaining, to consider the policy issues of our day from moral standpoints?

The issue of Gay Marriage, for example, has not actually been treated from any such standpoint, to my knowledge. It’s easy to hear the shouting and stomping that “marriage has always been between a man and a woman” or that “Gay Marriage is a matter of Civil Rights,” but the underlying moral issues inherent in both claims are actually far more important and interesting than the claims themselves.

We never seem to talk about how following or departing from tradition – what’s “always been done” – makes our society morally improved or worsened. At least, we never get any examples or case studies. Likewise, we rarely get discourses that put rights, who grants them, and who protects them, in the context of the moral standards we hope to achieve and maintain as a society.

What do we get instead? Position after position and opinion after opinion. Moral grandstanding, in other words.

Personally, I believe in the concept of a “moral bottom line,” a cultural net gain or loss influenced by our actions, behaviors, and policies. The moral economy is encoded in official laws and programs, as well as social customs and traditions. It is driven by daily contests and decisions made in homes, synagogues, schools, offices, and on TV and the Internet. It is administered by authorities in the courts, police squads, legislative bodies, and religious organizations. But what anchors morality to the individual and collective consciousness is the perception that morality derives from G-d. Whether it actually derives from G-d is unknowable and probably irrelevant.

But the point is that morality works as a textual formation, as a perceived product of a perceived transcendental force. If morality ceased to be understood as such a product, it not only would cease to have a spiritual resonance but also would fragment individuals from each other, from their communities, from their society, and from their government. This, I think, would make the moral economy poorer.