Amnesia, the bible and the Iliad

It’s the week­end, which means… Rest. Or, intended rest. Ear­lier this after­noon I came across a com­ment which I’ve heard a few times, but never really gave seri­ous thought to. The com­ment goes some­thing like this:

If tomor­row we all woke up with amne­sia, we would place the bible along­side the Iliad as great fic­tions of history.

I don’t really have much to do today, so a brief reflection.

I find the most damn­ing crit­i­cism is the impli­ca­tion that reli­gious believ­ers are not crit­i­cal in their faith — they have not ratio­nally exam­ined their beliefs, con­sid­er­ing what they believe and why they believe. That upon wak­ing with amne­sia, we will — for some rea­son — all be meta­phys­i­cal nat­u­ral­ists and itin­er­ant skep­tics. And hav­ing exam­ined the bible we will find it to be false, just as we will con­sider the Iliad to be some very old, well writ­ten fiction.

To be sure, it is true that a large num­ber of pro­fessed the­ists, espe­cially of the fun­da­men­tal­ist vari­ety, aren’t crit­i­cal at all. How­ever, the real­ity remains that there are peo­ple who have exam­ined their faith rig­or­ously and main­tained it. Recent exam­ples of such peo­ple would be Ravi Zacharias, William Lane Craig, Josh McDow­ell, J.P More­land, myself, etc.

Per­haps we should give more thought to the real­ity of amne­sia. For if I woke up an amne­siac, I might ask myself, “who am I?” “Where am I, and what am I doing here?” “How did I get here?” “How should I live?” etc. Fur­ther­more, our dis­cred­it­ing of the bible would be very long in com­ing because we’re amnesics. We would learn of our his­tory from books, watch it on films, etc. If this is the case, why should we sup­pose that we will come to a dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion that we’ve arrived at already? We know of all this infor­ma­tion already, and there are still reli­gious believers.

Think­ing about this more, per­haps it’s also being claimed that Chris­tians believe in the bible because they’ve been told to, that if they approached it with a “fresh slate” they would not be so con­ducive to believe it. They believe because they were born in a “Chris­t­ian cul­ture”. But what of the reli­gious con­vert — the Mus­lim who becomes Chris­t­ian, the Hindu who becomes Chris­t­ian, etc. Could these peo­ple be com­pared to our hypo­thet­i­cal amnesiacs?

In any case, I smell red her­ring…

Edit* And a hello, to Tre­tiak and Deify

Related posts:

1. The Bible, Propaganda?
2. The Bible and Homo­sex­u­al­ity: Introduction