Talk Talk

Scanning by Alistair Begg on the radio tonight I heard him discussing the "stupidity" of deconstructionism and the "idiocy" in the "ivory towers" of those in the field of postmodernism.  Now, I have to give him credit for bringing up these concepts - where else can anyone hear about them publicly? Unfortunately, I imagine his audience doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.  To reduce these movements of thought to the terms stupid and idiotic is, at best, lazy and at worst deceptive.  It shows his own lack of vocabulary.  For someone so interested in language in order to propagate his message, he should be more interested in how language works.  Does he think the word of God was handed to us in modern English in completely unambiguous terms?  The answer is, of course, yes.  And this shows his own stupidity and idiocy.  He proceeds from the premise that every word and phrase in the Bible has a singular, immutable meaning.  At which point his work diverges from any intellectual pursuit.  

First, given the unending amount of religious media, the massive amount of religious denominations (along with their internal conflicts), the history of religious wars, and the endless "talk" (babble) about this passage and that, its clear that there is no center of Biblical interpretation.  There are as many interpretations as there are readers, and it is constantly reinterpreted in new light.  Otherwise, he would be out of a job and everything would have been decided two thousand years ago.  Second, it is clear that language is a construct of humanity that continues to evolve and that we operate only with concepts found inside this construct.  So, even if the original authors intention was to relate a directly perceived truth, it had to be "encoded" into the language of the time, reduced from a pre-language meaning.  And that meaning has been re-translated though history into new languages as they come into existence.  So, what we have now is a multi-generational copy of the original thought.  Further, there is no indication that the Bible was intended to be such a precise, narrow vision.  Given the factual and logical contradictions that are constantly present, if that was the intention then it is a complete failure.  Alistair's problem is that since he operates from that illogical premise there is no way to reason with what he saying, he has closed off any possibility of negotiating a new and improved conclusion.  He condemns the intellectuals, but since he doesn't work in the rational field of the intellect, he is not proving their arguments to be invalid.  It is comparing oranges and apples, and all he can do is resort to name calling. 

Begg can denounce the deconstructionist for removing meaning, the postmodernist for rejecting the meta-narrative and the atheist for rejecting the existence of God.  But even if this group of miscreants were to proceed without any arguments, reason, or evidence (in the worst un-intellectual case), all they would be doing is coming down to his level - operating from a presumed premise based on belief.  Deconstruction and postmodern thought do not state that anything can mean anything (or nothing), they only reveal the internal contradictions, ambiguities and multiplicities that are inherent in human thought and magnified by the limitations of language.  I understand that Begg wants to believe in a transcendental signifier and must be concerned with the deconstructionists' lack of belief in one.  But, if he wants to discuss deconstruction then he needs to do it on their terms and argue convincingly why there is a transcendental signifier that gives a pre-established meaning.  Calling it stupid is not nearly enough. Perhaps he could start by reading Who's Afraid of Postmodernism and Postmodern Theology.  On second thought, maybe its best if he didn't discuss these concepts, as he only promotes misinformation that may be blindly accepted by his audience.

No, you're not entitled to your opinion

In  No, you're not entitled to your opinion, Patrick Stokes argues (quite well) that not all opinions are the same.  It is not enough to say that I have my opinion and you have yours.  There has to be some reason, and as he states: "you are only entitled to what you can argue for." Allowing every possible opinion to be right makes all views correct, and therefore nothing is more true than everything else and we end up in nihilism.  Relativism in morality is difficult enough (and presents problems even for us non-absolutists) but add extreme relativism into aesthetics and knowledge in general and the whole idea of truth is destroyed.  Opinions (at least about the external world [1])  must have some correspondence to reality and its facts.  Furthermore, views- if anywhere near complete and worth holding- must hold some level of rationality that can be argued for.  If one wants to support a right wing candidate because of belief in the super-capitalist view of trickle-down economics, then one must be able to argue why that is the correct course of action (and be able to overcome contradictory evidence found in the facts of data).  Otherwise, your "opinion" cannot be taken seriously.



[1] As Stokes notes, there are matters of taste which involve matters pourely internal to oneself.  What do I like better? - chocolate or vanilla? But this is of no consequence to anyone else. If we are to have discourse with anyone outside of ourselves - then we have to invoke criteria to evaluate competing statements in order for them to have any meaning at all.