Testing faith and testing God.

I was recently pondering 1 Thes 5:21, where the Apostle Paul instructs us to "test everything", which seems to include God. But according to Deut 6:16 we must not test God. So there appears to be a contradiction.

One way out of this is to appeal to the context of 1 Thes 5:21, to say that Paul was speaking in vs. 20 about prophecies, and so the "everything" in "test everything" should be restricted to refer only to prophecies. Or, we could appeal to the context of Deut 6:16, claiming that the "test" there refers to the behavior of Israel at Massah---which consisted not of "testing", but more of a doubt that God will provide and grumbling against their leader Moses.

But I think there is a better way to resolve the contradiction. It does seem right to me that we ought to have evidence for everything which we believe, and so we ought to test everything, where "everything" refers to everything. And, Deut 6:16 is cited in other situations (such as Matt 4) in ways that make "test" seem to refer to testing.

So, I think it really is improper to test God. And, at the same time, I think it really is proper to use testing to generate evidence for all our beliefs, including our religious beliefs. Here's what I think is going on.

While it is good to have arguments and proof for everything we believe, there are certain sorts of "testing" which violates other moral obligations we have. For example, I have the belief that anything dropped from the roof of a skyscraper will fall and smash into the ground. And I believe that this holds true of, say, my grandmother. But I should not test this belief by throwing my grandmother off the roof. When Paul tells us to "test everything", he does not mean to say that our obligation to test our beliefs can justify any action whatsoever. Certain tests are immoral and should not be conducted. (Bioethics, for instance, is concerned with a large class of moral constraints on proper testing.) Paul assumes that we will conduct our testing in ways which are consistent with our moral obligations.

So the Bible instructs us NOT to test God. We must remember that God is a person with whom we have an intimate and loving relationship. There are moral bounds for how we are to treat him. The scientist, for example, ought to entertain doubts about various hypotheses and construct elaborate experiments to test them. But that same scientist may be acting improperly if he entertains doubts about, say, the faithfulness of his wife and constructs elaborate experiments to test that. This is how it is with God. When we test our religious beliefs, we have to keep in mind that God is a person to whom we have moral obligations, and we have to conduct our tests in ways which are consistent with those obligations.

The problem, then, is to spell out what, exactly, are the moral constraints for Christians as they seek evidence for their faith in God.

Truthlikeness

So, I've been working the last few weeks on the Master's thesis to finish up my theology degree at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The topic is truthlikeness. I'm examining various philosopher's attempts to articulate what it takes for one theory to be 'closer to the truth' than another theory. Also: supposing we don't already know what the truth is, how can we know we're getting closer to it?

One motivation for all this is to make sense of scientific progress: in what sense are scientific theories getting 'better', if all our past theories are false and our current theories are most likely false as well? And, can we know that our theories are, in fact, getting better?

I'm about halfway done (though the last half is probably going to be much harder than the first). I don't think anything is ready to be shown, but here is a bibliography which I've compiled for the topic.

S3

After spending a year in non-operative status, the Triumph Speed Triple went back into service this week. It's a 2001 model which I purchased in April of 2002 and drove for about 2200 miles before getting distracted with other things (namely, marriage). I had to replace the battery, change the oil, and get two recall repairs at the dealer: replacement of the clutch cable and the fuel fittings. Unfortunately, it took the dealer two weeks to get parts, so I wasn't able to start riding until Tuesday (Aug 2). (The fuel fittings had cracked, and the bike was spraying fuel whenever it was turned on.)

I had forgotten how fuel inefficient the S3 is. After filling up the fuel tank (4 gallons), I ran out at 200 miles. Thankfully, I had just pulled into the driveway of a nice family who had a canister of gas handy for stranded drivers: they apparently get a lot of that where they live. I got caught because the only gas station on 138 between the 5 the 14 was closed. Running out of fuel caused the engine light to come on: the fuel pump races since there's no fuel, causing the voltage to fluctuate and signalling the fault. This put the bike into "limp home" mode, which reduced performance significantly. Things reset themselves after 2 fill-ups, though. Unfortunately, the 14-138 is not that interesting a ride, so none of this was worth the trouble.

Just this morning, though, I woke up at 4am and decided to look up another ride. After checking out pashnit.com and sbc-rides.com, I decided to drive the hundred miles to Santa Barbara. After passing through the Gaviota tunnel on the 101 freeway, I took the Hwy 1 exit towards Lompoc/Vandenberg. Daybreak was just settling in, and there was an unusual absence of fog, which made that stretch the most spectacular visually of the trip.

The fog set back in as I rode Hwy 246 west to the beach and then back out east. Things were clear again by the time I went on Hwy 154 south back to Santa Barbara. The views there were awesome: it definitely was worth stopping at the vista points.

Overall, this trip was a great way to get back into riding. Hwy 1, 246 and 154 are all pretty tame---easy to handle for someone who's still just getting the hang of riding. If only these roads weren't 100 miles away from where I'm at in Arcadia.... The best ride close to me is the Angeles Crest Hwy 2, a route I've taken many times on the 1991 Kawasaki Zephyr 550 which I bought as a starter bike back in 2000. Unfortunately, I recall Hwy 2 is a bit too advanced for someone like me, who's been off his bike for over a year, and still isn't used to the power of the Speed Triple. Maybe next time. I've got to come back to Southern California more frequently.