I mentioned the idea in an earlier post that sometimes it's hard to accept the gospel of Jesus as true because it's "too good to be true." The way His salvation and grace is so perfect and complete and meets all of our needs with no atoning works or righteousness necessary on our parts is just so, well, convenient. And we distrust immediate belief in things that are convenient because we don't want to be called naive, simply calling things true because we want them to be true.
From a certain aspect, the thesis that Jesus is too good to be true adds credibility to His message. Imagine if the Bible spent all of its time talking up the omnipotence and goodness of God and promoting Jesus as the only way to salvation, and imagine if somehow, that salvation was incomplete or defective. Not the triumphant spectacle and redemption we had hoped for and been led to anticipate. What would happen? We would wonder at the disappointing disconnect between what we thought God was capable of and what ended up happening. This perceived disparity is actually the prevalent doubt most amateur theologians wrestle with, manifested specifically as the Problem of Evil.
So if the gospel of Jesus seems too good to be true, then it becomes all the more compelling, since it touts itself as the only way to salvation, freedom, truth, life.
The Neti Pot has been the recent popular buzz item, a proven cure for sinuses and congestion. My fiancee has one, her sister has one, and my roommate has one. The procedure sounds disgusting: you brew up some warm solution in this teapot-looking-contraption, tilt your head sideways, and pour the liquid through one nostril, letting it seep through your nasal cavities and out the other nostril into the sink. It's the stupidest scam I've ever heard of, but 100 % of the users I've talked to swear by its effectiveness, which is remarkably convincing. By all accounts, its ridiculous design notwithstanding, the Neti Pot really is too good to be true, and that's the main reason that I'm becoming convinced it must actually cure sinuses and congestion. Gross.
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My roommate Andy used to do something similar every night. He took a plastic bottle and squirted saline up one side of his nose, and it came flowing down the other. Zach and I were consistently disgusted at this, but Andy swore by it.
ew. sounds like it cures sinus congestion by completely removing your sinuses.
It seems like the "too good to be true" is a necessary but not sufficient condition to judge how true something is though, though it is a good check to run on the gospel.
i.e. if the gospel also gave me Wolverine and Superman's powers and Matt Dunn's ripped body, that'd ALSO be too good to be true, but unfortunately false. =*(
Once, I accidentally discovered that Dr. Pepper does the same thing. Not comfortably, though.
I'm not sure about the added credibility. Leaving aside the obvious points from the psychology literature on the difficulties we have critically evaluating things (especially unfalsifiable ones) that we'd like to be true, I think there's some circularity here. A lot of the evidence offered for God's goodness is inextricably bound up with the talk of salvation and the afterlife. This is why the Problem of Evil deserves to be capitalized, after all – the material world just doesn't look like it's run by an all-loving God. That the Bible says that salvation is bestowed in the way that you'd expect an all-loving God to bestow it isn't evidence that salvation is actually bestowed in that fashion, because the notion of salvation is the primary evidence offered for the existence of an all-loving God (you could run this the other way around, but either way you don't get self-reinforcement). The consistency is just that – it's only non-contradiction, and is only more credible a priori than baldly contradictory claims would be.
It's also worth noting that your notions aren't clearly consistent, at least judging by what most people actually believe. The obvious point is that almost all self-identifying Christians will claim to believe in an all-loving God, while, as a whole, they possess remarkably different notions about what the afterlife is like and about who gets saved and for what. That is, there are going to be other Christians who will tell you that your notion of salvation actually does contradict the notion of an all-loving God (or at least that your notion of salvation seems incomplete or defective). Of course, there are also people of other religions and of no religion (and no few self-identifying Christians) who might tell you that any kind of salvation (where salvation is the sort of thing that even non-Christians are going to wish that they had) based at all on faith is necessarily unjust and is certainly not the will of a perfectly good God. It isn't just rhetoric when some of the New Atheists talk about the Christian God being an evil one – many fell away from Christianity precisely because they found some of its core principles, like salvation by faith, morally repellent.
You're right. It is a consistency contained circularly in the Christian faith. But inner consistencies are helpful for people on the inside who at least want the Bible and basic Christian theology to be consistent with itself. It was a helpful thought to me.
To your second point, I'm sure there is a great bit of diversity of thought about how to judge God's goodness, but I base this piece on personal perspective: while I have to respect diversity of opinion, I can't hold my thinking captive to the subjectivity of six billion other thinkers.
Ewwwww. That is so disgusting that I can't even think of anything remotely theological to contribute to this discussion.
I guess I misunderstood you, then. I read 'adding credibility' as more than 'establishing logical possibility', which doesn't seem like very solid reassurance to me. That's the bare-bones minimum of credibility, after all, and oughtn't to add anything to the epistemic probability of a claim that we're even a little bit confident of. If anything, consistency defenses should be most relevant to those nonbelievers who have real doubts about the consistency of the system.
Also, I'm not saying that you should refrain from committing to an interpretation of God's word or a system of ethics because of the diversity of views that exist. My main point in the second paragraph was that, as a matter of fact, Christians choose interpretations of the Bible (here salvation) that conform to their own beliefs about morality (here what they think an all-loving God would do). The statement that that one's notion of salvation is remarkably consistent with one's notion of what an all-loving God would do therefore carries no information value and cannot be taken by a reasonable person as evidence of anything at all, really, because people with radically different interpretations of the Bible also perceive a remarkable consistency – psychologically, it's the desire for consistency with moral intuitions that drives the choosing of interpretations. That's not limited to salvation, or even to religion, and similar effects are extensively documented in the psychological literature.
You've made the claim that the material world seems inconsistent, or counter-intuitive, with the idea of an all-powerful good God (Problem of Evil), and you've made the claim that psychologically, people tend to refine their beliefs around their intrinsic moral intuitions. Does that mean all theists are built with naturally defunct moral compasses? Where does moral intuition come from?
It makes some sense that we would have skewed moral compasses, or at least it's consistent with the Christian paradigm where flawed people only know good through the grace of God. That would make faith in God counter-intuitive to our natural selves, but completely consistent with our spiritual selves, if you'd allow such a duality. This duality is also biblically mentioned.
I'm not following. How would the material world seeming inconsistent with the existence of an all-powerful all-good God indicate that theists come with defunct moral compasses? I'm just noting what the Problem of Evil is. It only follows that theists have screwed up moral compasses if (1) God actually exists and (2) there's nothing to our existence beyond the material world. Neither one of us believes both of those things. The usual solutions proposed to the Problem of Evil involve postulating that the evil present in the world is necessary because of some good that it secures beyond this world. Moral evil is allowable because of the value of free will, natural evil is allowable because it's somehow soul-building, etc. I don't see how the psychological basis of people's beliefs about metaphysics really enter into it, either.
It seems likely that moral intuitions come in large part from biology. There's interesting work on particular personality traits and attitudes and how they relate to genetics, and some evolutionary psych just-so stories that account for a lot of moral thinking (though note that they're only just-so stories and aren't backed up by much). There's also some very suggestive work that's been done with animals where we've seen that even something like a dog has something that can be characterized as a moral sense. A lot of particular beliefs are clearly results of socialization – it's not surprising that no American is okay with slavery, wife beating, or witch burning now even though lots of Americans were okay with those things in the past. One way of looking at it is that how we treat our peers is pretty innate, but who exactly we view as our peers is largely (though not entirely – we're probably a little bit racist/xenophobic/etc inherently) a result of learning. If you're curious, it's rather out of date in its biology, but Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals is very good on the kinds of social pressures that shape moral thinking.
I agree with you that it's very hard to be a moral realist (moral values have some independent existence) while maintaining that one's own moral intuitions are perfectly on target. There's something rather arrogant about assuming that you're right and everyone else is wrong when you have no reason to think yourself more qualified, after all. We do need to recognize that our own intuitions are not always perfect guides to moral truth and that it's possible for us to be in the wrong while not knowing it.
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