Hey Parableman!

After an extended hiatus, (the last interview was in June) this is the 10th in a series of interviews with bloggers who are part of The Blogdom of God. The Blogdom of God is a loose group of Blogs that identify themselves as 'God blogs'.

Today's interview is with Jeremy Pierce of Parableman. Besides being a part of The Blogdom of God, Jeremy is an adjuct instructor at Syracuse
University and Le Moyne College as well as a graduate student in Philosophy at Syracuse. Since he's into thinking heavy-duty thoughts, I gave him some "advanced" questions. Read the interview to see how he answers them.

Q: Who are the Brown Derbies and why
do you like them?

A: They're an a capella group at Brown University, where I did my undergraduate
degree. I had a very good friend in the group, and I got to know many of
them during my time there. I liked them because, at least at the time, they
were one of the best collegiate a capella groups in the country. They had
excellent arrangements, specializing in trying to sound as much like the
popular songs they were doing, including mouth drums and so on. It was about
as far from doo-wop as you can get. They were one of the first groups to do
that sort of thing well. Everyone's doing it now. They also had a unique
brand of humor at their live shows, and it even sometimes showed up on their
albums (like beginning one album with the DTS theme, done a capella).

Q: Have you experienced any liberal discrimination due to your conservative
beliefs at either Brown or Syracuse?

A: I don't know about any discrimination at either place. Brown is generally
open-minded in a truly liberal way. Unlike the inconsistent liberals who
tolerate everyone except those they don't consider tolerant, most people at
Brown tolerate everyone, including exclusivistic Christians. Often it's the
demeaning sort of "you can believe that if it's good for you" line, which
doesn't accept what the person is realing claiming, that the gospel has a
demand on everyone. Still, the tolerance displayed consistently is nice in
that no one is overtly hostile to the individual Christian.

As for conservative beliefs, I had lots of great discussions at Brown. There
were plenty of active conservatives and libertarians there. Jacob Levy, who
blogs at The Volokh Conspiracy, was at Brown during my time there and was a
prominent name on campus. I think he wrote for the daily paper or something.
Conservatives had a full voice there and weren't really marginalized. There
were ideas that I consider insidiously evil that the administration assumed.
These came out strongest in orientation and dorm events during the first
year. Still, open discussion was always encouraged, as long as no one
insulted anyone outright, and I was never inclined to do that sort of thing
anyway.

I think a number of my fellow graduate students consider me totally nuts for
being a Christian. Many of them disagree with my political beliefs very
strongly. Many of them may not know what I really think, though word is
probably getting out more because of the blog. Still, I don't see how it's
really affected how I get along with anyone. There are other, even more
vocal, conservatives in my department, and sometimes they're fully accepted
by pretty much everyone as equal members of the department, including
socially. I'm more separated from everyone socially because I have a family
than I am for anything I believe. I was much more involved with people in my
department my first year when I was single in every sense and my second year
when I wasn't married but engaged.

Q: Have you decided on a dissertation topic? Any ideas?

A: No. Yes.

I had been planning to do something that didn't work out, though something
in the same general area might be fine. It had to do with issues related to
personhood, persistence through time, composition of material objects, and
coming into and going out of existence. I decided to put that off and work
on something else for a while, since I do need to have two comprehensive
papers before I'm officially in the dissertation phase, though I finished
all my coursework a couple years ago. Since I have something to say about
racial classification issues, I'm working now on a paper related to that,
which will get into philosophy of language and how kind-terms refer, the
metaphysical nature of kind categories like species (and presumably race),
the genetic issues about how much variation needs to occur between groups
for it to count as a legitimate category, and more philosophy of language
about ambiguity (or more likely polysemy, which is like ambiguity with more
than two meanings). I think race terms might be like that, and I've never
heard anyone even considering such a view, never mind defending it.

Q: I would imagine you've read a lot of Philosophy papers. Have there been any
that were really memorable because they were so good or bad?

A: I guess this doesn't include books. My favorite paper of all time is David
Lewis' "The Paradoxes of Time Travel". It's the best discussion of time
travel ever written, and most of it is readable enough that I've discussed
it in an introductory course. It does a lot more work than defending the
possibility of time travel (though also showing what's wrong with most time
travel stories in scifi). His paper "Are We Free to Break the Laws?" is also
quite excellent. Both of these papers explain what I think is the right
approach to free will -- compatibilism without necessarily endorsing
determinism on a physical level. His "Holes" is also a model of the styles
of contemporary metaphysics. Lewis' "Survival and Identity" and Ted Sider's
"All the World's a Stage" and "Four-dimensionalism" had a big impact on me
in my thinking about persistence through time.

In philosophy of religion, John Hawthorne's "Arguments for Atheism" is an
excellent defense against no-evidence arguments for denying God's existence,
and most of what I've read by Daniel Howard-Snyder on the problem of evil is
first-rate. William Alston's "Advice to Divine Command Theorists" is the
best discussion of God and morality anywhere, and he has a great paper on
how prior value judgments affect the epistemology of religious belief.

I tend to forget really bad papers, so I don't have good examples of any.

Q: How common is plagiarism in the classes you teach?

A: Last semester I had five cases, two from one person, but this is the first
time I've done regular papers in a few years. When I do dialogue papers I
rarely see it. I caught eight cases in my first year of teaching, though, so
when they have assignments that they can do it they will.

Q: What do you think of homeschooling children?

A: I prefer homeschooling parents. They're generally better at the teaching
part of it than children would be.

I see nothing wrong with homeschooling. In many cases it may be the best
option, but it has huge downsides. Christian parents who homeschool are
robbing their children of both privileges and responsibilities if they don't
find some other way to get their children interacting in a regular and
time-intensive way with children who aren't from Christian homes. It would
also be very bad for Christian parents to abandon public schools to having
no salt and light, at least as a general practice. Still, it sometimes might
be the best option for some parents. To insist that it's the only biblical
view is, I think, to be an apostate Christian. There are three
qualifications for excommunication in scripture: gross, unrepentant sin
(once challenged and given an opportunity to repent), gross, unrepentant
doctrinal error on basic gospel issues (once challenged and given an
opportunity to repent), and serious divisiveness without repentance (once
challenged and given an opportunity to repent). Those who insist that
parents are sinning by sending their kids to a public, private, or private
Christian school, or for that matter those who insist that parents are
sinning by homeschooling, are in danger of falling into that third category
and therefore being considered nonbelievers.

I researched some of the assignments Jeremy gives to his students. This is one of the questions he poses to them. I wondered how he would answer it himself. If you happen to be one of Jeremy's students you would be wise to read his answer before first answering for yourself. -jdm

Q: You're an angel. Given this information, God will do one of the following:
A) Create a world and roll a ten-sided die. If 1, he'll create life. If 2-10
he won't.
B) Create ten worlds. For the first, he'll roll a ten-sided die. If it's 1,
he'll create life then stop. If 2-10, he'll go on to the next world to roll
again until he's created life or run out of worlds. Is A or B more likely if
you find life? Is A or B more likely if you discover you've fallen asleep
and woken up on a planet with life? Explain your answer.

A: Given that you find life, A is more likely. Given that you happen to wake up
on a planet with life, B is more likely. I'm not going to go through the
equations to calculate this, but the second includes factoring in the
chances that you also happen to be on the planet where the life is, which
isn't the case with the first.

I don't think this ends up giving the consequence I once thought it did,
unfortunately, though I don't think it has the opposite consequence either,
so I've stopped using it with the design argument in opposition to the many
universes hypothesis. Instead, I just use the analogy of a group of marksmen
firing on someone point blank. If they miss, you might conclude that there
were countless numbers of firing squads, and chances are one of them would
fail somewhere. This just happened to be the one. You might. But you
wouldn't. It's much more likely that something design-wise happened.
Similarly, assuming the probability calculations the scientists give about
how likely the cosmological constants necessary for life were, and it
really is that unlikely, then a designer is a much better conclusion than
postulating oodles and oodles of universes. That's not an explanation any
more than postulating lots of firing squads is in the other case.

Q: What is your favorite philosophical argument/approach for defending the
faith?

My piece on my blog about a biblical argument for Christianity is the best
thing I can come up with right now, though I'd want to supplement it with a
number of other arguments.
(http://mt.ektopos.com/parablemania/archives/000305.html) One is the good
work by contemporary philosophers arguing that we don't need evidence or
proof to have knowledge. We don't even need to know that we know to have
plain and simple knowledge. The biblical descriptions of faith show it to be
a kind of knowledge given by God. If God is giving knowledge, then it's
about as good a source as any. Even if we, from a subjective point of view,
can't know that it's knowledge, it in fact is. When you put all that
together with responses to objections against the faith, I think you've got
a responsible picture of why it's not even just ok to believe what
Christianity says. It's easy to see how it might be eminently reasonable.
That would take a lot more work than I can really put into it here, but
those are important components of it. I think the traditional arguments for
God's existence have much more merit than most contemporary philosophers do,
but I don't think they're proofs, and they just come in on top of the stuff
I already said.

Q: Do you think there are passages in the New Testament that reflect the
culture of the time they were written and aren't meant to be prescriptive?

A: Yes. Paul tells Timothy to bring his cloak with him when he comes to see
him. I don't take that to be prescriptive. I'd have to find what remains of
Paul's cloak and what remains of Paul's body and then take it to him. So
would you. That's an obligation Paul never intended to carry on to anyone
except Timothy, and it's not even clear that it was an obligation for
Timothy.

Some people might accuse me of doing this with I Cor 14's command for women
to be silent and not speak in the gatherings of believers, but I take that
to be referring to the evaluations of prophecies during gatherings of
believers. Once seen in that context, I think it is prescriptive as it
stands. It never was meant to apply to just any old talking in the
gathering, which we see when we see Paul discussing the women who were
themselves prophesying earlier in the very same book. I doubt they were
prophesying silently.

Greeting with a holy kiss is culture-bound. The point is to greet with an
acceptable greeting common within a family. For us that might involve a hug
and for some more reserved just a handshake. For some today it still does
involve a kiss. The principle Paul was communicating stands today. The
specific application need not. I place head coverings and hair length in I
Cor 11 in the same category. One rule of thumb I think is worth following is
that if a command appears only once we shouldn't rely on that for anything
we hold as doctrinally binding. Any really important doctrine is based on
multiple texts and usually on texts throughout scripture in many cultural
settings. Some of the ones that appear only once are less clear simply
because it's not absolutely sure how much of what's being said is
culture-bound. I think those who hold a wholly egalitarian view of gender
roles are misguided and often letting today's cultural views guide their
hermeneutics and then saying that the NT culture is the one that affects the
text. So I think this sort of thing does go wrong often enough, but it's
legitimate to figure out what the main purpose the author had in mind. Paul
does seem very concerned with distinctions between men and women and how
that reflects the eternal role differences within the Trinity and between
Christ and the church. He doesn't ever seem to be giving a theology of hair,
veils, or kisses in their own right.

Q: What in the Bible has been the most puzzling to you?

A: Genesis and science, not just evolution or time within Gen 1:1-2:3, which I
think is fairly easy to handle on an old-earth view except for the problem
that comes up on some views related to a fallen world before the fall, and
there are things to say there that I'm not fully settled on, though that
aspect belongs in this list) but genealogies and lengths of lives, which
brings up the greater problem of large numbers in the OT, which perhaps
puzzles me even more.
The ethical issue of divorce in Ezra 9-10 is something I keep changing my
mind on, so I guess that's a sign of puzzlement.
I wonder a little bit about the end of Mark and why the best manuscripts
seem incomplete or show a very strange, sudden ending.
I'm a little puzzled at Jude's use of clearly unorthodox Jewish literature,
not really in the fact that he uses it but in how he uses it. There are
things to say there, but it's a little puzzling.
One minor issue of interpretation bothers me a lot for some reason. The best
exegetes of our time on I Peter 3, II Peter 2, and Jude have those passages
talking about Jesus preaching a victory message to demons in hell. These
exegetes take those passages to be about an interpretation of Genesis 6 that
the best exegetes of Genesis of our day think is not the best interpretation
of Genesis 6 and that it's about something else. I don't know what I think
about this anymore, but it has big consequences on what you say about the
use of the Old Testament in the New.

Q: Do you consider yourself to be an evangelical? Why or Why Not?

A: Yes. The why is pretty simple. Just about every definition I've seen, except
those loaded with a negative evaluation from the start, is true of me.
People disagree on what an evangelical is, but all of them would agree that
I'm one. Some might not call me a fundamentalist. Others would very much see
me as one. I think the word has ceased to be useful enough to care.

Q: "As a Christian, I think it's really fun to wait around on campus until I
see a likely victim, then hide behind a tree until I can pounce out and
tackle the person, ready to do the old "shove the Bible down the throat"
maneuver. Of course, it's best when I can beat the person on the head with
my very large Bible before I do the oral surgery part of the procedure."
I thought the above quote was pretty funny. Probably because I've met
Christians who were really like that. What do you think is the most
effective way to lead people to Christ?

A: The most effective method is become good friends with nonbelievers, to spend
lots of time doing things that you have in common, to be intentional about
bringing other believers into those relationships so that your nonbelieving
friend can be living in some ways within the scope of the Christian
community, and to live lives reflecting God's character, including being
honest about the gospel when but not insisting on putting it into every
situation but rather letting its significance define one's life. Those who
say to evangelize with your life and only speaking the gospel when necessary
are probably too far, but I lean more on that side most of the time.

Q: As a left-handed person did you realize that you're the spawn of Satan?
Besides Ehud, the left-handed judge, lefties don't seem to be very well
represented in the Bible. Seriously though, how do you think being
left-handed has affected you?

A: Sometimes the Bible uses the categories of the day to make points
poetically. That happens in Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, probably Psalms, and I'm
sure some of the prophets with regard to left and right. Some people think
it's really giving a hidden message about the American political spectrum,
which I think is hilarious and a great party joke when only conservatives
are around, but it's a pretty horrendous heremeneutical strategy. Left and
right stood for something in the Hebrew mindset, and what they stood for are
what those statements are really about.

I'm not left-handed, really. I can't write well with my left hand (basic
kindergarten level of development and out of practice). I learned many
things with my right hand. When my kindergarten teacher decided to teach me
to write with my right hand, it's because she believed me to be
ambidextrous. I think a better description would simply be non-dextrous.
Either because of the switch or maybe just some natural anomaly, both hands
are like most people's left hand.

Q: Do you listen to the Diane Rehm show often?

A: No. I think she has an annoying voice, an annoying accent I can't place,
annoying views, and a seriously biased approach to most issues. When my wife
is in the car, NPR is often on, even if I'm driving. When the car starts,
even when I'm alone, no music has yet been inserted, so I often see if an
intersting topic is on NPR, even if it's Diane Rehm. Normally I don't listen
to it more than a few times a month, with the occasional periods of more
intense exposure, as has unfortunately been the case in the last few weeks
when I teach my class and then drive home while she's on.

Q: Why do you think FDR was the worst president ever? It seems like there are
so many other choices you could have made.

A: He created the era of big government. There's so much debate about whether
his solutions really helped us get out of the Great Depression to begin
with, never mind whether they should have been kept afterward. I think he
was a moral coward, unwilling to press his conviction that we should get
into WWII earlier. He was also unduly high on himself, thinking the country
couldn't survive without him. Until that time no president had chosen to
break with tradition and run for a third term (and he ran for a fourth!),
even though there wasn't a constitutional term limit yet. It still shows
something about his character. The effect of his policies and the trends
they've started have got to weigh into his evaluation as heavily as the
incredibly good effects of what I see as norally repugnant decisions made to
rebel against the proper, God-given authority in the American Revolution.

Q: What happened between September 2003 and December 2003? There seems to be a
big hole in your blog archives during that period of time.

A: Nothing special, I don't think. I started my blog and did a test post in the
middle of the night when I couldn't sleep. I came back to it a few months
later and then really picked up with it. Part of my motivation was my wife
starting a blog, and I couldn't let her hog all the fun. I did have mine
first, after all, even if I hadn't done anything with it. I didn't really
know what blogs were when I set it up, and I started looking at blogs in
December as I was trying to figure out how to join the fun.

Q: Have you ever read Island of the Blue Dolphins?

A: No. It sounds vaguely familiar, but it's possible that I've never even heard
of it. Jeremy's wife is from Barbados and the book is set in Barbados. I read it in grade school and it's always been a favorite of mine.

Q: You're from a large family. All of your siblings look to be pretty
accomplished and intelligent. What do you think it was about your
upbringing that caused all of you to be the way you are? (or is it that you
just got lucky genetically?)

A: This question sounded like some sort of test question at first. My dad
taught us to think, and my parents encouraged us to pursue our interests,
giving us lots of chances to land on different things, I assume realizing
that if we pursue what we love we'll be more excited to thrive at it but
forcing us to do important things that we didn't want to do as well. There
are probably some good genes in there somewhere too.

Q: How has having an inter-racial marriage affected you? What kind of
experiences have you had in this regard?

A: In most ways that you might expect it to affect me, it just doesn't. Race is
part of everyone, especially white people who don't realize it, but it's not
the most distinctive part of either of us. I've answered some aspects of
this in this post: http://mt.ektopos.com/parablemania/archives/000557.html

Still, there are ways that I'm different because of an interracial marriage,
and I can't really quantify all of them. There was never a time since I've
known my wife that I didn't think she was beautiful, but it took some
adjusting for me to realize that standards of beauty I was raised with would
seek to undermine that judgment simply because of what I grew up being
conditioned to find more beautiful, e.g. lighter skin. When I decided I
wanted to marry her, I basically knew I was making an agreement with God
that my kids might not look very much like me. It's turned out that they
look much more like me than her in terms of skin color, but that's not what
I expected. Other ways it's affected me include being a little more
concerned about race issues than I might not otherwise have been,
particularly black-white issues (though I've long been more concerned about
them than most people I know) and a little more understanding of what it's
like to be black than I could possibly know otherwise, not that I can ever
know some things. It's never affected us in the ways you might expect. No
one in our lives shows any sign of thinking anything of it except a couple
people who consider it noble. Our premarital counselor hadn't even thought
to raise the issue and was unprepared to say anything about it when asked
if he had any advice. I think I'd hate living in the South, but here in the
northeast interracial marriage has become a fairly normal thing nowadays,
and most serious racism is gone or buried out of fear of those who hate
racists, which is most people.

Q: Do you think the fact that your wife is from Barbados makes her culturally
different than if she were born in the United States?

A: Yes. If you compare immigrants from Barbados with most African Americans,
there are huge differences in values. Some things are similar, like this
annoyingly nonchalant attitude toward timeliness and precision, but Bajans
tend to be much less race-focused than African Americans, despite their
equally oppressed past. They seem more inclined to see achievement in the
mainstream as something good and not something "other" because it's "white".
The biggest difference is that Barbados is so heavily influenced by the
British. They drive on the left, bake macaroni and cheese (calling it
macaroni pie) as one of their main staples, and have a heavy Anglican
presence in addition to their many Pentecostal churches. Her own church
background involves both.

Q: What do you hope to achieve with your blog?

A: My original goal was simply to have an easier way to put material I write on
the internet than my old website. Opening up a special program to FTP
everything, having to type in a password every time I want to do so, and
having to deal with editing it in unusual software or have multiple windows
open to know what it will look like is just too much. So I decided to use
the blogging format for ease of entrering things and an already-determined
organizational system. Then I got to know what the blogging community was
like, and I saw people I know reading my blog, and I came to have more
purposes. I guess I want people, particularly philosophers, to see what a
Christian trained in the most careful thinking the world has to offer has to
say about various issues. I want those unfamiliar with Christianity to see
aspects of it that they wouldn't be exposed to in their everyday life. I
want those who are politically liberal to see that not all conservatives are
alike and some are actually aware of what liberals think and why and still
resist some of their arguments. I want conservatives to rethink some of
their positions, particularly Christians who are conservative and who take
views that I see as unbiblical. I want Christians to rethink some of their
assumptions inherited from the spirit of our age. I want white people to see
some of the residual racism in society that they may even unwittingly
contribute toward. I want black people who don't already realize it to see
how much of racial reconciliation also needs to come from the black side and
what that might involve. My purposes really are many at this point.

It's not merely wanting to be well-known or wanting people to think highly
of what I write, though I sometimes have those desires. I'm driven mostly by
the realization that I've been placed in a certain situation, with the
abilities and drive that I have to learn, to think carefully and precisely,
and to express that learning and thinking in easily-understood formulations
(most of the time, anyway). I'm very good at finding holes in an argument
and not as good at coming up with arguments but good enough at regurgitating
good ones I know of. I consider myself wasting what God has entrusted me
with if I don't use those abilities to enrich the community of believers in
my circle of influence, which I've come to see is a lot different when it
comes to blogging.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to say?

A: To all those who would misinterpret what I've said and then will challenge
me on it: "That's not what I said."

Please stop by Parableman and see what else Jeremy has to say.

If you haven't read previous Blogdom of God interviews, check them out here:
Josh Claybourn
Adrian Warnock
Fr. Jim Tucker (Dappled Things)
SecretAgentMan
Totem to Temple
LaShawn Barber
Antioch Road
Ryan's Head
Belief Seeking Understanding

If you are a member of the Blogdom of God and would like to be interviewed, please contact me. -jdm