Religion and Theseus's Paradox

[eirias]

Much of secular America equates "Christian" with things like "cultural conservative," "prudish," "homophobic."  This is not quite accurate, in that many churches are engaged in fierce internal debates right now about whether to modernize their teachings, to bring them more in line with modern culture.  The battle pits "reasserters" (strict constructionists of Church teaching, if you will) against "reappraisers" (loose constructionists).  I don't know how well-known this is among the nonreligious, but I read a couple of preacher-blogs regularly, and nowhere is our modern culture war more open and more bitter.  Some days ago I read some heated comments by a reasserter on one of my two favorite such blogs.  In one of these comments, he several times accused the blog's author, an ordained priest of the Episcopalian Church, of not being a Christian.  If we ignore the insult for a moment, what does he mean by that?  How much change is too much for a religion to survive?

I was put in mind of Theseus's Paradox -- many of you will be familiar with this story, I think.  Say you have a ship.  Like all ships, bits of it wear out from time to time, so you replace them.  After some time, every piece of the ship will have been replaced.  At what point, if any, does the identity of the ship change?

It is an old philosophical problem, and I don't think there are any hard-and-fast answers.  But let's imagine the ship's owner believes that each plank is integral to the ship's identity, and so chooses not to replace the boards.  Eventually, they all rot.  The material identity of the ship has remained the same (modulo the rot), but in another sense its identity has been destroyed -- because it can no longer carry people anywhere.

I tried to tell the angry reasserter about Theseus' paradox, but he never wrote back.

Comments

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

Seeing as how Christianity has tended to be fractious pretty much from its inception, I'm not sure whether we can really ascribe any single identity- or even remotely close to single identity- to it; I'm not sure Theseus's Paradox truly applies. Perhaps all Christians are given rough blueprints to building a ship, and judge others based on how similar their ship looks to one's own.

Like I've mentioned before, I would find Christianity far easier to stomach(both as a creed and as a cultural phenomenon) if it embraced a good deal of Pelagianism. I view the idea of total depravity as one of the most harmful ideas ever to hit the planet.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I can see your point, but am not entirely sure I agree; I think that for many sects, the Nicene Creed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_creed) serves as a reasonable rule-of-thumb for inclusion/exclusion. It's not a perfect identity thing, but it's an adequate heuristic.

And... you're just not going to score any points with very many Christians by saying, "The religion you place so much value in doesn't really exist as a coherent whole." Even saying that change happens over time no matter what you do is probably a losing proposition.

[zebediah.livejournal.com]

Moslty on the notion of Theseus' paradox (although I did wish I heard more, particularly in the media, about Christians in opposition to fundamentalists -- I suspect it's a media problem as much as any).

I think identity isn't about materials, but about patterns...a boat constructed of completely new wood in the same model as This Longboat is more like This Longboat that what you would get if you broke the longboat to peices and constructed, say, a house. Ref: necrobiosis, the fact that basically every cell in your body gets replaced within a seven-year span.

But identity is also a mythic construct, and so affected greatly by perception...if you broke down This Longboat into peices and built a house out of it, named the house after the longboat, lived in it, and kept telling the story of how "all the wood in this house used to be part of my longboat," you could transfer identity over pretty well. After that, keep telling the story while doing minor remodeling...heck, knock down a wall, build a new wing painted with a big longboat motif, and you can keep identity associated with the house even as the material identity dissapears.

A sobering thought when applied to churches...

Now, what are the "wooden planks" when talking about christian denominations? Important quotations from the bible? (it's large and contradictory enough that I don't think any church fully embraces all of it) Church traditions? The people who are part of it, or rather, since those obviously change form generation to generation, the demographics or families?

What's the purpose of a Church? Saving souls (carrying them over the water?) is the ultimate purpose, but hard to measure in any reliable way, sadly, as we don't get to look at the afterlife.

(a friend of mine, [Unknown site tag] has been working on a book about tax philosophy in the USA, and in the process has turned up a lot of interesting things about how churches changed as they moved south. And of course, there's not much out there that looks like the really early church, back when we were getting persecuted by romans for being a scary cult)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I think identity isn't about materials, but about patterns...a boat constructed of completely new wood in the same model as This Longboat is more like This Longboat that what you would get if you broke the longboat to peices and constructed, say, a house. Ref: necrobiosis, the fact that basically every cell in your body gets replaced within a seven-year span.

For some purposes, I agree completely -- but not for all. For instance, if you clone a bacterium, you'll wind up with an organism following essentially the same pattern as the first, but for purposes of clarity it's necessary to distinguish them. Ditto with two dolls from the same mold that are owned by two siblings. They're the same, and yet, if your sister steals yours, it becomes clear that in some respect they're really not the same.

I like your longboat idea, and am amused by your analogy :).

As for the planks when talking about denominations... I'd been thinking of them as individual beliefs or teachings, but I suppose they could be multiple things. In particular I am thinking of the teaching that men should not have sex with men. This is a specific plank that is on the verge of replacement in many churches, and the fact that my friend argues for its removal makes him un-Christian, according to at least one of his opponents. Now, the reasserter doesn't think it's about this teaching -- he thinks it's about authority more generally; that you argue for the replacement of plank X with a new one made in a modern fashion means that you don't place your trust in Biblical authority. I and my friend would argue that Biblical authority has somehow survived centuries of having planks yanked out and replaced now and again, and that by such a strict criterion, this reasserter's religion isn't really Christianity either. But again, I think any firm answer you come to is bound to be problematic.

I don't know what the purpose of a church is. As a theist, I used to believe that it was something like the pursuit of truth and justice and all that is holy, and that anything else was a distraction. As an agnostic, I now believe that it has many purposes, most of them having little to do with truth directly. Some of them are about power, some of them are about companionship and belonging, some of them are about hope, some of them are about boredom. Some of these even overlap. It strikes me that maybe human institutions need to be complex and multifaceted if they want to survive long enough for questions like Theseus's Paradox to even come up.