The "Why is Farting Funny?" Theological Argument

Introduction


So I'm going to clarify the "Farting is Funny" point for people who wanted to know what that was all about Tuesday night at the "Does God Exist" forum put on by the Longview Bible study group. The point seemed to cause a lot of fuss and it seems to have been largely misunderstood. In the room while I was speaking I was simultaneously being booed and cheered. The weird part is that it was across the aisle booing and cheering. I was being booed by Christians and atheists and also cheered by Christians and atheists. I'm fairly certain that the reason for this is merely that I am an artist. Regardless, I feel like I have a fairly good argument here and so I wanted to post it again for the people who were there that wanted clarity but I also wanted to post it on the blog to see what other people might think about it. If you weren't there Tuesday night, that's fine, I'm going to sum up everything you need to know about the argument. For those of you who were there, what I said was actually a series of points-which is why I think people might have missed what I was really saying. In a point that is developed in a series, if one forgets a part of the flow of that series it has the potential to deconstruct the whole thing, like a house which loses one of its support beams has the potential to cause the whole structure to collapse. Some only got half the point I was making because they remember only half of the series of things that I said. Other people might have actually been offended by the things I said because the things I said were connected by abstraction, as all good artful arguments are from people of artful personalities. When I ask rhetorically, "Why is farting funny?" I am saying something like this to abstract an idea. I'll offer a brief apology (meaning defense) of who I am and what I do which hopefully should give some understanding and framework for what I'm about to again offer. Everyone wants to kill the artist. It's a historical trend.


"Abstractions may be formed by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose."

How I tend to think is: "This is like this is like this". I run into trouble with hard line traditionalist thinkers at church because they are focused on protecting what is "right" whereas I tend to be more focused on what is "like" in order to paint and arrive at what is "right". I am perceived to often be making points that seem unrelated but I actually make unique points which, if people have patience to understand them, are in fact very relevant and are not, in fact, being said merely out of a careless and flippant comedic spirit-which is often how I am first perceived to be by people who are unfamiliar with artists like me, an artist who has been encouraged by supportive friends and family to speak his mind.


As an artist type personality I tend to paint a picture or tell a story in order to make my point. I don't generally say my point in its most basic, logical dry bones form. Artists break conventional rules and structure, which to traditionalists can feel threatening and offensive, but artists are necessary creatures because they keep us sane. Artists in some ways know rules the best, that is why comedians are able to be funny. They have well placed jabs at the refineries of how people act; they can poke at the thoughtlessness of some traditional norms in society and point out the things that we hold to unthoughtfully or inconsistently. This makes us laugh.
Now in the "Does God Exist" forum there were many math and science people who spoke out, but I spoke out as the artist because I felt the conversation was imbalanced. It is important for all different kinds of people to have input because that way you get the best chance of more complete perspective. The artist in me wanted to poke at Einstein a bit to show that he was actually making a mistake.


I will provide the needed context of the night and reiterate all of the relevant points that I think are necessary to understand my argument in a second but then I will recreate starting again with what I started with on Tuesday night, the first part of my series of arguments, a point about economics and GDP. Once I have that I will begin again to build on it as artists do in an attempt to reconstruct my argument. Keep in mind this is all to make a serious point and criticism of Einstein with how he seemed to approach the question, the question that we were concerned with at the forum, "Does God Exist". Einstein can seem like such a daunting Titan especially to the imbalanced intellectualism of mathematicians and scienticians, but don't worry because the artists have the key to unlocking Einstein's mistake; the key is to fart in his face.


What a Controversial Statement, Now Time for the Actual Argument:


As is relevant to our purpose here, there was at the beginning of the night a point made about economics and correlation. Ed was building what I think is a good case, that if you get enough dots correlating and seeming to point toward a certain direction along a line through regression you have a good probabilistic case built. You can put your faith in whatever the relationship is being suggested by the correlation of the variables. In this case Ed was making the point that it is reasonable to believe that God exists because that is what the mathematical variables, the evidences, I think there were 38 of them, seem to imply. But being that I am an artist I was naturally bored with the point being made (nothing wrong with the point) and so I took to tearing it down and painting with it.


The Qualitative Aspect of Life is a Serious Matter


Since the particular relationship that was used as an example was an economic relationship between GDP and unemployment, something that I am familiar with because I majored in economics, I was immediately able to conjure up from memory a heterodox critique of GDP as a measure of societal well-being. GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, is the total money value of all goods and services produced in an economy in a year. It has an indirect relationship with the unemployment rate. To put this in laymen's terms, as the unemployment rate increases, the output of the economy shrinks. Ed's point was that there is a definite correlation between the unemployment rate and GDP. Mainstream economists generally see a shrinking economy as a negative thing because the orthodoxy of utilitarianist capitalism is that the more stuff we have the better off society is. This is a wrong, oversimplified, and overly mathematical approach to measuring the well being of society. More stuff being produced does not say anything about how that stuff is being distributed. It could be that a couple of fat cats are hoarding those goods and services produced in our booming economy, but that the rest of society is in slave labor. Slave economies can look great on paper if one's measure of greatness is purely mathematical, a high GDP. Another criticism of more stuff being the ideal that is always good for society is that more stuff is not necessarily better stuff. We have tons of crappy fast food restraunts that keep our economy booming but that destroy our health and enable us to live "workaholic" lives - efficient but anti-relational lives. When we don't sit down to eat as a family there is more opportunity for an epidemic of loneliness, which is exactly what we see when we ignore the qualitative aspect of life in favor of the quantitative, when we become "lovers of money" as scripture warns against. This leads to a whole range of other problems in society in schools, churches, etc.. I have just completed the first part of the series of points that I made on Tuesday. Now I started with this point of criticism against mathematical economics in order to abstract something fairly simple out, that there is a qualitative/quantitative aspect of life that we need to take seriously.


Introduction to Einstein


According to our speaker, Ed, in his corroborative probabilistic case that favored belief in the existence of God, we were informed about Albert Einstein and his cosmological constant. Eisntein originally had assumed that the universe was neither expanding or contracting in his General Theory of Relativity, but it turns out that it was later discovered by Hubble that the universe is in fact expanding. When Einstein discovered this it seemed to demonstrate to him that the universe had a definite beginning from which everything then expanded. This seemed to imply for Einstein that God or some supernatural thing created the universe. He had up to this point been unpersuaded but now he was willing to reconsider the existence of God. He called in a panel of people including a priest, a reformed theologian, and a few other religious figures to talk about the question of God's existence. It seemed for Einstein that God, if he exists, was either not wholly good and therefore perhaps the supernatural consisted of two entities or more; or that God was not wholly powerful, because if he was he would be able to deal with evil.


As the point was being made that there is a universal constant rate at which the universe expands I, as an artist, naturally wanted to create with that information. I began wondering at what rate does the universe expand? I then wanted to ask a qualitative question, "does it expand like the tortoise or does it expand like the hare?" (Here I was merely abstracting a qualitative concern). I then asked the question, which is the kind of question that also hung Einstein up, "does it expand like an angel or does it expand like a demon?" (Here I am abstracting a particular qualitative category: good/evil).


My Criticism of Einstein


The qualitative aspect of life is not something that Einstein considered very deeply. Einstein knew the aspect of life that can be quantified, perhaps it could be said, like no other man before in history knew; but the qualitative aspect of life is something that he quite missed in all of his quantitative contemplating. The more common man on Main Street contemplates the qualitative aspect of life because he doesn't have the education and gift and money to be able to withdraw to study rooms to contemplate the great quantitative questions of natural science like Einstein. But Einstein is the kind of guy, unlike the guy on Main Street, that misses the birth of his own child, who suffers from too much work and not enough relationship. Celebrities often have this problem. They can't live normal lives.


In Einstein's chamber of studies his face was solemn as he thought, withdrawn in the loneliness of his mind, about the quantitative conundrum of whether or not God exists. There were other people in the room with him that he had invited: the priest, the theologian, the rabbi, etc., but they were there for a particular purpose like a business exchange, an exchange of information, not for tea and crumpets and company. This is not what Einstein needed. He didn't know what he needed but he acted according to what he thought he needed to answer the question of whether or not God exists. Einstein needed something more like a hug; Einstein needed a valuing experience with his heart; Einstein needed something to qualitatively feel and evaluate. He needed the priest to fart in his face for heaven's sake! And he needed to see the reformed theologian laugh about it and the rabbi fall out of his chair from it. He needed to see the world as surprising.


The world in truth is surprising. It is surprising that farting should be funny and not sad. If there are no eternal things like God, or eternal things that only an almighty and all powerful God can secure like real justice and truth and joy, if life is just a short material existence followed by nothing, than farting is sad. Farting has to do with decay and waste and imperfection and so in a world in which there is no God or power or hope to defeat death, the only reasonable reaction to farting is sorrow. But in the real world farting is quite funny in almost any situation. It can be powerful to persuade mental and intellectual giants. Hot air rises for a reason. People are certainly supposed to contemplate what farting is about, especially the snooty and proud with their noses high.


If God is not real than farting would always be a reminder of death and it would be fearful and sad; but God is real and therefore material death is not the greatest kind of death, that is to say, material death - the thing that can be measured by an EKG. Death is not merely or primarily a quantitative thing, death is a qualitative thing. Similarly, this is also why Jesus is not merely or primarily a ticket to heaven, as atheists so often wrongly feel that we Christians feel, but Jesus is much better described as a Friend or Foe.


If I was one of the religious people in the room with Einstein I know what kind of thing I would ask him after I farted in his face. I would ask him, "What do you think life is really about, Einstein? Do you think it is about your heart rate, like the rate of your universal constant of expansion? Are you blind to the relational aspect and qualitative aspect of life, Einstein? Don't you know that your heart beats faster when you are with your loved one?"


More on the Topic of Life and Death as Qualitative:


One does not possess life like one possesses something that can be merely accounted, like one possesses money perhaps; one possesses death like one possesses a good joke or a bad joke, death is a qualitative state of being. Death to God is like sleeping (Mark 5:39).


"I am come that they may have life, and may have it more abundantly." That is what Jesus said (John 10:10). When he is talking about life he is talking about it abounding qualitatively, not quantitatively. Do you think that Jesus meant to say that life consists in having the highest GDP? That life consists in the abundance of the things which man possesseth, that can be measured in barns? He says the exact opposite (Luke 12:15).

Farting is funny because the qualitative aspect of life is so serious. Einsteins should first get some caring friends and maybe even a couple of drinks also to open up their heart and ponder that. I think it would do good to balance their intellectualism with some common sense down to earth sensing. I wouldn't recommend doing the qualitative things that are like death, the deathly things like getting "plastered" or getting "wasted" because as the first implies a certain inanimate, material deadness like a wall without pictures, so also the second implies the picture, that which bears an image, and treating it like it is only inappreciable trash; trash and waste are those things like crap that are good for nothing except to be decomposed in the ground and eaten by worms. I'm speaking literally and qualitatively.


Consider the Qualitative


The religious question is not what variable will solve the equational problem of sin? The question is how can we like children gone astray, be returned to the Father of life? It is a question of disrelationship and restoration of relationship. That is why one needs to have an open mind and an open heart. One needs to be open to considering things from a relational point of view and not merely a data-like, graph-like point of view because one has to deal with values and not merely with facts. One has to be evaluative as to what is really important. What is really important about life is not merely that things operate in a mechanical way, that people's blood streams flow at at a rate that can be measured; but rather that their faces flush red when they are found embarrassed when they tell a lie, and that they flush pale as a white washed tomb with fear and shame when they are found naked.

Life is not merely quantitative; it is sacred or in other words, qualitative. This question of "Does God Exist" is not primarily a question of math and science; this is a question of value and life and death. Don't be deceived with Einstein into thinking that God is primarily and often found in a merely quantitative exercise of mental facts and trivia, have someone fart in your face instead in order to bring you down to earth, the real earth, so that you don't commit as G.K. Chesterton warns in his book "The Everlasting Man", " . . . sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality." I'm talking about the living God who created both the quantitative and qualitative to lead us to Him like a vine and branch. I am guessing that our approach to the question should be a little more organic therefore to include things like art, practicality, experience, senses, etc., to look more like a tree, and less like a scientifically and rigidly cold sword of metal, a sword that when we fall back on and lean on too heavily hurts us. That way if the son of God enters the world saying, "I am the vine, you are the branches", perhaps we will be more able to clearly see that a tree is not merely a 15 feet tall material substance of wood that can create units of happiness for us if we cut it down, and even more units of satisfaction, dare I say it, if we were to hang someone on it who questions the authority of the things in which we trust? God gave us both the quantitative and qualitative aspect of life to lead us to him as a bird is led to build its nest in a tree, both for the soundness of the branch and for the cozy comfort by which the wind can rock it ever so slightly like a baby that is rocked in a crib. Consider the birds.


²⁷ God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ²⁸ ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’^[b] As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’( Acts 17:27-28)


Conclusion


Believe it or not this whole "farting is funny" argument is not a new argument at all. It is just another one of those tired arguments that is being restated in a creative way by an artist convinced that the popular tendency of his age of modernity is off base. Thomas of Aquino (1225-1274), the great thinker and influential philosopher of scholastic tradition something like this:


"Far be it from a poor friar to deny that you have these dazzling diamonds in your head, all designed in the most perfect mathematical shapes and shining with a purely celestial light; all there, almost before you begin to think, let alone to see or heal or feel. But I am not ashamed to say that I find my reason fed by my senses; that I owe a great deal of what I think to what I see and smell and taste and handle; and that so far as my reason is concerned, I feel obliged to treat all this reality as real. To be brief, in all humility, I do not believe that God meant Man to exercise only that peculiar, uplifted and abstracted sort of intellect which you are so fortunate as to possess: but I believe that there is a middle field of facts which are given by the senses to be the subject matter of the reason; and that in that field the reason has a right to rule, as the representative of God in Man. It is true that all this is lower than the angels; but is higher than the animals, and all the actual material objects Man finds around him. True, man also can be an object; and even a deplorable object. But what man has done man may do; and if an antiquated old heathen called Aristotle can help me to do it I will thank him in all humility."
- "St. Thomas Aquinas" by G.K. Chesterton