Trading Homo Sapiens for Homo Ignorans

This is something I posted in my academic blog, The Quintessence of Dust, and I figured I would post it here as well, since the topic is suited to Musings. The text I quote is The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Anthony Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York.

----------

So, I've been musing a bit about this passage in Keller on page 117:

All Christians believe all this--but no Christians believe just this. As soon as you ask "How does the church act as the vehicle for Jesus's work in the world?" and "How does Jesus's death accomplish our salvation?" and "How are we received by grace?" Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians will give you different answers. Despite the claims of many to be such, there are no truly "generic" nondenominational Christians. Everyone has to answer these "how" questions in order to live a Christian life, and those answers immediately put you into one tradition or denomination or another.

Christians seem to struggle with this a lot. It can be somewhat embarrassing to declare that you have been led to find the truth and then admit that others teach a radically different practical application or interpretation of the same truths. Some Christians teach that grace is so predominate in salvation that our actions do not matter. Others teach that works can of themselves produce meritorious results and grant us a better place in heaven. Still others teach something in between. This is only one of a host of disputes, ranging from whether infants should be baptized to whether salvation can be lost.

Both Keller and Miller are not concentrating on these disputes for obvious reasons. Since they are trying to convince non-Christians of the basic veracity and authenticity of the Christian faith, a detailed description of doctrinal disputes would be distracting and probably bewildering to much of their intended readership. Christianity can be boiled down, so to speak, into its most basic tenets, those truths which the Bible unmistakably teaches. I am not, therefore, blaming either author in any way for avoiding these sticky issues, given their stated intents.

But the subject of intramural disputes got me thinking. Are Christians the only people who disagree as to the practical application and interpretation of their faith? Certainly not. I am not familiar with all the 'denominations' of all the world religions, although I know that Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims have tended to disagree on a few things. Even atheists tend to agree only to the extent that they deny the existence of any deity (and often hate the very idea of his existence). Keller cites the atheist scientist Stephen Jay Gould disagreeing with fellow atheist Richard Dawkins on a key belief of many atheists, that religious faith and science are incompatible (90-91).

No animal is uncertain of how to live. Apes do not form anti-vine-swinging lobbies, nor do lionesses debate hunting methods. Fish do not have various schools of thought as to how one should best swim, or whether swimming is necessary at all, or whether every fish simply dreams that he swims but in reality always remains stationary. Humans are the only living things that debate how to live: whether they should be humble or arrogant, meek or aggressive, hungry for power or eager to help others, whether to worship themselves or something outside themselves, whether something they hear is true or false. Keller and Miller would be out of a writing job if this were not so. And this is also, I think, a compelling argument for both truth and goodness. This may seem a logical leap, but this impulse is absolutely unique to humans. We are the only creatures who can reorder our lives based on something other than external circumstances, and we are constantly trying to do it, either because we have failed to live up to a particular standard or we have become convinced that a different standard is more worth achieving. I do not believe that we would do this if there were not some sort of ultimate standard to which all humans know they must attain.

As I recall, C.S. Lewis (whom, I notice, both authors we are reading seem to quote frequently) makes a similar argument in the first chapter of Mere Christianity. He calls it an appeal to 'fair play' or some kind of moral standard. We do not feel offended that someone has stolen our property for no reason at all. We recognize that something outside of ourselves has been violated. We may be more properly categorized as homo ignorans than homo sapiens, but this is what the Bible would lead us to expect. We are born piloting the ships of our lives without a map, and most of our lives are spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, in seeking a light by which to steer. In this case ignorance may be the first step toward truth.