Thor's Day: Verbicide

Aristotle (384–322 BC). Roman copy after
Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 BC
(alabaster mantle a modern addition)

A crime of rhetorical proportions

By Kyle Garza

The best defense against the whimsical rhetorical strategies of any good prosecuting attorney is a solid understanding of Aristotle’s three appeals of persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos. To Aristotle’s mind, these three are ultimately what lead to a listener’s persuasion in favor of a speaker’s position. While the ethos of a speaker rests entirely in his personal character, his pathos and logos are established through the words he employs in his rhetorical attempts to persuade his audience. In matters of persuasion, all winsome speakers must sway the hearts of their audience by using diction that will appeal to their emotions (pathos) and their logical thinking (logos).
    In contemporary dialectic surrounding matters of apologetics, much is lost on the average listener who cannot analyze the pathos and logos that are manipulated by a speaker’s diction. At times, speakers in a debate will speak past one another in their efforts to persuade each other or their listening audience. This is often a result of verbicide: the intentional (or sometimes accidental) misuse of words as a means of persuasion. In the postmodern age, when the meaning of words is rapidly evolving, it is paramount that the average layman understand the various uses of the standard “buzz words” that can easily be confused depending on who is speaking in the debate: the Christian or the atheist.

Take the Christian use of “faith” for example. “Faith” is etymologically founded on fides, or trust, though today it is all too often merely associated with belief. A word like this gets particularly confusing because it means something different for the first century Christians who were eyewitnesses of Jesus’ miracles and Christians today who know Jesus through the Holy Spirit. What is most important about understanding this term in the Christian sense is its attachment to trust in persons: a trust that is first established by some degree of evidence that the other party can indefinitely remain “faithful” in the relationship. Faith understood like this summons the idea of a relationship of one to another.
    It is not faith in a law like gravity, as though one were to say how he “trusts” the law of gravity, hence is not afraid of flying into space when he jumps off the ground. It is, rather, the kind of trust one has in another person. Just as a husband and wife remain “faithful” to one another in their vows to love and cherish one another before all others, so does the Christian have faith in God, and rightly so considering the fact that God is likened to a husband to His beloved in Scripture. [Isaiah 54:5, Jeremiah 31:32, Hosea 2:16, 19, NIV]

Augustine of Hippo, Saint Augustine
(354–430)

    For this reason, the atheist skeptic does not speak of Christian “faith” in the same way, because scientists (not counting psychologists) who study empirical data are looking for uniformity in laws and principles; people and their relationships are simply outside their scope of study. The Christian God has “personhood” or “agency” at the core of His being, hence humans are made “in His image” and thus have unique personalities, and as Saint Augustine put it, “The image of the creator is to be found in the rational or intellectual soul of humanity” alone, which is capable of relationships beyond pure mammalian instinct [Augustine de Trinitate XVI. Iv. 6 quoted in Alister E. McGrath, Science & Religion (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 2010), 112]. But to the atheist’s mind, “faith” is tantamount to “blind faith,” which is to believe something completely void of evidence. The Christian understanding is that “faith” and “belief” two different terms, but they are synonymous in atheist rhetoric.
    To have “faith” in anything (to the atheist’s mind) is to believe it without reason, which suggests a sense of irresponsibility in one’s intellect. It is commonly associated with the connotation of being mindless sheep to a shepherd [John 10:11, NIV], an association that many atheists find offensive. To the Christian, being called a sheep summons imagery of peace, tranquility, protection, and safety [Psalm 23, NIV]. To the atheist, the title of “sheep” is insulting because it diminishes the human capacity to autonomously think, since sheep are generally known as unintelligent creatures. The atheist has a sense of pride in being able to stand without God. This, however, is a foreign concept to the Christian, for at the heart of Christianity is the willingness to submit to the idea that humans are not God and that our understanding of anything is miniscule in comparison to God’s knowledge.
    So the conflict lies in a matter of pride. To the Christian, all associations with sheep and shepherds (common, understandable imagery for Jesus’ mass 1st century lower-class audience) summon imagery of a faithful follower. But this imagery is belittling to an atheist, for faith like this diminishes the human capacity to reason and understand the universe, something that every atheist acknowledges sets us apart from all other animals in the world.

The conversation surrounding sheep is often only a stone’s throw from the use of the word “sacrifice.” When Christians refer to sacrifice, they often immediately recall Christ’s death on the cross, the severity of the cost of human sin, and God’s payment to bridge that gap between Him and man; heartfelt thankfulness typically replaces those feelings of remorse and pain once the Christian fully grasps the implications of a God figure reaching out to mankind in pursuit of a relationship. The use of the word sacrifice here is associated with a sense of nobility and chivalry and heroism: the kind of noble sacrifice one might see today from a Marvel superhero or any venerable protagonist in a contemporary film or novel. It is the idea of “taking a bullet” for a victim in distress. It is exemplary behavior, something we idolize in American culture in the highest degree, with accolades like the Medal of Honor or the Purple Heart.
    Naturally, the atheist will want to discard this use of the word because it has an emotion attached to it, and the skeptic epistemology divides all understanding into emotional understanding and intellectual understanding, the former of which can seldom be trusted, and the latter of which should always be trusted. Thinking like this, however, discards the reality of what makes human experience and all epistemology distinctly human. C.S. Lewis distinguished between these two understandings by illustrating it through the analogy of a young man in love. He experiences love in the first person, within the experience itself, hence the import of the preposition “in” love. The psychologist observing his behavior, on the other hand, sees it externally as a series of hormonal chemical interactions. Lewis draws this distinction to focus on the fact that, in our modern thinking, we idolize the latter, more distanced observation as the more “correct” way of seeing all things, when in reality both perspectives must be taken into account in order to fully understand love. [C.S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” from God in the Dock, ed. Hooper, Walter, in The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis (New York: Inspirational Press, 1970), 442]
    This may seem good and well, but noteworthy neuroscientist and atheist author Sam Harris has himself said several times that Christianity is a religion of human sacrifice, and no amount of repainting it as a love story will do. It is centered on Christ’s sacrifice of His innocent life so that sinners might be made righteous. But when Harris and other skeptics like him use the word “sacrifice,” they do not want the word to carry with it those Christian connotations of heroism and chivalry. Rather, they will attempt to use the word to make Christianity seem barbaric and even pagan in its use of the word. Essentially, this is due to the fact that the common atheist sees Christianity as nothing more than “just another religion,” one of many in the world, all of which happen to be wrong. Richard Dawkins often employs the quip of saying that he is just as much an atheist as any other Christian: his atheism just includes one more God than every Christian (because no Christian believes in Zeus for instance). Of course, the average person is not so schooled in Roman culture and history to be privy to historical context, so calling Christ’s “sacrifice” barbaric seems easy enough. As it is, there are enough uses of the words “death” and “blood” floating around in Christian rhetoric to easily make it sound Scythian in its usage.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

    The dissonance lies in dissociating the Christian use of the word “sacrifice” from the pagan practice of the word. This is particularly difficult, though, because Christianity does admittedly have elements within it that seem mythical in nature; that is why C.S. Lewis called Christianity the myth become fact due to Christianity’s interaction with actual ancient history. [C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 66-67] Just as the word “force” means something entirely different to a physicist conducting research and a police officer answering a domestic abuse call, so “sacrifice” will be understood differently depending on the context.

Still, even if a modern historian were to say that we know the use of “sacrifice” was different to a first-century Christian, that sort of knowledge is yet another conflict that often arises in Christian-atheist polemics. The ideological realm of epistemology as a whole is difficult to engage in between atheists and Christians, for knowledge today is overwhelmingly abundant through the access of the internet and television, thus it is difficult to distinguish between different strata of information. Neil Postman found the words of Aldous Huxley particularly prophetic in describing the dilemma of America’s superfluous bank of information in the modern age: “Huxley feared those who would give us so much [information] that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism…[that] the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance….” [Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), foreword xix] As both atheists and Christians alike wade through the sea of information, the epistemological tension grows, particularly due to the fact that both parties have different views of what constitutes substantial grounds for belief in anything.
    Since we have already covered the distinction between “faith” and “blind faith,” it is here poignant to clarify that we are now referring to faith in its original sense: belief in a truth that one can trust to be true due to some sort of formerly observed evidence. The conflict arises when the Christian and the atheist disagree on what sort of source material counts as trustworthy.
    The source material in question often surrounds a debate between two different fields of study: the natural sciences and history. Christian apologists are ready and willing to invest their trust in knowledge and understanding that can be obtained from the liberal arts, that is to say history and literature. After all, the key medium of the transference of the gospels (the “good news” story of Jesus) has occurred through word of mouth and the written word. For some reason, however, this form of attestation, particularly the eye witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection, has met all the more scrutiny because of contemporary chronological snobbery: essentially, we assume that because people lived in the past, they knew less about the world, were less informed, were more gullible, and so on. The odd thing is that, even today, we trust the words of scientific experts about a plethora of things without consciously acknowledging what we are truly investing our trust (faith) in: their words. Hence history is often viewed as a field subject to observational error because the account of history can alter depending on who writes the history and whose perspective is called upon for the narration. The same can occur within the physical sciences such as physics and chemistry; that is to say, different scientists may produce different observations of data. As Alister McGrath writes, “It is particularly important to note that scientific data are capable of being interpreted in many ways, each of which has evidential support.” Otherwise you would be a positivist, one who argues “that there [is] a single unambiguous interpretation of the evidence, which any right-minded observer would discover.” [Alister E. McGrath, Science & Religion (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 2010), 52]
    In spite of the academic pedantry inherent in positivism, the common atheist desires to siphon all knowledge down to empirical evidence that can be tested again and again, with results that can be reproduced repeatedly in a laboratory; naturally this definition of knowledge categorically exempts from human understanding all events that happened in the past. Thus, history is beyond the scope of “scientific” knowledge when defined this way, so the idea of C.S. Lewis’s “mythical” God entering into history is meaningless to the atheist scientist. But even the physical science of physics (which has taken leaps and bounds in the past few decades) attempts to explain or communicate ideas like black holes, quarks, and energy without fully knowing what they are.

Parmenides (born c. 515 BC)

    C.S. Lewis even reminds us that “Aristotle criticized thinkers like Parmenides because ‘they never conceived of anything other than the substance of things perceptible by the senses.’” [C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 39] Lewis was also keen to note that there is one particularly primary element in the sciences that seems to owe itself to a supernatural creator: something that is inherently outside phusis (nature) itself—something that is unchangeable, but cannot exist on its own: the subject matter of mathematics, the heart of most physical sciences.
    Thus, for epistemological purposes, one must delve deeper into why there is a discrepancy between the domains of knowledge that Christian apologists and atheist scientists study. C.S. Lewis proves quite helpful once again in understanding the two primary mediums by which one comes to understand anything. Just as he referred analogically to the young man in love, he refers to a beam of light that creeps into a toolshed when a crack stands at the top of the shed’s closed doors. When one looks at the beam of light, it is an outside experience: one can see the beam directly and still be aware of the darkness that surrounds it. Lewis called this looking “at” the beam as an outside observer. However, if one allows one’s eyes to rest in the very beam of light itself, then the viewpoint completely changes: by looking “along” the beam of light in this way, one becomes unaware of the darkness that surrounds and instead has a perspective that is opened to all that lies outside the toolshed: green grassy hills and the sun itself. Lewis’s point, by means of several other analogies, is to draw out our modern inclination to trust only the outside “looking at” experience as opposed to the inside “looking along” experience.
    Thus we have the disparity between the atheist’s and the Christian’s epistemology. The Christian is willing to entertain and experience “evidence” that exists only “within” the beam itself, such as the writings of eyewitnesses of miraculous events or the joy of salvation prompted by the Holy Spirit. The average atheist, being skeptical by nature, only trusts the outside experience of the beam itself. The disparity lies in the distance of the experience to the experiencer. A skeptic thinks the evidence is more trustworthy the further one gets away from the experience or evidence itself; if one really wants to understand the composition of a painting, step away from it to take it all in. The Christian apologist, however, is willing to listen to experiences nearer the evidence itself, hence eyewitness accounts or personal testimonies of believers, the very “paint” that composes the picture being observed.

For some reason, it has become commonplace to place intense skepticism in matters of history and literature because they are purported by skeptics to be more privy to error due to the close proximity between what is communicated and who communicates it. But this perspective distorts the reality of all domains of knowledge. An expert gathers evidence and communicates it to non-experts, but no expert can completely divorce himself from his research: his findings will always run the risk of being tainted with human error.
    Interestingly enough, several skeptics temerariously challenge God Himself by admitting that, were He to simply appear to them and reveal Himself in person, they would willingly believe in Him and indeed invest their “faith” in Him. The obvious contradiction in this is that the skeptic himself does not trust the personal experience of others, but if he were to have the same experience they supposedly have had, he claims he would completely invest his trust (faith) in it. This may also be considered a kind of epistemological snobbery, because it assumes that the individual “knower” is himself the most reliable filter of information in the universe. This is no doubt a product of the American cultural championing of individualism and autonomy, but those notions have rooted themselves so deeply in the American subconscious that we naturally trust what we know ourselves far more than what others might tell us, especially when it comes to what we experience with our own two eyes. Likewise, experts in physics and chemistry give more credence to other experts in their own field and far less credit to experts in disparate fields such as history and literature. Will the two ever reconcile with mutual respect for their disparate realms of study? Only time and academic civility will tell.
    Without an actively attentive awareness of rhetorical manipulation through diction, “a fast one” can easily be pulled on the relaxed listener. In all dialectic matters where the atheist and the Christian worldviews clash, one must be prepared for a slow reading, a re-listening, and, granting amicable civility, re-conversing that can analyze what is happening behind any speaker’s words.

Copyright © 2015 by Kyle Garza