I wish there was a better word than lying for spreading false information. It's concise, charged, connected to the idea that the information being conveyed is false. But the scientific definition of "lie" isn't a false statement. We make false statements all the time, unintentionally. They're called mistakes.

The scientific definition of a "lie" is a statement intended to deceive. Intent is critical to this definition. If I tell you, "Bob's in the robot lab" because that's where I saw him last, but he's actually headed out to the barista, that isn't a lie, even though it's false: it's just a mistake.

But if I tell you "Bob's back at the office" - knowing full well that you're likely to look at his desk in the office, when he's actually taking a nap behind a closed conference room door across the hall, where you're unlikely to find him - then I've lied, even though the statement is true.

The problem is worse when we consider intellectual dishonesty. When someone puts forth a really terrible argument, are they actually being dishonest, or are they simply caught up in fallacious reasoning or even just honestly mistaken beliefs?

The truth is, people argue in bad faith all the time, and it's legitimately hard to tell - most humans are quite bad at spotting liars. Once an activist asked me to workshop a proposal he was making about a telescope built on native Hawai'ian land: he demanded ten percent of the budget go to native education.

"Isn't that reasonable?" he asked. "No," I said. "Imagine you're building a house. If you've budgeted a million bucks - half to land and half to construction, then if someone chops ten percent out of your budget, there goes your roof. No-one could agree to that even if they wanted to."

He tried various other unworkable permutations, until I finally asked, "Look, what do you want?" He thought, then said: "I want to put forth something so reasonable-sounding that no-one could oppose it, but which would be a poison pill for the telescope project. I want the telescope not to be built."

I declined to help him further. He was arguing in bad faith. To a casual observer, his proposals sounded like he genuinely wanted to help native Hawai'ian education, and was just naive about building construction: but behind that facade was a deliberate attempt to deceive.

It's hard to tell these apart. Politicians often lie, fooling mostly their own constituents; partisans assume their opponents lie by default. But the principle of charity demands that we assume the opposite: that others use ordinary words to make true statements with valid arguments about something interesting.

So, when positivist philosophers fail to extend this principle of charity to the tenets of religion, it's perhaps a stretch to accuse them of lying. I'm not even sure that they're actually being intellectually dishonest - but it is funny to encounter incoherent arguments from someone arguing that religion is incoherent.

I encountered this incoherence in an essay disparaging one of the key issues of the Great Schism that split the Roman Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox Churches: the doctrine of the Trinity, or, more specifically, how the Holy Spirit "proceeds": from the Father, or from the Father and the Son.

While this was enough to fracture churches back in the day, modern theologians think this "difference" to be mostly semantic, not doctrinal. But the author of the essay went further, claiming that it wasn't simply semantics - but that both positions had some unspecified fatal flaw which rendered them unintelligible.

But this 18 page essay on what's wrong with religious and philosophical thinking never gets around to actually telling you what, concretely, wrong with this kind of thinking. I'm not going to link the essay until I can read it again to be sure, but as you may have guessed, the problem is in the author's thinking.

The author mistook his disbelief in the premises for a flaw in the arguments. Since there is no logical flaw in these arguments - and I'll get back to that - they, as they said repeatedly in the article, found it difficult to put a finger on what's precisely wrong with this and other similar kinds of reasoning.

Well, I can help you out with that: the key mistakes philosophers make about religion is the allegation that religion consists of statements that are unprovable in principle, and therefore, because these statements are unprovable, they are therefore incoherent.

One professor put it like this: A man claims they met a man in a garden. You see no-one, so they claim the man's invisible. You listen, so they claim the man's inaudible. You excavate the garden and scan the dirt with X-rays, so they claim the man's intangible. At some point, you decide, the man just ain't there.

But that's not what happened at all. That's just the procession of bad judgments that follows from the bad arguments in David Hume's essay "Of Miracles", which we took apart earlier, perhaps unfairly, because Hume didn't have Bayesian or Jaynesian probabilistic reasoning at his disposal, but it's still wrong.

To be intellectually honest, we need to be up-front and open about the moves we're making. Religious people are not like a man claiming to have met an invisible man in a garden: they're like a man with a letter in his hand from that absent friend, reading it in the garden, waiting for them to come back.

You can claim that the letter is a forgery, or that the author is dead and is never coming back. Jaynesian probability theory tells us that if you entertain a variety of alternative hypotheses, you can get trapped in a state where you never accept an unlikely proposition, whether it is true or not. And that's fine.

That's your prerogative. But it's also a choice. And choosing not to believe the premises of an argument doesn't make the content or structure of the argument invalid. It just makes it not relevant to you. Like arguments over phlogiston or the luminiferous ether, they're simply no longer relevant.

Humans suck at understanding our judgments about logical arguments. We're strongly biased to think arguments are valid if we feel good about the conclusion, and invalid otherwise. If you've internalized Hume, and wrongly exclude the possibility of miracles, any argument about the spiritual feels wrong.

But choosing not to believe in the spiritual doesn't make it impossible. Jesus Christ did or did not come back from the dead; He was or was not the Son of God; He is or is not one Person of the divine Trinity, and did or did not inspire the information recorded about Him in the Bible.

If all that is true, why, then there may be any number of technical points which need to be worked out, and there's nothing incoherent about asking the question whether one aspect of this God we barely understand has this or that relationship to another aspect, which is equally difficult.

Similar debates go on right now in quantum mechanics, where extremely subtle issues about reality and measurement are debated every day, and while they look as abstract and as arcane as any arguments about angels dancing on the head of a pin, they can get cashed out into real experiments.

If there is a Judgment Day, discussions of the Trinity will get cashed out into real experiences as well. If not, they won't. If a philosopher, in their heart of hearts, just doesn't find the evidence for the Trinity convincing, I think he can be excused for gracefully bowing out of any of those discussions.

But calling those discussions incoherent is wrong, I think it's intellectually dishonest, and it sure feels like lying. I don't know that the people who hold that are actually lying, so I extend the principle of charity: and yet ... If you don't believe, just say you don't believe: don't argue your opponents are incoherent.

-the Centaur

Pictured: E. T. Jaynes, author of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

Coveting is distinctive among the Ten Commandments in that it is a thought crime. For those not familiar with the Ten Commandments, they're a set of guidelines from God in Exodus and Deuteronomy in the Bible. How the guidelines break into "ten" is up for debate, but the rough outline, loosely interpreted, is:

1. God is the Lord of everything.
2. Don't have any other Gods.
3. Don't misuse God's name.
4. Keep the Sabbath holy.
5. Honor your parents.
6. Don't murder people.
7. Don't commit adultery.
8. Don't steal things.
9. Don't lie in court.
10. Don't covet your neighbor's stuff.

The first command is a statement of God's authority; the second through the ninth are involve some kind of action - making an idol, cursing a blue streak, shopping on Sunday, dressing up like a bat, killing Bruce Wayne's parents, making off with the Lost Ark, telling Tom Cruise he can't handle the truth.

But coveting is different. You don't have to physically do anything, like take your neighbor's nice new car: you just need to think about it. Jesus goes even further in Matthew 5:27-28, suggesting that if you look at a woman with lust, you've committed adultery with her in your heart.

Seems harsh, but I've heard priests speculate that God's reasoning behind these challenging passages is that coveting is really bad for you. It's not just that coveting your neighbor's house, spouse or possessions is a gateway to theft or adultery, it's that it puts your brain in a bad state.

Coveting is "yearning to possess something": possessions themselves are things which can possess us if we are not careful. But there's nothing wrong with wanting something per se: you can want a soda if you're thirsty, a better car if you're in the rat race, the four walls of your freedom if you're a monk.

But coveting someone else's possessions - not wanting a house to keep up with the Joneses, but wanting your neighbor Jones's specific house - is the problem. Coveting the possessions of others puts us in mental conflict with the people around us, which can lead to real conflict.

So even though it seems innocuous, coveting is a pitfall which is important enough that God wanted to warn us about it. But in a way, that makes coveting a very obvious pitfall. Unfortunately, coveting is just one of the ways that our human brains can go wrong with regards to our view of the people around us.

One of the modern "technologies" that humans have developed for maintaining the health of our minds is cognitive behavior therapy, a collection of experimentally tested cognitive and behavioral psychology techniques, designed to improve our well-being by detecting and correcting bad thought patterns.

These "cognitive distortions" can be self-destructive - thoughts like "I'm not good enough" - but they can just as easily be self-serving - "Everything would work out if they'd just listen to me." These self-serving narratives have the advantage of making us feel good about ourselves - but they don't better ourselves.

When we interact with other people, a healthy mental response keeps things in perspective. Someone speaks over you in a meeting, which happened to me a lot today; but you recognize that there are simple explanations involving no bad intent (as it turns out, my internet was flaky, and my voice kept cutting out).

But when cognitive distortions kick in, simple events like that can get overgeneralized ("This always happens to me"), magnified ("They didn't hear me at all"), can swamp out positives (like forgetting the good stuff) and can lead to catastrophizing ("Everything is going to hell in a handbasket").

These distortions aren't accurate, but they enhance the intensity of the events, worsening our stress levels - but, paradoxically, making it feel a relief when the events are over, giving us a bit of a dopamine hit for surviving the encounter, leading to the distortions growing stronger and stronger.

Cognitive distortions can turn into internal narratives, which can turn a momentary event into a years-long obsession. On one volunteer project, our group leader took offense when the previous leader tried to boss me around. I'd barely remember this, if our group leader didn't bring it up every time we talk.

Loving your neighbor as yourself is hard. But Jesus also says in Matthew 5:44 that you should love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Jesus clearly meant this to be directed at real enemies, people who've harmed us, but it applies with equal force to people who we just think have harmed us.

Loving your enemies is really hard if those enemies exist only in your own mind, because your cognitive distortions will twist anything that they do into something that is evil - like in politics, where partisans disbelieve anything the opposition leader says, even if he's reading the time off of an atomic clock.

But learning not to covet is like ... training wheels for eliminating cognitive distortions. It's good and healthy to want a sandwich if you're hungry. It's not so healthy to want someone else's sandwich. Perhaps that won't motivate you to take it. But you might think they got the better deal.

Even in something as petty as who gets the best slice of the cake, we can build tiny slights up into a tower of resentments. Techniques such as "one cuts, the other chooses" may be game-theory optimal, but we are rarely in situations where these techniques can always be applied.

So the solution starts with us. Don't covet your sister's slice of the cake. Don't resent your coworker's "DAYYMNN" sportscar. (No, really, it is VERY jawdroppingly nice). Don't covet your neighbor's spouse. Learn to distinguish between wanting to improve your situation, and envying the situations of others.

Building the cognitive tools we need to avoid self-serving narratives is hard, because each person's mind and situation are unique. Fortunately, we can start with something easier, something both easy to detect and easy to fix, by following the tenth of the Ten Commandments: do not covet your neighbor's stuff.

-the Centaur

Pictured: John Watson, founder of behaviorism.

Keeping with the Sunday theme of a day of rest, let's keep this short. Jesus once said:

And answered them, saying, Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day? [Luke 14:5]

To help me observe the Sabbath, I attend Mass, perhaps read a section of a religious book, and try to avoid shopping (or even to have groceries / packages arrive on Sunday, if I can).

But sometimes errands gotta err. And Jesus points out that the Sabbath was made for us:

And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath. [Mark 2:27]

And so one way to take your day of rest is to deal with the things which are like your oxen in the well - those things in a metaphorical pit which will keep getting worse unless you make them better.

-the Centaur

If you're a working scientist - if you work day-to-day in domains not well understood enough to engineer solutions from known principles, if collecting data, generating theories, formulating hypotheses, and testing them are your bread and butter - then religious arguments often seem pretty crappy.

It's not that scientists can't make terrible mental gaffes, of course - they're human, like everyone else. But there's a certain mental discipline necessary for doing real science well which surpasses even the rigor expected in the philosophical and rationalist communities. We just don't know as much as we like.

And while some theology, regardless of whether you buy the premises, is based on solid argument - even though he lacked modern tools of valid argumentation, Aquinas is no slouch - vast swathes of religious thinking is based on a particular kind of garbage: reasoning from analogy.

Again, don't get me wrong: analogical reasoning is indispensable. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter built his career by demonstrating the power of analogy in thought. At one talk, his host said something like, "We'll join you at coffee hour after we drop Doug's books off at my office slash study."

Hofstadter whirled, smiled, and said, "At your office slash study. Beautiful." Beautiful, because his host had illustrated precisely what Hofstadter had shown in his talk: that we use analogy constantly in our day to day reasoning, case in point: an office slash study is a place used for work and to store books.

Everyone knew what he meant, and that's the beauty of the analogy. But just because we understand his off-the-cuff comment doesn't mean it's a meaningful foundation for a science of "office slash studies" - it was a convenience category, useful for calling something out, not for drawing firm conclusions.

Unfortunately, Christian "apologetics" leans heavily on analogies. In God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis said that Islam is the greatest of the Christian heresies, and all that's best in Judaism survives in Christianity. Well, that's cute, and it may even make you think, but it's bunk if you know the histories of the religions.

All too often, Christians use analogies about Jesus, their faith, and the world to argue for one point or the other - but then go beyond it to act as if those analogies were real. This is how Augustine got in the trap of arguing for forced conversions for "pastoral" reasons, forgetting about the real people being abused.

One such analogy is behind the idea that "food dulls the soul." This is a relatively obscure theological point, I admit - as J. K. Rowling might say, we're pretty deep in wand lore here - but it illuminates both the positive value of this kind of reasoning and the pitfalls inherent in this kind of imprecise reasoning.

"Food dulls the soul" is a concept - from Lewis or Miller, elaborated by a local priest - that if you find yourself backsliding into a sin you thought you'd conquered, check your diet over the last twenty-four hours: it's likely that you had a big, hearty - dare I say gluttonous - meal which softened you up.

The general idea is that the Devil assails a poorly defended point - it's easy to accidentally overeat - before attempting deeper corruption. The proposed theological mechanism is that "food dulls the soul" - focusing you on your body, detaching you from your spiritual connection, making it easier to sin.

I've observed this. The overall phenomenon is real. The explanation even has a grain of truith in it. But as stated, the explanation is garbage. True-sounding garbage: the precise phrase would be specious bullshit, statements that sound true but which are simply made up to suit the author's purpose.

For the soul is the form of the body. At very the least, it's an eternal Einsteinian record of every event that ever happened to you in the mind of God, and at the most, it's an eternal, indestructible spiritual essence under the total control of the Supreme Being of the Universe.

The soul is the form of the body. You can't separate it from the body. You can't be born without it, or sell it to the Devil, or cut it away with a subtle knife. If you hop in the transporter, or get transported to the grid, your soul will go with you, no matter how convoluted the episode. Commander Data would have one.

And so: you can't "dull" the soul. That would be like wearing out the number five: it's not even wrong, it's incoherent. And yet, something rings quite true about this idea - to the point that I recognized the immediately. What gives, then? This is a problem well known to artificial intelligence researchers:

"Soul" is a suitcase word.

In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky defines "suitcase words" as words with a whole cluster of meanings we carry around like a suitcase. My favorite is "consciousness," which packs in attention (I was conscious of the noise) to wakefulness (I lost consciousness) to sensation (conscious experience).

When that priest discussed "food dulling the soul," he was engaged in a bit of sloppy theology to convey a subtle idea. The soul should be reserved for the theological soul - which has a precise definition to keep us out of trouble - but it's a stand-in for our intellects, our hearts, our spirits, our state of grace.

The theological soul itself can't be dulled, but we humans as rational animals can get in a very animal state, where we are focused on this world to the exclusion of the next. Our rationality become reactive; our spiritual senses can get dulled; our actions are in touch with our bodies, not our spirits.

Whether the Devil literally exists or not, whether we are tempted by spiritual forces of evil or whether we're simply vulnerable to engaging in locally greedy policies rather than appropriately delaying gratification to gather greater reward, we can get in a mode where we're self-satisfied.

And when we do - when we overfeed our bellies, or underfeed our spirits - that's when we are vulnerable to falling into deeper problems. Like the "office slash study" where Hofstadter's books got dropped off, "food dulls the soul" is an analogy, a stand-in for a whole cluster of related ideas.

Much of Christian apologetics and spiritual advice falls into this category. Specious bullshit is too unkind for this kind of analogical reasoning when it is used in its proper fashion: as a roadmap. This kind of theology is technically untrue, but may be useful, guiding us in the general direction of the good.

Feynman once said "the sole test of any idea is experiment". But is it? Astronomers might disagree. Even though telescopes put on space probes are called "experiments", they aren't: they are instruments for gathering observations. Astronomy is an (almost) purely observational science.

But even though it isn't strictly true as stated, Feynman's maxim is nevertheless useful - a bright, clearly visible sign that can guide us away from deadend a priori thought-mazes and towards evidence-grounded a posteriori theories which are falsifiable.

The same can be said of many theological maxims. Food may not technically dull the soul, but it can get you into trouble. Islam isn't a Christian heresy and Judaism isn't contained within Christianity, but the faiths do exist in a relationship which is fruitful for Christian thinkers to seriously consider.

But, while they may be useful, these maxims aren't literally true. So be careful with the theology you encounter. It may be a useful crutch for your thinking, but don't swallow it whole or try to build castles atop of it. At best it will leave a bad taste in your mouth, at worst buried in a pile of sand.

That last bit isn't true either, but hopefully you get something out of what I mean.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Douglas Hofstadter.

Back in the day, I had both a "Jesus fish" and a "Darwin fish" on the back of my car (as I recall, it was an Isuzu Rodeo, a nice car but nowhere near as reliable as my beloved Nissan Pathfinder or my seemingly unkillable Toyota Prius). I also had a "Cthulhu fish" fridge magnet which I had as a joke.

But I wouldn't have put a Cthulhu bumper sticker on my car, because the school of fish on that bumper were not a joke (though I admit I enjoyed the smidge of irony) but instead represented a sincere advertisement of my beliefs - and while it's a fun story, Cthulhu doesn't cut that mustard.

You're reading a Lenten series, so I hope it's apparent that I'm a Christian; during this series, I mentioned that once I thought of becoming an evolutionary biologist. To some Christians, these things seem hard to fit together, as many Christians are dead set on sticking to the cosmology of the Hebrews.

But the stories told in Genesis are wrong, at least as cosmology, geology, biology or history. The meaning behind the misleading Catholic term "myth" for some stories in the Bible is that stories are inspired by God and teach important truths, even if they aren't precisely accurate histories.

Despite some people's attempts to treat the Bible as a fax from God, our understanding of God has progressed since the books of the Bible were written by their authors, collated by early Christians, and ultimately approved by the early Catholic Church.

For example, the Trinity - the notion that the one (1) God manifests in three distinct "persons", Father, Son and Holy Ghost - doesn't appear directly in the Bible; we developed that understanding over time. But it's the most important Christian doctrine. You can't understand Jesus as the Son of God without it.

On the other hand, other ideas we have discarded. Even within the Bible, we see debates between sincere believers, such as the rejection of Jewish dietary rules for Gentiles in Acts of the Apostles. Doctrines like the divine right of kings and the proper treatment of slaves have been abandoned.

Now, science is familiar with this process. Some scientific ideas were bad from the get-go. The Earth was never at the center of the universe, matter isn't composed of four elements, and the motion of projectiles can't be explained by an "impulse" that slowly runs out: these ideas were never right.

Other ideas - like the Earth being round, matter being made of atoms, or light being made of waves or particles - started off right. Now, Earth isn't perfectly round, and atoms aren't perfectly indivisible, and tiny things are weirdly both waves and particles - but these ideas were on the right track from the beginning.

There's very little that science can "prove" to be true. All science is based on observation, generalization and experiment, and new experiments could show nuances that could force us to throw out our ideas - the technical term for this is "defeasible" reasoning - likely outcomes which might be true.

This is a natural outcome of the probabilistic reasoning that underlies most of our formal reasoning apparatus (and might even explain some of the inner guts of cognition as well): unless something is absolutely certain, conclusions founded on it can't be absolutely certain.

The best you can hope for, as far as proofs go, is to develop theorems of broad applicability. Physicists argue from symmetries, which enable vast regions of deduction from very few premises. Computer scientists use the theory of computation, which applies to a broad category of possible universes.

But, between our observations, our generalizations, our experiments, our theories, and our theorems, science has come up with a few things we can count on - the Earth is round, matter is made of atoms, and at the speed and scale experienced by humans, the Newtonian approximation to mechanics.

Science doesn't have definitive truths, but it is an engine for seeking it - for expanding the regions we think are probable and discarding the ideas which contradict experiment or each other. "The sole test of any idea open to observation is experiment" is the best tool we have for reaching truth - in any area.

That's why I put the Darwin fish with its cute little feet on my car: to represent the search for truth. But science is not enough. Science, by itself, is amoral: it can tell us what exists in the world, but it can't tell us what to do with it. That's where ethics, morals, religion and spirituality come in.

You can go far without invoking the supernatural. Philosophers argue that you can't go from an "is" to an "ought" - to argue from what exists to what to do about it - but this isn't quite true. Ayn Rand points out ethics are judgments about what's good for human beings, so we're not free to pick any ethics we like.

But as we discussed earlier, no individual human being experiences enough to make accurate ethical judgments on their own - nor are we guaranteed that our society has experienced enough to make our ethics accurate either. And if there really is an afterlife or a spiritual realm, experience won't cut it.

If there is a God, then we rely on Him to inform us about the spiritual dimension of the universe which either exist in the afterlife we haven't yet reached or are part of the cosmic nature of the universe which we don't have the stature to grasp. And this information - this Revelation - is therefore special.

This is the reason early Jews and Christians wrote down their experiences, and the reason the early Church collated it and preserved it. It's the reason fundamentalists treat the Bible as literally true, and the reason I treat the Bible as primary source material.

Ethics come from the spiritual dimension of the universe, and are ultimately holy. What we should do is determined by what is - and who - is behind it. Choosing the right action isn't just a good idea: it's seeking holiness - it's choosing to follow God. And that's why the Jesus fish was on my bumper.

I say "truth and holiness" - with the truth first - because truth must come first. I don't believe in Jesus because I think He's holy; I think He's holy because I believe the stories about him are true. And while parts of the Bible that are myth, to me the Gospels (and Acts) are my primary source about Jesus.

But once you understand the truth, you need to decide what to do about it. And like the cosmology of the Bible was modified by on our current understanding, there are principles in the Bible that have needed refinement as we learn more about the world. But it's important to start there, every time.

Truth, and holiness: first find out what's true, then try to do the right thing, treating the good as sacred.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Chuck D.

While Christianity means following Jesus, the starting point for that journey today is the Bible - whether you're a fundamentalist who takes the Bible as literal truth, or a Catholic who views it through the lens of dogma and tradition, or a rational theist like myself who treats the Bible as primary source material.

But one thing you can't do with the Bible - even if you're a fundamentalist and thinks it's literally true, or a Catholic who believes in the richness of orthodox doctrine, and especially not a rational theist - is actually prove anything with it, not without breaking the meaning of "proof".

Perhaps I'm oversensitive about this point. In colloquial language, proof can just mean evidence offered to reach a conclusion: you can offer your driver's license as a proof of your identity, gather facts to prove innocence or guilt, offer those proofs as trial to help a jury reach a conclusion.

But that's not the way that people used the word "proof" to argue about the Bible when I was growing up, nor is it the way that I've seen people use the word around me to argue for their beliefs. Those people use the word proof like this: "You should believe X, same as me, and I can prove it with the Bible!"

The most egregious example I heard was a Catholic priest at Christmas mass give an enormous list of Catholic doctrine - mostly, political doctrines - which they then followed by the extraordinary statement that all of these things logically followed from the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But the theology of the Catholic Church - four hundred pages of catechism in my 1983 copy, near nine hundred in the 1994 edition, thirteen hundred pages in McBrien's Catholicism, or 1500 pages in the latest edition of Denzinger - do not logically follow from the hundred thousand words of the Gospels and Acts.

You can take the Gospels on faith. You can take the Bible to be mythical truth, like the Catholic Church does, or to be literal truth, like fundamentalists do. And, guided by grace, you can build a theology on it. But you cannot use it as a foundation for logical argument, for the text requires interpretation.

The Bible consists of around seventy books with a wide variety of content - myths, histories, stories, songs, proverbs, parables, essays, biographies, letters, and prophecies. These texts are not written with sufficient precision for them to serve as axioms for logical argument - nor were they meant to.

The reason is simple to understand: axioms for logical argument must be atomic, with meanings that are completely self-contained to serve as bases for logical deductions; but the meaning of any particular passage of the Bible must be taken in their textual, historical and religious context.

This isn't an argument for relativism or for radical textual analysis, but the simple point that even the shortest sentence in the Bible, "Jesus wept," has a meaning which can only understood by reading the story in the text that surrounds it - and every act of reading is an act of creative imagination.

Researchers in artificial intelligence have discovered that reading even the simplest possible stories generally requires inventing novel concepts that don't yet exist in the mind of the reader. Each reader must recreate within themselves knowledge contained in the stories, knowledge they don't yet have.

And they recreate that information based on what they already do know, and so will idiosyncratically create their own unique interpretations of the concepts of the story. Perhaps this is why different Christian groups I encounter seem to read the Bible in such different ways.

Now, most groups of Christians I know are convinced that there is one true way to read the Scriptures. One friend once claimed that there was "only one true interpretation" - despite coming from a tradition that claimed each Christian was responsible for their own interpretation of the Bible. And yet ...

Catholics complain Protestants ignore the plain words of Scripture in which Jesus gives spiritual authority to Peter and his descendants - which is the source of the authority of the Pope over the Church - or the words that indicate that the bread and wine of the Eucharist become the literal body and blood of Jesus.

Protestants complain Catholics read into the plain words of the Scripture things that are not there - interpreting the metaphorical language of the Last Supper to be literal - or read out things that are there - like ignoring the existence of Jesus's brothers and sisters to preserve the doctrine of the ever-virgin Mary.

You might be able to build a theology on such a foundation. And, if guided by grace, you might even be able to build a true theology on such a foundation. And that theology itself might contain logical arguments. But those arguments rest on your interpretations of the Bible, not the Bible itself.

Actual logical arguments require a funny kind of paradox in their application. Mathematics is repeatable reasoning, an act of creative imagination that builds tools which enables one person to build an argument which another person can reproduce precisely. But this repeatability comes at a terrible cost.

Logical arguments need axioms which are unambiguous within the context of their formal language - even though they are not precisely defined in the real world. And the conclusions you draw from those axioms are true only within the context of that language, even if they have a broad scope of application.

Points and lines in Euclidean geometry have a precise meaning in relationship to each other, but are "undefined terms" with respect to reality, only qualitatively described. This enables us to use the proofs of Euclidean geometry for a vast variety of practical applications, even though ideal "points" do not exist.

And even though Euclidean geometry doesn't describe the real world at all. Space is actually curved - not a barrier for mathematical analysis, though it is more complicated - and intermixed with time; but the more precise details of the Einsteinian space-time continuum don't show up at normal human scales.

But it does show a deeper truth: if an argument is rigorous enough to be logically true, that truth is restricted to the formal realm, and may not correspond to reality; if an argument is grounded in reality, its truth is contingent upon evidence which can be overturned, and cannot have the force of a formal proof.

In the early days after Jesus's ascension, Peter thought he had it all worked out, following both Jesus and Jewish law. But God spoke to him in a dream, making Peter realize that the old rules weren't appropriate for new believers, leading to a decision to no longer require all of them.

We build elaborate theological structures on top of our interpretations of the Bible. But insofar as they're based on the Bible, they're not proofs; and insofar as they are proofs, they're not guaranteed to apply to the Bible. We need to be humble about what we can prove, to leave room for the Spirit to work on us.

-the Centaur

Pictured: King James. Yeah, that King James, commissioner of the King James Bible.

Christianity has all sorts of weird words: Primum Mobile, Eucharist, Paraclete; there are other words which are used in weird ways, like adoration, adoption ... and apologetics. "Christian apologists" doesn't refer to people who are apologizing for Christianity: it refers to theologians trying to defend it.

As I hinted at last time, in a worldview where belief in God rests on faith as a free gift of grace from God, Christian apologetics are both indispensable and unnecessary, essential and impossible. Christians are called on to spread the Gospel, with the knowledge that no rational argument can ever convince.

That hasn't stopped people from trying, though. The greatest Christian apologist of the past two hundred years, full stop, is C. S. Lewis, author of not just the Narnia series but also great apologetic works like The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce and The Abolition of Man.

And so, while Lewis's works have moved me greatly, I often find his works have holes in their hearts. The brilliant G. K. Chesterton, author of In Defense of Sanity, is even worse; his favorite trick is to turn common ideas into paradoxes to make a point - frequently at the cost of intellectual honesty.

I've heard it said that Chesterton argued that all great things contain paradoxes, because at the heart of everything is the paradox of the cross: a tool of condemnation turned into salvation, death turned into life, failure, humiliation and defeat turned into success, glory and victory.

And this is perfectly good Christian theology - and consistent with Godel's incompleteness theorem that we discussed earlier. Most Christian religions assert that at the heart of the faith are mysteries that cannot be fully understood, just like Godel showed that all systems of thought have ultimate limits.

But it's unsatisfying for a rationalist, even a Christian one, for it means that many Christians - even as they are sincerely trying to do their best to spread the Gospel the best way that they know how - are at the same time committing to statements that are at best foolish and at worst lies.

And if you are tempted to retort that it's good to be foolish in the name of the Lord, like David with his tamborine, I want to be super crystal clear that I don't mean the good, faithful kind of foolishness, but a performative, "bad faith" foolishness in which people pretend things are other than what they are.

You've met the type. The street preacher with the specious comeback; the televangelist who carefully edits his stories to play his position. The new "friend" who, when they find out you are a Christian, asks "Why don't you come to my church?" with the words "instead of yours" hanging in the air.

For a Catholic growing up in the south, in Greenville, South Carolina, hometown of Bob Jones University, this was particularly irksome. As a child, I was buttonholed by street preachers across the street from BJU, who'd pester me on subsequent weeks on whether I'd read the pamphlets they shoved on me.

If these people find out you believe in evolution, whoo boy, the volume gets turned up to eleven. I aaalmost ended up going into evolutionary biology as my field, and I can't tell you how many bad arguments I've heard about why evolution won't work. No, not bad arguments - meaningless.

But it wasn't just evolution. Many of the arguments which were forced upon me were purely theological. One argument really stuck with me - a true Chesterton style paradox, what at first appears to be a nearly meaningless argument which nevertheless captures an important truth about Christianity.

Call this "argument" the Cross over the Chasm. The idea is that in the beginning, God and Man were united, but Adam's sin caused the Fall, creating a chasm that cannot be bridged. Man can try to cross the chasm with good works, but fails; God can try to cross it with grace, but grace doesn't reach either.

But that's where the Cross comes in. While the arm of good works can't reach, and the arm of grace can't reach; but you can write Jesus vertically between them, and turn those two arms and the word Jesus into a cross that bridges the gap. Jesus's sacrifice on the cross bridges the gap between god and Man.

Now, what's bad about this Cross over the Chasm episode?

By itself, nothing, but in the moment, what happened was this: a friend found out that I was Catholic, and decided to "show" me the true role of Jesus in religion - except of course, in the mind of people like him, he doesn't have a religion, but a close personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Never mind that this "argument" doesn't actually "show" anything - at best, it's a mnemonic for a few bits of theology which are perfectly consistent with Catholic doctrine. (Many people in the Bible belt who are upset about what Catholics supposedly believe don't realize there are fewer differences than they think).

But the real problem is that people who act like my friend did there are both implicitly rejecting the faith of fellow Christians - and lying about their own faith. Religion is the word we use for someone whose close personal relationship with an invisible person is a vital part of their worldview. Denying that is a lie.

And denying the faith of a fellow Christian is attacking that faith. I also have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ - which, in humility, I'd never describe as close, because it's never as I'd like, a relationship I'm always trying to improve, with the help of His grace; but I do believe and I choose to follow Him.

That's super hard, and we don't need to throw stumbling blocks up for other believers. For a Christian, other Christians should not be our theological enemies. And so, while I don't believe in buttonholing Christians to get them to convert to other branches of Christianity, I think it's good to ask:

What was good about the Cross over the Chasm episode?

Well, first off, it's a really clear mnemonic for really important theology. It's a great little story which clearly shares important truths about Christianity: humanity and God are separated, but reaching for each other in works and Grace, and Jesus - and His sacrifice - is the mediator that makes union possible.

It's not at all a logical argument, but the story has stuck with me for years. Had my friend come up to me, enthused, about this new metaphor, rather than presenting it as one more argument against my faith (!) even though it didn't contradict my faith (!!) it could have acted as a bulwark, not a stumbling block.

More importantly, at least my friend was trying to share the Gospel. Once a woman told a televangelist she didn't like how he was spreading the Gospel. He asked how she was spreading it. She replied that she wasn't spreading it. His response: "Well, I like how I'm doing it better than how you're not doing it."

I'm acutely aware that many people don't want to be proselytized, and that's their prerogative, of course - I know from experience I don't enjoy it myself. I far prefer the Episcopal "Tea with the vicar OR DEATH!" "Oh? Well, tea please" to any amount of street preaching or personal buttonholing.

But, if you are interested in the Christian faith, know that ultimately, rational argument will fail.

A paradox - a mystery - lies at the center of the faith: "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again." While I'm  comfortable with this idea, sometimes it takes a Chesterton paradox - or a sketched diagram of a cross - to break through the rational so that the free gift of grace will start working.

-the Centaur

Pictured: C. S. Lewis.