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.

To make sure my Sabbath remains a Sabbath, and since responsible people are still working remotely because of the pandemic, in lieu of writing an essay, I'll use that time to watch recorded services from Saint Stephen's in-the-Field instead (note these were filmed at our sister parish St. John the Divine).

If you haven't "gone to Mass" today, I encourage you to take a devotional.

Stay safe, seek rest, and God bless.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a graphic. Wow, Illustrator is ... so unnecessarily hard to use, and the Illustrator community seems filled with a small contingent of strangely unhelpful people who can't seem to realize there are other drawing programs out there and legitimate reasons to question why Illustrator does Illustrator.

Growing up in the Bible Belt meant that many of my friends didn't just believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, they believed it was literally true and argued - sometimes, strongly argued - that accepting the Bible as the infallible Word of God was absolutely necessary for salvation.

There's a great Christian word for that point of view: idolatry.

Biblical idolatry, to be specific: worshipping the Bible instead of Jesus. As I said when I started this series, Christianity is about following Jesus (faith), away from your old life (repentance), and towards the kingdom of heaven (goodness), in the hope of salvation (only accomplished by his sacrifice and grace).

Placing the Bible, a book - a collection of books, in three different languages, by dozens of authors, over centuries, collated by a completely different group of people - as the center of your religion is placing an thing - a divinely inspired thing, perhaps, but a thing - in place of Jesus God, and distorts Christianity.

Treating the Bible like a fax from God gets you so caught up in the buzzing of the machinery that you miss the message. People I respect get lost mining the minutiae of the Bible, combing through their  Interlinear Bibles to construct their own elaborate castles in the air in favor of simply following Jesus.

But how do you get to know Jesus if you don't know the Bible? You don't, full stop. Yes, you can - and should - read the Apostle's Creed, which summarizes what Christians have learned about Jesus, as approved by the descendants of his own apostles - who have evolved into our modern bishops.

But for us today - and even when the Apostle's Creed reached essentially its current form, 700 years after Jesus died - we must rely on the Bible to tell us who Jesus was. While the Church has traditions about Jesus not recorded in the Bible, even the Church itself doesn't consider these very reliable.

So we're stuck with the Bible to get to know Jesus - which is as it should be, scientifically (if you include history in the "sciences," writ large, which I do) because the New Testament of the Bible is the only extended primary source material we have about Jesus's life.

Before we drill into that, here's a question: Do you believe George Washington cut down a cherry tree?

If so, shame on your primary school history teachers, because it very likely didn't happen. The cherry tree myth was invented 7 years after George Washington's death - and almost 70 years after the alleged incident - by an early biographer, who didn't even include it until the book's fifth edition.

That doesn't mean it didn't happen - but if it had happened, it probably would have been mentioned in the writings of Washington or people who knew him. But the story was first told after everyone who could verify it was dead, by a biographer out to show Washington's success was due to his "Great Virtues."

Historians prefer not to use that kind of second-hand evidence (though, if all else is lacking, they'll grit their teeth and soldier on). They prefer to use primary sources - documents and diaries, art and artifacts, recordings and records that were directly created in the time of study, preferably by the people involved.

Put another way, if you want to know what George Washington thought, you need to look at what he actually said and did. Speculating about what he might have thought or did can be interesting, but unless that speculation can be tied back to actual documents about Washington ... you're just making it up.

In the same vein, students of the "historical Jesus" hunted for writings about Him by His contemporaries, and found only a handful: a few references in the historians Josephus and Tacitus written around AD 90 and AD 115, and just possibly some in the Talmud, collected around 200 from older oral traditions.

All these recount narratives that are brief and generally second- or third-hand. These primary sources let us know that Jesus existed. But if you want to know more about Jesus's life - whether you're a historian or a Christian or both - and you're looking for primary sources, the Bible is it.

We don't need to imagine that the Bible is an infallible fax from God in order to recognize we need to treat its words with utmost respect. If you wanted to learn what George Washington wrote in his diary, you wouldn't make a new diary entry up, now would you? The same is true of the Bible.

There are hundreds of manuscripts of the Old Testament and thousands of the New Testament, with many discrepancies; but this is where we start. I prefer the New Oxford Annotated Bible, others prefer the Interlinear; to help interpret them, I use histories like Ehrman's and Anglican and Catholic catechisms.

Jesus is God. Jesus lived as a human being. The Bible was written by human beings who were met and moved by Him, and was preserved by people who were following in His example of reading and sharing the Scriptures. We don't need to deify the Book; we need to look through it to the God behind it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a primary source, in this case a 1st-century bust alleged to be Josephus, a historian born shortly after Jesus died, and who wrote about him while Jesus's contemporaries were still living. Whoa. Timing-wise, that'd be like ... like a picture of me in my 60's, if I had written a biography of JFK.