At 2am on Monday, Bart Ehrman talked for five hours on why he's not a Christian.
In his part of the world it was Sunday, but for me it was 2am, so I didn't listen to him live. But I did watch him over the next few days while eating meals. It's here.
Over the five hours Ehrman gave a mix of his personal life history, academic scholarship on the Bible and Christianity, and observations of the world in which we live. In all aspects it was a brief overview, but it was a pretty good summary of how things are.
In my opinion Ehrman is both sensitive and sensible, and I mostly agree with what he says. Highly recommended to watch.
If you've watched it, here are a few of my quick thoughts:
1. Ehrman grew up as a Christian, and as a teen he had a born again experience in which he converted to evangelical Christianity. He studied the Bible and Christianity as an evangelical believer in the inerrancy of the Bible. But over time through his studies he began to see the discrepancies, so came to see the Bible as written by people for people. He still believed that God was active in the world, but that the Bible wasn't God's perfect word. However, some time after that, as he looked at the world around us, he could not see God's active participation. The world contains too much suffering, and the self-evidence of that doesn't fit with an all-powerful loving God who actively helps His people. For Ehrman, a memorable point was when he was saying the Nicene Creed in church, and found that all he could honestly say truthfully was that Jesus was crucified under Pilate and suffered and was buried. He thought it would be dishonest of him to continue participating in church.
I have a great deal of respect for Ehrman on that, and I think it's an honorable response to take. However, it's not the only possible response.
I have heard and read of a number of Christians in that same situation, who have nonetheless consciously decided to continue as Christians in the church. Their thinking is that language and belief is not purely propositional. That is, when we speak we are not always intending to make statements about the world that are either true or false. Language has lots of other purposes. Just because we don't believe the statements are literally true doesn't mean that they don't have other value in saying them. One purpose is a social one, to create and enhance loving community bonds. For these Christians, saying the Nicene Creed in church is not about merely stating facts about the world. It is about joining together with other people in a loving, shared community. Saying the Creed together helps form relationships, which helps others, and makes the world a better place.
Some of these Christians are non-realists, or fictionalists. They believe that God does not really exist, but that the church is a wonderful, human, place to create and enhance a good community. Don Cupitt and Lloyd Geering have written about this. Others of these Christians still think that God exists, but think that God is really not like what most/many Christians think he is. John Bishop (my graduate advisor back at university) suggested that God is literally love (a relation that come into existence in ideal communities). All of these approaches treat Christianity as a tradition, not a single doctrine, and as such it's possible to take inspiration and think differently while still staying within it.
I assume Ehrman, as an academic, is aware of this approach. But he does not mention it at all. I wonder why he chose not to personally do things that way.
2. As I understand it, Ehrman's main reason for leaving Christianity was that he was convinced by the Argument from Evil. I agree with him on this. And I completely agree with him that it's important to genuinely acknowledge the real horrors of suffering, in real life situations, and not try to theorise it away with abstractions. Clearly he's read and thought a lot about this, and he wrote a book on the various ways the Bible writers responded to suffering (I've read his book, God's Problem, and I highly recommend it).
However: back in the day at university I did a graduate course on the Argument from Evil, where we looked at some of the detailed back and forth on the replies and counter-replies. I don't consider myself an expert on this, but in all of what I have heard and read of Ehrman on this, he has never shown that he is aware of much of what we covered in that course. Maybe he doesn't feel the need to mention it, but sometimes I wonder why he didn't present (and reply to) certain responses to his arguments. There is definitely much more back and forth to the issue than he shows. Consequently, so far I've felt that his discussions of the argument are, while essentially correct, a little light.
3. Similar to the Argument from Evil, I think Ehrman is also a little light on metaethics, when he discusses how it's possible to have morality without God. I think he's mostly right, but I don't think he presented the issue of objectivity in ethics as precisely as it could have been presented. As I understood him, he seemed to grant too quickly that if we reject the existence of God (and especially the Divine Command theory of ethics), then we are left with an ethics that is not objective (but that's okay). Contrary to this, there are lots of ways of understanding ethics in an objective way that are not connected with God.
4. Mostly I agree with Ehrman's practical ethics. He says he's a humanist, and I think he rightly focuses a lot on helping other humans. I think his outlook in this respect is admirable, and he has done a lot of good in the world. As far as I understand it, I think Ehrman grounds this human-centred ethics on the observation that humans have evolved in certain ways to have certain dispositions and values, including social values of helping each other.
However, I am with Peter Singer in thinking that this approach is "speciesist". I agree with Singer that a better way of grounding our ethics is to consider suffering in general, by all beings, and not merely human suffering. So, while I agree with Ehrman that an essential part of living in this world is about helping other humans, I think we could and should extend this help to non-humans who also suffer.
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